Today as part of the Finnish
Invasion blog tour, David Hackston the translator of Kati Hiekkapelto’s Anna
Fekete series talks about his relationship with Anna Fekete.
I have a very special relationship
with Anna Fekete. Our friendship started in the spring of 2014, when we were
introduced to one another by a common acquaintance. The late, great Gary
Pulsifer, with whom I’d worked on several Finnish crime novels, contacted me
and told me about an exciting new Finnish woman he thought I should get to know.
And that is how I first met Anna.
Anna and I have met three times
now. Each occasion has been different, yet each subsequent encounter is richer,
more satisfying than the previous. I enjoy watching her grow and develop; I can
empathise with her disappointments, her heartache. With each new sentence I
understand her more.
One of the challenges – and
responsibilities – of being a literary translator is the opportunity to (re)
create characters in our own languages. Not only are we (re) telling a story to
a new audience, introducing them to a culture with which they might be
unfamiliar, we are also bringing characters to life, making them real, turning
them to flesh and blood. What makes my relationship with Anna Fekete – and all
the other characters in Kati Hiekkapelto’s trilogy – so special is that
Anna has developed over the course of the three novels in English every bit as
much as she has in the original. While she has grown as a character in Kati’s
hands, so the English-speaking Anna becomes more rounded, more whole, with each
new adventure. Of course, this is one of the benefits of working with a writer
and her characters over an extended period of time.
Key to Anna’s character is the
fact that she lives between a multitude of cultures: she is a Hungarian-speaker
from a town in northern Serbia. In Finland, she is a refugee – a well
adjusted one but, to many Finns, a refugee nonetheless – and it is this dual
sense of being an outsider (both in Serbia and Finland) that is essential to
who she is. From a translator’s perspective, the crossover between different
cultures adds another layer of complexity to our job. Translation, by
definition, is the interaction of two cultures – in this case, a
northern-Finnish culture and an English-speaking readership – and the
translator is a conduit between them. In shaping the character of Anna in
English, I often feel as though I have to “translate”
Hungarian and Balkan culture as well, something that Finnish readers too find
strange and exotic.
Anna’s sense of detachment from
the Finnish culture, in which she lives and has grown up, often pops up in the
small details of her everyday life. In The
Hummingbird, the first book in the trilogy, there is a touching scene in
which Anna and her obnoxious partner Esko share a moment of friendship, as Anna
is about to lose hope of solving the case. Esko quotes an old Finnish nursery
rhyme to her, and she doesn’t understand one of the words. The crucial word is
‘huttu’, an old word for porridge. In
English, it’s inconceivable that a highly educated woman like Anna wouldn’t
understand this word, so I had to think more about how to translate the
entirety of the situation to English-speaking readers, a complex set of
circumstances that transcends the words themselves. In English, Esko now quotes
the nursery rhyme “Pease pudding, hot and
cold”, and Anna becomes confused at the idea of making a pudding from peas.
Now, even though the words have changed, the English presents a situation in
which two cultures try but fail to understand each other.
Hungarian culture is present throughout
the trilogy, and to me it makes perfect sense that The Exiled, the third book in the series, plays out entirely in
Kanizsa, the town of Anna’s childhood. The book is much more slowly paced than the
previous two, which gives Kati the time and space to really create the world of
the town in a way that hits all the senses – the sounds, the smells, the
language, the food, the pálinka. The
Exiled is a beautiful and at times claustrophobic evocation of life in a
small Balkan town.
An interesting facet of the
Hungarian world of the books is that Anna and her family obviously speak to one
another in Hungarian, their native language. In all three books this is
represented by the occasional line of Hungarian dialogue – deliberately left un-translated
for Finnish readers. These lines sometimes amount to nothing more than saying
hello and are often a litany Hungarian swear words, as Anna curses to herself,
but the fact that they are not translated for the reader is interesting given
the idea of existing between cultures. Having lived in countries where I don’t
speak the language very well, it can be both a blessing and a curse to sit in a
café unable to understand much of the hum of conversation. For refugees, of
course, not understanding what is happening around you must surely be an
intimidating experience. The lines of un-translated dialogue in all of Kati’s
books are a very subtle way of making this point. For an English translator it
is easy to leave them un-translated, and they will have the same effect. How
will Kati’s Hungarian translator deal with this cultural clash? That could be
the subject of a whole new blog post.
Exiled
Murder. Corruption. Dark secrets.
A titanic wave of refugees. Can Anna solve a terrifying case that’s become
personal. Anna Fekete returns to the
Balkan village of her birth for a relaxing summer holiday. But when her purse
is stolen and the thief is found dead on the banks of the river, Anna is pulled
into a murder case. Her investigation leads straight to her own family, to
closely guarded secrets concealing a horrendous travesty of justice that
threatens them all. As layer after layer of corruption, deceit and guilt are
revealed, Anna is caught up in the refugee crisis spreading like wildfire
across Europe. How long will it take before everything explodes?
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