"Trado" - Lost and Found in Translation
Trado is a book on translation, betrayal, love, and writing, co-authored by Svetlana Cârstean and Athena Farrokhzad, that was published in 2016, first in Sweden, and subsequently in Romania.
Athena Farrokhzad is a poet, literary critic and translator who made her literary debut in Sweden in 2013. She was born in Iran, but fled to Sweden along with her family in order to escape the Islamic Revolution. Her Romanian translator is Svetlana Cârstean.
Svetlana Cârstean is a Romanian poet and a translator, born during the communist regime, who first got published in 1994. Her Swedish translator is Athena Farrokhzad.
Trado is rather revolutionary: it includes three books within the book. There is a book of poems written by Svetlana Cârstean, one by Athena Farrokhzad, and between these two parts there is an essay written by the two authors on translation, love, betrayal, their personal experiences with dictatorships, literature, and life in general.
The book is revolutionary on many different levels: first of all it dismantles the idea of the author as main actor and ultimate owner of the text. That is where the translator comes into play. According to the authors/translators, translation is born from the desire to destroy, while the translated text is "a body full of scars", a very evocative metaphor that definitely works for the literary field especially, and the more creative industries. The two poets make us redefine the translator as creator, co-author and Maker.
Another feature worth mentioning is the style of the books, which is progressively deconstructed: page after page, the text becomes less material, less structured, less anchored in reality and more impressionistic, following the different styles of the two authors. Nonetheless, the flow of the book seems effortlessly smooth, and there is no dissonance.
I was drawn to this book since I first saw it in a bookshop several months ago, so I decided to explore the history behind its making. This is how I found out that Svetlana and Athena met during a translation summer school in Sweden and became friends. Their bond grew stronger when they translated one of Svetlana's books (Floarea de menghină) into Swedish, and subsequently when they translated one of Athena's poem collections into Romanian. Yes, you read that correctly: they translated. That is because Svetlana does not speak Swedish and Athena does not speak Romanian.
Therefore, their process is mediated by an additional translation within the translation, since they communicate in French and English. This is something that obviously struck me, since I could never conceive translating anything from a language I do not speak or understand! Nevertheless, Svetlana and Athena have a privileged (co)author - (co)translator relationship, which is something I am sure a lot of translators would envy. They can access the meaning intended by the author with ease through direct contact and a meaningful dialogue with the author of the source text, and recreate this meaning in their own languages.
The very definition of the word "author" is challenged and deconstructed by their collaborative work, which in Athena's words is "coded female" and is incompatible with the male-dominated literary industry.
What makes this project truly unqiue is that the pair only seem to focus on what is gained in translation, not on what is lost. They make us question the idea of an "original", of a source text. As Athena aptly puts it: writing already implies translating experience into words. Who is to say we cannot choose different words, or languages for that matter, to translate that very same experience?
Romanian version- Trado. 2016. Publishers: Nemira.
Swedish version - Trado. 2016. Publishers: Albert Bonniers and Rámus.
