Daniel Hahn on Translating

Daniel Hahn’s new blog at Booktrust’s Translated Fiction site is a pretty interesting experiment:

About to embark on translating a fourth Agulausa book, Estação das Chuvas, Daniel has kindly agreed to write a diary about the process from start to finish, which will appear exclusively on this website.

Or, in his own words:

In this blog I hope to examine the translation process, working through a novel from my own first launching into a first draft, right up to publication. It’s not a blog about the life of a translator – musings about translation generally, reports of events I’ve attended or readings I’ve given, people I’ve met at launch parties, books I’ve read – but intimately about a single piece of translation work, which I hope will bring you closer to the experience, to the pleasures it brings and the questions it raises.

I am just about to embark on the translation of _Estação das Chuvas _by José Eduardo Agualusa, a wonderful Angolan novelist I’ve been privileged to work with a few times before. This book – our fourth together – presents a search for the story of Angolan poet Lídia do Carmo Ferreira; but it’s also the story of many other people who spin into and out of her life and the narrator’s; and each has his own rich back-story told, and each engages with the setting – the state of their country through the second half of the 20th century.

Should be very interesting for months to come . . .