Writing. And reading. And translating.

A great moment happened the other night outside the Waterfront Theatre. From the street you can see into the theatre's lobby bar, where a book signing was taking place. There were also numerous people sitting and standing around looking through the books they'd bought, waiting on line for the authors to sign. Two fellows walked by. One paused, motioned for the other to look in the windows. "You see?" he said. "What did I tell you?" The other guy looked. "Uh, yeah, they're reading. Some of them are writing." The first guy pointed to the sign. "Writers and Readers Festival." Then back to the bar. "Writing. Reading. I told you." They moved on.

This festival truly is both a writer's and a reader's paradise. At the Lost and Found in Translation session last night, four authors and one substitute (Stephano Benni is unwell and was represented by Genni Gunn) read their works in the original language while the English translation scrolled by on screen. This is a fascinating process, because you can see how the translator made the cadences and sounds of the original work in a new language. Even with languages I don't know at all--Young-ha Kim read in Korean--there would be this moment of shimmer when each language started to make sense, when I felt if I just listened a bit more I would suddenly be able to understand the original.

The discussion afterwards produced some interesting insights. An audience member asked Stephane Audeguy about the various English translators of his books and how he worked with them. The answer: he doesn't, in fact. "I decided instead to trust the guy," he said, and reports being very happy with the renderings into English. Mr. Kim said something similar in response to a question from his translator, whose name I didn't catch and my apologies to her. (She was on stage with him to interpret, although most of the time he didn't need it.) Mr. Kim's relationship to his translators? "I tell them to pretend I'm dead."

Another point that came up about translation is that it isn't always a simple, one-way process. German author Leonie Swann's novel centred around a herd of sheep is set in Ireland. Why? "Well, let's face it, German sheep are allright, but they are usually behind fences and fairly boring compared to Irish sheep." More seriously, she reports that she wrote the novel in German because she is German; but she feels it is more closely a part of an Anglo-American writing tradition. And since the translation of the book into English occurred before the German publication, she was able to alter her original text when she saw in the English something that she wanted to use. She reports finding some passages much better in English.

At the book signing afterwards I noticed a crowd of Dutch-speakers clustered around Anja Sicking, whose reading from her novel "The Silent Sin" was infused with another kind of translation. Trained as a classical clarinetist, Sicking's reading had a kind of musicality I realized later was completely intentional: one of the central characters is a music publisher.