Alex Niemi on the Process of Translation and the Rhythm of Language

I’ve known Alex Niemi since 2012, when we both started a graduate program in literary translation at the University of Iowa. We co-edited our program’s literary translation journal, Exchanges, and years later, during a brief stint as managing editor of the translation press Autumn Hill Books, I was lucky enough to edit Alex’s first book-length translation, The John Cage Experiences by the Belgian writer Vincent Tholomé. It was, like all projects Alex takes on, strange and beautiful and entirely its own.

Since then, she’s published two more translations, both collections by the Russian poet Anna Grazova, and a chapbook of her own poetry, Elephant, with Dancing Girl Press. She won an NEA Translation Fellowship and the Heldt Prize for Best Translation in 2023 and, this past spring, was awarded a Michalski Foundation residency in Switzerland. When I saw her in Iowa City this summer, she mentioned that she had a new project coming out. Something weird and wonderous, almost uncategorizable: The Endless Week, a novel by the French poet Laura Vazquez. I knew immediately I wanted to talk to her about that—my first time interviewing a translator for this occasional column, but I hope not my last. Our conversation took place in early September via a shared Google document while I was in Pamplona, Spain, and she in Milwaukee, where she now lives.

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Sarah Viren: This is my first time interviewing a translator for this column and I’m excited. Do you find you talk (or think) about your work differently if it’s a translation versus your own poetry or writing?

Alex Niemi: I find it easier to talk about translations because I have a more objective view of the book. It can be hard to talk about my own poems when I’m in the thick of writing them—what are my major themes? I don’t know, I’ll tell you when they’re done!—But with a translation, I have a global understanding of the book and the way it’s interacting with the world, what it’s trying to do and what it’s interested in.

There’s also the very obvious difference in that I’m not writing in my own personal style when I translate. This is my favorite thing about translation: I love masquerading as other authors. I like to think about the author as an extra character, and I try to inhabit their way of viewing writing and the world around them. I listen to interviews and try to figure out their process and something about their psychological space when they’re working on a project. Then my conception of the book and the author condenses into this vibe that I channel mentally when I’m translating. The vibe for The Endless Week was really intense—I could barely work on my own stuff when I was translating it because I felt completely overcome by Vazquez’s style.

SV: One description of the translator I’ve always liked is that they are the closest reader of a text—even closer, arguably, than the author themself. Given that and also what you said about the intensity of this book, I wonder how you’d describe The Endless Week. What other books does it remind you of? (For my part, I found myself thinking about Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This, John Kennedy Tool’s A Confederacy of Dunces, the Amelia Bedelia books, and The Odyssey).

AN: I also thought of No One is Talking About This! I feel like there is a kinship between Lockwood and Vazquez as cross-genre writers who started off as poets. They also both have a sense of humor, a sort of zany quality that takes their work in surprising directions. I love the Amelia Bedelia comparison, because there is an almost philosophical literalism to the observations Vazquez’s characters make. Like in one of Salim’s YouTube speeches when he says, “When we’re having a bad day, when we’re having the worst day, we say: It’s a rotten day or: It’s a bad day, but the day hasn’t done anything, it hasn’t done anything to us, it hasn’t done anything wrong.” Vazquez is really good at stating things that are both obvious and hard to notice, as if she’s spent a lot of her life trying to find the secret logic or assumptions hidden in everyday idioms.

Overall, however, I found this book incredibly hard to describe when I was pitching it. Laura reads widely. She’s talked about the influence of Kafka and Lucretious on her writing in interviews, and I feel a Kim-Hyesoon-like vibe, but I think one of her biggest influences is the massive, mind-boggling text that is the internet.

The book is built around the space of the internet in the characters’ lives, and The Endless Week really captures how all-consuming it can be, especially for people who have retreated from the world, like the main character, Salim. The structure of the book has different modalities—Salim’s YouTube speeches and the comments sections, the father’s proverb emails—that are all taken from genres that have developed through the internet in the past few decades. In this way, The Endless Week feels very egalitarian to me in terms of its influences. It takes the internet seriously as a text and puts its literary devices up alongside the likes of Kafka without batting an eye.

SV: Yes! I wanted to talk about that aspect of the book. One thing I loved about the reading experience was how disoriented I sometimes felt. Was I in a physical space? Or somewhere on “the network”? And in whose perspective? Salim’s? Sara’s? The Grandmother’s? Any confusion was eventually clarified as I read, but the moments of disorientation felt emblematic to the novel (and also somewhat like the liminal state of translation itself). So my question: how did you avoid that translation “sin” of explaining and/or clarifying unnecessarily? How did you work to distinguish between any legitimate confusions you might have had at the level of syntax or language, say, with intentional confusions built into the text itself?

AN: I treated the translation of this novel like a poem, in that I let the strangeness wash over me and didn’t try to think too hard about making things “make sense.” I don’t mean that I didn’t try to understand what was going on, just that I didn’t try to simplify anything or over-explain odd images. I think, as a translator, it’s important to approach a book with curiosity and openness, to do your best to avoid letting any preconceived notions you have about literature (or in the case of this book, reality) guide your choices too heavily.

I remember, however, that there were a few small images that sort of threw me: one was in the rap in the book where a guy was described as having a “crab head.” My brain, for whatever reason, would not accept this image. I remember trying to imagine a crab head. I failed to imagine a crab head. Do crabs have heads? Isn’t it more like a contiguous body? Is this man’s head like a whole crab body? I googled. I reached out to the author to make sure there wasn’t some idiomatic expression or reference I wasn’t aware of. She said very laconically, “No, his head is just shaped like a crab.” In this book, you just have to accept that heads are sometimes shaped like crabs.

SV: Oh! Can you talk me through one or two other challenges you faced while bringing The Endless Week over into English and how you resolved them? I’m curious, for instance, about the close attention paid to the word THIRST earlier in the novel, both its meaning and the sounds that word makes—sounds that have to be quite different in the original.

AN: Yes, the word for thirst in French is SOIF, which is totally different! So I had to rewrite the descriptions of the sounds a little bit for it to make sense. For example, the French described the vowel sound, the OI, as “suddenly opening,” which doesn’t work at all for the I in THIRST. So I described it as taking up space by “lengthening” instead of widening. I remember repeating the word to myself a bunch of times until it felt like it wasn’t a word. I felt like I couldn’t describe it, like I suddenly didn’t know the word “thirst” or any word at all really. I found it hard to articulate the way a word could take up space in a body. The experience made me realize that there are a lot of ways I could be imagining words that I’d just never thought of. This feeling—that there were ways of thinking about language I just hadn’t ever thought of—was one that came up over and over again while translating this book.

Something that interests me about this book on a language level is that it privileges a form of sonic suspense over plot suspense to drive the reader’s interest. We’re propelled by the rhythm of the words, as well as by the surprising, sometimes incongruous, observations of characters. The opening of the novel illustrates this well:

A head doesn’t just fall off, it can’t fall off. It’s connected to a thin
string that goes all the way down to a person’s feet, and if the head
falls, so does everything else. You should avoid breaking your head,
but you can break your limbs. When you break a limb, you remember
the limb is there. When a tooth gets infected, it vibrates inside,
almost as if it’s speaking. When you pinch your hand, it suddenly
appears. If a person puts an eye out, it becomes the main thing
about them. In truth, the body is soft. People are soft. Their hands
are soft, more tender than wood, softer than plastic or shells, they
are softer than fruit, more tender than the majority of things on
Earth. You can pierce through them with a needle, with a nail, it
would be easy, you wouldn’t even have to push that hard. There’s
nothing easier than piercing through someone’s hand with a pike
or a piece of wood. If you lose your hands they might as well rot,
there will still be arms left behind. Not your head. A head doesn’t
just fall off.

When I was translating this, it felt paramount to make the rhythm of this paragraph strong like in the original, to make the beats of repetition land in the right way, like the insistence on the word “soft.” If I’ve done my job right, the emphasis of the sentences “In truth, the body is soft. People are soft,” should land on “soft” as a punctuating sound in the paragraph, echoing the “off” from the beginning and end of the passage.

We also see several of Vazquez’s odd, uncanny observations in her way of describing the hierarchy of the body in terms of breakability. To me, it feels like Vazquez took the logic of a poem and expanded it into a novel. And throughout the book, she doesn’t really use the traditional toolkit of fiction: the plot is secondary and the characters don’t develop in a way you’re accustomed to seeing. But she forms their world through language that vibrates and keeps you guessing.

SV: Love that, and I definitely felt that emphasis on “soft” while reading. There is a sense of permeability throughout the novel, an evasion of the typical rules of space and time that when applied to bodies opens them up to the reader in ways that feel both beautiful and horrifying. Or to quote the old man, “purity is born of putrefaction.” It’s a deeply philosophical book but also a startlingly physical one. I wonder, as a last (and admittedly broad) question, then, what translating The Endless Week taught you about, well, human existence?

AN: Oh, gosh. There are so many things this book gets into. The “purity is born of putrefaction” moment is said by one of the more disturbing characters in the novel: an erratic old man who is covered in pustules and claims to be able to see the future in fields of wheat. The old man feels to me like an inverted messiah figure. He is bringing us some kind of gospel, but it’s wrapped in his rudeness, his grossness.

I think this is something the book plays with a lot—the idea that something true can come out of the mouth of a liar, or something smart can be followed by complete idiocy. All the characters are watery in this way. They all have capacities for cruelty and goodness. The Endless Week reminds us of the deep gray area that humans inhabit. And how, despite all of the cruelty and desperation, people still connect, they find each other across their disappointments and their traumas. And the internet, made in our image, is sometimes the thing that brings us together, and sometimes it’s the thing that drives us apart.