Fair by Jen Calleja review – on the magic of translation

The Guardian

25-07-2025

Jen Calleja is used to making things happen for herself, by herself, despite the fact that collaboration is vital to all her endeavours: her work as a literary translator, rendering German prose and poetry into English; her life as a publisher, and co-founder with her friend Kat Storace of Praspar Press, which aims to bring Maltese literature to a wider audience; her own writing, which includes the novel Vehicle and the essay collection Goblinhood; and her other incarnation, as a member of the post-punk band Sauna Youth.
All of this takes a significant amount of energy and determination, but one of Fair's central contentions is that it is all made far harder than it ought to be by, in effect, the covert acceptance of inequality and exclusion in the arts and literature. She recalls, for example, finally feeling that she has made it as a translator when she is invited to speak at the London Book Fair; years later, she returns to tell the audience that she has plenty of work, but only £30 in her bank account because so many of the organisations in the room are behind on paying her. 'Out of the frying pan of grifting,' as she acidly notes, 'into the fire of contempt'.
But it is not simply a question of spiralling workload, dwindling rates of pay, insecure employment or even the spectre of AI. Translators are additionally required to go along with their own erasure: to sign up to the idea that invisibility is hard-wired into their value, and that a truly great translation is the one that the reader fails to notice. Maintaining this fiction might take obvious forms – neglecting to give a translator their rightful billing on the text itself – or it might be subtle and insidious, as in the insistence that translators suppress their regional identity by rendering everything in homogeneous southern English. Departing from such strictures has not hindered translators such as the inestimable Deborah Smith, who introduced Yorkshire dialect into her versions of the novels of Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang.
In fact, as Calleja demonstrates through several fascinating and detailed translations in progress, shepherding a piece of writing from one language into another requires so many minute responses, thought processes and decisions that the translator would find it impossible to suppress their own voice and experiences; and that if they managed it, the result would probably be worse, inert and undynamic. Her relationship with the manuscripts on her desk, for example, is informed by her life-changing encounter with Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser (The Reader), a novel that she selected at random in a Munich bookshop when she was a teenager, over time allowing the chasms in her understanding and appreciation of the prose to slowly fill in and resolve. 'Looking at this first page now, it feels so strange to know how I would translate it, how only I would translate it,' she writes. 'Even stranger to think that now I pick up novels in German, open them, read them, and know how to translate them into books you buy in shops. That people trust me to do this.'
Fair is so titled in part to reflect its qualities as a manifesto – not only an improvement in pay and working conditions, but a demand that literary translation as a practice and profession should be a viable aspiration for a far greater number and type of people. It also describes the book's puckish structure, in which we wander the stands, stalls and hallways of a notional trade fair, and where the illusion of cosy intimacy and friendliness – the decorated cubicles for meetings, the drinks receptions, the musical performances – are at odds with the corporate reality of such gatherings, which are essentially transactional rather than poetic. It can be a somewhat distracting and disorientating mechanism, which is perhaps the point. Stripping away the industrial structures of creating art is far easier said than done, but as she repeatedly tells us, you have to start somewhere.
Fair: The Life-Art of Translation by Jen Calleja is published by Prototype (£12.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply