Books are my business: Literary translator Deirdre McMahon

How did you become a translator?

I started off studying to be a primary teacher many years ago.

I had six months of German at school and I got interested in it as a language.

I attended the Goethe Institut, and went to Freiburg for a summer literature course, and I was sold.

I came back and did a BA in English and German at University College Dublin in the evening system and I continued on and did a masters specialising in modern Austrian literature.

I was teaching all the time as well.

At the end of the 1980s, the real world kicked in and I didn’t have time for any more fluting around with books.

I kept reading and worked on the modern languages primary schools project for four years, which was great.

Then I took early retirement from primary teaching and did a masters in literary translation and writing at the University of Warwick.

What does your role involve?

When I’m working on a book it’s very, very intense, because you’re in that world. You have to remember to come out of it, and go for a walk or something. 

I try to work in bursts, and then come back and edit. Because I’m still a rookie translator, I am also pitching things.

The two books that I’ve translated that have been published have both been books that I pitched, sending them around to various publishers. 

I’ve done extracts for books, but I haven’t got to the stage of being asked to do books. I’m also now learning to be a bit pragmatic about it.

I’m really passionate about children’s books but it’s very difficult to get an in with a children’s book publisher without an agent.

What do you like most about what you do?

I like the fact that I’m working with really beautiful words and concepts. I don’t have to think up my own plots, and that’s a help. 

I’m working as an artist, or working creatively with a piece of work, and I have a loyalty to it, but I also have to be loyal to the English language as well.

What do you like least about it?

Rejection is obviously difficult to deal with. Also, sometimes if you find a problem, you can spend a whole morning wrestling with one sentence.

I’ve also turned down jobs which involved editing AI material.

Three desert island books

A book I go back to again and again is Staying Alive, Real Poems for Unreal Times, published by Bloodaxe and edited by Neil Astley. I often just pick it up and find something useful.

Another book I would go back to is Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, which I loved. It has been around the circle of various friends and it has come back to me.

The last one, which I have read in German but not in English yet, would be The Café with No Name by Robert Seethaler. It is set in Vienna, not the fancy opera house Vienna but a working-class area, and is about a man who has come through a lot of difficulties and opens a little café in a disused building.

The book is about the clientele who come into the café and how their stories intertwine. The characters are really well-rounded and developed, and when I finished reading it, I just felt, I want to go back to the start, I want to stay with these people.

I’m really excited to see what it’s like in English; it’s translated by Katy Derbyshire who’s a fantastic translator, and it has just been published by Europa Editions.

• Discover the voices shaping Europe’s literary landscape with Deirdre McMahon and Carolina Schutti, winner of the European Union Prize for Literature in 2015, An Díseart, Dingle, Saturday, November 16, 12pm to 1pm. dinglelit.ie