Translators open the world to us when they translate novels, plays and poetry into English. We can access cultures and languages we will never speak. Translating literature is not a mechanical process. When language is art, the act of translation is as much about aesthetics as meaning.
On this month's Short Talks from the Hill podcast, Todd Price speaks with writer Padma Viswanathan, who teaches in the University of Arkansas Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Translation program. They discuss the practice, art and deeper purpose of translating fiction into English.
Todd Price: First, I want to congratulate you for being named to the shortlist for the 2026 International Booker Prize for your translation of On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia. Our listeners might be more familiar with the annual Booker Prize, which honors a work of fiction in English. The International Booker Prize since 2016 has honored works translated into English. The prize is unique because the award is shared equally between the author and the translator. Tell us a little bit about the plot and setting of On Earth As It Is Beneath. It's a really wonderful work. I greatly enjoyed reading it — very cinematic as well.
Padma Viswanathan: On Earth As It Is Beneath is set in a penal colony in some remote location. It was founded on certain principles and then largely forgotten by the people who set it up. These men, these prisoners, were transported, installed there, and then nobody really remembers that they are there. The director in charge of this place is starting to go insane, and the primary symptom of this is that he creates this sick game that involves effectively hunting a prisoner once in a while.
Price: Talk about how you approach the translation.
Viswanathan: A translator has no control over where a story goes. At the line level, we make many, many choices. In the case of this book, it felt very important to me to achieve the greatest leanness in English that I could. Much of the prose, even in the Portuguese, is quite blocky. It's a little bit rough-hewn. It's dry, along with the landscape being dry, except for certain places where, in dialogue, you'll get a little wink of humor between these men — which I think humor is an expression of tenderness. That intimacy, that long acquaintance between these men, will very briefly come out here and there. And unless I got those beats correct — they are also very laconic; they say like two words in their dialogues to each other. And then there are certain places, either concerning one of them or concerning the landscape or concerning someone's history, where there will be these flights of lyricism, and there's a different kind of affection expressed there. Sometimes it's danger in the landscape, sometimes it's a beauty that comes through to them. I really felt like in making the prose as tight as I could, I was going to give sort of platforms for those other qualities to lift off.
Price: Do you think about the rhythm? Do you say the lines out loud in both languages and think about how the stresses fall? Obviously each language has its own stress patterns, so there are limits to what you can copy and replicate. But how do you work on that level where it's more rhythmic and about sound?
Viswanathan: Yes, absolutely. I do. In my own work I also edit for sound very much, but my own personal rhythms as a writer are very different from Ana Paula's. I very much had to read in my mind and aloud, depending on which draft I was in. With this particular book, I did something I've done a version of for several of my own books: between draft four and draft five, I retyped the entire thing. I put my existing draft on the left side of my screen, because I feel like she writes quite quickly — she certainly seems to produce about a book a year — and there was a way in which I wanted to have a swiftness in my own prose. Working line by line and word by word.
Price: As someone whose artistic medium is prose, do you see this as an artistic expression, or are you channeling the other author, or is it somewhere in between?
Viswanathan: It's very much an artistic process, an artistic expression. There are some people who are primarily, if not exclusively, translators as artists. Some of the ones we most admire — Alison Entrekin in my own field, or Katrina Dodson — have taken on some of the most difficult writers and texts in Brazilian literature. There's no other word for them but artists, if you read them in English or compare their work to the originals in Portuguese or to other people's translations; you can see how inspired their choices are. Think of it like a sculptor working with clay. That sculpture is limited by the medium. So within these spatial, linguistic limitations, you're definitely trying to engage in an artistic practice.
Price: As an individual artist, how do you find the experience different from producing your own novel versus translating somebody else's work? What kind of satisfaction do you find in each project?
Viswanathan: Each is terrifying in its own way. When I'm writing my own books, I'm staring out into nothing, wondering if anybody could possibly be interested in this, and building it from the ground up. But I'm only obliged to myself and my characters. In the case of translation, of course you're beholden to somebody else — a real, live or real dead person who created this work. What if I'm not serving them? What if the way I read their work is not something I'm able to get across? That would feel terrible. The primary motivation, especially when you're starting in translation — this was true for me, and I think it's true for most beginning translators — is that you read a book in a language that almost none of your friends speak, and you're like, oh my God, you have to read this book. And either it's not translated or there's only what you think of as a quite inadequate translation, and somebody reads it and they're like, "meh." And you're like, no, you must understand the genius of this writer. So then you take it on and then partway through you think, oh my God, what have I done? But you have no choice at that point.
Price: Why do you think sophisticated readers might treat translation as almost invisible?
Viswanathan: In a way, it means we're doing our job correctly. If you become very aware of the awkwardness of a translation, or if there are things that make you suspicious about the way something is rendered — I can talk about this right now because she's dead, but I just finished rereading Constance Garnett's translation of Crime and Punishment. She did an enormous service to English readers by bringing so much Russian literature into English. But a number of her choices are pretty odd for us now, especially 100 years on. It just happened to be the copy I had on my shelf. I wanted to reread it, so I picked it up instead of the 13 other translations that are possible. And now I think I'm going to go pick up a couple of them and compare some of the bits where I put a little note in the margin — "ouch," because a word would pop out that just seemed so wrong. The register was off. For many years, until recently, translators' names were not on the cover of the book. Sometimes they weren't even on the opening title page. Publishers were encouraging readers for many years to believe that something had been written in English, because they felt that the notion of translation would be off-putting. You would feel, maybe, if you have a little bit of access to a language, that you really should read Proust in the original. In my case, no. Instead, I should just really pick up a translation — of which now there are a couple — and maybe compare a little bit, but engage with it as a fun thing, in gratitude to the translator, but also in a spirit of critical response in the way that you would respond to other aspects of the story.
Price: Just one final question, a general one. There's more written in English than any of us could ever individually read, and more coming out every week. So why translation? What is the value in bringing these works into English?
Viswanathan: You know, I never even questioned that — which seems revealing in its own right. I think most of us who read, and I should mention we have only talked about the translation of fiction, which is what I teach and what I write mostly — I think most of us who read, especially novels, read for many reasons, but primary among them is curiosity. We're curious about other people's lives, and fiction gives us intimate glimpses, intimacy with the lives of people who we otherwise could never know. Works written in Portuguese, written in Tamil, written in Bengali — those works were written for readers in those languages. And now you've become one of those readers, right? So you've not only taken your place among people who have access to that, but almost as though you've joined another whole reading population. It's definitely a related satisfaction to being in my classrooms. I love teaching books because I love talking about books with people and hearing how differently each person around the table reads the same book. Well, that expands that connection.
You can hear this entire episode of Short Talks from the Hill with host Todd Price talking with writer Padma Viswanathan, a celebrated translator of Portuguese and teacher in the University of Arkansas Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Translation program.
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