Letters: The Written Kintsugi
In Conversation with Irene Pujadas and Laura McGloughlin
By Miles Dunn and Amelia Cropley
Edited by Naomi Adam
Marking the launch of The Letters Page, Vol. 5, our publicity team met with a writer-and-translator pair who contributed to the latest edition. Irene Pujadas is an author and literary critic, as well as co-founder and -editor of the literary magazine Branca. Her letter in Vol. 5 is a beautifully crafted discussion of temporality and a very human connection to place, especially her home of Barcelona. Enabling Irene’s work to be shared with a wider audience, Laura McGloughlin worked in collaboration as the letter’s translator. Recipient of the British Centre for Literary Translation’s (BCLT) Translation Mentorship, Laura is an established translator of Spanish and Catalan fictional and non-fictional literature.
In interview, Irene and Laura considered the collaboration involved in the translating process, and spoke of their personal experiences with letter writing.
Translating another’s writing is an intimate task; it involves getting to know their work closely and being trusted to maintain authenticity to their voice. Yet Irene and Laura describe their collaboration as ‘an easy process’. And while Laura used to be hesitant about contacting an author, self-conscious about her questions toward them, with Irene, this fear was non-existent. Laura tells us that Irene was ‘very open from the beginning’ of the process, always willing to answer questions in a ‘prompt and helpful’ manner and talk collaboratively about their project.
Laura shares that Irene’s work had a clarity to it, making the translation process much easier. While familiar with translating various genres, translating letters is new to Laura, and she has found the voice required to be slightly different, in a way more personal. Laura began her journey as a translator in academia, studying literary translation at university, focusing in her early career on more traditional fictional pieces. Laura does however mention a sample she translated in Querido Diego, Te Abraza Quiela by Elena Poniatowska, a collection of letters from Angelina Beloff which masterfully blending fact and fiction. She notes that she brought much of what she learned from this experience to her collaborative efforts with Irene.
Their collaboration also involved the challenge of translating the less widely-spoken language of Catalan. With its complex history, finding the meanings of words and phrases in the language is often not as simple as flicking through a dictionary. While Laura is used to this challenge, stating that 90% of what she translates is Catalan, how to emulate the true feelings of the Catalan language in an English medium becomes nuanced and complex. Laura, at times, admits to struggling with the harshness to which the English language would constrict Irene’s writing. The Catalan word parsimònia, for example, translates negatively into English, and thus she decided to spotlight its two separate meanings: first, leisureliness, and second, lack of haste.
‘Translators have a special power’
Considering this decision, Irene suggests that ‘translators have a special power’ in reproducing a writer’s work. She also suggests that writers have an inherent faith in translators and their work, especially when the writer is less familiar with the language that their work is being translated into. Not writing in English herself, Irene placed great trust in Laura to emulate her voice honestly.
From the beginning of our conversation, the art of letter writing is a core focus. Something about its analogue ‘magic’ appeals to both Laura and Irene, who note its the physicality, timelessness, personality. ‘No one is going to collect your emails’, says Laura, with Irene observing the beauty of seeing your friend’s handwriting, errors, imperfections and thought processes – ‘it is completely authentic’.
Elsewhere, Laura found this authenticity highlighted in The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting by Philip Heshner, a history which navigates the endangered art of handwriting. After Heshner realised that he missed something in a friendship by not knowing a close friend’s handwriting, he decided to bring to focus the ‘warmth and personality of the handwritten note’ in his book.
Laura and Irene both speak to us of their personal relationship with letter writing. Laura is apt to send letters to whoever on her Facebook friends list wants one, while Irene sends long digital letters in the form of emails to a friend in New York. In a beautiful analogy, Laura compares letter writing to kintsugi, or ‘joining with gold’ – a Japanese technique of repairing ceramic and porcelain ornaments using golden filigree. Seeing a letter’s imperfections, the process of its creation and the hand behind it, personalises it; just like kintsugi, these flaws can be accepted as the letter’s gold. There are no autocorrected or AI-generated amendments here.
Similarly, Irene and Laura speak about letter writing’s individualism, considering it a process more for the self than the recipient. Together, we conclude that its catharsism, innate subjectivity, and often stand-alone nature, make it almost ritualistic. Unpacking this viewpoint, Irene ‘fiercely’ recommends Natalia Ginzburg’s The City and The House, a novel exploring humanity and the tenderness of goodbyes through letters. The Arts Desk beautifully relates the novel to theatrical art; claiming the letters ‘resemble a Greek chorus or vernacular commentary on the events taking place backstage’.
Discussion then turns to Barcelona as a City of Literature, with Irene mentioning the amount of bookshops in the city. This is a central component of Barcelona’s City of Literature status, with over three hundred bookshops, forty public libraries and the widespread recognition that it is the publishing capital of Catalonia. Then there is the Sant Jordi book festival: a celebrated Catalan holiday where lovers exchange a rose and a book. Here in Nottingham, we understand living in a city where literature is shared so widely, and Barcelona and Nottingham are in fact each celebrating ten years as a UNESCO City of Literature.
‘Language flows, it doesn’t fit in a box, it breaks out and moves out’
Irene states that as a Catalan writer, she feels a strong sense of pride for Barcelona, and in how her home city and Catalonian culture more generally naturally influence her writing. We consider how simply writing in your mother tongue language indexes a belonging to a certain place: ‘If I was not able to write in Spanish, I wouldn’t be completely myself’, Irene says.
Agreeing, Laura adds: ‘language flows, it doesn’t fit in a box, it breaks out and moves out’. Having lived there for many years, Laura then describes Barcelona as ‘the city of my heart’: she mentions that every time she revisits she feels immediately welcomed back into its lively and literary community.
This then leads to our final topic of conversation: how place influences the translation process. Laura, whilst led by the writer’s meaning, has found her ‘translations will always have a lean to Irish culture’, as she was born in Dublin. Her subconscious has drawn her to where she learnt and first used language. Meanwhile, this idea of place influencing writing and creativity naturally harmonises with letter writing, which we often paradoxically associate with both distance and intimacy.
You can read Irene Pujades’ letter, translated by Laura McGloughlin, in The Letters Page, Vol. 5, which is available for purchase here.
Do you have something to say? The Letters Page team are back in the office, and ready to read your real letters again. We publish stories, essays, poems, memoir, reportage, criticism, recipes, travelogues, and any hybrid forms, so long as they come to us in the form of a letter. We are looking for writers of all nationalities and ages, both established and emerging.
Your letter must be sent in the post, to:
The Letters Page, School of English, University of Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK
See our submissions page for more information.
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