Reading Through a Magnifying Glass: An Interview with Olivia Hellewell
By Arwyn Clayton and Elodie Edwards
Edited by Naomi Adam
Translation is at the heart of our recent collaboration with UNESCO Cities of Literature, The Letters Page, Vol. 5 (available here). This edition features nine letters from Cities of Literature around the world that were sent to us by writers in their native languages, and made accessible for readers in Nottingham and beyond by nine incredible translators. To celebrate their involvement in the project, this week we spoke to Olivia Hellewell, who translated Manca Renko’s letter from Ljubljana, about her thoughts on and experiences with translation.
Where do you start with a translation?
Where I start can really depend on the text I’m translating. If there is time and if the text that I’m translating isn’t really, really long, I will always start by just reading as a reader: noting any impressions that I have, maybe making a few notes or scribbling on it in some way if I think that there’s going to be areas that I need to pay attention to.
Unfortunately, there isn’t always time in the professional translation world to read every book from start to finish before you need to start translating it, and
there are a lot of translators that advocate for starting to translate the book straight away because that replicates the experience of a reader.
If you were translating a crime thriller, for example, and you’d read the whole book and you knew where all the twists and turns were and then you started translating it, your decisions might be influenced in some way by the fact that you know what’s coming. But if you’re translating in real time, you’re going through that process of discovery as a reader would. I’ve done both; if I’ve had time I often read a book first, because I’m also reading to discover new writing in Slovenian or Spanish.
Do you ever find it hard or frustrating that no translation can ever be perfect?
I never come with the expectation that I am going to produce something that’s exactly the same because I’m working with a different set of tools. English as a structure is a very different structure to Slovenian, for example, so there will always be things that I have to accept are different – and that’s fine and that is a good thing. I think that can be quite generative in a way; where there is something that is seemingly impossible to convey fully, it really makes you think ‘okay, what can I do instead? How can I work around this?’ and I absolutely love that problem solving.
I think that’s one of my favourite things about translation, that you are solving a puzzle and you can solve it creatively.
There are definitely times when you can feel frustrated that no matter how hard you try you don’t feel you can quite hit exactly what the author was saying, or exactly recreate the impression you got – but no impression is exactly the same. I think it’s really unfair that some people have this judgement about translation and this expectation that it will be the same because that doesn’t exist in readings of the text in the same language, let alone between readings of the text in different languages.
What was your experience collaborating with Manca Renko on this letter?
Manca is somebody whose work I’ve been aware of for some time. I have done some copy-editing and proof-reading work for some of her academic outputs before, and then in recent years she has established a publishing press. I’ve always got an interest in what’s happening in Slovenian publishing and particularly independent publishing, so I noticed that she was working on this and I thought it looked like a really cool project unlike anything I’d seen in Slovenia before. Then a while ago she got in touch and told me that she was publishing this book of essays and she wanted one of the essays translating, and we worked together on that.
Then I heard about this edition of The Letters Page that was coming out, and of course Ljubljana is also a City of Literature , so Jon [McGregor, TLP Editor-in-Chief] asked me for suggestions of who he might ask if they’d like to write a letter for it, and in lots of ways I was spoiled for choice! But I’d recently had that really positive, collaborative working relationship with Manca, and so I just thought I would ask her and she was really keen. And that’s how it happened!
We noticed that this letter felt very conversational and intimate. Is it difficult to retain a writer’s tone and voice in your translation?
That’s really interesting because I felt like it was quite a close letter as well – I’ve never met Manca in real life and yet through all of our correspondences and working together through translations I do get a sense that we would really get on. Maybe because I sense a lot of overlap in our ideals, in our age, in our professions, that probably helped me quite a lot in pitching her voice. But it doesn’t always work like that, you can translate works by people who are completely, polar opposites to you and that’s cool as well.
When I approach a text I’m reading really closely and I’m paying attention to what an author is doing: do I notice patterns; do they tend to always phrase things in a certain way; do they have specific tendencies to use certain turns of phrase; do they always have long sentences, or does it vary? There are all kinds of clues that you pick up in a text, and this just comes from really, really paying attention. It’s quite hard to describe but it becomes quite intuitive.
It’s like looking at a text with a magnifying glass when you’re reading as a translator.
Is the active presence you have in this letter conventional of your process, or is there usually an expectation of invisibility that comes with translation?
A letter in this context is definitely a specific genre, and the brief of this translation task was quite open and creative in that way. If I were translating a novel that was going to be published, nobody wants to see my thoughts inserted directly into the middle of a fiction text – I mean, maybe some translation nerds do! But that isn’t something that an editor of a publishing house would typically be happy to see and the person that you are working for ultimately has that final say on the practise that you employ. There are other ways sometimes that I can make my presence as a translator more known – with fiction, for example, I’ve written translator’s notes or prefaces at the start that give me a chance to explain to a reader a little bit about what I tried to do with a text. There are ways that you can do it, but I wouldn’t normally be quite so present in the way that I interject with this letter.
I think that Manca in her letter was very generous in the way that she invited me in. I was present in Manca’s letter to a certain extent because she made references to me as a translator and was asking me to do certain things for other readers in Nottingham; like ‘please explain this’ or ‘edit this out’. She was really gracious in already acknowledging my work before I had to state that myself and that contributed to that sense of genuine collaboration and playfulness I think.
One thing that I haven’t done yet and that I promised Manca I would do is write back with a handwritten letter, and I really, really must do it! I’d really like this to spark some real world collaboration and letter writing, because we don’t do that much anymore.
Inspired to start your own correspondence? 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.
To be considered for our upcoming issue, Volume 6, your letter must be sent by 22nd March 2026 in the post, to:
The Letters Page, School of English, University of Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK
See our submissions page for more information.
Need some inspiration in your letter-writing endeavours? You can purchase our latest collection, The Letters Page, Vol. 5, by clicking here. And click here to read our feature article ‘Writing During the End of the World’, in which Production Editor Soha Kassab discusses Manca’s letter as a sharp and self-aware meditation on the uneasy business of writing in a world that refuses to stand still.
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