Show Notes
In this podcast, we’re joined by novelist Elisa Shua Dusapin, whose debut novel
Winter in Sokcho was translated and published in the UK this year. In conversation with Dr Sandra van Lente and joined by her translator Aneesa Abbas Higgins, they discuss shared identities, isolation and the relationship between writing and translation.
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast brings writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions
about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.
Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website:
https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit
https://writingwestmidlands.org/Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest
Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Guest Curator: Kit de Waal
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Podcast Transcription, Episode 13: Elisa Shua Dusapin and Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Kit de Waal
Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast series. I’m Kit de Waal and I’ve worked with the Festival Director, Shantel Edwards, as Guest Curator of this year’s podcast series. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. In this podcast, we’re joined by novelist Elisa Shua Dusapin, whose debut novel Winter in Sokcho was translated and published in the UK this year. Elisa’s novel follows a young French-Korean woman who works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse in a deserted tourist town on the border between South and North Korea, and the uneasy relationship she forms with a French man who checks into the hotel. Joined by her translator, Aneesa Abbas Higgins, they discuss shared identities, isolation and the relationship between writing and translation.
Pro Helvetia Message
This episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast is supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.
Sandra van Lente
Thank you all for tuning in. My name is Sandra van Lente. I'm a freelance cultural project manager and academic who works on the lack of diversity in the publishing industries. I have the great pleasure to introduce you to today's guests on the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast series, Elisa Shua Dusapin and Aneesa Abbas Higgins. Elisa Shua Dusapin is a Franco Korean author who lives in Switzerland and wrote the novel Winter in Sokcho which we will be talking about today. Her debut novel was originally written in French and published by the Swiss indie publisher Editions, Zurich. Winter in Sokcho was translated into 13 languages if I'm not mistaken, among them English, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins and published by Daunt Books, and German, translated by Andreas Jandl and published by Blumenbar. Elisa has won several prizes for her novels, among them the Robert Walser prize, the Prix Alpha and the French Prix Régine Desforges for Winter in Sokcho. She has two more novels out that we might hear about more later.
Aneesa Abbas Higgins is a literary translator and translates from French to English. She spends most of her time between London and a small village in France. In addition to Elisa Shua Dusapin’s novel, she has also translated from Tahar Ben Jelloun, Nina Bouraoui and Vénus Khoury-Ghata. Her translations won several awards, for example, her translation of the Goncourt winner, What Became of the White Savage by François Garde, and a translation of A Girl Called Eel by Ali Zamir, which was published by the indie publisher Jacaranda books in 2019. Aneesa has kindly agreed to translate those of Elisa's answers that she might give in French today. Thank you both for joining us for this podcast. Can we please start with you, Elisa, and how you became an author. So how and why did you start writing?
Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
She never, it wasn't that she specifically always wanted to become a writer. It was more questions that she had herself about the multicultural upbringing that she'd had being a mixture of Korean and French. So, when she was 13 she went to Korea for the first time and it came as quite a shock to her to realize that her family was not unique that there were plenty of other people in the world like her and it made her start thinking about things and it made her start to read a great deal and as she was reading she began to realise that writing might be a way of addressing the questions that she had about her own identity. So, Elisa was very lucky to have some wonderful teachers when she was in high school who encouraged her to write and she began writing - never thought about writing a novel - she was writing short texts that were to do with her French Korean identity. And it gradually grew into what became the novel Winter in Sokcho that, in fact, she wrote between the ages of 17 and 21. But she never thought about getting it published. And it wasn't published until she was 23 and that again was on the encouragement of a former teacher.
Sandra van Lente
Thanks a lot for sharing this Elisa. So, can you share with us, what did you set out to explore in your first novel?
Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
She wanted to write, create a character who was something of a mirror image of herself. The opposite in a way but the same, so a young woman who had grown up in Korea, and who knew the French language through literature and studying and who also had this feeling of being a foreigner, a stranger in her own land even though she understood the culture and the language and that she had the same feeling of being out of place, but in two places also. She started writing this as she was coming out of adolescence at an age when we're thinking a great deal about our body, our relationship to our body, body image, our own image and she wanted to write something about the violence really that is done to women in South Korea in terms of the pressure to have plastic surgery done on one's face to make one conform to a certain image and how the young woman, the character in her novel relates to all of this violence and body image and pressure to have one's face look a certain way.
Sandra van Lente
Was there a character that you found more difficult to write than the others, Elisa, and if so, why?
Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
The male character Kerrand was the most challenging, not so much difficult, but he was a character who she didn't first imagine that he would have to have a whole life story, a history, be a fully rounded person, she just wanted him to be there as an example of the male gaze. His function was to play the role of the male gaze so the narrator, the female narrator, could be reflected through him. So, at first all he had was a function and the rest of him as a person was something of a mystery to her.
Sandra van Lente
I would like to move on to the translation process then. Aneesa, how did this book come to you? And why did you choose to do the translation?
Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Well in fact, this was one of the books that I did find myself because it doesn't always work that way. You know, sometimes one is presented with a book and asked to translate it, but this one, I did find myself. I found it, when I'm in France, I always spend a lot of time lurking in my local bookshop, looking for interesting books. And I found the book sitting on the table there, in the recent publications. And it was a very, very hot few days, we often have heat waves, very, very intense heat waves. So, it was a very hot afternoon, I picked up this little book, I liked the title. I flicked through it, took it home and read it in one sitting and I was absolutely entranced. And I was entranced, I'm sure the fact that it was so hot, and the book was taking me to a place that was so cold, a blast of fresh air, but I fell in love with the way it was written. And I was completely seduced by the book and I thought I would love to translate this. So, I set about doing a sample and submitting it to publishers. And I was very fortunate it was picked up by the magazine Asymptote and Elisa was featured as one of their new French voices in a feature they were doing with my translation of the opening chapter. And so, one thing led to another and that led to Daunt Books finding it and asking me to translate it. So here we are a couple of years later.
Sandra van Lente
Amazing, thanks for sharing that. And Aneesa, what were the major challenges for you for the translation?
Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Every book has its own challenges, you know what you want to do is to recreate the author's voice as best as you can in English, and also to give the reader the same, or as close as possible, to the same experience that you have when you read it in French. So creating a translation is about a lot more than simply figuring out what the words mean, it's much more a question of digging beneath the images and finding how those images are conveyed. And this is a book which is full of intense imagery, some of it is quite visceral, some of it is very atmospheric. It is very visual, but it's also full of smells and tastes. And so the challenge was to convey the same images into English and to reflect Elisa's incredible economy of language, she has a great talent for using very few words to conjure something very rich and something that is so appealing to the imagination. So yes, I would say the fact that, I mean it’s quite a short book, there's quite a lot of empty space on the page. But it took a very long time because in a way it's like translating poetry, you know, every word has to be carefully weighed up not only against the French, but also against all the other words, in its little network, you know, words exist in a network, they slip and slide, the meanings and values and sounds and tones and rhythms can all change according to how you place them on the page. So, all of these things were part of the challenge and the pleasure because it is a great pleasure.
Sandra van Lente
Oh yeah, I hear you. Elisa, did you feel that you had to explain or maybe also translate some parts of Korean cultural aspects to French or Swiss readers? And if so, how did you decide what you explained in more detail and what not?
Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
She never thought that she was trying to teach or tell anybody about Korean culture. That wasn't her idea at all because for her Korean culture was simply part of her life. She lived it, she grew up hearing the language spoken, eating the food, you know, it was very much part of her life. And the last thing she wanted to do was to create a novel that was in any way didactic. So really, her approach was much more that she wanted to just immerse the reader, although as she said when she was writing, she wasn't even imagining it being read, she had no idea of a reader in mind. But in a way, what she was doing was she was trying to create a universe that immerses us in the world of this Korean culture as she knows it, which I think she does very well.
Sandra van Lente
I couldn't agree more, as a reader I really enjoyed that too. And I'm asking this question, because I know that there are some other publishers who feel a bit different about that, and might maybe put some pressure, especially on debut authors to explain a bit more for different cultural contexts. So yeah, I'm glad that you didn't feel this pressure at all. Can I ask you two, how did you work together? Was it a close collaboration? And can you share a bit about that? Aneesa first please.
Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Yes, we did work together in some ways. I was, you know, I was very fortunate that Elisa was so responsive to my questions. My approach with asking authors questions, what I usually do is wait until I finish my first draft. And I think I did that this time. I hope I did. Because what I try to do is I try to keep a running track of my questions as I go through it, and some of them will answer themselves as I go along. So, I do try to wait until I've got some questions that I know are worthy of, you know, the author's input. And then I also found that as we were editing it some of the questions that came back to me from the editor, Jelke, who did a superb job, I have to say of editing. The questions that she asked me forced me to ask myself again, whether I had fully understood or whether what I had understood was, you know, the only, whether there were better ways of understanding. So, I don't think as far as proofreading, but certainly we kept on coming back to it. And she was great. She always sent me very long considered answers. And we communicate in a mixture of English and French, you know, I sometimes write to her in English and she answers me in French. And we're both quite happy with that. So yeah, and they weren't necessarily questions about specific words and details of words. They really were more to do with the ideas, underlying the images, clarifying that I had understood them in a way that Elisa…because English sometimes needs to spell things out a little more than French does, you know, in French, it is a little bit more possible to present an idea in such a way that it remains quite elusive and ambiguous. That doesn't work so well in English and sometimes one does have to pin it down a little more in English just because the language demands it.
Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
She appreciated our collaboration, that I paid so much attention to the to the finer details and she did appreciate it. I’m very glad, I think the text, you know, was infinitely worthy of this. So, of course, I was going to ask all those questions, but she also said that when she was writing it, in fact, in her head, none of the characters were actually speaking French anyway, they were speaking English or they were speaking Korean. So being asked to explain in greater detail, what was meant by some of the things that were said or some of the things behind the characters sort of plunged her into an understanding that the book had, it had gone beyond her, that it could be interpreted and understood and translated in all the different senses of the word. And it was quite a revelation to her.
Sandra van Lente
Thank you very much. And Elisa do you always work so closely with your translators? And can you maybe share some of the experience you meet with different translators.
Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
Elisa hasn't worked as closely with her other translators, and that the collaboration that we had was particularly rich. Her collaboration with the other translators wasn't quite as rich as the collaboration that she and I had for the English translation. For the German translation, it was interesting because that's another language she understands and she was able to follow it more closely and appreciate it more. And also with the Korean because she does understand and speak Korean but she had no contact at all with the Korean translator and she would have liked to have done and she found that reading the Korean translation, there's a feeling of strangeness because the translator stuck very closely to the structures of the French language. And the effect that that has in Korean, it makes it seem very foreign and very strange, which is an interesting point. Because it is something that, this is me adding this now, that goes backwards and forwards in the translation world, should one aim for that feeling of foreignness, because this is a translation or should one aim to give a translation which is a more authentic rendering of the effect that the book has on the reader. So that's an interesting point.
She doesn't have a negative opinion at all of the Korean translation, its just that she would have liked to have had more communication with the translator. For example, in the Korean language, the subject pronoun ‘I’ is avoided, it's not used, whereas in French, it's used quite a lot. And that Elisa's character in Winter in Sokcho, her main character is a young woman who is in fact, she's a voice in search of a body. She is a young woman who's looking for herself, she's unsure of herself, but in the Korean translation, because of the use of the pronoun ‘I’, she comes across as a much more assured person, a person who's much surer of herself which is a strange quirk, the difference.
Sandra van Lente
Thank you two very much. Now we have heard a lot about the book. Can we please hear from the book now? Elisa, would you mind starting the reading please?
Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
[Extract from Winter in Sokcho]
“At the bus stop there was no one but us.
‘So you're French? From Normandy?’
I nodded to show I understood.
‘You've heard of it?’
‘I’ve read Maupassant’.
He turned to look at me.
‘How do you picture it?’
I thought for a moment.
‘Pretty. A bit melancholy.’
‘Well, it's changed since Maupassant’s day.’
‘I'm sure it has. Like Sokcho.’
Kerrand didn't reply. He'd never understand what Sokcho was like. You had to be born here, live through the winters. The smells. The octopus. The isolation.
‘Do you read a lot?’ he asked.
‘I used to before I went to university. I used to love reading. Now it's more of a chore.’ He nodded, tightened his grip on the package he was holding.
‘What about you?’
‘Do I read?’
‘What do you do for a living?’
‘I draw. Comics.’
The word comics didn't sound right coming from him. It conjured up images of conventions, queueing fans. Maybe he was famous. I didn't read comic books.
‘Is your story set here?’
‘I don't know yet. Maybe.’
‘Are you on holiday?’
‘There's no such thing as a holiday in my line of work.’
That evening, he wasn't there again at dinner. Feeling emboldened after our walk, I took him a tray of food that was less spicy than the meals served to the other guests. He was sitting on the edge of the bed. His stooping figure silhouetted against the paper wall. The door had been left ajar. Pressing my face to the doorframe, I could see his hand moving over a sheet of paper. He placed the paper on top of a box on his lap. The pencil between his fingers was finding its way, moving forwards and backwards, hesitant, searching again. The point hadn't yet touched the paper. Kerrand began to draw with uneven strokes. He went over the lines several times, as if to erase and correct, etching the contours into the paper. The image was impossible to make out, branches of a tree or a heap of scrap metal perhaps. Eventually, I recognized the shape of an eye, a dark eye, beneath a tangle of hair. The pencil continued in its path until a female form emerged, eyes a bit too large, a tiny mouth. She was perfect. He should have stopped there.
But he carried on, going over the features, gradually twisting the lips, warping the chin, distorting the image. Then, taking a pen, he daubed ink slowly and purposefully over the paper until the woman was nothing more than a black misshapen blob. He placed a sheet of paper on the desk. Ink dripped down onto the floor. A spider scuttled into view and started to run up his leg, but he made no move to brush it away. He looked down at his handiwork. In an instinctive movement, he tore off a corner of the sheet and began to chew on it. I was afraid he'd see me. I put the tray down silently and left.”
Sandra van Lente
Thanks a lot Elisa and Aneesa. If you want to read it in full now, Aneesa’s translation of Elisa's novel, Winter in Sokcho, was published this year by Daunt Books. And maybe as a last question, what are you currently working on Elisa and can you share something about your new book?
Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
Elisa's third novel has just been published this August and the title is Vladivostok Circus. And it's a story about a trio who perform the very dangerous discipline of the Russian bar. They are creating a new act. They're based in Vladivostok and the novel is told from the point of view of a young costume designer who comes to Vladivostok from Switzerland to work with them, and who gets to know them and has to work with them on the level of trying to understand and get inside this vitally important bond of trust that has to exist between the three performers, for them to carry out this extremely dangerous circus discipline. So that's what that novel is about. Apart from that, Elisa has been working on the cinema adaptation of Winter in Sokcho. And she's also been creating a young adult play, which will be being performed in January. When she has finished a novel, she needs to do something else for while, she writes in other areas too in order to distance herself from the novel that is completed before she can begin on the very long task of creating another novel.
Sandra van Lente
Thank you very much Elisa and Aneesa for participating in this podcast and for sharing so openly. I hope you two get to work together on the next translation too, I know there are many people looking forward to it. Thanks a lot. And goodbye.
Elisa Shua Dusapin
Thank you very much.
Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
Outro message
Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Birmingham Lit Fest presents…podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love for you to tell us about it – leave us a review or a rating and find us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. You can download our latest podcast episodes, every Thursday, from all the places you would normally get your podcasts and find transcripts of our episodes in the shownotes and on our website at www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org . Details about our full programme can also be found on our website. Until then, happy reading!
The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast is curated by Shantel Edwards and produced by 11C and Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands.