Elizabeth Upshur is a Black Southern storyteller and editor. She is the co-poetry editor at Okay Donkey Mag and is a contributing editor at The Seventh Wave. She is the cofounder of The Southern Esesu Endeavor, a virtual thirdspace for members of the Black Diaspora, and home of the annual 3 day SEE virtual retreat filled with editorial and generative workshops, Open Mics, Submission Crawls, panels, and presentations. Elizabeth is a recipient of scholarships and fellowships from Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, Poets on the Coast, Grub Street, Hugo House, and Voodoonauts.

In my last blog post, I shared how playwriting has offered me a different perspective in my writing and helped mold my revision process. Today, I want to reach back even further into my writer’s toolkit to talk about what we can learn from translation as a practice and as an integral part of literary ingestion.

Translation is the process of taking a piece of literature in one language (the source language) and recreating it in another language (target language). Depending on your school of thought, preference may be given towards the literal words, the cultural context, rewriting the work to evoke the significance of the original work, the energy or joie de vivre, etc. 

My first experience with translation was in Spanish class, where our professor would have us attempt to translate a song in Spanish into English. The goal was to help us learn more words in Spanish, to get a feel for language rhythm and musicality, and hopefully, to make something coherent that expressed the same sentiment as the original. I still remember the song in question, a kicky latin rock piece called A Dios Le Pido by Juanes, meaning, To God I Pray. 

Okay, but how does this tool help us with our writing?

When I translated, my practice looked like scaffolding my translations by focusing on individual words, the bare bones of what was being said in a literal sense. Next was reading how prior translations had been done—which helped ensure my original translation wasn’t too far off as a young translator. Finally, focusing on context helped me make my revisions and final drafts, seeking every opportunity to highlight the same humor, allusions, or cultural context in the lines and the energy of the translated poem. In fiction, this would look like the following steps.

1. Never settle for an okay word.

Always find the perfect word to convey the emotional center of whatever it is that you’re trying to say. In your down draft this may look like a comment highlighting that you want dialogue that sounds more how the character should sound or to help lay the foundation for a plot twist, demonstrate that friends are beginning to sound like one another, or betray that a romance arc is rising. That is, your first draft contains what you want to say, but your revision sharpens those words into what you need to say, which is why the second draft tends to be a little shorter and tighter. 

I feel like I did this quite naturally with names, agonizing over first, middle, and surnames to make sure my characters had these effortlessly cool yet relevant handles. I wanted my heroines to have names that meant protective, fortunate, strong, while my villainesses might have names that spoke to their greed, darkness, or thirst for power. This isn’t about opening up a thesaurus and using it like a rolodex; it’s about making setting and dialogue work together in a way that’s cohesive, unique, and interesting. 

Study language and stay abreast of how it changes. Each word choice matters.

2. Read your predecessors… but put your own spin on things.

My favorite is a Zulu quote says that “people are people because of other people.” By extension, we might say that people become people by being in community. So, writers become writers because of other writers. Because they’ve read and been inspired, but also because they are constantly learning, constantly in community, constantly seeing connections and being driven to weave their own stories in response. 

Before you can break the rules with style, you have to know them and the purposes that they serve. If you want to write a generational saga, you should read García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Isabel Allende, Mildred D. Taylor, Yaa Gyasi, Imbolo Mbue, etc. 

Give yourself homework to read the greats and contemporary work. These are your teachers and your peers, not your competitors. And as you absorb their work, you’re sure to feel inspiration strike as you think, hey, I love what they’re doing with the genre or these tropes, but here’s how I want to write this in 2024. 

3. Research matters, especially for context.

This one goes hand in hand with #2. If I want to write a sci-fi short story about an assassin with really cool guns, I can just make it all up. But researching real world weaponry and studying fight scenes is going to show me how combatants engage one another and help orient me on the page to navigate my own fight scenes. Logistics matter, like how heavy is this weapon? How many projectiles can it hold? What damage does it cause? How can my character hold it, attack with it, defend with it? If I want something that’s not humanly possible, I can still do it; I just need to make my character non-human or change the setting to have no gravity. Which I can do. Because it’s sci-fi.

When I first started writing, I wrote a lot of mysteries and historical fiction, so I researched police procedures, law, and medicine, as well as specific time periods to know how people ate, slept, and moved around their world. It’s a lot easier now with Pinterest to build these tapestries of what clothing, food, technology, and architecture looked like for different characters/worlds, but don’t forget how much you ground yourself and discover through a book. A good library haul will do wonders for the soul!

To avoid getting lost in researching (and over researching) I suggest having a shopping list, e.g., read three books before my down draft, read up to two more books/essays if something isn’t clicking in my revision, and then swap with at least one beta reader who can offer notes on these research areas. Research can be fun, and it helps add layers, context, and vibrancy to your world to help it stand out and find its audience. 

I love this quote by Italo Calvino that says, “[w]ithout translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. [S]he introduces me to the world.” Translation is part science, part art, all alchemy. I hope that these tools are helpful for you in your next draft and your next revision. 

Last but not least, I hope that you have a better understanding of translation as a practice and the work that translators do to make literature accessible in different languages for a multitude of audiences. It’s how I’ve read Sappho, Beowulf, and the oldest known novel in existence—Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th century Japanese court drama The Tale of Genji. 

If you want something a little more contemporary, here’s a peek from my own TBR list, recent Nobel Prize for Literature awardee Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. 

What translation tools are you most excited to work with in your next writing session?