by Rose Facchini
Analyzing how exclusionary translation can be, especially in the publication process, Kasia Szymanska’s Translation Multiples: From Global Culture to Postcommunist Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2025) challenges the view that translation is a one-way movement towards a single target text. Szymanska’s interview with Rose Facchini covers translation’s institutional biases, visibility, political potential, growing subgenres, relationship to censorship, paratextual outputs, and future.
Rose Facchini: How do you think that the works analyzed in your book invite us to rethink the directionality of agency in translation?
Kasia Szymanska: We tend to think of translation as a linear process, with the source text and target text in a one-to-one relationship. My book undermines that sort of relationship by talking about a single source text that forks into multiple different variants. Many translators consider multiple possibilities and variants in their heads, and I was interested in that tension between what they see as a multiple potential of translation and something which actually comes out of their translation process, which tends to be one final ready-to-read product. In the book, I discuss those translators and artists who do not only think of the translation process as something inherently multiple and procedural but also end up displaying more than one translation variant in the actual publication.
I also point to publishers and other institutional constraints as an arena in which those processes might play out. Many audiences are unfamiliar with the idea that translation transforms the original. In practice, most readers treat the translated text as a stand-in for the source text, regardless of its meaning in the original language or how many agents participated in the process of translation. Yielding to these expectations, publishers tend to present translations as finite projects and self-contained works. So readers may not be ready to embrace the multiples, because it is, after all, a challenging—and perhaps boring—way of reading.
RF: You draw attention to how “translation multiples” foreground the translator and, as a result, the process of translation itself. This challenges the long-held ideal of the translator’s invisibility, which Lawrence Venuti has famously critiqued. How do you think that translation multiples could reshape the reader’s role in constructing meaning, particularly in contrast to the more traditional, singular understanding of translation that may reflect the agenda of the translator, publisher, or political entity?
KS: Venuti suggests that translators should undermine their invisibility by foreignizing texts. I take issue with his proposal, mostly because there are different ways of knocking readers out of their usual habit of equating the translator’s voice with that of the original author. For example, when reading Venuti’s own translations, I get the sense that he wants to make the text sound more Italian by rendering sentences longer and more convoluted. The reader may attribute the suspension of their disbelief to the translator’s ineptitude rather than deliberate foreignization.
Other markers besides textual foreignness manifest the translator’s presence. When we think about more “traditional” types of translations, there are footnotes, paratexts, covers, and so on. All of these make translators visible, communicating their identities, aesthetic preferences, or whatever else. Readers are more familiar with such practices than they are with deliberate foreignization. Quite often, in brackets or footnotes, translators also mention alternative translations. Translators become more tangibly visible in these moments; they display to the readers not only their presence but also their critical apparatus and their process for deciding how to communicate the nuances of the source text to their target reader.
Your question is tricky because my book tries to show that the ethics of translation do not necessarily hinge on faithfulness to the source, but rather on sincerity or honesty about the process to the readers. Showing them multiples involves some level of honesty because translation itself is inherently multiple; making that multiplicity visible offers a range of possibilities that challenge the reader’s usual approach to engaging with translated texts. Here, the readers’ role would be to engage with translation multiples and realize that each translation they receive offers only a very partial view into the original text.
By experiencing a wider range of variants, readers might become aware of the textual instability or uncertainty at the heart of the translation process. Each reader will still prefer one translation from that array of possibilities, but readers will be discouraged from taking any single option for granted.
RF: How do you see the multiplicity of translation as a form of resistance—not just politically but also aesthetically?
KS: Aesthetics has a subversive potential. Along these lines, some of the more experimental aspects of translation multiples can be seen as creative acts working against the grain. I see a few areas in which translation multiples serve resistance: in translation itself, in the arts and literature overall, and perhaps in politics.
Regarding translation, translation multiples complicate our reading practices, as no one really goes to the bookstore and orders multiple versions of the translations to read them one after another; that’s something we academics do. The more subversive aspect is about presenting these kinds of texts as challenging—listening to a recording of almost 50 different variants of the same text (such as in Caroline Bergvall’s “VIA: 48 Variations on Dante”) can become fatiguing. So in a way translation multiples are not easy to read, but at the same time they are harbingers of some hidden truths about translation. They expose the readership to the translation’s transformative potential.
In literature and the arts, the genre of translation multiples reminds readers of familiar practices across various disciplines, such as variations on a musical theme or jazz improvisations, in which each version or performance is on par with all others. This departure from one fixed musical score is quite similar to the relation of translation multiples to the original. Similar structures appear in metafictional films, experimental theater, and works like Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau, where a single story is retold in 99 different ways. These forms, like translation multiples, share a subversive or experimental potential by deconstructing seemingly fixed concepts such as the “original” (be it a musical score, an original scenario, a narrative), revealing that filtering is always present. Similarly, forms like Brechtian theater disrupt any linear narrative by displaying a sequence of otherwise-fragmented scenes and breaking the fourth wall. Translation multiples also engage the audience in this way, becoming self-reflective commentaries that break the illusion of a singular, semantically stable source text.
Politically, the potential of pluralist translations becomes perhaps most visible in those examples that open the text and the idiom of translation to a less hierarchical, more inclusive form of presentation. A typical print outlet would not include many such examples, precisely because they represent a marginalized way of using language that is somehow out of the mainstream. Its suppression makes pluralist translation’s potential subversion clear. Translation can become a kind of safe space for testing out different idioms, different possible ways of using language and translating, without imposing those hierarchies that tend to be more conservative or, under authoritarian regimes, to hew to a certain canonized version.
This idea of pluralist multiples is taken a step further in the later chapters of my book, which discuss how Polish translation multiples became such a forum for discussing different visions of politics or society—not only different political systems but also shifting identities—during the rapid political and economic transformations of the 1990s. That is a commentary not only on the way we structure information but also on the way we structure a more expressly political debate around different possible interpretations of a given historical “fact” or “true” way of doing things.
RF: Any translation will have its inherent biases, but they can certainly become more extreme when the translator actively opposes the author. You mention in your book that Ryszard Krynicki is not exactly a favorable reader of Brecht’s works. Similarly, in Andrzej Kopacki’s rendering, “the plum tree is constantly covered behind the ‘fig leaves’ of language, just like Brecht is doomed to be obscured by the screen of translation” (146). Do you think translation could be considered a form of inherent censorship?
KS: Censorship tends to have negative connotations. I would rather talk about translation as a productive layer of uncertainty; it provokes so much interesting writing, argumentation, and passion. But it is true that censorship is a kind of extra filter, and I feel like the roles of the censor and translator are quite similar in some ways. There is this inevitable layer or textual screen that separates the original from the reader.
Yet it would be a mistake to equate translation and censorship. Their relationship is quite complex. In the Soviet context, for instance, practical circumstances produced a fairly common view of translation as separate from censorship. For authors prohibited from writing as original authors (such as Anna Akhmatova, Josif Brodsky, Boris Akunin, to give a few examples), translation was seen as a kind of “safe art” that censors rarely inspected closely. In those situations, translation became a realm for innovation and experimentation but also subversion and resistance; it could provide an outlet for intellectual rebellion.
I am also interested in the ways in which censorship fosters creativity. For example, in Victorian England, the Obscene Publications Act of 1867 prohibited sexually explicit content on moral grounds. Translators of French novels, e.g. by Zola or Flaubert, responded by employing euphemisms, creating a more varied language. By (self-)censoring the work, those translators ended up engaging in more creative ways with that text and producing a more linguistically diverse—and even more interesting—text.
RF: From your work with translation multiples, what advice would you give to translators, editors, or publishers who are interested in creating or supporting translation multiples going forward?
KS: To the publishers, I would say: be open to more experimental formats. Consider supplementing the printed version with a digital one and finding ways to combine the two. Many before me, such as Rebecca L. Walkowitz, have identified the digital space as something which could open the text up to different interpretations and multiple translations. Such publishing formats impose no printing or shipping costs, so the economic aspect would not play a role. I see that as a potential solution to the fact that publishers may not be ready to invest in the extra pages dedicated to different versions of the text.
To the translators, I would say: be honest in prefaces to your work. Make clear where you stand and how your particular take can be positioned in a wide array of possibilities. Be honest with the readers about the fact that this reading is just your own partial interpretation, that this is just one of the possible ways of thinking about the text, because text—especially literary text—can be interpreted in multiple ways. What critical edition you read and what literary criticism you are most familiar with can influence your translation strategy. If you want to flesh out psychological aspects of a text, for example, you would choose a certain set of vocabulary. If you want to look at more feminist aspects of a text, that would spark a different range of strategies. Communicating that multiplicity of potentials to the audience is something that I would advise translators to do, but I think they already do that pretty well. The fact that a new genre, sometimes called the “translation journal” or “translation memoir,” is coming into prominence means that translators already feel that they need some extra space to spell out those conundrums they encounter when translating, as well as their inevitable dissatisfaction with their final version.
Paratexts—prefaces, afterwords, and translator’s notes—are the more standard, traditional places in which translators can communicate the partiality of their reading. However, many of these still tend to focus on the source text only—what it meant in its original context. Some, more critical paratexts also specify that there are different readings, but I would be curious to hear more about the translator’s own strategy: with which of the readings they side, which opinions influence their strategy, which approach they follow, and other possible ways that they might have gone about translating.
In the case of retranslations, which occur in the context of prior translations of a given text and often deliberately introduce some new translation as an alternative to its predecessors, I would expect to see more engagement with those other texts in lieu of the single-minded promotion of one’s own. Publishers tend to promote each new translation as the new canonical standard and aspire to that status, whereas I would suggest introducing each new translation as part of an ongoing dialogue with others.
RF: Not necessarily an improvement, just an updated one, a different take…
KS: Or it could be targeted at a different audience, have a different function, flesh out aspects of a text which did not interest the previous translator, and so on. It is not necessarily better, as you say, but one piece of a puzzle in that dialogue between different versions, texts, and translators.
RF: I remember keeping a translation journal during my own studies, and I think that they are essential, not just to express to the readership what your process is, but also to dialogue with yourself, work through your line of thinking, and understand how you reached certain points in the translation.
KS: Maybe the genre of “journal” or “memoir” is increasingly becoming a place reserved for translators. Some literary translators—in the US at least—have begun looking for alternative venues to express those aspects of the creative process belonging to the art of translation. A group of translators (including Idra Novey, Jennifer Croft, Jen Calleja, and Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi) has recently written novels in which translators become protagonists, narrators, and other characters, and they are being given more and more agency. I think that this is not entirely coincidental—this is happening in recent years with the growing interest in translation.
RF: Where do you think this genre of translation multiples will be going next? Are there any other emerging practices, perhaps regarding collaborative translations, that you find particularly exciting?
KS: As I was writing this book, especially the later chapters, I noticed that my selection of examples spans a couple of decades. The first project focused on multiple voices within one piece. Then you have this case of Robert Stiller’s three critiques of different political projects in three different translations of the same novel. What both of these projects had in common was that they were created by the same translator, whereas the final one was this kind of multiplied collaborative project of presenting Brecht from different perspectives and doing it in multiple voices. I think that collaborations between translators, especially a more globalized network of translators, may be where translation multiples are heading next.
I am currently editing a volume of essays by translators of Olga Tokarczuk across fifteen languages, and I noticed that the translators are actually in touch with one another. Some use others’ versions as a way to reflect on their own translation choices and to explore the potential for collaboration. The kind of collaborative or dialectical way of thinking about translation is something which I find to be a promising field, especially when translators are in conversation with one another. When working on that project, I noticed that a Polish book translated into Hebrew (such as The Books of Jacob) can sometimes serve as a textual base for solutions to translations in other languages by other translators. The Hebrew translation rendered some of the terms related to Judaism in a very specific way, which then informed other translators’ thinking about their own translation solutions and strategies.
Owing to those informal networks as well as more formal translation associations, I am hoping that translation multiples may take the form of more collaborative, conceptual anthologies containing multiple, different versions by different translators. Maybe there will be more projects like Adam Thirlwell’s Multiples, a collaborative book that invited some translators to translate short stories into one language and then others to translate them back into English. But it is an interesting question—I hadn’t thought about it before. The genre of translation multiples has not exhausted itself as a form.
RF: Building a larger, globally connected community of translators would really benefit the field, not just by addressing the limitations between languages, but also by highlighting the unique freedoms that some can offer. Exploring how different sociopolitical contexts shape these limitations and freedoms would be a fascinating project. I think your book is going to open up a whole new world of examining translation and assessing the meaning of its process. What impact do you hope that your book will have on readers, academic or otherwise, in the fields of translation, publishing studies, and so on?
KS: Looking at the 2023 PEN Manifesto on Literary Translation, I feel like my book has a lot in common with what translators postulate. I am hoping that, for translation studies, my book will reintroduce this dialogue around the transformative potential of translation through the lens of multiple translations: what it means to translate, why translating more than once matters, why we think that there is something ethical about translating more than once, what the political aspects of it are, and how it becomes a democratic or ethical or pluralist space. I think that the book will hopefully shift the discourse on the ethics of translation from the idea of faithfulness to the source text toward the ethics of comparative reading.
I hope that this also helps shift perceptions around machine translation and AI, challenging the view by the public and even by those in other disciplines that translation is something easily handled by technology. If it is just one-to-one equivalence, let the machine find the most statistically frequent solution based on the corpus. But what interests us, as readers and critics of translations, is their innovative and creative potential, which often resides in the outliers instead of standard language uses reflected by the statistically most frequent translation solutions. That is why it is crucial to consider the multiplicity of those possibilities, especially those which could otherwise be obscured and not make the cut.
The message which can be sent to the publishers is to think about translation as a creative art; that does not only mean putting the translator’s name on the cover but also considering other formats that can demonstrate multiplicity to the readers. There is never a single equivalent word or text, given the differences between languages, literary traditions, social contexts, political contexts. Do not let one single translation monopolize the discourse around certain texts or authors.
RF: Perhaps another message is: erase some of the competition among translators and head towards a more cooperative atmosphere.
KS: Sure, and in fact a lot of studies on retranslations talk about alternative takes as competitors or rivals that in a way always try to debunk the previous version. Multiples try to show that we should be thinking about translation more in terms of dialogue and collaboration (rather than competition), which may not always translate into how the industry works.
Kasia Szymanska is a Lecturer (assistant professor) in the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester, and the author of Translation Multiples: From Global Culture to Postcommunist Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2025). Her research lies in the intersection between literary translation, multilingual writing and politics. To date, her work has appeared in PMLA, Contemporary Literature, Slavic and East European Journal, and she is currently working on two co-edited volumes: The Bloomsbury Handbook to Modernism and Translation (with Rebecca Beasley) and The Tender Translator: Olga Tokarczuk Across Languages (with Joanna T. Huss). Before joining Manchester, she was an assistant professor at Trinity College Dublin and a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, where she had also completed her PhD in Modern Languages. You can find out more about her ongoing work here.
Rose Facchini is a Lecturer in Italian at Tufts University and the Editor and Italian Translator Editor for the International Poetry Review. Her main research focuses on the intersection between Italian studies and environmental humanities, with a focus on climate change and foodways. She also explores how Italy imagines the rapidly changing landscape through speculative fiction and how this correlates in the real world with policymaking and sociocultural adjustments. Her translations have been published or are forthcoming in a wide range of journals and by various publishing houses, such as Asymptote’s Translation Tuesdays, Snuggly Books, and West Branch, and her research appears in Military Medicine.
Edited by Zac Endter
Cover image: edited version of “Views of the Tesseract”from Charles Howard Hinton’s The Fourth Dimension, 1904. Public domain.
