An interview with Jen Calleja—one of Britain’s leading translators—and Gregor Hens—one of Germany’s leading writers—about their new books, and their career-long collaboration
Norman R Shapiro famously likened a good translation to a pane of glass. To enable the reader to peer through at the source text, the translation “should never call attention to itself,” with the translator’s touch becoming apparent only “when there are little imper-
fections”.
In her playfully experimental memoir Fair: The Life Art of Translation, novelist and International Booker-shortlisted translator Jen Calleja sprays silly string all over this windowpane, blithely refusing the invisibilising of the translator and ridiculing the very possibility of a singular, ‘true’ translation.
The release of Fair by Prototype coincides with the publication by Fitzcarraldo of
Calleja’s translation of The City and the World, an inventive personal and intellectual exploration of cityscapes by German writer Gregor Hens, himself a translator into German of writers including Kurt Vonnegut, Will Self and Leonard Cohen. His most recent previous work in English, the 2015 experimental long-form memoir-essay Nicotine, was the second book Calleja ever translated, which she credits with making her name as a translator.
Calleja and Hens spoke with me about their translation philosophies and how their long-standing personal relationship informs their work together.
Odhran O’Donoghue (OOD): Throughout Fair, you extensively discuss wording choices in translation, the various possibilities for nearly every word in a text. The title, Fair, perfectly captures this diversity of potential meanings and interpretations. How did you think about the multiplicity of language in writing Fair, and about how that plurality more broadly pertains to translation?
Jen Calleja (JC): I was really satisfied with the title. It’s one word that encapsulates many meanings, and quietly undermines the ridiculousness of the English language, in which singular words can have twenty meanings. So, how on earth can we imagine translation, or even writing, being a case of ‘there’s only one way to express a concept or to express another word in another language’. There’s something really freeing as a writer who’s done translation in realising that all these words, and all this language, are super faulty. It’s kind of the opposite to when you’re translating, when there’s a lot of anxiety and responsibility about finding the right word for somebody else.
Jen Calleja
is a poet, writer and essayist, whose translations from German to English have seen her shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize. Her most recent book is Fair: The Life-Art of Translation (Prototype, 2025). Jen is also the co-founding editor of Praspar Press and played and toured in the DIY punk band Sauna Youth.OOD: The first thing that struck me about Fair is its form—the framework of a hybrid art fair/book fair/fun fair that structures it. It reminded me of your story ‘Literary Quartet’, in that you’re interrogating a pillar of the creative world through an almost farcical lens. What was the genesis of that approach to exploring your life and work as a translator?
JC: When writing memoir, you start with quite disparate memories and occurrences. Right at the beginning, I was thinking about a kind of ‘rags-to-riches’ story: I started from a non-arts working-class upbringing, and now I’m a well-published translator working with prestigious presses. But that idea made me feel very depressed, and it took a ridiculous amount of time to figure out why: because I didn’t have any money. So, I had this epiphany that this isn’t a bottom-to-top story, it’s a fumbling-around-on-one-level story.
I knew that I needed a memory palace and that it was always going to be an architectural structure. Eventually it got flattened into this fair structure, with all these cubicles that become set pieces for memory that no longer needed to connect together. The fair is absurd because fairs are absurd. To anybody who’s an outsider in publishing or in things deemed upper-middle-class in general, you can see them as these quite weird rituals that you’re excluded from.
OOD: This fairground form also enables a circularity in the narrative. There’s so much happening on the structural and sentence levels, and there are so many ideas, but at the same time, you keep returning to the same beats so the reader can’t forget about class, or the labour of translation. Was that something that you thought a lot about when writing?
JC: I learned from my books Vehicle and Goblinhood that sometimes the loops and recurring motifs don’t become apparent to me until quite late. But I can’t separate my experience of being a translator from my background, from my gender, my age, from all the other experiences I’ve had, from all the translators who helped me. It was about constantly drawing attention to all these networks, which are often invisible.
Some feedback I got from an early reader was that the book seemed to be powered by anger, was that what I wanted? The answer is ‘yes’, because I wrote it out of a lot of frustration and anger. I didn’t want it to be miserable, but also didn’t want to downplay all the threads that I’m trying to talk about. And again, that’s where absurdity can realign the balance.
OOD: Gregor, The City and the World (TCATW), like Fair, is a very elliptical text, repeatedly returning to similar ideas, refusing linearity and publishing’s (artificial) delineation between academia and trade non-fiction, or fiction and non-fiction. Could you speak to that as a jumping-off point?
Gregor Hens
is a German writer of fiction and creative non-fiction. His most recent book in English is The City and the World (Fitzcarraldo, 2025), translated by Jen Calleja. He has himself translated Will Self and Kurt Vonnegut into German. He teaches Urban Studies and Creative Writing at the Free University in Berlin.Gregor Hens (GH): I love the structure of Fair, and its breaking of boundaries, especially with a topic like translation. We often think of translators as these slightly dusty older men with dandruff on their shoulders, and it’s nice to have this very different vision of what the life of a translator and the translator community could look like.
In my own work, I got into creative non-fiction because I was bored with academic writing. I wanted to mix it all up and just explode it. Since TCATW is about a topic that I didn’t study academically, I felt very free. Academics and writers often pretend they have all the answers, and I don’t do that anymore. It’s a record of my own way of thinking, how it evolves, and how it spirals out of control.
OOD: This refusal of definitive answers, which manifests in how you write of the city as simultaneously knowable and unknowable, something that can be thought about in so many different ways, almost feels like it could be mapped onto the act of translation—as a refusal of a definitive rendering of the text in another language. As a translator, does that resonate with you?
GH: Yeah, I see some ways of connecting the two. You can think of the discussions about translating Kafka, for example (every generation has the duty to circle back to Kafka): you keep trying, but you never actually reach the core of meaning. In the same way, in my book, I use the image of the spiralling galaxy with the black hole in the middle to talk about the city. Maybe we’re getting closer and closer, but we’ll never actually reach the centre, or we’ll get swallowed up in some way.
OOD: You’re mentioned in Fair a few times, including when Jen presents initial translation choices for a passage from Nicotine, and talks through all the possible words that could make sense as analogues of the original German. Jen, you talk about translation as an almost instinctual or intuitive thing, but also emphasise that it’s an active, involved, iterative process. Do you respond to this idea of approaching the event horizon of truth without necessarily being interested in nailing it down definitively?
JC: Completely. I love that Gregor’s book is about never looking directly at ‘the sun’, because it’s not the point. As a translator, and also as a writer, you know it’s never going to be perfect, but you try to get as close to a sense of satisfaction for yourself, because you have to live with the book or translation afterwards.
Nicotine was only my second ever book translation (the new book is my twentieth, which is wild). I always say that I was spoiled by this first experience of working with Gregor. Nicotine would have been a very different book if he hadn’t given me permission to make it my own. Sometimes as a translator, that’s all you need.
OOD: To what extent was this relationship enabled by Gregor also being a translator? Gregor, does your experience on the other side inform your rapport?
GH: Definitely. I know what it means to sit there and do this. As an author, you really have to let go. Personally, I would hate translating an author who knows the target language – I’ve actually refused jobs translating writers who speak German. I don’t want someone to meddle in my text – it’s my text.
JC: Gregor has taught linguistics for many years in universities. His English – grammatically at least – is probably better than mine. I get asked quite often, ‘Why doesn’t Gregor or other authors just translate their own books’, and it’s because it’s a completely different thing.
It takes me a lot of effort to become Gregor, because Gregor’s writing is quite distant from mine, and that’s why I find it so exciting. Even though I worked for a long time on TCATW, it’s still mysterious to me in some respects; it has this aura. I’m very interested in how you wrote it. Did you have it completely mapped out in your mind?
GH: I wouldn’t say I planned it out, but there were certain trajectories that I wanted to get at. I wanted to start relatively slowly and to build up speed, to start at basically ground level and then remove myself more and more. But I also wanted to preserve in the book the process of thinking about this—to find a balance between planning things and responding to my own thinking as I went.
OOD: Jen, in Fair, you describe translation as “literature I’ve understood utterly and completely rewritten into literature”, but even now you’re still beguiled and unsure about how Gregor did what he did. Is that a sensation that you felt particularly with this book?
JC: Some translators really believe in a sense that they ‘become’ the author, and read all the books an author was reading at the time of writing a book, etc. I don’t go that far because I know I can never truly take on all of Gregor’s memories and research and experiences. I only really have the book. I don’t know how it was made, and my reading of it will change over time. I might reread my translation or Gregor’s book in ten years and view them completely differently, because we change as people and as readers. So, it’s good that it’s still mysterious. Maybe even Gregor can’t claim to know everything about this book—the author often doesn’t have all the answers.
OOD: Was there any difference in how you approached TCATW versus Nicotine at the beginning of your career? Gregor, did you sense any difference this time around?
JC: The thing with getting more experience is mainly that you have less fear. But when I first read TCATW in German, I remember thinking very clearly, Oh, he’s got even more complicated—and what I mean is, it’s become even more rich. The books are so similar and yet so different, and I knew that this would be a lot more challenging.
GH: When I heard that you would translate it, I thought, Oh, I feel sorry for Jen. Because it really is very dense. But I do feel that your voice in the book is very confident, and that’s wonderful. I can’t put my finger on it, but maybe Nicotine is a little bit more hesitant in places?
JC: This feels like a job appraisal, but I really like it! This doesn’t usually happen with authors and editors. I like the word ‘confident’, because I think of being 27, 28, when translating Nicotine, and needing all the confidence I could get. I probably was quite tentative, but I still feel very proud of it.
GH: It occurs to me that we’re in totally different situations as translators: generally my writers are either dead or they don’t know German, so, I’m a king in my own realm. You work mostly with
living writers who speak at least some English.
JC: I’ve never translated a dead author. And it’s always been really important to me to have a connection—or to at least attempt a connection, but it doesn’t always happen.
OOD: I was fascinated by your discussion in Fair of the temptation, when the relationship with an author goes well, to interpret that to mean that the translation must be good, that it functions almost as a stamp of authority.
JC: There’s definitely a temptation to think you can get this ultimate signoff for the translation. When authors whose English maybe isn’t quite as strong as Gregor’s say that the translation is good, you want to believe them; you want somebody to say, ‘This is good,’ because often you’re working with editors who can’t read German. But I know that, realistically, you could have a really fantastic relationship with an author as a friend or peer, but maybe the translation isn’t good.
That said, it’s a very vulnerable experience to be translated, and it’s vulnerable for me to admit when I don’t understand something, and friendship can help you to be vulnerable with one another. It’s less about that signoff, and more that we can feel open to communicate.
But then if you’re too close, there’s the fear you won’t be able to be honest, that they wouldn’t tell me if something had gone awry.
All these different factors are always in play. But that’s what makes it interesting.
