Image: Kaylen Baker
Editorial intern Jordan Kramarsky ’23 talks with former NER intern Kaylen Baker ’12 about the pliability of language, translation as method acting, and the importance of literary community.
Jordan Kramarsky: Where are you now, geographically and professionally?
Kaylen Baker: I live in Paris and work as a translator—by day. By night, I’m working on the manuscript of what I hope will become my first book of stories. I should add (because I know my college self would have wondered how I got here) that my path has been quite meandering. In France alone I’ve worked in several public schools as an English teacher, at a natural wine bar, at an independent French publishing company, and for my own translation micro-business.
JK: You’ve studied and worked as a translator and a creative writer; how do these disciplines inform each other?
KB: Intricately! I came to translation through creative writing, by taking a creative translation workshop with Susan Bernofsky during my M.F.A. I loved Susan’s idea that anyone who writes can try their hand at translation, so long as they have a rudimentary knowledge of another language and the writing skills to reconstruct the author’s voice in their own language. Creative writing teaches you to be daring. To mimic and borrow and bend. You learn how pliable language is by writing. In those ways, it gives you all the skills you need to disguise yourself as the foreign doppelgänger of another writer. Creative writing informs the last editing round of translation in particular, when you need to unpin the work from the original and see if it stands on its own. In a way, translation is the reverse of writing, and very mathematical—the sum (or story) is already laid out, you just need to reconstruct it through another formula. Translation relies more on rules rather than rhythm and intuition. It has informed my writing by making me more consistent and detail-oriented. Maybe too rigid—I’ve become an inadvertent fan of the oxford comma. But discovering new writing techniques by translating French writers has been rewarding.
JK: What do you read for pleasure? Have you read anything good lately?
KB: Mostly fiction, though last year, in the throes of climate despair, I read Being a Human by Charles Foster. It’s an odd, mystic, maybe controversial take on our species’ history. Yet it allowed me to imagine what it was like to live 40,000 years ago as a hunter-gatherer and made me rethink how integral stories and metaphors are to our state of existence. Somehow, it gave me some closure on my fears of impending doom. Otherwise, some splendid reads have included Trust Exercise by Susan Choi, When I Sing, Mountains Dance, by Irene Solà, and Mona by Pola Oloixarac.
JK: What do you love about the translation process? What does your process look like?
KB: Well, I admit I don’t love the first draft! It’s stiff and slow-going, almost forensic. My text ends up covered in red markings and highlights and bracketed comments as I look up definitions and synonyms and try out various combinations of words. In the subsequent drafts I start making choices, giving myself the freedom to select what I like, what I believe works. The draft I love comes next, when I use more of the creative writing brain, approaching the text as if it’s my own, and focusing more on how it sounds out loud. I’ve heard at this stage some translators will go into method-acting mode, swiping on lipstick to get in the mind of, say, Clarice Lispector . . .
JK: When were you an intern at NER, and what do you remember about it? Did your experience influence your current field?
KB: I have some nice memories from reading submissions. There’s something really tender about that experience, being the first set of eyes on a stranger’s story. I remember microwaving mugs of water for tea, and trying to understand how my co-interns were already so worldly and eloquent! I think it’s important for anyone interested in literature to be around people who work in it and care for it with a fierce passion. Finding people who protect a space where fictive worlds can thrive becomes more rare after college, so knowing back then that this space can exist and matters to others was very influential.
JK: Any advice for readers looking to pursue creative writing professionally?
KB: Read, read, read! And write. As much as possible—that’s when it becomes easier to jump back inside the story/book/manuscript without needing to mentally resurrect all the scaffolding. Don’t be afraid of rejection. Notice what’s working and which ideas get you into a groove. Have some friends who write. None of this is particularly related to the professional world of writing, I suppose. But I think it remains true for even the most established writers. At every stage, the writing life is an intimate one.