Listen to Hugo Hamilton's talk and readingWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, author Hugo Hamilton talks about his 'Strange life in translation' and reads from his novels ‘The Speckled People’, ‘The Sailor in the Wardrobe’ and 'Hand in the Fire', before answering questions from the audience. Recorded at the Central Library on 17 November 2010, as part of the series 'In Other Words . . .Irish Literature in Translation in Your Library'.I think Sinead said it perfectly; I live in translation because as a child it was very complicated, you know, because we spoke German at home and Irish and then we migrated out onto the street but it was a different language altogether and then back again, you know, and we were not ... my father refused to allow any of this language from outside, the English language was barred from our house, so effectively we couldn’t go back and bring that country back in with us into the house so that caused a lot of trouble for us as children. And you know, what age am I now, I mean I’m an adult finally and I still have this feeling that, you know, there are certain words that I just think of in a particular language. For instance, lobster, I always think of it in Irish, gliomach and then it goes through the other languages and gets translated back into whatever language I’m speaking so there’s a bit of a time delay constantly and you probably don’t notice it now but in my twenties there was a very, very obvious kind of delay and sort of a hesitancy with language and I describe myself as, you know, in this constant state of atranslation where I always have to look over my shoulder to see what country I was in before I could speak. You know you can imagine like we were not allowed English in the house and often you’d have uncles coming up from Cork, West Cork, and I describe it in my book as, you know, suddenly like the house was full of smoke and English and there was nothing my father could do about it because these were his people. But then like they’d ask me a question and I’d have to look at my father and look at my mother and then see like, you know, which language do I even speak now so there was almost this kind of a prevarication, you know, in anybody who has three languages there’s some kind of hesitancy and prevarication in that before like you finally get to talk.And then you could notice that with my family even still, you see us kind of, you know, starting a sentence in one language, you know it sounds right, but then it ends with sort of a German syntax, you know. So there is a sort of constant translation going on and, you know, it’s funny my brother Franz, you know, he should be here tonight, he’s a living example of somebody who has kind of learned the language second hand, it’s a foreign language, English is a foreign language to all of us in our family. And so my brother ... like I concentrated when I was growing up I kind of rehearsed English to myself and, you know, like speak to the wardrobe in English, you know, I’ll batter you and all those kind of terms that I heard on the street, I would rehearse them to myself because I wanted to get the colloquial version of English and I wanted to fit in with the people on the street. But my brother has a different version, his English is very formal and when he’s talking to me in English he will say things like yes I could commence that next week, you know, it’s terribly formal language like that he has, it’s almost like sort of letters from the bank or you know business letters and so his language was always kind of, you know, he wanted it to be perfect in that way like with sort of very formal expressions, you know. With regard to, like he’s always saying that, you know, with regard to next Sunday (laughter), you know, yeah and, you know, complete – all those kind of words, you know, words that I don’t use, I just say start and finish but he uses commence and complete, you know. It’s bizarre, you know, but he sounds great. But it’s a demonstration that like we are actually speaking a foreign language, you know, it’s still ... okay, we’ve been speaking it for 50 years but, you know, we’re still catching up, you know.I wanted to read you a small passage that illustrates that in The Speckled People. It’s a description of a coal delivery. We were actually quite a privileged household. I mean my father was an engineer and we had central heating but it was never on, you know, (laughter) like there was just like a, you know, he would put on three or four, he would count the coals going in, you know, and that would heat one radiator. Alright.A truck stopped on the street outside and because they couldn’t go round the back the men with black faces and black hands had to come through the house. My mother was afraid the wind would slam the doors shut in anger so we had to hold them open, Franz at the front door, me at the in between door and Maria at the back door. She told us to count the bags as they came in. In Ireland people count in their heads she said but in Germany people count out loud. So out loud we counted, eins, zwei, drei, vier, funf – all the way up to fifteen. The men walked in stooped over with heavy sacks leaving long black marks with the sacks scraped along the wall on their way through and where they went down the three steps towards the kitchen and out the back door they put a black hand up every time to hold onto the door frame. One of the men winked and made me forget what number I was on. (laughter) I didn’t know if I should be counting the sack that was coming or the sack gone by but then I heard Franz counting the next number at the front door and I was able to catch up. When the shed outside was full and the coal was spilling out across path the men got back onto the truck. One of them counted the empty sacks as if he couldn’t trust us to count right. He came back inside with a pink piece of paper covered with black fingerprints and asked my mother to sign her name, that was to make sure she agreed there was no mistake in the counting and that nobody ran away with one of the empty sacks. But there could be no mistake because we counted out loud in German and the man counted the empty sacks in English and it was the same number no matter what language.It’s a funny thing as well like my mother spoke in this German accent always, you know, and I think she misunderstood Ireland, you know. She learned English and her English was fairly good but she didn’t understand nuances and the way Irish people spoke, you know. I think, you know, it’s not just about language but it’s a matter of expression and it’s what people say and what people leave out, it’s the silences between their sentences that matter as well so even if you understand a language it’s still ... you have to translate an entire culture and I think my mother had difficulty doing that. I think the best way of describing it is the fact that, you know, she would always tells us, you know, to be honest, if somebody ask you a question you just answer it you don’t invent something you just tell them the way things are and like I kind of realised after a while that’s completely the wrong thing to do in Ireland (laughter) because the Irish have a completely different sense of truth and all those kind of little spaces in between the truth and my mother never could get to grips with that, she was constantly, you know like she just couldn’t get to grips with it, you know, and just the kind of whole dance thing, the detours around language here in Ireland and I actually happen to think that that’s the great source of the power of invention in language, I mean it’s what brought Joyce and Synge and Beckett and all those writers, I mean that’s the source of the great lrish literary tradition. Even today I think, you know, that whole sort of ambiguity of language is what sort of marks Irish literature out.But my mother had sort of difficulty translating those kind of ambiguities into concrete German understanding, you know, and I think I have the same problem in German even though I kind of grew up speaking German in the house I still have ... but I never went to school in Germany, I mean I’ve read a lot, but I’m still missing a sort of a freedom in the language that, you know, the people who went to school in Germany would have, you know. And it’s also because of the prohibition of the English language in our house I speak a very, very clean pure German and it doesn’t have any words in it like super or in Germany a mobile phone is called a handy, you know, there’s a million words, English words, come into the German language but I never used them because just I think, oh yeah, my father is still behind me, you know, I’ll get a clout on the back of my head even though my father is long gone now, you know, you have that sort of instinctive hesitancy. So people who listen to me speaking in German, you know, and I do tours in Germany and I talk about my books in German and then think I come from another century sort of pre-war (laughter), just hasn’t got old yet, you know.And I mean I remember when we were children we would always be asked on the street by old woman God you have three languages that’s brilliant isn’t it, you know say something in Irish or say something in German and we’d be standing there like thinking what will we say, you know. The same thing happens in Germany, the old woman will all ask us say something in English, say something in Irish and they had a feeling that our German was very much pre-war, you know, and they called it German without chewing so chewing for them only came in with the Americans, you know, and also the American language came in. So I mean all those kind of lovely influences that sort of, you know, change language all over Europe we missed out on completely.I’d love to read you another passage from ‘The Sailor in the Wardrobe’, it’s the second memoir and it’s not directly to do with language but it’s interesting maybe for Ireland now because we have all these different languages on the streets, you know, that’s the one thing I notice now that, you know, the whole phobia about the Irish language I don’t know if we have that anymore because we have all these people speaking other languages on the streets so like what’s so odd about speaking Irish then? I don’t think we have that quite healthy kind of self hatred that we had when I was growing up, you know, and the kind of, you know, I grew up in, as I call it, this language war and where my father was trying to get rid of everything British, you know. So anyway this:My father is not the kind of man who keeps a stem of grass between his lips, even with his shirt open he looks like he’s thinking about something that still has to be done to improve Ireland to keep this landscape from disappearing. We climb halfway up a mountain and look back at the small grey Opel Kadett parked like a toy car along the road, we see the houses and the small people of Ireland working in the fields below us, my father holds his arm stretched out in front of him and tells Stefan to look across the landscape with his eyes open because there are certain things that can only be seen in the Irish language. In English my father says you can only see as far as the eye can see. On the way home he’s looking for a place called Echo Gate, driving up and down the country roads for a long time saying it can’t possibly be gone away. My mother points at lots of gates and tells him to stop so we can shout over them to see if we can hear anything coming back but he drives on with a determined look on his face until he finally comes to the right place and we all stand shouting across the gate towards the ruins of a monastery. The echo is very clear. We count how many seconds it takes for the word to come back. We shout in German with the sun going down and the cows looking up wondering what we’re saying. It’s a perfect echo each time as if the fields know our language, a whole family shouting back at us with great excitement as if they’ve been waiting for centuries and this is the first time somebody has come to the gate who understands them. Our voices come out from under the mossy stones and start calling back hoping we don’t leave again. How are you all over there and how did you know we were coming, my father shouts in Irish, when the echo comes back my mother says you must be Irish because who else would answer a question with another question (laughter). The sky changes in layers of yellow and purple and deep grey. We can see the dark outline of the ruins fading against the land. Stefan is barking like a dog, Ciaran climbs the gate and Maria stands behind him singing a ‘do, re, me’ ladder of notes that stands up against the sky and we’re like the family laughing at ourselves in the mirror even when we get back into the car and drive away my mother’s voice is still laughing around the ruins after it gets dark.So that’s a real place, Echo Gate, I’m sure some of you might have seen it or have been there, so if you go there and shout over in Chinese it will come back in Chinese, you know. Any language you like and you don’t need a translator.Yeah I’d love to answer any questions you have about strange life in translation. I think the other thing that’s possibly interesting to say about my writing is just the fact that, you know, I suppose I have to admit in some ways like that Irish writing can be very lyrical and I’ve always kind of rejected lyricism, I don’t know why, you know, none of my books have any kind of strong lyricism in it, you know, and it’s probably exactly that rule that my mother had set, you know, she said look, you know, don’t tell any lies, don’t embroider anything just tell the truth the way it is and I think that’s still a rule I have as a writer even, that any excessive colouration well she would sort of think like that’s fake, you know, that doesn’t stand up to her scrutiny, you know, and it’s part of this Irish way that she kind of resisted in some ways, you know. That’s always ... I’ve been talking to German people a lot about their experiences here in Ireland and it’s often mentioned by them that whole way of talking is different. So I think my writing in a way has this very deliberately plain direct way of presenting facts and I think writers have also commented on that, you know, that my writing is also terribly careful because I’m handling and this is a foreign language to me and I have to be correct in it, I don’t know. I was talking to a writer recently and he said to me just quite in passing he said, you know, Hugo I love my mistakes, you know, it’s a great admission to make isn’t it? I wish I could say that, you know, but that’s part of the development of the literary culture in Ireland, it’s actually based on beautiful mistakes, you know, this transition between the Irish language and the English language, you know, once the Irish transferred everything across into the English language they produced this extraordinary ... yeah, it’s a very colourful language that we invented here in Ireland, you know, and I think it’s interesting what John Banville says about it he refers to language and the literary traditions here as something that’s more like a stain glass window, we don’t really want to see what’s out there we just want to see the colours, you know. Okay, that’s probably boxing Irish writing in too neatly but, you know, that’s interesting to me in terms of language and where I stand as well as a writer, I’m still translating my mind onto paper as I write, you know. I try to recreate some of those thoughts in the mind of a migrant who is just now coming into Ireland and at the beginning of the book I kind of describe his linguistic problems, you know he’s just not a ... he’s just trying to pick up the local language:What does it matter where you come from? (This man’s name is Vid Cosic.) What does it matter where you come from? You could say it’s irrelevant. I wanted to forget about my own country and start again. I wanted to get a foothold here, get to know the place and the people. I already knew some of the most famous names like James Joyce and George Best and Bono and Bobby Sands. I knew the most important landmarks like the GPO where the Easter revolution took place and Burgh Quay where the bus to Galway leaves from right next to the immigration offices. I was beginning to understand the way things are done here, the way you have of saying how’s the man and what’s the craic. I was starting to pick up the jokes trying not to take everything so seriously. I was working on the accent learning all the clichés – at the end of the day, 9 times out of 10, only time will tell. I was eager not to be misunderstood or misled so I stuck to the expressions that would give me least trouble. I was reluctant to abbreviate, I never allowed myself to use puns or play with people’s names, I tried to limit the amount of times I used the words without meaning such as like or you know, I was cautious with terms like mega and sketchy and legging it and literally glued to the television. But, you know, I’ll just read you another extract, which actually describes my brother in how he speaks. His first job was working in a nursing home so:The nursing home was administered by nuns in brown habits but they didn’t take part in the caring anymore, those duties were carried out by the lay nursing staff. The few nuns that were left over came out from their residence early in the morning to walk the grounds with their headgear blowing vertically in the wind. I got to know one of the nurses on night duty, her name was Bridie, she had red hair, she was much older than me, in her 50s, but she kept winking and calling me the love of her life. She would laugh out loud and repeat a few things I said, not just the accent but the vocabulary. She said I sometimes sounded like a letter from a bank using words like complete and commence and with regard to, words I picked up from newspapers and which were not suited to everyday use. I’m going to commence laughing she would say. It took me a while to get the hang of the ordinary words. At first I could see no difference between start and commence. My sentences must have sounded like translations asking people if there was any room of work going for a carpenter.So I’ll just read at the end of that chapter about his observation of this woman Bridie:When I stopped working there she said she was not surprised that I would break her heart and walk away it was the story of her life. She invited me for a farewell drink. We met in a pub close by and she seemed older out of uniform or younger, it was hard to say, more motherly perhaps and also more fragile and more like a girl. Sitting with her coat on and her handbag beside her she stirred her vodka and tonic with a plastic stick and did all the talking because I had nothing to say and didn’t know what questions to ask. She placed her mobile phone on the table beside her drink and watched it for a while to see if it would ring. She started crying. Now I could not work out what to do in a situation like that where she was not my mother or my sister. She ended up putting her hand on my arm to comfort me instead. She opened her handbag searching for a tissue to wipe her tears but then she produced a letter and asked me to read it. Dear Bridie, it said, it is with a heavy heart that I write you this letter. It was written by her fiancé around 30 years earlier. I read it slowly all the way through moving my lips across every word. He was breaking it off with her so I gathered. They intended to get married; the date had been set for the wedding and the families notified. At the last minute he changed his mind and explained that he was not ready for it because he was still drinking too much. He was not fit to be married to her, he didn’t deserve her love and the only thing left for him to do was to leave the country and emigrate to America. I suppose each country has its own rules for love and dishonesty, different ways of disappearing and walking away from the past, different measurements of loneliness and happiness. I wanted to track down the man who wrote that letter and tell him that he made the biggest mistake of his life but it was no longer possible to intervene because time had turned us all into distant observers. She told me she had a baby shortly after that, after he left, that she had been persuaded to give it up for adoption. She had tried to make contact with her son in recent years but he had not wished to meet her. She asked me if I thought he would be good looking and intelligent so I said yes of course. She wanted to know if he might have red hair like her and then she answered all her own questions assuring herself that her boy was happy in his new family and better off not looking back. Even though he was grown up by now living his life she still spoke of him as a baby. Staring right into my eyes she said she hoped he turned out a bit like me in fact which made me think of myself as her son promising to do my best. She’d been holding on to the farewell letter ever since refusing to get off the bus at the terminus, dreaming back and forth along the same route wherever. Go for it she said to me, putting the letter back into her handbag. I wondered if these were the exact same words she had spoken to her fiancé just to be big hearted and to make sure they parted as friends with no hard feelings. She pushed me with her elbow unable to sit beside me any longer. Then she stood up to embrace me. Come back and see me some time, she smiled through red eyes then she sat down and looked at her phone to see if anyone had left a message. She waved with both hands and told me to take care of myself so I walked out the door away across the street not even watching for the traffic on the wrong side of the road as though it was impossible for me to get killed.So there you are that’s Vid Cosic trying to get a foothold, and trying to understand the country, and trying to understand the history of the country as well and what the people are like, what their backgrounds were like. I don’t know if you have any questions?QuestionsParticipant 1: Can I just ask you something please? I’m reading ‘The Hand In The Fire’ at the moment, I’m about halfway through, and so I was very anxious to meet you to see if you spoke the way you write (laughter) and I’m struck by the way the sentences in your book are very short sentences, simple sentences, and at first I felt ah, you know, it’s not doing anything for me but gradually as I went through the book I realised it created its own atmosphere, these short sentences, and also something you said this evening about your mother I felt ... I realised there wasn’t the lyricism in the story as you said but yet the observations of small things and very true things about the city and about the country and about the people I really said yeah you’ve got a handle on it alright, you know, it’s very true. But I was wondering about the short sentences did you write them in that book for a particular reason or was it unconscious?Hugo: No just very much because just saying all that ... no I mean I like the structure of sentences and I like the writers who do that. Participant 1: So do I, yeah.Hugo: I mean I think I kind of possibly liked Ernest Hemingway too much, you know, but I mean I like some writers with long sentences. You know, one of my favourite writers is an Austrian Writer, Thomas Bernhard, who just can do a page with one sentence, you know.Participant 1: Yeah.Hugo: And they all, you know like they’re all kind of often the same sentence just turned around in different ways.Participant 1: Yes.Hugo: So he repeats the sentence in kind of a musical way.Participant 1: Yes.Hugo: But I think all writing also has kind of a musical form at the back of it, you know. Like lots of writers will tell you that, you know, Colum McCann in particular who will talk at length about sort of how important the musical cadence of the language is for him, you know, and that’s very much the same for me, you know. I mean probably, you know, I just have three chords and doing everything with just the three chords on a guitar but, you know, for me that’s sort of rhythm in the language, is that’s what is important for me to create and I do that with short sentences, you know.Participant 1: Yeah.Hugo: The other answer would be, you know, it’s just that’s part of my upbringing my German/Irish/English upbringing.Participant 1: Yeah.Hugo: And that’s the way I thrust myself. I suppose, yeah, I mean there are lots of other answers to it as well. I mean I think short sentences sometimes allows you more room for ambiguity actually, you know, I think the Irish writers are good at short sentences, you know, I’m not the only one. I think McGahern as well I mean there’s lots of writers with ... I think it allows more space between what’s being said, you know.Participant 1: Right yeah. Thank you.Participant 2: I just want to ask did you learn to write in German or just ...? No?Hugo: No I never ...Participant 2: Yeah.Hugo: ... I mean I’ve written in German, I’ve tried to do that, but it’s not easy, you know. I mean I would have to live there. Participant 2: Yeah.Hugo: Maybe I’ll start now.Participant 3: Do you see the character in Hand In The Fire as a big departure following on from the books that have been largely autobiographical you’re suddenly stepping outside?Hugo: In some ways yes I mean it’s very much a fictional character but, you know, I’m not sure I completely get away with it, I think too much of myself is on view in this book, you know. In fact, you know, I mean some of the reviews remarked on that, you know, that I show my hand with this fiction, with this story. And then in some ways they are. My experience as first generation immigrant in Ireland is actually very similar to that of a migrant coming into the country except that a migrant can always walk away, you know. I speak to migrants about this and they say, you know, I don’t have that problem that you have, you know, of trying to fit in and trying to kind of be like the Irish, be truly Irish, because they come from somewhere else and they just say well, you know, to hell with it.Participant 3: I’m different, yeah.Hugo: Yeah, I’m different, you know, and if it doesn’t suit me if people don’t respect me in this country I’ll just walk away, you know. And I don’t have that luxury. I grew up here in Ireland and I felt the inadequacy of growing up as a German-Irish child, you know. I’ve always felt I’m not quite Irish enough, that I’m not getting away with it and that’s what I’m trying to describe with this book that it’s, you know, the story of a migrant trying to kind of fit in and not ever catching up, that sort of disadvantage. For instance like I think it’s very interesting like the landscape and the way that Irish people have of sort of mapping the landscape, basically the Irish map for Ireland is not just a piece of paper with sort of roads and train connections and towns, the Irish map of the country is a very, very intricate and sensitive and, you know, elusive thing where it’s a grid of connections between families and friends and sort of memories of the country, you know, and for a foreign person to understand that I mean I watched my mother trying to understand that map and she failed, you know. My mother never made the transition to Ireland quite fully, you know, even though she had six children. So she is the story of a migrant who hasn’t made it in Ireland, who hasn’t quite understood the Irish map because the Irish map is quite a fluid thing in a way, you know. It’s made up of all these kind of conversations rather than anything specifically on paper and we all know that about Irish people like as soon as you get into a conversation you start talking about families, you know, people that you know, connections, towns, you know, street names – all kinds of things, it’s actually a sort of conversation full of social fact checking and I’ve heard people say this. A film maker in Cork recently said that to me he comes from a small town in West Cork and he said to me – a lot of English people living in the town, you know, but he said you often get the impression that there’s no point in talking to them because there’s no electricity, you know. They talk to you about very sort of specific things but they’ll never get into that sort of fluid electric conversation that Irish people have that goes back three centuries in time and that sort of connects up all our people, you know. So that’s one of the things I try to describe in Hand In The Fire and that’s one of the things that I sort of feel even as a sort of grown person living here most of my life, you know, I still feel I’m not quite connected into that Irish map, that Irish social map and, you know, it could be my fault but still I feel it’s a formative thing, you know, in my childhood somewhere I kind of understood that I’ll never get to grips with this map, you know, but I’m still trying.Participant 4: Can I ask, you know, in Hand In The Fire Vid has this I suppose quite dark history so that he’s been in an accident and he’s lost a lot of his memories and he wants to escape that history, did you do that so that he wouldn’t have that option of wanting to go back or knowing that he can easily go back and ...?Hugo: Yes I mean it’s very deliberate. I think really I’m showing my hand here again because with a German mother I lived most of my life trying to kind of pretend I wasn’t German. In fact there are episodes in my memoirs where I describe seeing my mother coming down the street and I run the opposite direction. Okay like a lot of teenagers may do that (laughter), you know, you don’t want to see your mother because like she kind of, you know, let’s the cat out of the bag, you know, but I mean I think it’s exaggerated in my story because, you know, who wants to have a German mother in the 19 ... you know, she was a lovely mother, you know. That sort of burden of history was very, very difficult for me to understand, possibly more difficult than it was for a lot of German people because, you know, they weren’t being called Nazis on the street every day, we were, we were put on trial. And I have the feeling now ... and that’s why I chose a Serbian character because he has the same history behind him which he is trying to forget, trying to walk away from, and with which he has nothing to do so I am echoing that sort of very personal experience through his story. And I suppose it also allows me to examine this immigrant without going back to his country, without constantly referencing his own country, you know.Participant 5: Do you think that ... you talk about like an Irish identity, about mapping and so on do you think that sort of the American influences and English TV has changed since you were ... if you were a child now in the same situation? Do you think it’s more international now?Hugo: I think so I mean that’s an interesting question, you know, I mean I’d love to talk to sociologists about it and linguists about it and, you know, we’re constantly translating ourselves into an American way of saying things and I mean the way people talk in Dublin now is very, very different to the way people talked, you know, in the 70s even, you know. In fact if you want to hear somebody talking real Dublin language the way it was spoken in the 70s and even further back you should listen to Paula Meehan, I mean she is like the real Dublin, the way it was, you know, and she even says, you know, she’s afraid that it will completely disappear, the Dublin dialect. So we are constantly imitating the American way and, you know, those faces, like the inflections of people, we talk now ... the tail of the sentence is almost up now, you know. But then again like I mean I talk to some young people and they say yeah my parents do all that social mapping, they kind of do all the rounds, you know, like they say oh yeah his father was a butcher oh no, no he was a chemist, you know, and all those kind of things like that’s really important even still and young people say like I mean we don’t do that anymore, you know, but will they? I think they will when they get to thirty or when they have babies themselves, they’ll start doing it because it then becomes important, you know, and they have the skill for it, they’ve inherited the skill, you know. So I think a lot of the Irish ways of doing things are still there even though we kind of speak with accents that we picked up from friends and whatever, you know, I think we still do things with a very kind of distinct way.Participant 6: Hugo can I ask you about your mode of working, say that you speak carefully and I think you probably write carefully as well, but do you work carefully? Do you work slowly? Do you do several drafts of a book or ...?Hugo: Oh I do lots of drafts of a book, you know. Yeah and I kind of re-write things constantly, you know, that’s ...Participant 6: And do you wait a long time before you put pen to paper? Do you think about the idea a long time?Hugo: No I don’t because like you can’t think about what you’re going to write, you can only find out what you’re going to write when you’re writing it, it actually kind of just comes out and it’s because you have this terror of not finding anything to say, you know, it produces this something, you know, particularly when you’re kind of constantly writing and you’re writing every day and that’s the great freedom you have, you know, just writing uncarefully, you know. But then I go back and re-write and, you know, change things a lot but the basic burst I mean I like things to be written in a burst because they’re honest and then they kind of have a bit of magic to them when they’re written in a burst because like, you know, you have to think on your feet, you know. And then you can go back and sort of pare it down.Participant 7: This is a question about your translations, your novels into German, I’m guessing from what you said that because you don’t write German you don’t translate them yourself.Hugo: No I don’t no.Participant 7: Well are you involved in the choice of translator or not? Like does the translator need to have a background in that kind of knowledge of Ireland, coming from a kind of dual knowledge, from a knowledge that kind of dual.Hugo: Yeah well that’s very interesting because, you know, my German translator has never been to Ireland, you know, and he did a fantastic translation of ... well I started with The Speckled People and he’s been working on all my books since then and he rarely ... I mean I show him the manuscript each time and he has about five questions each time and then I look over the manuscript and I have about five changes that I ask him to make, you know. But he’s a poet himself, you know, and a writer so he just has a feeling for language and I’m often sort of worried that the German version is better than the English. (laughter) So there is only one thing that I had to kind of change at one stage, in The Speckled People I had this phrase, you know, this man at some stage stands up and tells my mother, you know, Hitler was a great guy, you know, like he fought against the British and his phrase in it is he said, Fair play to the Germans, and he didn’t understand what fair play was so he looked it up and fair play in the dictionary sounds like justice so he just translated it like that, justice to the Germans, and it was a completely different meaning so things like that I was able to kind of catch but, you know, I can’t spot those things in French or in Spanish or Italian so there’s probably some wonderful mistakes in those translations, you know. (laughter)So listen thanks very much for coming and thanks for all your questions. 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