For Izidora Angel, translating books from her native Bulgarian to English is akin to an actor reading a script.
She’ll start by writing five or 10 pages in order to understand the author’s voice — the cadence, the emotional beats. Then she’s able to fully inhabit it.
“You have to find all the nooks and crannies of it … otherwise it’s like hitting the (wrong) note on the piano,” the 45-year-old Near West Side resident said. “It doesn’t sound right and everyone can hear it.”
Still, Angel felt an unusually intense connection with “She Who Remains.” The novel, by Bulgarian author Rene Karabash, follows a young woman cloistered in a rural Albanian village who escapes an arranged marriage by becoming a “sworn virgin.”
The book — and by extension Angel — has been celebrated across the world this year as a finalist for the International Booker Prize, an influential literary award for translated fiction. It’s even been recommended by Malala Yousafzai and Dua Lipa. In Chicago, she shares her talents with the Third Coast Translators Collective.
Around 30 people translating from over a dozen languages, including Arabic, Ukrainian and German, make up the group. Their fluency may not always match. But they still manage to pore over words and themes together, a practice they say is complex and deeply human, especially given the rise of artificial intelligence technology.
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“As a translator you’re not building the replica of the same ship,” said Maja Teref, who translates from Serbian alongside her husband. “On the contrary, you’re building a counterpart. You’re building a ship but the material that the ship is built out of is going to be different.”
“A replica would be Google Translate — word for word, and that wouldn’t make any sense,” she added. “That’s just gibberish.”
‘Inhabit both of these languages’
Much of Angel’s work is informed by her journey to the U.S. from Bulgaria. She wants her mother tongue to have a place in this country.
“I have to make people care about this tiny little place in the world,” she said.
Angel’s childhood in Sofia, the capital city, coincided with the end of communism, which she said made it difficult to leave the country without connections. That changed after her father, who held an “American dream” since he was a boy, started businesses. He then sent her, her mom and sister to west suburban Lombard when she was 12.
The move wasn’t always easy on Angel, who said she probably experienced the most culture shock in moving to a suburb after living in a major city; but her mother had the foresight to sign her up for English lessons beforehand, which helped.
“You’re there (in Bulgaria) on Wednesday and on Thursday you’re not there, and you resurfaced in America,” Angel said. “You don’t know anybody. There’s no family other than your immediate family.”
Angel attended university in the U.K. and briefly moved back to Bulgaria in her 20s where she worked for a magazine before returning to Chicago. It was after watching a Bulgarian translator speak at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Hyde Park that she realized translation was her calling.
“I inhabit both of these languages in really profound ways, and they inhabit me in turn,” she said. “I can do something quite interesting on the page because of that.”
Like Angel, English was Maja Teref’s second language, so she’s been translating since elementary school. The 55-year-old Rogers Park resident recalled translating a book about Iron Maiden for herself in seventh grade because she was such a big fan of the band. She later worked for Radio Yugoslavia as an English translator before coming to Chicago for grad school.
For Steven Teref, 56, he became fully invested in the language and culture after meeting his wife. They first crossed paths in 1995 at the Neo nightclub. Now they translate Serbian poetry and books together.
“The couple that translates together stays together,” he joked.
‘Lost in translation’
According to Angel, the phrase “lost in translation” exists for a reason. Bulgarian uses the Cyrillic alphabet while English uses the Latin one. Meaning in Bulgarian is often expressed through different verb tenses, whereas English deploys its more robust vocabulary.
That’s where the artistic element comes in, including in “She Who Remains,” Angel said. The novel’s main character becomes a sworn virgin, meaning she takes a vow of chastity and lives socially as a man. Her name changes from Bekija to Matija.
English isn’t as gendered as Bulgarian, which Angel said allowed her to better convey the ambiguity in Bekija’s identity.
“It actually allowed for a really beautiful in-betweenness, so that we’re not gendering the main character,” Angel said.
The text was alive on the page, Angel said, which made translating it a relay race of sorts with the author.
“I was running in step with (the author). I was admiring the writing, but I felt like I could handle it,” Angel said. “It didn’t overpower me.”
In one section, Bekija remembers the wedding dress her grandmother gifted her before she died; Angel said she went over it again and again to get right. She had to carefully place phrases like “she said” so English readers could understand who was talking while maintaining the melody and rhythm of the original text.
The Terefs ran into a similar issue when translating “Children” by Milena Marković, a novel about a woman’s relationship with her disabled son that comes out in October. They decided to use past tense when the main character spoke and switch to present tense for other characters to make it clear.
At the same time, the couple said they want to preserve Serbian culture in their work. They’ll keep a word like “pljeskavica” — a Serbian meat patty — because it’s different from a hamburger, they said for example. It can take anywhere from a year to five years to finish a book.
For Angel, there was about a five month period where she “blacked out” and intensely focused on translating “She Who Remains.” It was published earlier this year, but Angel said she primarily worked on it the prior two years.
She watched as the book’s popularity grew on social media, but when it made the longlist for the International Booker Prize, she broke down in tears. Her husband and three children were home when she got the call, and they all hugged to celebrate.
“It was being legitimized at the highest possible level after so many years of just feeling like I was doing a fool’s errand,” Angel said. She’s also translated two other novels and is writing a memoir.
Even though it didn’t ultimately win the prize, the publicity brought an influx of sales. She also hopes the success brings more awareness to translated books in the U.S., where the amount published is quite small.
It’s important for everyone to “widen their frame of reference,” she said.
“It’s like if you go to a Mexican restaurant in Chicago, it’s not eating Mexican food in Mexico, but it’s close,” Angel said. “Just because something was rendered into English, you still can taste and smell and feel the source.”
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Ali Kinsella, who translates from Ukrainian, said the country’s literature can show Americans how to identify and resist fascism. Russia invaded Ukraine more than four years ago, unleashing Europe’s largest conflict since World War II.
The 40-year-old Uptown resident picked up the language while working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine.
“Ukrainians know what it’s like to live under fascism, under totalitarianism, and they’ve been writing about it for decades and decades,” Kinsella said. “And I think that they have a lot to teach the world about what it means to … survive individually and collectively as a culture.”
Chicago’s translators collaborate
Bringing the literature of the world to English speakers is the goal of Chicago’s Third Coast Translators Collective, which Angel helped start a decade ago. They were even the first readers of “She Who Remains.”
In workshops, they parse through the poems and novels group members are working on. Their discussions typically revolve around what is “best” — the best word, phrase, idiom or sentence structure to communicate the author’s meaning, Angel said.
“The thing about translation is that you’re never in charge of the plot or the pacing,” Angel said. “But within linguistic parameters, the question is, are you bringing this over in the best possible way.”
Jamie Rising, 34, said the group’s advice has been incredibly valuable. Others may not know Portuguese — the language Rising translates from. But they’re still attentive to tone and flow and can critique the English version.
Kinsella recently presented a historical fiction book to the group where the main character speaks to her mother with formal pronouns, which in Ukrainian indicates respect, not distance. Kinsella was struggling to demonstrate in English that such formality is actually a sign of intimacy.
“It was very helpful to have other people listen to it or read it and tell me where they thought I was succeeding and where I wasn’t,” she said.
For Kinsella, it’s the kind of nuance AI can’t yet replicate.
“AI poems are very flat,” Kinsella said. “There’s no beating heart inside of them.”