The Danger with Translation and an Ethical Question

The Guardian has an interesting article by former Granta editor Ian Jack about some translators who invented an Albanian author and had quite a bit of luck publishing their "translations" of him in English. As Jack reports it, they even got Time Out Scotland to declare him "'Albania's second greatest living writer' (after Ismail Kadare, later to win the Man Booker International prize)."

These "translators" had so much success with this fake author that Jack was at one poit considering publishing a collection of his work in English through Granta. But of course in order to do that he would have to meet the writer in person, and instead of pursuing some Weekend at Bernie's-esque hijinks the erstwhile translators let the jig be up:

We debated buying a story for the magazine. We even wondered if Kajane had more that could be published as a collection. We needed to get in touch, but our only route lay through his translator, Kevin Phelan, from whom the submissions had come. Phelan said Kajane wasn't easy to pin down, but he himself might be passing through London soon. He was sure Kajane would be thrilled at the idea of a collection. A meeting was arranged, and so one afternoon Phelan turned up in the office from Heathrow, in transit (as it turned out) between Nairobi and Washington.

The denouement will now be obvious, but before the meeting it seemed no more likely than discovering that Syria's leading lesbian blogger, Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, was a married, middle-aged American called Tom MacMaster living in Edinburgh. Photographs and biographical details of Kajane, after all, appeared in the contributors' notes of serious US journals. We needed to meet or at least talk to him before we could publish – a condition none of his publishers, before or after, seems to have made. Phelan then confessed that Kajane didn't exist. Phelan and a friend, Bill U'Ren, had invented him. The two had met as creative writing students at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Phelan had made a couple of short trips to Albania in the 1980s. U'Ren had never been. As young writers, they'd discovered that their stories, which then had contemporary US settings, attracted little attention; perhaps too playful to fit the fashion for trailer-park realism. Albania changed everything.

Phelan's revelation was transfixing, and nearly as unbelievable as how he and U'Ren earned a living. Phelan was an FBI agent . . .

With translation becoming ever more widespread, this story does bring up some interesting questions. Most journals and anthologies don't insist on meet an author; nor do they tend to insist on any greater proof that said translation is what it is than the translator's word (usually specified in the publication contract).

I will admit that this is a fairly cool hoax--and it does bring up interesting questions about how the fact of being a translation can make various texts more seductive and more publishable--but in the end I have to come down on these two for injecting such dishonesty into the practice of translation. If you sign a contract stipulating that a translation is what you say it is (and I can't imagine that these two didn't sign more than a few of these contracts at various points along the way) you should take that seriously. These guys didn't, and now when I read our submissions I'm going to wonder if I'm being lied to.