Daniela S. Zounková - Translator of the Month

Ten years ago, Daniela left her intellectual life in the university city of Brno and moved her whole family to Rychleby, a remote and mountainous region on the border between the Czech Republic and Poland. Here she spends her time variously translating, running a small farm in the foothills, giving language classes at a local Montessori school, cross-country skiing and a range of other activities that would no doubt appeal to outdoorsy Norwegians.

How did you end up becoming a translator of Norwegian literature?

In the beginning, I was an avid reader and student, with a particular fondness for Czech literature. My time at university coincided with the years after Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, when the borders opened and it was suddenly possible to travel and study abroad. By pure chance, I was awarded a scholarship at the International People’s College in Helsingør, Denmark, and from there it was only a short path to the language of Norway. On my first Norwegian visit, I found that I had always loved this country – I just hadn’t realised it yet! My decision to become a translator was due to a happy combination of loving my own mother tongue and my passion for all things Scandinavian.

I was probably quite dauntless in the beginning, even if my determination perhaps wasn’t entirely rooted in sufficient knowledge of the source language. Some older fellow-students invited me to take part in translating a collection of short stories by contemporary Norwegian writers, and I confidently accepted. I then practiced the art throughout an extended period of translating from English, and when the next opportunity of translating from Norwegian came along I had by then gained a bit more faith in my abilities. Gradually, I almost exclusively replaced English translations with Norwegian ones.

Your colleague Miluše Juříčková has passed the Translator of the Month baton to you:

“Hi Daniela! You have translated both children’s literature and books by Thomas Hylland Eriksen. Could you describe what it was like to meet him and to work with his texts?”

Dear Miluše, thanks for the question. It was indeed thanks to you that I first became acquainted with Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s texts. Early on, while still a student, I was given the opportunity to help translate Eriksen’s book Tyranny of the Moment. I remember in 2004, sitting in my student lodgings at Kringsjå in Oslo, hammering my way through page after page on a borrowed laptop, while hoping that my translation would at least capture some of Thomas’ personality. I was lucky enough to be able to follow his seminars at the university back then and meet him in person every week. Anyone with experience of his lectures knows that he found it quite impossible to stick rigidly to any pre-determined subject. So I now somewhat hazily remember the time I spent with him as being filled with torrents of words, dazzling associations, jokes, digressions, references to current political and cultural topics, and so on.

The second time I met him was at the 2019 Norwegian Literature Week festival in Brno, when he gave the lecture “The Side Effects of the Information Age” after which we discussed his books together. He was already very ill at the time, but there was no visible sign of it effecting his optimism, energy, or zest of life.
I also found the richness and [bifurcation] in his writing to be a constant challenge and huge translating conundrum: How could I be faithful to the original and help Czech readers hang on to a coherent thread without getting lost in the text? Thomas was also known for having great confidence in the linguistic abilities of those translating his books. His answers to most of my questions would go something like: “No, I don’t really know what I meant by that, but you’ll figure it out.”

I am certain that the translations of Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s books helped central ideas and concepts from modern cultural anthropology reach the Czech Republic at that time. His books have had a great impact on how we understand globalisation, identity, and our increasingly high-tempo world. They have changed the way anthropology as a science is viewed within research circles and among the general public. Eriksen managed to present academic concepts with humour and ease, which until then had been something of a rarity in Czech non-fiction literature. I have never developed such a close and warm relationship with any of the other authors I have translated. And although it might sound a little overblown, I miss Thomas very much, and it makes me terribly sad that I will never get another new book from him to translate.

Of the books you’ve translated, which did you enjoy working on the most?

The one I most enjoyed translating, which was however also the most challenging, was undoubtedly the children’s book Slush Mountain by Bjørn Rune Lie (original title: Slapsefjell). Although this picture book contained a mere 25 pages of text, there was barely one sentence that was free of puns, jokes, or allusions to some uniquely Norwegian phenomenon from the world of skiing. There are well-known figures from Norwegian history, different types of ski wax, outmoded clothes and ski bindings, popular winter lunch-packs, knitted mittens – in short, everything one could describe as quintessentially Norwegian, accompanied by charming illustrations. My children know this book by heart, and some of my translations of funny, Norwegian swear words have even caught on at home.

Read more

[More about Daniela on Books from Norway]

Those of you who understand Norwegian can read her interview here.

More interviews in NORLA​’​s series

Translators are our most important stakeholders when it comes to the spread of Norwegian literature in the world. Their work is of crucial significance, and in order to shed light on this, we embarked on this series of interviews, known as ​‘​Translator of the Month​’​.​​
You can find all of the interviews here