Sophie Lewis is a translator from French and Portuguese. She has pursued a career in publishing alongside translation, running the UK office at Dalkey Archive Press, then working as Senior Editor at And Other Stories, and currently as fiction editor at the Folio Society. She is also a workshop leader for Shadow Heroes, organising creative translation workshops for secondary school and university students.
How do you find new works to translate? What is the balance between pitches and commissions, and how do you choose publishers to pitch your translations to?
Most of the time I respond to enquiries from publishers: they come to me and request a sample or a book report. If they’re enthused by my sample or my report they ask me to do the translation – this is a very short version of what happens – and if I’ve loved it and reported on it positively, I say yes. It’s rare that I come to a publisher and say out of the blue that I have this book and want to persuade them how good it is, but there’s a growing instance of a hybrid of these two things. Increasingly I want to champion the other works of writers I have already translated; I don’t want to hop around and do one book from one writer and one from another, I’d like to build up an œuvre.
Is that championing of authors partly connected to the fact that you’re an editor as well as a translator?
Yes, perhaps, especially if I’ve translated one book for a publisher and they’re not interested in publishing the rest of that author’s work. Often you have a relationship with the author, so you don’t abandon them after one book; in most cases there’s more to be done, and that’s a translator’s job and not just a publisher’s. I’ve always been an editor as much as I’ve been a translator, and I think that translators are often hamstrung by not knowing how publishing works, not knowing what happens to books once they’ve sent in a complete translation, not knowing what the constraints are on publishers. I’ve also given workshops [for the Society of Authors] on how to be edited, how to be a translator and how to cope with the process of editing. It can feel very invasive, a tussle as opposed to something constructive: it’s underdiscussed and not understood, and it can put publishers off translations because it’s not just double the cost of the book, it’s also double the hassle.
You were instrumental in setting up And Other Stories. To what extent has their work – and your continued involvement with them – changed how translated literature (particularly women’s writing) is published in the UK?
It was Stefan (Tobler)’s idea, and I was privileged to be able to join him. Stefan asked me early on if I would be involved, and I attended some of the early discussion groups. It was always a community initiative; he brought lots of people together to decide how this publishing house should work. And he asked me to join as a partner when I was just about to move to Brazil, so I did it from Brazil for a while, which was a crazy idea but it was really valuable, not only because I was able to do the job and be there at the beginning, but also because we were able to do what we said we would do, which was keep it light on its feet – no office, barely any staff – we used technology instead of shelves and bricks and mortar, and it was great to do that because otherwise I think we’d have gone more traditional by default.
So do you think that And Other Stories has been a trailblazer in UK independent publishing?
The subscription model has really grown in interest after And Other Stories took it on and committed to it. And Other Stories was prescient in seeing that this was a way to do many things: to keep the publisher funded in a way that would not require capital, but also to create a community at the same time, and that’s what people are trying to do ever more around us. It keeps on growing, and I keep on meeting subscribers, so it has been pioneering. The language or country-specific reading groups were also pioneering: there’s a lot of unpaid work and stress behind the scenes, but people have talked about how to get over the hurdle of trying to get publishers to read the books they might be most interested in, so this bringing together of a group of readers within a specific time frame to look at a certain small number of books and to comment on them and discuss them is a really interesting model. They don’t always publish the books, but it does build up a community of people who understand And Other Stories. And it has attracted funding at times, so it’s obviously a model that can chime with the interests of the ministries of culture in different countries. So that is a pioneering thing to do, and it goes on.
It was your idea to commit to the Year of Publishing Women; how did that come about, and do you feel that it was successful?
After Kamila Shamsie published her ‘provocation’, Stefan and Tara (Tobler) asked whether we should do something for it. I think they meant we might write something in response; my first thought was “yes, we should”, and my second thought was “we should actually do what she’s suggested”. But the only way to do it was with a lot of planning and shared objectives and data gathering to follow what happened, to interrogate all the means by which we received books, and to talk to publishers and agents about what they were sending to us and what they could send for the Year of Publishing Women. It was always going to be a mixture of publishing women we’d already published and publishing new authors. The other reason I thought it was important is that And Other Stories is a press that publishes mostly translations – 60-70% of what they publish is in translation – and so it was more relevant for us than for publishers who don’t publish many translations, because women do struggle to get published outside the Anglophone world, they have so many things against them. They struggle to get published, and to get published well – in big enough numbers and with a big enough marketing campaign behind them – to make an impact. So they then don’t win prizes. Everything is against them. And then by the point that someone has to pitch the translation of that book to an Anglophone publisher, the hurdles are enormous. So I thought that was where the interest lay, that we should follow up the process and look at all the elements of that chain, and how we reached the decisions that we should publish these new books from these very different places.
What do you perceive as the greatest challenges regarding gender bias in translated literature, and what might usefully be done to respond to and overcome such biases?
I think publishers need to go a little bit further in the work that they do, or in the tentacles that they reach out, assuming that they do, in order to hunt down the women that they want to publish, to give them a better chance of making it over into another language. And I think that the way to do that involves networking creatively, bringing scouts in – they have a wealth of knowledge, and they usually work for a single publisher in a single country, but I think that they can be tapped into a little bit more to see what comes out of a region or a country. Agents are also so much more on the ground than publishers are – agents from overseas are the ones to be talking to, and also translators who live within the countries where they translate from. They’re isolated in one sense, but on the other hand they are finger-on-the-pulse people. For example, the translator Jethro Soutar brought the first Equatorial Guinean writer into English. Jethro introduced not only his novel but the author himself to And Other Stories, from which point Stefan was able to negotiate a contract with the author, who owned his own rights, to represent him, and that meant that And Other Stories was able to sell that on into other languages, and thereby champion the author even further in a way that the original publisher was unable to do. It’s a productive relationship, and a model for how people who struggle to get published and then get published in small ways can make it on a bigger scale.
Do you think that Francophone and Lusophone women writers are well represented in translated literature?
French is moderately well represented, but Lusophone writers are not well represented. I don’t see many Portuguese books coming out, and the territories are big: maybe not as big as the Francophone world, but big nonetheless. But this goes back into cultural history: Portugal is a poor sister to Europe, is pretty much ignored on the world stage, and Portuguese language within Latin America is often overlooked. So we get into questions of cultural supremacy, and how the world has configured itself, playing out in publishing. So there I have a bigger job of advocacy to do.
