Hana Sato is forty-four. She was born in Tokyo, educated in Kyoto and at the Sorbonne, and has lived, since 2018, in a small apartment in Alfama, Lisbon, from which she translates contemporary Japanese literature into English and French. Her most recent project — an eight-hundred-page novel by a writer she asks us not to name here — took eighteen months, was drafted across five cities, and contained one sentence that she rewrote, in her own count, thirty-one times over the course of a year. We spoke on a rainy afternoon in October.
Q You have said the book took eighteen months. Is that fast, slow, or normal for a work of this length?
A
For me, slow. For the market, slow. My editor would have preferred twelve. If I am honest, ten. But this is a book with one specific sentence in it — I will not tell you which — that governs everything that happens in the last three hundred pages. It is a sentence I could not have translated in twelve months. Or, more precisely: I could have, but the translation would have been embarrassing, and the book would have been worse than the original, and I would have known.
Q Tell me about the sentence.
A
I can tell you what it is not. It is not the famous sentence. Every novel has one or two "famous" sentences that a translator agonises over publicly, and half of them are marketing. This is not one of those. It is a sentence, twenty-two words in Japanese, spoken by a minor character on page 461, that contains — I do not know a better word — a specific kind of national grief that does not exist in English or in Portuguese. Not exactly. There is a corner of it in Portuguese, actually, which is one reason I moved. It took me thirty-one drafts to find a version that did not sound either too explanatory or too coy. The final version is seventeen words. I lost five. I made peace with the five.
Q How do you translate a sentence you cannot translate?
A
You do not translate it. You build a room in English that has the same acoustic. If I try to translate the words, the reader gets the words and misses the sound. If I build the room, the reader stands in the room, and the sound is what she has, and the words are what she does not notice she is standing on. This is the whole practice.
Q Five cities. Which cities, and in what order?
A
Kyoto, for the first two months — to be near the writer. Tokyo, for six weeks — to be away from the writer. Lisbon, for six months — because I live there. Paris, for eight weeks — because I needed the French archive at the Bibliothèque nationale. And Naples, for the last stretch — because a friend had a small apartment above a bakery and I needed to smell bread at five in the morning. The Naples chapter is, to my ear, the warmest chapter in the English.
Q Do you answer the phone before eleven?
A
No. Nothing before eleven. I get up at six, work until ten-thirty on a specific chapter, walk for twenty minutes to a small café, drink one coffee, come home, and after eleven I open the world. The morning belongs to the book. If I answer the phone at nine, I am no longer the person the book is being translated by. I am a small-business owner, and small-business owners write worse sentences.
Q Money. What does a translator of your standing make on a book like this?
A
For this book: an advance of twenty-eight thousand euros, plus royalties on the English edition after earn-out, plus a separate contract for the French. If I average the last four books, it is about forty-two thousand euros a year, before expenses. My rent in Lisbon is nine hundred euros. I do not have children. It is a livable, unglamorous number. It goes a long way in Alfama. It would go nowhere in Tokyo.
Q You have said before that you were, at some point, "paid to disappear." When did you first realise that?
A
The precise moment. It was the second week of drafting my third book — a smaller novel, three hundred pages. I was reading a paragraph I had translated the previous day and I noticed that the paragraph was, in English, a paragraph I would never have written in English. Not the ideas — the shape. The commas were not in my places. The verbs were not my verbs. And I thought, well, of course. I have not written that paragraph. Someone else wrote that paragraph, in a different language, and I have been paid to make it possible for her to write it in mine. My job is to be the door. Not the room.
Q How do you switch off, at night?
A
I do not switch off. I switch subjects. In the evenings I read a novel that has nothing to do with anything I am working on — usually in Portuguese, sometimes in French, never in Japanese. I cook a very simple thing. I do not talk to editors. Once a week, on Saturday, I have dinner with a specific friend at a specific restaurant in Alfama, and we do not talk about work. She is a pianist. She has a much better switching-off practice than I do. I copy her.
Q The book is finished. It is out. What have you not told the writer?
A
That I moved a comma on page 118 from the middle of the sentence to the end. It changes the emphasis. She did not want the emphasis changed. She was correct. I did it anyway. I hope she does not read the English closely enough to find it. If she does, I will owe her a dinner.
Q What are you translating next?
A
A shorter book, a hundred and forty pages, by a poet who is writing a novel for the first time. It will take me six months, because it is short, and because poets write novels in sentences that are shorter than they should be, and shortening them further is where the work is. After that, I will take three months off, and I will write, in Japanese, a small piece about Lisbon. It will not be for publication. It will be for me.
✦ End of Interview N° 02