Elisa Wouk AlminoĚýis a Los Angeles-based writer and literary translator from Portuguese.ĚýShe is the translator ofĚýThis House(Scrambler Books, 2017), a collection of poetry by Ana Martins Marques. She is currently a senior editor at Hyperallergic and is the editor ofĚýAlice Trumbull Mason: Pioneer of American Abstraction(Rizzoli, May 2020).ĚýShe teaches at Catapult and UCLA Extension.

Ěýby Vigdis Hjorth, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund (Verso)

It’s not uncommon for women writers and artists to be discussed in terms of their personal lives. Their image becomes as much a fascination, if not at times more, than the work they produce (think of Clarice Lispector, Frida Kahlo). This is what I think about when I look up the English-language articles on two books that made it on to this year’s BTBA longlist: Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth (translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund, published by Verso) and Welcome to America by Linda Boström Knausgård (translated from Swedish by Martin Aitken, published by World Editions).

I read both books without knowing anything about them or their authors. I was completely gripped by Will and Testament, a story narrated by a woman who was sexually abused by her father as a child. Estranged from her parents and siblings, she must face them as an older adult to discuss the heated terms of the family inheritance. Welcome to America likewise drew me in with its moving story about a young girl who stops talking after her father dies. Here, too, is a story about a violent father and how familial relationships both construct and disturb your sense of self.

It turns out that both of these stories are based, to an extent, on their authors’ lives. Will and Testament has been described by the media as a “sensation” and “literary scandal” in Norway, causing one of Hjorth’s sisters to write a book in response (not yet translated into English). As for Boström Knausgård, she’s had the unfortunate fate of being consistently discussed in terms of her former husband, Karl Ove Knausgård.

Discovering these intimate ties certainly adds a level of intrigue, but by focusing on them we sort of miss the point of these books: that they have accomplished something spectacular through fiction.

I loved both books and their English translations, and ultimately think that they deserve deeper critical discussion in English-language media. But I’m choosing to spotlight Will and Testament for a few reasons.

First, as is the case with so many international authors, it’s taken too long for the Anglophone world to recognize Hjorth, who’s written thirty-seven books to date and is a household name in Norway. Secondly, the writing in Will and Testament feels fresh and inventive. The book switches between reading like a novel, personal essay, notebook, and art criticism. The form alternates between long, meditative paragraphs and brief ones that are isolated on blank pages like poetry. The writing, which is profoundly suspenseful, keeps you on your toes. (At one point while reading this, my heart actually raced.)

I imagine it wasn’t easy for Charlotte Barslund to translate Will and Testament (she is also the translator of Hjorth’s previous novel, A House in Norway). Reading this book is like being inside someone’s mind as they’re working out a thought, unearthing buried feelings — a messy process where ideas are repeated, and memories are out of order. But the use of repetition isn’t boring or heavy, and the jumbled thoughts aren’t confusing. On the contrary, the effect is clarifying as we come to understand the effects of trauma. It’s impressive how light, clear, and precise Barslund’s English rendition reads, how she places the perfect emphasis on one or two words in long, meandering sentences (there are several of those, strung together only by commas).

Will and Testament is, finally, a very timely book. While it can get a bit irksome to discuss books in terms of their trendiness and relevance, Will and Testament (published in Norway in 2016) is available in English at a time when conversations around sexual abuse are particularly prevalent and public. Readers are bound to confront their own assumptions, biases, prejudices, and questions while reading this book. Hjorth cuts through the noise, the buzz, and the gossip to deliver a story that lays plain the pain and conflict of sexual abuse.

Some critics have questioned Hjorth’s choice to seemingly mask her own story with fiction, implying that she might as well have billed it as a work of autobiography. This, to me, strikes me as a simplistic view of fiction. By presenting itself as a novel, Will and Testament creates space in the reader’s mind that nonfiction could otherwise limit—as long as you don’t get caught up in all the “scandal” before setting out to read.

I teach an online beginner’s translation class. On the first class, I ask students to briefly review a work in translation (I give them the option between a short story and a poem). The task, at first, seems hard. I’ll get questions like: Can I really judge this if I don’t know the original language or haven’t read the original? How do I know if it’s good? I tell them to evaluate a translation like any text: Analyze the use of language, the tone, the imagery. Is it clear and vivid? Elegant and fluid? The big news flash of this exercise: The qualities of the work are partly thanks to the efforts of your translator.

Over the course of six weeks, we continue to debate what makes a good translation and how to make our own translations as best as they can be. There are no straightforward answers. We talk about whether translations should necessarily cater to American-style sentence structures, or whether there is a value in challenging the English-language reader with atypical syntax. We compare multiple translations of the same texts, and in realizing how drastically different they can be, we conclude that a translator and her perspective can have a great influence.

For this prize, I’ve received so far around fifty books, originally written in at least ten different languages, and I only know three of those languages (Portuguese, French, and I can get by with Spanish). The stories range from a man who keeps a notebook of handwriting exercises ( by Mario Levrero, translated by Annie McDermott), to a thriller where young boys keep mysteriously jumping into the train tracks of Buenos Aires (by Sergio Olguín, translated by Miranda France). Many of the authors are new to me.

As a judge, I feel I must not only look for a good translation, but also for an exciting one. Is the translator making surprising or risky choices, and succeeding? Is the author’s voice startling and unfamiliar? Has the story or narrative been overtold or not expressed enough? Who is the translator and what kind of work have they been committed to? Like my students, I acknowledge that it’s not an easy task to evaluate translations, mainly because there is a lot of work that goes into considering them—we’re not only dealing with the books themselves, but the many contexts that surround them.

Admittedly, I have the most fun obsessively pondering things like word choices and the shapes of sentences in translations. For example, the first chapter of Alia Trabucco Zerán’s , titled “11,” is two pages long but just one sentence. As a translator, I am in awe of how the prose flows, so I pause at each comma and conjunction, figuring out how translator Sophie Hughes made the English version read so effortlessly. Over the next few months, I suspect I’ll sit with all kinds of puzzles. In the meantime, I look forward to encountering not just new authors, but also new translators, who challenge and amaze me.