| Mark Kline | Interviews | Amita Basu |
Mark Kline is an American translator and short story writer. He lives in the South Harbor district of Copenhagen, which overall is a pretty decent city. Should you ever visit – come by train if you can – he recommends the marinated fried herring on rye. The Little Mermaid statue is unremarkable. Tivoli is best in the morning before the madding crowd, the boat taxis are good, the winding paths around the miniature rocky hills in the Botanical Gardens are a delight. Try the nature walkway above IKEA. Refshaleøen is ‘in.’Go picnicing north of the city in the forest with the world’s oldest amusement park. Sønder Boulevard and Værnedamsvej and Jægerborgsgade and Larsbjørnstræde are streets with personality. Bring an umbrella, don’t step out on the bike paths, ‘buy less, live more,’ talk to strangers, wander the city on late, twilit summer nights. Mike hopes this little guide helps you enjoy his city.
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AB: In your interview with Canvas Rebel, you say it was a one-year course at university, followed by long-term membership in an online writing workshop, that got you started writing. Was this the Internet Writing Workshop, where we met virtually in 2020? You say how this workshop taught you to critically read other members’ writing as well as learn to see problems in your own. You also talk about how you’ve learned over the years to set a piece aside and work on other pieces. I know you to be a slow and careful writer, allowing each piece the time it needs. This approach has paid off – you’ve appeared in such prestigious venues as The Missouri Review and Words Without Borders. Tell us about your typical process with a story from idea to publication.
MK: “The IWW was that workshop, yes. It’s a forum for critique and discussion, and it’s open to writers of all ilk, from beginners to professionals.
More often than not, my stories start with a character. I’ve been influenced by my father, who loved being around interesting people. Though I suspect these people became a more interesting version of themselves around him. Farmers, cowboys, aunts, grain elevator managers, WW1 vets, caregivers, insurance agents, mechanics, oddballs and drunks, nurses, local bank presidents and construction company owners – I watched how he turned people into storytellers by getting a kick out of listening to them. He gave me the gift of liking people.
A story character may or may not be inspired by an actual person. The character may or may not immediately ignite a story. Sometimes I will write blindly and stumble on the character’s dilemma or challenge, their world, their family. And sometimes everything falls into place and sometimes it all falls apart.
A story may also grow out of things like a small innocent situation, or from something I translated, or from a piece of furniture. Or whatever. I may write a scene and lose my bearings and set it aside for several years. Usually, though, I’m stubborn and will fight to “finish” a story and then end up writing several versions of it over a period of years, so that what I end up with is nothing like what I began with. Typically I’m wildly inefficient and slow as molasses, and also open to offshoot ideas as the story progresses. It’s an understatement to say that I’m no role model when it comes to process.
I don’t think about my father when I write, but he’s there. Whatever my characters have to face, I want an intensity to come out. They must not be boring. Or if they are, their boringness must be interesting.”
AB: Your primary career is in translation. You translate from Danish to English, and you specialise in the popular genre of crime fiction, though you’ve also translated a range of other works including political nonfiction. Your Canvas Rebel interview discusses how translating a work is a bit like solving a three-dimensional puzzle. I’d love to hear more. Do you also translate from English into Danish?
MK: “I’ve always wondered if many translators are puzzle freaks. There’s so much to keep track of when translating a book, especially with fiction. The tone of the narration – is it serious, glint-in-the-eye, lyrical, melodramatic, self-ironic? Is the dialogue in the original formal or colloquial, and what about vulgarities, or the little filler sounds in Danish which don’t quite translate into English? How to signal Danish dialects? Jokes, plays on words that keep popping up… Poetry can also be enormously challenging, with all its dimensions to deal with, some of them hidden, some like wisps of smoke.
There’s something I’d like to put to rest here – A.I. cannot translate fiction without a human translator involved. It almost goes without saying that the same goes for poetry, though an A.I. translation of a poem can be very interesting, in a bonkers way.
It’s rare for someone to be able to translate both ways, Danish to English and vice versa. Bilinguals from birth would be the obvious candidates, especially if they have lived in cultures where each language is spoken. Language and culture are so closely intertwined.”
AB: You also translate short fiction. You’ve translated several stories by writer Helle Helle, including “It Could Be Grass,” a subtly written story about two couples. The narrator’s marriage is in trouble, which we see partly by observing her with her husband Erik, but primarily by hearing her unreasonably unfavourable thoughts about her sister-in-law Birgit. This is a story where nothing much happens on the surface, but a whole world seems to be falling apart inside. I’d love to hear your thoughts on Helle Helle, whose work you introduced me to, and your experience translating her work, as well as the collaborative process of translation per se. How much back and forth is there, how much inventiveness is called for, and how do creative differences get resolved?
MK: “It’s very interesting to read your thoughts on Helle, in particular ‘nothing much happens on the surface,’ because that’s a common characterization of her fiction in Denmark. Though she’s not everybody’s cup of tea – who is? – she is enormously respected here, and not only by the literary world. Many Danes see themselves, their neighbors, their Danishness in what she writes. I haven’t worked with a more gracious and sharp-eyed writer, ever. Her stories were quite short, and if I’m remembering right, I usually sent her a draft of my translation before we ever discussed a story. Then it was mostly getting the details down, a word here and there, or some meaning I might have whiffed on. Her prose is straightforward but subtle, anything but simple. She’s one of these writers who says more in three words than others say in a dozen. That was the challenge in translating her stories. That, and making sure what was going on underneath the surface in Danish translated into English. I might add that she is now exclusively a novelist. Several of her novels have been translated into English by a brilliant translator, Martin Aiken, and I recommend all of them.
I’ve already briefly addressed the inventiveness necessary in translation. Sometimes you simply have to improvise, open your mind and let the ideas flow, just like the writer of an original text. After translating for years, your mind gets used to this translation-think, you draw on experience to solve the knotty problems. I’ve run into very few creative differences with the writers I translate. A book of poetry I translated,“kingsize,” required resolving many sorts of problems, which were hammered out mostly between the poet, Mette Moestrup, and I, sometimes along with the editor. These were discussions that led to mutual agreement, because the solutions became clear to all of us. I believe most translators will bend way over backwards to accommodate the wishes of writers, and usually it works out for the best, because writers want their book to be translated as well as possible. They will listen to the opinions of translators. And if they don’t trust them, they will ask for or find another.”
AB: Your story in The Missouri Review, “The Shortest Distance Between Me and the World,” follows the narrator Alex on his quest to love the whole world, including the sun, which he loves sitting in though it doesn’t quite agree with him. The fact that Alex has multiple sclerosis makes his indefatigable optimism even more remarkable. There’s one person whom Alex struggles to love, someone who reminds him perhaps a little too uncomfortably of aspects of himself. Alex shares a fun dynamic with his sister, who lives with him and looks after him. You’ve written other stories about Alex and Asia. Tell us what these stories mean to you and how you craft them. Also what you want readers to take away from them – if you think about that kind of thing at all? Not all writers do.
MK: “Writing the Alex and Asia stories has been wonderful fun. While writing that first story, the focus began to zero in on two main themes: a first-person account of the experience and challenges of having MS, and an exploration of a sister/brother relationship. How two strong and quite different personalities handle the situation of living together as siblings, with the brother’s MS affecting both of them every single day. It got to the point where I simply let them go, allowed them all their entanglements and clashes and fierce love. As far as crafting the stories, it’s been very much the characters who lead the way. Often ideas for plot come from them in some fashion. What they do for a living. Their needs, obsessions, idiosyncrasies. Their other relationships, their home. I mix all the stuff together and throw it on the wall about a thousand times, and voila! A story is born.
I don’t usually think about what I’d like readers to take from the stories. But since you ask, and now that I do think about it, it would be nice if readers get a sense of Alex and Asia, of their relationship, and cringe at their entanglements and clashes and recognize their fierce love. And of course I would hope at least some readers enjoy the stories.”
AB: Your first published original story is “Maniac Island” in Slow Trains. The narrator, Paul, has had a country song stuck in his head for three days. As the song loops, it acquires layers of significance via memories of events in Paul’s life when that particular passage was playing in his head. Paul jokes that an alien parasite must’ve implanted this earworm to drive him crazy. This story also features a knowledgeable German with an expressive face, and an island awhirl with migratory birds.
You have a background as a musician, which shows in this story. Tell us how you developed this story and what it means to you.
MK: “It started with the German guy. I still have a clear picture of him physically, his appearance and mannerisms. And back then, for some forgotten reason, I visualized him sitting at the round dining table in a house I lived in as a teenager. And quickly the idea of how songs get stuck in people’s heads entered the picture. I’ve written very few stories without music playing some sort of role, it’s what my mind naturally turns to. The same goes for humor, and for somewhat eccentric personalities. It’s also a typical way that I write: instead of working out characters, story, and structure, I give an idea or personality some space and see where it all goes.”
AB: I’ve realised in the last year or two how valuable it is to read a story aloud when I think it’s almost done. When you read something aloud, you find errors in sentence rhythms and dialogue; you also identify repetitions and spots where the story’s energy drops. I’ve also just begun trying to capture the voices of people I know by trying to talk like them – an exercise that, even in the privacy of my room, feels oddly confronting! (It’s an exercise at which Dickens, an actor and performer as well as a writer, excelled at; he was a world-class mimic and this gift enormously enriched his writing.) Even if our work is meant to be read silently, language is first and always speech, spoken and heard. Ultimately it’s the voice in our head that tells us whether what we’re reading or any good.
I imagine that being a skilled musician, having a good ear, is vital as a writer and translator. How does your musical training more generally feed into your work with text?
MK: I played in bands for many years, singing and hearing songs hour after hour, night after night, and there’s almost always a rhythm of speech involved in a song. That can’t help but have shaped the way I write. I listened to and played a lot of mid-60s [Bob] Dylan when I was younger, and I was attracted not only to his surrealism with attitude, but to how he let go of the reins in writing songs, how they sometimes stretched out beyond measures, how he often performed his songs beyond singing or speaking, where his voice was his lyrics, where he was the song. I’ve definitely carried that over into my fiction, in that there are times when I have to disregard the conventions of writing and grammar, or else it’s not going to be genuine. Not that that’s unusual. And it’s not something I aim for. It’s just me.
I think music is part of this intertwining of language and culture, it affects the way we speak. And vice versa, probably. Listen to Danish folk music, for example the way a typical waltz is accented, the third beat down and first beat up – you can often hear the same rhythm in their speech.”
AB: You’ve told me that you feel the need to be careful, when switching from translating to writing, not to let the style of the writer you’ve been working with influence your own. What aspects of someone else’s style do you feel tend to seep most easily or insidiously into yours? And on the other hand, given that we all learn from imitation, in what ways has translating enriched your writing?
MK: “Great questions! The problem with this seepage that most concerns me is when I’m working on a version of a story, when it’s in the revision stage. My sentences at times tend to set out on long journeys, with detours along the way, whereas Danish crime fiction tends to not. As we discussed before, I translate a lot of crime novels. Writing, whether it’s my own fiction or a translation, to me requires settling into a state of mind that synchs with elements of writing such as prose styles. It’s not easy for me to suddenly change a mindset in the middle of the day. It takes time, also, to get back into the feel of a story and its direction.
Like musicians, writers are always growing, developing, learning, and translation provides a great opportunity for this because of how deeply it requires you to delve into a book you’re translating, how thoroughly familiar you become with it. It’s like taking apart some complicated machinery, checking every part, seeing how it fits into the whole. It can’t help but affect writing.
Sometimes a translation will give me an idea for a story. It may be the subject of the translation, or it may be the prose style. But suddenly a connection is made in my head, and off I go.”
AB: In your Canvas Rebel interview, you talk about how your writing workshop taught you to read slowly and deeply. You’ve been an extremely acute and insightful reader in our own critique partnership. You’re able to see what the writer’s intention is with a piece and to gauge how far the writer’s achieved this. I imagine, too, that sometimes when you’re writing a particular piece, you may be drawn to reading certain writers. Tell us how the relationship between reading and writing has evolved in your life over the decades. And what role do these play in your life more generally? I’m going to quote that other interview again: “Writing fiction is a crazy way to twist the world into making sense.”
MK: “We all spend a lot of time trying to make sense of things big and small. It might be what we do most. Today I’ve been wondering why my laptop battery is running down so fast; why the chilis in my garden aren’t turning red; why a story I read this morning was so littered with unnecessary, mechanical, intrusive, obstructive, and totally correct commas; and a million other things.
Many years ago, someone mentioned to me that something dramatic had happened between my grandparents on their wedding day. Exactly what it was, they either didn’t know or didn’t want to say, and I never found out. It’s nagged at me all these years, a rock in my mind’s shoe, so to speak. Finally I wrote a fictionalized account of that day, by putting my grandparents in a parallel universe. They weren’t quite themselves, and the story wasn’t quite something that could have taken place. I know it’s not true. And yet it’s eased my frustration with not knowing what happened. I feel like I’ve done what I can. Which is pretty crazy.”
AB: Several of your stories feature descriptions of nature; setting is key to your work, and your settings are often rural. I’ll never forget reading your story in workshop about grieving parents set on Mand Island; I hope to see it published very soon.
Setting can be tricky: fun to write, but an easy distraction from the main event. I used to love writing long and unoriginal descriptions of nature; I’ve also read extensive descriptions of nature in works by established writers, good and specific descriptions, but often interrupting the main story rather than furthering it. (Unpopular opinion: Jhumpa Lahiri falls squarely in this camp.)
You manage to properly situate action in a setting, to have setting generate action, to integrate setting into a story in a way that feels natural and often offers clues about the “point” of the story. Tell us how you approach setting and description.
MK: “In writing – and here I’m talking about short stories – I’ve always had this sense of setting as something a character observes or experiences. Possibly it’s because I write so much in first person and third person close to a character; there it would be strange to write a section of detached description or setting. Also, like many people I enjoy traveling and experiencing other cultures, other types of nature, but the places that stay with me the most are those that feel magical in some way. Mand Island is one of those places. My childhood home, the Flint Hills of Kansas, is another. It seems natural to me that such places actively shape a narrative, because they reach into you, affect you.”
AB: Country music shows up again in “A Song Singing,” published in Fugue. The two main characters, Isabel and Dennis, have conflicting views on music – more cerebral vs. more intuitive – but Isabel nonetheless rewrites parts of Dennis’s songs in ways that, he acknowledges, often improve them. And again, in this story, we have nature seeming to observe and subtly comment on the human action: e.g. “Outside the window, around the sand parking lot, the cottonwood leaves clicked. Like fingers snapping, polite applause in the dark.” This story addresses bereavement and guilt, unspoken attraction, music as communication, and characters caught in limbo. It also studies how, sometimes, a piece of art can be years in the making. Tell us how this story developed.
Also, you told me that in your current assessment this story is “too long.” We’d all be rewriting our pieces continually if we could, and I love this story’s leisurely pace, which lets us slip into the rhythm of these characters’ lives – but what would you cut if you were to rewrite this story today? Or would you redo the whole structure more efficiently? (Readers: don’t let us spoil the story for you. Read it first: it starts on p21.)
MK: “Loss is a theme I return to again and again.
I felt I could never wrestle parts of a few middle sections into place, there were passages where I felt the story’s wheels were spinning. It’s not because I didn’t try, time and time again. It reached the point where good enough was going to have to be good enough. I’m quite sure I wouldn’t want to do wholesale changes. And because I did so much work years ago trying to redo those few sections, cutting and rephrasing and moving and replacing and so forth, I wouldn’t even want to give it another shot. I don’t even like thinking about it. Good enough is good enough.”
AB: You alluded briefly in a recent conversation to how generative A.I. is revolutionising translation, threatening the livelihoods of translators, as it already has writers and visual artists. Some months ago I came across this collaboration between a human writer and generative A.I. – eleven versions of a story where the writer fed the A.I. increasingly larger chunks of the beginning of a story and the A.I. took up the thread. The writer herself was impressed by the results. I feel primarily a nagging sense of unease. Tell us how technology is influencing your work, how you and other writers and translators are adapting, and which aspects of human creativity and meaning-making you think are easier and harder for A.I. to emulate. Given that, at bottom, A.I. merely identifies and replicates patterns – can we ever expect anything truly original from it?
I know that Europe takes concerns around technology and privacy, for instance, much more seriously than the U.S. (whereas, in India, lack of regulation is the default state, and police have an outdated and fragmented knowledge even of well-established and major cybersecurity issues). What steps have you seen and would you like to see governments taking to protect human creativity and ensure that we use technology to improve our lives rather than taking over our most precious human functions?
MK: “It’s my impression that when it comes to translations, the publishing world is in a state of transition. And guess what: money is a factor. As I’ve said, translation software isn’t advanced enough to translate works of fiction all by itself. For instance, currently I’m working on a few crime novels that have already been translated by a software program and then edited by people unfamiliar with the Danish language, with changes by the author sprinkled in throughout the book. It’s interesting, to say the least. Some of the mistakes border on the hilarious, double mistakes, first by the software program and then by the attempts of an editor to make sense of it.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that doing A.I. translations of a lot of literary fiction would be completely useless, using them as a kind of first draft would be at best a waste of time, they would be that bad, and unless a translator swooped in to save the day, they could be potentially damaging to the reputations of authors and books. Specifically, the best translation software on the market consistently misses the tone of a voice, whether of a character or a narration. It takes so little to be so wrong in these cases. When a word means two or more things, as words often do, the software regularly gets it wrong. The more complex a sentence becomes, the more difficult it seems to be for the software. It also tends to translate sentence structure literally, which can be very stilted, even jarring. There’s a wide gap between a reader being able to understand a translated text, and a reader getting some kind of enjoyment out of it.
What will the situation be in five years, though? My hunch is that literary translators will gradually feel more pressure to use AI translation as it improves, and with some books, emphasis on some, their job will tend in the direction of a translator/editor. That might be really going out on a limb. Who can predict what the world will look like in five years?
Another question: I wonder how readers would react to A.I.-written bestsellers and book series, if they were aware no writer was involved? I’m thinking of the interest people have in the lives of writers, in their public appearances, etc. On the other hand, how will writers be able to prove that A.I. played no or at least a limited role in their works?
The EU Commission and Parliament are very concerned about things such as privacy and cyber attacks, given that we are in this somewhat behind-the-scenes state of cyber war with Russia. It’s not for nothing that in the past months the Danish government has officially informed all Danes to have a specific amount of vital supplies on hand – water, food, battery-operated radios, etc. As far as protecting creative human endeavors, though, I’m not aware of that being a concern of government. It’s quite possible I’m just not up on this.
AB: What writing and translating projects are you working on now?
MK: As far as my own writing projects go, I’m doing something I’ve never done before – writing a story set in my Kansas home, the Flint Hills. Sitting around for hours and thinking about back home would normally make me feel like I’m wasting time, but this gives me an excuse for it. Unfortunately it’s going to have to wait for a pause in translation work. Otherwise, I’m also fiddling around with a long-term project based on mistakes made by my voice-recognition software, which I use because I have a few problems with my hands. I’ve been collecting these mistakes for years, and I form haikus out of them. The titles are what I spoke, and the misinterpretations are in the haikus. For example:
“The beets I planted”
The capless Iceland,
shelfless Ross, sheetless Greenland.
The beachless planet.
It’s interesting how minds tend to connect random dots in ways meaningful to them. Something like constellations.”
AB: You have a garden that you love tending and spending time in. Give us a snapshot.
MK: “A rosemary bush a meter in diameter and almost a meter tall. Pumpkin vines crawling around, with seven pumpkins of an uncannily perfect symmetry. One chili plant that produced incredible numbers of organic heat missiles, one chili plant with chilis that couldn’t quite ripen this far north. Basil, thyme, cilantro, lemon thyme, sage, scraggly tomato plants, edible flowers. A row of beans. Single bushes of raspberries, gooseberries, red currants. A few wild blackberry bushes that are probably remnants of what was part of Copenhagen’s defense a few centuries ago; try charging through rows of blackberry bushes four meters tall – good luck with that. No beets this year, though.“
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Interviewed by Amita Basu, Columnist & Interviews Editor, MeanPepperVine
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