10 Questions for Johanna Bishop
- By Franchesca Viaud
Profile of a solitary man, in shirt sleeves, whose pose of
sharpening a blade suggests he is a knife grinder. Often
called The Spy, since he seems to be listening to some-
thing attentively, it is thought to depict the man who
discovered the Catiline conspiracy; at other times of day
he appears to be Cincinnatus, at still others Manlius Capi-
tolinus.
—from Andrea Inglese's "Five Visions From The Big Duck," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
I suppose I translated a few poems and songs from French and Italian as a teenager—recently, an old friend even dug up a Natalia Ginzburg essay that we had the youthful hubris to tackle over a beer in college. But a couple of years after moving to Italy, I became enamored of a novel (never mind what, since I didn’t get very far) and decided to give it a try. I struggled through a chapter or two of convoluted prose, then got internet access for the first time and immediately started looking for websites related to literary translation. This led me to an Italian listserv, Biblit, which had just been founded and had already attracted many of the country’s best translators. The energy was incredible: this was in 2000, and everyone seemed ecstatic to be talking to each other online after years of working in solitude. To me, it was like eavesdropping on demigods. All of them brainstorming over puns, over proverbs, getting impossibly worked up about punctuation; some of the best-read, smartest, most articulate, most generous people I’d ever met. I soon realized I wasn’t ready to translate a long novel yet, so I abandoned that first attempt. But I stayed in the group, because I finally knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I don’t have formal training, and can’t proffer a list of names because I think I’ve been influenced by almost every translator I’ve interacted with and admired over the years. There are dozens if not hundreds of them. Many are Italian, which has given a more Italian flavor to my translation approach—I’ve come to realize this now that I know more US-based translators, and it’s not better or worse, just slightly different. Each interaction has contributed some angle, some tactic, some consideration to keep in mind, in ways often bound to specific, practical examples. I don’t mean that I don’t give a damn about theory, but most of what I know even in the more abstract realm has come to me secondhand, by way of peers, filtered and mingled and impossible to untangle from the rest. I guess the greatest single influence on my approach to poetry has been Andrea Sirotti, a masterful translator with whom I worked on two books into Italian years ago, one as a sort of consultant and one as co-translator. Being in that role of source-language exegete and watching what he did with my input was amazingly instructive.
What other professions have you worked in?
I’ve worked in a wallpaper showroom, on a farm, in a call center, and in a few restaurants. I had a brief stint as an assistant gardener whose duties included harvesting raw opium for the personal use of the estate’s owner, which was sticky and unpleasant. I’ve also taught EFL, cleaned guesthouses, modeled for life drawing classes, and driven a carriage. It was a great relief to discover there was something I was better at and actually enjoyed.
What did you want to be when you were young?
A theater director, like my father, and/or an actor, like my mother. I haven’t performed since I was a kid, but when I get the chance to do readings I try to tune into those genes. Hilariously, I took a vocational test in eighth grade and the top suggestion that came back was “Translator/Interpreter,” even though that didn’t interest me at all at the time. It’s kind of depressing to think that my soul could be glimpsed via bubbles filled in with a no. 2 pencil.
What drew you to write a translation of this piece in particular?
I’d translated a few things by Inglese over the years and was always struck by how natural and comfortable it felt to don a version of his voice, even though I’m sure we’re very different people. That doesn’t happen with every poet I admire. So I knew I wanted to translate a full collection of his, and was drawn to the one these are from—The Big Duck—by the narrative framework (which indeed involves a duck) and by the three voices of the three sections. They’re quite distinctive, yet all recognizable as Andrea’s. Throughout, it gave me the same sense of vertigo that I get when trying to look closely at a picture or a piece of writing in a dream: the closer I look, the more it swarms and shifts, until it feels like falling inward, endlessly. Among other things, it’s a book about the difficulty of imagining a world outside the one we’re in at a given moment, no matter how absurd. Which, of course, made it a horribly appropriate thing to find myself working on during the Covid lockdown.
These are from the second section, made up of impossible ekphrases that sometimes incorporate bits of art history texts and eighteenth-century scientific treatises. They were fascinating to translate, as was the rest of the book, and I hope we find a publisher so that it can be read as a whole.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
Not a place so much as a time. I once heard an Italian translator talk about drawing on the words of your childhood, finding ways to use the ones that put down the earliest, deepest roots in your mind. They may be somewhat regional, or part of your family lexicon, and of course you can’t scatter them around at whim—but when they fit just right, it creates a secret, satisfying bond. It might even be a rhythm of speech you remember. For me that would be the speech of western Iowa, where I would visit my grandmother in the summer, or of Lancaster, PA, where I went to school. And, I guess, the speech of Elizabethan theater, because I heard Macbeth performed hundreds of times as a little girl and still know a lot of it by heart.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
I can’t listen to music while I’m working. Birdsong, maybe.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
Turning on the computer? As a freelancer, I translate full-time and there’s always a deadline around the corner. Nor is there a clear dividing line between my literary and non-literary jobs. (The latter mostly revolve around contemporary art, but nowadays there’s an increasing overlap: writing by artists, for instance.) For years it was hard to undertake any projects on my own steam, because the constant pressure from commissioned work made it a struggle to carve out the time. You can only spend so many hours a day translating. In order to do the kind of work that has no deadline, I’ve learned that I have to set aside space in advance by turning down some of the offers that come in. And not just set aside what’s strictly necessary, but an extra cushion, to protect it from the inevitable slippage of other things and to give my language brain some breathing room. Maybe the ritual I’m developing is the anticipatory one of saying no, sorry, my calendar is full.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
My partner. Having a native speaker almost always on hand is invaluable. Especially one who grasps the nuances of translation. He’s not a translator himself, but he really understands what I need to know about the source text.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
As a young woman I used to paint, and I would love to go back to that someday. Sometimes I miss the immediacy of non-verbal communication.
JOHANNA BISHOP is a translator from Italian with a particular interest in the overlap between literature and visual art. Her work has appeared in journals such as AGNI and Another Chicago, and she regularly translates poetry and prose for the bilingual Florence Review. Recent books include Oh mio cagnetto, by artist Diego Marcon, and the forthcoming The Sioux / Little Dragon, by Anna Maria Ortese. She also co-wrote the English version of EMERALD, a 35-minute video poem by Azzurra D’Agostino, which premiered last year at the Santarcangelo Festival.
