Member Spotlight: Shelley Fairweather-Vega

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? I’m a translator, and my way of writing helps other writers speak to people who would never read them otherwise. Translation brings down barriers and opens our eyes to people and ideas we’d otherwise never notice.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? Deadlines! If the universe won’t give you one, invent it yourself.

What is your favorite time to write? I can translate any time, as long as there’s a little noise in the background and I have a comfortable chair. But I like to treat my translation practice as a business as well as a creative endeavor, so I try to translate only during business hours.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? In his book The Process of Translation, William Weaver, translator from Italian, wrote: “The worst mistake a translator can commit is to reassure himself by saying ‘that’s what it says in the original’ and renouncing the struggle to do his best.” This feels very true to me. Translators can never rest with the rationalization that we’ve simply translated what was written, because “what was written” is not a simple idea. And writers must refrain from instructing their translators to “just translate,” for the very same reasons. A good translator is constantly forging a balance between what is written and what is unwritten, what makes sense and what isn’t supposed to make sense, and recreating all of that with new words.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? Being a writer feels like a more courageous choice than it used to, now that conventional wisdom would have us believe that large language models will write everything better and faster than any of us, starting any day now! But translators are very used to that idea. People have been telling us translators that the machines are about to replace us for decades. My translation out this month, We Computers: A Ghazal Novel, by the Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov, is actually about a human poet who programs a computer to write and analyze poetry, and it discusses all kinds of views on authorship, art, beauty, and humanity, covering both east and west and referring both to the ancient and the modern. It’s such a smart book, and as its translator into English, I get to be a part of thousands of new readers discovering it. This will never stop being a thrill.

Shelley Fairweather-Vega’s translation of We Computers: A Ghazal Novel Hamid Ismailov is out now with Yale University Press.