Katy Derbyshire is a London-born translator who has lived in Berlin for almost 30 years. She translates contemporary German writers such as Judith Hermann, Olga Grjasnowa and Inka Parei. Her translations of Clemens Meyer have been twice nominated for the International Booker Prize. Katy co-hosts a monthly translation lab in Berlin, heads the imprint V&Q Books, and co-founded the Dead Ladies Show performance and podcast format. Katy played a major part in the establishment of the Warwick Prize for Women Translation, which honors female-authored books of fiction and has been administered under the auspices of Warwick University since 2017. In this interview, we talk about a wide variety of topics, including publishing with Seagull Books, the differences between translating commercial texts vs literary ones, the dilemma of who should be translating whom, and her translation of Robert Seethaler’s The Café with No Name. An excerpt from this new work follows the interview. — Nancy Naomi Carlson
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Nancy Naomi Carlson (NNC): You’ve produced quite an impressive list of titles with Seagull Books, one of my favorite publishers. How did your first book with Seagull come about?
Katy Derbyshire (KD): Since I’m based in Berlin, it’s easy for me to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair every year. It must have been 2009 or 2010 and I was aware of their German list through the translator Martin Chalmers. I went to their booth to have a look, got chatting to a friendly man and woman and asked: I don’t suppose you’re looking for translators, are you? They turned out to be publisher Naveen Kishore and editor Sunandini Banerjee, and they said: Oh yes, we’re always looking. Send us a wish-list of books you’d like to translate! Which is pretty much the opposite of what other publishers were telling me, a barely-published translator. I sent two suggestions and they responded: Is that all? Those two were Dorothee Elmiger’s Invitation to the Bold of Heart and Inka Parei’s The Shadow-Boxing Woman, and I went on to translate Inka’s two other novels for them as well. I’m really pleased I’ll be starting work on her new book, Humboldthain, for Seagull next year.
NNC: I had a similar experience when Seagull agreed to publish one of my own poetry collections, and then a second. Let’s go even further back and talk about what first drew you to translation as an endeavor.
KD: Actually, I did my first few book translations before Seagull, but they were hugely supportive and helped me to build up a sense of what I enjoy translating. Their philosophy of listening to translators makes their catalogue global in a way you just don’t see elsewhere.
Translation was initially a way for me to earn a sustainable living in Berlin. I’d moved here with a BA in German studies, which basically meant I had no qualifications other than speaking German — but not as well as an actual German. I trained up and began translating commercial texts for agencies shortly after having my son — I loved the process of imitating so many different voices but I did not love the material. At the same time, I was reading a lot in German and felt this evangelical drive to share books with people who couldn’t read them. So my motivation is quite complicated — I need to pay the rent, I enjoy the challenges of finding the right words, tone and rhythm, and also I want to become part of books I admire — or for them to become part of me — and enable others to admire them, too.
NNC: It’s good to know that you can still pay the rent but follow your heart when it comes to choosing books to translate. Here’s a three-part question. Are you still translating commercial texts? Can you tell us how your translation process for literary texts compares to the one you’ve used for commercial texts? As your son gets older, how has raising him affected your translation life?
KD: Well, I’m translating fewer commercial texts because I have less time, and also because the bottom is rapidly falling out of that market due to AI. That’s critical because the commercial work is important for the rent-paying aspect. It pays better and takes me less time, plus I’m simply not emotionally invested in much of the material. I still translate for the German Resistance Memorial Center though, which elicits a strange mix of emotions. I must have typed the phrase “was murdered in a concentration camp” thousands of times by this point, and I have to harden my heart to those words and rejoice in the times I type “survived the war.” It’s still very painful to write “was murdered in April 1945,” to think of those people who would have lived on to celebrate the defeat of fascism, if it hadn’t been for sadistic Nazis still killing even as they retreated, in the certain knowledge that they’d been defeated.
The two translation processes are definitely different. I will always begin a literary translation by re-reading the book so that I’m immersed in its language and characters — I don’t take on literary projects without reading them first, since spending so much time inside books I don’t like makes me miserable. And my literary translations get several more drafts than the commercial ones, polishing until I’m happy with the tone and my word choices. Then the editing process is also more detailed, ideally more collaborative, with different concerns. Largely, commercial translations have to be clear and comprehendible. In contrast, some of the writers I love most work with ambiguity, like Judith Hermann, with voices and dialogue similar to those of Robert Seethaler, or tease the reader like Clemens Meyer whose big fat novel The Projectionists I’ve just started translating. So the challenges are very distinct.
That said, I do think my grounding in commercial translation gave me the experience and confidence to mimic different styles. I also set up glossaries for each major project, commercial or literary, because I’ve learned the importance of consistency and continuity. In the workshops I’ve led over the years, I value having commercial translators in the group. They have a wealth of tricks and shortcuts, they understand different aspects to translators with a literary background. What’s important to learn is that literary translation has different priorities and can often be much freer and bolder. We need to remember our advantage over AI — we can be inventive, break the rules, and inject a personal touch based on our own experiences, physical and emotional, and not just say “this is how we write in English” as commercial translation requires.
My son! Having a child changed my life in so many ways, but one big advantage was that I learned to manage my time. To begin with, I was translating while he was at kindergarten and sometimes after he went to bed, so the work had to fit into that schedule. He’s an adult now but I generally still manage to hit deadlines. On a practical level, an older child means I’m freer to travel and could theoretically apply for residencies, if I didn’t hate being away from home. I do get invited to appear with my writers now, which was rarely the case 10 years ago, and I enjoy sharing a stage with them, most recently Clemens Meyer in Ireland. It’s becoming an important part of the job, presenting our work in public.
And then of course I have a tempting linguistic resource at the kitchen table — a young bilingual! I’ve heard other translators say they like to consult their children and grandchildren to stay in touch with “youth speak.” But I’m not sure we can simply ask young people “what word would you use here?” if we’re translating young characters. Ideally, younger translators would be translating younger writers, using their own language rather than faking it. Isn’t that why we’re training up literary translators? There are plenty of writers my age and older, so why should I be straining to recreate authentic young language — and possibly failing?
NNC: I hadn’t thought about the impact of AI on commercial translation. This makes sense, of course. Your work translating for the German Resistance Memorial Center sounds fascinating, but also heartbreaking. You also make a strong case for younger translators translating younger writers, rather than faking it, which brings up the dilemma of who should be translating whom. Are you able to elaborate on this question?
KD: Let’s grab the bull by the horns, shall we? I don’t think individual translators are universally suited to every kind of writing. I know I’m not great at translating poetry, for instance, but I can do a good job with dialogue — one of the things I most enjoyed about translating The Café with No Name. Maybe I’m a prosaic person who talks a lot! When I’m commissioning translators for V&Q Books, I look for people who can relate strongly to the writing. As I mentioned, we draw on all of our life experience to write and translate, both physical and emotional. And a huge part of translation is our deep understanding of the original – so I think work that centers experiences of racism, to address the most controversial example in recent times, benefits from being translated by people who have experienced it themselves. You’re going to get a better book in the end from someone who deeply feels those words.
Not all books are about something in that way, though. In Seethaler’s case, we have an omniscient narrator telling stories about various characters, so all I had to do was to slip into that observing persona, fairly common in historical fiction. There’s plenty of writing where life experience isn’t as important for translation quality as, say, a sense of rhythm or botanical knowledge or a broad vocabulary. Experience is one aspect in a whole palette of factors. What I’d like to see, though, is a more diverse field where people join the profession from many different backgrounds, rather than only via academia or publishing contacts. That can only make for better translations all round.
Having said all that, I love translating stuff set in East Germany, pre- and post-89 – but my first visit there — or here, because I’m in the east of Berlin — was just after reunification in 1990. So maybe I’m not the right person for the job, or maybe there isn’t one; there were a few English-speakers in the GDR but I only know one who translates.
NNC: Let’s now focus on Seethaler and The Café with No Name. What initially drew you to the novel? What were some of the pleasures in translating it, besides the use of an omniscient narrator? What were the challenges?
KD: I’ve been a fan of Robert Seethaler’s work since his 2014 novel A Whole Life, narrating one man’s life lived out in the Alps. I’m certainly not the only one — my friend and colleague Charlotte Collins loved the book too, and it was she who persuaded Picador to publish it in her beautiful translation. Charlotte went on to translate Seethaler’s The Tobacconist and The Field, but on this occasion she was too busy to take on the translation so the publisher asked me. I checked with her, as translators’ ethics demand, and she was fine with it, especially as she’s now working on Robert’s The Last Movement, a novel about the late years of Gustav Mahler.
What I particularly love about The Café with No Name is that it doesn’t focus on well-known historical figures but instead zooms in on ordinary fictional lives in a working-class neighborhood of 1960s and 70s Vienna. We meet sideshow wrestlers and factory workers, a butcher, an immigrant from Yugoslavia, wonderfully written characters gathered together in that soapiest of setting –: a local watering hole. I got to stroll into Robert Simon’s café with the rest of them and imagine playing cards and gossiping, drinking wine or raspberry soda. The place is much more down-to-earth than we might expect of a Viennese café. No delicate cakes here: “To eat, there’s bread and dripping with or without onions, freshly pickled gherkins or pretzel sticks.” Then there are lyrical passages describing the passing of time, changes to the city, or the characters aging. The book can feel cozy and nostalgic at times but it’s more than that; these people lead tough lives and don’t necessarily achieve happiness in the end.
The dialogues presented a stimulating challenge — how to recreate working-class speech of the time without anachronisms. Because the café is on the edge of a market, I watched footage of stallholders from London’s Covent Garden fruit and veg market, especially around its closure in 1974. I found them surprisingly well-spoken, possibly because they were talking to the BBC. Perhaps I also subconsciously channeled my parents’ generation, phrases like “roly-poly,” “right you are,” and “bloody Nora!” And of course, the perennial challenge of setting — will my readers understand Vienna, the way the houses are built, how public transport works, what local wines mean to people. That may well be insolvable, but I try to add judicious glosses to help my readers out.
NNC: I loved reading this novel and seeing how you effectively resolved some of these translation challenges. It’s precisely the fact that the characters live out their ordinary lives that is most compelling and makes them seem universal. Some are driven to find meaning in their lives. Some let life happen to them. Can you please give our readers an introduction to the excerpt that follows?
KD: The excerpt is one of my favorite chapters, a defiant celebration in the face of adversity as the café closes down. You meet almost all the characters, who are fairly self-explanatory. Perhaps it’s good to know more about Rose Gebhartl, someone I rather admire. We’re told she’s always in full makeup and on the lookout for gentlemen, and she’s what might have been called “past her peak.” “Her coat, which she rarely took off even in summer, had lost its shape over the years and was just as crumpled and worn as Rose Gebhartl herself.” The chapter ends with a real life incident from Viennese history, which dates the party to the summer of 1976.
NNC: Thank you for sharing details of your personal journey in the world of translation, your thoughts on issues faced by translators, and introducing our readers to Robert Seethaler and The Café with No Name.
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An Excerpt from Robert Seethaler’s The Café with No Name
The party was on Saturday, the thirty-first of July. The date appealed to Robert Simon: it was the height of summer, on the cusp between farewells and new beginnings, and aside from that the guests could have a lie-in on Sunday and he’d still have a couple of weeks left until his tenancy expired. Enough time to get everything sorted out.
During the week before, he and Mila had handed out flyers in the area around the market: GRAND CLOSING PARTY! SAT. 31.7. START: 6 P.M. END: WHEN THE LAST GUEST LEAVES. WHERE: IN OUR CAFÉ. FREE OF CHARGE.
They’d bought paper lanterns at Herzmansky’s department store. And bunting, and fairy lights. Tall bouquets of paper flowers, artificially perfumed. Glittery, shimmering, wafer-thin flags that started dancing at the slightest gust, seventeen fifty per pack of three. Mila insisted on confetti. She took every pack she could find off the shelf and stuffed their trolley with it. Her idea was to cover the floorboards and the outside seating area with a thick layer of confetti, which the dancers would keep kicking up into little colored clouds.
“Candles!” she exclaimed. “We need tall white candles. Everything has to be bright with candles. The light will reflect in the guests’ eyes. Just imagine it: all those eyes full of candlelight!”
The week before, vans delivered four extra barrels of beer, seventeen crates of Gumpoldskirchner, three crates of dry and two of sweet sparkling wine and two pallets of fruit brandy from Southern Styria. The butcher brought two tubs of fresh dripping, Navracek the greengrocer added a sack of spring onions, and Frank Wessely contributed a small kitchen fridge, to hold emergency rations for late at night. In the morning, Mila set to with broom, mop and scrubbing brush to get the inside and outside as clean as a whistle. She strung bunting from the street lamp to the entrance, hung up paper lanterns and placed candles on the bar, the tables, by the windows and on the floor on either side of the door. At noon the sky darkened and thunder rolled in the distance. But barely half an hour later, the clouds parted and the sun appeared radiant in the sky.
Around three, Kurt Dvorcak drove up in a rust-red Renault 4. It took him an hour to fetch his records and DJ gear out of the boot and connect everything up on a table next to the bar. Simon had met Dvorcak many years ago in the Zum Goldenen Mond, where he’d laid on the music for a regular’s birthday party. He was actually a plumber. He’d joined the family business shortly after the war for lack of alternatives, but after his father died he’d sold it and invested most of the proceeds in his passion: music. He expanded his record collection by three tall shelves, bought the biggest PA system on offer at Elektro-Sobetzky on Margaretenstrasse, got himself a white suit studded with sequins and diamanté and matching silver boots, and from then on he toured up hill and down dale, dishing out musical entertainment at allotment association parties and goldenwedding anniversaries as “Heartbreakin’ Kurt.”
At five he put the first record on the turntable, and at half past, the café was full. Simon had pushed the tables and chairs against the wall to make space for dancing, the bar was buzzing and the first rounds of drinks were turning the sober afternoon clarity into an atmosphere of shimmering expectation. Everyone had dolled up in white, pale-blue, sunshine-yellow shirts, bright summer dresses and airy up-dos that exposed shiny tanned necks. Mischa the painter was wearing a broad-brimmed hat with a peacock feather tucked into the hatband. Heide Bartholome had squeezed herself into a lilac dress, from which her assets bulged in new and entirely unexpected ways at every turn. Rose Gebhartl came along in an eggshell-colored summer suit, her face plastered in make-up and her ears dripping with gold. She paused in the doorway, looked around for a moment, and then made a bee-line for the glittering form of Heartbreakin’ Kurt behind his record players.
Dusk crept slowly over them. The light on the outside walls turned yellow and the sound of closing shutters rang out from the market. The café grew more crowded, the mood more exuberant, the laughter louder and the tone of the conversations higher. One by one, the traders came in. Some had dressed up as much as they could, others were still wearing their work coats over threadbare cord trousers. A few factory girls fluttered in like shocked butterflies, welcomed with cheers and shouts by a group of roadworkers.
Suddenly, Heide Bartholome was standing by the outside tables. Balancing a brim-full glass of sparkling wine in one hand, she began to swing her hips to the song “Sei du mein hellster Stern,” her gaze fixed far across the rooftops. For a moment, the guests seemed to hold their breath, all eyes on her, and then Heide tipped back her head, emptied her glass in one, and tossed it behind her, where an elderly man nobody knew took a dive to prevent it from smashing against Heartbreakin’ Kurt’s Renault 4. “Got it! I got it!” he called out, picking himself up and holding up the glass like a trophy. His heroic deed unleashed spontaneous applause, whereupon Heide Bartholome raised her arms and started turning in circles, like a spinning top gone to seed. Only a few seconds later, the entire outside area was full of dancers. Inside, the music surged and the “brightest star’ on the turntable burned out with a disturbing sound, but immediately afterwards came “Kiss Me, Kiss Your Baby.”Now the party had started.
At seven the butcher came by, arms linked with his father. All attempts to seat the old man at one of the tables failed. He stayed outside, standing beside the lamp post with his hands behind his back, staring expressionlessly at the goings-on.
“He’ll be fine,” the butcher said to Simon. “At least he’ll be in the light when the night comes.”
Long before sunset, Simon had to hook up the third barrel of beer; there were only four bottles each left of the dry and sweet sparkling wine; plum, raspberry and pear brandy were all gone; and Simon was glad he’d at least stocked up on enough Gumpoldskirchner and apricot brandy to get half of Leopoldstadt bladdered.
People were dancing inside now as well. Frank Wessely and his friends Breuer, Prsbiszil and Bednarik had brought their wives and were manoeuvring them around the room with stiff steps and jutting hips. Other couples danced cheek to cheek in increasingly wild circles, while a few of the younger women were dancing alone, only occasionally resting in a man’s arms for a fleeting moment before they fluttered away with a laugh.
Mila had tied her hair back with a flowery headband, which lent her a slightly rakish look. A fully loaded tray high above her head, she made her way through the scrum, trying to keep an overview between the dancing bodies. Sometimes she sat down on René’s lap as he leaned his head against the wall beside a window, his arms crossed. She gave him a quick peck, ran her fingers through his hair and stroked his cheeks, then leapt up again to make her rounds.
Harald Blaha was plastered. He rolled his glass eye across the tables, threw it up in the air, made it vanish and magicked it up again from behind the ears of slightly disgusted women. Shortly before midnight, he nabbed an empty shot glass, stuck it in his eye socket, climbed on a chair and began making speeches. Simon grabbed him by the collar, dragged him outside and sat him down on the pavement, where he fell fast asleep, his back cushioned by the ivy on the wall.
“Kiss Me, Kiss Your Baby” was played three times, and on the last playing Mischa and Heide lurched across the road in a tight embrace, tear-streaked cheek to cheek, watched by the butcher’s father from beside the street lamp until his son finally took him gently by the shoulders and pushed him inside to the bar.
Heartbreakin’ Kurt played everything his record boxes had to offer: “Goodbye, My Love, Goodbye,” “Mary Oh Mary,” “Der Junge mit der Mundharmonika,” “Mandolinen um Mitternacht,” “Rote Rosen,” “Das Wunder aller Wunder ist die Liebe,” “Sunshine Lover,” “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep — that one four times over, and it was barely audible the last time because the guests formed a spontaneous choir to jointly mangle the lyrics. Frank Wessely sat on the bar and conducted, Rose Gebhartl—by this point on Heartbreakin’ Kurt’s lap—cawed along and even René left his seat to take a few steps across the dance floor with Mila. Heide Bartholome squealed in Mischa’s arms as the younger guests circled beneath the lamp post like confused moths.
No matter how long the party actually went on, later on no one could have said when exactly it had ended. The first few left the café shortly after midnight, among them the butcher and his father, while the last staggered home in the gray light of dawn. At four, the closing chord of “Flammende Liebe im Wind” rang out, one last couple still taking tired, mute steps around the floor before they halted and swerved arm in arm out into the morning. Heartbreakin’ Kurt shook the tinsel out of his hair, loaded his gear, record boxes and Rose Gebhartl into his Renault 4 and drove off up Leopoldsgasse at a concentrated crawl.
“It was just like I imagined it,” said Mila. She had taken off her apron and was looking around the room. “Everyone looked so lovely.”
“Hard to believe,” said René.
“And now it’s over,” said Simon.
Pale-blue light was falling through the windows; the café looked suddenly small without the guests, the noise and laughter.
“My legs are blooming killing me,” said Mila. “I think all my blood’s gone down to my ankles.”
“We’re off,” said René. “You coming?”
“I’ll stay a bit and get the worst of it cleared up,” Simon said. “Don’t want people speaking badly of the café.”
But his fear was misplaced. No one was bothered by the broken glass in the gutter or the single strip of bunting fluttering from the lamp post until it was carried off by the wind. No one complained about the trampled layer of soggy confetti, beer mats and cigarette butts or the smell of spilt beer and cold tobacco smoke that wafted from the open windows over to the market for days to come. Not even the obscene drawing that Mischa the painter had daubed on the opposite wall with ashy fingers, titled War of the Sexes, upset the neighbors and passers-by.
The truth is that soon enough, no one thought of the party anymore. And even Simon, when he revisited that night later on, could barely remember more than a few blurry details. What remained was the feeling of farewell. Over the past few years, the area around the Karmelitermarkt had changed step by step; though each of those steps in isolation was not particularly significant, in retrospect, the party seemed to him like a last flicker of an almost extinguished time, one last bright blaze shining out of the mist of the past.
One of the last to leave the café had been Old Georg. In the first light of dawn, he set off up Haidgasse and Rotensterngasse to Praterstern and then headed northwards to the Danube. He’d drunk a lot even by his standards, but although he sensed the tiredness in his limbs and the ground felt like thick cotton wool beneath his feet, he got the feeling he could keep walking for hours and hours. He too had danced and sung, and shortly after midnight he’d even held one of the factory girls in his arms and taken a few breathless twirls with her. The sight of her smooth white brow and the scent of her hair had clouded his senses so much that he’d almost lost his balance, and he’d have fallen flat on his face if the girl hadn’t grabbed him by the collar and plonked him down on a bar stool.
He crossed Walcherstrasse, where a couple of uniformed tram conductors came wordlessly towards him, heads down on their way to the early shift. Asphalt-gray pigeons awoke in the guttering and strutted along windowsills, cooing. The half-bottle of apricot brandy Simon had given him as he left sloshed in his coat pocket; he wanted to round off the night with it. He briefly considered a park bench at Mexikoplatz but then went on instead, across Handelskai and along the banks of the Danube, heading downstream. At a landing point for cargo barges, he sat down on the bank, leaned against a stone mooring and looked out over the river. The sun was rising above the construction cranes in Kaisermühlen; the light glinting off the water hurt his eyes. Only now could he tell how drunk he was. When he closed his eyes for a moment it felt like the ground was sliding away underneath him, all of space tipping over and plunging him into a deep void. He took the bottle out of his pocket and drank a slug. He leaned his head against the stone. His coat was too hot but he was too tired to take it off. He blinked. Drops of sweat flashed on his eyelashes in the light. Once again, he felt like the earth was moving underneath him, and in the next moment he heard a deep drone, followed by an ear-splitting crash. He pressed the bottle to his chest, tried to get up but fell back and stayed where he was. His eyes moved downstream. At the spot where the pillars of Reich Bridge had just been arching up, the water was foaming and the sunlight was refracted in an aura of steam and dust. The bridge had disappeared, only parts of the road surface still protruding from the river. Sparks sprayed from the overhead tram cables as they dangled into the water, frayed and tattered. Oddly enough, in the precise middle of the river, its tyres lapped by the water, stood a red bus. Old Georg screwed up his eyes. Behind the white noise in his ears he heard dull screams, but he wasn’t sure; it might have been the seagulls scattering skywards in all directions. He felt the bottle against his chest, behind it his thudding heart. He wanted to get up and go somewhere shady and cool, but he was too tired and too confused. He took a large gulp, and as he lowered the bottle he saw a man clambering onto the roof of the bus in the glittering spray, positioning himself there motionless, his face in his hands. Old Georg took one last mouthful. He closed his eyes and waited patiently for the warmth that would soon spread around his body, and once it came he said out loud to himself, with a certain emphasis: “Bloody Nora, such a lovely bridge, and now it’s gone.” He decided not to open his eyes again, felt the empty bottle slipping out of his hand, leaned back and let go.
[From Robert Seethaler’s A Café with No Name, translated by Katy Derbyshire. Europa Editions, February 25 2025.]