An Interview with Katherine Silver

“Don’t you think that when you are writing, submerged, not questioning the source text, you are both as isolated as you could possibly be from others and your surroundings and more connected than at any other time?”

Translation is:
A handy metaphor
A conversation
Never wholly the work of a translator

I had read several Katherine Silver books before ever reading a book by Katherine Silver. An acclaimed translator of authors such as César Aira, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Horacio Castellanos Moya, for decades she has been the medium through which the words of many great authors pass into English. This is what drove my curiosity when I learned that she had a novel entirely her own coming out. What would she be like translating herself?

The result is the slim but deep Echo Under Story, a journal-like account of a woman named K., who has returned to her childhood home following her mother’s death to take charge of the house, on the one hand, and grieve on the other. The fragmented format of short, diaristic entries—many of which include translations of passages from Proust at the bottoms of the pages—is both elastic and roomy. Silver leads the reader into K.’s distant past, her always-shifting musings, her relationship with her mother, and the forest near the house where she spends so much time. If there is any plot to speak of beyond the K’s return and reckoning with her mother’s absence, it’s her mind’s constant, melancholy play along dissolving thresholds: between life and death, the natural world and the self, the need for solitude and companionship, what’s been lost and what’s still to be gained.

As K. reflects, “We grow up I in a mythical landscape and return to find the magic gone but nothing to replace it.” But she does replace it, with the words conjuring that loss.

Echo Under Story is a book that translates human longings, which merits translations in its own right. Katherine Silver and I chatted about her book when it came out this fall.

—Aaron Shulman

THE BELIVER: The elephant in the room I feel we should address first is that you’re best known as a prolific and celebrated translator. What is the story of your own writing, and how has translation—or even certain authors—affected your work and this book in particular?

KATHERINE SILVER: I like the image of an elephant; it has such a massive and unavoidable presence, whereas a translator is more like an elusive puppeteer, a wizard behind a curtain, someone heard but not seen. I started translating after I started writing, which was before I can remember. I was determined, from very...