Shining Moon Episode 05: Translations and Writing in English as Your Second Language I

Hello, and welcome to Shining Moon: A Speculative Fiction Podcast, Episode 5. Today we’ll continue our series by asking questions about translation and writing in English as your second language. We’ll find out how difficult it is to write in your second (or third) language, what the advantages of writing in another language are, how you deal with reader expectations, and how to go about getting reputable translations for your work.

 My guests today are Alex Shvartsman and Anatoly Belilovsky. 

www.alexshvartsman.com, @AShvartsman on Twitter, @alexshvartsman.bsky.social on Bluesky,  or Alex Shvartsman on Facebook

Anatoly Belilovsky can be reached at @loldoc on Twitter/X.

"Don't tell me that the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." -- Anton Chekov

Piano music for closure

Thank you for listening to Shining Moon! You can reach the host, Deborah L. Davitt, at the following social media platforms:

www.facebook.com/deborah.davitt.3

Bluesky: @deborahldavitt.bsky.social

www.deborahldavitt.com

Transcript

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hello and welcome to Shining Moon, a speculative fiction podcast episode 5. I'm your host, Deborah L. Davitt. Today we'll continue our series by asking questions about translation and writing in English as your second language, or your third, or your fourth. We'll find out how difficult it is to write in your second or third or fourth language, and what the advantages of writing in a leathered language are, how you deal with reader expectations, and how to go about getting reputable translations for your work, which is a thing. 

My guests today are Alex Schwartsman and Anatoly Belilovsky. Let's start with some introductions. Anatoly Belalovsky was born in a city that has changed owners six or seven times in the last century, the latest crude attempt at adverse possession being in progress even as we speak. He was traded to the US for a truckload of wheat and a defector to be named later. learned English from Star Trek reruns, and went on to become an SFWA member in spite of a chronic cat deficiency by publishing nearly 100 pieces of original and translated prose and poetry, much of it collected in halogen, nightmares, and other love stories. He tweets occasionally at loldoc, come for the puns, stay for the punditry. Hi Anatoly, thank you so very much for being on!

Tolya:
Thanks for having me.

Deborah L. Davitt:
My second guest tonight is Alex Schwartsman, who is a writer, translator, and anthologist from Brooklyn, New York. He's the author of Kakistocracy, 2023, The Middling Affliction, 2022, and Eridani's Crown, 2019. These are all fantasy novels. Over 120 of his short stories have appeared in Analog, Nature, Strange Horizons, and many other venues. His website is www.alexschwartsman.com. Hello Alex, thank you very much for being on.

Alex:
It's a pleasure to talk to both of you.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Well, let's dive right into it. I'm going to deviate a little bit from my planned script by saying that I recently had someone who cold called me basically off of Facebook with an offer to translate me into Spanish to translate up to 15 of my poems into Spanish and then to for the low price of 200 euros. Was this a good offer or was this just a hokum?

Alex:
Well, it's impossible to tell. There are legitimate translators that reach out to authors of works that they love and offer to translate them. Usually, though, we offer a split. So essentially, we translate your work for free. And if it sells in the target language, we split the money evenly between the translator and the author. So the fact that they're asking you to pay upfront could potentially be a warning sign. Having said that, the best way to tell is to see whose other work they've translated already and where it's been published.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah, I kind of figured that I needed to do a little bit more digging on their website and see what else they had done. They, I was just sort of in the mode of, but money flows towards the writer. What are you talking about?

Tolya:
Well, I'll translate it as well, hopefully. The other thing about it is, and that's my personal opinion, I don't think it should be taken as gospel, but you really want somebody who's in love with the piece to be translated. And that means they have

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah.

Tolya:
to translate or die.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah.

Tolya:
And you

Alex:
There

Tolya:
don't

Alex:
are.

Tolya:
talk about me upfront when that happens.

Alex:
There are

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah,

Alex:
activist concerns.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I would tend to agree with that too. It was a very nicely written offer and it really sounded good right up until the point where it was pay me hot dollars first. And I was like, hmm, I think I wanna talk about that a little bit before I engage in that. All right, so let's go into the actual script. Writing in your second or your third or even your fourth language, since most of the people I will be talking to about this topic are polyglots. is a very interesting task. How do you go about just getting even started? I mean, what level of fluency do you need? Do you have to be able to think in it first? Because I found that when I was to my mom's horror, my German was never very good. But when I was taking Russian, I was actually able to start thinking in it a little bit. I was able to start writing in it a little bit. So since my mom is German, this was of course just AAACK. So what level of fluency do you need to be able to write in your second or third language? Just talk to me about it? It's fascinating. Alex.

Alex:
So I think you kind of nailed it exactly there when you talked about dreaming or thinking in that language. When I first came to this country, I asked a multilingual person what language they thought in. And they kind of looked at me like it was obvious and said, whatever I'm speaking in. And I think that that's the fluency, is if you can switch

Tolya:
Mm-hmm.

Alex:
your thinking as quickly as you can switch speaking between those languages. That is probably the true fluency and the level of mastery that you would need to do translation. Now, as far as writing in a language that's not your own, it is certainly challenging, but there are pluses as well as there are minuses. You get a lot of extra experience from

Tolya:
I'm going

Alex:
the

Tolya:
to

Alex:
cadence

Tolya:
take a few minutes to

Alex:
and

Tolya:
get back

Alex:
the

Tolya:
to

Alex:
depths

Tolya:
you.

Alex:
and the wisdom of the other languages that you speak that you can use and almost make it your own. And a lot of readers will be non-devisor. They will think that you're being really smart, whereas you are perhaps doing an idiomatic translation or just using some ideas and thoughts that you may have picked up in the other language. So that's the benefits. The downsides are that for many of us, our English is not perfect. I know that for me, I make mistakes that are kind of super amateur. But at the same time, I will also use lots of SAT words that many of my Anglophone friends may not know right off the bat. So it's kind of like this weird dissonance where you are making like third, fourth grade level mistakes, but you're also using college level English and about.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Would you like to add something to that?

Tolya:
Yeah Yes, I Totally agree that you're very highly influenced by your source language. In fact I'd like to compare it to epitaxial crystal growth there is a substrate of your original language and It it doesn't force you into a certain word pattern, but it suggests it the way the epitaxial substrate influences the crystal growth on top of that. You can see it extremely well in Irish writers. You can almost tell when a writer has grown up speaking English in Ireland, which itself is influenced by Irish sentence constructions. What is that in the Ada? Also, Yes, the word choices can sound a little stilted because you might have been used to certain words in your source language that are in common parlance that aren't as useful here commonly.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm. That's actually something that I was going to ask about later, but since you've brought it up. Accidentally using cliches or sayings or things that come out of your native language and just translating them verbatim is something that my mom does, and she's going to kill me for saying this. But. She likes to say what the farmer doesn't know the farmer doesn't eat or various things out of German that come straight through. And my husband looks at me when I repeat them and goes, why are you so down on farmers exactly? The farmers are good people. We wouldn't eat without them. Why are you so down? I'm like, because I've heard this my whole life. What are you talking about? So are there any examples of where you have just... done a lateral translation of something that, and you've just expected it to just come across beautifully and perfectly. And then you realized, oh, wait a second, that's not a saying in this language, or I'll again pick on Alex since he's right here on my screen. So do you have any good examples of this?

Alex:
So a lot of the time it works, and I think part of the job of being a good translator is to figure out exactly the moments where it would cause too much confusion and figure out whether you should keep the expression or substitute for a similar expression that is familiar to the English readers. But I should also say that this is exactly how some of these expressions come into common use. For example, the term flea market. is literally directly translated from French. And if you think about it, flea and market doesn't really mean anything, right? The market of fleas, but it's become to mean in English what it means in French now, because it's common enough. More recently, there's a, I believe it's a Polish or a Czech expression, not my monkeys, not my circus.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I've heard that one, yes.

Alex:
That has become a lot more common in English news recently. But that is a direct translation of a sort of European, I believe, Polish expression. So there's a lot of times where you have to kind of play it off. I'm not thinking, I'm kind of cheating. I'm not answering your question directly because I'm not thinking of a specific example from my personal use where it failed utterly because if it was going to fail, I would have deleted it and just used a more common expression. But I think that these are the kind of things that we think about and this is how words come Cross borders and it doesn't just work into English. It works that way into other languages as well Russian has adopted probably a much greater percentage of its words than even English

Deborah L. Davitt:
Would you like to add something to that at this point?

Tolya:
Yeah, one of my favourite expressions from my childhood is, who's going to clean your room? Pushkin?

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hahaha! Yeah, that one doesn't translate necessarily all that well to English, but I can totally hear a mom saying it. That actually gets me to the question of cultural translation and translating. I'm going to use an example from my absolutely favorite translation, which was a translation of crime and punishment, which was done in the 90s by... Let's see, what were their names? Richard Piver and Larissa Volokonski. And they did such a wonderful job doing a fluid and natural translation of a 19th century work to modern English, but they also had to put in a lot of footnotes to let you know that there were cultural things that don't translate, whether it's the use of nicknames, which is just rife in Russian. and or just the cultural things about what level of coin this was. So there was cultural translation going on at the same time as there was language translation. And I guess the question for you guys is how do you go about making things just effortless without having to resort to footnotes when you're doing a cultural translation as well as a I'm going to pick first on Anatoly.

Tolya:
Well, I just want to pick out one expression that means completely different things in English or in Russian. If you take the phrase, can't hold a candle, can't call the candle to something, that means it's far inferior.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Tolya:
Whereas if you say in Russian, ÿ ñâå÷êó íå äåðæàë, I didn't or couldn't hold a candle, that means I wasn't there to witness it.

Deborah L. Davitt:
OOF

Tolya:
completely different context. So what you want to do when you're translating something is rethink the whole thing all over again in English. Don't translate

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Tolya:
but rethink it, rewrite it. And I've had conversations with other translators about it. No, you have to be true to the source. You have to be true to the dream. I think.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay. How do you feel about that, Alex? Do you feel that you have to be true to the source, or do you have to be true to the dream?

Alex:
So there's a really popular concept among translators, which comes from Italian, which I'm about to butcher. Apologies in advance. Traditore, trattatore. It means to translate is to betray. By necessity,

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Alex:
you will betray either the author or the reader in order to make the translation, because there's usually no perfect translation. Something has to give on one end or the other.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Alex:
And you have to really think deeply about each choice. And the place where you start is what is the purpose of your translation? If you are doing a translation that is, you know, more for like a university press or, you know, like for, you know, some kind of an archival purpose, you want to be as loyal and sort of, you know, close to the original text as possible, which means that text is going to be a little bit difficult to read. You're going to use a lot of footnotes. You're going to have some. turns of phrase that don't read very smoothly in English at all. Whereas if you're doing a literary translation and the purpose is to entertain the reader, that's when you begin betraying the author as much as possible. I hate footnotes.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hahaha

Alex:
I'm not saying I've never used them, I certainly have. But I will go to great lengths to avoid even a single footnote if I can help it. And so there's all sorts of tricks. There's really like a plethora of. items in my toolbox to be able to avoid doing that. And sometimes that means literally adding a sentence or a sentence splice into the text that clues the reader into the meaning so that you can avoid having them look down to the bottom of the page, or even more awkwardly trying to use the footnote in an ebook or an audio book, which is

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh god.

Alex:
something to think about these days, right? It's not everybody's

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah, you

Alex:
doing

Deborah L. Davitt:
do.

Alex:
it on paper. So my preference... in most of the material that I work with, because I'm blessed to work with fiction and mostly genre fiction, I want the reader to feel like they're reading a work written in English. I want to keep all the original, I don't wanna use the word exoticism, but keep the work uniquely Russian or Ukrainian or Moldovan or whatever the source is that it's being written from. but I also want the text to read as though it was written in English, which means that I will betray the author a lot,

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hehehehe

Alex:
but gently and with a lot of forethought.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay, I like that. Thank you so much. All right, let's move out of translation into more your writing in English and do I've spoken with other people who have used English as their second language, but they've had encounters with editors who want to rewrite them, who want to sort of revisit their word choices and sort of pick on their diction and their second language, but they're proficient enough to say, no, that is the word that I meant. This is the word that I think is the best in this context. How do I put this? A little bit more of a shove that you have to give editors to get them to realize that, no, this is the word that I meant, or do you have this kind of problem? Anatoly, do you find that you have to give editors a little bit of a gentle kick? Or have you had this problem at all?

Tolya:
Very rarely. And mostly the editor who's going to buy my work is the editor who's going to respect my work to begin with. They're going to respect my work choices. They're going to respect my sentence structures. If they didn't like it, they wouldn't have bought it. I had a very interesting back and forth. about one of my stories where I ended up agreeing with about 20% of suggestions because they were great and studying about 80% of them because they were headed into the generic English area and away from the way I wrote it.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Very good. I'm glad you were able to stead it because your word choice is just so important to your voice as an author. And it's a shame when they decide to try to make things more generic and really gets on my nerves. Alex, have you had similar encounters?

Alex:
I have, and in most cases, it's not the acquisitions editor. As Tuolja said, a lot of the time, if they're willing to buy our stories, they already respect our voice and our choices. A lot of the time, though, it's when this goes to a copy editor, who is a completely different

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yes.

Alex:
part, much further removed from the text, and they're just kind of looking at it as its own thing. They're not thinking about who wrote it. That's where it becomes a little bit more problematic. And yes, there are many, many instances where I had to fight for word choice. And the one story that I like to tell is when the copy editor flagged the word gruntled. And they

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh god.

Alex:
literally put in a note saying, that's not a word. It looks like the trans. Now, this was a translated story. I know you wanted to walk away from that to the text, but this was a translation. And they're like, the translator must not be a native English speaker. And they just. They thought they could use it as the opposite to disgruntled, but they can't. I was pissed. I wrote an essay. I literally sent that copy editor a note that was the length of a page. Not only

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hehehehehehe

Alex:
the usage of the word and how it's proper, but delving into its history and showing how, hey, this has been in use for 100 years. Excuse me. I know what I'm talking about.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Good for you!

Tolya:
Alex, but also you have to realize that in translation, you are a masochist in translation. I only translated one Katarina story. You translated a whole bunch. And she makes words up. She makes three level puns. She is impossible to translate, and yet you have done it. Total respect. I could see the way her original drove you up the wall when you translated it. I could see her translations driving editors up the wall when they played Aizan.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hehehe

Alex:
I love, can I just say I love working with her text precisely for that reason, because she plays with language. And there's nothing more fun and more sort of like, nothing gruntles me more

Tolya:
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hahaha

Alex:
than finding a way to relate a really, really complicated play on words or a pun or something that was used very well. And like, I mean, she wields that pen extremely, extremely well in Russian. And to be able to come to even close to relaying that to the Anglophone readers is just the best. So I definitely welcome the challenge each and every time. And I actually have a story of hers on my docket for translation now for which I must learn a whole bunch of words for the Chukotsky language, which is a Chukchi language, which is like an indigenous people in Chukotka, like in the far, far north of Russia. of which I know very little, but she knows a whole lot, so I will have a lot of work to do just to get that story to the English readers, but it will be worth it.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Could you repeat the name of the author please? Cause I would like to check this out.

Alex:
K.A. Terina, that is Fernanda Plume, and her translations between Torre and myself have been published in Asimov's a whole bunch of times, FNSF, Podcastle, a bunch of anthologies, Apex, all sorts of, like she's very well published in English and rightly so, and we've both had the privilege to translate her work.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Fantastic, thank you. What else do we have on the docket here? We've talked about editors who want to change authorial voice, reviewers and people like that. And Tolia has already touched a little bit about unconscious mirroring of grammar structures in your native language. He had mentioned that Irish writers tend to have the substrate of their own language under underpinning how they convey things in English. Let's see. When you guys read your work in public, what is the reaction that you have from readers? Do you have any, have you ever had a hostile reading environment where people have gone, no, you're not Ukrainian, you're obviously Russian. You're the bad guy or something like that. Have you ever had to deal with a hostile audience or something like that? Or has it just been relatively peaceful for you? which I hope it has.

Tolya:
Well, it's been very peaceful up to and including being the only person in the room.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Ahahaha I have done that. It's embarrassing.

Alex:
That's the most hostile environment you can imagine for a reading, actually.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah.

Alex:
But I'm with Tolya. It really hasn't been a problem. Up until the last couple of years, most of us, when people would ask you, hey, where are you from, and you would just say I'm from Russia without a second thought, even though both Tolya and I are actually from Ukraine. But

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Alex:
it wasn't a political issue, and it wasn't something, I can't speak for Tolya, but for me, Up until the war started, I never really examined it very thoroughly, but I would never, you know, say I'm from Russia today. You know, like I think it

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah.

Alex:
makes a difference politically, socially. And so I will always say, yeah, I'm from Ukraine and I support them. And you know, I've been trying to focus a lot more on creatives in Ukraine and connecting them with editors, translating their works, et cetera. But nobody's really called me, I've had the misfortune at this point, I have to say, of translating some of the very vocal pro-war, pro-Putin Russian authors before this cluster happened. And nobody tarred and feathered me for it. I mean, it's the

Deborah L. Davitt:
That's

Alex:
work.

Deborah L. Davitt:
a good thing.

Alex:
It's out there. It exists. I will not work with them again. But I'm also not going to hide the fact that I have done so in the past. I never applied a political test to anybody, and I just read the work and judged it. And we've moved past that, unfortunately, as things have escalated.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yes, indeed.

Tolya:
Ugly

Deborah L. Davitt:
Well, thank

Tolya:
enough.

Deborah L. Davitt:
you very much. Go ahead.

Tolya:
Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. Oddly enough, I bounced off a whole bunch of those people even before the war for completely different reasons. People who tend to support the imperial flag, as it were, the Russian Empire flag, tend to have other problems. They tend to be violently xenophobic. or suddenly so, which makes no difference. There were problems in the text itself that I would, I just bounced off and said, no, I'm not trying to.

Alex:
I mean,

Deborah L. Davitt:
That's

Alex:
yes,

Deborah L. Davitt:
fair.

Alex:
there are works like that. There are certainly some authors and some works that I've bounced off pretty hard as well. But there are also works in English as well as in Russian by authors whom I may not at all agree with, but I love the works. And I think that's a debate that we've been having in the science fiction community for a long time, whether how much do we want to connect the work to its author. And you know. Ender's Game is still one of my all-time favorite books in science fiction and there's not a lot of there's not a lot that I agree with the author on socially you know but I still respect

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Alex:
the book so it's kind of that way with some of the science fiction in Russian as well where I recognize that the authors certain authors they are very talented and I like their work but I will not continue reading it because I don't find them palatable as human beings.

Tolya:
Absolutely.

Deborah L. Davitt:
That's fair. All right. Let's see. If you are dealing with somebody who is reading your work for you, say somebody who's, you've had something done at Podcastle and they are working out things that you've dealt with linguistically, whether it's punnage or you've brought in words from another language, how do you coach them to be able to convey your meaning? or the translated meaning as well as possible. Because they're professional narrators and they take great pride in their work and well, they should, but they generally need a little coaching. How do you go about coaching them so that they can convey the meaning appropriately?

Alex:
So my favorite format to consume books is audio books. So I listen to a lot of narrators interpreting authors work and I

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Alex:
many times I recognize certain pain points. So I think to the at this point, it's already influenced my own writing where when I'm writing the book, I'm kind of conscious of how it will work as an audio book, so I'm less likely to engage in some acrobatics that will only work on a written page. But beyond those specific moments, I think a lot of it is having a really good communication with your narrator and giving them ample notes and

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Alex:
having the opportunity to review their material. If you're working with a podcast or you're working with an audio book narrator, I've had it both ways. I've had an entire book dropped on me where I had no input whatsoever beyond providing some notes ahead of time. And I've had situations

Tolya:
Thank you.

Alex:
where I was given an opportunity to comment chapter by chapter and corrections would be made. And it's night and day, the experience of that. So

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah.

Alex:
any podcast, any fiction podcast, any audiobook producers, please, please give your authors an opportunity to weigh in because it'll just end up a better book.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh, I 100% agree with that. I had something podcasted early on, like in 2019 or so, and the wrong copy was sent to the narrator. And there has been no correction made to that story since. But the narrator very cheerfully and very professionally read out things that were sent in stubs that were supposed to be corrected and things like that. And I just went, no! So yes, it has to be a two-way street. There has to be a conversation. Tolia,

Alex:
I feel

Deborah L. Davitt:
what

Alex:
your

Deborah L. Davitt:
is your

Alex:
pain.

Deborah L. Davitt:
experience with

Tolya:
Well,

Deborah L. Davitt:
audio books?

Tolya:
I think the funniest slash cringiest thing that ever happened with the story of mine, it had the word Luftwaffe in it. It was pronounced as if it rhymed with laugh. Luftwaffe.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I'm trying to picture this. Oh, God. Oh, that makes me hurt inside, I'm sorry.

Tolya:
I'm sorry. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh.

Tolya:
That brought you to a screeching stop.

Alex:
I'm

Deborah L. Davitt:
It

Alex:
gonna

Deborah L. Davitt:
did,

Alex:
go.

Deborah L. Davitt:
yes, because that hurt me in my German grammar. Usually my husband pounces on me with deliberately mispronounced words or bad grammar just to watch me cringe. We like to say that it hurts me in my grammar, but it's an unexpected assault from my other language.

Tolya:
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Do either of you have any recent projects that you'd like to talk about? Anything new coming out soon?

Alex:
Well, I have two books that are coming out back to back within literally the next two to three months

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh wow!

Alex:
Yeah, I have my next urban fantasy novel Cachistocracy which is book two in the series that's coming out in October and I'm very excited about that I have You know, it's a very funny book and we just finished producing the audio book, which is why I was I was waxing poetic about that process it was such a fulfilling and wonderful process to work with

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh,

Alex:
the

Deborah L. Davitt:
wonderful.

Alex:
moderator. So I'm really excited about that. But also as an editor, I have an anthology called the Digital Esthetics, which is a bunch of stories by some of the world's best science fiction authors. And I mean worlds because there are lots of translations and lots of material from outside the Anglosphere there. And they're all stories about the hot topic of the interaction between AI and art. which we're all talking about incessantly for the past year and a half. So we did

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh

Alex:
an

Deborah L. Davitt:
yes.

Alex:
entire book with the likes of Ken Liu and Adrian Tchaikovsky and Jane Aspenson and lots and lots of international authors from all over the globe. And that's coming out in November. So I'm super excited about those projects. I'm ramping up for the promotion drive on both of them.

Deborah L. Davitt:
How fantastic! Antolia, do you have anything new coming out or something recently out that you'd like to talk about?

Tolya:
Well, I just do short fiction, and I've collected most of it in, as you said, Halogen Nightmares and Other Love Stories. That's available on Amazon. Lately, I have a series of stories set in an alternate universe where warfare was forbidden in exchange for musical warfare. Battles of the bands through the ages, as it were. And recently, Bruce Betkey at Stupifying Stories bought two of them and they recently came out. That's Sound of Music about submarine warfare with music and The Cool War, which is about blues leading to the destruction of the Berlin Wall.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I love this as a concept. I will have to check these out. You said stupefying stories?

Tolya:
Superfine stories, yes.

Deborah L. Davitt:
They're out now?

Tolya:
They're out now.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay, I will definitely have to read these. Thank you so much.

Tolya:
Not bad

Deborah L. Davitt:
Well,

Tolya:
at all.

Deborah L. Davitt:
This has been a relatively shorter episode, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. We have very long episodes and we have rather short episodes and we balance out in between. Thank you for having agreed to be on the podcast. It was a delight getting to speak with both of you. Next time, we'll continue this conversation on translation and writing in your second language with three other exceptional writers, Jelena Donato, Floris Kleijne, and Cecile Christofari. See you then. Thank you so much.