Firstly, congratulations on Blood Book’s English-language publication! Thank you for taking the time to do this interview. Given that many New Books in German readers have a keen interest in translation and language, I’d like to start by asking you how you perceive translation. Especially as you’re also a playwright, and a writer who works multilingually…

Congratulations to you too, on the publication! And thank you for the question. I’ve realised I don’t feel at home in one language, but somehow in the in-between of languages. Swiss-German, the language I grew up with, doesn’t have a grammar; in fact, it’s not a written language at all. It’s only an oral language – because Switzerland was still a farmers’ state until the 1850s, and though it’s a super-rich country now, for a long time it was very poor, with some of the highest emigration rates in the nineteenth century. So because my first language doesn’t exist in written form – even though High German, as we call it, is pretty close – I’ve never felt that the languages I could write in are my home. Writing, for me, has always meant having to go elsewhere. The way I speak just doesn’t exist in a written place. And so I have to visit the town of High German, and then the town of English, or Spanish, or French, and so on. I’m crossing space in order to get how I look at – or feel about – the world into written form. In one of my current projects, I’m writing initially in English and Spanish. It’s like a pre-version, and then I translate myself back into German. And one of the reasons for this is that I think we are always a different person in different languages.

Back in spring 2023, Looren Translation House held a workshop, funded by Pro Helvetia, for twelve of Blutbuch’s translators from around the world. I found it so illuminating to hear about the linguistic challenges from the perspectives of the different languages. You were there with us for a couple of those days – what was your experience of it?

That workshop was really important for me: to open the door and see into the nitty-gritty of the translation process. It confirmed some thoughts I was already having – that the texts I write, perhaps because they’re more language-focused than plot-focused, can’t be translated, they can only be trans-carried, carried across from this one language, town, or country, into another. Looren strengthened my belief that translators are co-authors, and that the more language-focused text is, the more it has to flow through the mind and mouth and body of the translator. I don’t see it as Blutbuch having an original in German and sixteen translations, but rather that the text now exists in seventeen versions, with seventeen co-authors. I feel like there’s this conservative way of thinking about translation that focuses on the potential loss. And yes, sure, some of the parts from the German version just couldn’t be carried into the other languages. But in each of those languages, the new version gained other elements. I work a lot with metaphors of fluidity, and language is a fluid thing. So if translators get the opportunity to really have that freedom, I think it’s a process of multiplication, rather than of copying.

That’s really beautifully put. One of the things I was struck by was your trust in us – how you told us to have fun with it and transgress and be wild. Sometimes authors say they trust the translator, but when it comes down to the reality of it, they can (understandably) find it hard to let go. There were a few parts where you said, this bit is really important to me, can you try to do this, etc. but beyond that you encouraged us to stir ourselves into the mix. Does it come quite easily to you to trust in that way, I wonder, because of how you view the creative process?

Yes, absolutely. And I feel like there’s no other choice. I mean, the only language I can really have an opinion on is the English. I speak French and Spanish, and a tiny bit of Portuguese, enough to understand a text, but not enough to form an in-depth opinion about the connotations that individual words might have. So to me it felt more like a liberation, rather than struggling to control seventeen versions of the text. That just wouldn’t be possible.

It would be exhausting!

Exactly. And also, the whole point of the book is the non-individuality of a body, the all-connectedness of everything. Basically, it’s impossible to say I, and my story is – there is no separate I, and there is never just one story. For me it’s very important to stress the fiction in auto-fiction. And nowadays I would describe my projects more as auto-fabulation. I take things that are true, or that I know, but the goal is always to speculate with them. And in the three years since Blutbuch’s publication, I’ve seen it put with the autobiographies in libraries and bookshops, and that’s fine, I calculated this – I wanted my life and body to be a projection screen, to allow people to find their way into the topics and aesthetics that are important to me. But my book is entirely constructed… I tried to build it in a way that seems authentic, but a lot of it is speculation. I also feel that auto fiction describes something that is in the past. And Blood Book is not about the question: who was I, or how did I become who I am now, but rather about becoming. It’s about the future. Auto-fiction is the past and maybe the present. Auto-fabulation, on the other hand, is about the future. How can we take the heritage that has been passed on to us from centuries of violence and suppressed transgenerational trauma, and move forward? In the book, there’s a section about the narrator’s ancestors which is intended to show a lineage that’s not purely genetic – it’s not a direct bloodline, but rather lines of blood and body and stories, that stretch from the 1330s to the present day of the narrator and their mother. It’s a trans-carrying of heritage, non-material heritage, of stories, of topics, of transgenerational trauma, of body language, of how to move, of how to be a body, basically. And I see the translator as a new body, a non-genealogical continuation of that story.

What you said about having different identities in different languages really resonates, and I like the perspective of the translator being a new body, because so often, historically, translators have been encouraged to be invisible. At Looren, it felt like you were saying: Don’t be invisible.

Yeah, and it really grosses me out – I can’t put it any differently – this idea that there’s this cult around the genius, the author of the so-called original, and that translators should dissolve themselves, and that’s also a topic in the novel, the dissolution of people behind others because they’re not regarded as important. And in my opinion, that’s just not possible. I mean, of course you can be invisible as a translator in how a book is marketed, but it has passed through your mind nonetheless, and your body, your mouth, your hands. And going back to your question about trust, at Looren I felt you all knew the text better than I did. You’d found new mistakes, and questions I hadn’t thought about. So there were only reasons for me to trust each of you.

We were all at such different stages as well, which was so interesting. Three years have passed from the summer when I did the sample translation, until now, the publication. And a lot has happened in the world during that time. I wondered whether you might like to say something about the new sections we interlaced into the English version, and about what moved you to write them?

Sure. One motive was that English is the language that’s closest to me of all the new versions, and so I wanted, in some form, to be part of carrying the German version across into English-speaking regions. And also, like you said, there’s so much going on in the world, and so much of it is exactly what I’ve been trying to write against or away from. This repetition of transgenerational trauma, of patriarchal colonial violence and capitalist violence. And I wanted to explore that within the new sections. The rise of fascism, and the concentration of capital in the hands of a few rich people, to me it’s a mix of an old feudal system and a new techno-capitalism. It’s like we have the kings of old in a new structure. And there’s more and more data suggesting that anti-trans propaganda –and I’m not making it a conspiracy theory, it’s not like one single group of people are directing it all – but it’s all linked to a few conservatives with a lot of money. And they’re not all connected, but it is all connected to the concentration of capital. And in that regard, I find it very similar to the historic witch hunts, which had two peaks, the second being around 1560 to 1660. There’s too much detail to easily summarise it, but I see long, historical connections and I wonder how people can be surprised by what’s going on, because to me, it’s always been going on. And that’s what I tried to show in my book. It’s not a new wave of fascism, or patriarchy, or colonial capitalism, it’s just an up and down of the same old. And I wanted to create a character who is trying to be different but absolutely not achieving it, and this is also very important. We cannot not continue to be violent, but what we can do is try and get in touch with the violence we’ve inherited and look at it, reflect on our actions and learn from others.

I know you were concerned about how some passages might be received in the English-language world, for example, where the narrator is examining their own inherited racism. And I completely understood your hesitations, but at the same time I didn’t want those parts to be taken out, because they encourage us all to interrogate ourselves while reading. And that feels really important.

Yes, that’s exactly what’s important to me: there can be no existence outside of violence, not for anyone born into this world. I’m obviously not anti-woke in any way, but I do think there’s a dangerous tendency in some left-wing discourse to expect oneself and others to have totally distanced themselves from any forms of violence. And as a result, there’s been a lot of in-group fighting, a sense of trying to out-woke one another. I do think it’s important, of course, to say: hey, this might seem violent or hurtful to other people, but in a sense, that’s not the problem we need to be fighting. And I wanted to create a character who has these flaws, who is reproducing violence but also trying to be better. I was afraid, at the same time, that individual sentences in the book would be taken out of context; for example, the racist slur. But that’s the point: racism is a deeply embedded component of everything we are taught, and what matters is how we deal with the racism we’ve all swallowed in this society from day one. For me, an honest conversation about racism, or transphobia, or queerphobia, or sexism, would start with the words: yes, I am racist, I myself am transphobic, and this is the way I try to deal with the violence I swallowed before I was able to decide what to swallow; what I hear, what I watch. That’s the only choice we have; how to handle the violence we’ve been born into. If we don’t acknowledge the fact that we are formed by violences that are centuries and millennia old, if we don’t acknowledge where we are right now, there can be no process and no change.

There’s something you said earlier that I’d love to come back to. You mentioned that you’ve been writing in English more, and Spanish, and translating yourself back into German. I wonder how that experience has felt for you, and what challenges or discoveries have come out of it?

So, it’s part of – I wouldn’t say projects, specifically – but rather my practice, where I’m trying to not be able to do well at the things I’m doing. There’s a section in Blood Book, as you know, about the very idea of mastering being very European male, and there’s a sense of, if you can do something well, why do it? Because it’s fun, perhaps? Or maybe it’s just fun for your ego? But there’s no process of learning or unlearning in that. Writing in other languages and re-translating myself is part of other practices where I’ve tried to unlearn stuff. I was also writing on other surfaces, not paper or the computer, or writing with a different hand, on topics where I felt I wanted to say things that I couldn’t say with the techniques I already know. In German we have the expression einer Situation nicht gewachsen sein, which means not having the ability to handle or master a situation, but literally, it means not having grown enough to do so. And that’s the idea behind what I’m doing, to grow into and through other languages and other ways of writing.

One of the lines in Blood Book I’ve returned to again and again is ‘der Weg entsteht im Gehen’. I found I had to try new techniques because it was so different to anything I’d ever translated before. And one of these was using voice dictation software – which I had done before, but for Blood Book I used it precisely because it sometimes mishears me. I knew this would encourage playfulness, and the kind of joyful linguistic errors that come up in natural conversation. I used it especially for the stream of consciousness sections, and a lot of gifts came from that.

That’s amazing. Do you have other techniques or experiments you tried out when you were working on it?

So, I remember you talking to us at Looren about rituals you used while writing, and I was really open-minded to that. I had already practised somatic dance before Blood Book, but never in connection with my work. For certain sections, those that took a lot out of me emotionally or physically, I would do somatic dance either to get into the right space, or, at the end of the process, to let things out. Because everything flows through the body, and I’ve learned that when I suppress emotion, I end up feeling it physically.

It’s great that you found these forms of handling it. And as a translator you literally have to, because, like I said, it goes through your mouth and hands. You ingest texts, and have to somehow grow them again through your body. So it doesn’t surprise me when you talk about somatic symptoms in connection with your job. I find it’s really important to give the body back to writing – because it’s not just an intellectual, unbodied activity.

Finally, I wanted to ask you whether, three years on, there’s anything in particular you would like readers of the English language version of Blood Book to take away with them?

Well, there’s this quote, I think by Robert Walser, about disquieting the calm and calming the disquieted. My hope is that my work will slightly unsettle people who are settled in this world, and soothe the people who are struggling. And also, that there’ll be laughter, because … my work IS funny. Like, seriously, it is. Really. I swear.

Thank you so much for your time, Kim, it’s been wonderful to talk, and it also feels – to borrow the words from Blood Book – like coming full spiral.

I fully agree – thank you for your time and thoughts, too, and for taking Blood Book into your body and mind!

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You can read more about Kim de l’Horizon’s Blutbuch, which won the 2022 German Book Prize, here. The English translation of Blutbuch is available as Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and as Blood Book with Sceptre.

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Feature photo © Valerie Reding.

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