It’s a big ego boost to have a publisher express an interest in doing a translation of my books. It’s also a bit scary.

As a writer, words are my tools and my toys, my paintbrushes and electric cattle prods. It’s the craft of writing that I love— finding very specific words, carefully chosen, tweaked over and over to try to give readers the experience playing out in my head.

Similar words mean different things, logically, and even more, emotionally. Shivered is not shuddered, narrowed eyes are not squinted, a harsh breath is not a difficult breath. There’s a degree of nuance between a character saying “His voice made my entire body sit up and take notice” and “I heard his voice and I got hard.” Anyone who’s played with Google Translate knows just how badly idiom and humor can change if shifted literally between languages. (I once used GT to check out a non-English review. It claimed the reviewer said my character had “happy doughnuts” – I still have no clue what that phrase was supposed to mean.)

So every translation is an exercise in trust. The publisher is trusting that the story I wrote will appeal to a different audience. I’m trusting that the translator they choose will have the perceptiveness and the skill to both recognize and convey the nuances I worked hard to create, in another language. I can talk to authors whose works were done before mine, and look at their reviews, but in the end, it’s handing my words over to someone else who will transform them, and then put my name with theirs on the transformation. Knowing I won’t be able to evaluate how that has come out, except indirectly.

I’m lucky enough to have books out now in Italian and French. Triskell Edizioni gave my Life Lessons series into the talented hands of Cristina Bruni, and the reviews of her work are much like the reviews of the original books— a comforting indication of a faithful translation. The Lezioni di vita series also came out with gorgeous covers, which is a bonus indeed.

And a couple of weeks ago The Rebuilding Year came out in French from MxM Bookmark, published as L’annee du renouveau – Se reconstruire #1, with an intriguing cover and a translation by Camille Wright, who has done books by some of the biggest M/M names, including Heidi Cullinan and N.R. Walker. The initial reviews are great, and I’m able to relax and be glad to have had this opportunity. And to have taken the chance.

It’s wonderful to see M/M moving into wider arenas. I’ve been impressed for years by the people who read our stories in English as their second or third language, but it’s great that they‘ll get to see more of the genre with a skilled translation. I also hope that new readers finding these books, and seeing that they have an audience, may be encouraged to write more original M/M fiction in languages other than English. Most of us authors were inspired by the books we read to create our own. I’d love to hear that someday John and Ryan inspired a French-speaking writer to create their own men living in Bordeaux, or maybe somewhere like Luxembourg, or even the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire.

And hopefully those stories will then go into English translation for folk like me who don’t read in a third language. There are so many shoes the genre has yet to walk in.

But that trust— that’s why you’ll see authors ambivalent about looking for translations. I’ve had a couple of offers that didn’t inspire confidence. It makes me even more grateful to have found two translators in whose hands my stories kept their meaning, for better or worse true to what I wrote. Good translators deserve a world of appreciation.

– Kaje Harper

April 2019