Short stories tend to have much shorter lifespans than novels do. As such, a translation is a form of reincarnation. The end result is the same story, but also a completely different one at the same time. The first level of changes is due to the different language operating under another structure, a different set of ties binding the abstract with the specific. But there's also the second level, a more intimate level where the story surreptitiously obtains new properties after it’s been processed through the mind of the translator.

I got into translation for the same reason many people get into blogging, writing reviews, and other fannish activities: I loved certain stories and felt the strong desire to share them with my friends. Except many of my genre-reading friends do not speak Russian. And while I'm not a reviewer and am a lazy blogger at best, in this case I had, ahem, a particular set of skills…

Ma io penso che gli scrittori di fantascienza non siano profeti, sono solo narratori, ecco perché ci sono sia cose buone che cattive che provengono dalla grande attenzione che riceviamo.

Science fiction writers are not prophets, we’re just story-tellers, that’s why there’s both good and bad things coming from the attention we receive.

For the latest of our author/ translator interview series, we're delighted to welcome H. Pueyo, writer and translator of 'Saligia', in our March 2019 issue. We asked her to tell us more about the story, and her experiences of writing and translating. Can you tell us more about yourself and your writing – what first got you into speculative fiction? Writing is an old passion of mine; it never occurred to me to do anything else in my life since I was a very small child, so it’s hard to separate myself from it. That being said, I’m very new to speculative fiction!…

For the latest in our author/ translator interview series, we're delighted to welcome Mike Jansen, writer and translator of the story 'Fluxless'/ 'Fluxloos', which appears in our December 3rd, 2018 issue. Mike was kind enough to provide bilingual answers to our questions, so we hope you enjoy reading more about his work, and about the Dutch SF scene. Kun je ons iets over jezelf en je schrijven vertellen – hoe ben je ooit begonnen met fantastische literatuur? Can you tell us more about yourself and your writing – what first got you into speculative fiction? Ik heb altijd alles gelezen dat los en vast zat, sciencefiction, fantasy en horror.…

Read in Italian here People who know me know that for some years I have been involved in an almost impossible mission: to promote and spread not much the concept of SF “diversity” (a positive idea that hides, in my opinion, a fundamental error, that is diversity from a common standard; from a normality that has become a benchmark for evaluating any phenomenon, yet which doesn’t exist in reality) but instead a fairer distribution of “the future” and therefore of opportunities between dominant cultures and languages and those ones considered minor for the only reason of being “other”. Fortunately, as a small publisher and SF writer, in five years of translations from at least six languages, ​​and with a catalogue of over seventy stories published from around the world I can affirm: Quality has no colour, Quality has no nation, Quality has no language, Quality belongs to everyone.…

Read in English here Le persone che mi conoscono sanno che da alcuni anni sono impegnato in una missione quasi impossibile: promuovere e diffondere non tanto il concetto di “diversità” – un’idea positiva ma che nasconde, a mio giudizio, un errore di fondo, la diversità cioè da uno standard comune, da una normalità diventata metro di valutazione di qualsiasi fenomeno, il quale tuttavia nelle realtà delle cose non esiste – bensì una più equa ripartizione di futuro e quindi di opportunità tra la cultura e la lingua dominanti e quelle ritenute minori per il solo fatto di essere “altro”. Per fortuna, da piccolo editore e divulgatore di fantascienza, in 5 anni di traduzioni da almeno 6 lingue e con un catalogo di oltre 70 storie pubblicate da ogni angolo del mondo posso affermare quella che, pur sembrando una banalità, è tuttavia il presupposto di quanto sta avvenendo nel genere dalla SF nonostante non se ne tenga conto: La qualità non ha colore, La qualità non ha nazione, La qualità non ha lingua, La qualità appartiene a tutti.…

I knew that the way in which the language itself evoked a particular time and place was what made the novel special, and that these subtle flavors could easily be lost in translation.

Thank you to Small Beer Press for giving us permission to publish this excerpt from Su Wei's novel The Invisible Valley, translated by Austin Woerner and released on April 3rd 2018.