Magdalena Edwards's Experience With Translator Benjamin Moser

May we delve into the world of fiction for a moment—if you can call Clarice Lispector a fiction writer—because Magdalena Edwards's essay on translator Benjamin Moser at the Los Angeles Review of Books is a must-read. Edwards, who had struck up a correspondence with Moser after connecting over her work on Elizabeth Bishop's translations of Lispector's stories, notes that: "In September 2015, when Moser asked me if I’d be interested in translating The Chandelier, Lispector’s second novel, I was thrilled." More:

In the end, when The Chandelier was published, I was credited as the co-translator with my name after Moser’s. The truth is that Moser tried to get me fired, arguing that my completed manuscript was not up to snuff, that my level of Portuguese was insufficient, and that he would have to rewrite every line of my translation. What happened?

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One way I can begin to answer that question is to turn to a Guardian article by Alison Flood, from May 13, 2019, in which she discusses Moser’s forthcoming biography, Sontag: Her Life and Work (Ecco, September 17, 2019). Flood’s article centers on Moser’s claim that Sontag was the real author of Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959), the book that cemented her ex-husband Philip Rieff’s career — a book she presumably wrote when she was in her early 20s. Flood quotes Moser quoting a friend of Sontag’s, Minda Rae Amiran, who “told him that, while the pair lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, ‘Susan was spending every afternoon rewriting the whole thing from scratch.’” The expression “rewriting the whole thing from scratch” — in reference to Sontag’s work on Rieff’s Freud book — grabbed my attention, because it echoed the argument used to explain why I needed to be fired by New Directions. Presumably my work was so shoddy that Moser would have to rewrite every line. However, while I was tied up trying to communicate with New Directions — this was in late summer 2017 — to save my reputation and my work, Moser began simply to edit my manuscript, not to rewrite it.

Find out more at LARB.