Lola Rogers
Photo courtesy of Lola Rogers
Bio
Lola Rogers is a literary translator living in Seattle. She has translated 12 novels for large and small publishers in the U.S. and Great Britain, including When the Doves Disappeared by Sofi Oksanen, which was a 2016 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize nominee; The Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo, which won the 2017 Prometheus Award; and Sinisalo's The Blood of Angels and Rosa Liksom's Compartment No 6, both grantees of the English Pen Award.
Rogers has an MA in Finnish Language and Literature from the University of Washington and has trained and interned at FILI Finnish Literature Exchange in Helsinki. Her recently completed translation of Rosa Liksom's novel The Colonel's Wife will be published by Graywolf in 2019.
When I was first learning to translate from Finnish, I asked a respected veteran Finnish-to-German translator to recommend one Finnish author whose work hadn’t yet been translated into English and should be, and he said he was very surprised that Daniel Katz’s novels weren’t available in English. This led me to read Katz’s work, and it was indeed strange that such a writer was virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. His books are so brilliantly witty and his cosmopolitanism, Jewish point of view, and broad knowledge of history speak to a wide international audience. I decided then to try to make English-language publishers aware of Katz’s work.
I've been lucky to be able to make a living on literary translation. Translating all day every day has given me the practice and expertise I've needed to write works from a language as complex and distinct as Finnish into what I hope is graceful English worthy of its originals. But the living I make is a modest one. It doesn’t allow me the luxury of taking time off from commissions to work on unpaid projects of my own, and over the decade I've been working as a translator I've had few opportunities to influence what publishers choose to have translated.
Being chosen as a translation fellow is an affirmation of the value of Daniel Katz’s work and my own. It will finally give me a chance to translate The Death of Orvar Klein in its entirety and still pay the bills, and it's a rare chance to spread the word about this author's beautiful literary voice.
Excerpt from Chapter one of The Death of Orvar Klein by Daniel Katz
[Translated from the Finnish]
At four o'clock on an afternoon in Helsinki, on the shady side of Punavuori Street, curled up on top of two packing crates, slept the invalid shoemaker Ortshik Klein. A thousand-head herd of small, medium-sized, and even very large Kleins meandered the moldy cart tracks of Europe.
Ortshik Klein was not ein kleiner Klein. He was one of the medium-sized Kleins. But, with his legs tucked against his stomach and his other limbs gathered under and around him, his wasted body fit into half a square meter. In the other half was a greenish-yellow puddle of his vomit, from which the seagulls, those lovers of strong flavors, were picking out pieces of horse sausage.
Ortshik Klein was a 90-degree invalid, a status confirmed by the church social workers in these cases by means of a protractor as tall as a man. His upper body thrust straight forward at the middle and was thus perfectly parallel to the street, and, theoretically, to sea level. He did not, however, have a hunchback. When working at his shoemaker's table he was unable to sit and had to lie down, as if he were lying on his back.
What the cause of the old cobbler's bent back was no one knew for certain, but he himself tended to attribute it to an incident that occurred in Riga, on the outer harbor at Ust-Dvinsk, on the mouth of the Daugava River, where he claimed he had once earned his livelihood.
Supposedly, when he worked at the harbor his back was hardly bent at all until the day he carried a certain traveling magician's trunk aboard a ship bound for England. The trunk was devilishly heavy, but when Klein stopped at customs they found nothing in it but the light tools of a magician: a magic wand, trick rings, decks of cards, handkerchiefs, one listless rabbit, and other such junk, so he carried it from customs to the ship, gasping and cursing and feeling suspicious. When he reached the gangplank his back bent about twenty degrees closer to the ground and let out a tremendous crack and the trunk slowly slid over his shoulder blades, neck and head, and fell with a thud onto the dock and broke open. In addition to the startled rabbit, there stumbled from the burst trunk one fugitive small-time swindler and pickpocket named Riigas-Mackis and three half-dazed and horribly painted harlots whom the magician had hidden in a secret compartment at the bottom of the trunk. With the exception of Mackis, who was a favorite of one of the harlots, they all intended to begin a new, honest life in the Baltic colony in Soho. The magician knew nothing of this plan—his intention was simply to send the women thus trussed to England and add them to a prostitution ring then flourishing right under Queen Victoria's bustle, a sickening stench of unwashed genitals right below her copious corset. Riigas-Mackis ended up doing time and the other parties received stiff fines from the harbor gendarmerie, except for Ortshik Klein, who had been demonstrably unaware of the trunk's false bottom. But after this incident he was never again able to straighten his back.
That was what Klein said, but his story couldn't have been more than half true.
About Daniel Katz
Daniel Katz is one of Finland's most beloved comic novelists. He is the author of 13 novels and short story collections and numerous stage, screen, and radio plays. He has twice won the Finnish State Prize for Literature and in 2015 was awarded the Pro-Finlandia Medal for his contributions to Finnish letters. Long considered one of Finland’s most international authors, his novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages, but this will be the first translated into English.