Translating a few lines of Michelle Steinbeck’s Favorita.

How literature is translated from one language into another is still quite a mysterious – or seemingly straightforward – process to many readers. As a literary translator, I’ve found the best way of illustrating what it is we do all day is by showing the multiple drafts we go through in the process of translating a poem, a short story or a novel.

Here I’ll be breaking down the process of translating just four sentences from Michelle Steinbeck’s novel Favorita – the first three sentences of the novel, and the first sentence of the third chapter.

Here are the first three lines of Chapter 1 of Favorita in the original German:

In der Küche meiner Großmutter hängt ein lyonerfarbiges Telefon mit Drehscheibe. Es schellt. Ich hebe den Hörer ab und schweige hinein.

This is my version of a literal translation:

In the kitchen of my grandmother hangs a mortadella-coloured telephone with rotary disk. It rings/jingles. I lift the receiver up and am silent/don’t say anything into it.

Let’s look at the first sentence. The German way of saying something belongs to someone is a bit long-winded. It’s not intended to be literary – it’s just the common way of doing it, just as it’s more common for us in English to say simply ‘grandmother’s kitchen’.

In my grandmother’s kitchen hangs a mortadella-coloured telephone . . .

In English, we wouldn’t really say ‘hangs’ in this way: it feels a bit Germanic, perhaps? We’d also probably not say that a telephone is ‘hanging in the kitchen’; it’s a bit abstract. We’d probably say it’s ‘hanging on a wall’ or ‘on the wall’ in the kitchen. I would, anyway.

To simplify things, I could have flipped the sentence around:

There is a mortadella-coloured telephone hanging on the wall in my grandmother’s kitchen . . .

But then the emphasis lands on the kitchen, and spoils the reveal of the telephone in the second part of the sentence. It also couldn’t be:

Hanging on the wall in my grandmother’s kitchen is . . .

In this line, ‘hanging’ suddenly becomes the key part of the sentence – the most important aspect is that the telephone is hanging somewhere. It also feels like we’re starting in the middle of a story rather than the beginning.

It doesn’t seem all that bad, in retrospect – isn’t that funny? In fact, starting with ‘hanging’ suddenly feels like the perfect start to a violent story, if a bit on the nose.

This was my first proper attempt at the first line:

On the wall in my grandmother’s kitchen there is a mortadella-hued rotary telephone.

‘Telefon mit Drehscheibe’ is just what we call a rotary telephone; pretty straightforward. As you can see, I’ve tried out ‘-hued’ instead of ‘-coloured’. I hadn’t read the whole book at this point, and couldn’t yet judge where on the spectrum of literary it was supposed to be. Michelle fed back that Fila wouldn’t use fancy words like ‘hued’.

On the wall in my grandmother’s kitchen there is a mortadella pink rotary telephone.

I’m always drawn to colour in writing and subsequently in translating. I think here I was impatient to name the colour, rather than stating what is there – a telephone the colour of mortadella, which isn’t the same as naming that colour.

Here’s the final version of the line:

On the wall in my grandmother’s kitchen there is a mortadella-coloured rotary telephone.

These were the first attempts for the second and third lines, which remained the same throughout:

It rings. I lift the receiver and say nothing into it.

Though ‘schellen’ is used both for a doorbell ringing and to mean ‘jingle’, a straightforward ‘rings’ seemed the best fit – ‘jingles’ doesn’t really work for a phone. And in German, there’s an active verb for not saying anything or making a sound – ‘schweigen’. Rather than using a negation – ‘didn’t say anything/speak’ – I went with ‘said nothing’ to keep this shade of something active happening: that Fila is purposefully saying nothing.

So this is the final version, which ended up in the book and on the cover:

On the wall in my grandmother’s kitchen there is a mortadella-coloured rotary telephone. It rings. I lift the receiver and say nothing into it.

First lines of books always feel like life and death for a translation. I must have stared and stared at this line for, cumulatively, hours. It’s not perfect, but no translated line ever is, no sentence in general is perfect, and we can always find a different way of doing it – usually moments after the book’s gone to press, or years later, when sliding the book off the shelf for a quick peek.

The first line of Chapter 3 was the line that caused the most back and forth between me, Michelle, our editor Aisling and the copy-editor Kate, and required re-writing multiple times.

Die Stadt im Süden gibt sich unschuldig, verräterisch nur die frühmorgendliche Hitze.

This basically means:

The city in the south presents/acts itself innocent, treacherous only the early-morning heat.

sich geben – to behave in a certain way with deceptive intentions
unschuldig – innocent, chaste, guiltless
sich (selbst) die Schuld geben – to blame oneself
verräterisch – treacherous, telltale, suspicious, treasonous, traitorous, tattletales
sich unschuldig erklären – to declare oneself innocent

Though I’m now immediately drawn to the word ‘tattletales’, this is what I had first:

The city in the south appears innocent, betrayed only by the early morning heat.

Aisling: I wasn’t sure I understood this. Is the heat betraying the guilt of the city in some way?

I reworked it, considering that perhaps the city’s true nature is revealed in the light of day:

The city in the south appears innocent, only in the early morning heat does it give itself away.

Michelle: Not sure if this is right. Meaning: The city plays innocent, but the early morning heat (which is now) is already telling of how hellish it actually can be.

OK, I’m getting closer. I spruce up the personification, and make the early morning an indicator of what the city will unleash.

The city in the south is acting all innocent, but the early morning heat betrays what’s to come.

But what is to come?

Kate: I think you’re right, it needs more of a hint as to what the ‘what’ in ‘what’s to come’ might be.

Michelle: How about: The city in the south is acting all innocent, only the early morning heat foretells its true colours.

Now we’ve got it, thanks to Michelle.

Jen: Have slightly adapted, as foretells is predict and foretaste is a taste of the brutality/harshness of the city as totality.

The city in the south is acting all innocent, but the early morning heat is a foretaste of its true colours.

So it took four of us to get to this line. It seems much wordier, but as my original line stood, the sentence was ambiguous and unclear. If this had been Michelle’s intention, then it could stay replicated in the translation. But in this case, she had a very clear idea of what was meant to be communicated. Perhaps it was one of those times when the original line didn’t quite hold everything that was required, so the translation needed to be expanded, adapted.

What Michelle and I found particularly funny and vindicating is that this line was one of those quoted in the rave review of Favorita in the Irish Times. We definitely couldn’t have foreseen that happening back when we were grappling with the sentence.

Favorita is around 90,000 words long, so you can multiply this process hundreds of times, at least. Admittedly, not every sentence needed this level of scrutiny while translating Favorita, but, just like when writing my own work, I have to try out half a dozen lines per page in a myriad of ways until it feels right. And yes, sometimes, on a difficult day, it can be every line on a single page.

Jen Calleja is the author of Fair: The Life-Art of Translation (Prototype 2025 / Invisible Publishing 2026), Vehicle (Prototype 2023) and the translator of over twenty works of German-language literature, including Michelle Steinbeck’s Favorita.

More on literary translation and fiction in translation.