What is Janet Gesme's background?

Janet Gesme is a professional violist who became a literary translator. A car accident and long healing process became the turning point that launched her translation work.

What books has Janet Gesme translated?

She has translated Martin Schleske's The Sound of Life's Unspeakable Beauty and Listening Hands: Eavesdropping on the Sound of Life from German to English.

What is the central debate about translators discussed in the episode?

Whether the translator should be invisible or foregrounded as a co-maker of the final work.

What overlap does the episode explore between music and translation?

Both demand deep listening, patience, and the ability to hold meaning intact until the very end.

The Hidden Decisions That Make a Translation Feel Natural

Translation as an Act of Listening: A Conversation with Janet Gesme Ali Alhajji: Welcome to Reading the World. I’m Ali Alhajji. This is a podcast about literature, language, culture, translation, and the humanities as ways of reading the world more carefully. Today’s conversation begins with a disappearance we rarely notice: the translator. Most of us pick up a translated book and read it as if the author were speaking to us directly. The prose feels natural, and we take that naturalness as a sign of accuracy—as though the words had crossed from one language into another intact. But something happens in that crossing. A translator must decide what to keep and what to let go, where to smooth the prose and where to leave the original texture standing, whether to make a foreign writer sound as though he had always been speaking English or preserve some trace of the fact that he was not. These decisions shape what we hear, what we miss, and whether we remember that a book came from somewhere else. To think about this, I’m joined by Janet Gesme, a professional violist who became Martin Schleske’s translator into English. She works between two acts of interpretation: playing an instrument and rendering a text. She also plays the Schorschi viola, which Schleske built for her. Janet translated Schleske’s The Sound of Life’s Unspeakable Beauty, published by Eerdmans in 2020. The book received a Christianity Today Book Award in Culture and the Arts in 2021. She has now translated another of his books, Listening Hands: Eavesdropping on the Sound of Life, scheduled for publication by Eerdmans in September 2026. She also translated Christopher Schacht’s Around the World on 50 Bucks. Janet performed professionally as a violist and teaches German and music part-time at Central Oregon Community College in Bend, Oregon. Janet, welcome. Janet Gesme: Thank you so much, Ali. I’m happy to be here and to speak with you today. Ali Alhajji: That double competence is where I want to begin—not with what a translator reads, but with what she hears. Take me to the first sentence of Schleske’s that you remember hearing rather than reading. Where did the German arrive as sound before it arrived as meaning? What did it sound like before you understood it? Janet Gesme: The first sound was a recording of Martin Schleske speaking. Although the first book I translated was Der Klang: Vom unerhörten Sinn des Lebens, he was giving a talk about Herztöne, the book now appearing in English as Listening Hands. He was speaking about sharpening the iron of a thumb plane, which is used to carve the front and back of a violin, viola, or cello. He explained that sharpening requires care, patience, and slowness. If you work too quickly or press too hard, you can burn the iron, soften it, and ruin its cutting edge. He related that process to human life. We become dull in the course of trying to do our best. We grow tired and burn out. Sometimes we need to withdraw from our work and allow ourselves to be sharpened, but we cannot be too hard on ourselves in the process. Otherwise, we burn out again. That was the first thing I heard from him, and it resonated deeply with me. The entire first chapter of Listening Hands develops that idea, and early readers have been moved by it. Ali Alhajji: Have you ever felt dull as a translator? What sharpens you again? Janet Gesme: I have felt dull in several senses. Sometimes I simply do not understand what is happening in a passage and think, “I’m not clever enough for this.” At other times, I’m exhausted. When that happens, I step away, lie on the floor, and go before God. I say, “I don’t have it. I can’t do it. I have nothing.” I allow myself to be filled again by the Holy Spirit. That may lead me to ask the author a question, consult a physicist, or speak with a luthier. Schleske is a physicist, and parts of his work require that expertise. Ed Giesman, a luthier here in Bend, Oregon, has also been extraordinarily helpful with these translations. Ali Alhajji: Let me clarify the sequence of your work. You have described The Sound of Life’s Unspeakable Beauty as your first translation, but Christopher Schacht’s Around the World on 50 Bucks appeared in English earlier. What was the actual order, and why does the Schleske book feel like the beginning? Janet Gesme: In 2015, I was in a car accident that ended my career as a professional violist at that time. On the day of the accident, someone gave me Schleske’s first book. That was the first book I began translating, and I worked on it throughout my long recovery. I had translated the entire manuscript and was still looking for a publisher when some of my work reached publishers in Germany. They liked my translations and recommended me for Christopher Schacht’s book. When I was asked to translate Around the World on 50 Bucks, they wanted it completed in seven months. I had been working on Schleske’s book for three years. I thought, “If I’m going to do this, I will have to inhabit this person for seven months.” Then I read the book and decided that I wanted to inhabit his perspective because it was fun. We completed it in seven months, so it was published before Schleske’s book even though I had translated Schleske first. Ali Alhajji: Schleske uses the image of wood having Mitspracherecht—a right to participate in what it becomes. That is almost a theory of translation. Where does his German exercise that right? Where does the text push back against you, and where do you overrule it? Janet Gesme: The original text should affect a German reader in the way the English text affects an English reader. You are trying to evoke similar emotions, intellectual ideas, and responses. That is a tightrope because the cultures are not the same, and the cultural difference affects what you can say in English. German prose may begin with one idea, develop ten related ideas, and then return to the original point. That structure is less common in American English, so it can be difficult to carry across. Ali Alhajji: Would you describe that German structure as less linear than English? Janet Gesme: People tend to consider their own language clear and straightforward because it is familiar to them. Narratives in any language can be linear, circular, or take many other shapes. Certain German structures feel very linear to me. German can compress a sentence’s worth of information into an adjective preceding a noun. English usually needs a separate clause, so the noun arrives first, followed by a pause and further information. In that sense, English can feel less linear. German verbs create a different experience. One part of a verb may appear near the beginning of a very long sentence and the other part at the end. The reader must hold the first part in mind until the construction is complete. Ali Alhajji: So the distinction may not be between linearity and nonlinearity. It may be about how long the reader must hold an idea before the grammar completes it. This reminds me of a recent discussion in which we compared six English translations of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. The creature into which Gregor Samsa transforms takes different forms in different translations. One translator calls it a cockroach, although Kafka’s German remains more ambiguous and is sometimes understood as closer to a beetle or simply a monstrous vermin. How did you imagine the creature when you read the book in German? Janet Gesme: I have only read it in German, and I am certainly not an expert on insects. I imagined a large, creepy-crawly bug. What struck me most was the change in tone. At first, I found the story humorous, almost like a comedy. Then it became deeply sad and tragic. Ali Alhajji: That ambiguity illustrates the choices hidden beneath a translation’s fluency. Most readers pick up a translated book as though the author were speaking directly to them, and the translator vanishes. Lawrence Venuti famously critiques that invisibility. You have said that vanishing is the best outcome a translator can hope for. What should an ordinary reader listen for in order to hear the choices beneath the fluency? Janet Gesme: I hope the reader hears the author’s voice. If the author speaks English as an additional language, I want the difficulties of speaking it to disappear so the author can communicate directly with the reader. Ali Alhajji: Does that mean you lean toward domestication rather than foreignization? Janet Gesme: It depends on the work. I recently translated a book by Markus Günther that is very specific to the place where he was born and raised: Germany’s Ruhrgebiet. German readers immediately understand the associations of that blue-collar, industrial region and its history. American readers may not. It is similar to the way names such as the Bronx or the South Side of Chicago evoke immediate associations for many Americans. The English-language reader needs to understand what the German setting feels like. The translation must therefore feel foreign and familiar at the same time. Domestication and foreignization have to work together so that an English-speaking audience experiences something of what the place evokes for a German-speaking audience. Ali Alhajji: Can you give us one example of language from Schleske that moved naturally into English and another that required domestication? Janet Gesme: In the final chapter of Listening Hands, Schleske writes conversationally: “Hab ich es doch gewusst: Der Mensch muss erst einmal sich selbst lieben. Wie könnte er sonst seinen Nächsten lieben?” That becomes: “Yes, you have to love yourself first. How else can you love your neighbor? Poor neighbor, I have enough troubles of my own. Please understand why I cannot love you.” In a passage like that, the German can sound natural in English without much difficulty. Other expressions become awkward if translated literally. “Dem möchte ich nur polemisch erwidern” would produce an unnatural English construction. I rendered it as, “I want to confront that selfish response head-on.” When the essential content is an idea, I often make the language more idiomatic for the English reader. When place and cultural flavor matter, however, I need to preserve their Germanness. Ali Alhajji: Schleiermacher famously said that the translator either brings the writer toward the reader or the reader toward the writer. Which movement matters more to you? Janet Gesme: I cannot choose; I need both. The reader must move toward the author and understand that author within the author’s culture. At the same time, the text must move far enough toward the reader to reach the heart directly. If readers become stuck at “What does that mean?” they cannot reach the author at all. Ali Alhajji: Practicing translators often resist choosing one method absolutely. I encountered the same problem while translating The Cambridge Companion to World Literature into Arabic. Because it is a critical work containing passages from poems, novels, and short stories, I often had to translate literary excerpts for which no Arabic translation existed. The poems were especially difficult: meaning was only one part of the problem. I also had to consider meter, rhyme, and formal complexity. Have you faced a similar challenge? Janet Gesme: Absolutely. Listening Hands begins with a poem by Rilke and ends with an excerpt by Martin Buber. In both cases, the publisher chose my translations rather than previously published versions, which was a great compliment. I wrestled with the Rilke poem for hours. I tried different words and arrangements, searching for the right flow and feeling. I love that work, but while I am in the middle of it, I do not know whether I will succeed. I keep asking whether I can make the poem as beautiful in English as it is in German. Translating poetry is extraordinarily difficult but also deeply rewarding. Ali Alhajji: If you get it “right”—in quotation marks, because there is no single correct literary translation. Let us return to the translator’s invisibility. You said that vanishing allows the reader to experience direct contact with the author. I gently disagree. Translators and their labor should be more visible. We now have awards that recognize translators alongside authors, whereas historically many prizes recognized only the book or author. What is your view? Janet Gesme: I think it is wonderful that people are paying attention to translators, recognizing their work, and rewarding them when they have done it well. I fully support that. At the same time, while someone is actually reading the book, I want that reader to feel in direct contact with the author. I do not want the reader to feel that someone else is standing in the room. Ali Alhajji: I understand that distinction. The translator should be recognized outside the reading experience, even if the reader encounters the prose as direct contact with the author. This brings us to the question around which Reading the World is built. What does translating Schleske help us read more carefully about the world—not only about books, but about how meaning survives, or fails to survive, when it crosses from one language and one belief into another? Janet Gesme: Schleske is a master at looking at the basic materials of life and finding deep spiritual meaning within them. Reading his books can transform how a person reads the world. It can deepen even one’s connection with a tree. Drawing on Hundertwasser, Schleske discusses the idea that “the straight line is godless.” When we look at trees and the rest of nature, we do not see perfect straight lines; we see irregularity. Human beings are also irregular. We may dislike that about ourselves and think it is not beautiful, but Schleske argues that it is. We are God’s creation, each of us unique rather than an exact copy or a perfectly straight line. Carrying the meaning of his work from German into English is both easy and extremely difficult. It is easy because the hearts of German and English readers hunger for many of the same things: reassurance, challenge, and meaning. The difficult part is making the language sound natural without allowing the words to become caught in a net of confusion between what works in one language and what works in another. Ali Alhajji: We often hear that something is “lost in translation,” and translation studies also speaks of intranslatability. Have you encountered an expression whose meaning could not survive intact in English? Janet Gesme: Christopher Schacht and I discussed my translation of Around the World on 50 Bucks every week over Skype. We encountered several idioms that simply would not work directly in English. For example, Schwein means “pig” in German, but the expression “Du hast Schwein”—literally, “You have pig”—means that you are lucky. In one episode, Christopher was on an island where the number of pigs a person owned indicated wealth. He made a joke using Schwein, but an English reader would not immediately understand why it was clever. I no longer remember exactly how we solved that particular problem, but we struggled with it. Jokes and idioms are especially difficult to translate. Ali Alhajji: Before we close, is there anything you would like to add about Listening Hands? Janet Gesme: I have read several responses from people who received the book in advance. I am touched that it has already changed decisions they are making in their lives. It has inspired some readers to be brave and do things they had previously hesitated to do. It is exciting to see Schleske’s new book having such a positive influence. Ali Alhajji: I look forward to reading it. This conversation has repeatedly shown that a translation is not simply a window. It is a set of decisions about rhythm, texture, which words to preserve in their difference, and which to smooth into ease. Sounding natural—something we often mistake for fidelity—is itself a decision with cultural stakes. Janet’s work lies at the seam between two acts of interpretation: playing an instrument made by the very author she translates and rendering his sentences in another language. At that seam lies the question of whether a translator is a faithful messenger, a performer, or a co-maker. We have not settled it. Instead, we have found that the answer changes according to where one stands within the work, and that the three roles collide rather than resolve. Many thanks to Janet Gesme for this conversation about translation as an act of listening and for helping us hear the choices beneath fluency. What I hope remains with us is not an answer but a sharper question: when a book crosses from one language and one belief into another, what survives—and who decides? Thank you for listening to Reading the World. I’m Ali Alhajji. Until next time, keep reading carefully.

The Hidden Decisions That Make a Translation Feel Natural

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