Interview with the trilingual self-translator Monika Zgustová

Abstract

Monika Zgustova (Prague, 1957) is a multilingual writer, translator, and journalist whose career has been profoundly shaped by migration, exile, and the crossing of cultural borders. After fleeing the Czechoslovak dictatorship with her parents at the age of sixteen, she lived and studied in the United States and has worked in Spain since the 1980s. Her relationship with languages has two complementary dimensions: she translates Czech and Russian authors into Catalan and Spanish while writing and self-translating her own works between Czech, Catalan, and Spanish. In this interview, Zgustova reflects on this trilingual creative process and explains that she does not regard self-translation as a simple transfer between languages, but rather as a new version or rewriting of the text. Her working process generally begins with a first draft in Czech, which she subsequently translates and reworks in Spanish and Catalan. The process, however, is not linear: during successive revisions she moves repeatedly between versions, introduces changes, recreates scenes or expressions from memory, and makes further modifications that are not always incorporated into the other texts. Each version consequently acquires an identity of its own and is treated as an autonomous work, even though all three influence one another during their development. For Zgustova, this freedom distinguishes self-translation from translating other authors and turns it into an extension of creative writing itself. The interview also addresses the editorial visibility of self-translation: depending on the publisher, her books may explicitly be identified as “translated by the author” or presented as original works. Zgustova considers both solutions legitimate, since self-translated versions can diverge considerably from the initial text. This conception also explains why she does not establish a strict hierarchy among her versions when her works are translated into further languages.