In the autumn of 2023, I found myself in the mountains above Lake Geneva, at a place called Château de Lavigny. I had been invited there on a fellowship to work on my translation of Kim de l’Horizon’s debut, Blutbuch, which in English has become Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues.
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The blush-stoned château, the former home of the Ledig-Rowohlt publishing family, echoed with the whispers of the legendary authors who had stayed there over the last century. Early each morning I would tiptoe downstairs, cross the dew-coated grass, slip through the gate, and go for a run through the vineyards.
I always scanned the horizon for Mont Blanc, which seemed a fluid rather than fixed landmark: sometimes visible and sometimes not, depending on the weather or time of day, or perhaps its own whims. I imagined it cheekily shifting position, evading my gaze. It reminded me of “I am rooted, but I flow”—the words of Virginia Woolf—one of the epigraphs to this novel, and a fitting mirror to its genre-defying style and the process of translating it.
For a translator, a book like this is a gift. Infinitely playful, it extends an invitation to luxuriate in language. It is genre-fluid, gender-fluid, and overflows with neologisms. De l’Horizon’s writing shifts frequently between registers, blurring the borders of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry; of fabulation and realism; of past and present.
And yet it is also—and I say this lovingly—a torture, because of its inconsistencies and ambiguities. There are countless metaphors used to describe the craft of translation, and one is of carrying something—meaning, in essence—from one place to another. I interpret this as striving to create an equivalent experience in the English-language reader, even if it doesn’t always occur through the same means, or even at the same moment as in the original text
De l’Horizon’s writing shifts frequently between registers, blurring the borders of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry; of fabulation and realism; of past and present.
With Blutbuch, the metaphor of transporting from A to B didn’t feel right, because the fixed locales of A and B, of German and English, appeared more fluid and hazier the longer I looked at them, and the words I picked up to transport were slippery too.
Their layers of meaning multiplied and slithered out of my grasp. And in a way, this made sense: in this narrative there is no resolution or destination; it is a spiral, an unending process of becoming. This translation demanded a new approach.
Fortunately, before I began my first draft, I was invited in spring 2023 to participate in a workshop at Translation House Looren in Switzerland. With funding from Pro Helvetia, the center gathered the eleven translators who had been commissioned to bring De l’Horizon’s debut into their respective languages. Up in the mountains outside Zürich, we spent four intense days—joined, on two of those, by the author—workshopping the text and its linguistic challenges.
We discussed the finer details, such as the dialect terms and their meaning, and the wider issues, like gender identity and transgenerational trauma. Those conversations with colleagues, whose native languages included Catalan, Croatian, Dutch, Italian, and more, were greatly enriching for the work ahead, and I have carried their voices with me.
Unsurprisingly, even the title presents a conundrum. Blutbuch is a compound noun of Blut (blood) and Buch (book). The “blood” element has associations with bloodlines and inheritance, and also with violence, as experienced through transphobia, homophobia, and the forcibly-imposed gender binary.
For the German-language reader, further associations arise as they delve into the narrative: the title also refers to the Blutbuche—the copper (blood) beech in the narrator’s childhood garden (with this family tree element being an additional nod to bloodlines). And in the Bernese German dialect, dä Buch means “the stomach”/”belly,” subtly suggestive of other recurrent motifs: emptiness and fullness in the body, the digestion of ideas.
After playing with many possibilities for the English title, the author, the book’s editor at FSG, and I found resonance through the multiword, poetic title of Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues. It gives space to the novel’s themes while also mimicking its linguistic and interpretative play.
One of de l’Horizon’s core motivations in writing this book was to find a form of genuine self-expression in a language that is rigidly gendered. In German, nouns are assigned one of three grammatical genders—male, female, or neuter—through their articles, der, die, or das.
Professional roles are often appended with -in to denote the female form: der Lehrer (male teacher) becomes die Lehrerin (female teacher). References to groups of mixed gender have traditionally defaulted to the male form in the plural, die Lehrer, while the female plural is die Lehrerinnen. In recent years there have been efforts to make the language more inclusive—for example, by adding an asterisk to the plural (Lehrer*innen) to include males, females, and those who identify as nonbinary—which have been opposed by traditionalists and far-right groups.
Suffice to say, German is a language that doesn’t offer an easy home to nonbinary bodies and identities. In English, there is arguably more linguistic flexibility for gender-inclusive terms. They as a singular pronoun, in my mind and mouth, is a relatively smooth option, and one with historical precedent. Its use emerged as early as the fourteenth century, and survived criticism from stringent mid-eighteenth-century grammarians to become more commonly used in modern Standard English as a gender-fluid pronoun.
For this translation, therefore, I needed to find ways of creating an inflexibility in English that would echo that of the German text. I chose to do this by keeping the cultural context of the original as present as possible—by retaining and contextualizing some of its phrases—and also by seizing the linguistic gifts that presented themselves.
For example, in German the noun for child is neuter, “das Kind,” with es (it) as the pronoun. I have rendered the child as it in the English too, knowing that this would read awkwardly, where in the original it does not. I actively welcomed this depersonalization in order to suggest the rigidity that exists elsewhere in German’s gendered nouns. Though attributing a consistent male or female gender to the child in the translation would have made it read more smoothly, I feel it would have been unfaithful to the intention of the original.
My choice also emphasizes Swiss German’s objectification of children and women; in the dialect, many of the nouns for adult women take the neuter article das: “I didn’t want to be an object; I wanted to be a person, and grown up, and being grown-up meant having a gender, a male one. As a woman, you were at risk of remaining an object or becoming an ocean. I didn’t want either” (page thirteen in Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues).
The German also carries a sense of negative space—the uncertainty of the child narrator feeling pushed to choose a gender—that I didn’t want to lose. That child is a neuter noun in German almost suggests that there is a neutral period before they grow up and need to choose.
In the original, within parts two and three, the narrator is either it or the child, and at the very end of part 2 is referred to as he/the boy. Because I see gender-neutral and gender-fluid language as different concepts—to me, the former suggests an absence of binaries, while the latter speaks to an expansion, an unending ebb and flow—I chose, with the author’s blessing, to also briefly incorporate she and they as pronouns.
A significant challenge in this translation was always going to be the original text’s use of the Swiss German dialect; more specifically, Bernese German, from the narrator’s home canton of Bern. Switzerland counts four main spoken languages: German, French, Italian, and Romansh, and numerous regional dialects.
(To the uninitiated, the vocabulary and cadence of Swiss dialects can seem almost impenetrable, so great are the differences to Standard German. I vividly remember, on my first school exchange trip to Germany at the age of thirteen, landing at Basel’s airport—which exits into France, Germany, and Switzerland—hearing Swiss German, and wondering what on earth I’d been learning for the previous two years.)
In German-speaking cantons, Standard German is the official written language and is taught in schools, while the Swiss German dialect, with local variations, is the main mode of communication in day-to-day life. A person’s ability to speak Standard German accent-free is, the author told us at Looren, seen as an indication of their educational status, and this imbues language with friction and class dynamics.
In the original, the narrator interweaves the Standard German they learned in school with the Bernese German they spoke with their mother and grandmother. I chose to retain some of these dialect words, such as truckli (trinket boxes) and meertrübeli (currants), contextualizing them in order to offer the reader an idea of the cultural setting.
The novel’s frequent shifts in register and style reflect the narrator’s attempt to try on different linguistic identities. They are seeking to find a language—or a blend—that feels authentic.
Here, language is many things; sometimes it is oppression, shame, or armor (such as the child’s self-imposed “spell” of speaking in short sentences); sometimes, it is exploration or empowerment. Part three includes a compelling contrast between a stream of consciousness style and a formal, academic register.
So far in this note I’ve emphasized the challenges of the translation process, but I also want to highlight the joy. For just as this book carries the weight of responsibility to sensitively convey generational trauma and the oppression of queer and nonbinary people, so too does it offer a lightness.
In a letter to their translators, the author encouraged us to be wild, transgressive—and to have fun. I felt this most where écriture fluide, the term used by the author at Looren to describe this flowing, gushing, and washing through the borders of language, comes to the fore.
Sound and cadence were key, and, with de l’Horizon’s permission, I chose poetry over literal meaning. I soaked myself in the texts that had inspired them—Annie Ernaux and Édouard Louis, among others—and allowed my own textual influences to enter the mix.
I developed new pre-work rituals, like somatic dance, and used voice dictation to create space for the delicious wordplay and neologisms that can result from mis-hearings. The more I allowed myself to relax and be carried by the energy of the narrative, the more gifts presented themselves in English, with pontifiqueering, smother tongues, and cunning stunts not stunning cunts being my favorite inventions.
De l’Horizon’s journey through language(s) continues with part five. In the original, this section was composed in English, a language which neither their mother nor grandmother speak, so it is also the language in which the narrator feels most free. It represents their incomplete attempt to reveal themself to their grandmother, addressing her, but not in a way that will be truly heard.
During the time when I was working on the translation, it became ever clearer to me that I couldn’t pin the book down.
In our Looren workshop, de l’Horizon emphasized that this part should appear in a different language than the rest of the book. In the original, the English is followed by a German translation created by the author using DeepL. This allows non-English-speaking German readers to understand it, but also serves as an additional voice and energy—described by the author as an “agency.”
Most other translators at the workshop planned to include this English section and to use AI to produce a translation in their own languages. For me, this was tricky—how could I convey the feeling of difference or liberation that this final chapter represents when the preceding parts in my version are also in English? If I were to translate de l’Horizon’s English into something—an invented idiolect?—would it come across as forced?
I feared that leaving their occasional non-native grammatical errors untouched could risk confusion for readers about whether they came from intention or rushed work. Torn, I returned to the idea of equivalency: German-language readers encountering de l’Horizon’s English would, depending on their own fluency in English or lack thereof, either notice or not notice errors, or skip straight to the AI-created German. If they did the latter, they would notice awkwardness here too (due to the effect of translating from non-native English, via AI, into German).
Ultimately, I decided to leave de l’Horizon’s English text so that the reader can experience, for a short while, the author’s voice directly. The space between our Englishes offers the additional voice and agency the author was seeking. I decided to trust that the reader would perceive the difference and sense there was a reason for it.
Between the summer when I first encountered Blutbuch and the publication of Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues, three years have passed. During the time when I was working on the translation, it became ever clearer to me that I couldn’t pin the book down. Like Mont Blanc on those morning runs, like Grossmeer’s memory as she succumbs to dementia, the narrative’s language(s) and meaning(s) are too elusive.
Instead, I had to trust the process and let the novel’s ambiguity carry me along. I had to root myself, but flow. Just as the book itself has changed, so have I. Translating it has made me more courageous in my work as a whole, and for this I will always be grateful.
I hope I have found a fittingly effervescent and fierce voice in English for the author, while also, with their encouragement, allowing my own to join the chorus. More than anything, I hope it will give a voice to those who feel silenced, a home to those who haven’t found a welcoming space within systems of stark binaries.
Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues overflows with humanity. As I write these words, in a world that seems painfully divided, I know it’s time to hand the book over to the reader. I hope you find as much joy and empowerment in it as I have.
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Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues by Kim de l’Horizon and translated by Jamie Lee Searle is available via FSG.
