Books Are My Business: translator Brian Robert Moore

Brian Robert Moore is a literary translator based in New York. BAMB

Brian Robert Moore is a literary translator based in New York. 

His father is from Waterford, and he holds an MPhil in Irish writing from Trinity College. 

His translations from Italian include Meeting in Positano by Goliarda Sapienza, A Silence Shared by Lalla Romano, and You, Bleeding Childhood by Michele Mari. 

He is also translator-in-residence at Tolka Journal.

How did you become a translator?

I moved to Milan after living in Dublin, and I started doing editorial work with publishers there. 

I did translation samples for publishers, which they use to sell the translation rights. 

It was really good training, because I did everything from spy thrillers to very literary stuff. 

I realised that was what I liked doing the most. 

I wanted to do full-length books, and eventually got lucky when Other Press was going to publish Meeting in Positano by Goliarda Sapienza. 

I submitted a sample which they liked and since then, I've been able to focus on book-length translations.

What attracted you to Italian as a language?

I started studying it at college, a bit on a whim because I didn’t like the fact that I didn’t know a second language well. 

I was very interested in Italian culture, originally because of cinema and art. I didn't know the literature very well. 

But literature got me hooked in a way because I started discovering all of these authors that I didn’t know who are household names in Italy, but for whatever reason, aren’t known in the Anglosphere.

What do you like most about being a translator?

I do really like advocating for the writers whose work I translate. 

It is a nice part of the work that whenever you succeed, you’re doing good work for literature that you care about. 

That’s always very gratifying, when you care about the books. 

In terms of the translation itself, I would definitely say finding the right voice is something I enjoy. 

Translation is a kind of obsessive process for me. 

And I’ve realised that the authors I’m focusing on tend to also focus on their own obsessions.

What do you like least about being a translator?

It can be, I don’t want to say lonely because that sounds like on an emotional level I feel lonely doing the work, which is not what I mean, I feel very much in company, especially with the author, but you do have a lot of responsibility and you can feel isolated with that responsibility. 

Because essentially there’s no right answer and you can be left to worry on your own for a long time about your choices. 

The more complex the books are, the more paths you could take to translating them.

Why do you think people should read more books in translation?

Whenever I hear that question, my tendency is to take a step back and think… we can’t imagine literature today without so many greats or classics that are in translation. 

It would be unthinkable, in the very literal sense. 

I mean everything, from ancient texts to 19th-century Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, etc. 

We would never conceive of a literary world where those texts didn't exist. 

So there's no reason to think that some of the most vital literature today is not being written in other languages.

What are you reading at the moment?

I’m finally reading The Dirty Dust ( Cré na Cille) by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, the Alan Titley translation. 

One thing that bothers me in translation is this desire to avoid any kind of what’s considered a regional language and way of speaking. 

Often there’s this idea that language should be this very neutral English, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. 

I’m finding this book inspiring as it's this very unique case where because Ireland is a majority English-speaking country, you can have a more specifically Irish manner of speaking and it seems plausible. 

I wish that translations were not so wary of regionalisms in general. 

None of us have this kind of neutral, standard English — that doesn’t exist. 

Writers can draw on everything, and try to make the richest, most complex works from a linguistic perspective — I wish that there was not such a fear of a similar technique in translation. 

There are a lot of reasons why people are sceptical of doing things like that, but being narrow-minded about it never helps. There needs to be more conversations about it.

Also, Seven Steeples by Sara Baume was one of the most beautiful novels I've read in a long time. 

I found it very inspiring, the precision and the craftsmanship of how she works, the prose in that book, I think I will be revisiting a lot in the future when working with authors who are in that in-between space between prose and poetry.