Reading What Ends in translation

It's been nearly twelve years since my novel What Ends was published in the UK — and I haven't read it since. I've picked it up a few times to try, thinking it might be interesting to revisit with fresh eyes, and with enough distance from the text to appreciate it as a story in its own right. Heck, I thought, I might even learn something about my strengths and weaknesses as a writer, which I could take forward into future work.

Well, spoiler alert, even a decade does not provide enough distance for this writer to switch off his inner critic. I could never make it past the first chapter, so cringeworthy did my late-twenties prose seem in retrospect. Each word choice, each comma placement, each unnecessarily precise description: it seemed incredible that anyone had ever agreed to publish it, never mind shortlist it for awards. All I could see were all the sentences I would have cut or written differently. It was all weaknesses, no strengths.

Last month, though, What Ends was published in Italian for the first time, and this seemed to provide a unique opportunity to try one more time. That's because I speak Italian at a level that seemed perfect for my purposes: good enough to follow almost everything, but still clunky enough to not get hung up on word choice, comma placement, or other nuance. Finally, a way to appreciate the story, without my inner critic upbraiding me for the writing itself.

So this week, I did it: I read my own novel again for the first time in twelve years.

It was an odd experience. For one thing, even with twelve years' distance, I still remembered a lot of it, right down to the sentence level. I would read a line in Italian and still be able to recite the original English in my head, word for word. I'd start a scene and be able to picture it as if it were a real memory, rather than something I imagined fifteen years ago. Or else I'd recognise that a particularly slangy or extended metaphor was coming up, and wonder how the translator would tackle it.

On that note, by the way, the translator, Paola Vitale, has done a lovely job. This manuscript threw a lot at her: cryptic crossword clues, Scottish slang, absolutely egregious word choice and comma placement, and she's captured it all perfectly, probably even improving it in places. I've particularly enjoyed how she's handled all the idioms, and I've learned a few new Italian ones as a result:

• "She's in one of her strops" = "Oh, ha la luna di traverso" (literally "she has the moon sideways")

• "she gave him the scolding of his life" = "gliene aveva dette di tutti i colori" (literally "she told him about all the colours")

• "getting in each other's way" = "rompere le scatole agli altri" (literally "breaking each others' boxes")

I was also really charmed to learn that the ubiquitous Scottish plant "heather", obviously a woman's name in English, has an entirely different woman's name, "erica", in Italian.

Anyway. Though I vividly remembered some parts of the book, as I read on I was equally surprised by how much I'd forgotten others, including whole scenes and whole minor supporting characters. I was also surprised that there were some scenes and characters I was sure existed but that didn't actually appear anywhere, whether in the Italian version or, when I checked, in the English one. All I can think is that if I went back to some earlier draft, I'd find a few deleted paragraphs containing what I thought had "really" happened.

Maybe the most surprising thing was that it struck me as a very different story than the one I thought I'd written. Back in 2014, I'd describe it to people much as the flap copy did: as a story about a vanishing way of life, or a community struggling with disintegration. Now, though, reliving how the different McCloud children navigate growing up, and how each one comes out of childhood so differently, it suddenly seems much more bildungsroman-ish — a commentary on how much adults can shape the children around them, in ways they might not even realise, through tiny comments or gestures that seem totally insignificant in the moment. I guess, having had a child myself since I wrote the book, I'm sensitive to different things now.

Mostly, though, I was glad to find that a few of the most wrenching scenes — Barry getting set upon by the school bullies, Maureen's funeral, George struggling around the house alone with dementia — were freshly wrenching. Even through a modest language barrier, I was wrenched. That made me feel a little better about all the word choice and comma placement my twenty-something self inflicted on me; beneath it all, it seems, there might really have been a decent story getting told. If I can take away anything from my re-reading, it's that: the story matters more than the word choice and comma placement.

But hey, don't take my word for it. Why not buy yourself a copy and see for yourself?