Robin Munby: 'You're always writing in some sense for yourself'

This summer we've already heard from Will Boast and EC Osondu, and we'll be welcoming Elaine Vilar Madruga and Zhenya Oliinyk on to the podcast over the next few weeks. But this time we're heading north with Robin Munby and his short story Of All Who Sorrow, Joy.

Munby's narrator is adrift in language, an experience the author says is drawn from his own life.

"This is especially about that early phase of learning a language or living in a new place," he explains, "when you have some proficiency, but things are still a struggle."

At this stage, Munby continues, comprehension is often a matter of guesswork, but it's only a more extreme version of something that happens in your mother tongue. "You're half hearing what the other person is saying and filling in the gaps, which is often something we naturally do in conversation."

The narrator's blanks and missing pieces are echoed in the construction of a story built from fragments that cuts between a discussion about a journey and the journey itself. But it's no accident.

"I, as a reader, do very much enjoy writing that is ambiguous in that way," the author says.

As a translator from Spanish, Russian and Asturian, Munby's day-to-day tussles with language are very different from his narrator's. But translation itself is still something of a mystery.

"A lot of people invest a lot of time in explaining how to do it and analysing how it's done," he says, "and I find all of that fascinating. But I still find myself lost for words in terms of trying to describe how I do it."

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.