Alex Niemi: On Novels by Poets, the Hyper-Reality of the Internet, and the Importance of Sonic Suspense in Her Translation of Laura Vazquez’s Novel ‘The Endless Week’

What does it mean to split your life between the internet and the physical world? In Alex Niemi’s translation of Laura Vazquez’s The Endless Week (Dorothy, 2025), young poet Salim and his sister Sara navigate the world community through the screens of their phones. When Salim, who rarely leaves the house, sets out to find his missing mother, he is joined by his online-turned-IRL friend Jonathan, whom he “met a few years ago under a video of a whale” on a journey that takes him into the beauty and the violence of the modern experience.

The Endless Week is as tender as it is intense. The novel follows multiple characters, including Salim and Sara’s troubled father and their dying grandmother, dipping into their pasts, their innermost thoughts, their post histories, and their relationships in compelling spurts of language and poetry.

A poet herself, Alex’s translation of the original text from French to English captures the lyricism and the abstraction of the text, allowing English-speaking audiences access to this timely, insightful story. Informed by a lifelong love of languages, travel, and the written word, Alex shared with me her approach to this project, her strategies for maintaining fluency in multiple languages, and how her translation of The Endless Week found its ideal home among the canonically weird-cool titles at Dorothy.

Corinne Cordasco-Pak: To start, I’d love to know: what drew you to The Endless Week? What inspired you to pursue a translation project?

Alex Niemi: I discovered [writer Laura Vazquez] when she added me on Facebook after I was interviewed for a Belgian magazine. In 2021 I saw a post she made about her first novel and I loved the title, as well as the mysterious cover art—a series of windswept black marks—which turned out to be a painting by Pierette Bloch. Because I have a soft spot for novels written by poets, I decided to give it a read. From the first page, I was drawn into her style of writing, which felt completely new and alive to me. I knew it would be hard to find a publisher for such an experimental novel, but I felt strongly that I wanted to try. I looked for a publisher for almost three years. That’s unfortunately a common story. It can take a long time to find a publisher for a translation into English.

CCP: And then the book landed at Dorothy, which feels like such a dream press for an experimental novel, especially one in translation. How did that happen?

AN: Like a lot of people, I have been a long-time reader of their books. I thought, if there’s one publisher that will appreciate the glorious weirdness of this novel, it might be Dorothy. They had an open call, so I pitched it.

They were great to work with. It’s amazing what they can do with such a small team. Danielle [Dutton] does most of the editing and cover art. I had a lot of input; Laura and I were able to say what we wanted for the cover and they were really amenable. We actually ended up picking another painting by Bloch to reflect the original cover, and it was tricky to get the rights! And Marty [Martin Riker] has done a lot of heavy lifting with logistics and trying to get the book publicized. It’s great to work with people who are really in it for the books. They want cool, weird, boundary-pushing stuff. They’re just true lovers of literature.

CCP: Where were you with the project at that point? Did the translation have to be complete in order to submit?

AN: I had just done a sample, and I confirmed that the English language rights were available. I sent them the ten pages I had, and then they paid me to do a longer sample to see more of the book. This seems to be typical of fiction in translation, whereas with poetry, they often require the full manuscript. This was my first book-length prose translation, and I usually translate poetry, so it was a nice change in that regard. A whole book is a lot to do on spec. 

CCP: How else was working with prose different from working with poetry?

AN: It was a more immersive experience. If you work on a collection of poems, the pieces are generally shorter. Mentally, there are more pauses. With a novel, I would find myself translating for five, six hours a day. I was just completely consumed by it. I also had trouble writing while I was translating this novel because I was so overcome by Vazquez’s style. I felt like everything I tried to write around that time sounded like her.

But it also felt like a natural process because her style resonated with me. Coming from a poetry background, I felt like I understood the sonic logic of what she was doing. It’s a book that’s driven by poetic logic, in terms of sonic suspense: creating tension in the prose that is based on sound and those element-of-surprise associations that you see a lot in poetry. Vazquez is a master at linking together associative thoughts that feel compelling and strange and weirdly true.

CCP: How has your relationship with her developed over the course of this project?

NP: I messaged her after I read The Endless Week, and I said, “Hey, I love your book. I would love to try and pitch it in English if you're open to that.” And she responded right away. I have never met her, but we’ve tried to meet several times. We were waitlisted for a residency together and didn’t get it. She was supposed to come see me when I was in residence at the Michalski Foundation in Switzerland, and then she got sick. It just keeps not happening! But we have a cordial email relationship—she responds really quickly to any questions I might have, and we’ve collaborated on some other smaller translation projects.

CCP: Returning to this idea of the sonic tension of the text, what was it like to immerse yourself in the world of Vazquez’s language? Was there anything that you really tried to preserve?

AN: With a book like this, a lot of the impetus of the novel stems from the sonic quality, so that was something I aimed to preserve. When I was maybe three drafts in, I read the whole thing out loud in English to see if I had done it. French and English are closely related languages, so there were a few spots where I felt I had to choose between the sound and the meaning a little bit, but it wasn’t extreme.

[Vazquez] also plays with registers. There’s a scene with the social worker, where he’s using official language that has a Kafkaesque comic effect. That part was tricky to translate. I hadn’t done something quite like that, where I was trying to mimic how a hyper-professional social worker who was steeped in that idiom would speak.

It was also a fun challenge to translate Salim’s strange speeches online—which were oddly philosophical but completely ridiculous—and his poems. I felt like I had to tap into all of my translation experience to work in all of these different modes.

CCP: I loved the emails from the father, his lists of advice. I wanted to take pictures of them and text them all to my friends—they had almost a Polonious-esque, overblown voice, and yet as we learn his backstory, we begin to understand them better.

AN: The father is one of these characters who at first you’re like, “what’s wrong with this man?” Then, you get his whole backstory and figure out why he is the way he is. The father was one of the characters that really pulled at my heartstrings the most in the end.

CCP: There were some intense moments of violence in the book, maybe the most extreme of all being the father’s childhood. How did you approach those scenes?

AN: There are some really intense parts, and I think the hardest one for me to translate was probably the father’s childhood: not on a language level, just on an emotional level. I remember having to brace myself when that part came up. Laura is never trying to coddle the reader. She wants to be brutally honest. The father’s past made sense in the context of his character. Granted, it was an overblown version of what he might’ve experienced as a child, but I think she’s trying to trust the reader to consider the horrors of the world.

CCP: Violence seems like an essential part of a novel that’s about how we view the world through our phones. That’s definitely my experience of what it's like to exist in this hyperconnected moment—I open my phone and see the most horrific thing, then my friend texts me something funny.

AN: I don’t think I’ve read another book that represented the strange hyper-reality of the internet and the emotional difficulty of seeing everything all the time quite so well.

CCP: The only thing I could think of to compare it to was No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood.

AN: I was going to bring that up! I also thought of Patricia Lockwood when I was translating this for several reasons. One, because she’s a poet and that was her first novel, but also because she’s a poet who is famous for her internet presence. If I remember correctly—it’s been a while since I read it—she rendered the internet in a way that was a little more abstract. She poeticizes it a little bit. Whereas, while Laura’s work is poetic, it’s more raw in terms of its representation.

CCP: I saw that Vazquez’s next project after the novel was a play? She’s really working across genres!

AN: The play is great! I loved it. In France, I feel like people do more cross-genre work. This is a generalization, but in the US I often get the impression that writers are  dedicated to one specific genre with a few notable exceptions, like Patricia Lockwood or Renee Gladman. Maybe it’s partly because of the MFA culture here, where you pick a track in one genre.

CCP: Moving into some questions about your writing life: how do you balance your creative work, including translations, with your day job or other responsibilities?

AN: I’ve had various day jobs over the years. I used to be a Russian lecturer at the University of Iowa. I worked briefly as a book binder and learned how to do hand bookbinding. Right now I translate and I work remotely for an initiative called SALT, South Asian Literature in Translation, at the University of Chicago. I like being able to help with the administrative tasks, I find it oddly soothing. There’s so much cool stuff going on in the program as well, like mentorships for emerging translators, publisher grants, travel grants so that people can go to South Asia and check out the lit scene there, tons of things.

CPP: What is your writing practice like outside of translation?

AN: Translation will probably always be my main focus, but I write poetry as well. I’m open to other genres, but that’s what I’m producing at the moment. It’s important for my translation practice to understand my own writing tendencies so that I can avoid foisting my style onto other people when I translate. I also like being influenced by the people I translate. I learn a lot from them and I bring their knowledge into my own work. But the other reason why I like translation, more generally speaking, is because when you’re writing your own stuff, there’s a lot of pressure to develop a singular voice or style, whereas with translation, you get to write like many different people. My own writing feels inextricably tied to translation in this way, and my style changes over time as I learn more from translating.

CCP: Where did your interest in languages develop?

AN: I had this strange childhood where I was monolingual, but everyone around me was multilingual. My cousins speak Arabic. My mom’s best friend spoke Chinese and French. My mom studied Spanish and had a friend that she would speak Spanish with. I had grandparents who spoke Finnish and German. I lived a lot of my childhood in the Bay Area, which is super multilingual. And so I always thought it was weird that I only spoke English. I felt kind of embarrassed. When I was a kid it seemed like knowing another language was this cool thing, like a secret code. I would see people that I could only talk to in English light up when they got to speak their first language. And then I was just naturally drawn to it early on. If I heard people speaking another language, I was curious. I remember from a young age making lists of languages I wanted to learn. So it was situational, but there was also an internal pull to do it.

CCP: And then at what point did translation become your goal?

AN: Kind of late. When I was in college, I desperately wanted to be a French professor. But then I was doing an honors thesis and I really wasn’t enjoying it, so I dropped it and picked up a translation course in my last semester and I was like, “This is perfect. This is how I want to use my languages and my literary background.” I had this lovely professor Christi Merrill, at the University of Michigan, who was really encouraging. She told me about the MFA in literary translation at Iowa. At her urging, I applied and did my MFA in translation.

French and Spanish were my two strongest at that point—emphasis on French—and my Russian was in the works. I studied abroad in Switzerland in undergrad and learned some French there. Then I worked in France for a year, came back, did the MFA, then moved to Russia. And then I started teaching Russian. From my MFA on, I was looking for texts to translate and working to increase my knowledge of literature.

CCP: Are there any things in particular that help you maintain fluency?

AN: Reading is the primary way I do it. Right now, maintaining all my languages is a lot of work because I’m living in an anglophone environment. But abroad, or even in parts of the US that are more Spanish-speaking, your brain is like, “Oh, we need to understand this now.” It’s much easier to maintain a language when you can be immersed from time to time.I have sought out residencies abroad primarily for this reason. Though English is difficult to avoid these days no matter where you are! But mostly, I try to read as much as possible in my languages—also because I’m also looking for new exciting work and things to pitch [for translation]. 

CCP: As a fan of reading fiction in translation, I’ve been struck by how much gets translated from English to other languages in comparison to the reverse! 

AN: It’s really true. Anglophone literature is well represented internationally in other languages. I have a good friend from Spain who translates into Spanish, and she told me that about 30% of the books sold in stores there are translated. Not just from English, but in general. Whereas, the famous statistic that everyone always brings up is that only about 3% of what is sold in the US is translated.

CCP: As you bring work into English, how do you balance making it familiar to an anglophone audience versus bringing them into a world that wasn’t written in English?

AN: I think you’re always doing both simultaneously. Sometimes you’re letting something that won’t be familiar stand in the text and then sometimes you’re making hard decisions, like choosing a different poetic meter or trying to figure out how a specific character would talk.  You still want the text to function in English. You have to, to some degree, follow the parameters of English. I mean, you don’t have to—I’d be really curious to see what happens if you just said, “No, I'm going to translate this text and follow none of the rules of English grammar.” That could be a fun project.

CCP: Is there any advice that you would give to aspiring translators?

AN: Just to approach translation without assumptions about what literary language is. When I was a baby translator, I had all these random ideas that I’d received from school about what makes a good sentence, or how you use an exclamation point. Some of those beliefs bled into my translation choices early on. When you’re translating from other cultures, part of the joy and the interest of it is letting yourself be influenced. Asking not, “how could I make this sound pretty?” but, “what was this person trying to achieve?”

Also, try the best you can to divest yourself of any biases. It’s impossible to do completely, but it’s important to try to approach every text as if it’s the first text you ever translated, while simultaneously keeping your knowledge and experience in your back pocket. Every writer has a different style and you want to approach that style like you’re building it from the ground up. It doesn’t matter what the last person you translated wanted to do. It doesn’t matter what Faulkner was trying to do.

For example, in The Endless Week, I did everything I could to maintain Vazquez’s short, declarative phrases without combining them for “flow.” There are other ways to create a tight soundscape, and following her lead pushed me to find a solution. That’s a translator’s job.

CCP: Is there anything about the actual act of sitting down and writing that feels really essential to you?

AN: I’m lucky enough to have a home office. I live in Milwaukee, which means that rent is less brutal than in other cities. I have my little space and my desk and all my books and I feel particular about it. I have to tidy my desk before I start, but I don’t feel super ritualistic. I let myself flow between projects. If I have a pressing deadline, I’ll obviously prioritize the deadline. But I find that whenever I try to impose a rigid schedule on myself, it doesn’t work. I’ve tried to learn to go with the flow in my work.

CCP: Outside of writing and translation, what activities are most important to your creative life?

AN: I study languages for fun, but that also takes a lot of brain power. I don’t get relaxation from that, but I do get access to more words and more literature. Right now I’m learning Polish and Finnish. There are other languages I’ve studied and abandoned over the years.

When my brain needs to relax from all of these intense translation and writing activities, I play cozy video games. Like video games with farms and flowers and cakes. I find that, when I’m doing something like playing a video game, my subconscious is still turning things over from my work. Then, when I return to my projects, I feel like my mind has been secretly finding solutions while I was letting my conscious mind have a break.

CCP: As The Endless Week comes out this month, what’s next for you?

AN: I do hope that this book will find its readership and that I’ll be able to translate more of Vazquez’s work. I think, like every translator, you just hope that you’ll continue to do interesting projects. I hope The Endless Week will lead to more Vazquez in English and more exciting translation work for me.

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Alex Niemi is a writer and literary translator. She is the recipient of an NEA translation grant, the Heldt Prize, and an AATSEEL Book Award. Her latest translation is The Endless Week by Laura Vazquez (Dorothy, a publishing project) and she is the author of the poetry chapbook Elephant (Dancing Girl Press). You can find more of her work at alex-niemi.com.

Author photo © Fondation Jan Michalski, Tonatiuh Ambrosetti.