How Do You Do A Book Justice In Another Language? The Translator Of Drive Your Plow... Shares Her Process

Dua’s first Monthly Read of 2025, Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, was first known by another name: written in the author’s native Polish in 2009 as Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych. In 2018, it was republished in English, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones – who won the Transatlantyk Award for the most outstanding promoter of Polish literature abroad that same year. Here, Lloyd-Jones shares her process for translating Tokarczuk’s captivating work – and how she brought the characters, setting and story to life in another language...

Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead by Olga Tokarczuk is billed as an ecological murder mystery. But those labels are deceptive, because in this novel the author exploits the genre of crime fiction for her own purposes – to write a satirical critique of patriarchal attitudes.

At the heart of the book is the narrator, Janina Duszejko, at face value an eccentric woman in her mid-to-late-60s who lives in a remote village in southwest Poland, where she’s a misfit among the locals. It’s also the place where Tokarczuk has a house, in a remote village very near the border with the Czech Republic, and where several of her previous books have been set – including two that I had already translated: House of Day, House of Night and (in a fictionalised version) Primeval And Other Times. Many years before, I accompanied Olga on a visit to an elderly woman named Teresa Chmura, a retired architect and artist who lived in a dilapidated cottage. Olga used to keep an eye on her in the winter; I remember a dirt floor in the kitchen, lots of dogs and a warm, fascinating woman who showed us her drawings and told us about her past life as an architect working in the Middle East. Her way of life was part of the inspiration for the character of Janina Duszejko.

So I knew the location, and perhaps had some personal understanding of the narrator. Her voice is key to the book: she tells the story; as readers we see everything through her eyes and must trustingly follow her, wherever she goes and whatever she does. Without wanting to spoil the plot for those who haven’t read the book, I will say that the reader needs to like her and want to spend 250 pages with her.

It took me a while to capture the right voice for Duszejko. She’s quite stylised in Polish, and sounds eccentric. But when I had finished my translation, something felt wrong. I realised that Duszejko sounded too unconventional and that her tone could be off-putting. English literature specialises in eccentricity, it’s very familiar to us, so it needed to be more subtle. I went back through the entire translation, reining her in, making her sound a touch less odd. It seems to have worked, because many readers have stuck by her to the end, sympathising and siding with her, even though she does some things that most of us would hesitate to do. (Or would we?)

Drive Your Plow... has lots of odd features that I felt important to retain in English. The title is a quotation from William Blake and, yes, that’s how he spelled the word “plough” in The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell in 1790. (Though, of course, there was social-media criticism of the “translator who can’t spell the word plough”.) Each chapter begins with a quotation from Blake, taken from the poems Proverbs Of Hell, Auguries Of Innocence and The Mental Traveller. Naturally, all I had to do was to find the originals. But there was a knotty problem when one of the characters in the book, Dizzy, tried translating Blake into Polish. He and Duszejko jointly come up with four Polish versions of the same quatrain. (Incidentally, Tokarczuk used existing Polish translations of Blake, and in the course of her work found out to her surprise that all the translators lived in the Kłodkzo Valley.) The four Polish translations weren’t actually very good, so what I had to do was re-write the quatrain in less than perfect form, and writing Blake badly turned out to be quite easy to do.  

People imagine the strange use of capital letters in the text is taken from Blake, but in fact it is a feature of 1974 surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington that has carried over into Drive Your Plow... Duszejko’s use of capitals is not entirely consistent, but there is some logic to it: animates such as Dogs have capital letters but policemen, for example, do not. Some strong emotions are capitalised, such as Anger. Generally, the punctuation used by Duszejko is unconventional, and although translation involves punctuation as well as words (the translator “translates” punctuation, rather than slavishly retaining it, because different languages use it differently), I did my best to reproduce its oddity. (The well-intentioned Australian copy editor, without having read the whole of the book in advance, painstakingly corrected all the punctuation and capital letters, and it took me a week to change it back.)

The names of the characters are mostly invented by Duszejko. She hates her own first name, Janina, and prefers to be referred to by her surname, which in Polish means something like ‘big soul’. Olga and I discussed whether or not to find a version of her name that would have some meaning to an English reader, but by then there had been protests in Poland against hunting laws, at one of which a banner had appeared reading: “Duszejko Wouldn’t Like It”. We realised that Duszejko had become a brand and decided not to change it. But I did translate the other names; Dizzy is called Dyzio in Polish, which is short for the name Dionyzy – Dionysus, which prosaically exists in English as Denis. He’s Denis in the French translation, but the name sounds banal in English, and I felt the added comedy of ‘Dizzy’ suited his character.

Most of Duszejko’s nicknames were easy to translate (Big Foot, Good News, etc), but the character whom I named Oddball was a challenge. In Polish he’s Matoga, an old-fashioned word that means a spectre, a fright or a monster, but even among Poles it’s unfamiliar. At first I wanted to call him Maladroit, because Duszejko sees him as socially awkward, but he’s actually very practical. I discussed it with Olga and we jointly chose Oddball. I had the most fun with Innerd, whose name in Polish is Wnętrzak; Duszejko admits that he is one of the few people she knows whose real name suits them perfectly, so they need no nickname. ‘Wnętrze’ in Polish means ‘interior’, ‘inside’ or, figuratively, ‘inner life’, and although Innerd is certainly not a Polish name (and a rare one in English), it felt like a good fit for the character. It sounded plausible and, so far, no one has argued with it.

In fact, this book was comparatively easy to translate, and very enjoyable. The writing is so confident and consistent that Tokarczuk’s words guided me throughout. The best writing is sometimes the easiest to translate.