I have only translated living authors, a circumstance owing to my being drawn to contemporary literature—as vain as it might sound, I want to participate in the dissemination of the stories and voices of my lifetime, to partake in the artistic production of the Thailand I was born into. For each book I have translated, I have always had the author to consult, even to befriend. I have double-checked with them my understanding of certain phrases, asked them about minutiae like the exact color (blue can become tricky moving between Thai and English) or collar style of a shirt mentioned in passing, traded a multitude of emails, texts and phone calls with them, shared meals (and, lately, my vaccination status) with them. In other words, their existence as living human beings who begot the original works is something I experience as part of my reality as a person and as a translator.

  Yet, somehow, I remain preoccupied with “The Death of the Author,” that Roland Barthes essay I read over two decades ago as a college coed. I found myself formulating thoughts through it and discussing it in my last pitch, as I did in my first. It’s true, my initial encounter with the essay precipitated something like an epiphany: Barthes’s words opened up the possibility of reading, and, for me, they gave literary criticism its raison d’être. Post-college, though, many years passed where that piece of literary theory lay dormant in my brain, only to return with renewed vigor when I took up translation.

  Prabda Yoon’s story collection The Sad Part Was was the first book I ever pitched. In presenting the collection, I discussed at length how the stories in it insist on exposing themselves as texts (“[I]t is language which speaks, not the author,” writes Barthes) and are eager to discredit the Author, via metafiction and other devices, thereby giving the reader the pride of place as the maker of meaning. Given Yoon’s influences during the years when he wrote the book, reading his early work through a post-structuralist lens is definitely not farfetched, and I did not expect the essay’s death grip on me to continue. Except it did. A few months ago, I wrote a synopsis for Saneh Sangsuk’s novel Jao Garagade (English title to be determined), and before I knew it, I had resorted to Barthes again, to explain the significance of the book’s anticolonial narrative structure, which aims to re-elevate the oral tradition of storytelling in the face of the novel’s dominance, the novel being a form imported into Thailand from the West.¹ Garagade, in being made up of oral tales within a tale (some of them doubly contained), all either passed down or being passed down in the narrative present, inherently questions the idea of unitary authorship, harking back to a time before the myth of the Author took hold of our imagination.

  In many ways, Garagade and The Sad Part Was couldn’t be more different: the former is a tale set in a western Thai village in the 1960s and in the jungle that it used to be at the turn of the twentieth century, a tale that (in one of its many strata) mourns the loss of natural resources and hence mourns the lifestyle of the past, while the latter is an unapologetically urban set of stories that speaks to the Bangkok of the turn of the millennium, each using narrative forms reflecting their own substance. Why, then, did I feel so compelled to seek a “Death of the Author” reading in each of them?

  Even Barthes himself later questioned his own wisdom, as Kate Briggs, the translator of his Preparation of the Novel, tried to warn me when I was her student. For a long time, I put off reading the tiny sections in Preparation called “Return of the Author” and “Return to Biography” that she had pointed me to, fearing they would cause the foundation of my literary worldview to crumble. Although in the dreaded snippets Barthes goes so far as to describe his change of heart as an “about-face,” I hung onto the phrases where he humbly refrains from being prescriptive (“For me (once again, I’m not sure if I have the right to generalize) . . .”), and anyway, before taking the plunge into reading those two extracts, I had pre-consoled myself by reasoning: regardless of what he asserts therein, “The Death of the Author,” the text, has long been out there, severed from its Author, and need not be discounted merely because the same man who wrote it might later in his life wish to disavow it—He is dead.

  It is easy to understand why a translator who has spent years buying completely into the idea of the Author’s death being a precondition for reading would find that death likewise is a precondition for translating. As translators, we are readers first, even if we have the privilege of making our interpretation of the text less fleeting by documenting it in print. For a time, we get to be the “place where [the text’s] multiplicity is focused,” as Barthes says about the reader in his seminal essay. For a time, we get to play the writer reincarnated—a writer even more literally “imitat[ing] a gesture that is always anterior”—and doesn’t reincarnation always presuppose death? Later on, if we are lucky, we will die in many other people else’s hands or on their screens.

  Yet it’s not so simple: I’m haunted by the Author’s ghost.

  One basic task translators often do is write biographies in the target language for their authors. This exercise, at minimum, will require the translator to do some fact-checking, more likely also a bit of research, meaning engaging with the author’s life story is inevitable. This level of engagement—still conceiving of the author in the third person (the “external author . . . just the He,” as Barthes puts it in Preparation)—holds true regardless of whether the possibility to meet the writer in the flesh exists or not. But especially when we translate living authors, we potentially have some degree of access to their I, to the “writer’s interiority,” “the recourse to [which],” Barthes had once suggested, was “pure superstition.” In such a scenario, the temptation, accompanied, even, by a sense of duty, to tap into that interiority is overwhelming. That is, the specter of the Author feels all the more present when the unabstracted version of the author is a living person only a phone call or an email away.

  These musings are in no way meant to negate the wisdom of consulting the author. But as translators, we spend many, many hours alone, with our computer in front of us and the original text off to one side (too often always the same side of the desk, however orthopedically ill-advised). Translation decisions are made constantly, consciously, unconsciously, and I can’t help but yearn for a blessing from the Author’s ghost to read the text, remake the text. The psychological balancing act of the need to assert my own construction of the text while respecting the ghost of the Author has left me fixated with scouring the text itself for clues that it—and maybe its Maker, too—also subscribes to the principles put forth in “The Death of the Author,” that it—and maybe its Maker, too—is telling me, Go on, translate the text. Go on, give it another life.

Mui Poopoksakul is a lawyer-turned-translator with a special interest in contemporary Thai literature. Her translations include three story collections: The Sad Part Was and Moving Parts, both by Prabda Yoon, and Arid Dreams by Duanwad Pimwana. She is also the translator of Pimwana’s novel Bright. Currently, she is translating a novel by Saneh Sangsuk. A native of Bangkok who spent two decades in the US, she now lives in Berlin, Germany.

^{[1] Thai literature professor Saowanit Chunlawong discusses this aspect of the novel in her article “The Implication of Tale-Telling in the Archaic Love Story of Karaked,” available at: http://daen-aran-saengthong.blogspot.com/2012/01/implication-of-tale-telling-in-archaic.html (in Thai), concluding that Sangsuk suggests the novel is a continuation of oral storytelling.}