"The decline of language is now official, and oversimplification is the norm"

Adan Kovacsics (Santiago de Chile, 1953) is a writer and translator from German and Hungarian into Spanish. Among other accolades, he has received the National Prize for the Lifetime Work of a Translator from the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation, and the Pro Cultura Hungarica award from the Hungarian government. Kovacsics is the translator into Spanish of the work of László Krasznahorkai, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2025. He will be taking part in the UOC's international conference on Cultural Diversity and Funded Translations: Between Institutional Gatekeeping and the Market, Past and Present, organized by the GlobaLS (UOC-TRÀNSIC) research group.

Kovacsics is also the author of essays that reflect on the nature of language and its close relationship with the historical and socio-political context, especially in turbulent times. His most notable works include Guerra y lenguaje (2007), Karl Kraus en los últimos días de la humanidad (2015) and El destino de la palabra (2025). In this interview, he discusses the decline in public language, the manipulation of discourse and the role of translation in times of crisis.

Your essays look at the relationship between language, history and crisis. What does the decline of public language tell us about the times we live in?

We only have to listen to the President of the United States, Donald Trump, to see what has happened to public language. The decline of language is now official. Oversimplification is the norm. We are told that this is deliberate, in order to relate to the "person in the street". How little respect that phrase shows for the "person in the street"! I don't think it's something that's been done deliberately, but public language is no longer capable of speaking in any other way. Just with simple phrases and coarse words. And it will only get worse. 

During an era of polarization and propaganda, does language still help us to understand reality, or has it become a tool for distorting it?

Reality is language. You can't get away from that. And we must make every effort to use language to open up a way through the tangle of words that swamp us in advertising, propaganda, ideology, demagoguery and the media.

As a translator from German and Hungarian, to what extent do you think translation entails conveying a historical, political and cultural world, and not just words?

Well, words have a historical, political and cultural world within them. A good translation does that on its own.

When public debate tends to oversimplify everything, can translation withstand slogans, clichés and binary thinking?

Not necessarily. It can also reinforce the "slogan, the cliché and the binary perspective".

You have translated László Krasznahorkai into Spanish. What are the intellectual and ethical demands of a piece of writing that forces you to take your time, when everything else pushes us towards working quickly?

My commitment is to this literature in general. The same commitment has led me to translate Krasznahorkai's works, which for me, make the same intellectual and ethical demands as those of Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke, for example, whose works I have also translated. Then there is each author's personal world, and the demands of rhythm and knowledge that each one imposes.

This conference is based on the premise that the distribution of literature is not neutral. In your experience, who decides which voices cross borders and which ones are excluded?

It's a complex system, in which the market plays a key role. But I've met publishers who truly wanted to raise the profile of an author or a type of literature, beyond market considerations. And then there's politics: just think, authors like Imre Kertész, László Krasznahorkai and Ádám Bodor would have received hardly any attention if the Berlin Wall hadn't fallen in 1989. 

There is a great deal of talk about translation as a cultural bridge, but less about it as a filter. To what extent does translation also involve reproducing imbalances of power?

Power cannot reach everything. It cannot reach poetry. It is a mistake to treat poetry, in which I also include theatre, narrative, literature in general and literary translation, as a type of power. In a broad sense, poetry is precisely what removes us from power, what encourages us to remove ourselves from power, and to nourish that side of us which is so great and so valuable, which is not power. Ultimately, Mandelstam (1891-1938), the Russian poet and essayist who died in a gulag, a victim of Stalinist repression, was persecuted not because he opposed power, but because he withdrew from it and dedicated himself entirely to his words and his poetry, and that was intolerable. Experiencing anguish, experiencing death, experiencing excess, experiencing love, experiencing respect for our ancestors, that is where poetry lies, not in power.

In the debate about cultural diversity and bibliodiversity, do institutions really expand the boundaries of what can be translated, or do they merely revise the canon cosmetically?

I believe that the debate itself is institutional, and that literature must withdraw from it and gradually find its own voice. If literature joins in and engages with the institutional debate, it ends up being cowardly and complacent.

After decades spent working on translation and essays, what would you say best reveals the character of an era: the books that are written, or the books chosen to be translated?

Honestly, I couldn't tell the difference. I believe that writing and translation are interconnected. And furthermore, a society does not write. There are buffoons who call themselves writers or poets or translators or artists, who express life, the world and society, and society doesn't quite know what to do with them. It sometimes tolerates them and, in some cases, exalts them.4