Imagine growing up in a small village in northeastern Albania, where the world beyond your own country feels impossibly far away. Then, one day, you walk into a room and discover a pile of books on the floor. Suddenly, you have somewhere to go. Across Sweden on the back of a goose, deep beneath the Earth’s surface, or into the extraordinary world of One Thousand and One Nights.
For Granit Zela, a childhood discovery became the beginning of a literary life. Among his father’s books, he found stories that made distant places feel close and impossible adventures seem real. Years later, the curious boy would become an award-winning Albanian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator, with nine original books and 25 literary translations to his name. After a lifetime spent working with words, he still describes language as an immense planet he will never finish exploring.
A profession made of thousands of doubts
There is something wonderfully contradictory about literary translation. You spend months, sometimes years, working on a book someone else has already written. Every sentence exists, every character has a voice, every word has been chosen. Your job is to question all of it. Does this expression mean the same thing in another language? Will the joke survive? What happens to the rhythm of a sentence when its words change? And how do you preserve an author’s unmistakable voice without losing your own?
Granit compares translating a novel to arriving in a foreign city. Before you can describe it to someone else, you must explore its streets, understand its history, meet its inhabitants, and learn how everything fits together. He describes translation as perhaps the deepest form of reading, an idea I particularly love because it captures something we rarely consider when opening a translated book. Behind the words we are reading is another writer who has spent countless hours arguing with every sentence so that we can experience the story as literature rather than as a collection of translated words.
How far can a language travel?
Albanian is spoken across several countries and diaspora communities. For Granit, who serves as Executive Director of Forum 26, Përmes Fjalëve (Through Words), language is a common cultural homeland, one that should not be divided by political borders. But how does literature written in a smaller language find its place in a world increasingly dominated by a handful of languages, international publishing markets, and digital platforms? A book can be available online and remain practically invisible. Granit believes the answer begins with strong literary communities at home, followed by translation, publishers, partnerships, and opportunities for writers to reach new audiences.
His reflections reminded me of how much of our understanding of the world comes from stories originating far beyond our own linguistic communities. Literature allows us to discover places we may never visit, understand lives far removed from our own, and recognize something familiar in people whose experiences are entirely different. Translation makes those encounters possible, but it takes an entire literary ecosystem to help the stories reach us.
Who gets credit for the second life of a book?
One of the most compelling parts of our conversation concerns the people whose names we sometimes overlook on a book’s cover. If a translator recreates a literary work in another language, making thousands of creative decisions along the way, shouldn’t the contribution receive recognition as authorship? And shouldn’t recognition extend beyond a name printed somewhere inside the book? Granit brings this question into the practical world of copyright, contracts, attribution, transparency, and remuneration. Through Forum 26, he has participated in Albania’s ongoing copyright reform discussions, advocating for the recognition of literary translators as authors of their translations and for stronger protections for writers.
Literary translation is creative work, and recognizing its authorship should have consequences for how translators are credited, contracted, and remunerated. We also discuss artificial intelligence and the increasingly urgent questions surrounding the use of literary works to develop new technologies. Granit welcomes technological progress but insists that innovation must respect creators’ consent, transparency, and fair remuneration.
Literature needs time, and time has a price
A novel may take years to write. A literary translation can demand months of research, revisions, difficult choices, and the occasional moment of despair over a single sentence. Readers rarely see those hours when they open the finished book, but the people responsible for creating it have to find a way to afford them. Copyright, in this context, becomes more than a legal framework. It helps establish the conditions under which writers and translators can continue working, retain meaningful control over their creations, and participate in the economic value their work generates.
Our conversation raises a question worth considering: what happens to literature when the people creating it cannot make a living? We may lose demanding novels, experimental poetry, translations from smaller languages, and stories whose cultural significance will only be recognized decades later. Granit captures the importance of protecting creative livelihoods in a reflection that extends well beyond the individual writer:
“We are not protecting only individuals, we are protecting the possibility that a culture can continue telling its own stories, and that those stories can survive us.”
One last conversation for Season 8
I could not have imagined a more fitting way to close this season of Intangiblia. We began with the lives of creators and the many ways they find their voices. Along the way, we explored the people, institutions, rights, and relationships that make it possible for those voices to reach others. And we end with a man who discovered the world through a small collection of books on an earthen floor, then dedicated his life to helping words travel beyond the places where they were first written.
My sincere thanks to Granit Zela for sharing his story, to the International Authors Forum for its collaboration throughout this season, and especially to Serena for her generosity, dedication, and support in bringing these conversations together. Thank you as well to everyone who has listened, shared an episode, discovered a new creator, or joined us in thinking about what it really means to build a life around creativity. Somewhere, perhaps in a language you do not speak, there is a book that could change your life, and someone is working, sentence by sentence, to bring it to you.
Listen to our Season 8 finale, Granit Zela: The Job Where You Argue With Every Sentence, on Intangiblia.
Intangiblia™ is a bilingual podcast available in English and Spanish.
Give Your Words a Future
Every book carries more than the words printed on its pages. It holds years of imagination, countless creative decisions, and the possibility of reaching readers across languages and generations. Protection for the Inventive Mind is my interactive fieldbook designed to help you recognize the value of what you create, understand the intellectual property rights connected to your work, and explore ways to protect and develop it. Through practical exercises and accessible guidance, it invites you to think beyond the moment of creation and consider what your work needs to continue finding its place in the world.
The views and opinions expressed (by the host and guest(s)) in this podcast are strictly their own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the entities with which they may be affiliated. This podcast should in no way be construed as promoting or criticizing any particular government policy, institutional position, private interest or commercial entity. Any content provided is for informational and educational purposes only.
