Kamila Shamsie on the perils and delights of translation

Some years ago a friend phoned and said, "You'd better sit down." She and her Italian boyfriend had been arguing about who died at the end of one of my novels. He had asked her to read the final page of the novel aloud – "OK," he said. "In the English version, you're right; in the Italian translation, I'm right."

Attempts at clarification ran into confusion – my Italian publishers insisited the "right" person had died; the Italian boyfriend was adamant that wasn't the case; an Italian-speaking friend said he could see how someone might read it either way. But as I found myself considering the possibility of a "new" Italian ending, I discovered that I wasn't upset by it – if anything I was strangely pleased. I found myself re-thinking the oddness of that reaction last week during the three-day long Festival of Writers in Florence, which was structured around the Premio Gregor von Rezzori – a translation prize set up five years ago in memory of the great writer of that name by his widow, Beatrice Monti, who orchestrated the prize and the festival with the same energy and imagination she brings to bear on her writer's retreat, Santa Maddalena, where I've been a fellow this last month.

Over the three days, in lectures, interviews and private conversations, writers considered their relationship to the individual sentence. "What else does a writer have but sentences?" Zadie Smith asked in the opening lecture of the festival, entitled Why Write? In the days that followed, David Mitchell spoke of sentences as "artistic units"; Wells Tower pointed out that at the start of a piece of fiction, before characters have been brought to life in the writer's mind, "the initial unit of regard is the sentence"; Aleksandar Hemon, the winner of the Best Work of Translated Foreign Fiction prize, said that the work of the writer was to create an architecture out of sentences. If we writers are all so intimately tied to our sentences – as of course, we are – then can we view the translated versions of our novels as "ours" in any meaningful way? Was my strange reaction to the Italian death of a character I loved simply a sign of detachment from my translated sentences?

As I watched the shortlisted writers – Mitchell, Tower, Hemon, Miguel Syjuco and Marie NDiaye – I wondered if their amity and apparent lack of anxiety over who would win could be traced to their sense of remoteness from the shortlisted, translated texts. Though perhaps, also, it had something to do with the good feeling – and sense of good fortune – created by being in Florence on days of sunshine, delighting in an evening of Isabella Rossellini and Colm Tóibín reading famous love letters to a crowded theatre, attending events in the most extraordinary rooms – in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi and the Palazzo Vecchio – where the expressions of the frescoes and statues seemed to respond to the speeches, sometimes in agreement, sometimes in disdain.

But my growing certainty about the gulf between writers and their translated works was reeled in sharply while listening to Syjuco discuss the varying responses that his novel Ilustrado, about the Philippines, receives in different countries, depending on people's knowledge of the Philippines or the degree of similarity between their societies and that described within the novel. So even though they're all reading it in English, a kind of translation is taking place as it moves from one context to another, I suggested to Syjuco. Yes, he agreed. It was familiar to me, his pleasure in seeing the book he wrote shift in meaning between one reader and the next, rendering it a living thing with different relationships to different places and people. I remembered then that the ending that the Italian boyfriend had read into my novel was, in fact, the ending that I had originally planned to give it – before my own love for the character I wrote intervened and saved him. I was never sure it was the "right" decision, or merely the soft-hearted one. So the notion that my original intention lived on in translation – for some Italian readers, if not all – was what pleased me on hearing about "the wrong ending", I'm now convinced.

It was the last of the shortlisted writers – NDiaye, winner of the Prix Goncourt – who reminded me of the bottom line with writers and translation. As readers of her work, in both Italian and French, talked about her extraordinary gifts, I was a mere onlooker – none of her books are yet available in England (though Maclehose Press will publish her Three Strong Women next year). When it comes to books of high merit, the translated sentence that fails to relay some nuance or music of the original, is tinged with loss; the translated sentence that doesn't understand the nuance or music to begin with is negligent; the untranslated sentence is a terrible deprivation. No wonder I felt a little pang about how much translated fiction is available in Italy – the best translation prize of the Premio Gregor von Rezzori was shared by three translators who all produced translations of The Great Gatsby this year; not because of some odd coincidence, but because different publishing houses agreed to commission separate translations, and publish all three at the same time, in low-cost editions, so that readers could buy all of them and consider both Fitzgerald and translation.

Perhaps no one understands the value of translation better than Monti. Unable to read the original German in which her late husband wrote most of his prose (other than some short pieces in English), she reads him in translation, in Italian, French and English. The best of his translators – in Italian – she says, is "like an impersonator", conveying Von Rezzori's voice to her with extraordinary verisimilitude.

As I sat with her in the garden of Santa Maddalena she translated for me Von Rezzori's comments about the German language in which he wrote: "I use it as a foreign language; my mentality is not German." I found myself thinking about how "translated" and "foreign" are two separate things – sometimes a translated world can feel far more familiar than the foreign worlds I might find in a novel of the English language; and as a reader I am at home with both familiarity and foreignness.

Monti moved on to another piece of Von Rezzori's writing, this one about the Italian people among whom he lived: "As a stranger I received from them the privilege of hospitality." That sums up precisely my feelings on having my work welcomed into another language. (And sometimes – whisper it – I suspect that hospitality might extend to improving the sentences, if not the endings, of my books. It gives me great pleasure to believe that in a language I will never know, there reside better versions of my novels than the ones I wrote.)