Interview: Charlotte Mandell

The translator Charlotte Mandell did the heavy lifting for two of the more exciting imports from France: this year's The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell, and next year's Zone, by Mathias Enard.  Mandell, who lives in Upstate New York, is also the virtuoso translator behind Proust's The Lemoine Affair, a collection of literary parodies of writers like Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourt Brothers, and Saint-Simon.  You can find a bibliography and some of her translations here.

M: How did you get started as a translator?

CM: My parents were both university professors, so we spent long summers abroad, first in the Suisse Romande, then in the French Alps.  I learned to speak French at a fairly young age, and I still remember my first conversation in French with a stranger in a train station when I was ten:  we talked about ordinary, everyday things, but I was amazed that I could converse in another language, and be understood.  Then when I was thirteen I read The Adventures of Augie March and had another revelation about language:  things have no inherent reality, but are perceived differently by different people; “pain” could be “bread.”  Reality is entirely relative, and suffering can be replaced by food.  Language is all, and if you can learn to play with language, you can learn to overcome your own relative reality and learn about other people’s perceptions of reality.

I’ve been translating things since high school; I went to Boston Latin School, the oldest public school in the country (it was founded in 1635 – Harvard was founded a year later, to give its graduates something to do), where I studied Latin for five years and ancient Greek for two, along with five years of French.  I translated a lot of the Aeneid in one of my advanced placement Latin classes, and I remember really enjoying the process of translation, the feeling of making an ancient language come alive again.  And it was strangely exciting to read lines from Homer in the original.  I think Latin School is where I first realized that translation could be a pleasure. 

At Bard College, I majored in French literature and minored in film theory.  At Bard every senior has to complete a “senior project,” a thesis-length work that can be creative (if you’re a writer) or critical.  My senior project was a translation of a book of poems by the contemporary poet Jean-Paul Auxeméry, called le feu l’ombre in French, fire / shadows in English.  That won the Lockwood Prize for the best written project at Bard.  (I think I’d like to get that published now – I’ve been looking it over recently and I still like the translations.  Auxeméry is one of the translators of Charles Olson into French, so his work is influenced by Olson, as well as Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley and my husband, Robert Kelly.)  After Bard I considered going to graduate school – I was awarded scholarships to both Brown and Rutgers – but somehow more school didn’t appeal to me at the time, and I wasn’t interested in teaching as a profession.  I was still translating poetry and publishing the translations in various literary journals, but I never thought of translation as a profession.  Then my friend Pierre Joris, a poet and translator, was asked by Helen Tartar (then the editor-in-chief of Stanford University Press) to translate Blanchot’s La Part du feu; he didn’t have time, so he recommended me.  I sent in a 15-page sample that Helen liked, so that was the beginning of my translation career.  I feel very grateful to both Pierre and Helen for giving me that chance.

M: How many projects do you work on at once?

CM: I prefer to work on just one project at a time, but sometimes things overlap.  Right now I’m working on Mathias Énard’s Zone, but I also just finished translating two long essays:  one by Jacques Rancière for the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin about the video art of James Coleman, and another by Jean-Luc Nancy about Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s concept of the récit, for an upcoming conference at Fordham.  I’m also occasionally asked to translate articles quickly for the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. 


M: Do you ever feel as a translator that you're fighting with the text? that it goes in ways you want to resist?

CM: Hmm, that’s an interesting question.  Yes, I think I have experienced that, most recently with The Kindly Ones, when a character I really liked got killed off.  But usually I’m so caught up in trying to render the text appropriately in English that I don’t have time to fight against it – I’m sort of swept along with it, as it were. 

M: How did you approach translating a book of literary pastiches like The Lemoine Affair? Did you look at the literary styles of already-extant English translations of Flaubert, the Goncourt Brothers, etc., or did you work directly from the French? To what extent do you think literary style comes through in translation?

CM: With The Lemoine Affair, I worked directly from the French at first, until I had a rough draft of the entire novella.  Then I did look at Saint-Simon in English, to see how my translation compared with a translation of Saint-Simon’s memoirs done some time ago.  Proust’s Saint-Simon pastiche was the most difficult to translate, because of all the court lingo and the rules of etiquette that I was unfamiliar with.  With the other pastiches, though, I felt that the respective literary styles of each came through clearly enough in the English, so I didn’t feel the need to consult other translations – and of course Balzac and Flaubert felt just like themselves.  Proust is such a master stylist, and the styles he’s parodying are so distinctive, that you just have to stay close to the text to let the style show through on its own, I find.


M: Were there any particular challenges to translating The Kindly Ones? What about Zone?

With The Kindly Ones, the main challenge was the time constraint:  I was working against a deadline, so I had to finish the translation in about nine months.  That’s not a lot of time for a thousand-page novel!  In way, though, that very urgency worked for me, since I just had to dive into it and try to inhabit Max’s voice, and I could put all other projects aside for those nine months.  With Zone, the challenge is to reproduce the style of the narrator’s stream-of-consciousness:  the novel is written around one long sentence, and I need to keep the reader’s undivided attention in English in the same way that the French does – it’s a sort of breathless, urgent, spontaneous, but also deeply erudite style that works wonderfully well in the original.  I hope I can maintain that momentum in English – when you’re reading it you feel as if you’re on the train with the narrator, being pulled inexorably toward some unknown goal. 


M: How do you get interested in translating a particular work?

CM: The writing.  If the writing is interesting, I’ll do it – I don’t care about plot or character development.  That’s why so many different genres appeal to me:  philosophy, poetry, fiction, musicology – so long as it’s well-written, I’m in. 


M: What's on your bedside table right now?

CM: I’m about halfway through Proust’s Jean Santeuil, but I’m considering putting it aside for a while – it’s written by a very young Proust, and his inexperience shows.  It’s disappointing in sort of the same way the explanation of a magic trick is:  you feel cheated somehow.  With Jean Santeuil I feel as if I’m reading Proust’s private rough draft for A la recherche, so I feel a little as if I’m trespassing where I shouldn’t be.  I also have a stack of books by Flann O’Brien waiting to be read – most of them are Myles na Gopaleen articles for the Irish Times, in various collections.  Oh, and P.G. Wodehouse’s Meet Mr. Mulliner, which contains the story “Honeysuckle Cottage,” probably the funniest ghost story I’ve ever read.  I read somewhere that that was Wittgenstein’s favorite story, and Wodehouse was his favorite author.


M: If you were in Paris tonight, what would you be doing?

CM: I wish you hadn’t asked me that!  I’ll start to wax nostalgic…  I could go on for pages on this one.  Let’s see… 

I’d probably be trying in vain to prevent Robert (my husband) from eating too much tripes à la mode de Caen at Pharamond, while I ate ris de veau.  If there were a Double Change poetry reading, we’d be going to that.  There was a conference last weekend on Jean-Luc Nancy that I’d have liked to attend, at Paris VII, I think, and was also a meeting of the editorial board of the Blanchot site around the same time that I wish I could have attended.  There’s a Roland Petit ballet coming up at the Opéra Garnier that I’d love to see, since he was close to Genet – he choreographed a ballet Genet wrote called “’adame Miroir,” which I translated in Fragments of the Artwork.  And I love opera – if Anna Netrebko were singing somewhere I’d go see her.   

Do they still have weekly teas at Shakespeare & Co.?  I remember enjoying those.  I also love having tea at Le Loir dans la théière (The Dormouse in the Teapot) in the Marais.  Or knishes at Jo Goldberg’s.  Or hot chocolate at that place around the corner from Shakespeare & Co. – I think it’s called The Tea Caddy. 

During the day I’d have lunch at my favorite café (Perec’s too--he wrote Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien there), the Café de la Mairie on the place St. Sulpice, and then dessert – millefeuille or some chocolate creation – at my favorite pâtisserie, Gérard Mulot, around the corner.  I’d look at the Delacroix painting in the Église St.-Sulpice and walk over to the Bon Marché for tea in that lovely old-style cafeteria, where Robert and I would watch the Ladies Who Lunch and try to guess what sort of government ministers their husbands were.  Then we’d walk over to Gilbert Jeune or Gibert Joseph and stock up on cheap fountain pens and Clairefontaine notebooks, the quadrille-ruled kind.  Then we’d take the métro to the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, our favorite Parisian park, full of 19th century follies and fake grottos and real ducks.  Or we’d walk around the Luxembourg gardens or the Jardin des Plantes – is there still a yak there? 

There’s a story by Mary Butts called “Mappa Mundi” that tells of a secret, alternate Paris available only to people who know the spell to enter it.  I think everyone who discovers Paris finds this secret other side if they look long enough – passageways they didn’t know existed, parks with strange landscapes, bridges leading to odd islands.  It’s a city that expands from within and creates haunting dreamscapes for anyone who inhabits it:  a city that’s bigger inside than out. 

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