Maitresse

Helen DeWitt at the American University of Paris

Helen DeWitt is in town from Berlin this week at the invitation of the Center for Writers & Translators, the Department of Comparative Literature and English, and the Masters in Cultural Translation at AUP.

The event will take place Thursday, December 1st, at 6:30 pm at 147 rue de Grenelle, 75007, ground floor.

DeWitt's most recent novel, Lightning Rods, was published by New Directions this fall and is receiving glowing reviews. Her first novel, The Last Samurai, has been translated into twenty languages, and is not to be confused with the Tom Cruise film of the same name.

The Los Angeles Review of Books has a panoply of coverage of Lightning Rods, including a review by Scott Esposito, here.

DeWitt will discuss the topic of translation in the context of a range of phenomena that are only partly linguistic, among them bidding conventions in bridge and the aesthetics of programming languages.

The general public is welcome. Please RSVP to Daniel Medin (dmedin@aup.edu).

“Est-ce le parfum d’une robe / Qui me fait ainsi divaguer?”

Keri Walsh has an article about Adrienne Monnier in the current issue of Brick Magazine that I encourage you to go and read.

Interestingly, Keri spends a bit of time discussing the translation into French of "The Love Song of J. Alfrd Prufrock" that Adrienne Monnier and her life partner, Sylvia Beach undertook. 

It was at the crossroads of their two poetic traditions, French and English, that Beach and Monnier undertook one of their most influential joint works, the first French translation of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which appeared in Monnier’s Le Navire d’Argent in 1925. For its first French appearance, Beach and Monnier deleted the epigraph from Dante, and in keeping with Prufrock’s stilted temperament, they wisely chose the formal “vous” for the famous first lines of the poem: “Allons alors, vous et moi” (“Let us go then, you and I”). Their translation reminds us that “Prufrock” is a poem that is deeply at home in French, inspired by the decaying urban scenes of Baudelaire and the Symbolist verse of Jules Laforgue. This provenance is especially apparent in the poem’s more hypnotic, undulating passages. The lines that follow Prufrock’s “hundred indecisions” lose very little in their French adaptation and scarcely seem to require translating at all: “Temps pour vous et temps pour moi, / Et temps encore pour cent indecisions, / Et pour cent visions et revisions, / Avant de prendre un toast et un thé.” Monnier remarked on the ease of rendering the poem, even though she lamented the necessary loss inherent in the process. For Eliot and others, she named the status of “poor translated poet” as a kind of exile. And indeed, there are passages that utterly resist the move into French: the alliterative noise of Prufrock’s “Do I dare?” hardly comes through in the French “Oserai-je?,” nor is the translation “Est-ce le parfum d’une robe / Qui me fait ainsi divaguer?” a satisfying substitute for the jangling rhythm of “Is it perfume from a dress / That makes me so digress?” Both in what the poem captures (that entrancing, prolonged French sound of the narrow streets that seem returned to their native habitat when they become “des rues étroites”) and for what it loses (those plosive sounds, that distinctly English self-deprecation, the deflationary effect of Eliot’s light rhymes), their translation reveals the poem’s origins and allegiances in a new, Parisian light.

Keri pretty much nails the deficiencies of French for an Anglophone writer, and the subtle attractions of it as well. I'm writing the same project in both English and French at the moment, and while I love the feel of French, I much prefer the sound of English.

Which doesn't bode well for the French half of my project, but oh well. It's a worthwhile exercise, no doubt.

the politics of translation

cross-posted from tumblr.

There's a fascinating piece up at Three Percent from the Croatian author Mima Simić, whose short story "My Girlfriend" was recently published in Dalkey Archive's Best European Fiction 2011 anthology. Simić explains that the edits Dalkey performed on her story-- which is written from the perspective of a woman and is therefore about her also-female girlfriend-- changed the meaning of it entirely, seeing as how they made it so that the story was told from the perspective of a man about his girlfriend. Whoops. Quite a slippage. [NDRL: See Dalkey's response, here]

This is egregious enough. But what I find really interesting about the edits are the small ways in which the editor (intern?) made adjustments to the wording ostensibly in the service of clarification:

original:
And now, after four years, it’s sort of passé, a matter too inappropriate to discuss

edit:
And now, after four years, it’s sort of too late – it would be too delicate to bring it up.

PASSE is not the same as too late. It has its own register, meaning and TONE. If I used it, that’s because I WANTED to use it. There was NOTHING wrong with the original, so why change it?

Simić explains that she did the translation from Croatian to English herself, and had it proofread by various native English speakers, including a creative writing instructor. But from the looks of the edits, whoever made them was treating the text as if it were "only" a translation that wasn't fully expressing the meaning of the original (without, one imagines, any access to the original Croatian). Why change it? Because to the editor it must have sounded a bit "off." The editor does not seem to even consider the idea that the phrasing and diction could have been deliberate choices made by the author. You can just see the editor sitting at his desk, keenly aware that he's working with a text that may be flawed because it was executed by a non-native English speaker. There's a very subtle element of condescension there, in the change from "passé" to "too late."

The change of the narrator's gender, however, would indicate that he didn't at all understand what the story is about. All gestures toward "clarifying" the meaning of the piece are therefore rendered suspect.

So while it is a great thing that Dalkey does this kind of anthology, and yay for more work in translation, what I was suggesting last week about the way we read authors in translation is underscored here. Even when we're welcoming with enthusiastically flung-open arms fiction from "marginalized" literary lands like Croatia ("Marginalized" from a Pamukian standpoint, because their authors are too rarely translated into English-- Simić calls herself, tongue in cheek, a "barbaric creature from the Balkans"), the literature still has to pass through editors who subject that writing to (in this case) an American, heteronormative standard of sense and meaning. The work of this editor demonstrates the attitude that when it comes to translations, it's acceptable for editors to toy with a text without showing the kind of restraint they might employ if they were working with the text of a native English speaker. The assumption is-- Simić's English (and her narrator's sexuality) is somehow foreign, and must be neutralized.

In the age-old translator's dispute over whether a work should efface all signs of foreignness or retain some trace of the original language and culture, this case goes a bit too far in the first direction.

[UPDATE: Michael Orthofer writes about the edits here, and posts Dalkey's response. Blaming the problem on a deadline is fine, but the way translations are edited, and the attitude of an editor towards a translation, is worth thinking about at more length. Chad Post gets into those issues here.]

Provincializing Pamuk

I'm cross-posting something I wrote on my Tumblr, because it's the kind of thing I would have normally written here, except it happened to come out over there.

I'm thinking about what Orhan Pamuk had to say at the Jaipur Literary Festival this past weekend, which I find fascinating, whinging, problematic, and wrong-headed, all at the same time:

"Most of the writers at a festival such as Jaipur [write] in English," he said. "This is maybe because English is the official language here. But for those writing in other languages, their work is rarely translated and never read. So much of human experience is marginalised."

He goes on to complain that literary critics "provincialise" his work:

"When I write about love, the critics in the US and Britain say that this Turkish writer writes very interesting things about Turkish love. Why can't love be general? I am always resentful and angry of this attempt to narrow me and my capacity to experience this humanity," he complained. "You are squeezed and narrowed down, cornered down as a writer whose book is considered only the representation of his national voice and a little bit of anthropological curiosity."

1. The fascinating part is the way this intervenes in a larger conversation about national literature that I've been observing and writing about for some time (sometimes in public, sometimes in this Word doc I keep on my computer).

2. The whinging part--isn't it obvious?

3. The problematic part is that Pamuk implies that the Anglophone literary world is the only world that really counts, and if you don't publish in English it's as if you don't publish at all. "...their work is rarely translated and never read." As if to have one's work read only by other speakers of your native language is about the same as no one reading it at all. [I just realized I've been all hey, my novel's coming out soon, but it's coming out in French and not English, so I guess I'm marginalized too. Awesome.]

So he's arguing that non-Anglophone writers need to be translated into English to be "read" (by Anglophones, who it would seem are the only readers that matter). But then he's complaining that once translated, those writers are treated as representatives of their countries in ways they find limiting. 

I'm sorry, but how can a work in translation not be treated as a work in translation, and therefore as a representative of another culture? Especially if a plea is being made to translate more for the sake of translating more? To what extent is Pamuk suggesting we erase cultural difference in the service of Literature?

4. The wrong-headed part: because I don't think this is the conversation we should be having anymore. The horse is dead. We need new ways of thinking about world literature that don't presuppose the Anglophone world to be the center of anything. (Cf the world literature manifesto that came out in France a few years ago, in which the Paris was declared to no longer be the "center" of Francophone literature.) It's at least someplace to begin. Words are powerful. Ever hear of performative speech acts? (No? Ok, read this.) If you don't want to be a Turkish writer, what kind of writer do you want to be? Don't just complain: change the conversation.

Charlotte Mandell on Zone

You'll want to read this interview with Charlotte Mandell, over at Conversational Reading.

And then you'll want to read Charlotte's translation of Mathias Enard's novel Zone, just published by Open Letter.

Here's an excerpt from the interview:

SE: Obviously, taking the period out of the equation forces a significant shift in punctuation in this book. Did you more or less follow Mathias Enard’s lead on the punctuation, or did you make any significant shifts from what he did in the French? And how did the punctuation come into play as you attempted to recreate in English the frequent shifts in mood and register that the book’s narrator goes through?

CM: Funnily enough, I don’t think I made many changes in the punctuation. Somehow the run-on sentence moved very easily, almost effortlessly, into English–is it because the narrator admires William Burroughs and Ezra Pound, I wonder? Zone was one of the most effortless books I’ve ever translated, once I got into it and began to inhabit the voice of the narrator. I make it a policy never to read too far ahead in a book, so that I feel I’m part of the creative process as I’m translating the book–I figure the author didn’t have the luxury of reading his book ahead of time, so why should I? I also like not knowing what’s going to happen next, so that my translation can feel as fresh as the original. Of course once I’m done with the rough draft I go over and revise and revise–I usually end up with three or four drafts of a book before I’m happy with the final version. But that policy of not reading ahead helped me in the case of Zone, I think, since there is such an interesting progression in the narrator’s voice as the book goes on.

I sent the final draft to Mathias Enard when I was done, and he made surprisingly few changes. He seemed happy with how it sounded in English, which of course was a huge relief to me.

Actually one of the things Enard wanted to change was my translation of the very first–well, I can’t say sentence, but the first line of the book: “tout est plus difficile à l’âge d’homme,” which I had initially translated as “everything is more difficult when you’re an adult.” Enard pointed out that “l’âge d’homme” is more fraught in French, and it conjures up Dante’s “midway through life’s journey”–he wanted it to bring Dante to mind, but also that midlife crisis moment that the narrator is experiencing. So Robert (my husband, the poet Robert Kelly) remembered the Fool’s song in “Twelfth Night”:

When that I was and a little tiny boy
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man’s estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
‘Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.

and Mathias and I agreed that that “man’s estate” was a good phrase, and more resonant than just “adulthood” or “manhood.”

More here.

That is all.

Charlotte Mandell on translating Zone

 If you haven't already heard about Mathias Enard's Zone, you should be hearing a lot more about it in the months to come, on the road to its English publication in December.  (I've lost track of how many times I've mentioned it on this blog.) It was THE book of the rentrée in 2008; it won the Prix du Livre Inter; Claro called it "the book of the decade, if not of the century" (ok he and Enard are tight, but that doesn't mean he's wrong); François Monti called it "a novel for the ages"; and I'm here to tell you: it's really good.

But the reason I'm telling you about Zone yet again is because the English translator is Charlotte Mandell (who I also mention here more times than I can count, because she is a top-notch translator and friend), and Charlotte just did a great interview with the NEA's Art Works blog (Charlotte won an NEA grant to fund her translation of Zone).  Here's an excerpt:

NEA: Zone offers a unique challenge with its one-sentence format. Why did you decide to take on this translation?

MANDELL: There’s nothing else like it out there! Especially not in French. One of my favorite novels is Joyce’s Ulysses, and Zone reminds me a little of that, and a little of another of my favorites, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, with some Apollinaire and Burroughs and Pound thrown in for good measure. Translating a 500-page sentence combines the creativity of translating poetry with the challenge of translating difficult prose. Zone is narrated on a train, and it has the rhythmic, slightly lulling feeling of being on a train, but it also has a sense of urgency and inevitability in French that I wanted to recreate in English. I loved the continuity and flow of the text, and I really loved the experience of translating it—I was always mid-sentence, no matter where I stopped for the day! I never read ahead when I translate, so I was always wondering what was going to happen next in the story. Translating Zone was one of the most enjoyable translation experiences I’ve ever had.

You can read the rest here. And plan on blocking out some reading time over Christmas break-- the book will be out in the US December 14th from Open Letter. (The same lovely people who bring you the blog Three Percent.)

(And in case you missed it, you can read my interview with Charlotte here.)

(And now I'll stop with the parentheses.)

Deux langues dans la bouche: Vanina Marsot's "Foreign Tongue"

Guest post! Dear readers, please welcome Julie Kleinman, who is a Paris-based writer, a PhD candidate in anthropology at Harvard, and my frequent partner-in-crime. In one of those weird intuitive moments that I can never justify, I thought it would be great to get her together with the writer Vanina Marsot, whose novel Foreign Tongue I had just read and loved. What follows is Julie's take on the book and their chat. 

Vanina Marsot divides her time between Paris and LA.  Foreign Tongue, her first novel, is about a Franco-American woman working as a translator in Paris, and ironically, it has the great distinction of being an untranslatable novel.

Over to Julie.

When I tell people that I live in Paris, people often gush, “You're so lucky! Paris is so romaaaantic!” I never really got it. Why romantic? Because it's pretty? So is Budapest.  At some point, when Paris became the place where I live and work, where I take the metro to and from my apartment, along more or less fixed trajectories, at some point I must have stopped noticing. What made the city so beautiful, that juxtaposition between the intricately detailed and the slightly worn and dingy, faded into the background. Something that can wake up this sagging attention for a moment, like the April light over the Seine in the evening, until it gets lost again in the metro-work-sleep routine.

Vanina Marsot's debut novel, Foreign Tongue, is the rare kind of book that shakes you out of this torpor, inspires you, gets you to notice the beauty of details and interactions around you, long after you've finished it. It's one of the few books I have insisted on reading in the crowded number 4 line at rush hour, before excitedly walking up the rue de Seine to a dinner party a block from the café where Anna, our protagonist, flusters and blushes her way through a first interaction with tall, dark, and handsome Olivier. The intense precision and originality of the scene are the kind of things Marsot does so well, and makes the book stand out from almost everything I have read by and about Anglophones in Paris.

I was lucky enough to have coffee with Vanina Marsot at a bar called Le Carillon in the 10^th, to talk about Foreign Tongue, life in Paris, and how to translate “bobo” into English. The novel is an untranslatable story about translation, a love story about language. Anna, American-French and recently heartbroken, moves to Paris from L.A. (Marsot's other residence), where her aunt lends her an apartment. There, she meets up with old friends, including an older man she calls Bunny, who suggests she find some translation work to make ends meet. She ends up translating a mysterious erotic novel, whose anonymous author is the subject of speculation and interest. She starts translating the rather misogynistic, heavy prose, before she meets Olivier, a French actor-director. Suddenly the novel-within-the-novel doesn't seem so horrible to Anna. Paris seems brighter.

 Although a big plot line in the book involves Anna's romantic entanglement with Olivier, this story becomes significant not as the center of the book but by how it relates to the larger arc of Anna's life and the translation she is working on. Nonetheless, her excitement over Olivier and the enticing world of the Parisian literary and theatre scene he introduces her to allow us a glimpse at Parisian intimacy and high society, where Ministers rub elbows with the literary elite (in France, as Marsot shows, they are sometimes the same; many politicians publish books on things like the ancien regime or the early history of the E.U.).  It also offers another take on a story that will not be so unfamiliar to my fellow Americans who have fallen for a certain kind of French man.  He is at once intrigued and baffled by Anna, this American woman, and we have the impression that Olivier just can't get his head around her independent behavior. You might have the urge to tell her to stop being tugged around by him, but you can feel the beauty of the morning light in her apartment, imagine the taste of the cafe-creme and croissants he's brought up from the bakery, as they read Liberation and do the crossword together.

 

In the novel, we discover a new side of Paris. What other book about Paris discusses a things like a Senagelese feminist collective weaving clothes in Barbes with the same ease as a libertine sex club? Sitting in a Saint-Germain cafe, and then collecting marabout cards at the Gare du Nord? The magic of Foreign Tongue lies in the details, as Marsot brings you a Paris you may not have expected, which includes African marabouts and exaltation at the supermarket Monoprix. I asked her how much she invented: a few cafes, she admits, including one whose unlikely name foreshadows the twist at the end. Still, she says, “I wanted it to be like the Paris I know. Paris is an informal hobby,” which she keeps working on. She's lived in so many arrondissements, from the 11^th to the 16^th, the 2^nd to the 5^th, so this knowledge keeps expanding. (Which one is the best? “The 11^th.”)

 

Marsot's Paris is both a Paris recognizable to visitors and one that only a connoisseur of the city knows. Between these two Paris-es exist many foreigners who make this their home: on the one hand, they have their neighborhood, what Marsot to me described as the “villages that make up Paris, each with their own bakery, restaurants. Of course everyone thinks their village has the best ones.” On the other, they have the landmarks to remind them they live in something bigger, and the walking itineraries that take them between these two.

 

But it's a whole city too, she explains, not just a mosaic of villages: “My dad [he's French], doesn't know Paris like I do, so I got to discover it for myself. And rediscover places he knows, like Caveau de la Huchette, where he went in the 50s and appears in the novel. Walking is so central to knowing Paris. Every year I do the same walk, from the Marais through the Seine islands, the Latin Quarter to Saint Germain and then back across the river to the Palais Royale. I check to see if my favorite places are still there, what the new places are. I've been doing the same walk for ten years, and my favorite places are still there.”

 

Can we say, then, that Paris doesn't change much? Some people call it a “Museum-city.”

“No,” says Marsot, “I don't think that's right. It's definitely not as bad as Venice, where the city is all tourists and cats! In France they are obsessed with public works, with construction, and that keeps Paris functioning and evolving. It's not fixed, so it's not a museum. Parisian urban planners are very practical, very aware of tourists.” If anything stays the same, she says, “It's the pride in doing things well. Like having great bread. Really excellent food is accessible here, it's more democratic, everyone can eat well. You don't have to go to Guy Savoy, you can go to the market. “ So is Paris expensive like people say? “You can live really well her for not very much, or you can spend a lot for luxury. It's the best city in the world for films, never mind L.A. In Paris, I feel like I'm living in the center of things, whereas in L.A. I feel like I'm living on the edge. Here I have everything within a walk from my house: a Chinese neighborhood, Polish cheesecakes, Algerian mint tea and pastries.”

 

What about the right-wing nostalgia for an earlier, more "pure" Paris, before immigration?

“It's like they want to make “Mad Men” for Paris. In that, people satisfy a nostalgia for things like three-martini lunches and male superiority. It's silly. I like the idea of different ethnicities mixing, which happens less in L.A.”

 

How do you translate “bobo” for your American friends?

“I just say Bourgeois Bohemian and then explain a bit and they see. We all like to make fun of bobos and bobo cafes and neighborhoods, but in the end, I go to those places and live in that neighborhood, and I'm probably a bobo. I translate neighborhoods. In L.A. they don't know anything if it's not the Marais. 'The 11^th? Where's that?' I tell them it's Silver Lake. The 15^th is the suburbs. I don't care if it's technically in Paris.”  I learned from Vanina that wealthy kids who live in the 16^th and like to display brand names on their jeans and sweaters are now called “les chalala,” or “les chal” for short. This is post-BCBG, nouveau riche.

 

Has her perception of Paris had changed since she first came here as a student in the 80s?

“When I first lived here, I worked for Gaultier. I read that he had said, 'Je suis un mangeur d'images.' I felt like that too, but I wanted to eat up Paris and its ideas. When I lived here as a student, I remember being in a club, seeing Serge Gainsbourg and Princess Stephanie there and thinking, this is the coolest place ever. I can't imagine thinking that now, my idea of fun is having a nice dinner with a bunch of friends. But there's a constant pleasure in novelty, in discovering what's new, whether a new restaurant you haven't noticed before, a new cocktail, or some liqueur you've never heard of that someone's grandmother made, with its handwritten label.”

In the novel, explains Marsot, like in her own life, Paris is “a site for finding clues.” Clues for living. “When feeling lost and misguided, you can look in the city for signposts and tracks to help you find your way.” Currently, she is working on a novel that takes place in part in her birthplace, Cairo (Marsot's mother is Egyptian).

I asked Marsot about this other, almost present language: We find out toward the end that one of the characters is from Cairo: Although your book deals with two languages, translation between English and French, I feel like there's also Arabic, though it's unstated. Especially because I read you were born in Egypt!

“Eve [the character] is from Cairo, I wanted to give her a real history, more depth. Arabic is pre-verbal for me, it's what I've lost, even though it was the first language. It's half-remembered, my earliest memories are connected to Arabic.” There is also a kinship between Paris and Egypt, two very different cosmopolitan cities. “Cairo is sophisticated, overwhelmed by conflicting emotions. It's both magnificent and dirty. In Paris, you find traces of the past. In Cairo, layers of the past and the present are there all at once, there's an intensity of temporality and it's vertical. Everything is piled on top of each other, all at once.”

Foreign Tongue, at the beginning a deceptively quotidian story of heartbreak, reveals its layers like Paris's past, its version of a city, of language, emerging as Anna follows the clues that Paris offers up, in order to figure out her own heart's dilemma. It makes you want to go outside and soak it all up. Suddenly everything is pushing at you with its significance, and the tiny boutique on the corner you never noticed, or the red bookstore only about the Paris Commune, or someone's forgotten and worn wristwatch on the café table: all of these things emerge as clues as you rediscover Paris, or wherever you happen to be.

 

 

Foreign Tongue, by Vanina Marsot, is published by Harper Collins and, if you can't find it at your local bookstore, you can find it online.

[Please note: Vanina will be reading today, Sunday May 31st, at the Café Etienne Marcel (32 rue Etienne Marcel, 75002), from 5-7 pm. Come on by!]

 

 

JM Coetzee at the American University of Paris

Last week, J.M. Coetzee received an honorary doctorate from the American University of Paris, and to celebrate, AUP organized an evening in honor of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist.  Coetzee himself gave a talk about his experiences with censorship under apartheid in the 70s and 80s, but before he did, a group of students and professors from AUP spoke briefly about his work.  One of the talks in particular I thought was worth sharing here, and its author, Geoff Gilbert (co-chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and English) was kind enough to let me reprint it here.

Prosody and novel life

The work of JM Coetzee may be difficult to speak about within the discourses of literary studies; but that is perhaps because it is absolutely literature (whatever that may finally mean). It registers, I think, some elements of the singularity of human life and thought and experience. One of the reasons that his work is bearable-- despite the terrible things which it sometimes witnesses--is that it does seem to believe in, or just to like, life; even if the ethical ‘unit’, the particle of valuable life is difficult to discern-- is almost nothing. But when the unit becomes held in a syntax, given a meaning or a function, something goes wrong.  Gestures seem quickly to turn wrong in Coetzee’s work, once they are extended and elaborated, once they stretch into a proposition.

Thus, I think, it is good, in these works, that I yearn towards you and wish to touch you, however disastrous it is that I will then declare myself a ‘servant of eros’. It is valuable to touch a dog and feel its heart and breathing within my circuits, but empty to claim, absolutely, that it is good to care for dogs. It is almost always good to want to move towards another person’s language, to say some of their words, but no claim to have negotiated a relation to alterity can really ever stand up.

Coetzee’s work values something opening up.  The problems start when we try to formalize that impulse of openness, rather than allowing it to continue just to be open.

The Japanese critic Ukai Satoshi has spoken very strangely about translation, and his words help me think about reading these gestures and the relations between gestures in Coetzee’s work.  He says that while ‘being translated might be an honor for their author, the words themselves are not necessarily giddy with joy as they await their transposition into other languages.  The words that are aware of being translated are [anxious and tense].’ Why do the words of the proud author not share that pride? Because in translation their finitude will be discovered.  The translation must say ‘these words mean thus’; and they are exposed as thin and bare.  It is, says Satoshi, shameful for the finitude of words to be discovered, as they are by translation.  But the shame must be shared between the two sides of the translation; shame described the relation between the written text and the text read, both increasingly aware of their finitude (words just mean thus; we as beings are finite too). And shame opens up novel life.

I wonder how this works in a novel. Here’s a moment from Disgrace, a terrible moment, where David Lurie is in the midst of the burglary of his daughter’s home, and realizes how very badly this will get, bad to death and to rape, for him and for her.  His words begin as the methylated spirits that have been poured on him are set alight, and ‘at once he is bathed in cool blue flame.’

So he was wrong! He and his daughter are not being let off lightly at all! He can burn, he can die; and if he can die, then so can Lucy, above all Lucy!

These are words in a moment of life, and it seems at first that David Lurie has been startled towards a thought which is also an experience, which is a gesture in words. This is something of a lambent cry: ‘so can Lucy, above all Lucy.’ It is concentratedly prosodic; almost operatic.

Prosody takes the rhythms of our world, as they are held in the ordinary rhythms of our prose speech, and pits them against the ghost of an ideal rhythm.  Our performance of a poem is pulled in two directions-- in one way towards the dictates of the matter of our language, and in the opposite, towards the ideal of a form which is not of the world at all.  It offers us a kind of thought about the world, and a kind of active being in the world.

When David Lurie is on fire, his thoughts come out with Wordsworth, as poem.  I do not know if that means he is most fully present here or most fully alienated.  It is very embarrassing to find oneself still in the space of literature when you are burning, and when you fear for your daughter.  Perhaps more embarrassing as it is the literature which has not connected to his students, or with which he has clumsily seduced them.  But here, in this novel, the moving into literature no longer indicates an untimely proposition-- this is not the mont-blanc moment which he wishes his students to see, but something terribly finite.

Rather I think here that I hear something which I can be ashamed of, and that opens novel life.

--Geoff Gilbert

the Salon of Anything is Possible

On this the penultimate day of the Salon du Livre, I have translated for your reading pleasure this excerpt from Christophe Claro's sketch of the book fair, collected in Le Clavier Cannibale (Ed. Inculte, 2009), which I hope he won't mind my citing here:

Why should a book not lead one to commit a crime, when it has so often led its author to the gallows? How can a book be innocent? Who hasn't dreamt of a book who would change his life? Why must it be changed for the better? [...] Let's rename the Salon du Livre the Salon of Anything is Possible. Let us stroll down the aisles while saying to ourselves that on each square inch of table sleeps a work which could drive us to rape, kill, fall in love, eat oranges, churn up the foundations, or become president. Let us lift up the veil (it's outlawed anyway now) and concede the power of the book. Let us bow down before the magnificent or dreadful consequences of reading.  Think of Sade, think of Villepin, think of Cadiot, think of Asimov or Adorée Floupette... doesn't matter which flask as long as you get drunk. To each book its own crime or virtue.

I, Translator

This came in my Google Buzz folder this morning via Charlotte Mandell-- a thought-provoking New York Times op-ed on human versus machine translation, by David Bellos: 

But what of real writing? Google Translate can work apparent miracles because it has access to the world library of Google Books. That’s presumably why, when asked to translate a famous phrase about love from “Les Misérables” — “On n’a pas d’autre perle à trouver dans les plis ténébreux de la vie” — Google Translate comes up with a very creditable “There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life,” which just happens to be identical to one of the many published translations of that great novel. It’s an impressive trick for a computer, but for a human? All you need to do is get the old paperback from your basement.

And the program is very patchy. The opening sentence of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” comes out as an ungrammatical “Long time I went to bed early,” and the results for most other modern classics are just as unusable.

[...]

However, to play devil’s advocate for a moment, if you were to take a decidedly jaundiced view of some genre of contemporary foreign fiction (say, French novels of adultery and inheritance), you could surmise that since such works have nothing new to say and employ only repeated formulas, then after a sufficient number of translated novels of that kind and their originals had been scanned and put up on the Web, Google Translate should be able to do a pretty good simulation of translating other regurgitations of the same ilk.

(Contemporary French novels of adultery and inheritance? Who can he be talking about?)

Mori Ōgai on translation and fallacy

I've been thinking a lot about translation lately, in large part because I reviewed the Dalkey Archive Best European Fiction 2010 anthology for the Quarterly Conversation (forthcoming, I'll let you know when it comes forth).  What seemed most interesting to me about that collection was the idea that there ever is a kind of fiction that can be classified as "European"; and the kinds of stories contained in that volume seem to suggest that translation can be a means of turning disparate cultures into one big melting pot. Then I read this piece on Néojaponisme-- a translation of Mori Ōgai 森鴎外’s Honyaku ni tsuite「翻譯に就いて」 (”On translation”), published in 1914 for a collection of essays on literary technique-- and it sort of complicates that idea, dealing, as it does, with a Norwegian text and Japanese as the target language.

Ōgai talks about the virtues of being "wrong" in translation-- adding or detracting from the original text; of most interest, I think, is the final section in which he contemplates how far a translation should go into the source culture. On translating Ibsen's A Doll House, he writes:

The sweets that Nora eats I translated makuron マクロン. Write rather amedama 飴玉, I was told. Advice like this simply boggles the mind. Tins of almond macaroons have been shipped here in great number so that you may buy them at Aokido whenever you please. Reflect, if you will, on the difference in situation between a woman of the West eating a macaroon and a child of Japan eating an amedama. I recall one scene in a novel by someone-or-other wherein two female university students in Paris’s Latin Quarter munch on macaroons as they trade stories of heartbreak. To switch those macaroons for amedama, of all things — well, it would certainly be comical. The gist of such teachings is that item should appear in translation as appropriately chosen items unique to Japan, but as for myself, I strive to avoid things unique to Japan, the better to produce an extraordinary effect. Furthermore, we only consider here cases where there is an appropriate corresponding item. When uniquely Japanese and inappropriate items appear, the results are quite unbearable.

To be continued when the QC review runs.

Charlotte Mandell reads from Zone

(I am two weeks behind on this one, but had to feature this here, as Charlotte is a friend and someone whose work I admire very much.)

Charlotte Mandell was recently awarded an NEA Translation Fellowship for her work translating Mathias Enard's award-winning 2008 novel Zone from French to English. The novel has the neat trick of being composed of one long sentence stretched over 517 pages, but this doesn't only function as a gimmick, or as some wacky constraint: it actually serves the narrative, cradled as it is during one long train ride from Milan to Rome, deviating down rail lines not taken or taken long ago, reliving and imagining getting off at other places.

But there is more here than one man's ride on an Italian train; Zone contains multitudes. I read much of it this summer, although I still haven't finished, but from what Charlotte reads in this video, she's captured exactly that feeling of a civilization trundling down a railway track at night, en route to the inevitable.

Via Open Letter.

on translating

Anthea Bell on the art of translation at the London Review Bookshop, in honor of their World Literature Weekend:

How difficult is it to find a “voice”?

We’re like actors, impersonating other people. So it depends how much you are in sympathy with the author of the original. It is a terrible thing not to be in sympathy. The late great translator Ralph Manheim once told me how the first book he translated from German was Mein Kampf, and he did get depressed having to think himself into Hitler’s mind. But someone had to do it, for the historical record.

in Rouen on a Tuesday

Two Tuesdays ago, to be precise, Orhan Pamuk was awarded an (another) honorary doctorate, this time from the University of Rouen, in Normandy.  In his acceptance speech, he discussed his love of Flaubert, Rouen's favorite son. Full French text here; English here. Via Pierre Assouline.

*

Wyatt Mason has a good post on Samuel Beckett and writing in one's native or adopted tongue; Mason quotes, by way of example, Beckett writing in English and an excerpt from Molloy written in French and translated into English by Patrick Williams. In one of Beckett's recently published letters, Mason finds an explanation for the shift from English to French: 

It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used when most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping though–I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.

We have only to look at texto-speak to know that language is not, in fact, at its best "when most efficiently abused." But this idea of Beckett's is interesting; and symptomatic of the kind of late modernism Beckett was writing at this period in time, which would then give way to his more postmodern output (the plays, notably).  Late modernism is marked by a kind of fatigue with the old models, but has not yet incorporated new ones; it has an element of "of courseness" to it; an element of "are we really doing this again"-ness.  It is in this context that we can understand Beckett's turn to French, as a way of, in his words, stripping off the mask that, in my opinion, culture and practice had encrusted. 

Via Conversational Reading.

*

I can't believe this is actually a story, like with quotes and everything. 

*
One day I will write a short story about all the idiotic boys I've dated over the years who took Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy as guidelines to live by (how many times before I moved to France did I hear these words from a would-be suitor: "Your dad's an architect? Oh my god, I loved The Fountainhead!").  Now that we're in the midst of a recession, Rand is popular again.  Sam Jordison takes a closer look, finding that although Atlas Shrugged may be" absurd," it is "strangely compelling.""Who is John Galt?" the novel begins.  Jordison summarizes:

Galt, it transpires (after 700-odd pages of hard yakka) is "Prometheus who changed his mind". A man who has refused to accept the increasing socialisation of American society in Rand's bleak future, who has "taken away his fire" and gone on strike. Living on the principle that "I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine", he's retreated to the Colorado mountains, along with his great big brain and a super-efficient energy generator of his own invention. He has also encouraged several other similar heroes to join him. These are all supermen: supremely intelligent, rich, very good-looking and clever. Without them the world outside begins to collapse and destroy itself, as a collection of two-dimensional "college educated" caricatures pass increasingly idiotic legislation in the name of "essential need", and feed ever more hungrily on the few producers whom Galt has not yet taken to Colorado.

If you ask me, Rand's novels are more "repellant" than "compelling," but ok.  Has Houellebecq read Rand, too? That would explain so much.

Christophe Claro on "French literature"

Meandering around the internet last week, I came across the blog of Christophe Claro, who is one of the more unique voices writing the French language, as well as the French voice of Pynchon, Rushdie, and Vollman, whose works he has translated.  Claro's blog, called Le Clavier Cannibale [the Cannibal Keyboard] after his latest novel (Editions Inculte), is a collection of odds and ends and occasionally the site of compelling discursions on matters literary and non-. One in particular, "Aux écrivains la patrie méconnaissante," caught my eye, since I'm interested in the problematic concept of national literatures, and, thinking it might be interesting for an English-speaking audience as well, I took it upon myself to translate it, with Claro's permission. For more on Claro, see François Monti's interview in The Quarterly Conversation.

Writers Without Country*

A cultural magazine (doesn't matter which, alas) has devoted a recent cover article to the following question: "Is French literature dead?" Of course, we have no doubt that the ten writers asked to "respond" are going to nuance, or even contradict this staggering possibility.

We also vaguely imagined that the article would serve as a kind of response to the incredibly dull polemic which grew up around Donald Morrison's article for Time magazine not long ago [Ed: The Death of French Culture].  Nevertheless, the very fact of using this kind of question to hook the reader speaks volumes. The question is provocative, though in a way I can't quite put my finger on.  What bothers me is not that it is provocative (and, to say the least, absurd); no, what bothers me (not that I'm losing sleep over it) is that it contributes tot he reification of this disastrous notion of "French literature" as a defined body of work, a paper entity, go figure-- and the question of the morality of this corpus, whether or not this is in question, conspires to personify an object of study which is all the same difficult to define. 

Because really, what is "French literature"? Books written by French authors? French-speaking authors? French-speaking French authors? A translation doesn't count? Although? If it's written in French? By a French person? What are the necessary conditions to be considered an author of French literature? How many months a year do you have to live in Paris or in Laval? Does French have to be your mother tongue? Does your subject have to wear a beret? When Raymond Federman writes in French, is that French literature? If Jim Harrison were naturalized tomorrow, would he count retroactively?

In short, it's all very complicated. And if "French literature" is a less precise idea than it would seem to be, how can we imagine that this imprecise idea could, like a body, be subject to an organic phenomenon like death? How can a literature die? Did it have to be born first? Is it possible for it to get sick? Does it grow up, or get old? These kinds of questions only reinforce the rancid notion of "generational literature" [a kind of literature that is associated, for better or for worse, with a group of writers of about the same age, and treating the problems of their generation] -- we had more fun, even, with the invigorating notion of the "death of the author."

So contested is the idea of French literature in the writers' responses in said article, that the mere fact that [the editors] thought it might produce something useful says more about literary criticism than it does about literature.  The scare quotes, I hate to say, don't change much.  The word "French" is pretty and all that, but as soon as we apply it to literature, that great destroyer of borders, or, for that matter, with the idea of death, well, we become aware of a a certain anxiety that-- how to put it? Perhaps we ought to reserve this kind of questioning for the obituary section (i.e. "It is with regret that we announce the death of French literature," and a memorial service would be held upstairs at the Café du Flore) or for the medical journals ("Researchers in Marne-la-Vallée have perhaps found the miracle drug to counteract the degeneration of French literature.  Preliminary testing has been carried out on the afflicted inhabitants of St Germain-des-Prés").  However, we look forward to reading the responses generated by this cultural magazine, which we hope is safe from nasty existential headcolds.

*I'm not entirely happy with this title.  Anyone want to suggest something better?

Simone de Beauvoir on La vieillesse

Woke up this morning to find Maud Newton had posted a video of Simone de Beauvoir discussing her book La vieillesse (translated as The Coming of Age), and had asked for a translation of its contents.  Ever one to oblige, and procrastinate, I got right to it. Questions, comments, and critiques of my translation welcome.

 

Q: Simone de Beauvoir, what does "aging" mean to you?

SdB: Many things at once. I wrote a 600 page book to explain, I can't answer you in 60 seconds. Ok, we can say first of all that to age is an organic phenomenon. The organs evolve, which leads to a slowing down and even the disappearance of the principal biological functions. This is connected to social and economic conditions. Because an older man no longer has the same ability to [deal with] fatigue and work, he is retired or he retires, he stops working.  Which is good for some people, because it allows them to have some more free time, but which is a [terrible?] thing for most people, because not having a job generally signifies a large decline in the quality of life, which is terrifying, and the pensions they receive are insufficient.

Q: You wrote this essay on aging, Simone de Beauvoir, to fight against a society that sees the elderly as pariahs, is that the case?

SdB: Yes. For the most part, we don't say it, but we treat them as pariahs. Unlike in myths and stories where they appear as wise, full of experience, someone venerable and respectable, but when we retire them we prevent them from working, it would be good to give them a decent amount of money on which to live. But we give them nothing, and there is a considerable number of eldery people who are paupers in France and the US.

Q: You say that Western society treats the elderly as pariahs, but is this not the case in Socialist nations, like Soviety Russia?

SdB: IT's not exactly the same thing. In Soviet Russia there is the slightest difference between the salary of a worker and the pension he receives after he has been retired [sa mise à la retraite]. There are also retirement homes, which are, if not more comfortable, more enjoyable, because the residents have the chance to get together, play games, take part in discussions.  We do this too, but there is a much smaller quantity of hospices and retirement homes in which the residents can enjoy their free time. [truncated, she gets repetitive]

Q: Do you consider that intellectuals like yourself, like most writers, grow older in a privileged fashion?

SdB: Absolutely.  On one hand, we generally belong to a privileged social and economic class, which means we have more money, we don't suffer from the same privations. But on the other hand, as has remarked [many a?] gerontologist, the more engaged intellectually the aging person is, the more slowly their faculties decline. If you have a good memory, if you exercise your memory, you will continue to keep it. And then you are someone who is curious, you know how to keep your mind occupied, which is very important, because, sadly, many elderly people, it's tragic for them, they literally die of boredom.

Q: But for you personally, Simone de Beauvoir, does it seem terrible to you to age?

SdB: No; it seemed terrible to me at one time, I said to myself "I'm going to get older," and there is a stage in my life, which is now, to get over. This happened around age 50-55. I think we think of it as a kind of obstacle you have to get past [ligne à franchir]; everyone feels it, male or female, at a certain point in their life.It can come very late, at 70 or 75 years old, or very early, there are people who are old by around 40 years old, it depends on one's health, economic conditions, their job status, on their circumstances.  At this time, I feel there is a line I have just passed, there are some things I can no longer do, or no longer want to, like walking [around the city], which I did a lot in my youth. But that's it, I'm not going to spend my time saying this line has been passed, I'm alive and I do my work and I look around me and don't think about what's over, I think I have this time to live, and I prefer to put it to the best possible use.

Q: Do you not think it's more difficult for a woman to age than for a man?

SdB: No--

Q: Because it's terrible to no longer please.

SdB: That's a widespread idea, but the moment a woman thinks her life as a woman is over actually comes much earlier, they experience a terrible crisis at the moment of their menopause. They can no longer have children, they imagine that they are no longer desirable-- it's very often at this particular moment [that the crisis takes place]. 50, 55 years old, that's not really old age. But generally after this passes, they are more serene than they were, now that they no longer have to fight to stay in the category of 'young women', when they were disadvantaged in this category.

Q: So how old is "old age"?

SdB: I can't give an exact number. Socially, we place it at 65 years old, because that's the average age of retirement. It's at that age that we think men should stop working. So we say that old age begins for everyone at 65 years old. But chronological old age is not the same things as biological old age, nor is it the same for everyone. You have some people who at 55 years old are terribly used-up, who have the body of an 85 year old, and you have 85 year olds who are extremely vigorous, who can keep up with someone aged 50. So there is an enormous difference, and we cannot say that old age arrives at one age or another.

Q: In fact, Simone de Beauvoir, this essay on aging is important because it is a comprehensive work, the consummate text on aging.  Do you think it will do for the elderly what The Second Sex did for women?

SdB: Yes, that's what I had envisioned. I wanted to think about [the subject of ] aging in all of its aspects the way I did [the subject of ] woman.   From a biological, anthropological, historical, social perspective-- that is, how it exists in our society today; and then on the other hand I wanted to treat the "being in the world" [l'etre dans le monde] of the elderly person, a little like what I did for women, the lived experience, that is to say, look at how he reacts in different situations, his relationship to his body, his self-image, his sexuality, his relationship to time, to what is past and what is to come, his activities, his plans, and his daily relationships with other people, his loved ones, everything that has to do with money...

Q: You say that society condemns the elderly. But according to your historical analysis, every society has always condemned them.

SdB: That is to say, there have been periods when there were only privileged old people, where we didn't speak of old age; in France in the Middle Ages your life was over at 35 years old. So in this case we can't say that the elderly were mistreated, since men didn't live to see their old age. And the rare privileged ones, as in Greek and Roman times, since they were rich and had property, since they were at the head of the family, they were respected, not because of their age, but because of the role they played in society. Except in feudal times, because the vassals, when they had to defend their earnings, by the sword at times, the father would step aside [s'éffacer] in favor of his son.  Which is what we see, for example, in [Corneille's tragedy] Le Cid.

Q: Do you think your book could have an effect on the situation of elderly people in our society?

SdB: Unfortunately, I don't think so. Books are never enough. It can have echoes in revolts, in movements of public opinion, so it seems to be efficacious, but in itself The SEcond Sex didn't change anything about the female condition. It only helped certain women to become aware of their condition. I know it helped them a lot because I've received many letters. So I think this book will help, on one hand, adults and young people, to see the elderly from a different perspective, to treat them in another way. And perhaps it will help the elderly as well to understand the reasons why they live the way they do.  But for the mass of [elderly] people for whom this is a material and economic problem, who really have nothing to eat or to heat themselves with in the winter, it is obvious that this book won't change anything.

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.