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Will you be in London on September 29? If so, we'd love to celebrate International Translation Day with you! Join us at Waterstones Piccadilly for a conversation with Deborah Smith (founder of Tilted Axis Press and co-winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize), Laura Barber (Publishing Director for Portobello Books), and Adam Freudenheim (Publisher & Managing Director of Pushkin Press). The panel will be chaired by Jonathan Ruppin, Literary Director for Orson and Co. and founder of the English PEN Translated Literature Book Club, and will include a Q&A featuring questions submitted to UK Editor-at-large Megan Bradshaw by Asymptote readers worldwide. RSVP at or invite your friends to our Facebook event page now!
In case you missed it, this past Friday marked the debut of an exciting new column on the Asymptote blog! Around the World with Asymptote gathers dispatches from our 80+ staffers based in six continents. The first installment offers insider perspectives on literary goings-on across India, North America, and Romania. For the latest coverage from our eyes and ears on the ground, be sure to check back each Friday at our blog!
Recently, our new Blog Editor Madeline Jones spoke with Penny Hueston, Senior Editor at Melbourne-based Text Publishing, about Hueston's work translating the inimitable style of Marie Darrieussecq, the ways her own editing and translation processes relate, and the exciting projects she has planned. We highlighted an excerpt from Men in a recent installment of Translation Tuesdays, curated by Asymptote for The Guardian Books Network.
How did you first begin translating?
After spending about four years in Paris doing post-graduate studies, I returned to Melbourne and was asked to translate various articles—by the literary critic Gérard Genette, for example—for the French issue of a literary magazine, Scripsi. I also translated, with the poet John A. Scott, poems by Emmanuel Hocquard and by Claude Royet-Journoud. Poetry must be the hardest writing to translate.
Would you say translating followed naturally from your editing career, or how do the two processes relate to one another for you, if at all?
I suppose you could say that translating is a form of editing. In a sense, both my fields of work are about being more or less invisible; at least that is how I conceive of my work as an editor. Julian Barnes seems to nail a similarity between the two processes: “Translation involves micro-pedantry as much as the full yet controlled use of the linguistic imagination. The plainest sentence is full of hazard; often the choices available seem to be between different percentages of loss.” Damon Searles’ take is that translators “gerrymander unscrupulously”, which could also apply to editors! Javier Marias could be talking about editors when he says of translators: “You have to choose every word. And like an actor, you have to renounce your own style.”
Both processes are about having an intense relationship with a text. Identifying particularities, getting inside the text, as well as having a vision about style and voice. Translating is an act of empathy, of finding something like the appropriate “melody”, but keeping what is idiosyncratic to the writer.
I continued to translate once I’d become an editor, because I enjoy translating and think it is an immensely important contribution to literature. At Text Publishing, the percentage of translated books on the list is about 20%, which is very healthy. I edit a lot of the translations and, of course, being a translator myself helps me to understand some of the decisions translators make in their work. When I can refer to the original, in the case of Italian (for the novels of Elena Ferrante, for example), or French (for books by Yannick Haenel, Elisabeth Badinter, Hélène Grémillon, Muriel Barbery, Raphaël Jerusalemy, Nancy Huston, among others), it helps, in discussions with translators and authors, to ensure that the idiosyncrasies of the source language are in some way retained in English. The priority in translation, in my opinion, is to render the English idiomatic and fluid, so that we don’t have that unsettling sensation of reading translatorese—some kind of hybrid English. And this is exactly what an editor does, too, identifying knots in the fabric of the prose.
There are instances in translation, at a syntactical level, for example, which are similar to editing: as English is not gendered, the qualifiers and modifiers have to be closer together, so sometimes longer French run-on sentences of nouns and agreeing adjectives need to be broken up—just as one might suggest to an author in editing a text in English.
Your most recent translation, Men by Marie Darrieussecq, is about a French actress working in Los Angeles who falls for an actor-cum-director there. But though Solange is a recurring character in Darrieussecq’s books, Men is not a sequel to All the Way, for example, which you also translated. How did you approach translating a character and a voice that you’ve translated before, knowing that this book is a separate entity, and about a different Solange?
Solange only appears in these two most recent novels by Darrieussecq. In All the Way she is a young adolescent stuck in a provincial Basque town. She is desperate to learn about sex, about relations between parents and children, between girls and boys, and between men and woman. In Men, Solange is in her thirties, she has had a child, whom she has more or less abandoned (he is living with her parents); she is doing bit parts in Hollywood as a mediocre actress when she falls for a charismatic black actor, Kouhouesso, who is intent on making a movie of Heart of Darkness in the Congo. Solange is desperate to play a role in his movie and in his life. The two books are completely self-contained and Men is not a sequel in any conventional sense.
But it is the same charming, self-obsessed Solange, eager to try new experiences, intelligent but naïve, obsessive and a bit ditzy. Just as it was not difficult to channel the voice of a confused, risk-taking teenager in All the Way, I found it equally enjoyable to give voice to a thirty-something woman still drifting, still looking for the perfect object of her affections. I always read my translations out loud as I go, especially when it is an interior voice like Solange’s. Darrieussecq cleverly narrates Solange in the third-person, but uses an interior point of view. So she has Solange narrating herself: “She, Solange, …” This technique allows for a fascinating double perspective on the character, a cinematic interior/exterior shot, a close-up from a distance, if you like, the ability to speak with all the intensity of subjective experience, but also to analyse the experience objectively. Until last year, Darrieussecq was a practising psychoanalyst and I wonder if the close-listening experience she brings to her novels is connected with that other part of her career.
I’m sure Darrieussecq had a lot of fun writing the character of Solange, through whose voice in Men she can play with all sorts of preconceptions about the French, about Africa, race, colonialism, bigotry, chauvinism, filmmaking, Hollywood hype, and of course, romantic love, sexism, and sex. Just as she did as a teenager, Solange fantasises about the man she thinks she loves and is forever imagining deluded scenarios and putting herself in extreme situations in order to somehow test his love for her—most of the time her illusions are shattered. But she is a survivor, and her ability to apprehend the bizarre side of things, especially the way her body connects with the physical world, suggested some of the tonal elements I tried to imbue her voice with in English—an openness to experience, coupled with a droll sense of her own shortcomings.
It was a joy to get back to Solange’s voice in Men. I feel as if I know Solange intimately; she has become a friend, like her author. Indeed, as Marie has said, Solange is her if she had not become a writer—all part of the “auto-fiction” element in Darrieussecq’s writing.
This is how, in an interview, Marie described the Solange of All the Way: “The contrast between what she thinks, what she says and what she actually lives was what interested me most, as a writer. I hope the book is both crude, cruel sometimes, and funny. And I like Solange because she’s a little philosopher who really likes to deal with the world. She’s also a ‘little soldier’, she’s valiant and so obstinate that she goes far beyond her own limits, sometimes without knowing it. She’s curious and she takes risks”.
Part Two of this interview will run in the next Fortnightly Airmail. For more translator profiles, navigate over to our blog for conversations with Lydia Davis, Adam Morris, and Jeffrey Green.
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