Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘translation’ category

Pastoral by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz

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My translation of “Pastoral,” a short story by C.F. Ramuz was published in the Winter issue of The Kenyon Review. This is a lovely little story about a young shepherd girl and teenage boy. Ramuz’s particular eye for village life is so clever, so sharp. Here is a short excerpt:

The magpies are carried away like pieces of half-burned paper in a fireplace. They are standing a little below the forest. A pine tree forest. The forest cracks, the forest leans. They watch it tip backward all of a sudden, showing the red of its trunks, and then it leans forward again. It disappears beneath its foliage. The forest is red, the forest is black; it takes turns shifting from red to black. There is an explosion, a crack, and then they stop watching because they’ve thrown their two hands forward against the ground (turning their backs to the forest). The goats stop grazing, astonished at this grass that keeps moving, which seems to escape them like water running up an incline.

Click here to buy the issue.

read, write, translate

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I read. I read because I’m curious. Because I crave alternate realities. Because I want a book to show me how to unravel experience, unravel life. I read because books exist. Because storytelling and metaphor, symbolism and dialogue are all innately connected to who we are as human beings. And who we want to be as human beings.

I read carefully. I read carefully because I love language. I love that language has the power to transform us, alter our relationships, amend our opinions and change the world. I love the awe-inspiring genius of the very existence of language. I read carefully because I am afraid to miss something. Anything. Everything. The truth. The point. The truth beyond the point. I read carefully because I am willing to forget who I am and experience a book’s reality as my own and this vulnerability is worth respecting.

I read critically. I am demanding. I am severe. I loathe a book that gives up on me, that fails to ask questions, that chooses the easy way out, that forgets its vocation. I read critically because I want literature to work its hardest. To achieve something. To affect change and improve society. I want books to have an impact. To make us, readers and non-readers alike, pay attention.

I write. I write because I’m ambitious. Because I want to find new ways of expressing old ideas. Because I want to see if I can say something different out of what’s been said a thousand times before. And maybe, just maybe, say something entirely new. I write because words in combination are mysteriously powerful. Because words are so much more than just words.

I write because words can create a scaffolding of ideas, structures of vision, entire universes of thought. Because fiction is a way to mirror the world and re-cast it at the same time. Because fiction is alive but also contained. Because fiction waits for us on the page and yet once read becomes a gift to the mind that cannot ever be given back. I want to give gifts.

I write as a way of considering the unanswerable questions. Because each piece written offers a possible solution that can then change a thousand times over again. It just needs to be re-written. I write for those endless reconsiderations of the world. For their grace, their ability to forgive us our mistakes, to celebrate our successes in perpetuum. For the possibilities infinite in a fictional landscape.

I translate. I translate because I’m not satisfied with a single set of words to shape my world. Because I want to make other readers unsatisfied along with me. Make them curious about other places, other voices, other ways of thinking. I translate because I believe translation creates permanent pathways between someone here and someone else over there.

I translate because the act of translation makes me into a bridge between the reader and the writer in me, as well as a bridge between the cultures I’ve embraced. Because it allows me to inhabit the expat home I’ve chosen and the real home I’ve left behind.

I translate because translation is an impossible venture, a hopeless work. Because I will never create a flawless translation. I can only construct a path or corridor, a stylized explanation, an echo that resounds in a different key. But I translate because the humility in this repeated attempt and failure makes me a better reader, a better writer.

a review of the new Madame Bovary translation

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I’ve recently come across three excellent articles, all about matters close to my own heart. I’ll mention the first one today and get to the two others either tomorrow or Monday.

The first is Julian Barnes’ Writer’s Writer and Writer’s Writer’s Writer from last week’s London Review of Books. This is not only a thorough and excellent review of Lydia Davis’ much-celebrated and much-discussed new translation of Madame Bovary, it is also a careful discussion of what literary translation is all about and what kind of choices translators must make.

With careful and good-natured severity (the best kind), he explains many of Davis’ choices and compares them to other, previous English versions of Madame Bovary. These comparisons are wonderful for a details enthusiast like me, as each reveals how the various translators interpreted or compromised the original.

I haven’t read Madame Bovary in translation, and I didn’t really plan to until reading this article, but as a translator I am now extremely interested in the choices that its previous translators have made. One choice that Davis made came as a surprise to me – she wanted to mirror Flaubert’s grammar and sentence structure as much as possible. This is a curious choice. Often a French sentence is a little turned around compared to an English sentence, not in terms of subject/verb or the big important parts of the sentence, but in terms of the little clauses and the commas. This is part of the musicality of French, and something that English doesn’t necessarily have.

As Barnes suggests, and I would agree, to keep Flaubert’s grammar in English is a risky decision. It keeps the translation accurate in one sense, but opens up a separate claim to inaccuracy. If a sentence reads awkwardly once it has been transformed into another language, this is a deep betrayal of a writer like Flaubert whose prose is anything but awkward. Which obviously makes Flaubert a most difficult writer to translate.

Barnes’ final critique of Davis is that she isn’t a great fan of Madame Bovary and he wonders whether it is possible to create a truly masterful translation when you are “out of sympathy” with the work. This is an excellent question. I would tend to say no. If you cannot find the beauty of the work in the whole, and not just on a sentence per sentence basis, I suspect your readers won’t either. But Barnes is ultimately fair with Davis, however, calling her translation “more than acceptable.”

For those of you who have read Davis’ translation, or any others, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.

book group enlightenment and a project

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Hello Friday. Very happy to see you. I had my favorite book group last night in our lovely wine caveau. As we enjoyed one of the local wines and nibbled on some gruyère, we discussed John Berger’s To the Wedding. Not only was this a lively, thoughtful and somewhat emotional discussion, it brought me to realize something about the book that I (stupidly) hadn’t understood before. I can’t say what it is here because it might ruin the book for someone who hasn’t read it, but suffice it to say that it changes everything. In a good way. It elevated the novel from what was already a delicate, beautiful story into something more intimately connected to human compassion. To our desire to correct the wrongs of the world. I love how a book can become something else entirely through discussion with other involved readers.

Changing gears a little bit, I would like to put out a small request to my readers. Now, some of you, I believe, are non-Anglophone and some of you, I also believe, are writers as well as readers. I have a fun project coming up with a literary journal later this winter. I’m going to be their writer-in-residence for a month and I will be focusing on literature in translation. To do this properly, I’m looking for some French or Japanese writers who would be interested in submitting their short fiction to me for translation. If you, or someone you know, would like to submit a story, please let me know and I’ll give you more details. And for those of you who are not writers, but avid readers and enjoy my posts on translation, I’ll let you know when the month begins and where to follow along. I hope it will be interesting for everyone.

And with that, have a good weekend. I’ve just started Coetzee’s first novel Dusklands, set in America of all places, and Woolf’s second novel Night and Day. Looking forward to finishing both over the next two days.

tuesday reading notes

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I finished up the last third of Anne Bragance’s Une Succulente au fond de l’impasse and it didn’t radically change my earlier impression of the book. Overall, very disappointing. But I am interested in several other Bragance titles and hope to find something on the same level as Casus Belli among her other books.

In the light of the current upheaval in publishing, I’m curious how this sort of thing continues to happen. I mean, how does a book this blah get published? Who is the lazy editor that doesn’t say, look, this needs some re-thinking, before publication? Bragance is an accomplished writer; I would assume she could handle it. I don’t think this is an issue of my reading in the wrong genre, or missing some deeply interesting or mysterious element of the book. (For what it’s worth, my entire book group agrees the book failed, so it isn’t just me and even if that’s only six people, we rarely come to such easy accord.) The book is touted as serious literary fiction but it reads like a first draft, or three first drafts. If it was meant to be three interconnected novellas, Bragance fails to work both the form and the stories to a satisfying conclusion. The three parts of the novel don’t speak to each other, except on a very superficial level. And as I mentioned before, the three first-person narrators could have all been the exact same person.

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The following most excellent and eloquent essay has been (s)linking around the web these days. The essay is on translation and written by Harvard University Press Editor Sharmila Sen. This bit will stay with me:

A translation is the original text’s wife. If too pretty, the translation must be cheating on her husband, the text. If faithful, the translation must not be very pretty.

I love that. And it was a timely sentence for me to read as I struggle with getting Ramuz into English. I recently got a disappointing rejection from a journal where an intern wrote, “I liked the French but the translation did not work”. Ouch. In the particular story I submitted, there were three POV shifts, a relatively unheard of use of a pronoun that doesn’t exist in English, unsettling shifts in tense and I won’t even go into Ramuz’s obsessional use of semi-colons. So, yes, she’s completely right, the translation doesn’t “work”. And maybe my translation fell short of resolving those issues so I’m more than willing to get back to the two texts and see what I can do to. But this is the struggle with translation…how to recreate/reflect the eccentricity of Ramuzian French in English to an Anglophone reader? I’ll just keep trying…

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My Virginia Woolf project is gaining momentum. I tucked into two of her earliest short stories over the weekend – Phyllis and Rosamond and The Mysterious Case of Miss V.  Phyllis and Rosamond is a detailed portrait of two women as well as a discussion of types. The story tosses the idea of freedom around, personal and intellectual freedom, amidst a discussion of marriage expectations. I won’t go into detail about The Mysterious Case of Miss V. because it was more abstract and less easy to describe, but it struck me while reading both stories that Woolf understood what the coming of modernity would mean for women, both the positives and the negatives, and already in her early work, she was trying to sort out the impending muddle.

And also, a small point, but I’m noticing how Woolf has several of her characters conflate hard, solid facts with the idea of comfort. It is a strange pairing. Yet emotions must have been shifting, unreliable things to get a grip on for someone like Woolf while facts were fixed, and dependable.  Comforting.

Alejandro Zambra – The Private Lives of Trees

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Last January, I bought myself a subscription to the Open Letter Books catalogue. Fantastic decision, this has been a wonderful treat. To date, I have received seven books. I haven’t read all of those seven yet, but the four I’ve managed to read have all been either really good or at least a fascinating reading experience. For anyone who isn’t familiar with Open Letter, they are a small press publishing books in translation, and the books are all quirky and interesting.

Last month I received The Private Lives of Trees by Chilean writer/poet Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell. The title alone promised good things and I sat down with it only minutes after taking it out of the bubble envelope. This is a tiny little book, easy to read in one sitting and perhaps best experienced as a single, contained read.

The story is simple: one evening, Julián is waiting in his apartment for his wife Verónica to come home from her art class. To pass the time and help her sleep, he is telling a story to his step-daughter Daniela called The Private Lives of Trees. He is worried about his wife’s lateness, but trying to keep his focus elsewhere. When Daniela is awake, Julián tells her the story, when she falls asleep, Julián passes his time remembering, worrying, imagining, reflecting…

The book has a brilliant and confident narrator, who resides just outside and above the story. An omniscient with a very subtle personality. This narrator never upstages Julián but provides the story with a light-handed metafictional flavor:

But this night is not an average night, at least not yet. It’s still not completely certain that there will be a next day, since Verónica hasn’t come back from her drawing class. When she returns, the novel will end. But as long as she is not back, the book will continue. The book continues until she returns, or until Julián is sure that she won’t return. For now Verónica is missing from the blue room, where Julián lulls the little girl to sleep with a story about the private lives of trees.

Now I said the story was simple, and that is true, but like all good novellas, The Private Lives of Trees is actually concerned with greater issues and moments than these quiet hours passed between Julián and Daniela. It is a wonderfully modern book, investigating the cracks and confusion of contemporary relationships, contemporary life. Julián considers a variety of reasonable reactions to his situation: jealousy, panic, apathy, anger. Those varying emotions turn this moment of Veronica’s absence into a reflection of his past – his childhood, his mistakes, his successes – as well as a consideration of his possible futures.

bookish news

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The Quarterly Conversation and Open Letters Monthly have teamed up this summer for a group read of Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji. The idea is to read about 70-90 pages a week and they have selected the more recent Royall Tyler translation. I’ve decided to join in and ordered my copy of the translation last week. My only experience with Genji is the original and Seidensticker, so this will be a treat. For other language nerds like me, there exists a very cool website in Japanese of the original Genji Monogatari, with the classical Japanese, the modern Japanese and a Romaji transliteration in three interactive panes. So. Much. Fun.

And I just learned (a month late) that Amazon has decided to launch a translation imprint called AmazonCrossing. Using their ever-so-detailed sales and reviews data, they plan to pick up books which are likely to become big sellers and have them translated. On the whole I think this is fantastic news…more books from around the world making their way into English. The first book they’ve picked is from France, The King of Kahel by Tierno Monénembo. I’ll be very curious to see what other books get on to their list.

this week's reading notes and some Ramuz

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Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie – Why has it taken me this long to read Rushdie? This is definitely a book to read slowly, however, so I’m taking it a few chapters at a time in the afternoons. I am surprised at how much I’m enjoying the narrator’s tangential way of telling the story. I usually dislike interruptions of this kind, moments which reveal the seams behind the main story, but the voice is really strong and it’s clear that these moments when the narrator draws attention to himself will come to be meaningful later on. I do find myself at a bit of a loss for this particular novel because my knowledge of India’s history is so poor.

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens – Yesterday I read one of the best scenes I think I’ve ever read in any classic novel to date. The scene occurs when a wine cask falls off the back of a cart in a Paris street and breaks and everyone in the shabby, run-down neighborhood jumps on the chance to drink some of the wine. Dickens has people building mud walls to catch the flowing wine, soaking it up in their handkerchiefs and sucking on the cloth, lapping at puddles or even chewing on the wood from the barrel staves. It’s a thoroughly disgusting image, but so vivid.

Nouvelles et Morceaux (Tomes 1-5), C.F. Ramuz – Every day I read a few more Ramuz short stories and select one or two to begin translating. I’ve finished three this summer and am sending them around for publication – although I’m finding it difficult to get contemporary journals interested in short stories written in the early 20th century. There are more and more journals interested in translation these days, something I definitely applaud, but most journals are publishing contemporary fiction from around the world, not classic short stories.

Anyway, this week has me working on a lovely story called Les Deux Vieilles Demoiselles (The Two Old Ladies). Ramuz does atmosphere so well and the story takes place on a summer evening, right at dusk, when the stars first appear and when these two sisters have finished their needlework and are sitting at the window looking out into their neighbor’s garden. I love his description of how the shadows of the impending night creep across the room:

Alors le jour s’en alla lentement depuis le fond de la chambre jusque là où elles étaient. On vit les meubles entrer dans l’ombre, on dirait qu’ils se noient ; d’abord ils entrent par le bas et l’ombre monte comme l’eau, et enfin, ils sont recouverts.

[And so the daylight slowly departed from the back of the room up to where they were sitting. The furniture entered into the shadow, it appeared to be drowning. At first, the base of each piece enters and the shadow rises like water, until eventually, they are submerged.*]

A bit later the ladies see their neighbor’s daughter, a girl of barely sixteen, sneak out to the orchard and meet a young man. One of the sisters jumps up, embarrassed and indignant, while the other begins to stare longingly at the scene. The one sister escapes to the kitchen while the other watches the couple. She tries to hear what they are saying and can’t, but suddenly she discovers she can imagine their conversation. She finds the words deep inside herself that she might have once said to some young man. Except, of course, she never got the chance. The scene ends with the sisters trying to console one another, although Ramuz makes it clear that this is impossible.

*I’m still tweaking this passage and making some decisions about how I want to handle it. Ramuz is notorious for his use of the French subject on, which is tricky to make work in English the way he uses it. A literal translation of that second sentence would be: One saw the furniture enter into the shadow, one would say they were drowning. He consistently brings a larger audience, so to speak, into the scene instead of allowing for a straightforward narrator. And you’ll notice he switches tense in that last sentence…just to make my life easy, of course.

a review up at The Quarterly Conversation

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I mentioned a while back that The Modern Library will be coming out in August with a long-awaited translation of one of my favorite novels – Amour, Colère et Folie by Marie Vieux-Chauvet. Well, it’s time to start ordering people! The book is available directly from The Modern Library but can also be found on Amazon.

If you need any encouragement to sample this excellent offering of Haitian literature, check out my review of the book just up at The Quarterly Conversation.

Nabokov on Madame Bovary

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Of the essays I’ve read so far in Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, the one on Madame Bovary was the most complex. Not only did I learn a lot about the novel, but I also got to peek in a window at Nabokov’s study style and passion for writing, translating and reading. His in-depth knowledge of the text reminds me that he believed we could never really read a text but only re-read it. It’s clear he knew the book practically by heart and had spent hours and hours analyzing scenes and conversations, diagramming character relationships and significant details. There are a few books I have read again and again, ones I believe I have nearly memorized, but Nabokov’s intimate knowledge of Madame Bovary made me want to go back to those books and look at them all over again, because surely there is more to see.

 

I also suspect he had a special appreciation for Flaubert because of Flaubert’s boldness in taking on an extremely taboo subject:

 

Indeed, the novel was actually tried in a court of justice for obscenity. Just imagine that. As if the work of an artist could ever be obscene. I am glad to say that Flaubert won his case. That was exactly a hundred years ago. In our days, our times…But let me keep to my subject.

 

Not that Nabokov would know anything about morality-based criticisms of a novel, oh no.

 

For this particular lecture, Nabokov doesn’t only focus on the actual text of Madame Bovary but he brings in a discussion of Flaubert’s letters to his then lover, Louise Colet, written while Flaubert was holed away in Normandy writing the novel. That added input adds a whole new dimension to understanding Flaubert’s intent. We often wonder whether great writers do things on purpose in their books, or if critics see things or find connections/allusions/hidden meanings the writer created by accident or maybe wasn’t fully aware of. The excerpts of these letters show that Flaubert knew exactly what he was doing at all times. And also that he worked very hard to construct his novel in a particular way according to a set of particular intentions.

 

Nabokov taught Madame Bovary to his students at Wellesley and Cornell using a translation by Eleanor Marx Aveling (the daughter of Karl Marx) which is available at Gutenberg. I don’t know how many other translations were around at the same time, but Nabokov has nothing but angry criticism for “the translators”. He went so far as to re-translate huge sections for his classes and made lists of mistranslated words.

 

One of his more interesting criticisms is when he says that the translator incorrectly translates Flaubert’s use of the French imparfait (the imperfect form of the past tense), a device which allows Flaubert to express the notion of uninterrupted time, things a person “used to do”, and any ruptures in that flow (all intentional constructs in his writing).

 

 

In Tostes Emma walks out with her whippet: “She would begin (not “began”) by looking around her to see if nothing had changed since the last she had been there. She would find (not “found”) again in the same places the foxgloves and wallflowers, the beds of nettles growing round the big stones, and the patches of lichen along the three windows, whose shutters, always closed, were rotting away on their rusty iron bars. Her thoughts, aimless at first, would wander (not “wandered”) at random…”

 

 According to Nabokov, Flaubert used the imparfait to fill the entire book with a sense of suspended animation, giving weight to Emma’s feeling of dreary monotony. That a translator would so casually overlook this aesthetic decision must have driven Nabokov insane.

 

Something Nabokov and I do not agree on is whether Charles knew about Emma’s infidelities. I mentioned this in my last post and after reading Nabokov’s essay I had to go back to the text to make sure I didn’t misunderstand something. But some time after Emma dies, Charles runs into Rodolphe (Emma’s first lover) in town and the two men go and drink a cider together. They’re talking but both men are looking at the other, just thinking of Emma. Suddenly Charles looks right at him and says, Je ne vous en veux pas, which means, I don’t hate you, or I don’t blame you. Flaubert, of course, turns the moment inside out by quickly switching to Rodolphe’s perspective and painting Charles in an awful, pathetic light – the same way Rodolphe treated him when he was secretly meeting with Emma.

 

I’m toying with the idea of picking up Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale, another I read in college but have nearly forgotten by now. It might be worth it after learning so much about Flaubert’s writing technique from Nabokov.

 

Otherwise, I’ve got to read Longinus this week. And I started Richard Ford’s Wildfire, which is quite short and I think I’ll finish up this afternoon. I am relatively unfamiliar with Ford’s writing style except for one or two of his short stories. In this novel, he’s using the first person and writes these kind of serpentine sentences with lots of commas and movement to them. I like the technique and how it informs my understanding of the narrator. But more on that later!

 

 

 

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