Photo by Vince Passaro
“I tend to be forgetful, or shall we say forgiving, of difficulty. The problem that tormented me for days fades away once a solution, however provisional, allows me to move forward, and further choices often inform or reinforce that choice.
In some sense I am only half a literary translator, and half a writer of fiction. Though since the two are hardly mutually exclusive, I would rather say that I am completely a literary translator, and completely a writer of fiction.”
Edward Gauvin is an American literary translator. He speaks French and Mandarin fluently, but translates only from the former, as his reading level in the latter is lamentable. He decided to answer our questions in English.
How did you start translating literature? What are “your” authors and languages?
I confess I somehow picked up the notion, I don’t know where, that this was a fit pastime for a young man alone in a garret, with nothing to show for his dreams of literature but the certainty of his opinions. I thought it was the kind of job you could grow old doing, while your clothes—you couldn’t afford new ones—gently frayed and fell from fashion. Perhaps you had stayed too long in a foreign city, yet somehow failed to make of it a home. Of course, whatever you translated was beneath you: cheap paperbacks tucked in the pockets of your raincoat, it was precisely their mediocrity that reassured. Days of remonstrating with your editor, of forgetting to shave, of forgetting to notice. Your breath, which you could see at your desk on winter days, sours...
But seriously, many translators I’ve met speak of an “Hey, I can do this” moment, which as we know, is the beginning of ignorance. I am no exception. I began translating in order to share stories I’d read with friends, dared to send a few out, and lucked into publications whose fledgling mistakes would mortify me scant years later. The ever-lovely Susan Harris at Words Without Borders was the first to believe in me, and two years after Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s “Delaunay the Broker” appeared at Words Without Borders, I was an ALTA fellow.
At the same time, I got my first paid gigs from hanging around comic-cons. In the mid-aughts, graphic novels were a boom sector in publishing; major houses were all launching their own comics imprints, and the success of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolishad turned heads, making a certain kind of French graphic import fashionable.
I tend to avoid jostling for “hot” authors, literary or otherwise, from a dislike of competition; Lord knows there are enough to go around. It is not about making a star of any one author, or just desserts for the long-neglected, but something more intimate, like matchmaking, I think: connecting writers with the readers who’ve been waiting to hear from them. I admit to a proclivity for obscurity—hardly rare in literary circles—that is easily satisfied in international literature, where even authors who are stars in their own countries are too often nobodies in English. There are a number of authors I’d like to translate but have no more claim to than a few published short stories and a few abortive attempts to interest publishers. Translator etiquette and the tricky politics of “owning” an author merit their own essay.
What do you like/dislike about your job as a literary translator?
I’d like to think all unhappy translators unhappy in their own way, but I suppose my bugbears are fairly standard. Many of them—the petty ones that routinely frustrate me—have more to do with being a freelancer than a translator per se; for instance, I detest such necessary administrative evils as invoicing. (Perhaps the fact that I don’t yet earn enough to justify, in my mind, outsourcing this task, makes this a more uniquely translatorial problem?) It follows, then, that low wages are loathesome, as are offers that fail to reflect the real cost in time of any assignment, the hours frittered blithely away on pitching, rights chasing, correspondence, promotion, spokesmanship—in short, everything but the honest deskwork of translating. But surely this persistent fiscal undervaluation stems from a more deeply rooted problem, one all translators must face—namely, widespread misperception of what our task entails, the process: the leeway, the rewriting, the adaptation, the localizing... all the changes we make that amount to a new text masquerading as an old. A certain segment of French publishing believes the more you pay a translator, the better translation you’ll get. The people I tell this to—Americans and translators alike—will roll their eyes: it’s a nice idea. But I choose to see in it less quixotry or easily suckered idealism than the sort of principled stand, like championing independent bookstores, that humanist, Vitruvian Europe tends to make a matter of course. That some things just take people to do right is a mindset very alien to pragmatic America’s better living through automation, a cult that won’t admit it is one. Like Soylent Green, Google Translate is people.
More recently, I’ve disliked being pressed for time; rather, disliked when a tight deadline wrings all the pleasure from a piece’s challenges, turning what might have been fun puzzles into panic to beat the clock. Ingenuity in the form of le mot juste is often an emergent property of leisure, yoga, or a brisk walk. Time constraints may be something professional translators face more often than their otherwise-funded colleagues: professors, etc.
What is the most enriching experience you have had?
I tend to feel close not so much to authors as texts. Then again, I tend to like recordings, not concerts. With what I think deliberate, yet likely quite sincere perverseness, William Gass called a fictional character “any linguistic location of a book toward which a great part of the rest of the text stands as a modifier.” To enter into a relationship with a work of fiction is to make of its author a figment. The engagement is with the page, not its demiurge.
There are pleasures the work affords—the endless process, the finished product—and opportunities the work opens up, sometimes only tangentially related. Sleeping over in one author’s guest bedroom, gabbing movies with another, applauding this one’s virtuosic gypsy guitar playing, or witnessing that one at death’s door—these are not experiences I would trade, but it is difficult to trace how they inform my work on their work.
Anton Kuh, friend and rival of Karl Kraus, advised, “If an author disappoints you as a person, it is because you have overestimated his work.” Like many things said ironically, or by an unreliable narrator, this is almost exactly half true. Meeting an author stands to one side of the work in question, much as translation does, though not in equal and opposite ways, as if authors were in some sense their own work adapted to the mortal medium of life. A surprising number of authors, having voided their expressive needs in their works, are spectacularly ill-equipped to discuss them with any insight, which is why we tolerate critics. Never trust the teller, trust the tale.
What made you feel closest to an author?
On Friday, November 13, 2015, I was in San Francisco with author Jérémie Guez and our editor Olivia Taylor Smith, doing signing rounds at indie bookstores for his English debut, the contemporary Parisian noir Eyes Full of Empty. The night before, at dinner after an event in Mountain View, we had been discussing 9/11, with which his book opens. At the time, I was in New York, awaiting the visa that would let me leave for France, and from an N train platform in Queens, I watched the towers fall. Jérémie’s protagonist, Idir, had been in jail. Though the novel’s main action takes place ten years later, the long shadow of that day still darkens it. We were in the Haight when the world went to shit. It was Rebecca Rubinstein at the Booksmith who first heard. When I think of that afternoon, I think of Jérémie swinging between short bursts of surfing headlines on a borrowed phone, brief texts and calls on his own, and flipping the radio dial. The news was split between the Paris attacks and a cyclist hit by a bus in Union Square. Jérémie’s office was close to Le Petit Cambodge, where he had often lunched. San Francisco became slightly unreal, a theater for our anxiety: the slow build of dread in the car embodied in traffic mounting outside. Halfway through the Broadway Tunnel, the news cut out in the middle of a sentence I no longer remember. I want to say it was the latest victim estimate, but any interruption then would have been suspenseful. That I was expecting the radio to go, wondering when it would happen, did not make it any less abrupt. The headlight streaks and halos on the yellow tunnel tile echoed back disbelief, a faint hysteria. We drove the rest of the way in silence.
What have you found most difficult to translate?
Truly, the categories of difficulty are infinite. It’s common to hear bad writing and good writing are equally hard to translate, in different ways: the good because it is so exacting, the bad because it is so vague. There are also times when what is “good” in one language would be “bad” in another; the politics of appropriate foreignization rears its Hydra head. I find fiction generally easier than non-fiction, taken in hand as I am by an author’s idiolect. I also tend to be forgetful, or shall we say forgiving, of difficulty. The problem that tormented me for days fades away once a solution, however provisional, allows me to move forward, and further choices often inform or reinforce that choice.
What have you enjoyed most translating?
I have heard writers, architects, and translators, when asked to name a favorite from their works, sometimes say, “The next one.” I prefer to translate that which surprises me, or which I’ve never seen before—a task for which I am often, by definition and intention, ill-equipped.
Most recently, there was a one-page strip from a 1993 collection of Agrippine, Claire Brétécher’s long-running comic about the existential trials of a spoiled bourgeois teen. A mainstay in books and newspapers since 1988, Agrippine is known chiefly for its author’s inventive use of slang, both current and confabulated—what critics have called its “linguistic velocity.” The strip in question had dialogue of deliberate gibberish. Translating almost pure nonsense gives a kind of giddy joy.
Which author would you love to translate?
Just as I have a hard time naming my favorite authors to read in English, so I have difficulty picking out just one to translate from French. In both tongues, mother and learned, I tend to cotton not to authors, but to individual works. A recent shortlist, in no order: Eugène Savitzkaya’s Marin mon coeur and Exquise Louise, Céline Minard’s Bastard Battle, André Hardellet’s Le seuil du jardin, Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s Les Messagers, Frédéric Tristan’s Dieu, l’univers, et Madame Berthe.
If you were not a literary translator, what would you do?
I would starve, but not on principle.
I would have liked to make music boxes by hand. Manual details, often unremunerative, soothe and absorb me.
In some sense I am only half a literary translator, and half a writer of fiction. Though since the two are hardly mutually exclusive, I would rather say that I am completely a literary translator, and completely a writer of fiction.
Published only; no drawer translations:
Stories & Essays (in periodicals): Patrick Modiano, Guy de Maupassant, Bernard Quiriny, Xavier Mauméjean, Laurent Queyssi, Patrick Besson, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Roland Topor, Anne Richter, Yves and Ada Rémy, Jean Muno, Thomas Owen, Maurice Pons, Eugène Savitzkaya, Jean-Christophe Duchon-Doris, Éric Faye, André-Marcel Adamek, Jean-Yves Masson, Thierry Horguelin, Sylvain Jouty, Yann Coridian, Jacques Gélat, Mercedes Deambrosis, Fatou Diomé, Marcel Béalu, Marie-Hélène Lafon, Nicole Malinconi, Atiq Rahimi, Anouar Benmalek, Carles Torner, Roland Jaccard, Lionel Davoust, François Chiado, Noël Devaulx, Thomas Gunzig, Pierre Cendors, Pierre Bettencourt, Pierre Mertens, Christophe Honoré
Selected comics: Frédérik Peeters, Marjane Satrapi, Gébé, Abel Lanzac, Toppi, David B., Lewis Trondheim, Joann Sfar, Blutch, Zeina Abirached, Olivier Morel, Ludovic Debeurme, Fabian Vehlmann, Serge Lehmann, Enki Bilal, Guillaume Bianco, Fabrice Neaud, François Ayroles, Jochen Gerner, Emmanuel Guibert, Cyril Pedrosa, Ruppert & Mulot
