Translation.
The word with its sibilants is one of my favorites, the word as it slides like doors, like a pint of beer on a copper counter, with a rustle, from one place to another, the hint of geometry in it — one of the most basic transformations, the mirror image, so familiar and yet subtly altered by the very process of being reflected, or as is the case, translated. So much better than the presumptuous French “traduction”, as if you were leading anything from anywhere… Side notes, tangent – that’s what I think about when I think translation.
For years I didn’t think much about it; I was “translating”, sometimes, for work, a questionnaire or a presentation from English to French or, against all rules (but I didn’t know that), from my native language into my second. I was often the unofficial translator of choice, in part because I spoke decent English, in part because I was happy to, but I wasn’t naming what I did. It was just “writing in English”, or “putting it in French” — or at most, “traduire”. The innapropriate French word was a shield: as long as translation was only traduction, I could enjoy it casually. I liked it because it put me in touch with English, and in English, everything is simpler for me. Except, of course, complexity, but that was not the goal.
(My guess is that everything is simpler in English because my command of the language is so much more rudimentary that my thinking has to follow suit. In this regard, maybe my trying to improve my English is an enormous mistake that will eventually deprive me of the safe haven of a familiar but still foreign language).
Then two things happened: first, Sophia Coppola catapulted the phrase “lost in translation” into my life, and translation became incredibly alluring — mysterious, nostalgic and sexy. My younger sister enrolled in translation studies, and I realized I was a little jealous, but only the tiniest bit; mostly I was fascinated. Translation had become something both otherworldly – a puff of smoke in blue light — and something real, something an actual person who brushes her teeth twice a day was concerned with.
That’s how translation entered my consciousness, and how I started paying attention to it. It’s become one of these magic words — like ”gin fizz” or “by the sea”, for instance – that makes me pay attention. This is why I knew I had to read Vengeance du traducteur when I heard about it (first on Stella Polaris’s blog, and then all over the Internet); this is also the probable reason I didn’t enjoy it very much. I expected it to be a fun novel, which it is; I wasn’t expecting it to be the next Great Novel, which it isn’t; but I was also expecting it to give me some insight into the process of translation, which it really didn’t. I was expecting it to be more elegant than it is. It’s not so much that I expected it to be a greater novel than I expected it to be a different novel. In other words: it’s not his fault, it’s mine.
Because of this little disappointment, I don’t know if you can trust me to review the book, but here are my impressions: Vengeance du traducteur is a smart novel which tries a little too hard. It follows a translator (let’s call him, as he introduces himself, Trad) working on a novel about a triangle between a writer, his translator and his secretary/ mistress. Unsatisfied with the novel, Trad decides to break the Golden Rule of translation and to meddle with the writing; however, he soon notices that his interfering has consequences way beyond the closed world of the book.
This story line worked fairly well for me, and Trad’s language when he let it loose was alternatively sensual, wicked and whimsical, all with the clear mastery of a cultured writer with a musical ear. However Matthieussent seems to have found this too easy, and he added more levels, more complexity, notably through endless dream scenes, dramatic suggestions that maybe nothing is quite as it seems and reality could be elsewhere, a generous helping of heavy-handed symbolism, and a jump back in time to 1937 Paris with Dolores Haze, the actress and woman Nabokov’s Lolita became when she left her literary nymphet self behind. All of this felt a little too much, a little too referential, a little too reverential.
Early on in the book, Trad mocks his writer who indulges in adjectives and adverbs; perhaps he should have heeded his own advice and lightened up his own tale.
11 textbooks (mostly Latin, Roman civilization and linguistics), 10 classics for school (Proust, Rilke, Gauthier, Modiano, Claude Simon, Georges Perec) and EIGHTEEN various books. THREE of which I paid for — the rest courtesy of my bookstore owner friend and from another friend, who works for a publishing house in Paris.