I first read Forêt noire in the winter of 2013, shortly after my grandfather died. Though it was, as they say, an easy death, it had levelled me, and I found myself unable to sleep at night, alert with the knowledge that everyone dear to me would sooner or later be taken away. During that time, this book was not only an unlikely source of consolation; reading it felt like an indulgence, too. Whenever I attempted to talk about it with someone else, I could not find words to explain the rush of pleasure—a physical buzz not unlike the one you might get from a slice or three of the titular cake—that I felt each time I picked it up again. This translation project began with that buzzy feeling, and with a desire to tease it out and understand it; at the time, I had no contract and no full-length literary translation to my name. Mréjen’s graciousness and enthusiasm kept me at it, as did a growing conviction that, while the novel isn’t for everyone—certainly not for members of the cult of the carefree—it would find its Anglophone readers. I hope that it comforts and unsettles them in ways they don’t yet know they need, and that it works on them in ways they’re unable to explain.
One of the interesting things about translating this book very sporadically over a number of years was that all my drafts and notes—all the emails and texts exchanged with Valérie, who also became a friend—began to mark the passage of time. With each year that’s gone by (and how fitting that the novel’s opening scene should take place on New Year’s Eve), our respective forests, Valérie’s and mine, have grown denser with ghosts. On January 2nd of last year, Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens, the beloved founder of Éditions P.O.L., died in a car accident while on holiday with his wife in Guadeloupe. Just a few weeks earlier, Valérie had accompanied him to a screening of his second film, Éditeur, which traces his decades-long journey in publishing and investigates his relationship to his authors. In the days that followed his death, she wrote an essay about the film and her memories of Paul from that night. These lines have stayed with me: A woman takes the microphone: now that you’ve made this film, and after so many years in the same profession, do you think you’ll go into a new line of work or will you keep at this one until the end? (…) He shakes his head—cheekbones lifting in a smile, neck tucked slightly between his shoulders—and says: you know, I’ve been doing this work for fifty years; if I was going to get tired of it, I already would have a long time ago. My model is Maurice Nadeau, who died still working at a hundred and two, so… (…).3 In the space of an ellipsis, fate takes a different turn.
I WOULD LIKE TO EXPRESS my thanks to E.C. Belli, Ruggero Bozotti, Eleanor Kriseman, Chad Post, and most especially Julia Sanches for their invaluable insights over the course of the translation process. Thanks also to the editors of Joyland Magazine for publishing an early excerpt; to Veronica Esposito for helping me to find an interested publisher in Phoneme Books, and to my husband, Christian Estevez, for his cheerful support and always perceptive comments on the French. I’m indebted to the Collège Internationale des Traducteurs Littéraires in Arles for giving me time to complete final edits in a place so lovely I didn’t want to leave (and haven’t). Above all: thank you, Valérie Mréjen, for your patience, your unfailing kindness, and your words.
VALÉRIE MRÉJEN (B. 1969) is a writer, filmmaker, and mixed-media artist. She has written five novels, most recently Troisième personne (P.O.L., 2017), and exhibited widely in France and abroad, including in a solo retrospective at the Jeu de Paume gallery in Paris. Mréjen has made several short films, documentaries (Pork and Milk, 2004; Valvert, 2008), and a feature-length film, En ville, co-directed with Bertrand Schefer and a Director’s Fortnight selection at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011. She has written two original plays (Trois hommes verts and Le carnaval des animaux, a collaboration with singer-songwriter Albin de la Simone based on Camille Saint-Saëns’s musical suite), and her adaptation of Alexandre Dumas fils’s La dame aux Camélias was performed in Arthur Nauzyciel’s production on stages throughout France. An alumna of residencies at Villa Medici in Rome and Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto, she is curating a 2019 exhibition based on the archives at the Institute for Contemporary Publishing (IMEC) in Normandy and working on a documentary about students at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. More information can be found online at www.valeriemrejen.com.
KATIE SHIREEN ASSEF is a literary translator living between Los Angeles and Arles, France. Black Forest is her first full-length translation.
1. Black Forest, of course, refers to both the mountain range in Germany often associated with the macabre fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, and the decadent dessert that gets its name from that region.
2. The author famously ended his own life ten days after delivering the manuscript to his editor at Éditions P.O.L., the same publishing house that would later add Forêt noire to its inimitable list.
3. Mréjen, Valérie. “Au cinéma avec Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens.” Trafic no. 105 (2018) : 7–12. Print.
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