Revenge of the Translator
Page 25
Doris and I have been living in a three-room apartment in the 10th arrondissement of Paris for some time now. Every so often I perceive in her gaze a sort of distrust or perplexity, as if she suspected me of having hidden her keys or deceiving her, without any proof. I can’t pretend that I don’t also sometimes fall prey to that astonishment, that incredulity that suddenly makes me frown and interrupts me in the middle of a sentence, when the cold, implacable logic whispers to me that it’s impossible and unreasonable, even dangerous for my mental equilibrium, to believe in the possibility of sharing a life with the character of a novel I’ve written. I have no desire to reread Vengeance du traducteur. Even if I still have not yet managed to forget a single phrase of the book, I do not want to change a word of it.
There was much ado in the press about the disappearance of Abel Prote. On May 22, 2007, Le Monde published this brief article in its literary supplement:
A Writer’s Mysterious Disappearance
Abel Prote, the author of several daring and remarkable novels—including La Maison du deuil and, more recently, the very unique (N.d.T.)—had not shown any sign of life for a week in his Parisian home in the Odéon neighborhood. And for good reason. The police, alerted by the building concierge, tried in vain to enter the writer’s apartment. Even with the help of a locksmith, the police did not succeed in forcing open the door. After breaking a few windows, they had the unpleasant surprise of immediately running into a compact wall made of a sort of hard resin, yellow and translucent, similar to amber, which filled all the rooms of Abel Prote’s apartment up to the ceiling. Investigations are underway to determine the exact nature of this uncommon material. The police now wonder whether they will discover the body of the novelist fixed in this impenetrable mass, like an insect of the Oligocene era fossilized in a block of amber. The inquiry is, as they say, underway.
Doris just went out. She was delighted to hear me tell of the unusual circumstances that allowed me to rid myself of Prote with his own involuntary complicity, then of how I transformed his apartment into a monumental mausoleum for an absent cadaver: a final subtraction, followed by an unexpected addition. A double click and the job was done. It brought us even closer. I think Doris …
Someone’s just rung the doorbell. I have a meeting with my American translator, who’s visiting Paris. A certain Emma Ramadan. She lives, I’m told, in Providence, Rhode Island. Not New York. We’re supposed to work the entire afternoon on the most difficult passages of my novel. To be honest, I sincerely doubt that it’s possible to translate Vengeance du traducteur into English … First problem that comes to mind, the English title Translator’s Revenge is already taken. She’ll have to find another and then write the American version taking the new title into account. But first she’ll have to rethink the embedding of the narrative bearing in mind this unexpected interlocking, this new level of expansion …
This Emma Ramadan seems nice. Enthusiastic, zealous, and nice. She wrote to me that she really likes my novel. She’s even translated a few pages already. I truly hope that it’s not David Grey using a fake name. But, in addition to this rather understandable apprehension, I harbor another, more insidious fear: that this Emma Ramadan will be like me, that she will not remain humble, enthusiastic and zealous, modest and rigorous. That she will take herself for Zorro, the masked avenger, or for a vampire. Or heaven forbid, that she take herself for a writer.
I get up to open the door. I fear the worst.
BRICE MATTHIEUSSENT is an award-winning translator of over 200 novels from English into French, including the writings of Jim Harrison, for which he was awarded the 2013 Prix Jules Janin from the Académie française. In 2000, he was awarded the UNESCO/Françoise Gallimard Prize for his translation of Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street. His other translations include the works of Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Annie Dillard, Rudolph Wurlitzer, and Charles Bukowski. He graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Mines de Paris in 1973, and earned his PhD in philosophy in 1977. Matthieussent currently resides in France, where he teaches the history of contemporary art and aesthetics at the École supérieure des beaux-arts in Marseille. Revenge of the Translator is his first novel, and was awarded the Prix du style Cultura upon publication in France in 2009.
EMMA RAMADAN is a translator living in Providence, Rhode Island, where she is co-owner of Riffraff bookstore and bar. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant, an NEA Translation Fellowship, and a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. Her translation of Anne Garréta’s Not One Day, published by Deep Vellum, won the 2018 Albertine Prize, and her translation of Anne Garréta’s Sphinx was nominated for the PEN Translation Prize and the Best Translated Book Award. Her recent translations include Anne Parian’s Monospace (La Presse), Oulipian Frédéric Forte’s 33 Flat Sonnets (Mindmade Books), and Fouad Laroui’s Prix Goncourt-winning story collection, The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers (Deep Vellum).
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