Translation as Breathing New Life in a New Language: Conversing with Charlotte Mandell

Photo: Robert Kelly

From the classics of Marcel Proust, Honoré de Balzac, Guy de Maupaussant, Gustave Flaubert and Jules Verne to contemporary works by Jean Genet, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Rancière, Bernard-Henri Lévy... the list of French authors and works that Charlotte Mandell has translated is diverse yet solid. An award-winning translator of French literature and philosophy, Mandell has been translating since 1990. Working in two languages has been her approach towards understanding thoroughly the literary essence of each oeuvre. How different is a translator's life from that of a writer? In this October issue, she shares with Greta Aart about her art as a French translator.  

Translation is a test of patience and perseverance that seeks some sort of transparency in-between languages. How do you define translation?

A translator is a medium. Before starting to translate, a translator tries to empty him/herself out, absorb the text, and then speak the text anew in his/her own language.

A translation should sound as fresh and new as the original text. It should never sound like 'translationese', something that's neither French nor English. It should sound as if it were breathed in the 'into' language. In a way, all language is translation; we try to convey the 'original' language of mind and body into words. The translator's job is to make everything sound 'original'.

What attracts you to the craft of translation?

I love reading, and I think translating is the truest form of reading. People are always asking me if I write my 'own' work. I find it hard to convey to them that I feel no need to write—II would much rather 'be' a lot of different authors by translating them. I never read ahead when translating, so translating for me feels like more of a creative process: I have no preconceived notions of how the book will end, and can put myself in the author's place by trying to imagine what will come next.



Ibn Battuta speaks and says


I the Moor the Stranger the Shadow
on the steps of the known, I visited
the violet city and the great wall

then I said the words, having also
followed the lines that pronounce the foam
of the sea on the shores the most secret
the ones most stifled by sun and salt

I the Shadow have visited the dark
land of Blacks burned by light
and by wind loaded with sand
they appeared like new signs
that first my footsteps then my mouth
transcribed, the hand of the scribe
was breathing under dictation

in the procession of Sijilmassa I met
this image which was returning from this country
where I was going in front of myself
on the way back now I meet a man
who is leaving the place I’m returning from in search
of myself and
“I am you” the Shadow tells me


                fereshta-ye karîm


Excerpts from Fire Shadows, Mandell's unpublished translation (1990) of Jean Paul Auxeméry's, le feu l'hombre
(1987), courtesy of the author.




By doing so, do you risk translating in an incoherent voice, a language style that varies from place to place? Your approach seems rather daring!

Actually I know quite a few translators who work the way I do. If the book is written in one coherent voice, there's no risk of losing that as I translate. On the contrary, it sounds much more alive and new, since I'm translating the same way the author wrote. The author couldn't read his book ahead of time as he was writing it! Why should a translator be any different?




Translations by Charlotte Mandell
Melville House Publishing


That said, I do a lot of revision after I finish a first draft. I usually end up with three or four drafts of one text before
I'm happy with the final version.

As a French translator, you have an intimate relationship with French as a language and a culture. How did it become such an important part of your life? Having English as your mother-tongue, how do you balance the demands of both languages?

My parents were both university professors when I was growing up, so we had long summers off, which we started spending in French-speaking Switzerland. I also spent time in France, when I was little. In high school, I concentrated in French, Latin, and ancient Greek, and then majored in French at university, spending a year of study in Paris. I went to Bard College, where all seniors have to write a thesis-length work (a 'senior project'). Mine was a translation of a book of poems by French poet Jean Paul Auxeméry, le feu l'hombre (translated as Fire Shadows.) Auxeméry himself is also a translator, and has translated poets like Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Robert Kelly.

Translation by Charlotte Mandell
Fordham University Press

Available from Amazon

As to balancing the demands of both languages, that's an interesting question...I wish I could spend more time in France. As it is, I watch the French news every day on TV5 via satellite, so I can keep up-to-date on the news in France.
(I translate news articles occasionally for The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal Europe.)

Do you encounter cultural barriers or baggage that are difficult to approach during your process of translating? Do you believe that it is indeed possible to translate languages, literally and culturally?

I think a few authors (a very few) are impossible to be translated well: Racine, for example, since the sound of French is so important to his poetry. Conversely, I can't imagine a convincing Finnegans Wake in French, or Flann
O' Brien's great At Swim-Two-Birds.

I've been fortunate in that I haven't yet encountered an untranslatable text. I think dialects and cultural references
can all somehow be conveyed in the translated language; the most important thing is the voice. If I can find the voice in English, and make it sound convincing, everything else follows from that.

At the moment, what are you working on?

I just finished going over the copy-edited proofs of The Kindly Ones, my translation of Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes. My translation of Pierre Bayard’s L’affaire du chien des Baskerville, called Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong:  Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury USA next month.

Some other recent projects include a beautiful meditation
on sleep, The Fall of Sleep by Jean-Luc Nancy (Fordham),
as well as two books by the Tunisian poet, novelist, and essayist Abdelwahab Meddeb, Tombeau of Ibn Arabi and White Traverses (both from Fordham).  My translation of Proust’s Pastiches (which to my knowledge have never been translated into English before), The Lemoine Affair, has just been published by Melville House. And I recently translated a wonderful excerpt from the new novel Zone by Mathias Enard—I hope that finds a publisher in America or the UK, since there’s nothing like it out there. I would love to be able to translate the whole book.

"In a way, all language is translation; we try to convey the ‘original’ language of mind and body into words."

You’ve also mentioned having “no need to write” —would you think that your loyalty to translation may hinder your own will to write, if you were to
contemplate  starting from a blank page, without an original text or language as a cross-reference or interpretation? Creation versus re-creation. Would you also like to write?

But my point is that translation is also a form of creation. 
It’s not just recreating what’s already been written—it’s creating the text anew, in my language.  That’s why I don’t feel the need to write my own work; I feel fulfilled writing
 in many different voices, the voices of the authors I translate. It's interesting that classical musicians aren't usually asked if they also compose, but they're a lot like translators, in that they play many different styles of music, and the interpretations can vary hugely from one performer to the next.

I think all writing starts from a blank page, originals and translations alike. For me, all writing is creative. A poet writing about the sunset and the trees is translating his/her
thoughts and impressions into words.  All writing is translation, in a way.  
Actually I know quite a few good writers who are also translators: Lydia Davis, Paul Auster, John Ashbery, Cole Swensen, Pierre Joris, Robert Kelly, Schuldt, Clayton Eshleman, Jacques Roubaud–all are wonderful writers and excellent translators. Beckett was a great translator. Ezra Pound, Paul Blackburn, Baudelaire, Proust all translated.

On the other hand, one can also be a good translator
and not be a ‘writer.’ I think a good translator is a good writer, period.  A bad translator is a bad writer.