What is this thing dashing away, escaping from us and taking off? she wonders.
Let’s just say it’s your childhood, says the rabbit, before disappearing.
Translator’s Note
A voice rises from a blank space, its identity enigmatic and captivating. As words stream together, you are pulled deeper into its longing, its earnestness, its desperation, all the while wondering if you will ever really know just who it belongs to…
As a literary translator, I choose works that speak to me. From this book’s first words, I was so curious about the voice behind them, even after discovering that voice belonged to a rabbit with a penchant for philosophy. I was enticed, then held captive in the pages as I waited in wonder, hoping that what went wrong would be made right before the last sentence set me free.
Translators are readers first and foremost, and the works we choose to translate often choose us. But now I’d like to turn the metaphor on its (furry) head, because the translator must take the text captive in order to do something with it. The translator’s act of choosing a text can even be considered an act of violence, a cleaner shot than Tristan’s with a far more purposeful aim, for the moment of choosing marks the beginning of the text’s transformation. Not only the confines of the new language, but the translator’s own interpretation wreak havoc on the text, forcing it into places the author might not even have imagined. And so, there is always conflict in the translation process. Moments when the text resists and will not be tamed, moments when the translator might decide to leave certain words untranslated, or completely rearrange the words in a sentence, or leave ambiguities unresolved.
Translators often use the space of the translator’s note to discuss the nitty-gritty of the “problems” they faced in the text. But I’m not going to get into those here, because for me, this translation was so much more about diving in headfirst. Whatever you do, don’t think about it… Don’t estimate what’s left to accomplish, don’t congratulate yourself for what’s already been done… Go for it with your eyes closed, feeling confident, armed with nothing but your joy. While this is not my first published translation, it was in fact the first full-length translation I completed, serving as the capstone project for my master’s degree. It began tentatively, as I tried to aim at that enigmatic voice with my untrained hands. But at a certain point, I realized I had to just go for it and start digging, if only for the joy that translation renders.
What a beautiful encounter. The more time I spent with this text—translating it, revising it, workshopping it with others, musing on it as I went about my day—the more confident I felt recreating the voice and the story that so enchanted me from the beginning, turning the opening monologue into a conversation. Because translation truly is a conversation, and one that can get quite philosophical at times. What kind of diction might a rabbit use? How slangy should this dialog be? How can I emphasize this Biblical allusion? How can I avoid repeating this word in the same paragraph, since the French uses two different words? Does the way I’ve reworded this sentence make sense? Is this really the “right” word for this moment in the text? So much of translation is about finding your own answers to the questions the text raises throughout the process. And these answers, like the critical moment Tristan realizes what makes him so different from the rabbit, create the transformational differences that bring the translation into being.
In perhaps the most famous essay on translation, Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin puts forth the idea that a translation of a text is its afterlife, because literary texts can only survive through translation. I’m not dying… I’m persevering. I’m starting a new life, a surplus. I see our encounter as a miracle. You see, it’s only because translators choose to take texts into their care, carry them around for a bit, so to speak, and then set them free in a new place that we readers can fall in love with literary voices from elsewhere. Translators may well do violence to a text with the inevitable changes they incur, but they are also miracle workers, giving new life to something that otherwise might never have left its home turf.
But now, dear reader, this text has jumped out of my hands and into yours. I can’t show you exactly what I was aiming at, but I hope you’ve found something miraculous in the voice and the story that captivated me in the first place.
Enough with the metaphors.
I would like to thank my fabulous cohort in the NYU MA in Literary Translation (French-English) program—Hannah, Margaret, Patrick, and Serene, as well as our fearless leaders, Alyson and Emmanuelle—for all their input as I was workshopping this book. Their voices are here, too.
Thank you to Ben Van Wyke, who showed me in those fascinating conversations at ALTA that absolutely anything can be a metaphor for translation, from Jacqueline du Pré to a hunting party, and who, sadly, is no longer with us.
Thank you to everyone at Unnamed Press who fell in love with Desarthe’s story as much as I did and helped give it a new life.
And thank you to my dear husband Jonathan, for his depths of love.
—Christiana Hills
About Christiana Hills
Christiana Hills translates written works from French into English, specializing in contemporary literary fiction, with a particular interest in experimental works and the Oulipo. She is most recently the translator of Michele Audin’s One Hundred Twenty One Days and Agnès Desarthe’s Hunting Party. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies from Binghamton University.
About Jessie Chaffee
Jessie Chaffee’s debut novel, Florence in Ecstasy (Unnamed Press, 2017), was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2017 and is forthcoming in translation in five countries. She was awarded a Fulbright grant to Italy to complete the novel and was the writer-in-residence at Florence University of the Arts. Her writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Slice, and Global City Review, among others. She lives in New York City, where she is an editor at Words Without Borders, a magazine of international literature. Find her at www.JessieChaffee.com.
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