UUlrich (Frederica): 64-65
Ulrich (Friedrich): 64-65
Ulysses: 24, 121
Unknown Soldier: 38, 150
VVanzetti (Bartolomeo): 41
Vendall (Sir Michael): 64
Volterra (Vito): 40, 123
WWagner (Richard): 74
Wallerant (Fernand): 64-65
Winckler (Marguerite): 117
XXanten (Edmund): 63-65
YYersin (Claude): 62-63, 120, 144
Yersin (father): 63, 66, 91, 144
ZZach (Otto): 61, 63, 65, 78, 93
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
This text—what is it, exactly? A literary experiment? A pile of documents? A history lesson? A research project? A reading list? A language game? A series of exercises de style? Or no more than an assortment of words and numbers?
Nothing like translation can lead you to so deeply question the nature of a literary text, especially when you’re translating an Oulipian text. Although I didn’t have to worry about avoiding certain letters or adhering to a fixed number of characters in each chapter,1 the main difficulty of translating One Hundred Twenty-One Days was that, at times, it felt like eleven disparate translation projects. And one huge research project. My job, like that of the historian, was to look for connections between these disparate elements and make some sense out of them—my own.
Examples of Oulipian constraints, respectively from Georges Perec’s La Disparition (A Void, trans. Gilbert Adair) and Paul Fournel’s La Liseuse (Dear Reader, trans. David Bellos).
In particular, the novel’s structure, which combines eleven different stylistic forms and links their beginnings and endings with the same few words, proved far more challenging (but no less fascinating) than I first imagined. With each chapter came a new style and voice that had to both stand alone and fit into the text’s whole. Like little Christian, I was asking all kinds of questions. What kind of diction would a World War I nurse use in her diary? How much should a transcribed interview sound like the way someone (and a very old someone at that) would speak? Just how many fragmentary sentences are permissible in a historian’s notes for them to still be readable (despite all the warnings from my spell checker)? Can a series of locational cues take you on a walk through Paris even if you’ve never been there?
To find answers to some of these questions, I read into the text, as well as beyond it. After all, translators (like writers) are readers, too. So as I worked on this translation, I read lots of material: wartime newspapers, mathematics articles, psychological evaluations, historical diaries, transcribed interviews, and many of the books mentioned in the supernumerary chapter.
Beyond these questions of style, One Hundred Twenty-One Days is packed with references to literary works and real people, places, and events. In order to understand how all these references fit into the text, I researched them, in depth. First, I set out to read as many of the books listed in the supernumerary chapter as possible (then, judging this perhaps a bit too ambitious, narrowed my list down to those works that play more significant roles in the text, if not their most relevant parts). I also made a playlist of the songs referenced in said chapter, and listened to it often (usually while translating).2 I even compiled over a hundred images on Pinterest depicting many of the people, places, things, and events (or their partial inspirations3) that appear in the novel, from a kapok tree in Senegal to various photographs of mathematicians4 to all those historical plaques in Paris. Then, to get a better idea of where those plaques can be found, I took a virtual walk across Paris via Google Earth. And like any good researcher, I created a multi-tabbed Excel file to keep track of all kinds of information related to the text, including a timeline of the book’s events, a list of the Library of Congress call numbers for the books in the supernumerary chapter, and a chart copied from Wikipedia with details on all the English translations of Dante’s Inferno published before 1939.5 You haven’t seen any of this, but trust me, it’s there in the translation. For me, at least.
What if books came with their very own soundtracks? You might like to know that some of the fictional characters and places in the novel are inspired by real people or places, often with several real figures converging into one fictional one. There’s even a photograph of two mathematicians sitting outside and petting a dog that smacks of the one mentioned in chapter VI. Wikipedia: “English translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy.”
Here’s where I should probably say something about the differences created in the translation (which some might call “losses,” but “differences” is a bit less negative, don’t you think?). As Oulipian readers may have guessed, there are a few hidden constraints tucked into certain points of this book, such as the alphabetical list in chapter x and the parenthetical vocalic restrictions in chapter VII.6 Without going into terrible detail (no one wants to read a long translator’s note), let it suffice to say that I had to radically transform these passages in English in order to maintain the constraints. For me, such transformations were the most thrilling part of the entire project.
I made sure to ask Michèle for her permission to mention these constraints, since revealing constraints is a point of contention within the Oulipo.
Some of the other differences gained in my translation came about through the book’s rich intertextuality—all those quotations from and allusions to other literary works. As a general rule for the quotations from foreign-language texts, I chose to use published translations where possible. While this is the usual practice for quoting works in translation, it also celebrates the work of previous translators and their contributions to the ever-changing intertextual network that is World Literature.7
You will find a list of these translators in the Supernumerary Note, which follows this note.
A familiar face cropped up in all this intertextuality in the references to two texts by Rudyard Kipling: his short story, “The Elephant’s Child,” and his poem, “If.” Readers can decide for themselves how much or how little chapter I parodies Kipling’s story—for me, it was a matter of inserting certain words and phrases from the story into my translation, which certainly created a different effect compared to if I had simply translated the chapter without looking at Kipling’s text.
I also adopted a few strategies in other parts of the text to manipulate its heteroglossic nature, following what I saw as the text’s own logic. For example, I rendered Harold Smith’s letter in chapter x in British English, which seemed necessary given his Oxonian origin. I also followed the text’s logic in chapter v when I wanted to add a footnote to explain an acronym; while footnotes are usually discouraged in literary translation, in this case my footnote blends right in with the 46 other footnotes in the chapter. As for the German words and phrases scattered throughout the novel, I chose to leave those alone, since translations have already been provided in the text itself.8
In other words, no annoying translator’s footnotes required.
Before you close this book, please allow me to thank Michèle Audin, for her humility and openness to collaborate with me throughout this journey; David Dollenmayer, for his generosity in assisting my understanding of the Brecht quotations; my mentors Emmanuelle Ertel and Alyson Waters, for their infectious devotion to the art of literary translation; my parents, for their everlasting encouragement9; and my husband and best friend Jonathan, for his steadfast love and patience, not least in listening to my muddled attempts to express my translation struggles at the end of a long day’s work, reading through my entire manuscript when I was sick of editing it, and coming up with a solution for one of the trickiest parts of this text.10
And because you should honor your parents if you want to live a long life (Ex 20:12). No telling which one, but a choice few of you already know.
Christiana Hills
Binghamton, NY
SUPERNUMERARY NOTE OF SUPER TRANSLATORS
I would also like to thank the following translators for their exceptional work which, in various ways, found a place
in this translation:
ALAN BANCROFT (Poems of St Thérèse of Lisieux, St. Thérèse of Lisieux), ANN HOBART (“Should We Pardon Them?”, Vladimir Jankélévitch), ANTHEA BELL (On the Natural History of Destruction, W. G. Sebald), ARRAND PARSONS & LOLA RAND (The Damnation of Faust (libretto), Hector Berlioz & Almire Gandonière), C. K. SCOTT MONCRIEFF (The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal), CAROLYN FORCHÉ (“The Night Watchman of Pont-au-Change,” Robert Desnos), DANIEL LEVIN BECKER (Painting at Dora, Francois Le Lionnais), DAVID DOLLENMAYER (Conversations in Exile (uncredited), Bertolt Brecht), DAVID LUKE (Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), GEORGE MUSGRAVE (Inferno, Dante Alighieri), HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (Inferno, Dante Alighieri), KEITH WALDROP (“The Swan,” Charles Baudelaire), RAYMOND ROSENTHAL (The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi), RICHARD HOWARD (Force of Circumstance, Simone de Beauvoir), SAMUEL BECKETT (The Lost Ones, Samuel Beckett), STUART WOOLF (If This Is A Man, Primo Levi).
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AVAILABLE NOW FROM DEEP VELLUM
CARMEN BOULLOSA · Texas: The Great Theft
translated by Samantha Schnee · MEXICO
LEILA S. CHUDORI · Home
translated by John H. McGlynn · INDONESIA
ALISA GANIEVA · The Mountain and the Wall
translated by Carol Apollonio · RUSSIA
ANNE GARRÉTA · Sphinx
translated by Emma Ramadan · FRANCE
JÓN GNARR · The Indian · The Pirate
translated by Lytton Smith· ICELAND
LINA MERUANE · Seeing Red
translated by Megan McDowell · CHILE
FISTON MWANZA MUJILA · Tram 83
translated by Roland Glasser · DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO
ILJA LEONARD PFEIJFFER · La Superba
translated by Michele Hutchison · NETHERLANDS
RICARDO PIGLIA · Target in the Night
translated by Sergio Waisman · ARGENTINA
SERGIO PITOL · The Art of Flight · The Journey
translated by George Henson · MEXICO
MIKHAIL SHISHKIN · Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories
translated by Marian Schwartz, Leo Shtutin, Mariya Bashkatova, Sylvia Maizell · RUSSIA
COMING SPRING 2016
MICHÈLE AUDIN · One Hundred Twenty-One Days
translated by Christiana Hills · FRANCE
CARMEN BOULLOSA · Before
translated by Peter Bush · MEXICO
NOEMI JAFFE · What are the Blind Men Dreaming?
translated by Julia Sanches & Ellen Elias-Bursac · BRAZIL
FOUAD LAROUI · The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers
translated by Emma Ramadan · MOROCCO
JUNG YOUNG MOON · Vaseline Buddha
translated by Yewon Jung · SOUTH KOREA
SERHIY ZHADAN · Voroshilovgrad
One Hundred Twenty-One Days Page 13
