“Translating is betting that people can understand each other”
How do you approach a translation?
It all depends. Some texts seem very fluid from the first approach. Others, on the contrary, immediately present data that are unfamiliar to me. I then conduct a little investigation, by reading another work of the author, a philosophical treatise… I also discuss with the novelists what they wanted to say, as was the case with the American Philip Roth. Translation is a bet: that men, miles and hundreds of years apart, can understand each other.
Where does this vocation come from?
From my pleasure, from the sixth grade, in excelling in Latin versions. And to the encounter with English, at 15, through the surge of sixties rock. A revelation reinforced by the admiration I had for my maternal grandmother, a true pioneer who had been a French assistant in Scotland in 1920. I am perhaps also trying to suture two identity wounds. The painful amnesia of my father whose desire to be French was so great that he hid his Sicilian origins from us and passed himself off as Corsican all his life. And my own heartbreak at the idea of not dying where I was born, in Tunis.
How is translation an essential social practice?
It allows for self-expansion, in the sense of the Gospel. By opening up to a foreign culture, everyone understands that by being a little bit of the other, they can be more themselves. Moreover, translating means securing the treasures of humanity’s intangible heritage. The cancer ward, Solzhenitsyn’s film, released in English in the West in the late 1960s, escaped destruction and exposed the atrocities of the gulag.
You say that there are two conceptions of the multiplicity of languages which lead to two schools of translation…
In the Babel conception, men who wanted to rise up to God were broken into thousands of languages. This is linked to a laborious vision of the profession, where the translator painstakingly puts the pieces back together. Conversely, with Pentecost, everything is forgiven: the apostles preach and the pagans hear the Holy Spirit in their respective languages. From this comes a second current that believes in magical symbiosis with the author, which happened to me with Jonathan Coe and The very private life of Mr Sim (2011). But we are all, in turn, “Babelian” and “Pentecostal”.
There are also two types of rendering of the original text: highlighting the cultural difference or transposing it. Which do you prefer?
Those called “sourcers” stay close to the original language, while “targeters” deviate from it to give the reader the illusion that the work was written in his language. The archetypal example is It’s raining cats and dogs (literally: “It’s raining cats and dogs”) which the targeter transforms into “It’s raining cats and dogs”. Since English is hegemonic, I don’t feel the need to let it show more in French. But, here again, my colleagues and I oscillate between the two positions.
Among the monuments of literature, you say that when you die, you would like to work on Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. Why?
Because it carries the character of Captain Ahab, his crew and the reader in the same desire, that of going to the end of a hunt for the white whale which is metaphysical. By exploring the ambivalence of this color, symbolic of the sacred but also of emptiness, Melville suggests that Moby Dick embodies the vertigo of man: are we looking for everything or nothing? As the philologist Barbara Cassin summarized, it is a novel so untranslatable that we never stop tackling it, over the years, in a spirit of companionship.
For works that may shock today, such as Gone with the Wind On the issue of slavery, what is your position?
It all depends on the documentary interest that one gives to a book. In the case of James Bond for example, let’s publish them without changing a comma, even if it means adding notes: we’re not going to turn a racist and sexist Cold War spy into a lamb! We need to know where we come from.
You have given your version of striking dystopias like 1984 by George Orwell. How do they shed light on our times?
There are regimes that prevent certain truths from being spoken. However 1984 evokes this rewriting of history. Sales of the classic soared in 2017 as Americans rightly made the connection with Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States. Even if disinformation did not wait for him, he is the first to assume the concept of “alternative facts”, he who had made a name for himself thanks to the reality TV show The Apprentice, in 2004.
How does your profession view AI?
For simple prose, artificial intelligence (AI) is supposed to provide a basis on which we carry out “post-editing”. But I tested it on Philip Roth’s biography in 2022 and spent more time correcting inaccuracies than writing a first draft. As for literary texts, our role is to enrich them with our sensitivity, our associations of ideas, our depth of life. This is why I signed, last October, the manifesto of the collective En chair et en os calling on creators and distributors of works of the mind to refuse any use of AI.
This arrival shakes up a corporation that had finally earned its letters of nobility…
We are no longer seen as “traitors” to the original versions, but as champions of reinvention in this globalized world where borders are fading. “My heart has become capable of taking all forms”, by the Sufi poet Ibn Arabi, is the epigraph of my dictionary. I believe in the community of men.
