EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

The interviewer  Trudy Obi	The interviewee  Catriona Seth

Trudy Obi holds a PhD in English literature from UC Berkeley, where she wrote a dissertation on conceptions of intellectual labor in early modern Europe. Her research interests include rhetoric and humanist pedagogy, French literature, and neo-Latin poetry. She has worked as an in-house French to English translator on an international public health project, drafting and translating communications between U.S. headquarters and field office staff in Haiti and Madagascar.  She currently works at a translation agency in Berkeley, California, as project manager, translator, and editor. She also serves as Publications Director of the Northern California Translators Association (NCTA).

Catriona Seth, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford, works on recovering voices that have been traditionally excluded from the canon of eighteenth-century French literature. Her major research interests include the history of ideas, medical humanities, and autobiographical writing. In July 2017, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. A bibliography of the selected works of Professor Seth appears after this interview.

 

T.O. When did you decide to pursue the academic study of French, and how did that come about? 

I started by studying law, which I found extraordinarily boring; I didn’t stick to it long enough for it to become exciting. I’d always enjoyed literature, so I switched to studying French and Spanish. I was given a scholarship to spend a year in any French-speaking country I wanted. I decided to go for a master’s degree at the Sorbonne. I had no intention of becoming an academic then, but a few years later—after being a translator-interpreter and a management consultant—I asked my supervisor, “to become an academic, what should I do?” Long story short, I finished my thesis and sat the agrégation, the competitive examination necessary in order to teach French in France. I taught secondary school in France for a few years and then held positions at universities in Rouen and Nancy. I moved to Oxford nearly three years ago.

T.O. How did you find the transition from teaching at French universities to teaching at Oxford? Are the university systems in England and France very different?

French universities work on a catchment area system: you enroll in the institution nearest to your family home. In the UK, most students go away to university. This means that during term British students are generally around all the time and there is a real campus life. This is much less true in France. UK universities are selective. In France, on the whole they are not. Most academics in France have been through identical paths of study, unlike what happens in the UK or the US. I think the variety of backgrounds in the British system is a huge plus—and it is fascinating to have colleagues with very diverse backgrounds and approaches. Oxford has a particular advantage over many other institutions since much of the undergraduate teaching is based on the tutorial system so students have one-to-one or one-to-two classes and can tailor their own program to a large degree. This means that they are getting a very good grounding but also beginning to learn about research methods.

T.O. Your most recent work has focused on Germaine de Staël, née Necker, an eighteenth-century Swiss woman of letters. How did you come to study her?

I’d always been interested in the period of French literature which goes from before to after the Revolution. It often gets left out of literary histories. French literary study is based on centuries, so anyone who’s between centuries, like Staël or Évariste Parny, the subject of my Ph.D. thesis, is a complicated case and often gets dropped off either end.

A couple of years after I sat the agrégation, de Staël's novel Corinne was set as a text for the nineteenth century. I read it, and it was a revelation. It is an exciting and challenging book, full of interesting ideas.

T.O. What do you think is most valuable about de Staël?

She’s very human; she was at once very strong and yet had weaknesses. And she shows that you can be very strong because you acknowledge your weaknesses, because you’re prepared to affront them. And in that respect, she’s very much a role model for lots of people.

She was despised by many contemporaries who thought it was indecent for her to write about politics, that her lifestyle was too free because she had lovers openly. But I think she is someone who is sincerely trying, in her own way, to make the world a better place—through her writing, thinking about what an ideal society would be. She thinks people should be free, but also that you have to accept the need to give up freedoms for the common good. So she’s living in this perpetual tension, and has an extraordinary way of working through this philosophical notion of freedom and what we can do, and pushing boundaries.

T.O. Could you talk about some of her political writing?

One of the texts I find fascinating is Réflexions sur le process de la Reine, reflections on the Queen’s trial, published in August 1793. Marie-Antoinette is in prison, her fate undecided. Staël is saying, “I don’t think we should put her on trial; let me tell you why.” It’s a short but powerful text which speaks to two audiences. To the revolutionaries, she’s saying: “If you condemn her to death, you’ll make her a martyr.” She’s also saying to women: “Marie-Antoinette is the wife of the King; she has no political power. She’s a wife and mother like you and me—a mother separated from her children, a wife whose husband has been taken away and guillotined. We should show her some compassion.”

And that’s something vital for her—she believes there’s a place for compassion, for generosity, for feelings. And this is at a time when people are trying to think through rational ways of approaching politics. Staël thinks reason is important above all, but it has to be a generous reason, a reason nurtured and supported by generous feelings.

T.O. You have written that for Staël, “le roman a un potentiel politique actif” [“the novel has active political potential”].[1] How do Staël’s own novels participate in the political realm?

Let’s take the example of Corinne, her second novel, on its face simply a story of doomed love. But Corinne is set in Italy, at the time a series of small states. Corinne the character shows that Italy has a common past based on its literature and history—Italy is not so much a set of fractured states as one common destiny. Corinne was read by the Italians of the generation who went on to theorize what became the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy.

Delphine, her first novel, is set during the French Revolution and takes on all sorts of questions, like the promulgation of laws allowing divorce. This political content is fairly indirect, because these are letters exchanged by private individuals who are not particularly talking about what’s going on in the National Assembly.

T.O. And she’s writing Delphine after she realizes that the Revolution is not going to be liberating for women after all.

Yes, and this goes back to her pamphlet about Marie-Antoinette. She’s warning women, “if Marie-Antoinette is put to death, then everything which women might represent in society is also being sidelined.” That’s exactly what happened. The Revolution comes up with this vision of a virile republic, which Napoleon is only too happy to continue: a society in which women are allowed to stay at home and have lots of children and that’s about it.

Staël is extremely disappointed by this outcome. Later she writes that the years around the beginning of the Revolution were the best time ever to be young. She was in the thick of things: her father was a minister under the ancien régime, and during the Revolution her lover, Narbonne, was briefly a minister. She took part in all the political discussions behind the scenes. These were heady times: it looks as though there are going to be extraordinary possibilities for reform; it looks as though there’s a brave new world out there, and Staël is one of the people who can see it being born.

T.O. She was disillusioned by the Revolution, but what did she think of Napoleon?

Like many in her generation, she initially thinks Bonaparte might offer a solution. But then she discovers that he stands for everything she can’t bear—he’s exactly the opposite of what she’d hoped for. He wants things to be normalized, he wants a one-size-fits-all Europe where everybody would have the same languages and currencies. Staël is passionately interested in difference, in diversity. For her, if you’re different, it means you’re going to teach her something; difference should be celebrated and encouraged. So the vision of someone like Napoleon is anathema to her.

Some of her contemporaries said they both set out to conquer Europe, but they did it differently: Napoleon with his sabre and troops, Staël with her ideas and books.

T.O. Her work De l’Allemagne [On Germany] seems to be aimed at countering Napoleon’s view of the way Europe should be.

I don’t think Staël set out to write a book that was anti-Napoleon. She sent it to the printer in 1810 and the head of the police had the proofs destroyed. His excuse was “Ce livre n’est pas français,” (This book is not French). But I don’t think Staël is setting out to be anti-French. She’s very pro-French, but she’s also very conscious of the fact that there are things happening in Germany—in philosophy and literature in particular—which are not happening in France. She thinks if France can welcome ideas from overseas, it will be all the richer for it.

And because Napoleon set her up as his enemy, I think she became a sort of magnet for his opponents, or those who wanted to think about different ways of running a country, or imagining what moral values to defend. And Napoleon really didn’t need to treat her this way because she had no power, no troops. But on the other hand, she had every possible power, of course, because no troop can stop ideas circulating.

T.O. You are currently Co-Investigator on a project entitled “Dreaming Romantic Europe,” which was awarded a network grant by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Could you talk a bit about your plans for this project?

I’m working with Nicola Watson from the Open University, trying to think about Romanticism as a European rather than a national phenomenon. We’re asking people to choose an object—in the widest possible sense of the term—that for them embodies European Romanticism, and placing these objects in a virtual museum online.[2] We are asking scholars from a diverse range of fields and countries, and hope to showcase the diversity of European Romanticism.

We organized a conference at Chawton House [3] to look at the legacies of Staël and Jane Austen, who died within three days of each other. We wanted to look at the way the canon shapes our view, considering the contrasting fates of the world-famous writer who has now dropped off the map and the very discreet woman who lived in the English provinces but has become a major figure in world literature.

T.O. Could you say more about these contrasting fates?

When Staël died on 14 July 1817, she was the most famous woman in Europe, widely read, both admired for her talents and spirit and reviled by some for what was perceived to be her improper behavior—including her outspokenness on matters political. Austen, who died four days later, was unknown to the wider world. Those of her novels which had been published were unsigned. She had lived a discreet life in the English countryside. The contrasting fortunes of both women is remarkable: Staël has suffered partly as a result of having been seen as undignified by the Victorian age. Austen, on the contrary, was marketed by her relatives as a model of female propriety and her works as harmless sentimental stories. She has also benefitted greatly in recent years from some excellent adaptations of her novels for the screen. But the way the canon has operated shows how difficult it is for women to be accepted as engaged intellectuals.

 ———————-

[1] Catriona Seth, introduction to Œuvres, by Germaine de Staël, ed. Catriona Seth (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), xxvii

[2] RÊVE: The Virtual Exhibition 

[3] Chawton House, where Jane Austen spent the last eight years of her life, is in the village of Chawton, near Winchester, in the County of Hampshire.

——————

 

 Selected Bibliography

Staël, Œuvres (ed.), Paris, Gallimard, Pléiade, 2017.

“Jane Austen and Germaine de Staël: a tale of two authors,” The Conversation, July 17, 2017, 

“Enlightenment women’s voices,” in A History of Modern French Literature, ed. C. Prendergast, Princeton, 2017, pp. 330–50.

Évariste Parny (1753-1814). Créole, révolutionnaire, académicien, Paris: Hermann, 2014.

La Fabrique de l’intime. Mémoires et journaux de femmes du XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Laffont, Bouquins, 2013.

Marie-Antoinette. Anthologie et dictionnaire, Paris: Laffont, Bouquins, 2006.

An Interview With Jean Moorcroft Wilson

By Hannah Hunter

Siegfried Sassoon (1886 – 1967) was born in England to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. He was a satirical poet who also wrote prose but who gained prominence for his poems of World War1– a war in which he performed acts of great bravery but which he managed to survive. He converted to Catholicism, which became a central part of his life.

Jean Moorcraft Wilson lectures in English Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is married to the nephew of the distinguished British writer, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), and runs a publishing house with her husband. Dr. Wilson is widely recognized as the foremost scholar on the great English war poet, Siegfried Sassoon. Years in the making, Siegfried Sassoon: Soldier, Poet, Lover, Friend (published in May 2014) encompasses the poet's complete life and works.

In this latest book, Wilson reconstructs Sassoon's experience going into the war as a patriotic youth and coming out as a pacifist. Upon his return home from the front, he expressed his pacifistic convictions in his poetry and gave a voice to the millions of his fellow veterans who had been permanently scarred- physically and emotionally- by the catastrophic conflict.

Jean MoorcraftWilson kindly agreed to be interviewed by LMJ's correspondent, Hannah Hunter, in advance of the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, with which Sassoon's life and poems are intricately linked.

 

 

H Hunter: How was Sassoon's poetry received, and how was it affected by his growing celebrity?

To begin with it was met with almost complete indifference, only Edmund Gosse bothering to read it, and his mother: bless her cotton socks! And then [of course removed here] later on, as the war progressed and as what he was saying made more of an appeal to people and made more sense to them, then his reception was based not so much on him personally but on what the poetry was saying. But then once they saw him, and saw how handsome he was, and how Byronic he was, they took more notice; Philpot, the painter said: "you are rather Byronic, aren't you?" [1] So I think that then he was regarded as a very Romantic figure, and that helped to promote his poetry.

Celebrity affected his life deeply, although it was his poetry that first got him noticed; but then of course he was a lovely man to have around because he was handsome, because he was a very attractive personality, and because he was socially OK, he could be presented as a kind of figure head. When the pacifists wanted to fight their cause they had Sassoon up there fighting for them, didn't they. You know, because he was a soldier, because he was young and good-looking, he got a good reception.

I have a talk that I give on Sassoon and on the other war poets, and I say that he's the icon really because he's got all the qualities; the only quality he doesn't have is that he didn't die young. He's of the upper/middle classes, his men adore him, he's brave, he gets the MC: all these things he does, he's a fantastic figure! And yet inside I think he's really very young and very naive.

 

H Hunter: When do you think that Sassoon was writing his best poetry?

Well I think there were two periods when he was most affected, and produced the best poetry, and the war was one of them. Edward Marsh [2] was absolutely right, he needed a proper subject for his poetry – he needed to focus on a particular subject – I mean you can't write forever about getting up at dawn, can you? So there is this sense that when he got to the war he had a cause. Then in the twenties when he left the army, and there was nothing to fight for, you feel him losing this cause; of course, it comes back in the 1930s when he starts writing his prose because again he has a subject, more or less the same one, the war. The other period, I think, is the period when he's thinking about whether he should go into the church or not, the Catholic Church.

I think when he tries in the 1920s to write his political satires, and the social satires, that actually it's not his best poetry. His best poetry in this period is the poetry about himself; and one of my favourites is When I'm Alone, which is a lovely poem that he wrote in the twenties. I think when he starts to be political that you feel that he's not really terribly in control of his material: that it's being done as an exercise.

Once he goes into the church in the mid-fifties, the poetry seems to me poor, because the tension has gone – he's made up his mind – and poetry seems to me to rely very much on tension. I think that his conflicts before he decides on the church translate into a poetry of tension and there's something real there, there's a subject; whereas before that he seems to be writing about whatever takes his fancy, because he's a bit desperate for a subject. This later conflicted poetry is worth looking at. Not all of it succeeds by any means, but I think it's interesting, and the equivalent – well not the equivalent but a shadow, a pale shadow if you like – of what he was doing in the First World War. But in both cases he had something to write about, something he cared about. I don't believe he really cared so much about the

other subjects: those that weren't the First World War or his entry to the church.

I don't think he's the greatest of our poets. (Maybe that's because I don't terribly like satire.) I prefer his prose. I think he's a very important poet, a highly significant poet, but he doesn't reverberate in the mind in that lyrical sense. Perhaps it's because I like lyric poetry, I mean I much prefer Edward Thomas or Wilfred Owen. I think Sassoon's poetry was essential and I believe it was very powerful and as satire it can't be bettered.

 

H Hunter: Sassoon is dubbed a 'war poet' but his work predates WW1 and outlives WW2. Do you think it undersells him to associate his work so exclusively with WW1?

It obviously does undersell him, but maybe understandably so. But what I think undersells him even more is the lack of recognition nowadays of his achievements as a prose writer. I don't know whether you've read Fox-Hunting Man but it's a wonderful book: it's humorous, it's well-informed, it tells you how he's feeling as a child, it's full of wonderful insights into things. It seems to me a marvellous picture of a pre-war world plus the beginning of the war, and it is a very, very good book. I also find Memoirs of an Infantry Officer very good in terms of what it says about war. But I think that's where the real underselling of Sassoon comes, in his prose writing. And yet people did know Fox-Hunting Man because it was set as a GCSE book. [2] He was undervalued as just a war poet, that's why I originally wrote my biography in two volumes as I thought the second part of his life was just as much of an achievement as the first and equally fascinating.

 

H Hunter: Who do you see as the most authentic father figure in Sassoon's life?

Oh Rivers without a doubt, yes, Dr. Rivers. [3] I think that their relationship was complicated by the fact that Rivers was probably deeply attracted to Sassoon. Sassoon's letters which talk about loving Rivers, and Rivers would save me if I go smash or bust, or whatever he says…I think Rivers understood him, and I love Rivers because Rivers is actually affected by Sassoon's point of view. I think there may have been more than a little attraction to each other; I mean more than is normal between a father and a son, maybe. The fact that Sassoon was older when he met Rivers probably made him more aware of himself and his homosexual tendencies; whereas with his groom, Tom Richardson, for example, in his youth, that was really a kind of father-figure. His father had left his mother before Sassoon was five, a terribly sad story, and he was left without a father but with a very handsome, commanding, powerful young man to look up to in Richardson– you know, youngish!

 

H Hunter: What reasons do you think lead Sassoon to join the Catholic Church?

I think when he goes into the church he does that for many reasons. One of them is a genuine feeling of being just without anybody, without anything. It seems to me that Sassoon went into the Catholic Church partly because he found in it a largely male society. He also wanted to be under orders; he loved the ritual of the Catholic Church which was why he didn't go into the Church of England like his mother. And he loved the monks, he loved being back in that male world: he loved cricket, he loved hunting, for similar reasons.

 

What do you enjoy most about writing biographies?

I love the detail, I love the connections, I love the people involved, I love discovering those connections, which I believe reflect a great deal more about your central character: who that person is friendly with, what he cares about, how he relate to the outside world.

I find Sassoon highly entertaining: I think he's very funny, he's a nice person. People often say to me: do you like the people you write about? So far yes I have, I liked Sassoon. I started off by thinking that he was a misogynist, and wondering whether I would get on with this. But I ended up by loving him!

 

[1] Lord Byron[1788-1824],

[2] Sir Edward Howard Marsh KCVO CB CMG (18 November 1872 – 13 January 1953) was a British polymath, a translator, arts patron and civil servant.

[3] W. H. R. Rivers (1864-1922) was an English anthropologist, neurologist ethnologist and psychiatrist   best known for his work treating World War I  officers who were suffering from shell shock. 

Our guest this month, Annie Freud is a distinguished British poet and one of the members of the Freud lineage to gain fame for their intellectual achievements. She is the daughter of painter Lucian Freud, the maternal granddaughter of sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, and the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. [1]

 Freud was educated at the Lycée Français in London and then studied English and European Literature at Warwick University. Since 1975, she has worked intermittently as a tapestry artist and embroiderer, in addition to publishing works of poetry : The Mirabelles, 2010 and The Remains, 2015. 

                                                            

"Freud's poems are chaotic, hectic and witty; are a romp through London, its melancholy and beauty; are a sumptuous tumble through love, appetites and desire." (The Poetry Archive.)

 

Our interviewer, Jean-Paul Deshayes, was a certified English teacher and teacher-trainer at the IUFM (Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maîtres), having also taught French in London for 10 years at high-school and university levels. Jean-Paul now pursues a career as translator for the magazine media. Although retired, he engages in diverse activities: exchanges with other translators, assorted reading, DIY and martial arts, as well as trips to London with his English wife to visit their daughter and granddaughter. He regards translation (from and into English) as a particularly stimulating intellectual exercise and devotes himself to it both professionally and for his personal pleasure. Dedicated to poetry in all its forms, he likes  Robert Browning, Robert Frost and the English romantic poets in equal measure. By coincidence, South Bourgogne, where he resides is the birthplace of Lamartine, whose magnificent poem, “The Lake” he likes to read regularly.

 

Mr. Deshayes conducted this interview in English and then translated the questions and answers into French. French translation.

 

LMJ: You were born in Belo Horizonte (Beautiful Horizon), Brazil. When we speak about your linguistic career, it will seem to the readers that that name [1] augured a wonderful professional career, which included developing your own highly successful translation agency, and the senior interpreting positions you held at the United Nations, culminating in your present position as “Head of Conference Management Service” for a UN specialized agency.

[1]  The name of the great discoverer whom we know as Magellan was Fernão de Magalhães.

EM : Yes, the capital of Minas Gerais, a state of rich culture, history, fertile land, great weather and awesome cuisine. BH is also surrounded by mountains, which I guess makes us quite curious and inquisitive as to what lies beyond those peaks. At age six, I moved to Brasilia, where I spent most of my life. In the heart of Brazil’s central plateau, the place stood in drastic contrast to my experience in my home town: vast expanses of land, desert-like humidity, scrubby vegetation and not a rolling hill in sight. That greatly expanded my horizons and set me well on my way to the many changes I would experience in life, geographically and otherwise. I later transited through California, Washington, D.C. and Geneva, where I currently live with my lovely wife, two of my three children and the family Yorkie. 

 

LMJ : You showed an interest in reading at a very young age. I understand that your father was the driving force behind that early start.

EM: Both of my parents had a passion for teaching and literature, and the house was filled with books. Mom would often recite poetry to us at bed time, and she would often give us books for gifts. There was a lot of music around the house, too. My dad, a true intellectual who would later become a political speechwriter, let me play around with his battered Remington typewriter, and I spent endless hours punching keys at random, in hopes of stitching words or phrases together, all to no avail. One day it all dawned on me. I must have been five or six, but I still remember it vividly. I was crossing an intersection in my hometown, my father towing me by the hand, when the hazy neon light in the distance suddenly collapsed into a meaningful string of letters: “c-i-n-e-m-a.” The feeling was transcendent, as if a veil had been lifted. 

LMJ : Did you learn English at school? How were you able to acquire such a command of English as allowed you to embark on an interpreting and translating career?

EM: Like any boy, I wanted to grow in my father’s image, and speaking English was one of the many features I admired him for. So, I took any opportunity to learn the language, and went way beyond the weekly classes I had at school. Cable TV and Internet were not yet around, and I had to make do with the occasional comic books we bought at the airport and a few extra teaching aids I could find around the house. Also, travelling was not as easy as it now is. I was 26 when I set foot outside of Brazil for the first time.

At around the same time, I checked out George Orwell’s 1984 from a local library and plowed through the book in English, armed with a shabby pocket Webster’s dictionary that still sits on my bookshelf. It was a tedious effort. I spent more time looking words up in the dictionary than I did reading the book! I had read the story in Portuguese, so I knew the plot well enough not to get lost. Upon finishing the book, my level of English had increased tenfold. 

LMJ : What was your first interpreting assignment?

 

EM : My very first gig as an interpreter was in 1992, and I got to interpret for none other than Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. I was then a clerk at the Lower House of the Brazilian Parliament, and known to some to speak good English. The visit was announced at the last minute, and they had to improvise someone in the role of interpreter. They asked me if I would do it, and I jumped at the opportunity (as Thucydides once said, “ignorance is bold!”) Before I knew it, I was squeezed between the Prince and the Speaker of the House, in a room packed solid with journalists and TV crew. At that point, I seriously doubted my judgment (what was I thinking!), but there was no turning back.

 

LMJ:  How did you manage that assignment?

I survived it mostly unscathed, but towards the end I found myself confronted with a rather delicate situation. With his proverbial sarcasm, His Royal Highness let slip an unbecoming joke that might have been regarded as offensive. I hesitated for a second, wondering whether I might have misheard him, and raking my mind for an acceptable rendering. I panicked at the thought of eventually causing a diplomatic incident that could end my career before it even started. I eventually chose to omit the unflattering remarks altogether. In retrospect, I think I did well. Diplomatic interpreting – which was what I was doing that day – requires the interpreter to intuit what is really meant through and beyond words. I took a chance, and even made a name for myself as a self-assured professional. Little did they know I was just trying to cover my back.

I thus became the de facto interpreter at the Office of the Speaker. And that’s how it all started.

Details of that first, chance encounter with Prince Philip are the first chapter in my book, Sua Majestade, o Intérprete (Parabola Editorial, 2007). 

 

 

LMJ : You began to acquire your academic qualifications relatively late in life.

In the early 1990s, in Brazil, college-level training for interpreters – or translators, for that matter – was hard to come by. You had to learn by doing and in the process run a lot of risks. I jumped into the water and, much to my surprise, I managed to swim.

After interpreting successfully for about 15 years, and running my own translation agency for about as long, I started offering intensive workshops that became very popular for aspiring interpreters in Brazil. I had built a solid reputation in Brazil, and travelled extensively in the U.S. and Lusophone Africa. I had published a book on interpreting and I was presenting myself as an authority in the field. Yet I lacked the right academic credentials.

I then decided to put my career on hold and go for the right degree. And in 2007, at the age of 44, I relocated with my family to California, to pursue an MA in Conference Interpretation at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. I was put through a series of rigorous translation exams, consecutive and simultaneous interpretation, and was finally admitted into the Advanced Entry program with English as an A language and Spanish as my B 

Soon after graduation, I started collaborating with MIIS as an Adjunct Professor, offering seminars and organizing a roundtable to discuss the prospects of a future Portuguese program at MIIS – which materialized a few years later. 

 

LMJ : Did your MA from Monterey advance your career?

EM :  Oh yes, and faster than I thought possible. On the very day I received my MA I got to perform in front of a panel of observers from the UN, the State Department and the EU institutions. As soon as I got out of the booth, I was offered the opportunity to sit the State Department conference-level interpretation tests in Washington, D.C. (by invitation only), which I passed a few weeks later, with flying colors. Soon thereafter, I started to receive offers for high-level conferences from State and other Washington-based organizations.

My credentials and hard work had prepared me for that opportunity, but I would be remiss not to acknowledge the generosity of a few chief interpreters who opened their doors to me. My colleagues were also very welcoming and assisted me greatly as I settled in Washington. 

 

LMJ: You have interpreted for many VIPs, including Presidents Barack Obama, Cristina Kirchner, Lula da Silva and other heads of State. 

EM: I interpreted at several world summits, like the G20, the Nuclear Summit, the World Bank and IMF annual meetings, to name a few. 

LMJ : From what languages to what languages did you interpret? 

EM :  I worked mostly from English and Spanish into Portuguese, and from Portuguese into English. I also had a chance to render a short speech by Berlusconi from Italian into Portuguese at one of those summits. 

 

LMJ : Did you get to meet any of those heads of state?

EM : To say that I met them is inappropriate, but I did get to shake hands and rub shoulders with a few world leaders during those summits. I also got to interact professionally with a few of them, one on one, at bilateral negotiations (e.g. former President Lula, the Dalai Lama, and Prime-Minister Paul Martin.)

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

With  the Dalai Lama (and the Speaker of the House, Mr Michel Temer — who is currently the Vice-President of Brazil), 1997.

President Lula, first Lady Marisa, and pop singer Lenny Kravitz, Brasilia, 2003.

EM: Another interesting encounter took place at the end of the Pittsburgh Summit, in 2009. Coming back from the closing press conference, President Obama ran into a large group of interpreters backstage and insisted on taking a picture with the “translators.” I was the first to shake his hand, and we exchanged a few pleasantries. The moment was captured by the White House photographers.

  

The group picture with President Obama in the back, slightly to the right, was taken at the end of the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh (2009), as he was coming back from a Press Conference. The picture was taken by the White House photographers, at the President’s request. 

 

LMJ : You work for ITU, one of the 15 UN specialized agencies, which include the ILO, UNESCO, WHO, etc. Some of these are in Geneva but others are in Paris, Vienna, London, Rome or Montreal. www.itu.int/en/about/Pages/default.aspx

 

EM : Yes. In 2010 I was appointed Chief Interpreter of the International Telecommunication Union, the UN specialized agency for information communication technologies, with headquarters in Geneva. My job was to manage a pool of some 500 freelance interpreters who regularly assist us, in the six official languages of the United Nations. I took office just two weeks before the Plenipotentiary Conference, in Guadalajara, where I had to manage a team of 74 interpreters, most of whom I hardly knew. The most recent four-yearly cycle of UIT conferences culminated in another successful Plenipot (October-November, 2014), and in 2015 I was promoted to the post of Head, Conference Management Service. I continue to indirectly oversee the interpreting operations, as the new chief interpreter reports to me, but I now have a larger scope that includes conference logistics and room management.

ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2014 (PP-14)
Busan, South Korea

LMJ : Portugal has a population of over 10 million and Brazil has a population of 200 million. There are five former Portuguese colonies in Lusophone Africa, and other small remnants of Portuguese colonialism in Asia.  How does Portuguese rank as an international language?

 

EM : There is no denying the geopolitical importance of Brazil’s continental dimensions and the role it plays in stabilizing Latin America. The same can be said of Angola, in Africa. Brazil has more than once been a non-permanent member of the Security Council, which bears testimony to the importance it plays in ensuring the safety of our world. I believe Portuguese will eventually become a UN language. Perhaps the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP) will intensify its role in promoting Portuguese, which is certainly one of the most poetic and beautiful romance languages out there. 

LMJ : To end this interview with a question relating to both your fields of expertise – translating and interpreting – would you agree that interpreters are usually extroverts whereas translators are usually introverts?

EM: I consider myself an extrovert, a true people person, and I have worn both hats (I was a translator for many years before I started interpreting), so I guess the distinction doesn’t always apply. In fact, some of the best interpreters I have worked with tend to be rather quiet and withdrawn.

E X C L U S I V E   I N T E R V I E W 

 

The following interview was conducted by Skype between Los Angeles and Cartagena, Spain. 

 

                                                              

 

 

 

             

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Geraldine Brodie – The interviewee                      J. G. – The interviewer   

 

LMJ:  You are a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and a member of the Chartered Institute of Taxation. Did you study and practice Accounting before you came to the humanities? Did you abandon the former in favour of translation studies?

GB: In some ways I’ve had a circular career. I read English at Oxford, specialising in Old English and Old French language and literature. I’ve always had an interest in language, translation, interculturality and how they affect the way literature crosses borders.

After graduation, I trained as an accountant with the firm that is today KPMG. It wasn’t particularly unusual to do that with an English degree – accountants have to communicate well, and be systematic and enquiring. I was able to use my language skills there, running an audit in Paris. I stayed with the firm for 12 years, including two years in New York. While there, I took the opportunity to learn Spanish, at what is now the Instituto Cervantes.

That Spanish ultimately led me back to university. I signed up for a diploma in Spanish to improve my focus on learning, which reminded me how much I enjoyed studying languages. I applied for a place on the Comparative Literature MA programme at University College London; I was intrigued by the Translation Studies element, which seemed to address the interlingual cultural issues that I had begun to explore at Oxford, and continued to interest me as I worked in different environments. From there, I didn’t look back. I went on to a Ph.D. in Translation Studies, and stayed on as a Teaching Fellow. I’m now a Lecturer in Translation Theory and Theatre Translation. I did all this part-time, as I continued to work as an accountant, and I still have business interests.

 

LMJ: Your academic field presumably rests upon two pillars – theatre and translation. How did you develop an interest in each of those and how did you go about combining them?

GB: I inherited my interest in theatre from my mother. One of my childhood treats was to go with her to the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and I joined their youth programme (then called Theatre 67) when I was a teenager. An early highlight was a visit from Richard Chamberlain as Hamlet. My mother and I still enjoy the theatre together – we go to the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon when we get the chance.

An essay on tragedy for the Comparative Literature MA was the catalyst for me to combine theatre and translation. I decided to compare plays by Ibsen and Lorca, and when I realised how many, sometimes startlingly different, English translations were available, I wanted to investigate and understand the translation process.

Of course, I’m only describing my own journey – I’m by no means the first to notice this phenomenon. In fact, I learned a great deal from Manuela Perteghella on a short course she taught at London Metropolitan University, and she also introduced me to academic theatre translation research circles when I was beginning my Ph.D.

LMJ: Could you define your field of study and research for the 10 years you have been with UCL.

GB: I find theatre a particularly rewarding site to study translation, because, as I’ve mentioned, new translations tend to be commissioned alongside each new production, especially for classic plays. For example, one of the books I use in teaching my undergraduate module European Theatre in Translation is Romy Heylen’s “Translation, Poetics, and the Stage: Six French Hamlets”, in which the author discusses successive translations of Shakespeare’s play over two centuries. In the other direction, tickets are currently being sold in London for Molière’s “The Miser” in a new adaptation by Sean Foley and Phil Porter. “The Miser” has already been translated into English on many occasions, but for this new production starring Griff Rhys Jones there will also be a new text. What does this continual cycle of reinvention tell us about the nature of translation (and theatre)?

My research investigates this procedure: how these translations are commissioned; which plays and translators are selected; where translated productions are staged; who are the translators and other theatre practitioners collaborating in the process. I am particularly interested in the progression from the initial play in another language to the translated text that is performed, and the terminology that is applied to describe the process.

In London, translation into English for the theatre often takes place via a “literal translation”, prepared by an expert in the source language, which is then used by a writer to create a performance text. The result of this process is usually billed as a version or an adaptation rather than a translation – but not always; so it is difficult to work out how the production you are seeing has been translated. A current example of this is the work of the young French playwright Florian Zeller: three of his plays have recently been performed in London, all translated by the writer and director Christopher Hampton, who translates from French and German. And yet the most recent of these plays, “The Truth”, is billed as an adaptation. Why? In trying to answer questions like this, I am hoping to make the intercultural movements in theatre and translation more apparent and highlight the expert and very creative work of all the participants involved. That should include the literal translators, who are not given enough credit for their contribution, in my opinion. My book, “The Translator on Stage”, which I am currently writing for Bloomsbury, delves into these details.

LMJ: Were you ever able to use techniques learnt in accounting for your research or writings in translation studies?

GB: I use my accountancy skills all the time as a lecturer and researcher in Translation Studies. It’s useful to have a background in planning, budgeting and project management when organising teaching programmes and funded research activities. However, I have also drawn on my experiences investigating and documenting systems, learned when I was auditing organisations of all sizes from sole traders to multinational corporations, to research the field of theatre translation. My aim is to establish and record procedure, and then see whether I can find patterns or trends of behaviour.

So I don’t restrict my research to a particular language, historical period or genre of writing – I look at what is actually taking place on stage. With its very active and in some ways diverse theatre scene, London is a fruitful research ground for theatre translation. I estimate that around 12% of productions are derived from another language. These range from the classical plays of antiquity, such as Sophocles and Euripides, through historically renowned playwrights – Racine, Schiller, for example – to the more recent canon: Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Lorca, Brecht are all regularly performed. But there are also instances of lesser-known or contemporary playwrights being given rare or first performances in the English language. Plays do tend to come from the same languages, though -French, German, ancient Greek, Italian, Russian, Spanish. The Scandinavian languages are particularly well represented by number of productions. Of course, there are always exceptions to these generalised trends, and initiatives aiming to broaden the range.

 

LMJ: The book “Words, Images and Performances in Translation”, (to which you contributed a chapter, “Theatre Translation for Performance: Conflict of Interests, Conflict of Cultures”) demonstrates the ways in which words, images and performances are translated and reinterpreted in new socio-cultural contexts. Can you explain that concept?

GB: Anyone who has ever tried to translate knows that translation is far more than linguistic code-shifting. Replacing a word, phrase or sentence in one language with a similar unit in another is only the beginning of the communicative transfer. The book considered translation from a wider perspective, discussing how other media, such as artwork or advertising images, can be translated – and why the cultural implications of these activities are also relevant to what is traditionally thought of as translation.

My chapter on theatre translation discussed how a range of factors beyond code-shifting influenced the representation of translated theatre, which of course is a visual, aural and textual translation.

LMJ: You coedited a special issue of the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance on "Martin Crimp – playwright, translator, translated", with Marie Nadia Karsky of Université Paris 8. Can you tell us about the symposium that took place on which that issue was based and on your collaboration with Marie Nadia Karsky?

GB: As so often happens in academia, this collaboration came about serendipitously.

Marie Nadia was a co-organiser of a symposium at Paris 8 where I had been invited to speak about theatre translation in London. Over a cup of coffee after the event, we discovered a shared interest in Martin Crimp’s translation of Molière’s “The Misanthrope”, from our different language perspectives.

A year or so later, I was invited to apply for funding from the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni to run a series of workshops at UCL developing links with French academic organisations and exploring directions for research collaborations. I immediately thought of Marie Nadia and our shared interest, which both of us had been developing in the intervening period. Marie Nadia, together with colleagues from the French research group TRACT (Traduction et Communication Transculturelle Anglais-Français/Français-Anglais), had been working on a project with Masters students to translate Crimp’s version of “The Misanthrope” back into French. I had been investigating Crimp’s voice as a writer as it is revealed in his own plays, his translations from French and his versions from other languages where he has used a literal translation (these include German, ancient Greek and Russian).

Between us we put together a two-day workshop with presentations by academics from three French and three UK universities; a bilingual theatre workshop led by Anne Bérélowitch (director of the theatre company L’Instant Même) with French and English actors, exploring “The Misanthrope” in Molière’s original, Crimp’s translation, and the “back-translations” by the students; and finally a conversation about translation between the critic Aleks Sierz and Martin Crimp himself, to which the public was invited.

We had a very exciting two days, full of energy. Many of the students who had worked on the translations came over to London on Eurostar with the academic presenters and the French theatre practitioners. The Birmingham School of Acting provided student actors, and all mixed in with the UK academics and UCL staff and students. We drank a lot of coffee and ate substantial quantities of cheese, thoughtfully brought over by the French students.

The special issue of the journal publishes expanded versions of the academic presentations given during the symposium, and a transcript of Aleks Sierz’s interview with Martin Crimp. We hope it captures some of the energy and the range of conversations during the symposium. Marie Nadia and I very much enjoyed our collaboration, and are already discussing our next venture.

     
     Marie Nadia Karsky                  Martin Crimp

LMJ: Translation Studies are said to be expanding their boundaries. In what directions are they moving?

GB: Translation Studies has always been an interdisciplinary field. Just as translation itself adapts to fit the environments in which it takes place, the academic discipline is evolving to reflect new routes of enquiry. The fact that UCL now offers both MA and MSc programmes in Translation is evidence of the numerous opportunities for study and research.

In addition to the broadening of translation within the Arts and Humanities to include performance, artworks, images and other intercultural movement that I mentioned earlier, there is also an increasing awareness of the advances of technology in translation. This is significant for the use of digital tools for translation – how will Google Translate impact future translations and translators? Technological advances also present an opportunity to carry out new science-based methods of research. My UCL colleague Claire Shih, for example, sees translation as a cognitive human behaviour that can be investigated using digital research instruments, such as screen recording, key logging and eye tracking software.

These different areas also speak to each other: advanced digital tools can be used to translate theatre in the form of intermedial surtitles; computational software can be harnessed to investigate style in literary translation. It is this interdisciplinarity that I find exciting about Translation Studies as a discipline. Ultimately, though, it is the everyday presence of translation in our lives, mostly overlooked, that for me is endlessly captivating, and I’m pleased if I can pass on any of that fascination to my friends, family and, most of all, my students.

 
Blog footnote:

UCL is  a public research university in London.  It makes the contested claims of being the third-oldest university in England, and the first to admit women. UCL has over 100 departments, institutes and research centres.  It has around 35,600 students and 12,000 staff. Its alumni include the  "Father of the Nation" of each of India, Kenya and Mauritius, the founders of Ghana, modern Japan and Nigeria, the inventor of the telephone, and one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, as well as at least 29 Nobel Prize winners.

Yanky Fachler kindly acceded to our request and  travelled to Cambridge to interview Professor Nicholas de Lange, the English translator of over a dozen books by Israeli author, Amos Oz, including Judas, which was short-listed for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. An ordained Reform rabbi, Professor de Lange is Emeritus Fellow and Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Cambridge University's Faculty of Divinity and Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. He has held visiting positions at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the Jewish Theological Seminary of Hungary in Budapest, the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, the Freie Universität Berlin, the University of Toronto and Princeton University. He is a prolific translator of contemporary Hebrew fiction, and has served as Chairman of the Translators Association. In the following extracts, Professor de Lange shares some insights on the art of literary translation.

Yanky Fachler is a translator, broadcaster and writer of  several books in the field of Jewish history. He was born in the United Kingdom, spent almost thirty years in Israel and currently lives in Ireland, where he is founder and chairman of the Jewish Historical Society of Ireland.

 

 

 Y.F. :  How would you define a translator?

A translator is a reader who is also a writer. I read the text, and then I write it. My aim is to write a book that is word for word like the original – without being a word for word translation. Since I also write many books of my own, I see no difference between a translator and an author. As an author, you convert material from your mind on to the page. As a translator, you convert someone else’s work to the page. I am uncomfortable being asked which specific words of phrases in Hebrew I find difficult to translate. I don’t like being asked whether I find Hebrew a difficult language to translate. The actual words are almost irrelevant. I translate paragraphs.

 Y.F. :  Do you read a book before you start to translate it?

I don’t like to read the book in advance. Partly because translation is so badly paid that it takes up too much time; and partly because I like to discover the book as I go along. This approach, though, can lead you astray. In Oz’s My Michael, there is a couple living in Jerusalem who drink endless cups of tea. One day, the man is ill and he asks his wife to bring him tea with milk. With my British background, I found this strange. How had he consumed all the previous cups of tea? Then I learned that in Israel, tea with milk is only given to sick people. I had to go back and rewrite all the tea scenes, replacing cups of tea with glasses of tea. Going back to the question of reading a book before translating it, some of the other translators at the Man Booker event agreed with my habit of not reading the book first. But one translator was adamant: “I must read the book first, because I might not accept it.” The only time I have turned down a translation job is when I was too busy.

 

Y.F. : The actor Lawrence Olivier claimed that actors must learn to love the unsavoury characters they portray on stage. Does something similar happen with translators? Do you have to love some of the unsavoury characters you translate?

N.d.L. :  Translation isn't impartial. Like Olivier rightly says, you must be on the side of the character. You must love the characters you translate. Many of the characters that populate Amos Oz's books are unpleasant, but I don't let my dislike of them stop me from portraying them as they should be portrayed. Anyway, unsavoury characters make interesting characters. You need enormous sympathy for the characters you are translating. For example, some of the books I translate have no narrator – they are entirely epistolary. Everything is in direct speech. Just as a theatre audience needs to know the distinct voice of each actor on stage, so the translator must make the reader aware of which character is speaking at any particular time in an epistolary piece. While on the subject of dialogue on stage and dialogue in translation, I once translated a piece for BBC Radio 3 that was only intended to be read aloud, not to appear on the printed page. The actress called me and said she had a problem with a couple of phrases. "Could you please go back and check the Hebrew to see whether that is what the author really meant?" My heart sank. This was going to be a disaster. Yet when I went back to the original, she was absolutely correct. Without knowing any Hebrew, the actress had stumbled upon a couple of places where my translation did not do justice to the original.

Y.F. : You are quoted as saying that a faithful literary translation demands transcending the words to convey the whole cultural context. Could you elaborate?

N.d.L. :  As a translator, you have to translate the context of the book you are translating. You are asking people to read about a culture they don't and can't know. You have to make the context clear in a subtle way. For example, when there is a reference to Chaim Nachman Bialik, Israel's national poet, you don'; have the luxury of using footnotes. You need to find a more subtle way of letting the reader know who Bialik is. It's the same with biblical and Talmudical references. I don't feel the need to explain what the Bible is or what the Talmud is. I leave it to my readers to pick up allusions and to look stuff up for themselves.

Y.F. : What is your latest Hebrew literature translation project?

N.d.L. :  I don't go out of my way to look for Hebrew books to translate, but I am currently engaged in translating perhaps the most challenging Hebrew novel, Days of Ziklag by S Yizhar. This hugely influential modernist work was first published in 1958, and is one of the two most difficult Hebrew books to translate. The other is Yakov Shabtai's Zikhron Devarim (Past Continuous). I was drawn to the Days of Ziklag project because it is the ultimate challenge for a translator – a bit like translating James Joyce. Although Yizhar was writing before the emergence of Holocaust literature as a genre, his War of Independence themes resonated with Holocaust themes such as ethnic cleansing.

Y.F. : Do you ever collaborate with other translators?

N.d.L. :  Right now, I am collaborating on S Yizhar's Days of Ziklag with a former student of mine, Yaacob Dweck. But what with me living in England, and Yaacob living in the USA, we have calculated that it will take us many years to complete the project [1] . I am not unaware of some of the perils of working with a collaborator. The translator Ros Schwartz once told me of her experience in co-translating a book with another translator. She soon discovered that they each had their own style, and this made it very difficult to find a consistent voice. Even little things like the propensity of one translator to use "start" where the other translator used "begin" caused difficulties. As a rule, I often feel uncomfortable reading other translators. If a book is translated from a language I don't know, I find myself asking what the original was like. I suppose I only enjoy translations that are extraordinarily well done.

 

Y.F. : In Judas, Shmuel gives Yardena a gift for her secular birthday and another for her Hebrew birthday. Having two birthdays is like having two identities. As a translator, does English represent your secular identity, and Hebrew your sacred identity?

N.d.L. :  That is a very subtle question. Yes, English is my secular identity. I certainly regard Hebrew as a sacred tongue, and I prefer to use it only for sacred purposes. I have translated more medieval Hebrew poetry into English than modern Hebrew literature. I don't speak modern Hebrew. I can't read a Hebrew newspaper. [2]  I can listen to the news, but I get lost when they talk about politics. I am unfamiliar with many modern colloquialisms. I do not even regard myself as an expert in Hebrew literature. At the get-together of the Man Booker Prize short-listed authors and their translators, the authors were asked to read from their work in the original language. Amos Oz wasn't there, and they asked me to read. I refused, because my spoken modern Hebrew is not good enough.

 

Y.F. : Jews have traditionally been multi-lingual. They spoke the language of the host country, they prayed in Hebrew, and conversed in Yiddish, Ladino, Aramaic or Arabic. Does the Jewish cultural DNA give Jews an edge when it comes to translating?

N.d.L. :  It is true that through the ages, Jews used their linguistic versatility to become great translators. But the golden age was during the medieval period. In the world of modern literature, Jews no longer have an edge. Most of today's best translators are not Jewish. A lot of translations of modern Hebrew literature used to be clumsy, with translators often not even translating into their mother tongue. But things are much better nowadays, because the authors themselves have learned to be more choosey about who will translate them.

  

Y.F. : You seem to be drawn to works associated with Israel's War of Independence. Do you think that the war could have been avoided?

N.d.L. :  The main theme of Judas is the conflict between David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister – a true-life character, and the fictional character of Shaltiel Abravanel. Ben Gurion believed that the Arabs would never accept a Jewish state in Palestine, so the only alternative was to fight them. Abravanel insisted that war was avoidable, and for his views he was expelled from the ruling elite. He did not think that Israel should be a Jewish state, rather a country in which all could live in equality as brothers. Whatever my views on Abravanel's views may be, I do not let this influence my translation.

 

Y.F. : In Israel today, some people brand Oz a traitor for his controversial political views. How have his views impinged on your long-term collaborator as Oz's translator?

N.d.L. :  I don't have any opinion about Amos Oz's political views. I am a translator, and I'm really not involved or interested in Israeli politics. I am an academic. It is not my job to pass judgement on the opinions expressed in the book. It is not my job to impose myself on the text. It's not my job to get involved in the politics. It is my job to translate what's put in front of me.

——————–

  The interviewee: Nicole Nolette joined the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, as Assistant Professor of French Studies in July 2017.  She is the recipient of the Ann-Saddlemyer prize, awarded by the Canadian Association for Theatre Research, and also the winner of the award for best work in theater research for the period 2014-2016, presented by the Quebec Society of Theatre Studies, for her book Jouer la traduction. Théâtre et hétérolinguisme au Canada francophone (2015). She has published numerous articles in the fields of translation, theater and French-Canadian literature. From 2014 to 2016, she was Social Science Research Council postdoctoral research associate of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University.

 

The interviewer: Geraldine Brodie is Lecturer in Translation Theory and Theatre Translation, and the Convenor of the MA in Translation Theory and Practice at University College London. She devised and co-convened the Translation in History Lecture Series and the Theatre Translation Forum, and was a co-editor of the online journal New Voices in Translation Studies from 2012 to 2015.

Geraldine's research focuses on theatre translation practices in contemporary London, including the collaborative role of the translator in performance and the intermediality and interlinearity of surtitles.She is a frequent presenter on these topics, in the UK and internationally, and her work has been published in a variety of publications. Geraldine is a member of the Panel of Associates of ARTIS, a new research training initiative in the broad area of translation and interpreting studies.

Geraldine has an MA in Comparative Literature from University College London and read English as an undergraduate at Brasenose College, Oxford where she specialised in Linguistics, Old and Middle English and Old French. She has a Diploma de Español como Lengua Extranjera from the Instituto Cervantes. Geraldine's research interests include the multiple voices of translation; direct, indirect and literal theatre translation; adaptation and version; the intermediality of surtitles; and ethics in translation. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and a member of the Chartered Institute of Taxation. Geraldine's first monograph, The Translator on Stage, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2017.

Geraldine was our Linguist of the Month in August 2016.

 
The following interview was conducted in English by Skype between London and Ottawa.

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GB:   Your recent book, Jouer la traduction, discusses translated and bilingual theatre in areas of Canada where French is a minority language. How did you become interested in this topic? What is your personal experience of working in French in Canada?

NN: My interest in bilingual  theater (French-English) and its translation began in 2005 when I was studying with Louise Ladouceur at the francophone Campus Saint-Jean, University of Alberta. At that time I became interested in the bilingual theater of Western Canada because its translation often seemed impossible. I examined whether, rather than considering this theater as untranslatable), one could see it as a game. I then wanted to see if this game of translation might also take place elsewhere, in other postcolonial or diglossic conditions, for example. I chose to study two other case studies similar to that of Western Canada: the province of Ontario, to the west of Quebec, and the region of Acadie, to the east. The city of Montreal and McGill University seemed to be the ideal places from which to observe the evolution and movement of theatrical productions from across Canada. I worked with Catherine Leclerc, a specialist in literary multilingualism and author of Des langues en partage? Cohabitation du français et de l'anglais en littérature contemporaine (2010).

I have also been able to visit the sites of production and translation of bilingual theater over the years. For three years I worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the United States with Doris Sommer at the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University, supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. And for the past year, I have been teaching in Nova Scotia, on the extreme frontier (and origins) of the territory of Acadie. My studies in translation were conducted in French in English-language universities, and I continue to teach in a similar context.

 

GB: Can you give some examples of how French-language theatre is presented in areas where French is a minority language? What approaches to translation are taken, and what kinds of audiences are catered for?

NN: There is a quite significant difference between theater produced west of Quebec (Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia) and that produced in the east (Acadia). In Ontario and Manitoba, for example, francophones make up about 4% of the population; in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the figure is more like 2%. In Acadian New Brunswick, on the other hand, French is the main language of 30% of the population. This difference in the demographics of minority groups also appears in the practices of production and translation of bilingual theater.

In Acadia, the francophone population, even though bilingual to a large extent, creates very little bilingual theater. However, a wide variety of French dialects inspires artistic production. Some of these local varieties of French (including Chiac, spoken in Moncton) also include borrowings and code-switching. This is the case, for example, in the futurist production Empreintes [Traces], presented by the Moncton-Sable Collective after a text by Paul Bossé, which includes an actor playing a Chiac-speaking cyber sapiens who has some fun with the translations she interprets for the audience.

In Ontario and especially in Western Canada, theatre practitioners are more likely to opt for bilingual theater. In Western Canada there is often a preoccupation with identity or community, whereas in Ontario there is a tendency towards the artistic, and sometimes post-dramatic, exploration of bilingualism on stage. I’m thinking, for example, of the production Le Rêve totalitaire de dieu l'amibe by Louis Patrick Leroux, in which the character of the Commentator makes ironic judgments in English on the dramatic action that takes place in French. In another production, L'Homme invisible/The Invisible Man, two actors share the action: one narrates, the other translates; the direction of translation is then reversed so that there is no longer any identifiable language of departure or arrival.

In accordance with these multilingual practices, it is also in the west that such theaters explore a variety of different translation strategies. Surtitling, for example, was used initially by the Théâtre Français in Toronto around 2005 and has rapidly been taken up by many of the minority theatrical institutions in Ontario and the west. In contrast, there is no surtitling policy in Acadie; when touring in the west, however, Acadian theater productions are sometimes surtitled.

I am interested in these regional differences with regard to bilingualism and translation, but I am also investigating how theatrical productions circulate and are legitimized in major theater centers in Canada: in French in Montreal, and in English in Toronto. Since theatregoers in these cities do not necessarily share the bilingualism of the minority communities who create the theatrical forms we are discussing, performances are developed to address new audiences. Thus, a particular bilingual production can become more or less bilingual for spectators who may not be able to fully comprehend it in French or English.

These two stages – the initial bilingual composition and its subsequent translations – are what I call “playful translation”. In the book, I discuss certain paradoxes in the reception of bilingual or surtitled theater productions in Toronto and Montreal. On the one hand, in Toronto, English surtitles not only succeed in attracting audiences with English as their first language, but also francophone audiences unused to hearing French regularly spoken in their minority context. On the other hand, francophone audiences in Montreal are themselves often bilingual, and are less resistant than might be expected to the presence of English on stage.

 

GB:   Your book investigates the concept of “playful translation”. Can you explain how this functions in relation to French-language theatre in Canada? Can this concept be applied to other forms of translated theatre?

NN: I consider “playful translation” at two levels: the playful inscription of bilingualism in a theater production, and its reinscription in subsequent translations of the same production for other audiences. In both cases, playful translation may take the form of performed translators, redistributed replicas or surtitles above the stage. The concept of “play” seems particularly potent: it is employed in language (“play on words”, for example) and in theater (where to act is also “to play”). Considering French-Canadian theater from the perspective of play is also quite innovative; it is customary to regret the ongoing assimilation that is manifested by the bilingualism of minority groups. It seems to me that the concept of “play” equally permits the development of opportunities with regard to translation. Creating a space (in the sense of the space necessary for movement) for "play" in the activity of translation is to follow in the line of word play and the play of multilingualism. It puts a stop to the consideration of such practices as fundamentally untranslatable.

I also consider that the concept of playful translation could be applied to other theatrical forms by minority groups on the boundaries of different languages. The work of Tace Hedrick on bilingual poetry (Spanish-English) in North America and its translation, for example, reminds me that there are international connections that can be traced through playful translation. There could also be other multilingual contexts where it would be interesting to test this concept, such as Hong Kong or Yakutsk.

 

GB:   I noticed that your book discusses translation theory from both English-language and French-language sources. How would you envisage a translation of your own book into English?

NN: In writing this book, I aimed to cross linguistic and cultural boundaries of translation theory, minority literature and production. The concept of play, for example, allows me to draw on Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois, but also on French theory as it is reworked by American cultural studies. I wanted to dip into an interdisciplinary and intercultural repertoire to discuss productions dealing with translation and still in the process of translation. Discussing such productions was perhaps easier in French: the book caters for an audience that already has some awareness of French-Canadian theater. The translation of this book into English would require a fuller presentation of the context generating the issues of French-Canadian theater in order to inform a new audience.

 

GB:         Where will your research take you next?

Since the publication of this book, I have been pursuing several avenues of research. One of them is the contribution of technology, which is ubiquitous in multilingual theater productions and their translations. The character of the cyber sapiens interpreter in Empreintes [Traces] shows that the Chiac dialect and Babelfish style translation can go hand in hand. The use of surtitles is another example of the contribution of technology to the translation of multilingualism. I would like to expand these connections, perhaps by researching perceptions of stage technologies. I am also aiming to advance the theory of multilingual theater; beyond the drama of assimilation, beyond the concept of playful translation – itself carrying some sense of denunciation, I consider that new forms of bilingual theater are making further efforts to target intercultural encounter. To this extent, bilingual theatre presents the hope of potential encounters. In Canada, my concept of “play” relates primarily to French-Canadian theater practitioners, with “hope” attributed to English-Canadian practitioners. A more comprehensive review would consider these two possible forms of bilingual theater in Canada. We have yet to theorize the potential of these moments of meeting – and translation.

[1] Jouer la traduction. Théâtre et hétérolinguisme au Canada francophone
University of Ottawa Press
May 27, 2015

 

[1] Jouer la traduction
Théâtre et hétérolinguisme au Canada francophone
Les Presses de l'Université d'Ottawa
27 mai 2015

 

The following interview was conducted by Skype between Los Angeles and Montreal

S. S. – the interviewee	J. G. – the interviewer

   
                                       

Jonathan: Your parents were born in Toronto. You spoke English at home and despite studying French at school your first significant exposure to French came in your teens. How did that come about?

Sherry: My mom was very forward-looking…meaning that she recognized that French was important in Montreal! That may sound very obvious now, but I grew up in a city that was still practically a colonial city—with a powerful and very self-sufficient English-language minority. What was experienced by some as intolerable change starting in the 1960s (those who felt threatened or excluded by a French-language city) was experienced by others as a period of social, economic and political excitement. The fact that I took a university-level French course while I was still in high school changed my outlook entirely. I was increasingly attracted to French-language culture.

Jonathan: You found Montreal to be comparable with Calcutta in certain respects. (You later wrote « Villes en traduction: Calcutta, Barcelona, Montreal », Presses de l'Université de Montreal, 2013). Can you expound on that comparison.

Sherry: Calcutta and Montreal were founded in the same historical period of colonialism—1609 for Calcutta, 1642 for Montreal. Montreal was founded as a French city, then there was the Conquest of 1759 which meant that Ville Marie became Montreal. Both cities were the products of spatial division—a more modern, spacious area which contrasted greatly with the rest of the city. Of course the colonial divides of India were very different from the colonial divides of Quebec—where two European powers were in competition, and where the indigenous presence had been largely obliterated. But the linguistic and spatial arrangements of Calcutta and Montreal share the same colonialist premise and the interaction between parts of the city shared similar dynamics. What I learned was that there was a great deal to be discovered when you looked at Calcutta and Montreal as cities in translation. The history of the Bengali Renaissance as it played out across Calcutta is rich and fascinating—the story of innovations in science and the arts that were a product of the interplay between communities. The same is true of Montreal, mutatis mutandis. A cultural history of the city since the 1940s for instance tells of numerous new pathways created across the city. Literary personalities such as Mavis Gallant, F.R. Scott or A.M. Klein have woven cultural ties between the French and English speakers, both in journalism and in poetry. What is important to note, however, is that translation is not always successful and that failed translation can also be useful to explore.

Jonathan: You went on to study Comparative Literature at Brandeis University in the USA, and did your Masters in Paris, obtaining a Diplome de l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, and a doctorate in literature compareé from the University of Montreal. Your career-path is somewhat unusual: although you were initially a literary translator you soon moved into the academic study of translating. Your positions have included Professeure du Département d'études françaises at Concordia University and membre de l'Académie des lettres du Québec.

The long list of books you've written includes "Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City", for which you reached the finals of the Ville de Montreal, Grand Prix du Livre. Although some might have regarded that as being an ivory-tower occupation, your writings were widely recognized, as witness the many prizes you have won, such as the Prix Andre-Laurendeau en Sciences humaines.

During your distinguished career, what advances have you seen in the role of the literary translator?

Sherry: The very fact of the expansion of Translation Studies as an academic field is a great success story of the last 3 decades or so. The growth has been exponential—books, journals, academic programs, summer schools, and the list goes on. The field is especially important in Europe, and literary translation is increasingly recognized as an important creative activity. Translators are getting more recognition, I think, in general—with the wonderful work of translators associations, of high-profile translators, and of academics who take the work of these translators seriously and are making their work the object of serious study. In Canada, literary translation benefits from government support and a certain degree of public recognition. But the same platitudes are often repeated. We still need to work towards further recognition of the creative value of translation—not only in relation to the Canadian scene but internationally.

Jonathan: Your very latest book, just published, "Translation Effects: The Shaping of Modern Canadian Culture" (written together with Kathy Mezei and Luise von Flotow, McGill-Queen's University Press, pp.496) deals, inter alia, with the subject of bilingualism. For the benefit of our readers who have not read it and may not manage to do so, could you give us one or two points on Canadian bilingualism?

Sherry: We argue in the book that official bilingualism has in many ways masked the multiform realities of translation within Canadian society. And so the book—which is a collection of 30-some essays—shows how translation is a factor is many aspects of literary and cultural life—through First Nations languages, immigrant languages, and the unequal transactions of French and English. While official bilingualism is an important element of our national self-definition, allowing the country to function, it only applies to the legal realities of the country. The cultural realities are messier, more unequal, but also creative of new mixtures.

Jonathan: So why has the Federal Government gone to such lengths to promote and preserve bilingualism?

Sherry: Official bilingualism in its current form was a result of the political unrest of the 1960s. There is a very significant separatist movement in Quebec, always ready to re-emerge, and in the 1960s it was very strong. Official bilingualism was one response to this crisis, promising a French presence from coast to coast. But Canada also has a multicultural policy, which gives cultural rights to 'ethnic' groups. These rights are sometimes in conflict with one another, or perceived as such. It is true that official bilingualism has remained in place for many decades now, and seems to have performed its task well. But while the government used to do all its translation in-house, it now outsources practically all translation tasks, and no longer ensures training.

Jonathan: Dr Paul Christophersen of the University College in Ibadan, Nigeria, in his book called "Bilingualism", is quoted as saying that it is almost impossible for a "so-called" bilingual speaker to achieve 100% efficiency in both languages. 

Sherry: Of course there is no such thing as perfect bilingualism. Bilingualism is almost always asymmetrical, however there are many Quebecers who function as well in one language as the other. Usually this is an oral skill. Writing is another story. There are very few people who write as well in one language as the other, and for instance, while many can read equally well in both languages, in Quebec the literary institutions are quite separate. But as for day to day functional bilingualism, there are an astonishing number of people who could claim this capacity in Montreal especially. And while French-Canadians in the past were 'forced' to be bilingual, it is now English-language Montrealers who are increasingly bilingual. But as for 100% efficiency, I would say that this is not really a useful marker. What is 100% efficient when language is concerned?

Jonathan: Mr John Woodsworth, a Russian-English translator who submitted a report to the Canadian government many years ago, proposed to CBC: Replace the current system of separate English and French-language TV networks by a single bilingual network, with a daily schedule of mostly (if not all) Canadian-produced programming originating alternately in English and French, with captions (sub-titles) provided in the second language.

Sherry: An interesting idea, but unlikely to happen. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission regulates these matters. Twenty years ago it closed down a bilingual radio channel that alternated between French and English. With the present government's stance on public broadcasting, we will be lucky to retain public broadcasting, never mind revolutionize it.

Jonathan: In the course of this brief interview, we have only been able to touch on the diverse fields of erudition that you bring to historical and cultural aspects of translating. Nevertheless, we hope to have given our readers an idea of what they may find in any of the numerous books that you have written. Many thanks.

 

 

 Sherry Simon – The Flow of Languages, the Grace of Cultures (in French)

 

 

We welcome back [1] to the ranks of our contributors John Wellington a New Yorker whose art finds its inspiration in Old Master paintings, religious and pop icons, cinema, music, and his fascination with devotion, idolatry and the use of male and female imagery in art and life.  He has shown in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Paris and London.  His paintings may be seen on the website: johnwellington.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOU AND ME oil on aluminum, 68 x 48 inches See explanation below of the painting's legend [*]

John Wellington in his studio See "Studio Visit" video below [**]

 

John Wellington has recently released the first three volumes of Idols Demons Saints, a series of e-books based on his sketchbooks, showing the process of creating from the first inked line to a finished work of art. (See John Wellington : Idols, Demons and Saints by James F. Cooper)

John leads painting groups to Paris.

In the following article, John relates his friendship with Jean Giraud (1938-2012), the renowned French comic-book creator  known also by his pseudonyms Mœbius and Gir.

 ————

In 1977 a French comic – Métal Hurlant – was translated and reproduced for the American market as Heavy Metal Magazine.  At sixteen years old, looking through issue number one, I was visually transported by the storytelling of a number of European artists that I, like my friends, had never heard of.  There was one artist, whose masterful line work and surreal story stood out for me, even above the other exceptionally talented illustrators collected in that first issue.  His contribution was a wordless tale titled Arzach and he signed it “Moebius.”  That was my introduction to Jean Giraud’s world – a lone rider, flying a saddled Pterodactyl-like bird across an apocalyptic landscape to rescue what he believed to be a damsel in distress.  As a teenager I copied Jean’s drawings using Rapidograph pens and coloring my attempts with Dr. Martin’s Dyes or watercolors.  I spent hours trying to understand and unravel Jean’s magic of showing form and texture through the elegance of his line. It would be a few years later at art school, that when looking at the engravings of Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Albrecht Dürer, and Hendrick Goltzius that I would begin to understand the genesis of Jean’s hatch marks.

A decade later in 1988, two incidents brought me to France, both involving my creative life.  The first was my participation in a show at Centre George Pompidou.  The second was my involvement in both the pulp and graphic novel versions of a story for Marvel Comics.

Jean Dethier, the then Director of Architecture at Pompidou, visited my studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn after seeing my painting Der Erzengle [2].  Monsieur Dethier invited me to be a part of the large scale show he was curating: Chateau Bordeaux.  Asking what I would need in order to participate in the exhibition I requested to be embedded in a winery to paint, sketch and find my inspiration.  Weeks later Jean proposed that I stay at Château Pichon-Longueville Comtesse de Lalande for five weeks as the guest of General and Madame de Lencquesaing.  They would provide a studio, car, and of course, room and board in their château.  For five weeks in the summer of 1988, I drove through the vineyards of Pauillac and neighboring villages, painted, ate, and of course drank the grand vins of the local wineries. 

To support myself during this time, I worked as a colorist for Marvel Comics.  A few months before the Bordeaux trip, the editors at Epic Comics (an imprint of Marvel) asked if I would color a two-part pulp comic of The Silver Surfer. “Pulp” was the term we used for low quality comics printed on newspaper and usually sold in newsstands.  The story was written by Stan Lee, the creator of many of Marvel's greatest superheroes, including Spider-Man, The Hulk, and Thor, but what made this job the best of my career in comics was that it was illustrated by Jean Giraud – Moebius – my teenage art idol.

Jean sent color notes to the Marvel offices at lower Park Avenue in Manhattan, consisting not of

actual colors, but rather the numeric and letter codes that were used to identify colors for comic books printed on pulp paper.  Jean marked up black and white xeroxed pages of his art with arrows pointing to letters and numbers like Y2R2, Y2BR3 and every other combination of Y (yellow), B (blue) and R (red) that could be made from 25% (2), 50% (3) and 100% of the dot pattern of those colors.  American pulp comics had a VERY limited color palette (the majority of the color choices looked a muddied greenish brown) and I don’t think Jean was ever happy with the results of the reductive and poor reproduction values of the final product.  Still, the two part pulp version of The Silver Surfer sold well and that summer as I was preparing to leave  for Bordeaux, I was asked to paint the pages of a high quality graphic novel version of the Stan Lee/Moebius The Silver Surfer.  This process was called “blue-line” as Jean’s pages were printed on large art board as blue, rather than black lines.  These could then be painted over in gouache or washed with watercolor where the pages would be scanned and photographed as original art with the black line work of Jean’s drawings overlaid on top of the painted pages.  

 

Before starting my five weeks of painting at Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande in Pauillac, I spent a week in Paris to meet with Jean Dethier and some of the other artists and architects that would be contributing work to Chateau Bordeaux.  Jean Giraud had agreed to meet me that week so that I could show him some of my finished pages for the graphic novel.  As excited as I was to finally meet the artist whose line work I tried to emulate a decade earlier, it was also my hope that he would not be disappointed in these painted pages as he had been in the already published pulp version.  And so it was with equal amounts of excitement and trepidation that I went off to meet Jean Giraud for a drink at Le Select on Boulevard Montparnasse on August 15th of 1988.

I was already sitting on the terrace of the café when Jean Giraud approached me.  I was 27 years old and he had recently turned 50.  He seemed to my young eyes both boyish and old.  Jean’s hair was wild, receding and greying, his face showing deep furrows around the brow of his forehead and along the creases of his mouth, but his eyes, framed by thin wired oval glasses, twinkled with youth.  After we ordered drinks from the waiter, I produced the pages I had colored.  He studied each one carefully and smiled when he returned them to the portfolio.  Relieved that he approved of my work, we turned our conversation to art.  He was working on a new series of abstract paintings that he was planning to show at Pompidou at some point.  He joked that he would avoid his opening as he feared the reaction to a body of work that was far different from what he was famous for. 

 

After drinks, Jean invited me for dinner around the corner at a vegetarian restaurant called Dietetic Shop on Rue Delambre.  The bright green facade and large yellow lettering made this petite bistro near impossible to miss on the tranquil street behind Boulevard Montparnasse.  At the time, Jean was a practicing “rawist” and Dietetic Shop prepared all his food uncooked as to his wishes.  At dinner we showed each other the drawings in our sketchbooks as we both always kept one with us.  Jean was one of those artists that could draw anything from imagination.  I have met a few more artists like him in the decades since, especially in the world of concept illustration and comic book art, but the type of visual memory skill that Jean possessed, has to this day, felt as much to me like a super power as a talent.

Earlier that evening, before our rendezvous, I had watched an interview show on television to help improve my poor French.  I described to Jean the strange man that was being interviewed; disheveled, unshaven, his eyelids heavy and swollen, and chain smoking Gitanes.

This man, wearing a denim jump suit, went out of his way to antagonize the host, and when a photo was shown of him looking both straight at the camera, and in profile – an American ‘perp” photo – I was sure he was a criminal.  Well, a criminal that could sing, as the show then played a video of this man performing the ballade Mon Legionnaire.  Jean Giraud laughed and knew exactly who I had seen on TV a few hours earlier, not a criminal, but the great singer and song writer Serge Gainsbourg, promoting his latest album You're Under Arrest.  To Jean’s astonishment I still had no idea who this person was, so after our dinner, Jean took me to a record shop on Montparnasse where I bought two cassettes for my Walkman.  And so that evening was not only the occasion of my meeting one of the great artists of my youth but also my introduction to Serge Gainsbourg. I became the proud owner of the cassettes, Melody Nelson, and You’re Under Arrest.  Within a year I would own many more of Gainsbourg’s albums, and become such a fan as to mourn his loss on March 2, 1991.

Two days later Jean invited me to his studio to hang out with him while he painted his abstract paintings.  I pulled out my gouache paints and started a small portrait of him working over the drafting table, while he made his acrylic paints and brush do magical things on the page.  We talked of fame, comics, films, and the struggles of being an artist.  And most importantly, we began a friendship.

Over the years, Jean would visit me in New York City.  Once he came at my invitation to lecture at the New York Academy of Art.  Another time, after drinks, we drew in each other’s sketchbooks where till this day I know I got the better part of the deal.  His drawing depicted two cowboys of the future meeting in a desert called Providence, references both to the city where I went to college and, I imagine, to our friendship.  Above the drawing, he penned the letters “GG,”  a reference to the black Siamese cat I had at that time.  To this day I treasure the sketch for many reasons.  But one is because of his love of America and specifically of “the Wild West.”  He once talked about his earlier comic book work done under the nom de plume “Gir.”  Blueberry depicted with astonishing accuracy, cowboys and indians, Winchester rifles, and every other accoutrement of that genre, and like Sergio Leone and his “Spaghetti Western” films, Jean illustrated these comic books before ever visiting the United States.

 

A decade almost to the week after our first meeting, in the summer of 1998 I painted my last portrait of Jean.  We had finished dinner at his Paris studio on rue Falguiere behind the Gare Montparnasse, and our sons went down to the courtyard to play.  While drinking wine, Jean and I talked about art, children, women and life, stopping our conversations only when I needed to paint his mouth.  That portrait of Jean, painted in simple bold hatch marks, might have impressed him more than any other work I had done up to that moment.  When it was completed, he held the painting in his hands and said “magic.”  That was what art and the act of creating was for him.  Decades later, it is still what the act of creating is for me.  Magic.

 

[*] YOU AND ME, one of twenty-one paintings from the IDOLS, DEMONS and SAINTS series, references John Wellington’s travels to Asia.  The stuffed toys, burning on top of the Great Wall of China, are based on a character created by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami.  Other paintings from this series may be seen at http://johnwellington.com/demons.htm

[**] John Wellington – Studio Visit (6:51 minutes)
New York Academy of Art © 2013

 

  

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[1] John's previous contribution: "12 August – the day Jean-Michel Basquiat died 27 years ago at the age of 27"

[2] The Archangel, in German.