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Literary translation is often a job with little renown and few financial rewards, but translator Alison Anderson managed to strike it big twice in 2008: the French author JMG Le Clezio, whose novels Anderson has translated, received the Nobel Prize for literature, and Muriel Barbery’s novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog became a national bestseller. Here Anderson talks about the pleasures and the pains of becoming a hot commodity and the books behind these literary celebrities.

In this audio you’ll find a complete lyric essay by bestselling French author Christian Bobin, Alison Anderson on Nobel winner JMG Le Clezio, and Anderson reading from Muriel Barbery’s first novel, Gourmet Rhapsody.

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Here are some excerpts:

Alison Anderson on The Elegance of the Hedgehog’s success:

When you translate a book from French into English you never expect that it’s going to do something like this. Even if it’s been a bestseller in France. I mean, Christian Bobin, his book shave sold hundreds of thousands of copies in France, Onitsha [by Nobel winner JMG Le Clezio] was on the bestseller list the entire summer one year I was in France. But bestsellers don’t necessarily translate. Let’s put it that way.

How she came to translate The Elegance of the Hedgehog:

I have a thing about hedgehogs. So when I saw this title, I said, “What is this?” So I bought the book, I read thirty pages, and I fell in love. It’s funny, and intelligent . . . I just knew I wanted to translate it. . . .

Fortunately, the publisher who eventually translated it, I’d done some work for them before, so I said, “Can I do it?” and they said, “But you have to send us a sample first.” So I went though a long waiting period to see if they’d approve my sample, and they did.

On Christian Bobin:

I think I’ll start just by reading the biography that is in his own paperback books in France . . . because this is really all there is to say about his, because this is the way he wants it. “Christian Bobin was born in 1951 in Le Creusot, France. He has never left that town. He is the author of many works whose titles shed light upon each other, like fragments of a single jigsaw puzzle. In one of his works we find this phase like a self-portrait: “One does not write to become a writer, one writes to find, in silence, that part of love that is missing from all love.”

These days, fourth and fifth-graders at Sutro Elementary in San Francisco are translating poems from Italian, Latvian, Vietnamese, Japanese. Quechua, Latin and Arabic, as well as from Spanish and from the Chinese that is most of the students’ first language. Our residency at Sutro represents the first full rollout of Poetry Inside Out’s World Poetry Curriculum. And the results are astonishing.

For the last ten years PIO has worked mostly with Spanish bilingual kids, pointing them toward poetry through translating the grand words of Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca and Gabriela Mistral. Now our own Ondi Lingenfelter is preparing a curriculum in Chinese to do the same with Li Bai, Gu Cheng and Xi Xi.

But the concept of translation is larger than the traditional — and essential — model of accurately converting a text from one language (usually one’s second language) to another, usually native. After all, the principal translator of Nobel Prize poet Czeslaw Milosz is former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass — who does not speak Polish!

It all depends on scaffolding. What resources can we supply to make the transition between the complexities of two languages? For our first exercise at Sutro, we gave the students a short poem by another Nobel laureate, Italy’s Salvatore Quasimodo.

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
Ed é subito sera.

Armed with a translator’s glossary defining all the Italian words, the kids were easily able to work the poem into English. Fifth-grader Lawrence Liu is one of many who came up with an accurate version:

Everyone is alone on the heart of the earth
pierced by a ray of sun:
and it is suddenly evening.

Next, we turned the class into a thesaurus, asking the students to find the most interesting and important words in the poem and brainstorm synonyms and associations. Then they came up with alternate translations achieved by changing all the key words. Some of these are quite wild. Here’s fourth-grader Michael Ao Ieong:

Anybody is lonely on the lungs of Jupiter
stabbed by a fish of star
and it is all at once dusk.

Our second text was a Latvian magic charm, translated by Bette Vinklers in Two Lines. Here’s the first of two stanzas in Latvian and Vinklers’ English:

Lai bij värdi, lai bij värdi
Man pasam stipri värdi:
Daugavigu notarëju,
Mietu düru vidiñã.

Whoever else knows words,
I know words of power:
I can stop a mighty river,
pierce the middle with a staff.

Now we gave the children less scaffolding: värdi, we told them, means “words,” while stipri is “powerful.” What’s daugavigu? Chant the poem out loud, feel the powerful (trochaic tetrameter) rhythm, make things up, let your imagination fill in the blanks! Fourth-grader Crystal Huang was equal to the challenge:

Learn good words, learn good words
Repeat the powerful words:
All the words born from nature,
Feel the strong breeze.

Three petals gently float
Sweet sap from an oak tree:
Rare bugs, a bee bites,
Not a single leaf disappears.

Partial translation also created a magic spell with the eighteenth-century Vietnamese poet Hô Xuôn Hu’o'ng. John Balaban translates some of her “Questions for the Moon” straight up:

How old is the white rabbit?
How many children belong to Moon-Girl?

Why do you circle the purple loneliness of night
and seldom blush before the sun?

Working together, the Sutro students, many of them highly literate in Chinese, were able to identify some, but not all, of the characters in the original Chu-nôm script. Then their imaginations took over.

Did the Jade Rabbit’s children eat bread forever?
Did you get dizzy from looking at the clear water?

—Translated by Derek Li and Barry Chiu, 5th grade

And the children asked her,
“How did you fall from the purple tower forever?
Can you tell us your feelings when you almost
fell in the bay?”

—Translated by Carole Huang, 5th grade

When does a child say bye to the moon girl?
Will the purple tower be purple forever?

—Translated by Jesury Blanco, 5th grade

Are these children jade rabbits in bread years?
Was it the East I always expect from you?
Did you buy my feelings in your heart?

—Translated by Elaine Wen, 5th grade

Does the moon woman fly away from her children?
Why stay forever in the purple tower?

—Translated by Wendy Liu, 5th grade

Some crazy Moon Girl saw a unicorn.
She always jumps off of purple towers.
Five chickens jumped over the moon today.

—Translated by Johnny Xu, 4th grade

Are these pieces translations or original poems? At this level, the distinction may not be important. What is clear is that translation is a powerful key not only to cross-cultural awareness, but to unlocking unsuspected creative powers in young minds, giving a whole new meaning to the concept of literacy. Poetry Inside Out is still exploring the possibilities of our new World Curriculum. We’ll keep you informed.

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We now have audio for Alison Anderson’s weekend appearance on the nationally syndicated NPR show West Coast Live, courtesy of the Center. Click the above player to have a listen.

And to stay on top of all our audio offerings, subscribe to our podcast feed, using iTunes or your favorite feed reader.

(In honor of the Center’s translation workshop with Marian Schwartz on Saturday, March 20, we asked her to write a little bit about the craft to give prospective attendees a taste of what to expect. The workshop is geared toward new translators, covering practical topics like choosing projects, rights and permissions, and the publishing business. Attendees will also have a chance to undertake a hands-on translation of a passage of fiction. Spacing is limited and registration is required, but there is space left. If you’re interested make sure you register here.)

Literary translation is a creative act because there is never one “right” translation for any text. Two good translators can—and doubtless will—produce two good but different versions of the same original. Not only will they bring personal writing styles, reading experiences, and aesthetic preferences to bear, but they may well have different goals and interpretations.

How we are to treat proper nouns is a case in point. Should we use the foreign name as is or translate its sense into English? Or some combination of the two? In fact, there are no hard and fast rules here. I would always translate the Bolshoi Ballet as “Bolshoi,” not “Great,” but I almost always translate Moscow’s “Sadovoye Koltso” as “Garden Ring Road.” Even when they appear in the same text.

This particular decision comes up in the very first sentence of the story at hand, Fernando Sorrentino’s “Costumbres del alcaucil” (Habits of the Artichoke):

Desde el teléfono del dormitorio—casi no había cama, ni mesitas de luz ni placares ni ropas—llamé al mercadito Los Dos Amigos.

What is to be done with “Los Dos Amigos”? Do we leave it as is or write “Two Friends”?

Here are some questions, in no particular order, to consider in making a decision:

• Can the English reader be expected to understand what the Spanish phrase?
• Is the sense of the name useful or important?
• Is the Spanish name a direct reference to anything?
• Is the Spanish name well known in English?
• Does using the original name add desirable flavor to the translation, pulling us back to the original culture?
• Does the author play with the name at any point in the text in such a way that would suggest either keeping the Spanish or translating it into English?
• How does each option fit in with the rest of the text?

To answer these questions you have to have read the entire story, so start there.

In the workshop we will discuss the pros and cons of these two options:

“I called Los Dos Amigos market,” or “I called the Two Friends market.”

That’s one of the questions Ulrich Blumenbach asked himself while translating David Foster Wallace’s monster-sized novel, Infinite Jest, into German. The process of making this translation, which was published late last year in Germany, is detailed today at Publishing Perspectives.

Interestingly, through a website dedicated to the translation Blumenbach found that there are some challenges when readers respond to Wallace’s notoriously tricky and often purposely “incorrect” English:

In one of many such examples, a November 18th comment on Blumenbach’s November 15th entry from a user called Ronald Bergner says, “I noticed a mistake: P 1,032 ‘Dieses Vorgehen bergte Risiken [...]’ Do you mean the past form of ‘bergen’ or something else?” Blumenbach responds the very next day: “Concerning the apparent mistake on P. 1,032: Wallace allows the narrator to assume the respective speech of the character (here of the Wheelchair Assassins), and ergo on P. 1032 the “French-ified” German that we otherwise associate with Marathe emerges. Wallace marks the French Canadians not by their incorrect pronunciation, as the French are recognized in jokes or comedies…but through very precisely mistaken verb forms, terms, and idioms…” and he proceeds to give several examples.

Interestingly, the blog where Blumenbach received the above feedback become something of a hub for him to interact with his readers, an experience that is described as “a positive one for him.” Maybe more translators should think about creating websites for their books?

The article also notes that Blumenbach will be translating Wallace’s incomplete posthumous “novel,” tentatively titled “The Pale King.”

Our March 9 Lit&Lunch guest will be appearing on the nationally syndicated radio show West Coast Live this Saturday at 10:00 am. You can hear Alison discuss The Elegance of the Hedgehog, literary translation, and more on one of these stations or online at KALW.org.

Not to be lost amid Muriel Barbery and JMG Le Clezio at Lit&Lunch next week is Christian Bobin, who is huge in France but not so much over here. A good way to get an idea of this is to compare his Wikipedia pages in English and in French. To say the least, the French one is a bit more substantial. (Also check out how the French-language blogs hum with Bobin’s name.)

But reading Alison Anderson’s description of discovering and translating Bobin, he does sound like the kind of author with real potential to take off in the U.S., sort of like a Gallic Cesar Aira:

On every subsequent trip to France I bought up each new book; Bobin’s works are short, rarely more than a hundred pages, and he sometimes publishes several a year. I decided I would try to translate some of his short pieces. I sent them out; they came back; people didn’t get it. He’s not edgy, or trendy, or experimental; he’s deeply reflective, almost religious. Maybe people aren’t used to thinking about life in a philosophical way, at least not through literature. But while I may not have been doing a good job marketing or pitching Bobin to potential publishers and journals (something which Bobin would abhor, anyway, the whole commercial side of literature), I must have been doing something right in my translation, because in 2004 I was awarded an NEA translation grant for three short volumes, two of which, A Little Party Dress and I Never Dared Hope You Would Come, have finally found a home at Autumn Hill Press and will be published at the end of this year.

Bobin is one of the authors you’ll be able to hear Anderson reading from and discussing at our Lit&Lunch on March 9. As always, RSVP at our Facebook page, and those who can’t attend can hear the audio that we’ll be making available online afterward.

And be sure to check publisher Autumn Hill’s website for more about Anderson’s two new Bobin books, A Little Party Dress and I Never Dared Hope for You.

And for a little more Bobin, in our anthology Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed you can read Anderson’s translation from the yet unpublished La Dame blanche (”The Lady in White”), about that famous literary woman in white, Emily Dickinson.

If you drop by our Alison Anderson event on Tuesday, March 9, you’re going to see some of her translations for sale. When you see these books, you might find yourself stopping to stare, as Anderson has been blessed with some of the most eye-catching covers I’ve seen in bookstores. (Note, not all of these books will be available at the event, but you can still buy them at your favorite local indie bookstore.) Here, for instance, is one of her latest translations, The Most Beautiful Book in the World:

It’s hard to explain just how striking this book is when you see it face-up on a table full of new paperbacks. I still remember the first time I saw it, and the immediate impact it made on me. The colors really grab you, and then the image, centered around that floating, reading woman, draws you in to look around. I found myself almost irresistibly picking up the book.

Then there are these two, Anderson’s bestselling Elegance of the Hedgehog and the “follow-up” (actually published first in France) Gourmet Rhapsody:

You can see that Europa Editions made the wise decision to have Rhapsody look similar to the wildly popular Hedgehog, and to even paint the two in contrasting colors so that they would create a strong impression if they sat together at bookstores. And then the last one I wanted to share here is for Anderson’s Tokyo Fiancee (also a bestseller):

This one offers a nice stark black-and-white image, accented, but not dominated, by that huge red spot from the Japanese flag. And, of course, if all that wasn’t enough, the obvious passion connoted by the image will get people to look closer when they see it on the new paperback table.

(Before we get into Marian Schwartz’s offering in our Tookit series, a note: The Center will be co-sponsoring a translation workshop with Marian Schwartz on Saturday, March 20. Geared toward new translators, it will cover practical topics such as choosing projects, rights and permissions, and the publishing business. Attendees will also have a chance to undertake a hands-on translation of a passage of fiction. Spacing is limited and registration is required, so if you’re interested make sure you register here.)

Like any proud literary tradition, Russia’s is constantly referring to itself. Probably not more so than any other, but sometimes that’s how it seems when you’re the translator trying to track down a quotation. In the bad old days, before those crazy electrons started flying through the air and into our work spaces, we relied on native informants steeped in their own literature to identify an allusion. Not a bad solution. Tried and true really. But it does require human interaction and is never instantaneous (unless you happen to be that native informant’s significant other, an option that eluded me forty years ago).

A few years ago I attended ATA’s national conference—not a regular stop on my annual rounds—specifically to hear and meet Michele Berdy, an American expat who has lived in Moscow for decades and who writes a fine column for The Moscow Times explicating Russian vocabulary, idioms, and usage for English speakers. She was giving a workshop and delivering the Slavic Division’s keynote speech. Both performances were stellar, yielding multiple insights and new information but also a fabulous tidbit (assuming tidbits can be fabulous). Berdy told of a CD that collected vast quantities of Russian literature from the eleventh to the early twentieth century. Virtually everything by virtually every writer you ever have and haven’t heard of. And it was searchable.

Fast forward a year to Moscow. Locating and purchasing this CD was high on my to-do list while I was there. Friends sent me to Gorbushka, Moscow’s gigantic marketplace for household goods, music, and electronics. In the Metro, I eavesdropped on the various conversations around me until I found a youthful threesome clearly headed for the land of CDs. We all got off at the Bagriotonskaya station and I followed them, as the cops say on TV.

The Gorbushka I entered is a far cry from the black market that sprung up near there in the 1980s, before CDs were widely available in Russia, on a square by the Gorbunov House of Culture. The illegal trade had been brisk. Eventually the government threatened to shut it down altogether, but instead, in the face of furious popular opposition, including spontaneous protest rallies, they repurposed the nearby Rubin factory as the new “civilized and nonpiratical” Gorbushka. I think they were exaggerating about at least one of those adjectives.

The Gorbushka I saw was quite clean and unscary, but there were obviously unlicensed CDs everywhere. Heck, some of these guys weren’t even trying for a reasonable facsimile, and they had nothing against charging the MSRP for what looked to me like pretty sketchy goods.

Eventually I came to an out-of-the-way corner at the back of the second floor (doesn’t this sound Russian already?) where I found a high-quality vendor with an encouraging assortment of CDs—and they all looked legal, i.e., quality-controlled. After all, what good would a cheap but botched CD do me once I got back to Austin?

Indeed, there it was: Русская литература от Нестора до Маяковского (Russian Literature from Nestor to Mayakovsky).*

The CD holds the equivalent of 100,000 book pages, more than 3 million words, or about 200 500-page books. 120 Russian writers and poets! The compilation uses the authoritative original texts and provides both publication data and bibliographical information on the author. Hyperlinks take me to author’s notes. There’s even a brief bio and portrait for each author. This is not just a tool for identifying identify literary quotations. I can also search for names, concepts, and themes in various combinations. I can even . . . read.

My own discovery was that with this tool I could trace the usage of specific words and expressions over Russian literature’s entire public-domain history. I could discover how a word’s meaning and use had or hadn’t changed. When I find a word’s lineage I learn something about a writer’s artistic influences and his or her influence’s influences. It’s a completely new way to explore writing.

I have shelves and shelves of books in the original Russian, but more often than not I don’t have what I need at a given moment. I’m often missing a particular Chekhov story or Mayakovsky poem, let alone that very special Rozanov essay.

Now I have everything.

*Last I checked, the CD was still available from DirectMedia for 350 rubles, about $12, at www.directmedia.ru.

(Lit&Lunch 2010 continues! Our next guest will be Alison Anderson on March 9, where she’ll be giving us a triple-threat of French literature: JMG Le Clézio, Christian Bobin, and Muriel Barbery. We’ll be sharing various information about Anderson and these authors over the next couple weeks: first off is this interview, where she explains what drew her in to each writer and what, if anything, unites them.)

Scott Esposito: On your blog you note that Onitsha, your translation by 2008 Nobel laureate JMG Le Clézio, was one of your first serious translations. How was it that you happened upon Le Clézio a good 15 years before most American had heard of him, and what was it about this book that drew you in?

Alison Anderson: I had recently moved to San Francisco from Europe and was suffering from culture shock and nostalgia, so I signed up at the Alliance Française to be able to use their library. There was a copy of Le Chercheur d’or (The Prospector) on the new bookshelf; I read it and was enthralled, discovering an entire new world, both the strange distant world of Mauritius Le Clézio describes, and the slow, evocative prose I find so compelling. I immediately wanted to translate it but it had already been done, by Carol Marks. A few years later when I read Onitsha I found that same evocative world, and prose—so different from the plot-driven novels in English—and I set off on the long, hard—naïve—path of trying to find a publisher, but eventually found a sympathetic editor at Nebraska.

SE: Also on your blog, you note that Le Clezio’s books are demanding because they ask for the reader to give in not to the story but to the language (which is something that I’ve found as well). Elsewhere you described the language as “fluid and evocative, not too difficult, clear and classical” and called the book “a translator’s dream.” What about the language made you feel this way, and why did you find it so ideal for translation?

AA: Le Clézio doesn’t strive for effect; he has an image he wants to get across as clearly and deeply as possible. Clear prose in the original lends itself more easily (but on occasion deceptively) to fluid translation, at least in my experience. So on the one hand, it is always rewarding to be able to translate good prose that you can convey easily into English and know you haven’t “lost” too much or betrayed the original. But what’s more, with Le Clézio, is that there is an almost trance-like beauty to the rhythm of his sentences that takes over, and there is a kind of sensual pleasure to be looking for the corresponding words and experience in English. It’s hard to describe exactly, but very few of the authors I’ve translated since have had this effect on me.

SE: What other Le Clezio in translation would you recommend to readers?

AA: The Prospector, definitely. Godine has reissued it.

SE: To switch gears here, I’d like to ask you a little about Christian Bobin. In Two Lines you’ve characterized him as a literary phenomenon in France, where he sells hundreds of thousands of book. Could you give some idea of his place in the French scene, and what it is about his books that works so well?

AA: Well, it’s not exactly switching gears completely! As discussed in your earlier question, language plays an important in Le Clézio’s work, but this is nothing unusual for French literature. I would say that what matters in France is not so much a story, a plot, but a well-crafted moment of fiction; style and proper use of language are immensely significant. It’s not what is written but how it’s written. Christian Bobin took the use of language to new level, certainly in his earlier innovative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s; he completely eclipsed the border between prose and poetry in his short “lyric essays,” as Russell Valentino of Autumn Hill Press has eloquently called them. It’s a deeply personal prose, and whether you like it or not will also be deeply personal; he keeps a very low profile to this day, and has a sort of cult following, but clearly for him writing is a way to be close to life, to the lived moment, and this has touched a nerve with a lot of people.

SE: You’ve just published a translation Bobin’s called A Little Party Dress: Lyric Essays. Is this a typical work for Bobin? What American author would you compare him to?

AA: Yes, it is definitely typical; most of his books are very short and consist either of these unrelated essays, or are a long meditation on an eternal theme, constructed in short paragraphs. There are a few novellas that I find less engaging than the essays; there are also more challenging, more philosophical works that the publisher classifies as poetry.

I can’t say I’ve found any American author to compare him to; that’s why his voice was so startling and unique to me. There are surely poets who are closer, but the experience is different because there, you’re reading poetry.

SE: I’d like to switch gears again since I didn’t want to let you go without asking you a little about Muriel Barbery, whose novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog just lodged its 52nd week as a New York Times bestseller. This is a French novel that deals with the ideas of Husserl, Heidegger, and all kinds of other philosophers, and we often hear that the American public has no appetite for French philosophical fiction. (In fact, I believe The New York Times itself recently published something to that effect.) So why do you think this book has so clearly resonated?

AA: There are many reasons but to be honest I think the philosophy was the least of them: the book resonated in spite of the philosophy! (Some readers have confessed they skipped those sections, but really, I find they are meant to be tongue in cheek and you don’t need to take them at all seriously.) For me personally there are three reasons the book succeeded: the characters, the intelligence, and the humor. All three are woven together to create something that, while it is not always believable and should be read with a grain of salt, nevertheless resonates with readers on both an intellectual and an emotional level. People who didn’t like the book clearly took it at face value: you can’t. The characters are larger than life, but illustrate in a fresh way some age-old dilemmas . . . Beauty, the meaning of life, love, death—all the clichés, so how to write about them freshly? By having Parisian bourgeoises battle over lace underwear and concierges indulge surreptitiously in the joys of films by Ozu. It’s what we all do in fact.

SE: Lastly, I wanted to ask you about these three authors collectively, all French writers still writing today in French. Do you see them as unified by anything?

AA: I think they are unified by the importance of language, but they do represent very different aspects of French culture. Le Clézio was praised by the Nobel committee for his world view, so to speak, his concern for indigenous cultures, his global attention to life beyond the borders of one country, one culture, and his work reflects this on every page. Bobin is just the opposite, on first glance; very reclusive, introspective, he rarely travels. But he sees the world in a grain of sand . . . Muriel Barbery is more representative of a younger generation, you can feel more outside influences, but there is also a lot of satire of French society. I don’t think any of them are typical, at all, of what is generally popular and/or critically well-received; to me they do seem to be in categories unto themselves. Perhaps that is what I found so appealing about all three, virtually from the first few pages I read.