TWO VOICES: Alison Anderson on JMG Le Clezio

Posted on March 11, 2010 by Scott Esposito



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AlisonLiterary 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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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.