Translator Edward Gauvin on Serge Brussolo’s Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome
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The Booksmith | 1644 Haight Street | San Francisco, CA
Translator Edward Gauvin and Center for the Art of Translation Executive Director Michael Holtmann talk about Gauvin’s translation of French author Serge Brussolo’s The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome, out this month from Melville House Books.
Brussolo is one of France’s most influential authors, acclaimed for his hybrids of science fiction and fantasy, set in a uniquely skewed reality. The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome—Brussolo’s first book to be published in English—combines all of these elements in an exciting novel where mediums retrieve items from dream worlds that convert into valuable artworks in waking life. Kirkus Reviews said “This reads like a dream-state version of a James Bond film.”
Audio Table of Contents
0:00 Introductions
3:23 The world of The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome
8:40 A reading from The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome
13:25 How dreaming functions as a “gift” or a “work of art” in The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome
18:00 What is the deep sea diver’s syndrome
21:00 Translation challenges in The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome
28:20 How Gauvin discovered this book
35:15 Serge Brussolo as he fits in to the speculative fiction genre
40:50 Gauvin’s thoughts on the art of translation, and the idea that machines can translate as well as humans
46:15 Gauvin’s work with translating graphic novels
52:50 Audience Q & A
Edward Gauvin has received prizes, fellowships, and residencies from PEN America, the NEA, the Fulbright program, Ledig House, the Lannan Foundation, and the French Embassy. His work has won the John Dryden Translation prize and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award. Other publications have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, and World Literature Today. The translator of eight works of prose fiction and over 300 graphic novels, he is a contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders. He is currently a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellow for his work on Pierre Bettencourt, whom he has written about at Weird Fiction Review.
Serge Brussolo is one of France’s most singular, influential, and perennially bestselling authors. He is most acclaimed for novels that are hybrids of science fiction and fantasy, set in a uniquely skewed reality. He is also one of France’s most prolific authors, producing seminal works in numerous other genres, including historical fiction, thrillers, horror stories, crime novels, and young adult fiction. Though many of his works have been adapted to the screen, The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome is his first book to be published in English.
Michael Holtmann has worked in the arts for more than fifteen years. Prior to joining the Center, he held positions at the National Endowment for the Arts and the Folger Shakespeare Library. He has served on the board of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) and the international programming committee of the Bay Area Book Festival.