Two Voices Salon: Chris Clarke on Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano
Center for the Art of Translation | 582 Market Street, Suite 700 | San Francisco, CA
We were very pleased to host French translator Chris Clarke before a capacity audience for our Two Voices Salon on French Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick Modiano. Chris was in conversation with Two Lines Press’s Scott Esposito on his translation of Modiano’s 2007 novel In the Café of Lost Youth, recently published by NYRB Classics. This wide-ranging conversation included translation challenges Chris faced, Modiano’s roots and influences, the appearance of Guy Debord in this novel, Modiano’s particular use of French grammar, his reputation in France, and much more.
A full table of contents of the conversation is below.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
0:00 Introductions
1:40 Strange 19th-century, madmen French texts that Chris has been reading recently
2:41 How Chris discovered Modiano and came to translate him, including his weird, Modiano-esque dream
10:00 Modiano’s reputation in France before the Nobel Prize
13:10 As Modiano’s first book ever with multiple narrators, how it functions differently from his other books and what challenges it presents to a translator
18:45 What is the texture of Modiano’s particular method of thinking about the past (including Modiano’s own past and family history)?
22:35 Modiano as a writer of postwar France and why he portrays a time of economic success in such a futile, shady way, and how his portrayal of the past has changed over his career
27:11 Modiano’s use of Guy Debord in In the Café of Last Youth, and his relationship to the Situationists
31:45: Futility and eternal return in the work of Modiano, and how he reflects this in his grammar
36:30 The “intentionally vague” sense of place in Modiano’s work, particularly in how he creates Paris
40:00 Modiano on Paris
41:55 Chris’s experiences with NYRB Classics Edwin Frank and the team at NYRB Classics
48:30 Chris’s impressions of the other Modiano translators, and how to craft Modiano’s English voice, his tone and rhythms
53:45 The response to Modiano in New York
55:45 Audience Q & A
Chris Clarke was raised in Western Canada, and currently lives in Paris, France. His translations include work by Raymond Queneau (New Directions) and Pierre Mac Orlan (Wakefield Press), among others. He was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant in 2016 for his translation of Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives (Wakefield Press, March 2018). His translation of Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano’s In the Café of Lost Youth (NYRB Classics) was shortlisted for the 2016 French-American Foundation Translation Prize. Chris is a PhD candidate in French at the Graduate Center (CUNY) in New York.
Jean Patrick Modiano is a French novelist and recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. He previously won the 2012 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the 2010 Prix mondial Cino Del Duca from the Institut de France for lifetime achievement, the 1978 Prix Goncourt for Rue des boutiques obscures, and the 1972 Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française for Les Boulevards de ceinture. His works have been translated into more than thirty languages and have been celebrated in and around France, but most of his novels had not been translated into English before he was awarded the Nobel Prize.