Charlotte Mandell Interview

Our own Charlotte Mandell (she’s doing Zone for us) is interviewed on Maitresse:

The translator Charlotte Mandell did the heavy lifting for two of the more exciting imports from France: this year’s The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell, and next year’s Zone, by Mathias Enard. Mandell, who lives in Upstate New York, is also the virtuoso translator behind Proust’s The Lemoine Affair, a collection of literary parodies of writers like Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourt Brothers, and Saint-Simon.

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M: Were there any particular challenges to translating The Kindly Ones? What about Zone?

With The Kindly Ones, the main challenge was the time constraint: I was working against a deadline, so I had to finish the translation in about nine months. That’s not a lot of time for a thousand-page novel! In way, though, that very urgency worked for me, since I just had to dive into it and try to inhabit Max’s voice, and I could put all other projects aside for those nine months. With Zone, the challenge is to reproduce the style of the narrator’s stream-of-consciousness: the novel is written around one long sentence, and I need to keep the reader’s undivided attention in English in the same way that the French does – it’s a sort of breathless, urgent, spontaneous, but also deeply erudite style that works wonderfully well in the original. I hope I can maintain that momentum in English – when you’re reading it you feel as if you’re on the train with the narrator, being pulled inexorably toward some unknown goal.

via RSB