Video is now up from our Reading the World Conversation Series event with the acclaimed French-to-English translator Charlotte Mandell. It’s in seven parts, and there’s interesting stuff throughout—with parts 1-3 comprising the reading and parts 4-7 comprising the questions/answer portion (conducted with aplomb by our own senior editor, E.J. Van Lanen).

About the event:
Oct. 6 2009 – The French translator of Balzac, Proust, Flaubert, and others reads from her new translation of Mathias Énard’s Zone (forthcoming from Open Letter) and takes questions about literary translation. Zone has already been called “The novel of the decade, if not of the century” (Christophe Claro). In short, it is a 517-page, one-sentence novel about a spy, a train ride, a briefcase, and the pervasive violence of the twentieth century.

Charlotte Mandell is one of the great French-to-English translators, and has translated such prominent works as: The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honoré de Balzac, The Book to Come by Maurice Blanchot, A Simple Heart by Gustave Flaubert, The Horla by Guy de Maupassant, Listening by Jean-Luc Nancy, and The Lemoine Affair by Marcel Proust.

(This event is hosted by Open Letter and University of Rochester Arts & Sciences. It is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.)

To all those in the Rochester area, don’t forget that—today at 5:00 p.m. at the University of Rochester—celebrated French translator Charlotte Mandell (Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, et al.) will be reading from her new translation of Zone by Mathias Énard (a 517-page, one-sentence novel, forthcoming from Open Letter) and talking about the art of translation.

Here’s the Facebook link.

Or just click on the flyer below to get all the primary details.

I know we just announced the new RTWCS events, but we’re already on the heels of the first one next week(!), featuring the incredible French translator Charlotte Mandell. Anyone and everyone is welcome to attend. Here’s all the info:

OCT. 6, 2009
5:00 p.m.
Sloan Auditorium (in Goergen Hall)
University of Rochester
(free and open to the public)

Charlotte Mandell—the French translator of Balzac, Proust, Flaubert, and others—reads from her new translation of Mathias Énard’s Zone (forthcoming from Open Letter) and takes questions about literary translation.

Zone has already been called “The novel of the decade, if not of the century” (Christophe Claro). In short, it is a 517-page, one-sentence novel about a spy, a train ride, a briefcase, and the pervasive violence of the twentieth century.

Charlotte Mandell is one of the great French-to-English translators, and has translated such prominent works as:

• The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honoré de Balzac
• The Book to Come by Maurice Blanchot
• A Simple Heart by Gustave Flaubert
• The Horla by Guy de Maupassant
• Listening by Jean-Luc Nancy
• The Lemoine Affair by Marcel Proust

(This event is hosted by Open Letter and University of Rochester Arts & Sciences. It is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.)

Last week we posted about a new story of Mathias Énard’s that appeared in Le Monde. Énard, as you may already know, is the author of Zone, a critically acclaimed, award-winning 517-page one-sentence novel that we’ll be bringing out next year. Well, in the meantime, superstar translator—and recent NEA translation fellowship recipient—Charlotte Mandell translated “Migration,” the story that appeared in Le Monde and which you’ll find below. Enjoy!

This story comes from the Jebel al-Arab, the black volcanic mountain that stretches, in southern Syria, between the towns of Shahba and Salkhad. A mysterious, wild massif, dotted with ancient ruins and inhabited by the Druze, who in years gone by have been described as just as mysterious and wild as their rocky hills. In the winter, snow is frequent, and villages in the center of the region can be isolated for days on end. Electricity is uncommon there and telephones usually absent. This afternoon, around five o’clock, when the engineer Mohsen climbs into his Toyota pickup to go back to town, it is already pitch black out. Snowdrifts outline white piles against the low houses and walls; the basalt horizon makes the darkness even more opaque. The leafless apple orchards look alive, like fields of hanged men in the glow of the headlights.

The engineer Mohsen has as his only company a thermos of tea, a cassette of Amr Diab songs on his car radio, and the shrill cries of jackals. The engineer Mohsen is not afraid. The engineer Mohsen knows this country well, he comes here often to check or repair the capricious little generator that supplies the region with electricity. He knows the crisp smell of snow mixed with the odor of fuel oil spreading from aluminum chimneys and he is well acquainted with the silence, the immense silence of this car-less region that the constant yelps of the jackals only deepen. The engineer Mohsen knows that it will take almost an hour to cover the forty kilometers that separate him from town, following the narrow, poorly plowed roads where paving is infrequent. The engineer Mohsen knows that he will not meet a single car, apart maybe from a motorcycle or a delivery vehicle jolting along driven by a mustachioed man wrapped in a red keffieh. The engineer Mohsen takes his time. He waits patiently for the engine (and in consequence the car’s interior) to warm up, drinking a glass of tea. A freezing wind has started to blow. It will be better lower down. The engineer Mohsen shifts into first and begins his descent.

It’s as he is leaving the second village that he glimpses her. The girl (how old could she be? Twelve, who knows?) seems to be signaling to him, standing on the side of the road, in a coat the color of dirty snow. The engineer Mohsen is surprised. He stops and opens the passenger door. The girl leaps into the doorway and settles on the seat, trembling. She has a pretty face. She asks in a somewhat timid voice if the engineer Mohsen would have the kindness to drive her to the next village. The engineer Mohsen is a man from town, he replies yes, of course, without asking any questions, and starts up again. What could a child possibly be doing, out alone at this hour in such cold? True, it is winter, it’s still early. But it’s dark out and freezing. Still. The little girl remains silent, she seems to be scrutinizing the darkness, hypnotized by the light of the headlights. She is absolutely motionless, one hand resting flat on her thigh.

The engineer Mohsen turns up the music. In the half-light of the car, he has the impression that the beautiful profile of his passenger is glowing with a bluish light that seems to be oozing from her temple, streaming down her cheek, onto her neck. As if she were sweating. Or melting. The engineer Mohsen glances at the little hand calmly resting on her jeans. Despite the darkness, he thinks he can see drops pearling up on the surface of the white skin, sliding down her pants onto the seat.

The engineer Mohsen accelerates. The engineer Mohsen lowers the heat and opens the window a crack, without really knowing why; he looks straight in front of him at the road and the last curves separating him from the village where she (he doesn’t know what to call her) will get out. The wind stings his eyes, unless it’s emotion and fear; the tape has stopped and he can hear clearly, now, the regular plop plop plop of little drops on the floor resounding like a big clock despite the noise of the engine. He attacks a bend a little too quickly and is forced to cling to the steering wheel with all his strength so the Toyota doesn’t hit a low wall. The girl hasn’t budged an inch; the centrifugal force and the braking have just flung a little of that weird sweat onto the engineer Mohsen who is overwhelmed with a shudder of terror and almost cries out in surprise upon discovering that this liquid is icy, as icy as the expression on the face of his cold passenger and the heap of snow into which, after having skidded for several yards, the pickup has gotten embedded. The child has remained impassive; all that has happened is that a few drops of water (the engineer Mohsen is convinced now that it is water) have splattered the windshield. The engine has stalled. The first houses of the village are nearby. The child opens the door. She thanks the engineer Mohsen for dropping her off and gets out. The engineer Mohsen notices the moist halo that the girl has left on her seat and, perhaps because he is an electrician and because electricity has trouble admitting the existence of ghosts, or perhaps on the contrary because he is a Druze and hence used to strange phenomena, the engineer Mohsen shouts “Wait!”, leans quickly over the gearbox and manages at the last minute to grab his passenger’s left hand; he feels intense cold between his fingers, a wet cold, then, without a crack, as the girl is already disappearing into the night, he finds he is holding a child’s arm, a useless arm of ice that he drops onto the seat. Without knowing how, he gets out of the car and plops down in the snow. The engineer Mohsen’s scream sounds like the panic-stricken shrieking of a jackal.

When the engineer Mohsen has pulled himself together and returned to his truck, the arm has disappeared. Either it has melted, or it never existed. Only the wetness of the cloth tends to make the engineer Mohsen incline to the first explanation.

All around, the village is silent, the chimneys gently spewing the thick smoke of oil-fired stoves.

The next morning, after a night spent trying to find sleep, stupefying himself with arak, the engineer Mohsen is on the whole relieved to learn from the newspaper that a twelve-year-old child died at around five o’clock in the village of X, from pneumonia. On the other hand, he’s terrified by the next news item, which reveals that at the same instant, or almost, a little girl was born a few kilometers lower down: this birth would no doubt not have attracted the attention of either the journalists or the engineer Mohsen if the baby, a rare thing, hadn’t been born with only one arm.

To complement all the review coverage that Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones has been receiving, Ron Hogan from Beatrice, has posted a piece by Charlotte Mandell about translating this controversial novel:

People talk about ‘free translation’—and they usually mean something that I’d judge sloppy or pretentious. For me, my real freedom as a translator is to follow strictly, alertly, joyfully, the moves and rhythms of the original text. I want the reader to know exactly what the author thought—and when he thought it. That means I want the translation to present ideas, images, events in as close as humanly possible to the order in which those ideas, images, events occur in the original. I want the reader to hear the author think.

And to do that, I have chosen to translate right from the start of the text: I do not read ahead. I don’t read the book before I translate it. I don’t want to know what it means before I go through the actual formation of its meaning word by word. In that way, I not only try to keep the reader in mind (so that if I come to a puzzling passage I can guess the reader will be puzzled too, and I’ll try to find the best words to make the passage clear), but I also have the tremendous experience of, so to speak, accompanying the author in the act of composition. I follow at his pace, and go through his discoveries. [. . .]

As Littell pointed out in an interview, we have heard the victim’s story over and over. Now we need to hear the perpetrator. We need to try and figure out his motives, his excuses. And what a perpetrator Max is—his keen aesthetic sense constantly lures us into his mind. And then again and again we have to make our own choices, our own abstentions. What a moral workout the book puts the reader through—and that is a large part of its greatness, and my own satisfaction in what could otherwise have been a horror show. This is not the One Good Nazi of the sentimental (and to me disgusting) movies. This is the Evil Nazi, and we are in him for a thousand pages, and have to make our own way out. No consolations, no forgivenesses. I think about Paul Celan’s famous question, and realize we have to become the ones who witness the witness.

The whole piece is definitely worth reading, especially since Charlotte knows this book on such an intimate level.

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.

....

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

Over at Ready Steady Book Mark Thwaite has posted the “Books of the Year 2008 symposium” featuring recommendations from a host of authors, translators, and reviewers, including Scott Esposito (who recommends Adolfo Bioy Casares and others), Charlotte Mandell (who is all about Flann O’Brien), her husband Robert Kelly (who recommends Littell’s The Kindly One, Marias’s Dark Back of Time, and Nadas’s The Book of Memories), and Tom McCarthy (whose only recommendation is Toussaint’s Camera) among others.

Definitely worth checking out, especially if you’re looking for good recommendations to kick off 2009.

For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups.

The Lemoine Affair by Marcel Proust, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell. (France, Melville House)

One of the reasons this award is so much fun is the fact that someone like Marcel Proust can be on the same list as someone like Celine Curiol. Although I have to admit, I had no idea that there was anything from Proust that hadn’t already made its way into English . . . especially nothing this interesting.

The Lemoine Affair is part of Melville House’s Art of the Novella series, a collection of classic novellas by classic authors, such as Joyce’s The Dead, Cervantes’s The Dialogue of the Dogs, Balzac’s The Girld with the Golden Eyes, and Melville’s Benito Cereno. (MHP also does an Art of the Contemporary Novella series, which will be featured later this month in relation to Zambra’s Bonsai.)

This novella is a very unique, very playful book. It was written shortly after the “Lemoine Scandal,” a scam explained by Proust in the “Author’s Note”:

The reader may have forgotten, since ten years have now passed, that [Henri] Lemoine, having falsely claimed to have discovered the secret of making diamonds and having received, because of this claim, more than a million francs from the President of De Beers, Sir Julius Werner, who then brought action against him, was afterwards condemned on July 6, 1909 to six years in prison. This legal affair, which, although insignificant, enthralled public opinion at the time, was selected one evening by me, entirely by chance, as the common theme for a few short pieces in which I would set out to imitate the style of a certain number of writers.

As a series of pastiches written around a central event, this isn’t your typical novella. And that’s one of the things that makes it so intriguing. As Charlotte says in the interview below (more in a second), it’s Proust doing Balzac, doing Flaubert, doing Saint-Simon!

In order to celebrate this novella’s inclusion on the Best Translated Book of the Year fiction longlist I interviewed Charlotte Mandell, who, in addition to translating this book has translated Balzac’s _The Girl with the Golden Eyes, Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, and most recently Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, along with many, many other titles:

Chad W. Post: When I first heard about The Lemoine Affair, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that there was something of Proust’s that hadn’t made its way into English. How did this project come about? Did you bring it up with Melville House, or did they contact you?

Charlotte Mandell: The Proust project was my idea—Dennis and Valerie had asked me for some French ideas for their novella series, so I came up with three: Balzac’s The Girl with the Golden Eyes (which has been translated a number of times, but not to my liking), Jules Verne’s The Castle in Transylvania (_Le Château des Carpathes_, which was translated as The Carpathian Castle a while ago but is now out of print), and Proust’s Pastiches. (I had already translated Flaubert’s A Simple Heart and Maupassant’s The Horla for Melville House.) My friend Mark Cohen had given me a copy of Pastiches et mélanges a year or so before that, and while I knew the Mélanges (a collection of essays on art and literature) had been translated and published as Against Sainte-Beuve, I couldn’t find any published translation of the Pastiches. Which is sort of shocking, considering what wonderful material it is—Proust writing as Flaubert and Balzac!—but then again, it is a difficult piece to translate, so maybe no one wanted to tackle it before.

CWP: It really does seem like a difficult book to translate—everything’s so precise, and to really work you have to capture the voice of a number of different authors. Is there anything in particular you did to prepare for this translation? Reread bits of Balzac and Saint-Simon?

CM: Any good text speaks for itself, so if a text is well-written, and its narrative voice is convincing, there really isn’t any need for the translator to do anything but stay true to the text. And since Proust is a master stylist, he imitates each author’s style so well that it needed no help from me. That said, I did do some research as I was translating the book: I read a bit in Saint-Simon’s memoirs. And since Proust put many of his own friends into the Saint-Simon chapter, and since these same friends would later figure as characters in Remembrance, I read several biographies of Proust (the most helpful of which were William Sansom’s Proust and His World; The World of Marcel Proust by André Maurois; and A Proust Souvenir by William Howard Adams, with period photographs by Paul Nadar).

CWP: Was there a section that was particularly tricky?

CM: The most difficult pastiche to translate was definitely the Saint-Simon chapter, because it blends obscure 18th century court intrigue with Proust’s own intricate style and Saint-Simon’s interminable sentences, and places Proust’s friends in the court of Louis XIV. Proust admired Saint-Simon as a writer; I think one of the reasons the Saint-Simon pastiche is the longest one is that Proust got a little carried away with it, and it began to sound more like Proust than like Saint-Simon (the long sentence describing Proust’s close friend Robert de Montesquiou, the Symbolist poet and one of the models for Charlus, on pp. 79-80 sounds like pure Proust at his best). Proust said he wrote the pastiches partly to purge these authors from his system, so that when he began his great work, A la recherche du temps perdu, his voice would be entirely his own. I think Saint-Simon was the hardest author for him to exorcise!

CWP: In the piece you wrote about the book, you mention that the pastiche was a popular exercise back in the 1890s. It’s a really fun form, one that would have interesting results in just about any day and age. Which other famous pastiches as compelling as this one? (I’m mostly just curious. It seems to me like something the Oulipo would revive . . . )

CM: Rabelais was the first author I know of to write pastiches—The Third Book of the Pantagruel features a lot of pastiches written in the style of authors of his day. Alexander Pope, who spent years translating (or sub-contracting) Homer, did our most famous pastiche of the epic form in The Rape of the Lock. Henry Fielding’s Shamela is a much shorter parody and pastiche of Samuel Richardson’s commercially successful but interminable Pamela. Mark Twain has the Duke do a hilarious Shakespearian pastiche in Huckleberry Finn. La Bruyère pastiched Montaigne, I think. Max Beerbohm parodies different literary styles (H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and many others) in A Christmas Garland. The French author Paul Reboux, in collaboration with his friend Charles Müller, wrote many volumes of pastiches, titled A la manière de . . .; Proust is pastiched in it, along with his friends Alphonse Daudet and Anna de Noailles, as well as Tolstoy, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sartre, Jean Jaurès, Mallarmé . . .

It’s interesting you mention Oulipo – Raymond Queneau’s wonderful Exercices de style is a form of pastiche, since it tells the same story in 99 different styles (Umberto Eco translated that into Italian). That work spawned a number of other pastiches: Stéphane Tufféry’s Le style, mode d’emploi, in which he pastiches Balzac, Hugo, Verne, and Flaubert, among others; Lucien d’Azay’s Nouveaux exercices de style, in which he pastiches Duras, Echenoz, and Le Clézio, to name just a few; and the Oulipian Hervé Le Tellier, who presents 100 different views of the Mona Lisa in his Joconde jusqu’à cent, then 100 more in Joconde sur votre indulgence.

CWP: For readers unfamiliar with French literary history, this book could seem a bit heady or daunting with all the references and whatnot. Personally, I found it really enjoyable and entertaining, even in the sections where Proust was imitating someone I hadn’t read. Is there anything you would tell a potential reader in advance to increase his/her pleasure when reading this?

CM: Relax! Don’t worry about not getting all the references—just sit back and let the text lead you where it will. I’ve never read Henri de Régnier, but I felt I knew him perfectly after reading Proust’s pastiche—and I laughed out loud as I was translating it. All those endless parallel constructions (it was not this, but that . . .), the redundant and outrageous use of symbolism (Hermes’ caduceus, mucus resembling a diamond) . . . The wonderful thing about Proust is his ability to capture a particular author’s style and encapsulate it in just a few pages, or in some cases (as in the heartbreakingly beautiful end of the Flaubert pastiche) in just a few sentences. The pretended diamond is a fitting subject in this case, since each pastiche is a brilliant artificial gem of insight and style, and each one stands out and sparkles on its own. (It’s interesting to compare a Proust pastiche to a Beerbohm pastiche: Beerbohm is obviously Beerbohm writing in the style of . . . , whereas Proust becomes that author so convincingly you can forget you’re reading Proust. I think that wonderful ability to see through the eyes of another author is one of the things that makes Proust so great: as we read A la recherché, each character is so real that we become the narrator interacting with these characters, so that by the end of the book we feel as if all these characters were intimate friends of ours, and the narrator’s life and thoughts were our own.)

CWP: We (Three Percent and Co.) recently released our “Best Translated Book of 2008” fiction longlist, which includes Proust’s The Lemoine Affair. Assuming you think this book deserves to be on the list, are there any other translations you read/worked on this year that you’d like to recommend?

CM: I’m really pleased The Lemoine Affair made your longlist! I think I had six translations published in 2008, but the Proust is my favorite by far, and the one I’m most proud of, since it’s never been translated before (to my knowledge). A few other books of interest: Peter Szendy’s Listen: A History of Our Ears, an impassioned and erudite musicological look at the history of listening and who exactly “owns” the rights to classical music, and Balzac’s weird tale The Girl with the Golden Eyes. Jean Paulhan’s On Poetry and Politics is worth taking a look at, since Paulhan is an important figure in French letters and these essays are appearing in English for the first time. Also Pierre Bayard’s Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong, in which Bayard argues that fictional characters have lives of their own (as in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds or any of the Jasper Fforde novels), and are capable of doing things (including murder) without the author (or the author’s star detective) knowing it. Most beautiful of all perhaps is Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Fall of Sleep, which is coming out next year—an extraordinary instance of theory as lyricism.

CWP: What projects do you have lined up for the future? Are there any other gems like this that you’d love to work on but haven’t found a publisher for yet?

CM: The book I’m most excited about at the moment is Mathias Énard’s Zone, which you’ll be publishing! I think it’s the next Great Book, and I can’t wait to start work on it. As for other unpublished or out-of-print books, I’d love to translate Jules Verne’s Le secret de Wilhelm Störitz, about a mad scientist who turns a woman who spurns him invisible. I’d also like to translate Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale someday, since I don’t know of any translations that do it justice.

Mathias Enard’s Zone, which we’ve mentioned a few times already, just keeps racking up attention.

Thanks to Michael, for pointing out that Zone made Lire‘s 20 best books of 2008 list. According to my pidgin French, they say that it “possesses a scope that is rare in the French novel” and that it’s “difficult, but great.”

PW also noted our acquisition:

What’s in a period? That might be the question Chad Post, at Open Letter Press, was asking himself when he acquired the French novel Zone. The book, about a traveler making his way to Rome via train, is a study in, among other things, grammatical experimentation; it unfolds over 500 pages, in a single sentence. Open Letter, which submitted a bid for the book shortly after the Frankfurt Book Fair, is planning to publish the book Stateside in 2010; the title is published in France by Actes Sud and was written by Mathias Enard. Charlotte Mandell (who just finished The Kindly Ones) is doing the translation.

Unfortunately, my French isn’t up to it yet (I’m working on it!), so I’m anxiously awaiting—along with the rest of you, I hope—Charlotte Mandell’s translation.

Yesterday afternoon, Publishers Weekly sent out an e-mail alert regarding Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s decision to “temporarily” (their quotes, not mine) pause acquisitions. Which doesn’t sound very good:

Josef Blumenfeld, v-p of communications for HMH, confirmed that the publisher has “temporarily stopped acquiring manuscripts” across its trade and reference divisions. The directive was given verbally to a handful of executives and, according to Blumenfeld, is “not a permanent change.” Blumenfeld, who hedged on when the ban might be lifted, said that the right project could still go to the editorial review board. He also maintained that the the decision is less about taking drastic measures than conducting good business.

Wonder if any other companies will follow suit . . .

*

In contrast, yesterday our bid for Mathias Enard’s Zone was accepted by Actes Sud. A 500-page, single-sentence French novel, Zone has been getting a lot of great attention. Translator and author Christophe Claro said it’s the novel of the decade and it recently won the Prix Decembre. Brian Evenson e-mailed me recently about how impressive this novel is, but it was this quote from Conversational Reading that set the ball in motion for us:

Zone is considered by some to be the most ambitious novel to be published in France this year. Proust, Celine, Joyce and The Iliad are mentioned as the inspirations behind it. According to the editor’s description at amazon.fr the novel features such characters as Genet, Pound, Burroughs, Cervantes, Hannibal, and Napoleon.

That quote and this excellent excerpt that Charlotte Mandell (who will be translating the whole book) did for Fiction France.

Right now, we’e looking at a summer 2010 pub date . . .

Back a couple years ago, Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes was all the rage. The son of Robert Littell, Jonathan has dual-citizenship here and in France, and, in an unusual move, wrote this 900-page novel of a former Nazi officer in French.

In this article by John Litchfield, Littell explains his decision:

Littell, who also speaks English, Russian and Serbo-Croat, says that he chose to write in French because it was the language of his literary heroes, Flaubert and Stendhal. French is also the adopted language of the fictional narrator of his novel, Max Aue, an intellectual turned SS officer and mass murderer who has taken refuge in France under a false identity after the war.

Anyway, the book won the Prix Goncourt and was universally (or almost) loved by French critics. Unknown and a bit of a recluse, Littell went from obscurity to stardom so fast that rumors floated that either his editor at Gallimard, or his father, actually wrote the book. It was a huge Frankfurt book, went to auction, was sold for a lot of money (six, seven figures?) to HarperCollins, and is finally coming out in English in March. Translated by the extremely talented Charlotte Mandell (see Proust’s The Lemoine Affair, Balzac’s The Girl with the Golden Eyes, etc. We’re actually going to run an interview with Charlotte sometime in the next week or so.)

Yesterday, we received our galley, which is very impressive and well-made:

I’m particularly excited about the “Reader’s Introduction to The Kindly Ones.” This booklet (which is almost 100 pages long) is made up of a couple of interviews with Littell (more on that in a minute), a review from Le Monde, excerpts of other French reviews, a letter from Littell to his translators, and an excerpt from the book. This is the sort of “extra material” I wish all publishers (Open Letter included) sent along with their galleys. It’s so useful in introducing readers/reviewers to the book (this would have an even bigger impact if it was for a more obscure author) and can also be quite entertaining in its own right. Like the Littell interviews:

_Have you recognized yourself in the various portraits that have appeared in the press?

Not at all! Some of them were complete nonsense. I have been stunned by French journalists’ ability to make things up. I have discovered lots of things about myself. Apparently, I survived a massacre in Chechnya. Astounding. They must have just typed my name into Google and read the New York Times articles which mention an incident—in no way a massacre—that I experienced in Chechnya. In the French version, it sounded as if I had had to crawl out of a ditch from beneath a heap of bloody corpses! Fact checking doesn’t seem particularly popular in France. And I’m talking about simple facts: Apparently I have worked in China, am married, live in Belgium, speak German, and have a French mother. None of which is the case.

_As soon as it came out, Les Bienveillantes was praised to the skies; the loftiest comparisons were drawn. Were you flattered or freaked out?

Neither. Let’s take the comparison between my book and War and Peace. The people who make it haven’t read my book properly, or Tolstoy either, for that matter. They are different kinds of literature. Firstly, in War and Peace there is peace, whereas in my novel there is only war. And then there’s a whole other level of complexity in Tolstoy’s novel, an infinitely superior toing and froing between war and ordinary life.

In case you’re interested, the HarperCollins jacket copy references the fact that critics compared The Kindly Ones to War and Peace . . .

I have no idea how good this book is (the Germans didn’t seem to much care for it, but well, there might be extra-literary reasons), but regardless, Littell’s interviews and author appearances should be a lot of fun . . .

Not the most common of connections, but that’s the angle that Bloomberg‘s Robert Hilferty takes in his review of Proust’s The Lemoine Affair:

A hundred years ago French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922) lost money in the stock market, too. And as he would in the epic In Search of Lost Time, he converted the stuff of life into art. [. . .]

Translated by the super-talented Charlotte Mandell, this is the first time The Lemoine Affair is available in English, and it’s part of Melville House’s Art of the Novella series. (Which has been getting a lot of play here the past few days.)

As described on the Melville House site, this novella is a series of pastiches in which Proust imitates the writing styles of other famous French authors, such as Flaubert and Balzac. Based on this alone, I still can’t believe this never came out in English before. And the story behind the novel just adds to my disbelief:

A Parisian engineer named Henri Lemoine claimed to have invented a method of manufacturing diamonds from coal. He convinced the London-based president of the De Beers diamond empire, Sir Julius Wernher, to underwrite the process. The executive invested about a million francs before the fraud emerged.

After De Beers stock plummeted because of the scandal, Lemoine bought shares expecting to profit when the stock recovered. The ruse was discovered and Wernher sued Lemoine, who was tried and imprisoned in 1908.

Proust had inherited De Beers stock from his parents and fretted that the scandal would erode his portfolio. At the same time, he was inspired by the literary potential of Lemoine’s intrigue and hit upon an ingenious way to retell it — that’s the true alchemy here.

Add this to the growing list of Melville House novellas we’ll be reviewing over the next few weeks . . .

Emprise Review has a nice interview with French translator Charlotte Mandell, who has translated a number of classic authors (Balzac, Proust, Flaubert) along with more contemporary works (Genet, BHL, Littell). She recently completed an excerpt of Mathias Enard’s Zone (which I have in my hands right now), which is becoming one of the most hyped French books since The Kindly Ones.

What attracts you to the craft of translation?

I love reading, and I think translating is the truest form
of reading. People are always asking me if I write my ‘own’
work. I find it hard to convey to them that I feel no need
to write—I would much rather ‘be’ a lot of different authors by translating them. I never read ahead when translating,
so translating for me feels like more of a creative process:
I have no preconceived notions of how the book will end,
and can put myself in the author’s place by trying to
imagine what will come next.