Translation Diary: Daniel Levin Becker on Laurent Mauvignier's "The Birthday Party" (Part 1)
First pass: Flight forward
I translated The Birthday Party in three passes, which I’ll go ahead and call the minimum recommended number of passes for any translation of any length, but especially anything like this 640-page novel of intricately orchestrated action and painstakingly observed interiority. Things are always messier in practice, of course, but for simplicity’s sake let’s classify those three passes as follows: 1. translating, 2. writing, and 3. reading. The output of the first, then, being an unbecoming utilitarian simulacrum of the source text—full of errors and inexactitudes and unnatural phrasings, but in English.
My approach here was to translate the whole book straight through, as quickly as I could, leaving the labors of refinement to the later passes. It was suggested to me at one point that there are more efficient methods, for instance looping back to do the second pass immediately after the first for each chapter, or even for each page, but by that point I was already halfway through the manuscript and too superstitious to change tack midstream. So on I went in my haste, hurtling fuzzily toward the book’s end, knowing full well that by the time I got there I’d need to reacquaint myself with the beginning almost as if it were an unfamiliar text, sort of like how the Golden Gate Bridge is perpetually being repainted because by the time one end is finished the salt in the bay air has already corroded the other. (The air in this scenario is a mind trying to simultaneously accommodate other work, other readings and writings and translations, and I guess the salt is a global pandemic? I may well have rethought this analogy in a subsequent pass.)
In principle, haste is not the ideal mode for work that’s meant to be creative but also precise in its fidelity to something that already exists. But, as I said, practice is messier than principle, and as it happens a bit of haste suits The Birthday Party, which so often carries itself along with the propulsive momentum of thought, reading breathlessly even as it keeps dilating time to burrow into a moment, a memory, a perplexity, a silent wound. So, as I said, on I went in my flight forward—to borrow a process term from César Aira that’s like 70 percent pertinent here—both beleaguered and reassured to know it wouldn’t be the last.
“I’m also learning the landscape of the text: I’m osmosing its quirks and tics and challenges, internalizing the rhythms and energy of its storytelling, its sentences that sometimes last for pages.”
I’ve worked a lot (for unrelated reasons) with machine translation in the last few years, and I’m aware that the first pass as I’m describing it—the ragged, rickety manuscript I’ll spend a few laborious weeks or months pounding out—isn’t so different from the manuscript that an algorithm like DeepL can spit out in fifteen minutes. This is a sobering thought, but it’s not the anti-humanistic argument it might seem at first glance. Because, on the contrary, my inefficiency is valuable. Because, the whole time I’m hacking my way through this initial draft, no matter how many questions of comprehension or idiom I’m setting aside, I’m also learning the landscape of the text: I’m osmosing its quirks and tics and challenges, internalizing the rhythms and energy of its storytelling, its sentences that sometimes last for pages. All that slow, awkward progress—for even in haste, after all, it’s slow—will inform and improve the translation I finally write.
Continue reading: Part II.
Laurent Mauvignier
Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker
2023 International Booker Prize, Longlist
2024 Dublin Literary Award, Longlist
New York Times Editors’ Choice
“A real-time study in crippling self-consciousness, the fragility of normalcy, and the reality of violence.”—The New York Times
Buried deep in rural France, little remains of the isolated hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, save a few houses and a curiously assembled quartet: Patrice Bergogne, inheritor of his family’s farm; his wife, Marion; their daughter, Ida; and their neighbor, Christine, an artist. While Patrice plans a surprise for his wife’s fortieth birthday, inexplicable events start to disrupt the hamlet’s quiet existence: anonymous, menacing letters, an unfamiliar car rolling up the driveway. And as night falls, strangers stalk the houses, unleashing a nightmarish chain of events.
Told in rhythmic, propulsive prose that weaves seamlessly from one consciousness to the next over the course of a day, Laurent Mauvignier’s The Birthday Party is a deft unraveling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves, a gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present, written by a major contemporary French writer.