Emma Ramadan Discusses Her Translation Process in New BOMB
In the new fall issue of BOMB, Emma Ramadan is interviewed by Kyle Paoletta, who shines a light on translation work and bookshop-owning that Ramadan is less known for (her translation of Anne Garréta's Sphinx is widely acclaimed). Paoletta also catches us up on Ramadan's most recent work: "This year she released three translations: The Shutters, a poetry collection by Ahmed Bouanani (New Directions), Virginie Despentes’ Pretty Things (The Feminist Press), a novel in which a young woman becomes a pop star after taking over her twin sister’s life, and Revenge of the Translator (Deep Vellum), the fiction debut of Brice Matthieussent (known in France as the translator of Jim Harrison, Jack Kerouac, and Annie Dillard), which follows an American translator’s attempts to rest control of a novel away from its French author." An excerpt from their conversation:
KP Once you’re actually sitting down to translate a book, how much do you go back and forth between your manuscript and the original text? Is it helpful to read a passage in French again after you’ve already translated it?
ER My first drafts are always a mess. A huge mess. Purposefully. I just want to get through my first draft as quickly as possible, leaving slashes in the manuscript if there are ten different words that could fit somewhere and I don’t know yet which one I want to use. If there’s wordplay, if there’s dialogue, if there’s something I just straight up don’t understand, then I flag it. I don’t get the idea of doing a polished first draft. By the time you get to the end of the book, you know what words are repeated throughout, you know if the author’s doing something specific with a certain theme, if the character develops a little bit, if there are certain character traits. You don’t get that at the beginning. Even if you’ve read the book, even if you’ve read it twice, until you’re translating it you don’t necessarily pick up on those things. Or I don’t, at least. If I’m trying to make it perfect on my first draft, I think I’m missing out on a lot of stuff. I like to really think about things and let them sit, and if on the first draft I’m trying to get it perfect and not leave all these options open, then I’m going to come to a conclusion that’s different than if I let myself go through the whole thing and then go back.
Later in the process, I ask a French person for help on parts I don’t understand. Or I will spend an hour just trying to figure out a particular pun. And then I do another draft where I go through and try not to look back at the French. But you always do, because you read something and something doesn’t sound right so you go back and look. Dialogue is the hardest thing to translate. It’s not often I read a book in translation and think the dialogue sounds good. I think it’s always a little off. It’s so hard. But I don’t know if I could do it any better. I’m so hyperconscious of a line of dialogue that sounds weird in the French— if I translate it and keep it weird in the English—that people are going to think that I fucked something up. And that’s such a risk. I just think it’s really fucking hard.
Read the full interview at BOMB. At top: Ahmed Bouanani's The Shutters (New Directions, 2018).