Talking with Natasha Lehrer & Lauren Elkin about ‘The Paris Trilogy’
Kate McNamara
Thank you for joining us online here. It's just such a pleasure to be able to talk to both of you, because we admire your work.
Natasha Lehrer
That’s very lovely of you. Thank you for having us.
Lauren Elkin
It's really nice.
Georgia
Our first question is: how was this process of co-translation for you both? Was it always meant to be a joint endeavour, or did it just happen to become one?
Lauren Elkin
We knew that we both loved ‘Deux petites bourgeoises’, for instance, and Colombe. But it wasn't possible for either of us to do all of the work translating it in the time span that they wanted. So we just decided to do it together.
Natasha Lehrer
Lauren's being really modest. She got the contract.
Lauren Elkin
I didn't get a contract!
Natasha Lehrer
It was thanks to all the work that you had done. I’d read ‘Deux petites bourgeoises’ and loved it and mentioned it to one publisher and then done nothing about it. Lauren and I did talk about it, but I didn't sit down to do a sample or anything, which is the first thing you do, right?
Lauren Elkin
I got together with Colombe and said I love ‘Deux petites bourgeoises’, maybe we should try to find an English publisher for it. And she gave me ‘Seventeen’ at that meeting. And I went home and was like, Oh my God, this is amazing. And then I did ‘Seventeen' on spec because it was so short -- ‘Seventeen’ is this really important text in the lineage of Annie Ernaux on a subject that — this was in 2022, soon after Roe was overturned — was incredibly oppressing and urgent for me as an American. I think Colombe’s agent was the one who suggested we put these three books together, because they're all so short.
Natasha Lehrer
Yeah, such a brilliant idea. Anyway, I literally got a phone call — it felt like the stars aligning — saying, would you like to do this? It was total serendipity, and I was very grateful.
And then Lauren said such a sweet thing to me when we ended up dividing up ‘Deux petites bourgeoises' and doing half each, which wasn't the original plan, but then that's how it happened. Lauren said, ‘Isn't it the nicest thing that we're both two friends, translating a book by a third friend, about friendship.’
Kate McNamara
So you split ‘Deux petites bourgeoises' into two, and each translated different parts of the story? That’s really interesting in terms of the overall voice of the story. Did you try to find a voice that you could both work with?
Natasha Lehrer
I think full credit goes to Colombe. It's just her voice, which was not difficult. It’s sort of silly to say that it translated itself, but she has a certain kind of voice. She writes a French that's unusual in France, but not at all unusual in English. I say English specifically. Would you agree with that, Lauren?
Lauren Elkin
Yes. I think, as opposed to a project like the Simone de Beauvoir [The Inseparables], where there's a particular time and place — 1920s France — where you need an almost British voice to capture it, in the case of Colombe, it's so fresh, it's so contemporary, and it is so not French, that you could take a British translator like Natasha and an American translator like me, and we're both just listening for her cadence. We don’t end up sounding like ourselves. We sound like her.
Natasha Lehrer
I think the fact that it was so seamless — the whole project was so seamless — is to do with this fact that Colombe doesn't write in the literary register that French writing often has and which is where I think the voice of the translator often comes through. I'm sure it was the same with you, Lauren, with Simone de Beauvoir. In order for it to sound right in English, you do have to struggle with that register. It's not an easy process at all. But Colombe doesn't write like that. She claims she's not considered a serious writer in France precisely because she doesn't write in this literary register. I've also heard that criticism levelled at Elena Ferrante. She was not considered an important writer until she was translated into English and became a phenomenon, at which point the Italians thought, ‘Shoot. Did we miss something?’ And I think again that is because of this literary register that we don’t have in English.
French has a special tense, the passé simple, that isn’t spoken, it’s only written. I think that's one of the reasons why so many contemporary novels are written in the present, as a way of avoiding that literary tense. If you use the other past tense, the passé composé, you sound like a child. And there's no other logical tense to use, except the present, which stands in for the past tense, which can be complicated for translators. Anyway, that's another story.
Lauren Elkin
Look at someone like Édouard Louis, who is treated very seriously and also writes in a very unaffected way, the anti-passé simple kind of voice, but he's got a compelling, sympathetic back story -- ‘look at this boy who came from nowhere, and look at what he's doing now’. Whereas Colombe — I’ve spoken about this with her — she is writing about bourgeois people like they're worth writing about, and that is absolutely not done. It is so looked down upon to acknowledge yourself as being bourgeois. The history of the novel is the history of the bourgeoisie, but in contemporary France, you just don't go there.
Natasha Lehrer
I think she would have a totally different reception if she were writing in the traditional literary register. She is writing about bourgeois people, and drawing attention to it and shamelessly calling herself a petite bourgeoise, and on top of that she's writing in what could be mistakenly seen as an easy form of language. She’s not like Annie Ernaux, she’s not writing with no affect. She’s just writing. What she writes seems effortless, but it's extremely precise, well structured, with great depth. She’s the real thing.
Georgia
You said that she ‘shamelessly’ calls the story ‘Deux petites bourgeoises’, and I was wondering, what was the decision to translate that into ‘Friendship’ as a title? Because it loses some of that punch that I think it has in the French title. Was there a conversation around that choice for the title?
Lauren Elkin
There was no conversation, at least not with me. I don't know who made that decision. I sent in a list of potential titles when we were putting the initial proposal together, and it was very hard to find something that would work in English. I think I suggested ‘Two Little Girls’, but there was no way to capture the class element and the gender element and have it be punchy in English. I'm not at all surprised that they had to totally think outside the box and get something else. But I actually was not consulted on what they called it, I don't know if Colombe was either.
Natasha Lehrer
There's a tart little twist in that title that you cannot convey in English. I wasn't consulted either. And it always struck me as totally fine. You can’t have everything.
Lauren Elkin
There have been projects I've been on where, you know, they asked.
Georgia
Across all three of the novellas, class seems to me to be such a poignant theme. I was thinking when I was reading them that when translating them into English, you're also translating a very particular understanding of class in a French context into an Anglophone context. Was that something that you were thinking about when you were translating together, and was that something that you laboured over, or did it also come very naturally because of Colombe’s very specific voice?
Lauren Elkin
In ‘Seventeen', I know where she's writing about. I know that neighbourhood in Paris, I know the people who live there. I’m not part of that scene, obviously, I didn’t grow up there, I’m from New York. But I know its signifiers. At one point she writes that everyone dresses in Agnès B, even the teachers at the school, and I know this element of French society. And so, I felt because I had ethnographic experience of it, I could represent it on the page. The signifiers would be completely different if I were writing about growing up on Long Island or growing up elsewhere in France maybe. I don't know about you, Natasha? I think having raised children there you’re a bit more of an insider in this class than I am.
Natasha Lehrer
I’m in France, just outside Paris. I know the school, I know a few people who went to school with Colombe, I know that type, I know what she is signifying. There were moments where you we had to gloss: she goes to the École alsacienne, which is totally Parisian signifier. If you live in Nantes, and somebody mentions the École alsacienne, you'll be like, whatever. But if you're white, middle class, living in Paris, it’s the equivalent of saying ‘Eton’ Of course it’s not the same as Eton, but in the way that you don’t have to explain it. Colombe gives you everything in Deux petites bourgeoises. She gives you the clothes, the furniture, the parquet, the second homes, the holidays in the south of France, even having your second home in the right part of Saint Tropez. It’s all in the text. And we can visualise it too, Lauren and I, we both know what the park looks like when she describes it, when she's standing at the end of the street outside of a boulangerie, we can see it, and that helps. But you don’t always have to have direct knowledge of a place or a period. We wouldn’t be able to translate anything that isn’t contemporary if that were the case. During Covid I translated a book set in Arcachon. It's filled with very specific details. Some of it was set between the 1930s and the 1950s and I used Google maps, and old postcards that I found on the internet. A friend of mine gave my translation to her mother-in-law, who grew up in Arcachon at exactly that time. And she loved it. She told me I had captured it perfectly. I got invited to Arcachon as a result of this translation, and when I got there, I felt so comfortable. I could see I’d got it right.
We also did the translation in the most insanely short period of time. We did it in a matter of three weeks or so. I was in the middle of something, and you were in the middle of something, Lauren, and we dropped everything to do this translation. It's true that if I hadn't known Paris socially and spatially in the way that I do, I might have struggled to do it in that short period of time. But I think basically it's thanks to Colombe. She's so detailed. Remember, she's writing this book for her invented sociologist, and because of that conceit I think it means that her descriptions — her class descriptions and physical descriptions of apartments and furniture — are just so on the button, because it's for this sociologist who's using it for her own research. She had already done that job for us.
I'm sure that in our future there'll be another co-translation, or I hope so anyway, and it might not be as easy as this one.
Lauren Elkin
I have a book I want to work on with you, but we need to have time to do it.
Kate McNamara
To follow on from your personal connection to the works you are translating, then, I’d like to ask you about the translation of autofiction specifically. When you translate, you're necessarily filtering the words of the author through you and through your own subjective experience. Each translator's understanding and interpretation of a book would be slightly different. When you're translating a work which is autofiction or memoir, does this process feel different? When the writing is perhaps more personal to that author, does it feel different to then translate that work into another language through your own self and your own words?
Natasha Lehrer
A lot of what I’ve translated has been some version of autofiction, and I do feel that there's a kind of ethics at play, because there's a huge responsibility to the author, especially when it is a narrative dealing with trauma. There’s also this sense of gratitude that a writer has entrusted this job to you, because it is so personal.
I don't know if on the level of actual translation and language it makes a difference, because I feel responsibility for everything I do. Including a quite badly written thriller that I translated. It was terrible, but I wasn't going to let it into the world as a terrible book, so I made it better. I think it's a bit like having children. You absolutely love them in spite of their faults. And you don't love one more than another, or you try not to. But the thing is, you don't not love them because they're not perfect. There is a level of commitment and responsibility when you are a translator, and an intense relationship with the writer, whom you may never even meet. It is very intense with autofiction, but I feel it with all my books.
Lauren Elkin
I feel the same. Whether it's a novel written in the third person or something coming out of the author's lived experience in the first person, there's a similar level of intimacy that you're trying to capture on the level of the voice, but you're also trying to be very respectful of their them-ness, their alterity. You’re trying to handle it with as much care as you can and respect, and also fact-checking them at the same time and making sure everything balances out. Or asking whether you need a little footnote about what the TV show Apostrophes is. You're trying not to impinge on their narrative, but you're also thinking about the reader and what they need and trying to give them the information they might need as well, without taking the reader too much out of the narrative. But yes, it is obviously massively different to doing history or biography.
Georgia
Something that I found wonderful about these three stories is that they are so concerned with the body. I especially liked seeing the development of Colombe’s own relationship to her body, starting from ‘Seventeen’ to ‘Swimming’ where Colombe re-discovers her body through swimming. When Colombe writes about her relationship to her body, via swimming, I found myself very much immersed in that experience. Natasha, I read that you also took up swimming at a similar age, so I was curious to hear a bit more about that synchronicity.
Natasha Lehrer
I was terrible at sport. I hated it. Even as a child I lived in my head, and everything else about my body kept surprising me like it had nothing to do with me. Which I find unbelievably sad. And then, aged 50, I decided enough was enough. I was a very poor swimmer. I remember how humiliated I had been at school. It took me years to realise that it wasn't my fault I couldn't swim. I had totally internalised the humiliation. Until I was eleven, I hadn’t ever been in a body of water. How can you learn to swim if you've never been anywhere near water, because your parents are literally aquaphobic?
And then, like Colombe, when I hit fifty, I decided to take swimming lessons. It was a real liberation. Like Colombe, it has given me a completely different relationship to my body. Colombe writes so well about growing up wondering: what is this body? And about liberating that body relatively late in life.
Lauren Elkin
I had a different upbringing, but I did theatre from a young age and went to conservatory for university for the first couple of years. I started doing yoga in the mid-90s, and learned really early, when I was 18 or 17, just how important it was to do body work. I wasn't sporty either. I did dance. I was terrible at it, but I was a singer, and I was an actor, and so having that kind of training early on put me on a path to having bodywork as part of my life. And it’s not so much anymore these days, because life is very complicated with my son and my family life, and so I miss that, and I feel hampered. I feel like I'm not at my best intellectually, partly because my body needs attention, and I'm not able to give it attention. I know how to swim, but I'm not very good. But you know, maybe when I turn 50 in a few years, I'll sign up for lessons.
Kate McNamara
I’m going to stick with the idea of the body a little bit longer. Looking at your previous work and your writing, the idea of a woman's body seems very important to both of you. Writing from a woman's perspective, but also and particularly, writing the body into your work. Perhaps this is also a good moment to talk about the politics of translation more generally too: what books do you choose to translate? What works do you feel that it is important to bring into the English language? And how do you go about this selection?
Lauren Elkin
It's a very personal choice for me — which is not to say that the personal is not political, because it is — but the writing has to… I have to vibrate with it, and I have to feel like I have something to bring to the story. I probably exclusively do work by women, work that's feminist, work that's trying to do something new with form or with voice or both. Often, I will work on books with Jewish themes. I did Constance Debré’s Name which is coming out next year from Semiotext(e) and Serpent’s Tale. And I just fell into that one because I had worked with Semiotext(e) on a book I did about the bus. I think I said something about how much I loved her work. And they were like, do you want to translate one of her books? So often work falls into my lap. I don’t militate for projects as much as I would like because I just don't have the time, between my other writing projects and having a small child. I am only able to really get a new translation project if someone thinks of me and comes to me. But I think because of this back catalogue that I've built up, it's less a question of what I choose to work on, and more that people think of me for work that happens to be feminist or very concerned with the body.
Natasha Lehrer
I am shamefully lazy, and I find pitching really hard — I've never succeeded at pitching a book, so I don't really do it anymore, because I don't have the time. I have been incredibly fortunate. I have had strokes of luck that have knocked me sideways. One of the books I finished translating recently is Sad Tiger, which was shortlisted for the Goncourt a couple of years ago. It’s an extraordinary book that deals with incest. When it came out, and it was winning a lot of prizes and people were talking about it, I contacted P.O.L, the publisher, and asked who had bought the rights. Because that can work, I’ve done it before. And they said, Do you know what? Weirdly, no one, we just can't understand it. So being very lazy, I just went, Oh, okay, bye. Then the TLS asked me to do a review of it, and that review got sent to a publisher who had, meanwhile, picked up the rights, and they read the review, and the publisher contacted me and asked me to translate it. So, complete serendipity. I haven’t built up a portfolio strategically. I've just been very lucky.
Lauren Elkin
There are some translators who manage to read a lot more, and I'm very envious of them. They read everything that comes out, and they're much more calculated about what they think should be in English. And all props to them. I wish I could do it.
Natasha Lehrer
I have nice relationships with quite a few publishers. It usually happens that they come to me with a project, although ‘The Propagandist’ came from me pitching it to a publisher.
Lauren Elkin
‘The Propagandist’ is so good if you happen to see it around. It’ll be coming out in the spring in the UK. It's so, so good. Reading it in the aftermath of the US election, it felt incredibly timely and important.
Natasha Lehrer
Thank you. I'm so glad you loved it. It's getting a lot of love, I have to say, which is slightly surprising.
Lauren Elkin
I'm not surprised. It's excellent. It's a bit of a strange book, but it’s so committed, and surprising and resourceful. And a very brave story.
Natasha Lehrer
It’s a story that doesn't get told, about collaboration. It’s about a woman who has grown up in this world of le non dit, and slowly coming to the appalled realisation that her mother had been an active collaborator with the Nazis. Her entire family, basically, were all in bed with the Germans, were passionately committed to the Nazi cause, and wholly unrepentant in the post war decades. It’s an extraordinary story.
Lauren Elkin
And it’s so interesting, because no one in France ever talks about this. The stories are all always, like, my great uncle who was a resistance fighter. People never tell the story of their great uncle who was sleeping with Nazis and got a lot of jewellery and real estate out of it.
Natasha Lehrer
Her aunt had a kind of brocante after the war where she sold the possessions of Jews who had been forced to leave their apartments that she had amassed during the occupation.
Lauren Elkin
Like those people who just accumulated the apartments of Jews, I just hadn't made the connection to why some families in Paris have all these apartments. How do they have so many apartments? There you go.
Natasha Lehrer
It is the most unspoken-of topic. After her mother died, the author, Cécile Desprairies, decided to write about it, and her brother, at first, was behind her. But then the book came out, and he was furious. And now no one in her family talks to her. She was very brave to do it, and you kind of understand why nobody talks about it. It is something that the French have still not come to terms with. They need to do a lot of therapy. We know about it, obviously, thanks largely to Robert Paxton, but there's such a resistance in France to talking about it. It was always other people.
Lauren Elkin
It's great that the book was longlisted for the Goncourt because that gives it the necessary visibility.
Natasha Lehrer
Two really extraordinary things about this book. Only one photograph of the roundup at Vel’ d’Hiv exists. One photograph. And it was Cécile’s great-uncle who took that photograph at her grandparents’ apartment. He climbed up onto the roof and took this photograph. Cécile also writes about the Affiche rouge, a propaganda poster attacking Resistance fighters in the Manouchian Group. This poster is not super well known, but it's known. In fact, there was an exhibition about it over the summer at the Panthéon, so it's better known than it was. And this famous Affiche rouge was designed by her mother. She writes about growing up with that legacy, but it was totally unspoken, and so she had to piece it all together. And this is what she uncovered. It’s an extraordinary, haunted piece of writing.
Georgia
As a historian, I have so many questions about archives and family history that your response has brought up. I’d like to ask a question about the connection between archiving and the Paris trilogy. In ‘Deux petites bourgeoises’, it seemed to me that part of writing this story was an effort to archive the life of Héloïse, to bring her into the narrative. And I thought this was really beautiful. But I also noticed that in the French text, the relationship is between Héloïse and Esther. And in the English text, there's a change of name, and Colombe is explicitly named as part of the relationship. I was wondering how you felt about this change? Were you involved in this change between the French and the English, and do you think that it influenced your experience of translating this text?
Natasha Lehrer
That's such a brilliant question. It did for me. I think I was about halfway through the translation, or maybe it was during the first edit, that the American publisher said suggested we change it. Because the name change came after we'd pretty much done the translation, it didn't affect the translation process, but it deeply affects the book, I think a lot. The French have a very different taxonomy about fiction and nonfiction because they consider all forms of memoir to be fiction, which is true in a way. There are lots of books published here that are clearly memoirs, and yet they're called romans, novels. Somebody once told me that there are more prizes for novels, and that's perhaps one reason why. Generally, you're more likely to win a prize if it's called a roman. But that's a quite cynical reason. I like the idea that when you commit something to paper, you're making it up, even if it's come straight from your memory. I love that porosity, the idea that, yes, it's a novel, and yet, it’s also true, because it came out of my life, but it didn't really, because it really came out of my mind. I think it was a very good move to change the name to Colombe.
Lauren Elkin
Yes, I agree. I wasn’t consulted, but I like that they did it.
[Lauren has to leave conversation]
Kate McNamara
Now that we're coming to an end, we’ll move to the two questions we ask to each of the translators we interview. Firstly, is there a piece of writing that has guided you during your translation work, or a text or an idea that you keep returning to that kind of shapes your translation work?
Natasha Lehrer
There's a wonderful book that when I first read it made me think about translation in the world in a very different way: ‘La République mondiale des Lettres’ by Pascale Casanova. She writes against this slightly romantic, simplistic notion that as translators we are generously giving the reading public access to another culture. It’s not that there’s no truth in that, but it is inflected with some very problematic notions. Casanova’s book is not about the act of translation. It is about how national canons are constructed through translation and the importance they take on in a wider geopolitical context. She reinterprets translation in terms of power and gatekeeping in a global political context. Literature helps construct our worldview, not because it gives us access to culture, but because it enacts power. One reason it is important to me is because it reminds me that what I do as a translator does matter, and it also matters which books you translate. Slowly I am building a little library of the books that I have worked on and that I believe have value within a much greater system.
Kate McNamara
The second question is, what is a book that's been translated into English that you recommend for the people who are going to be reading the interview, and or a book that's not been translated yet but that you think should be translated.
Natasha Lehrer
I think I might say ‘In Memory of Memory’ by Maria Stepanova, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale. A beautiful book. And a book that’s not been translated… the very first book I ever pitched, or maybe the only book I've ever seriously pitched, ‘Un Certain M. Piekielny,’ a very charming, atmospheric novel. It’s about the author, François-Henri Deserable, going to Vilnius on a quest to find out whether this very minor character, Monsieur Piekielny, in Romain Gary’s most famous novel, ‘La Promesse de l’aube,’ was based on a real person. Nobody would pick it up. Various publishers told me that they thought no one would know or care who Romain Gary was. It's not the best book I've ever read, but it's a book that I often find myself recommending. And then I remember it doesn't exist in English.
Kate McNamara
Those are great recommendations. Thank you. And thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us.
