ast year, I decided to treat myself to a new copy of Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan, a novel I have loved ever since I first read it as a teenager, and whose dreamy opening line in its original translation from the French by Irene Ash – “A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness” – I know by heart. But which one to get? In the end, I decided to go for something entirely new and ritzy, which is how I came to buy the Penguin Modern Classics edition, translated by Heather Lloyd.
Some days later, in bed, I began reading it. The shock was tremendous, disorienting. “This strange new feeling of mine, obsessing me by its sweet languor, is such that I am reluctant to dignify it with the fine, solemn name of ‘sadness’,” went the first sentence, which sounded to my ears a little as though a robot had written it. For a while I pressed on, telling myself it was stupid to cling to only one version, as if it were a sacred thing, and that perhaps I would soon fall in love with this no doubt very clever and more accurate new translation. Pretty soon, though, I gave up. However syntactically correct it might be, the prose had for me lost all of its magic. It was as if I’d gone out to buy a silk party dress and come home with a set of nylon overalls.
This time last year, Ferrante was everywhere. Every book-loving friend of mine had either read her, or was just about to
Last week, I mentioned this experience to Ann Goldstein, the acclaimed translator of the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante. She laughed. “I know what you mean,” she said, down the line from New York. “My feeling about Proust is that he’s Scott-Moncrieff [C K Scott-Moncrieff, who published his English translation of A La recherche du temps perdu as Remembrance of Things Past in the 1920s]. I haven’t read the newer translations – but I don’t want to. I’m very attached to his, even though people always say ‘he did this’ or ‘he did that’.” If Goldstein is aware that for many people she will always, now, be the one and only translator of My Brilliant Friend and the other novels that make up Ferrante’s best-selling Neapolitan quartet, she gave no sign.
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Translation matters. It always has, of course – and should you be interested in the many ways it can affect the reader’s response to a book, I recommend both Tim Parks’s essay collection Where I’m Reading From, in which he asks interesting questions about the global market for fiction, and Julian Barnes’s brilliant and questing 2010 essay, Translating Madame Bovary. But perhaps right now translation is more important than ever – for suddenly, foreign literature seems finally to be finding its place in Britain, an island where it has previously struggled to attract substantial numbers of readers. How did this happen? It’s hard to say, but perhaps it began, thinking back, with the Scandinavian crime sagas — by Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbø et al – that we all began gobbling up in increasingly vast quantities around the turn of the century. Then there was Karl Ove Knausgaard’s confessional series of novels, My Struggle, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett, and a strange new addiction for many (the first volume came out in 2009). Finally, and most gloriously, there was Elena Ferrante. This time last year, Ferrante was everywhere. Every single book-loving friend of mine had either read her, or was just about to.
Naturally, publishers and booksellers alike are keen to capitalise on our exotic new appetites (to use the phrase “cash in” seems a bit unfair in these slightly rarefied circumstances). Nearly every week, publicists send me new or previously ignored (by us) foreign novels. Among those I’ve received this year, and thoroughly recommend, are Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali (trans: Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe), a Turkish novel from 1943; The Day Before Happiness by Erri De Luca (trans: Jill Foulston), an Italian novel – it, too, is set in Naples – from 2009; and, most gripping of all, the Israeli page-turner Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen (trans: Sondra Silverston). Meanwhile, Daunt’s publishing wing has just brought out what I believe will be my next foreign read: Marie, by the French writer Madeleine Bourdouxhe (trans: Faith Evans). The chic book with which to be seen this summer, it was written in 1940 and is set in 1930s Paris. It tells the story of a happily married woman who has a passionate affair with a younger man. Comparisons have been made both to Proust and Virginia Woolf.
“There are some books whose success is very local,” says Adam Freudenheim, the publisher of Pushkin Press, and the man who introduced me to the Russian writer Teffi (and to Gundar-Goshen). “But the best fiction almost always travels well, in my view.” For him, as for other presses that specialise in translated work (Harvill Secker, Portobello, And Other Stories, MacLehose Press and others), the focus is simply on publishing a great book; the fact that it is translated is “not the decisive thing”. And this, in turn, is how he accounts for the increasing popularity of foreign fiction – a shift that he, like Ann Goldstein, believes is real enough to turn out to be permanent. There are, quite simply, a lot of great translated books out there now, their covers appetising, their introductions informative, their translations (mostly) works of art in their own right.
Which brings me back to where I started. Last year, in another sign of how things are changing, Waterstones launched its monthly Rediscovered Classics promotion with Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse. I was happy about this, but disappointed, to put it mildly, to find that it was the Penguin Modern Classics edition that it had piled up in-store, awaiting new readers. So what I want to say now is this: if you tried it then and hated it, please, have another go, only this time entrust yourself to Irene Ash’s gorgeous 1955 translation. The story of a teenager called Cecile who discovers, during a golden Riviera holiday, that her beloved papa is to remarry, I am willing to bet it will cast a spell on you, whether you are poolside, or stuck at home in Britain, watching the rain.
Ann Goldstein, Italian to English: ‘I’m not creating something new. I don’t feel it’s my job to do that’
Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante: ‘It does feel strange to be a well known translator now, it’s totally unexpected.’ Photograph: Peter Ross / Wall Street Journal
Ann Goldstein is best known as the translator of the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet of novels, which have sold more than a million copies. She edited the complete works of Primo Levi, for which she received a Guggenheim translation fellowship, and has worked on books by Alessandro Baricco and Giacomo Leopardi. Her translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Street Kids (Ragazzi di vita) is published next month. She has been head of the New Yorker’s copy department since 1980.
I didn’t learn Italian until I was in my 30s, when I began taking weekly lessons with some of my colleagues in the office. The inspiration for it was that I wanted to read The Divine Comedy in Italian, and I dragged everybody else with me. Then about five years later, in 1992, the then editor of the New Yorker, Bob Gottlieb, received a manuscript in Italian. It was by Aldo Buzzi, sent to him by the cartoonist Saul Steinberg, a friend of Buzzi’s. Bob wanted to write a note to Saul, so he ask me to read it so he knew what to say. I read it, and I liked it, so I decided to try translating it – and Bob published it. A year after that, someone asked me to translate my first book. It does feel strange to be a well known translator now, it’s totally unexpected. The idea that any translator would be at all well known strikes me as amazing.
Will I ever meet her? I don’t know. I feel I have a close relationship with her, even though we have no relationship
My spoken Italian is not as good as my reading Italian, but I love the language; that’s why I learned it. It’s a beautiful language: musical, very expressive. It does lots of little things English doesn’t do, like you can add suffixes to words to give them all kinds of subtle nuances. The obvious one is “issimo”, but there are many others. I prefer to stay close to the text when I’m translating. Of course it should read well in English. But I’m not a novelist. I don’t feel like I’m rewriting, or creating something new. I don’t feel it’s my job to do that. For the third or fourth draft, I might work without the text. But in the end, I go back to it, to make sure I haven’t gotten too far away from it. I haven’t worked that closely with many writers because a lot of those I’ve translated are dead – and then there’s Ferrante, who’s an absent writer. I have communicated with her through her publishers. She doesn’t interfere at all; she said she trusted me, which seemed like a compliment.
The success of her novels has been astonishing, a phenomenon. There’s something universally compelling about them, apart from the fact that they’re very readable. I’m not a critic, and I haven’t read lots of contemporary novels, but people who have seem to think there’s nothing else really like them. There’s something about the way she looks at emotional relationships. They examine things you might not necessarily examine yourself. I translated The Days of Abandonment [about a woman who descends into an “absence of sense” when her husband leaves her] first. We all had to do a version of the first chapter, and then they picked me. I remember that I was completely gripped by it. It’s so powerful. It’s a story we all know, but she made it more intense, more interesting, somehow.
Will I ever meet her? I don’t know. I’ve sort of lost interest in that! I guess I have such a strong impression of her from having read her books so many times. I have a close relationship with her, even though I actually have no relationship with her. I’ve just translated Frantumaglia, a collection of her letters, interviews, and more personal essays. It gives a strong sense of her as someone very intelligent, who thinks about things in her own way, who has read a lot, and who is able to use that in a way that isn’t obtrusive. She is very analytical, and critical, knows her own mind, doesn’t want to waste time. If I got an email from her asking to meet up? Yes, it would send me into a bit of a spin. I’d have to practise my Italian for one thing. RC
