In On Your Feet, Jacqueline Feldman uses a short story by Nathalie Quintane to probe what translation is, does, and of what it is capable. Presented as a novel, this hybrid text is comprised of her translation of Quintane’s ‘Stand Up’, depicting a visit by Marine Le Pen to a provincial French town, an essay/travelogue on Feldman’s encounter with the author, and her Master’s thesis — in French — which focuses on theories and processes of translation. The following is based on a conversation which took place over Zoom at the end of January.
At a certain point in your thesis, you mention a desire to be connected with others — “la volonté de se lier à d’autres” — so I thought we could start with that: how did you first connect with Quintane’s writing?
I was introduced to Quintane’s work in 2018 by Hugo Partouche, one of my French friends. On a visit to New York he left me with his copy of Tomates, still her most famous book, her breakthrough. I had been grappling with, personally haunted by, a question about the politics of literature and a question about nonfiction writing, whether either of these was possible, and Quintane seemed to be doing something with form itself, and with humor, that furnished a response. It signaled a way forward. Later that year, I moved back to Paris, where I had lived already, and started reading more.
At what point did it occur to you to publish it as a novel?
The first person to call the thesis, in particular, a novel was Tiphaine Samoyault, and so it just didn’t occur to me to argue. I had promised to write this thesis in order to live as a foreigner in France for long enough to finish work on another piece of research and was, as I began the undertaking, determined to use it as an occasion to explore issues, writerly and personal, that I was going to have to work through anyway. There were also material constraints on my compositional process that caused me to favor a personal, contextualized and even dramatized approach to knowledge production. The story that unfolds at first covertly and then openly throughout the annotation to my first version of the translation—about everything that, frustratingly, you can’t express as you’re translating, because you’re limited by the words that you’re interpreting—turns out to be an account of other losses while living abroad. Of meaning, primarily, but not only—homely, poignant losses, not worth mentioning, but that add up. A règlement de compte. This was a reckoning that I guess I had to do. Consciously I was trying to politicize my foreignness, to activate it as a source of knowledge.
So the “novel within the novel” of On Your Feet was found out as one during the defense. My advisor and the jury recommended I try to get it published as a book and put me in touch with an editor.
But it was later that year, in Massachusetts, that I made friends with the book’s ultimate editor, David Richardson, who was interested very specifically in publishing experiments that looked into reading as a performance.
Our book was built out as a collaboration. It seemed obvious that there should be more English. So I wrote that travelogue, actually to get out of having to translate my thesis. It is a translation of art into life.
I returned to my quickly written thesis last. It was challenging to edit it in thesis form rather than adapt it, but the constraints of the academic setting are what caused this narrative to develop as it did, and they still contribute shape and meaning. I was forced not only in but by the context of the prestigious university to cough up everything I knew or thought I knew about French politics and language. This recitation, questing and personal, occasionally hostile or flip, is a palpably negative gesture. Maybe cynically, we thought we’d sacrifice nothing by keeping it in the book as a performance—as, literally, an illustration.
Nicholas Weltyk, the book’s designer, did an unbelievable job of making meaning out of the versioning we did of this translation as well as our archival finds. The orange text, indicating later stages, is the orange of the cover of Les Années 10, the collection in which Quintane’s story first appeared. Better than being a novel, On Your Feet is an inside-out book, an idea resonant with Samoyault’s in her book Traduction et violence—one she says few people are willing to admit—that translation requires a text to be un- or de-written before it can be written again, in another language.
You talk about how doing a translation creates versions, from the drafts onward, multiplying the text in more ways than people might imagine when acknowledging a new translation—
Samoyault writes that translation reconduit à l’état de brouillons—it returns the text to the state of a draft. It makes the text itself a draft, which I think is such a beautiful idea. It gives so much power to translation.
Does your process involve lots of drafts?
In my thesis I discuss a challenging idea advanced by a character in Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, his narrator, who may well be a mouthpiece for Nabokov’s own ideas, that real writers get rid of their drafts, that the specter of any still surviving draft diminishes the work, making its full, complete existence as a work of art with its own integrity impossible. That’s a really interesting idea, especially when put into conversation with Samoyault’s observation above. As I write in On Your Feet, it creates big problems for any work based in reporting or any form of research—just as it does for a translation.
In content and form, your book forces the reader to think very hard about the ways of and reasons for doing things — as you said, not “invisibilizing” elements that would be easy to take for granted. The visibility of translators has come on enormously in recent years. As someone engaged with the theory and practise, what do you see as the role of the translator at the moment?
I really recommend Samoyault’s book, which is committed not only to restoring to translation its negative potential, its oppositional power, but also to placing the “humanist” discourse on translation in its political context, that of being used, for example, by European governmental actors, still more darkly throughout histories of conquest. . . . In On Your Feet, where I am so often only riffing, I summarize the danger Samoyault describes by saying such actors praise translation “as a strategy of pacification” while “reducing difference to something decorative” and “in need of fixing” when difference—which literature works to defend by revealing everything that can be done in or with the language—more properly is oppositional.
I will come out and say that this is an important idea in our day of political horror and revanchism—but also, and especially, in the current technological moment. The wrong idea of translation as rendering equivalents, as a neutral, mechanical process, is everywhere encouraged by the availability of machine translation. If you can’t read this website, no problem, Google will translate it for you. We can criticize this without even beginning to evoke how it invisibilizes the human labor of translators. We don’t even have to begin dipping into our resentment to say why this is dangerous. It just forecloses so much thought.
But translators have long been innovative thinkers about dominance as it can occur in the relationships between languages. Lawrence Venuti, notably, talks about this: a language like English or French, in light of colonial histories but for other reasons too, is dominant over other languages in a problematic way that translators must be aware of. Machine translation creates another layer. Now, we need to worry about the dominance of pairs of languages. When there are many more examples of French-to-English translation for such systems to be trained on, they will do a much better job at translations of this sort.
We’ve talked about how you came into contact with Quintane’s work, but can you say something about what made ‘Stand up’ such a good choice for exploring what translation can be/do?
I love what Quintane does—across her oeuvre too—in the range of her diction, making use of argot, and through the acuity of her humor. I mean, it’s just a great read. The exercise Quintane had set for herself of embodying or being possessed by Marine Le Pen seemed useful, too, and interesting, and in translating the story I was going to have to go through it myself.
The use of literature comes up throughout On Your Feet, so it’s interesting to hear you mention usefulness again. What is it about Quintane’s work specifically that encourages these reflections?
I did get interested, reading Quintane, in this question she asks too about use-value or utility, uses of literature, but I think these uses that interest us are certainly uses in which literature’s sovereignty and independence—everything that defines it as literature—are maintained. It’s almost just a way of saying it’s generative artistically. Another idea from translation theory may be relevant here. One definition of a successful translation is that it is not “sterile” but subsequent translations can be made on its basis.
In Tomates, Quintane examines the Tarnac Affair, an episode from recent French history in which questions about the political use of literature and its use within the justice system were raised. Á nos amis, by the Comité invisible, an anonymous collective, was entered in as evidence during the trial of the Tarnac group accused of sabotaging the railway.
There are at least two uses of literature in that example: there’s the alleged use of the manifesto as inspiration or blueprint for an act of sabotage, but there’s also, and this is what Quintane is more interested in exploring—what is, in her depiction, chilling—the juridical or perhaps “prosecutorial” use of literature, the book’s being entered in as evidence. In the first use, literature is still being used as a text, as literature. We can discuss it as a way of considering literature’s generativity as a form of political potential as well as a criterion for artistic accomplishment. The second use of literature that I just mentioned, a juridical use of literature, in contrast seeks to limit, define, or more closely circumscribe the meaning of the text. Someone from a perspective exterior to the text is pointing back at it and really succeeding in freezing its meaning, saying this is what it is, what it’s for, how to read.
A definition of literature I find to be primary, possibly the most useful definition to me personally—in that, at times when I’ve lost sight of it, I have felt myself unable to write properly, whereas as long as I’ve kept it in my mind I’ve felt a little better—is, there are no priors. Meaning is created at the level of the sentence and the word. While this may be an entirely personal mantra, it is also a sense in which the usage I’ve been describing by outside forces, which is, in analogous cases, a reliance on such forces for any meaning to be made—the prosecutor but also the commercial publishing team or, in much of the so-called “autofiction,” the author’s celebrity, family history, or social-media reach—is anti-literary. While the best examples of a genre always and so famously transcend the genre to make their own, I think that that is why the kitsch examples of publishing’s current trend—the books coming out that won’t be read in fifty years—tend to be imbued with this corrupting, insidious quality, a style perhaps, I think of it as “you know what I mean,” vous voyez ce que je veux dire, that avoids, precludes, and is the opposite of literature’s only job, to write things out.
There are several moments in the text where you engage with external categories — thinking of your self-designation as “états-unienne” or what you refer to as “the woman thing” — how did these identities, or identifiers, affect the translation process and subsequently the novel?
I could start with états-unienne. There, I am taking my cue from Quintane. Some of her most famous books are of a prose genre she’s invented in which she makes recourse to the very pedestrian, actually classroom form of the explication de texte—Quintane is a lifelong schoolteacher—to remake thought and its expression, to do politics. It’s a defining feature of the genre she’s been inventing. While I think she is perfect, another French friend once told me her detractors think of Quintane as a “smart aleck,” maybe for this reason of her frequent tendency to linger on a grammar lesson. So my digression about états-unienne is, first of all, a Quintane tribute. And of course, depending on the context, it often sounds not at all right to say “American” and want it to be implied that you’re from the United States. Like a lot of people, I more often find myself writing United States American or North American or something like that.
At the same time, however, the expression “American in Paris” carries rich connotations that I can hardly shake off just by calling myself états-unienne.
What’s more interesting, I think, is detailing them, writing it out. It could be said of my project—of both books to be published this year—that they are memoirs of being an American girl in Paris. But the American in Paris is also a foreigner in France, and apparently it was necessary, in painting this picture of my time abroad, to write a lot about Marine Le Pen.
Le Pen is an interesting figure—the ways she represents and engages with French womanhood not least. Going back to “the woman thing” I found myself wondering as I read ‘On Your Feet’, how gender might have informed the way Quintane composed her story and how you, in turn, translated it.
When I share my woolly thing about “no priors,” I’m really referring, or trying to refer, to effects of the prose, by which the writing can take on any subject, and of course gender is a very interesting one. . . . It’s more fun to speculate, and so I will offer that I think that Nathalie Quintane’s gender affected her composition of her story in that it had allowed her to develop, working against constraint, a versatile, combative, keen creative intelligence.
My awareness of my identity—its entailments, situations, status as non-neutral—played into my choice of a project. In doing this translation, I knew that I would draw on my own experience as a woman from a bourgeois family, as a white woman, as someone’s daughter, as someone’s sister, as a blonde. . . . Marine Le Pen, c’est moi. For me, that was part of the power of translating this text, part of what made me hopeful about the utility of doing so. I was going to be trying to destroy myself, always a great sign.
Can you tell us a bit about the other book you have coming out this year?
I have a book coming out in October on Rescue Press, Precarious Lease: The Paris Document. It’s a work of non-fiction, of reportage that I began more than ten years ago. It precedes On Your Feet in the development of these projects.
I was digging myself out of a hole as I turned to On Your Feet, a project I thought up also as a “counter stretch,” like in yoga, to use another lofty metaphor, relative to Precarious Lease. I find that it is always generative to think of writing as writing against oneself, to think, in general, of writing against. The pieces collected in On Your Feet bear relationships like that to each other, of revising but revising in a strong sense—like disavowal.
In my work on Precarious Lease I was troubled—and I discuss this in the inserts, one of which you’re publishing—by certain standards of journalism’s, and especially by its claim of perfect accuracy in a work where interviews have almost all been conducted in another language, French. As we have said, in writing a translation you’re never rendering a perfect equivalent, so I was really bothered, as a reporter, by the idea that I was putting something someone had said between quotes and attributing it to them when it wasn’t at all what they had said . . . because they had said something in French and I had written something in English . . . I needed to attack translation for this reason, to work out some of my worries about accuracy and the intersection of literature and reality—the things that were keeping me up at night.
It’s interesting to compare how a sense of responsibility to a source might affect a translator and a journalist differently … Do you feel a pressure to represent reality in a particular way in your work?
When I think about fact, and I always hope I am a scrupulous reporter—when I am checking my work, it’s never in the service of reinforcing some vision I may have of what reality is. On the contrary, if anything, I’m hoping to catch myself where inadvertently I’ve run roughshod over the truth with a vision of reality I had not realized I held, by looking, line by line, at what I’ve written: is it really true? Where does it come from? What is it really saying? When you do that kind of an exercise, you are certainly trying to destroy any idea you may have of reality. There’s nothing to be preserved. You are creating an articulation.
On Your Feet is available from dispersed holdings. You can order a copy here.
Jacqueline Feldman is the author of On Your Feet and the forthcoming book Precarious Lease. Twitter @jacquefeld
Tobias Ryan is an English teacher and translator. He lives in Paris. Twitter: @tobiasvryan
minor literature[s] 