The taxing work of untranslating a translation

The “translation slam” held on the penultimate day of the Writers of India Festival in Paris last month was among the festival’s most enjoyable events, chiefly owing to its treacherous format.

On stage were three writers—the poet Sudeep Sen and the novelist Akhil Sharma, both of whom write in English; and the novelist Geetanjali Shree, who writes in Hindi.

Each writer was accompanied by two French translators, who had already received a piece of text from their respective writers that they had translated and brought to the session to present before the audience—which comprised people who spoke French, and/or English and/or Hindi.

Thus, each writer read the piece of text in the original language, and then each translator read their translation, after which there was a discussion on the minutae of translation choices—these discussions flowed naturally, often rapidly, between English and French.

Spare a thought, then, for the two people—Oona Seiler and Pascale Fougère—who sat in a booth in the balcony, and whose job it was to interpret everything that was spoken between English and French for the mixed audience, who were listening through headphones on an English or French audio channel. At the last minute, the scope of the two interpreters’ work was expanded to include interpreting the translated versions of each text—that is, apart from the discussions on stage, Fougère or Seiler, depending on who was not taking a break to breathe, also un-translated each French translation back into an English version, as it was read, so that those who didn’t know French could get a sense of the choices each translator had made.

An example might make clearer how this all played out. The first writer to read was Akhil Sharma, who read a portion of his short story “We Didn’t Like Him.” The audio recording of this reading is below (from 02:55 to 06:20):

One translator, Cyrielle Ayakatsikas, then read out her French translation of this text. As she did, the interpreter translated this translation back into English for people with headsets listening to the English channel—including Sharma himself. Understandably, this was a fairly rough and hurried translation, but served to give the listeners some sense of the translator’s choices. Then, the next translator, Bernard Turle, read his version.

The moderator, Xavier Combe, homed in on a particular point in Sharma’s text for a discussion. The line in question was:

Manshu was fourteen, and we were eight or ten, and, instead of playing with boys his own age, he forced himself into our games.

Ayakatsikas had translated this line as:

Manshu avait quatorze ans, nous en avions huit ou dix et, au lieu de traîner avec des garçons de son âge, il s’imposait dans nos jeux.

Turle had translated it as:

Manshu avait quatorze ans, nous en avions huit ou dix mais, au lieu de joueravec les garçons de son âge, il s’imposait de force dans nos jeux.

The discussion revolved around whether Ayakatsikas’ “traîner” or Turle’s “de jouer” was a better choice for Sharma’s original “playing.”

The floor agreed that the latter was a more accurate rendition, and that the former meant “to hang out.” Ayakatsikas had chosen the former to avoid the appearance in the same line of de jouer and jeux, which share the same root. But in doing so, most of the audience’s bilingual members agreed, she had diverted too far from the original meaning.

Combe asked Sharma if kids “hanging out” in the lane, “conveyed the atmosphere you were trying to instill.”

“It does not for me,” Sharma said in his wry, clipped style. “Because the effect that I’m seeking is the effect of mobility and motion. And so if I had wanted something where there were more pauses, I would have written in a slightly different way.”

But, Sharma added, Ayakatsikas’ version was not wrong, because it was “her interpretation of what the audience needs. It isn’t a response to my writing, because she is describing what would occur in French, what is needed for a French audience. So that is more precisely what is occurring. It isn’t my writing that is being interpreted. It is a relationship with the audience that is being generated.”

Since I don’t speak French, I emailed both translators later to ask them about their choices.

Turle replied: “There is not much of a proper translation issue here because the English was ‘play,’ which is plainly ‘jouer’ in French.” Avoiding repetition, he added, “is something students and translators are told by French publishers and academics alike to avoid at any cost.”

Ayakatsikas defended her choice, and said she hadn’t fully explained it at the event. “I argued that I didn’t want to introduce a repetition because ‘play’ and ‘game’ have exactly the same root in French and it would have made the line “au lieu de jouer… dans nos jeux,” she wrote. “I said that the French language hates repetitions and that editors tend to suppress them. But what I didn’t have the opportunity to add is that there is no repetition in English so there shouldn’t be one in French. I do use repetitions when I translate, but only when they are intended by the author and meaningful in French.”

Half an hour of the session was over by the time this one point had been closely scrutinised, and the discussion proceeded to another portion of Sharma’s text, and then to the other two texts.

The other two writers in the session presented even greater complications to the event. Sudeep Sen’s chosen text was his poem, ‘Kargil’—and very soon into the discussion, it became clear that the aural aspect of poetry made it impossible to arrive at definite conclusions about whether a particular translation choice was more effective than another.

In the case of Geetanjali Shree’s text, only those who were bilingual in Hindi and French could properly assess the two different translations. The rest listened to the translations—English from the French translation of the dense, evocative Hindi original—by the interpreters, who, quite frazzled by now, were still focusing furiously to keep up with the discussion and readings.

“Interpreting is a very specific physical experience,” Fougère later explained to me over email. “You feel your brain working, almost like a sport.” Her description recalled an almost zen-like calm immersion in frenetic activity. “When you are interpreting, you listen in a very specific manner,” she said, “so I would not be able to recall a word that had been discussed.”

It’s exhausting work, and it’s not hard to imagine how at one point, for a stretch of about one minute, Fougère found herself translating a French discussion on stage back into French. “French to French can happen with me when I am tired,” she told me in her email.

Around halfway through the two-hour session, the moderator Combe choked up for a few moments because he was moved by the grace and seriousness with which the writers and translators had worked. “I felt a sense of being dwarfed by all three writers when they spoke,” he explained over email. “Not only because their texts were stirring and written with outstanding talent, but because they were so humble when they spoke about the translators. Then I realised that all three were, at least, bilingual. To paraphrase a line by Goethe, if you don’t know any other language, you don’t know much about your own.”

For the session, Akhil Sharma was translated by Cyrielle Ayakatsikas and Bernard Turle; Sudeep Sen was translated by Olivier Deparis and Dominique Vitalyos; and Geetanjali Shree was translated by Annie Montaut and Tahnee Dierauer.