BookBlast interview with Philip Terry, translator
Philip Terry, tell us a little bit about yourself. When you were growing up, what books had an impact on you?
I grew up in a leafy suburb on the outskirts of Belfast, where I enjoyed playing in the neighbouring fields more than reading. The first books I fell in love with were mostly picture books, American comics that you’d find at Belfast Airport, Where The Wild Things Are, and the one translated from Spanish called Ferdinand, about a bull that refused to fight.
Were there any linguists in your family? At what age did you first develop a love of languages?
My father, Arthur Terry, was a distinguished linguist, and a founder of the Anglo-Catalan Association. I think there might have been an expectation from some of his Spanish friends that I’d grow up to be a Hispanist, but if anything that put me off languages. So, I came to languages quite late, really through a desire to read in French writers I had read and loved in translation. Alain Robbe-Grillet and Camus, for example, and Marguerite Duras, whose work has an incomparable music in the French that no translator has yet captured. Then when I was working in France in my late twenties, at the Université de Caen, I discovered Georges Perec and the Oulipo.
Tell us about some of the more challenging works you have translated, and why that was so?
The most challenging work I have translated is definitely that by the writers of the Oulipo. I’ve translated Georges Perec’s I Remember, Ian Monk’s 14 x 14, Michèle Métail’s Identikits, Raymond Queneau’s Elementary Morality, and lots of shorter texts that went into The Penguin Book of Oulipo which I edited. Translating Oulipo is difficult because of the constraints they use, so to do it well you have to translate the constraint as well as the meaning, though it isn’t always possible. The first sentence of Chaper 1 of Perec’s e-less novel La Disparition reads: “Anton Voyl n’arrivait pas à dormir”, but if you translate that as “Anton Vowel couldn’t get to sleep” you’ve already broken the constraint four times. Perec’s I Remember, at first glance deceptively straightforward, presents lots of problems of a similar kind, word games, hidden puns, and so on that are fiendish to translate, but often you can find a way in the end. One of Perec’s texts that I translated for The Penguin Book of Oulipo is called A Little Illustrated ABC. Here Perec takes sonic sequences like BA-BE-BI-BO-BU and RA-RE-RI-RO-RU, homophonically translates them into sentences or phrases, then writes a short text that expands on this. So from RA-RE-RI-RO-RU Perec gets “Rare est rire aux rues” (“Rare is laughter in the roads”). To cut a long story short, if you are going to translate this into English you either need to obey the constraint, and get a very different meaning, or translate the meaning of Perec’s text and forget the constraint. Here I took the decision to keep the constraint and have some fun with that.
Your latest translation to be published is Célina, released by Les Fugitives. In your Translator’s Note you describe how Catherine Axelrad gave you her novel over twenty years ago and suggested you translate it. Your rough draft then lay in a drawer until the Victor Hugo celebrations of 2022 when you decided to revisit it. How did the passage of time benefit your translation?
Well, it’s true that it lay in a drawer for twenty years or so, though I took it out periodically to give it a polish, trying to make it feel right. Once or twice in that time I did send it off to other publishers, including one publisher who’d brought out a Perec translation of mine, but I’m not even sure they read it. When I first read the novel, I just thought it was a great narrative, and it shed a light on an aspect of Victor Hugo that I wasn’t aware of. It fitted with a lot of books I liked in English too, by writers like Michèle Roberts – The Book of Mrs. Noah, for example – that told traditional stories from a new angle. What I didn’t see at first, and it’s something I love about the book, is its music, particularly pronounced in the opening with its sonic repetitions from the very first sentence on “perdu”, “Grut” and “bout”. I couldn’t do exactly the same thing, but I tried to get a similar effect with alliteration, especially on the “f” sound.
In your Translator’s Note you also describe the language which is certainly most unusual, in that it is both of its time yet very modern, with the merging of French and English words giving it an edge. Catching the voice and tone of an author is always tricky. How did you manage it in this instance? Can you give us any insights and tips as to how you managed to do it so well?
One benefit of taking a long time to translate was that it let me get really inside the character of Célina. She was, in Hugo’s house, both an insider and an outsider, and this was reflected in her language, at times sharply perceptive, but less polished and more rustic than say Hugo’s (Catherine wanted her to use the word “scrobbed” for example, rather than “scrubbed”). This found its way into how I recreated her language, her voice, and at times I gave her a slight awkwardness, a slightly “incorrect” way of speaking, even at times in places where there was no obvious trace of this in the French. So on page 13 I have “When I was thirteen my big sister Louise was took ill” which in earlier drafts had been “When I was thirteen years old my big sister Louise was taken ill” which is closer arguably to the French “Quand j’avais treize ans ma grande sœur Louise est tombée malade”. I think this made the translation good, and unusual, even gently experimental. The way I do it is wrong, but works.
You clearly not only love language but also have a gift for writing and word play. Please describe some of the eccentricities that are hallmarks of your translation of Célina.
One eccentricity is on page 45: “But I’d got so little sleep the previous night that I dropped into bed like a granite statue . . .’ There’s no “granite statue” in the French which has “je suis tombée comme une masse sur mon lit” (something like “I dropped like a stone into bed” in English). For me, “granite statue” works, and it was a secret reference to a single by the band Salad, “Granite Statue”, a band that some of my friends played in at the time of beginning the translation. You could see this as a kind of secret signature, like the face of a friend that a stonemason might place amongst the gargoyles decorating the façade of a church. It might look gratuitous at first glance, but it enacts, at the level of translation itself, the mischief that characterises Célina in the novel. There’s a similar mild eccentricity on page 53 in the phrase “what was eating me”: this is quite modern, mixing the new in with the old as in New York School poetry, and it gives a liveliness to translation; it’s also a good translation of the French “quelle mouche me piquait”.
How involved are you in the promotion of the books you translate? Is social media as important as we are led to believe, or are there other ways to build a community online and promote the books you are passionate about?
It depends on the publisher, some publishers do all these things themselves, some like to involve you more in the process. When there’s a chance I love to be involved, whether that’s finding places to review or doing Q&A, or taking part in readings, though I don’t use social media that much, the kind of self-promotion it involves I feel uncomfortable with.
Who are the five people, living or dead, you’d invite to a party?
Samuel Beckett, Georges Perec, Marina Warner, Angela Carter and Edith Piaf, though I’d probably be too overawed to speak to all of them.
Five favourite authors translated into English?
Georges Perec, Thomas Bernhard, Noémi Lefebvre, Jorge Luis Borges, Nathalie Quintane.
Five favourite feature films?
Stalker, Battleship Potemkin, India Song, Au Bout Du Souffle, Dead Man.
Five favourite musicians?
Jacques Brel, Radiohead, Thelonius Monk, Igor Stravinsky, my son Lou Terry.
Your bedside reading?
Finnegans Wake
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