THE LITBLOG CO-OP

LBC Podcast #5: Jordan Stump

Nominator:  Derik Badman

Nominee:  Television, Jean-Phillipe Toussiant (translated by Jordan Stump)

Subjects Discussed:  French humor, Jacques Tati, how Stump translates, comic beats, auctorial tone and linguistics, the pros and cons of long sentences, the benefits of reading aloud, translating Verne vs. translating Touissaint, why translators get a bad rap, "Translator Awareness Month," the influence of commercial interests on translated novels, forgotten French authors.

Backup Link:  (MP3)

(A co-production of the LBC and The Bat Segundo Show.)

Check out the Comments

I'd just like to encourage all our readers to check out the comments from this week's posts, there is a lot of good commentary, insight, and recommendation in there that you're missing if you are just reading the posts themselves.

Q&A with Jordan Stump

I emailed Jordan Stump, the translator of Television and a professor at the University of Nebraska, a few questions about translating, and he was kind enough to answer them.

Derik Badman (DB): How did you start translating French literature? Did you do other types of translation first?

Jordan Stump (JS): No, I really hadn't done any translation at all before I launched into literature.  The University of Nebraska Press has a superb reputation for (among other things) its extensive catalogue of recent French literature in translation, so when I was hired to teach French at the University of Nebraska, the Press's genial (then-) director, Bill Regier, asked me if I had any interest in translating, and if I knew of any contemporary French authors I might like to work on.  As it happens, I had just discovered the magnificent novels of Marie Redonnet, and Bill was more than enthusiastic.  After our conversation, I rushed right  back to my office and started translating, and I literally have never stopped since.

DB: I'm curious about the translation process. Harry Mathews wrote an interesting essay ("The Case of the Persevering Maltese" and others, I summarize here) that discussed translation and his process. How do you go about translating a novel? How do you work to maintain both meaning and style? When I read Television in English for the first time I was impressed with how much the voice of the narrator had maintained a consistency for me from the French to the English.

JS: Well, thanks; that, of course, is the goal, and the loss of the original voice is a translator's greatest fear.  I have my own perhaps idiosyncratic way of doing a translation.  I do the first draft as quickly as I can, without worrying in any way about the "quality" of it: my goal is simply to have something on paper to work with, and something that translates the text more or less literally, so that the meaning is there, and the ideas.  Then begins a very lengthy and extensive process of revision; I generally do six or eight drafts, trying to avoid looking at the original insofar as possible.  Once I've got a draft that I think more or less does the job, I ask my wife Eleanor Hardin to read the English text aloud to me, while I follow along in French.  This is important for many reasons: first, it will reveal any sentences I might have missed in my first drafts (a strangely common occurrence); second, it will reveal awkward repetitions and other infelicities that might not be apparent when one is simply looking at the words on the page; third, it allows Eleanor to point out passages that she finds awkward or unclear, and to suggest alternate wordings.  This last part is vital, first because she has an excellent ear for elegant and inelegant wordings, and second because I am in a sense hobbled by the fact that I have read the original.  I know what the original says, and a rendering that may (for that reason) be perfectly clear to me might be entirely impenetrable to someone who hasn't read the original--which is of course my intended audience.

How to keep the voice?  The question I always ask myself, at every moment of the revision, is this: does this sentence sound like something that the narrator (or the characters) of this novel would say?  If not, it's no good, no matter how efficiently it conveys the meaning. You've really got to know the narrator, and the characters, and the book; if you do, it's not all that hard to find the right words, or at least to recognize the wrong words.

DB: Did you have any correspondence with Toussaint during the translation? Do you generally talk with the authors of books you've translated (when possible)?

JS: Yes, I always try to work with the authors I translate; I always have loads of questions for them, of all different sorts (such as, for instance: what on earth does this sentence mean?).  In Toussaint's case, we were unable to meet while I was doing the translation, but we wrote back and forth a bit by e-mail, to discuss a few relatively minor points of meaning.  Since then, I have indeed met him, and I greatly look forward to working with him in a more detailed way should I have the opportunity to translate another of his novels, which I dearly hope I will have.

DB: Besides the process of translating the work itself, I'd be interested to hear more about the business end, that is: how do you end up doing a particular translation? Are you approached by publishers to do a specific work? Do you decide you want to translate a work and then try to find a publisher?

JS: By and large, I'm the one who decides what books I translate.  Occasionally a press will suggest a book to me, and occasionally I'll take them up on the suggestion, but only if it's a book or an author that I was thinking I'd like to translate anyway.  I can't translate a book I don't love, so most commonly I find a book I want to translate and then start looking for publishers.  Sometimes it's hard to find a publisher whose tastes are congruent with mine, which is endlessly frustrating, and sometimes infuriating.

DB: You've translated a number of contemporary French novelists (Redonnet, Chevillard, Oster, Modiano), are there any other contemporary authors you'd like the chance to translate?

JS: I'd kill for the chance to translate Jean Echenoz, but alas he already has a very fine translator indeed in Mark Polizzotti.  I'd love to translate more books by Antoine Volodine, but American publishers (and, it would seem, American readers) are somewhat skittish of writers as wholly original as he is.  There are other writers I greatly admire, but whose books (so far) don't seem to me likely to translate well: Iegor Gran, Nathalie Quintane, Jacques Serena...there are a great many more like that.  Any one of those could at any moment write a book that I think will work in translation, and when that happens I will pounce like a ravenous tiger.

DB: May I ask you to play favorites, which is the translation you are most proud of?

JS: I think my Balzac translation (The Wrong Side of Paris) is pretty goddamn good, and Claude Simon's The Jardin des Plantes also turned out nicely.  But--and this is a cliche, but who cares--my favorite project is the one I'm working on now, Jean Ricardou's Les lieux-dits (I still haven't figured out how to translate the title).

DB: You've written on a book on Queneau (On Naming and Unnaming), one of my favorite authors, and I'm told that you are working on some translations of his work. Can you talk about that at all? Which works are you translating? How has studying and writing about Queneau influenced your translating? Any comments on translating Queneau's notorious use of wordplay, puns, and the demotic?

JS: Queneau's one of my all-time favorites, too.  I really can't think of another twentieth-century writer whose voice and manner have so strongly marked the novel of the twenty-first century.  For the University of Illinois Press, I recently translated a selection of his essays, taken from Bâtons, chiffres et lettres and Le Voyage en Grèce; I think that translation will be out in the Spring of 2007.  Queneau's essays, particularly those from the late 1930s, are quite suprising: funny, vitriolic, wildly impatient with the literary world around him (surrealists, humorists, intellectual fakes). They really offer an understanding of his thinking that's quite different from what one might derive from the novels alone.  There's not too much wordplay or demotic in those essays, though there is some, particularly in one essay, "Written in 1937," which has a whole longish passage written in "neo-French"--how the hell do you translate that?  Once again, with patience, continual revision, etc.   

DB: One of the other LBC readers is curious about the use of the word "pensive" in Television. He found it obtrusive in its repetition and wonders if there is something particular about it in the book?

JS: It does pop up with some frequency, and maybe it's meant to be somewhat obtrusive, because that word so neatly summarizes the narrator's nature (a sadly familiar one, to anyone who has ever tried to write): he loves to think, but he doesn't love to work.  But since he feels guilty about not working, he convinces himself that thinking is the same thing as working, that somehow thinking about his project is getting him closer to writing it (or to having written it).  "Pensive" suggests serious reflection, but also inaction: little surprise that the narrator should so often use it to describe himself (in a positive way), and that the author should so often use it to temper that flattering self-portrait with a tinge of irony.

DB: Any under-recognized French authors you'd like to recommend to the LBC or its readers? Either those available in translation or not.

JS: Virtually every French author is under-recognized in this country (and some even in France).  I think the authors I've translated are all terrific, so if you haven't yet read Chevillard or Redonnet or Volodine I strongly recommend it.  Apart from that, let's see: Jean Echenoz, Marie Ndiaye, Christian Gailly,  Patrick Modiano, Lydie Salvayre, Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Rouaud, Eugene Savitzkaya, the last three I mentioned under number 5 above, Patrick Lapeyre... Again, there are a great many more.  Since about the mid 1980s, the French novel has had a real renaissance, and there are so many audacious and fascinating authors out there it's staggering.  One thing that I recommend to your readers: if you like one book produced by a given translator, you may well find a great many other remarkable books among his or her previous projects.  One way to keep up with French literature, in other words, is by way of its translators' choices: look at the back catalogue of translators like Mark Polizzotti, Linda Coverdale, Richard Howard, or me, and you'll find a wealth of new and fascinating books to consider.   Most translators translate only what they love, so if you like one book chosen by a given translator, you may very well like the rest.

(Thanks to Jordan for answering my questions.)

TELEVISION AND TV TURNOFF WEEK

I'm too busy struggling with dead PCs to be of much use to this lively and smart conversation but I did want to offer up an appropriate link.  About a year ago, Scott McLemee - who writes a very rewarding column over at Inside Higher Ed - used the occasion of TV Turnoff Week to look at Television.  So to speak.

But it seems like the right book to be reading now, during national TV Turnoff Week. Not because the unnamed European professor in Toussaint’s book is an example of what happens to someone who succumbs to the tube. Quite the contrary: Television is a book about how pride in not watching can render you even more obsessed.

Ticknor and Television

I wanted to circle back to our first nominee, Sheila Heti’s Ticknor, as part of our discussion of the Spring Nominee. By chance, I read these two books, Ticknor and Television, one after the other and, both times, I got stuck—I almost couldn’t go on because the sense of identification with the unhappy, blocked narrator was too intense. This is my character—when I’m reading contemporary fiction, I tend to plunge in with too great a suspension of disbelief and much too great a willingness to identify with the narrator. It’s partly circumstantial, too: I was embroiled in a bit of a copyediting nightmare of my own as I read about these unhappy writers. What kept me going was the connection to Beckett: I kept thinking, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on” every time I was tempted to stop. I had to remind myself that narcissistic failures are funny and pathetic rather than tragic. That’s a weird kind of reminder—I didn’t feel the humor in my gut so much as have to remind myself to recognize the approach as comic.

But to call the narrator of Television unhappy may be to project my all-to-American work ethic onto him. (I only aspire to having a slacker hero…). Think about when he goes to the park and strips down to the nude, in the German way, thinking about how to begin his manuscript: “But wasn’t this working, I asked myself, this gradual, progressive opening of the mind, this steady sharpening of the senses?” (51).

Ticknor obsesses about what he might be missing at the party—torn between knowing reminders that all large dinner parties are ultimately dull, that he is not the most glittering or beloved of the guests, and hoping or fearing that this night will be different. In Television, the narrator seesaws between the knowledge of how dumb television is and the sense, when you’re not watching, that “something might happen if you turned it on” (66). This is a writer’s dilemma, it seems to me: that sense of trying to strike the balance between the living necessary to sustain a mind and imagination and the retreat necessary to get the actual writing done. The comedy in both novels comes from the way in which these writers screw up the balance completely—neither living fully nor writing.

Still, they’re not at all the same narrator. Heti’s Ticknor is full of self-doubt and self-loathing where Toussaint’s narrator is hilariously over-confident. I particularly love how Toussaint skewer’s his German. In need of Kleenex, he goes to the newsstand and asks for “towels”: “’Maybe you don’t sell towels?’ I said with the tinge of irony that is sometimes my way. ‘No,’ she said. ‘And what are those?’ I said, affably (not meaning to humiliate her), pointing out the many packets of Kleenex lined up behind the counter. ‘Those are Kleenex,’ she said. ‘Well, I’ll take one of those instead then,’…I continued in my best German accent. She must have taken me for a tourist…” (31)

Did others of you see links to Beckett or Heti? Am I alone in my mad habit of identifiying with narrators?

The Slacker Hero

Hopefully, nobody will mind my jumping in late in the week as well.  I read the previous posts with interest because out of all the books I've read for the LBC so far, I think Television is my favorite.  The posts this week have been great, and they've touched on some elements of the book that hadn't occurred to me, providing much food for thought.   But we haven't yet discussed our narrator and protagonist beyond Sam's comments that, like other Toussaint heroes he is "detached, emotionally muted, static."

To me though, the hero of Television was this and much more.  As I read the book I slotted it away in my mental library alongside several books that share comic heroes who are more than a little pathetic.  Our hero reminded me most of Jim Dixon from Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, but I also saw in him Tommy Wilhelm from Saul Bellow's Seize the Day, and even in his more brooding moments, Binx Bolling from Walker Percy's The Moviegoer.  To be honest, I saw the narrator's decision to quit watching television as a smoke screen to distract us and himself from his lack of ambition.  Of course, as books like Television and Lucky Jim show, to those of us stuck in a work- and results-obsessed culture, a novel about a charmingly inept hero who manages to skate by in life with little effort is pure escapism and a delight to read.

What was most interesting to me, when comparing Television to other books in the hapless male protagonist genre, is the lack of consequences for this book's hero.  I chalked it up to a European thing - the Continent in particular since Lucky Jim shows us how uptight Jolly Old England is.  If I may generalize, were this same narrator stuck in an American book his actions would be fraught with consequences and people passing judgement.  Tommy Wilhelm elicits disgust from his father, while Jim Dixon strives mightily to avoid the disapproval of his colleagues and students, but for our hero, these concerns barely enter his mind, and his loving Delon never chides him for his slacking.

I don't know what we as readers are supposed to make of this man who, though ostensibly under pressure to complete his study of Titan Vecellio, leads such a blissful, meandering life.  The copy on the back of the book described him as an anti-hero, but in his ability to not get wrapped up in the expectations placed on him, he was my hero.

Toussaint: A Long Acquaintance

I'm rather late jumping into the discussion here, a delay I attribute (without embarrassment) to the fact that I spent Monday, Memorial Day, not unlike Television's hero, floating placidly in a municipal pool. However, I wore no goggles, nor was I naked, which is not permitted (as far as I know, although I have not explored the possibility) in the State of Michigan.

I was, maybe uniquely among LBCers, especially delighted to see Jean-Philippe Toussaint's novel emerge as this quarter's Read This! selection. I've been reading Toussaint for 15 years, ever since his second novel, Monsieur, was published in English in 1991. (I still remember reading Ginger Danto's New York Times review, which is as nice an introduction as you can have. Though you should also see Warren Motte's essay in Context No. 12 for a broader view of this unique Belgian genius.)

Since then, I've read all four of his books that have made their way into English, each offered by a different publisher and translated by a different hand:

The Bathroom, 1990, Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angeles, Obelisk
Monsieur, 1991, John Lambert, Marion Boyers
Making Love, 2004, Linda Coverdale, New Press
Television, 2005, Jordan Stump, Dalkey Archive

As you can see on the German-based Toussaint fansite (merci, Mirko), four books have yet to appear in English, including his latest, Fuir (Flight). Fuir won the prestigious Médicis Prize in 2005, and Toussaint has been popular in France and in other European countries for his entire career. But I can honestly say that in the 15 years I've read him, I've never met a single other Toussaint reader in the U.S. That is, until literary blogs came along, together with such Internet-age marvels as the Complete Review.

It was interesting to read Steve and Scott's thoughts on the parallels between the emotional detachment of Television's hero and the mediated experience of the world we receive through our TV sets. Very true, I think. But the hero of Television is not different than the heroes of Toussaint's other books -- they are all detached, emotionally muted, static, immeubles. They belong to a long line of literary resisters and refusers that Enrique Vila-Matas salutes in his novel, Bartleby and Co., although of a European strain that is less innocent than a Bartleby, and perhaps even with hints of a perversity typified by Des Esseintes, the hero of Huysman's Against Nature. But I guess I shouldn't presume to speak about the Toussaint books I haven't read. Maybe their heroes climb mountains and slay dragons. I doubt it. More likely, like the executive in Monsieur, they sit around eating paprika potato chips.

Even some of the situations in Television are essentially motifs or set-pieces that repeat themselves from book to book. When the hero's neighbors, hoping he'll take care of their houseplants, give him a tour of their apartment, I was reminded of the scene in the The Bathroom when the hero and his girlfriend receive a tour of their new apartment led by the former tenants. The hero also tours a new apartment in Monsieur. For Toussaint's heroes, nothing is stranger than other people's homes. Except possibly other people. Or, in fact, one's own self, if you really pay attention.

In several books, the hero finds himself talked into helping others with tasks he would rather not perform. (Unlike Bartleby, he doesn't seem capable of saying "I'd prefer not to.") Television's hero, with his plant-watering, gets off easy. In Monsieur, the hero is roped into writing a mineralogy text.

The true theme of Toussaint's books is the overwhelming strangeness of the ordinary world. For me, his novels are a remedy for the blindness we acquire through the dull repetition of everyday life, and the increasingly commodified and commercial nature of our language and the world we live in. I love them for their Keatonesque humor, which like Keaton's has a profound sadness at its base. How beautiful the world is, how awkward we are with the world and each other, yet how we manage to carry on despite it all.

Expectations

Scott's previous post about expectations in Television and the subverting of same came just before I read an interview with the recently deceased Gilbert Sorrentino (let me heartily say "READ HIS BOOKS!") by Andrew Palmer:

Sorrentino (replying to a question about reviews/reviewers): As far as I’m concerned, reviewers’ propensities are almost always “warped.”  This is because of the fact that the vast bulk of them come to the books under review knowing just what a novel or poem or play or essay should be! If the work under review does not fit this model, good night, nurse! Of course, they also willfully misread books, which may be what you’re getting at. Reviewers adore books in which somebody or everybody or the flawed hero or the whore with the heart, etc., is redeemed! And redemption comes in many forms, even patented UN-happy endings (the hero is rueful, the hero sees his best friend get eaten by a crocodile but saves his helpless baby from Satan, etc.). This is Hollywoodland transcribed as literature (that is, “literature”). For a perfect example of how it works, watch the Swedish Insomnia, then watch the one with Al Pacino. The former is bleak and unforgiving and honest; the latter is mush—Al dies, but what a death! What a guy! Why, the world is O.K. after all, serial killers be damned.

Television similarly does not go the way one might expect a novel to, and there is no redemption in the end.

The Strange Fascination of Television

I don't think I'm alone when I say that I'm not quite sure what's so darn interesting about this book. Derik discussed the narrative voice and the repetition of the television motif--those are two great elements (especially the narrative voice) that definitely kept me involved, but Television still feels, to me, like a book about nothing.

It's a book that never really goes anywhere, but rather plays with our expectations that every novel we read will have some overarching theme or idea or plot. Take, for instance, the title "Television," a title that practically begs for interpretation. Before I'd even read the first page I was already projecting myself into the possibilities for a fiction named Television--maybe it will be a critique of what TV does to culture, maybe it will be about art in the age of television, maybe the narrator will end up on television.

But despite the title and the idea of a narrator that quits watching television, Toussiant seemed to not be interested in really discussing TV. Fine then. I kept reading and immediately took interest in the monograph that the narrator is working on. It's the story of a pivotal moment in art history, a perfect moment for a close reading, something that can act as a lens and reveal to us new things about art and politics. Not only that, but it's the perfect device for Toussaint to construct a narrative around.

But no, in the second half of the book the monograph is mostly forgotten.So I kept reading--there was the business with the narrator subbing in for his psychiatrist friend, the trip to the museum, the airplane ride, the pregnant wife returning from Italy. All of it had so much potential for, for . . . something. But no. In the end we're almost exactly back where we began, the narrator watching television and promising himself to get to work on his monograph.

It's very much a tease. When the narrator points out that Titan Vecellio's initials are TV, I so much wanted this to fit into place somewhere, for this fact to induce some greater meaning in the narrative as a whole. But now, months after I read the book, I'm still not quite sure what significance that coincidence is supposed to have. There are so many moments like this, moments when you would expect the elements to start coming together into some greater whole, but when, in fact, meaning continues to elude you.

And yet, for all this narrative and thematic frustration, the book is undeniably engrossing. I think the fun here is that Toussaint is continually leading us on, getting us right to the point where we'd normally expect him to drop that nice New Yorker-story epiphany, and then leaving us to our devices. Instead of him nudging us toward meaning, he simply gives us all the parts and leaves us to assemble a meaning as we will. Toussaint's abdication of the authorial right to instruct us, the readers, in the meaning of his work strikes a parallel with Toussaint's anti-hero who goes through life encountering all sorts of potentially interesting things, but, ultimately, just wants to be left alone.

And in the end, I think this makes the book Television very faithful to the machine television. All day long the TV bathes us in all kinds of images. In real life, the device is just as omnipresent as Toussaint makes it in his book (you try going a whole day without encountering one). Everywhere we are saturated with dramas, newscasts, sporting events. But what does it all add up to? What does it all mean?

Who knows, and yet the vast majority of people still watch it compulsively (in the book, Toussaint says only 3% of Europeans don't have a TV, and those people are homeless). Similarly, even though Television may frustrate our attempts to make meaning out of it, it remains strangely fascinating.

Television Discussion Week Begins

This week we'll be discussing our Spring 2006 Read This! pick, Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint as translated from the French by Jordan Stump (Dalkey Archive). I've already posted about why I nominated the book. We will have posts by LBC members discussing the book, a brief text interview with the translator, and a podcast interview with the translator.

To kick off the discussion, there are two elements of the book that drew me to it again and again. The first is the voice of the narrator. The narrator is our single source of information in the book and throughout the book I wonder how much he is leaving out of his narration. But, while we don't know what he is leaving out, Toussaint makes it clear through the narrator's voice when he is, I won't say lying, distorting the truth. Much of the humor in the book comes from the disconnect between the way the narrator sees himself and the way we can see through what he says to the truth.

The other element that interests me is the structure of the book. There is no real conventional plot, nor even, one might argue, any real change that takes place in the book. The narrator does not come to any revelations. He suffers no tragedies, no real victories or defeats. He just goes about his life, working (a bit) and not working (a lot). In the absence of a unifying plot, Toussaint gives us a repeating motif, the television. The book begins and ends with the silencing of a television set, and in between the narrator is faced at every turn with television sets. For me, these ever present television provide the underlying unity to the novel. This less dramatic, less plotted style novel has a great appeal for me personally, and is something that I enjoy about all Toussaint's novels.

Maybe we can start out hearing what attracted the rest of you to the book, as well as any comments on the above.