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When a Boy Isn’t a Boy: Soft Skull’s Controversial New “Memoir”
posted March 9, 2010
Posted by Thomas Riggs in authors books translation
Perhaps you didn’t notice, but next month Soft Skull Press is releasing The Bad Life, the English translation of Frédéric Mitterrand’s “memoir” La mauvaise vie (2005). Over the last few months the author has become controversial, and in response Soft Skull published a defense of the book on its blog.
We’d just like to say that what is most surprising to us regarding the situation is that Mr. Mitterrand’s story has for quite some time been public knowledge to the French people, and in the most high-profile fashion. The Bad Life was published four years ago and became a bestseller in France. The controversial passages have been known to us all along and, among other things, it was the frankness and thoughtfulness with which Mr. Mitterrand discussed his life that drew us to the project. Whether you agree with Mr. Mitterrand’s story or habits, he approaches them with a compelling and thought-provoking honesty and we continue to stand behind this elegant and brave book in the same way we have since undertaking to publish it here. As a publisher, Soft Skull has always embraced controversial conversations.
So, then, who is Frédéric Mitterrand, and what did he do to cause such a scandal?
Translating Catcher in the Rye à la française
posted February 12, 2010
Posted by Thomas Riggs in authors books marketing translation world literature
Translation is a funny business. With a novel it’s important not only to maintain the meaning of the original text but to express that meaning in a way that can be understood and appreciated by people conditioned in another culture. For commercial publishers there’s another concern: how best to attract potential buyers.
In 1951 Catcher in the Rye became an instant best seller in the United States. Soon it started to spread across the globe, contorting itself into different languages. Although in some countries the title kept its literal referents (catcher, rye), elsewhere publishers chose titles that presumably better expressed the intended meaning, or would be more interesting or understandable to their readers, than a literal translation. In Swedish it became Raddaren i noden (”Savior in a Crisis”); in Hungarian, Zabhegyezõ (“A Sharpener of Oats”); and in Polish, Buszujący w zbożu (”Rummage Around in the Corn”).
In France J.D. Salinger’s classic became L’attrape-coeurs (”The Catcher of Hearts”). Why didn’t the French choose a more literal translation? I’ve read several explanations.
My copy of Franny and Zooey is a 1961 Little, Brown hardback (fifth printing, mind you), stamped “discarded” and sold to me for less than a dollar by the Missoula Public Library. Still covered in protective cellophane, the dust jacket contains this note from the author about the project he had undertaken:
Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series I’m doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York, the Glasses. It is a long-term project, patently an ambitious one, and there is a real-enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I’ll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I’m very hopeful. I love working on these Glass stories, I’ve been waiting for them most of my life, and I think I have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill . . . I have a great deal of thoroughly unscheduled material on paper . . . but I expect to be fussing with it . . . for some time to come . . . I work like greased lightning, myself, but my alter-ego and collaborator, Buddy Glass, is insufferably slow.
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