Edward Gauvin
interview by S Langland
What comic are you currently reading if any?
Fabio Viscogliosi’s Cascade. Philosophically, it’s reminiscent of François Ayroles’s Mesopotamian Notes, which The AI ran selected excerpts from in their second issue: succinct, whimsical musings caption only obliquely, tangentially, or contrapuntally related panels, sometimes in the same six-to-a-page layout. Ayroles’s musings, as befits his title, are more removed and observational in nature. Viscogliosi’s are open, open-ended, and personal, exploring pockets of memory and association in an attempt to approach or depict the free play of thought sparking thought—hence Cascade.
To describe it like that, though, is to approach it from a “literary” angle, weighted toward words and ideas; graphically, the two are wholly different experiences. While Ayroles’s stylized realism is almost sardonically meticulous, Viscogliosi’s images often tend toward abstraction, a showcase for his very contemporary design sense. Bold colors in large, solid, clearly bounded shapes have a childlike appeal slightly muted by the adultness of a nonprimary palette, earning him comparisons to de Chirico and, as fellow artist Morvandiau points out, also Apollinaire and Dino Buzzati. An American eye might even spot some Herriman.
Among Cascade’s pleasures is its luxurious Sunday dilettantism. Viscogliosi is an incorrigible name-dropper, littering text and image with references: Galileo, Ettore Sottsass, Joseph Joubert, Robert Walser, Jonathan Richman, Brian Wilson, Éric Rohmer, Gus Van Sant, Charlie Chaplin, Robert Bresson... (A private, toffee-nosed delight is that his predominant font in the book is a tweak on one designed by comics artist Richard McGuire.) That two books of such radically divergent textures could both be called “playful” and “nostalgic” is like watching meaning, once as coherent as a cloud, vaporize as it expands to accommodate—an experience not unfamiliar to translators.
In an interview with Alex Dueben at The Comics Journal, you say you tend to agree with Apostolos Doxiadis that comics “are uniquely suited to provoking thought” in a Brechtian manner. Comics, as a form, do seem to be able to do so much more than other textual and ‘literary’ forms and genres. What ways can American comics grow into their untapped potential?
I generally resist “more” for “different,” which would seem like some shifty relativistic sidestepping except that I think it holds (metaphorically) true across any number of fields today: variety is better, diversity is better. Biodiversity will save us from the next pandemic. Diversity of representation will spare minority characters the burden of representativeness. Instead of “replace” or “supersede,” try “coexist.” “More” as the caboose of the “Bigger Better Faster” train (sorry, 4 Non Blondes!) seems to hark back to a unidirectional rather than lateral, simultaneous notion of progress on multiple fronts. A poet friend once remarked to me after reading Chris Reynolds’ The New World that “as with most ambitious graphic novels these days, I found myself alternating between ‘wow, that's cool, a poet never could have done that’ and ‘ergh, from a poet's p.o.v. that was handled clumsily.’” Comics can do differently, and despite vast leaps in the last decade, the conversation lags in plumbing, unpacking, articulating just how. The greater the variety of comics available, the more we have to talk about.
I’m no thought leader on American comics, but as I was answering your first question, another thing the Ayroles and Viscogliosi had in common occurred to me: I can’t think of American books like those. (Grant Snider… sort of?) I tend to avoid prescribing, but it seems like there two ways to change that: American publishers can release books like that in translation, and American creators can be exposed to, influenced by, strike up a conversation with them. The latter will probably happen faster if the former happens first.
You could read Doxiadis as saying comics can, in a fictional context, deliver the pill of nonfictional content in ways we—as (American) addicts of, I dunno, unperturbed narrative purity? suspended disbelief?—find easier to swallow. But aside from that, straight-up nonfiction comics are a great growth field, in France especially but also here. That often has more to do with the medium’s practical affordances than pushing its aesthetic frontiers. Comics can seem faster or less daunting to digest (something they were long derided for, considered “childish”). That doesn’t necessarily make them “easier”: visuals can pack in a lot of information, and learning to “read” them is a skill unto itself.
Take three graphic novels that have made a lot of inroads in the last forty years, traveled really far from their original contexts (EDIT: the first especially of late, but that’s another conversation): Maus, Watchmen, and Understanding Comics. I think the popularity of that last speaks not only to the increased public conversation on comics mentioned earlier, but also to strengths of the medium. I suppose you could also argue that the nonfiction trend in comics is just bowing to the market trend in nonfiction (then again, comics were into memoir before the market was), but I think that’s separate from the viability and accessibility of comicsplaining as a real, formal element.
Maybe if nonfiction comics were to push aesthetics further, one direction could be to merge Will Eisner with Edward Tufte, balancing sequential narrative and diagrammatic design, with the latter’s informational layouts providing a Doxiadian distance?
Do you find that in revision some of the fun or magic of writing and translating is lost, and can you speak more to the thrill of first sitting down to translate a new project?
If I first-draft as an interpreter, I still revise as a translator. This might have to do with the sheer tonnage of dialogue from over a decade in comics and is NOT to claim equivalence with interpreters. While translation, especially literary, is fabled for if not founded on persnicketiness.
Am I emboldened by experience? These days as I attempt to surface some teachable principles from process internalized by repetition, I wonder what relative seniority has bought me, if anything.
Cliché gives us the protean translator, reinventing themself for every project. I’m a quick study—whether from character or occupational hazard is chicken-or-egg. I do a lot of learning for each book, which then gets forgotten or replaced: it’s all RAM, short-term working memory. I never registered how finite a resource this was until significant competition for it arose: first in the form of a child, and then of pandemic and social uncertainty.
My daughter, now 4.5, has been a different person every few months, sometimes weeks. I’m constantly revising my routine to accommodate her development, discontent, curiosity, boredom. Lockdown, loss of jobs, loss of childcare: add to these four house moves since last August, and you’re talking a lot of getting used to, a lot of new information. I’ve come to measure the steepness, real or imagined, of learning curves in terms of procrastination. No bandwidth left to learn even the easiest of new recipes (or a new kitchen, a new layout of contents to cupboards)? Frozen pizza tonight!
And so it was surprising to me that of all the kinds of learning I’d put off, translating wasn’t one of them. Is that seniority? Some sort of muscle memory for word work? Abated aversion. How’s that for a thrill?
I used to joke that the only “me time” I got as a new parent was work. Sure, easy explanation: workaholic, refuge in familiarity. But I’m not talking about habit, the appeasements of efficiency or productivity, work hours fungibly providing financial reassurance, but rather the content of those hours, the activity itself. Working with words on any level, from revising to proofreading, but especially first-draft translating, recenters me. There have to be some kinds of work that are better for the doing, rather than simply the having done.
In other interviews you have talked about the rules of translation and how translation for you is about pushing those rules to their limits. How does this concept apply to your translation of Jean-Marc Agrati’s “The Filter”? Are there aspects of omission which drive some of your choices?
Did I say that? Oops. I’m not sure what that means?
Though it may be entirely possible to pull from my work or behavior instances of limits being pushed—I am probably not particularly well-placed to see that—this is a phrase I don’t think of myself as typically employing, not least because of a slight allergy to its (Red-Bull, dudebro, gung-ho, cliff-jumping) connotations—no doubt a personal prejudice.
(I’ll answer the omission question later.)
What I was trying to ask in that question was in reference to your interview with The Comics Journal earlier this year where you said, “as a discipline, translation is all exceptions and no rules—no rules that matter, that is, beyond a certain point, and even those rules are really just conventions, and so subject to change over time.” So this idea of translation having no hard and fast rules only maybe context specific issues or exceptions.
So… I think I unhelpfully mushed together a few issues here—some relating to translation and others wholly personal—and your highlighting this phrase reveals its muddle.
I think, if I am being honest, that I like to give lip service to “rules,” because it makes me feel like I’m blending in, a priority for the ever-cautious immigrant. Lately, I’ve been wondering how that colors—so to speak—my approach as a translator, especially in a sensitivity to trespass (perceived, imagined, actual, unnoticed). Not for nothing do you have the cliché of the first-generation parent harping, “Speak English!” often with an accent (though you have the opposite cliché as well). Unwittingly or no, education hands down, embedded in its approach to language, a ladder for class-climbing to which the priorities of some people’s upbringing predisposes them… But there were lots of other reasons that I erred, earlier in my career, on the policing-convention side of usage: genre, intended audience, a personal fastidiousness. Acknowledging rules makes you feel like you’re part of a community (of shared values), in the know; rather, twigging them does, whether you wind up obeying them or not. Rules provide entry and later, perhaps a kind of camouflage.
But there are very few things where I learned, much less mastered, the rules before breaking them, as the adage prescribes. Less because I was such a rebel, always breaking rules, but more because I came to many things bassackward, and never formally or systematically. I think I went about absorbing Frenchness much the way I did becoming American: darting from one shiny fascination to another in the greater dark, and later stepping back to realize I had assembled a constellation that might be mappable, at least in part, onto others’ previously established or communally agreed-upon charts.
What “normal” English sounds like is a convention. What constitutes “closeness” to a source text is a convention. What a translation should strive to do is a convention. Conventions are subject to dispute among groups (nations, culture, schools of thought) and revision by time. That we live in a “Let them eat brioche” era should not be taken as evidence of our enlightenment (though the argument is sorely tempting) or the categorical inferiority of “Let’em eat cake” (sniff though we might at the outdated latter, with a disdain that is its own Gallic caricature). Our increased respect for exactitude may be enabled by brioche guest-starring on supermarket shelves—praise cosmopolitanism or blame capitalism. Meanwhile, like many a translation in the receiving culture, “Let’em eat cake” has gone onto an independently rich life of its own, giving us, among other things to be grateful for, a Gershwin musical.
Another point I meant to make but surely bungled there was that, beyond a certain level of (perhaps professional) competence, prescriptiveness is less useful. Which isn’t to plunge us into the bottomless doom of relativism (why is this always the knee-jerk fear?). Beyond a basic threshold, a text can support a number of equally valid interpretations. This seems like to remedial point to have to make. Every translator knows the question isn’t “right/wrong” but “better/worse for.” Complete for with time, place, audience, motive… any number of contexts whose founding assumptions theory is ideal for unknotting and evaluating.
And yet most criticism still persists in making the conversation about “right/wrong” or, in a gesture at forgiveness, “righter/wronger.” While assertions that, gosh, readers might be able to support more sophisticated models elicit shrieks of “BUT IF THEY’RE ALL ‘GOOD’ THEN HOW CAN WE EVER JUDGE???” When in fact there are lots of rubrics for evaluating, and this is one of the many places where a little bit of theory can go a really long way.
And in your translation of Peplum, I know you said that a lot of telling that story had to do with omission.
I want to be clear that what Blutch meant by omission and what I meant by omission are not commensurate remits. An author can leave narrative gaps and heighten the overall mystery. I can’t leave things out on that level. Abridgment (often editorial) is hardly alien to the history of translation, but that’s not what I was talking about, either.
Is it possible that for a porous, ambiguous story, you’d want to craft a porous, shifting language in tonal keeping? Perhaps. Not all works are structured so fractally.
The opposite is perhaps more often applicable: sometimes my translation of a sentence may retain traces of my attempt to explain it to myself. Those should probably be revised out of a work that’s striving for an air of mystery.
It might be useful to think about this in terms of the current conversation in fiction over worldbuilding and overexplaining. Writing on it, Lincoln Michel champions the minimalist and more literary approach of just tossing out “some interesting details—names, historical events, creatures, whatever—and those seeds can bloom into entire worlds in the reader’s mind.”
Scale that argument down, or port it over analogically from building an imaginary world to any description; suggestive texture on a word level is something the translator has almost total control over. But doesn’t the author determine those details? Sure, but I’m replacing all their words, so I’m responsible for—not to say always in total control of—the connotations. Authors and translators alike can litter the language with doors left ajar: veiled references that enlarge the sense of lived world by inviting the reader’s imagination to pry, peek, go wandering.
Long way around to ask, what were some points in Agrati's "The Filter" where you came across a translation issue where you felt you needed to break away from the convention of the situation?
Here’s a rule (of thumb) for you: French is 15% more prolix than English—apparently, we’re always jettisoning ballast. The rule is founded on standard (newspaper?), formal, or older French than it is on novels or the last two decades of internet, much less the colloquial register of comics. We’ve been told so often a bad translator will just leave out a word they can’t figure out how to handle. This stick does double beating duty, two things both unhelpful to my mind: wrack members of an already self-doubting tribe with further anguish, and perpetuate the myth that translation lives or dies on the individual word, rather than larger structures like the sentence, the paragraph, thematics, etc.
Take Agrati’s title: “Le filtre à air.” The redundancy threshold differs from language to language, expression to expression, something cartoonist Lewis Trondheim aptly lampoons in a strip from his diaries. Purporting to set down, in French, snippets of dialogue overheard from his beach cabana as literally as possible, he attributes to an American tourist: “J’ai eu le mal de mer à cause des vagues.”
To us, “I got seasick from the waves” is perfectly acceptable—slightly fuzzy, sure, but in a way that orally blips right by, and in writing, actually adds to its credibility as speech. To a French ear, “à cause des vagues” is superfluous because self-explanatory, and immediately makes the Americans figures of ridicule. Voilà—now I’ve just murdered a joke and cut the body up into tiny pieces.
Redundancy is based in shared assumption. In Trondheim’s, the body of knowledge assumption draws on is culture; in my instance, it’s narrative. What would adding “Air” tell you that the story doesn’t? Dropping it increases concision. Speed was important to me with Agrati’s story—a clipped tone that enhances menace. To my mind, this isn’t normalizing or domesticizing so much as pairing an affordance of English with one of the story’s own characteristics.
And maybe as clearer, shorter follow up question: when does your intuitive process hinder the meaning of the work you are translating?
The idea that certain translators are more suited to certain texts than others is a given, at least in literary world. But the idea that translators are interchangeable comes from a demeaning professional status in the marketplace.
A longtime client recently told me, “You’re our most courageous translator, and probably our most ‘writerly,’ in the simple sense that you emancipate yourself far more easily from the source language than anyone else.”
A few thoughts on something I’d never have seen for myself:
I’m not sure that should be how courage is defined in translation.
As complimentary as it sounds or is meant, this seems to go against the received grain of translation. Closeness is valued, a constraint invoked in definitions of the practice, but fidelity is anathema, a standard we seek to throw off; I think this is an inside/outside thing, has to do with who leverages these terms. I strive for closeness but am held to fidelity by others, arguably those who don’t understand the criteria I’ve set for the former, apply their own, or worse yet, some kind of universalist standard (who are we kidding?).
It would be nice if people, including translators, to admit that a little bit: that when commenting on the “rightness” of a translation, any reason you’re likely to adduce necessarily involves some theoretical parti pris.
So if I think this is true, what are texts where that emancipatory instinct might be a strength, and not misplaced? It occurs to me I’ve never been tempted to re-scale the mountain of Proust, but I’ve always been on the lookout for, I dunno, the novel equivalent of Le Palais idéal du Facteur Cheval?
Translator ethics is always an issue when it comes to “owning” and author, and I know many translators can be territorial with authors that they prefer to translate their back catalogue. What are some authors you feel obligated to represent continually?
Actually, I’ve come around on this; I now think it was a case of mistakenly hating the player, not the game. Or the solitary child, reluctant to share, upset other kids got their grubby prints on his toys. As a bookish introvert, I’m sympathetic. I can remember the exact circumstances that first led me to say it in 2016, in an interview with fellow translator Cristina Vezzaro on her site Authors & Translators. “What had happened was”: another colleague of mine had been translating a long-dead, hence public domain, French author for a long time, and shortly before a small press was to bring out the first of these in book form, a blog post appeared on a popular worldlit site, to the tune of: Wow, has no one ever heard of this author before? How is that possible? Let me tell you all about this author I just discovered! When some cursory Googling would’ve shown someone else had been publishing in litmags, writing essays, had a book soon to drop… This was the backbreaking straw, though; I’d already known other translators who felt conflictedly “stalked” by fans who started as readers and then became translators pursuing the same authors… (and without discounting the inevitable verity of that, also wondering… isn’t that how we all start? Is there some ceremony where you “bequeath” an author?) All this pissed me off disproportionately, I was probably channeling something else…
A few years later, I was going around calling translations cover songs and saying my ideal would be something like a tribute album: a single-author collection with each story done by a different translator; it would show off what translation could and couldn’t do better than that McSweeney’s “telephone” issue. Well, Archipelago’s actually gone and done that now, you could say the same of the Penguin Proust or the Norton Primo Levi, and poets have been doing it forever (they’re better at sharing?).
I was trying to square these two contradictory attitudes in my head when I realized I could blame… capitalism! The Highlander constraint—“There can only be one”—applies because of a structure external to the artistic or artisanal joy and process of translation: namely, rights. Rights are murky! As a concept, still contested; as a reality, always being revised. There was never just one translation; there are, in fact, many. At least temporally—a fact we try to obscure by making supercession a one-way street of trumped-up “improvements” (when for readers, libraries, used bookstores—it really isn’t). What makes us feel like the work we’ve already done translating someone becomes pointless when someone else beats us to the punch, except the fact that only one version will be published, acknowledged, remunerated? But it doesn’t have to be a title bout, right? Having only one around also serves, intentionally or not, the idea that there is only one, whether that be crowned with the title true, faithful, legitimate, etc. Let them all exist at once! Let us have the Ian Monk La Disparition! Translations could only benefit from translators pooling information, resources, impressions, approaches.
My earlier indignation was predicated on the availability of information. Due diligence is just a click away. Share and share alike! But play nice. Ask first?
Writer and translator Edward Gauvin (PhD, USC) has received residencies and fellowships from the NEA, PEN America, the Fulbright program, Ledig House, the Lannan Foundation, the Banff Centre, and the French and Belgian governments. The translator of over 80 short stories and 350 graphic novels, he has spoken on translation, French literature, and comics at universities and festivals, and taught at the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference in 2021. Find him at edward-gauvin.squarespace.com.