Meet the Translator: Clémence Aubert

When I hand Clémence Aubert a French novel that has already been translated into English, the first thing she wants to know is what the earlier versions got wrong. Not whether they got something wrong. What, and where, and why the translator before her reached for the easier word.

Clémence is the translator behind our French list, and Madame Chrysanthème is the first of her editions readers can hold. I want to introduce her, because the way she works is a large part of why the edition reads the way it does, and because a translator is the one person on a book’s team who is everywhere in the text and almost never named.

She is precise and unsentimental about the work. Ask her about a choice and she will not soften it into a maybe. Her sentences are short. She talks about a novel the way a joiner talks about wood, with respect for the specific and no patience at all for the vague. When she explains a decision she tends to show you the sentence itself, the French and then two possible Englishes, and let you see for yourself why one of them is a lie. That is not showing off. It is how she thinks, and by the end of one of her notes you find you are thinking that way too.

Take the tense of Madame Chrysanthème. Loti wrote it in the present, the plain present of a diary kept as the days pass. The English versions before ours moved all of it into the past, because the past tense sounds more like a proper novel. Clémence left it exactly where Loti put it, and her reasoning was one sentence: a diary in the past has already survived itself, and this narrator has survived nothing, he is still in the room. She was right. Once you have read the book in the present you cannot imagine it any other way.

Then there is the harder matter of how Loti sees the woman he has married. He calls her his little yellow thing. He refers, more than once, to her yellow brain. The pull on any translator is to sand that down, to make the man a shade more bearable to a reader today. Clémence would not. Her position was flat: the coldness is the book’s real subject, and a translator who files it off is telling a gentler story than the one Loti wrote. So she renders him as he is, and she is confident the discomfort belongs to you, and that you can be trusted with it.

She is as exact about the smallest things. Loti, a naval officer writing in 1885, spelled the Japanese words around him by ear, in a sailor’s rough phonetics. Clémence kept every one of his spellings instead of correcting them to the modern forms. To correct them, she’ll tell you, would make a more accurate text and a less true one, because the approximations are part of what the diary actually is: the record of a man who never quite learned the place he was living in. That is the kind of judgment she makes on every page, and it is why our French editions have the grain they do.

This is the sort of translator we go looking for. Not one who makes a foreign book comfortable, but one who knows precisely where the discomfort lives and refuses to move it. There are novels in French that English readers have only ever met through translations a little too polite to them. Clémence is not too polite to anyone, and certainly not to a narrator who has it coming. I am glad readers can meet her at last. Gladder still that they will meet her the way you are supposed to meet a translator: without noticing at first, and then, when you go looking, finding her in every line.

Idara Crespi
Publisher, Espresso Publishing House