For the first time in many years at the end of May I broke my own self-imposed travel formula by joining a tour of Crimea that focused on the life of Anton Chekhov and the years he spent in Yalta and its surroundings, led by a congenial Chekhov scholar and followed by an equally congenial mixture of people of all ages and backgrounds who had one thing in common:  a love of Chekhov’s work and a curiosity about the world he lived in, some of which, we discovered, is still very much alive in its way. The tour came about as part of a campaign to save Chekhov’s “White Dacha” in Yalta, where he lived the last years of his life, and which has been  suffering from a severe lack of funding since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The campaign, based in Great Britain with both Chekhov scholars and admirers and theatre people behind it, is raising funds for vital repair and maintenance on the Dacha (see Yalta Chekhov  Campaign.)  (My fellow participants from the tour know who they are and I won’t go into a lengthy description of this part of the trip here but, rather, also provide  other readers with the link to the excellent agency in Britain that organized the tour and encourage anyone who’s interested to write and enquire about subsequent tours…) What I did promise however to my fellow travellers was a description of the trip that I went on after I left them, where I journeyed by rail overnight across nearly all of Ukraine from the south due north to the town of Sumy, where Chekhov spent two summers as a young man, before he became the famous playwright we all know from the portraits with his pince-nez…

My interest in the Sumy summers came from Chekhov’s own descriptions in his letters. He was twenty-eight years old, unmarried, with a family who were both a great support and a considerable burden:  the best way to please everyone and stay cool, literally, was to get out of Moscow for the summer and rent a dacha on a country estate. The estate was Luka, a few miles outside of Sumy; in those days Ukraine was part of the Russian empire and this was a lush, verdant landscape of gentle hills and winding rivers… The family who owned the estate were the Lintvaryovs: mother, three daughters, two sons. The two families became instant friends and their own friends and acquaintances drifted in and out of the main house or the dacha as the summers progressed; there was fishing and swimming, music and recitals, not to mention conversation…There were dramas, including a birth, a marriage, a death, and not a few affairs of the heart. Chekhov describes his time there better than anyone else could; my own interest is in the Lintvaryov family and their interaction with their soon-to-be-famous summer guest. I wanted to see—as in Yalta—what was still alive of that time.

In 1960, the centennial of Chekhov’s birth,  a small museum was created in the building that had been the summer dacha; from 1919 until then the estate had served as a school. The dacha-museum is well-kept and visited regularly, despite the loss of Soviet funding. I was a bit of an oddity there, as a foreigner; nearly all the visitors,  I was told, were Ukrainian and Russian. The day I visited I joined the tour of a small group of medical students from Sumy, which seemed appropriate…

There are five rooms open to the public:  the entrance is a display room with photographs and historical information, a few precious artefacts like Olga Knipper’s evening bag and one of Anton Pavlovich’s pince-nez, donated by his sister. The first room to the left is devoted to Chekhov’s brother Nikolai, who died of tuberculosis the second summer and is buried in the local cemetery. Behind that room, overlooking the garden to the rear, is where Anton Pavlovich stayed; a simple reconstruction of the way the room must have been, with a writing desk by the window, a day bed in the corner, and a small table with medical instruments that were of great interest to my fellows on the tour. The other room to the right of the entrance was where Chekhov’s mother stayed, and directly opposite the entrance was a dining room with a piano where the family entertained.

That’s a rather dry description of a place that in fact is very much alive, full of the spirit both of the era—thanks to a tasteful arrangement of antiques that had belonged either to the Lintvaryovs or to Chekhov’s sister Masha, or were donated by well-wishers—and of the writer himself. Like my companions in Crimea, the women who look after the museum in all senses of the term—Lyudmila Nikolayevna, the curator; Anna the guide, Alla the caretaker—share an ongoing love of Chekhov’s work and a curiosity in those who come to visit. They refer to their famous ghost, in fact, as Anton Pavlovich, as if he had merely gone down to the river to fish for a while and would be back after sunset with a basketful of crayfish…

They are also very proud of their literary club, which meets at the museum for recitals, lectures, and performances. This is how we keep the intellectual life of the city alive, said Lyudmila Nikolayevna; our local intelligentsia is continuing the tradition begun here so long ago. They adopted me, when they found out how far I had come, and why I was there. I was taken to the back room (which had been Masha’s, and will again be someday soon) and plied with tea and biscuits and questions and more information than my poor head could retain; thankfully there are small guidebooks available and my old camera cooperated.

But for every painstakingly preserved teacup or garden hat or desk lamp in the Chekhov museum, there is an indescribable quantity of elegiac emptiness and absence in the old house across the street that had once been the Lintvaryovs’, a crumbling old brick building where the regulation waist-high green paint of its last incarnation  as a school is still visible on the walls through the gutted windows. The school was closed in the early 1990s:  the building that had survived two world wars, a revolution, Nazi occupation, the Red Army and hordes of schoolchildren has not survived twenty years of tight-fisted capitalism. Efforts to raise funds or interest the government have failed, thus far; Lyudmila Nikolayevna said even an article in the New York Times was unable to rouse any emigrant, or other, philanthropists from their apathy. Anton Pavlovich, in one of his letters, mentions his desire to create a writers’ colony in Ukraine…the old Lintvaryov estate would have been the perfect place.

Although I am not altogether sure it is what Anton Pavlovich would have wanted in the end, in this day and age. Too much of present-day writing—or being a writer—is about being published, getting in print, being picked up by the media—all things Chekhov avoided and disliked in his lifetime. Still, if it were to save the Lintvaryov estate, and the memory of the people who created such a wealth of memories and happiness for Chekhov in his youth…it might not be too high a price to pay after all. Certainly there is something there of the summers of 1888-1889, still: the river for fishing, picnics, swimming and swinging out on “tarzanka” lianas; the bucolic village of Luka, with its country church and jovial priest. The local people of Sumy do not mind that they are so far from the cultural centres of the world; they know what they have to be proud of. Anton Pavlovich wrote, in one of his letters, “Abbazia and the Adriatic are marvellous, but Luka and the Psyol are better.” His descriptions are filled with the nostalgia of knowing a privileged moment of youth that is all too evanescent; something of his Luka lingers not only in his stories and plays, but also in present-day Sumy.

I came home from lunch with a friend today to find my neighbors sitting on the lawn; spring weather seems to be here at last after bitter cold winds and cloudy skies for days and days. I joined them; a bottle of wine and three glasses appeared, and we all commented how peaceful it was without the planes, how nature was forcing us to appreciate a different rhythm.

From time to time a small biplane flew overhead, almost defiantly, even though Swiss airspace is closed; he was small and surely below the infamous cloud of ash; the plane was red, and my neighbor called him the Red Baron.

I have a plane ticket to London, due to depart in two days’ time. When I booked it I regretted it was so much cheaper than the train, because I was very curious to take the famous Eurostar from Paris that goes under the English channel in virtually no time at all; but the train ticket was nearly three times the cost of the budget carrier flying to Luton airport. How do “they” want us to be ecologically correct when the train is so prohibitively expensive and the plane so dirt cheap?

On Thursday when the volcanic ash cloud shut down British airspace I quickly realized I might not be able to take my flight; professional reasons propelled me to spring for a refundable train ticket when I saw how quickly the seats were going up in price on the website. I knew everyone must be thinking like me, and that it was only a question of time before there would only be First Class seats left. So now I have a train ticket, and a plane ticket, and I am waiting to see what the volcanic ash cloud will be doing on Monday morning. I almost hope it sticks around, even if it means I’m going to lose a lot of money on that train ticket, and will find myself amidst a huge crowd of travelers, all the way to London. Maybe it will feel festive, or maybe it will just be crowded and hot and unpleasant.

But I like the fact that nature at last has managed to do what, dare I say it, only terrorists have ever succeeded in doing until now. And no one has been hurt, and there are even lots of stories coming out of people who are delighted to be stuck where they are stuck. There are opportunities for encounters, for new experiences. When was the last time you spoke to your neighbor on one of those boringly predictable budget flights?

I’ll remember this afternoon for a long time; I will put it together with the carless Sundays of the early 1970s, when you could suddenly hear the birds on silent avenues, or ride a bicycle around the coliseum in Rome with no other traffic than pedestrians. The quiet sky, the incredible wash of blue haze and sunlight, the three glasses of wine, conversation. A tortoise chasing a cat. The Red Baron defying our silence. I really don’t care how I get to London. I like the idea that a volcano has come all the way to me.

Anna Gavalda:  Consolation

Consolation is as I said a book to get lost in, and I did for weeks and months, translating it with the echo of Leonard Cohen’s famous blue raincoat in my head…it’s a love story with a twist (aren’t they all?), where a lost love leads to a found love…and there are lots of children and donkeys and music and drunken Russians and bratty Parisian teenagers and a burnt-out architect… Anna Gavalda is one of France’s most beloved and popular authors, and she has yet to become known to the benighted Anglo-Saxon world, but she deserves to be read and beloved  for her humor and her warm take on life. I know I enjoyed reading it over and over, despite all the vicious puns I had to translate (she has told me she puts them there on purpose! Just joking) and I hope I’ve done justice to the rich “Gavaldian” world she creates.

Christian Bobin:  A Little Party Dress and I Never Dared Hope for You

Christian Bobin is one my favorite authors of all time. I am particularly proud of these two translations because I struggled for years to find a publisher, and at last they have been published by Autumn Hill Books, an independent small press in Iowa City, Iowa, specializing in translation. Christian Bobin is as different from Anna Gavalda as can be, but he is also a creator of worlds. Above all, he shows us how to see the intimate details of life that are there before our eyes and that we’ve never really seen or understood. His lyric essays read like a mixture of poetry and a short story; above all, the language fractures light, rearranges your emotional perception. For me these are little legible jewels, to be read again and again, just for the pleasure of the fusion between language and vision… I hope I’ve done them justice because they are indescribably beautiful texts in French, and it’s easy to curse English for being unpoetic and utilitarian, a language of shopkeepers…still, I hope something has come through of the light and the music.

The little town of Mantova, or Mantua in English, that I have only ever known through Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet (“to Mantua; /Where thou shalt live, till we can find a time / To blaze your marriage…”), has for 13 years been hosting a literary festival for four days at the end of the summer. It is the perfect venue, with its wide squares and palazzos and parks, its cobbled car-free streets, its mild climate, its medieval/Renaissance atmosphere. It is not overwhelming with other things to do or see, the way nearby Verona or Venice would be; and it has just enough cafés and restaurants to keep everyone in macchiati and agnolini.

The main, central square, Piazza Sordello, often looks like the running of the bulls, except the bulls are replaced by bicycles; you’ve never seen so many cyclists and bicycles in one small town, ridden not by self-conscious athletes with expensive, ridiculous gear but by elegant ladies in dresses or fathers with one baby behind and one in front. They ride in a slow and stately way, never growing impatient with all the congestions of book browsing festival attendants or other locals; they bounce over the treacherous stone cobbles with grace.

While the emphasis of the festival is Italian literature, obviously, and all the events are held in Italian with the help of interpreters where necessary, there were some eminent representatives of world literature present:  Nadine Gordimer, Amitav Ghosh, Anne Michaels, Slavenka Drakulic, Daniel Mendelsohn, Fay Weldon, Alan Sillitoe, Roberto Calasso, in addition to the dozens of Italian authors whom I haven’t heard of…because they’re not translated, or don’t get the attention they deserve outside Italy; not to mention other guests from Africa, the former Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe, Germany… I went to meet, at last, one of “my” authors, Muriel Barbery. Her Italian and American publishers were also there, Edizioni e/o / Europa Editions, as were her Italian translators. For two days I lived in a happy babble of Italian and English and French, discussing literature, feeling generally as if I were in a dream, or a brief utopia… and eating amazing food (when interviewed, Ms. Barbery was asked among other more weighty things, the indispensable Italian existential question:  Che cos’ ha mangiato? She’d had fish, from the nearby lake).

I have very odd contradictory and ambivalent reactions at times to being a translator into English. There is the obvious problem that Americans and Brits “don’t like” to read work in translation (or in any case such is the publishers’ lame excuse), The Elegance of the Hedgehog being a recent notable and happy exception. There is the fact too that literature is not considered vital to the UK/US culture the way the movies are, for example, and that Anglo-Saxons read far less than the French do, or if Mantova is anything to judge by, the Italians, as well. So there is less of a market for literature in translation in the US and the UK. And when you come to a place like Mantova, you feel ashamed, or sorry, that you were not born Italian (heads of state notwithstanding).

The day after the first (sold-out) event, where Muriel Barbery was interviewed by an Italian journalist, all the local papers had long articles, with photographs, of the event. There was even one, I believe, in La Repubblica, which is a national paper. Can you imagine even Philip Roth being given such coverage, outside the New York Times or the New Yorker? We were having coffee on the Piazza Sordello, and I happened to glance over at the next table; a woman was reading the write-up about the event the previous evening, and there was a color photograph of the scrittrice francese. Immersed in the article, the woman was utterly unaware of the presence of Signora Barbery (the very scrittrice in question) just behind her. It would have made an eloquent photograph in itself.

It makes me sad to think back on the poor attendance given some events like this that I have attended in the US. The empty chairs. The lack of newspaper coverage. The sense one has, as an author, of struggling against generalized indifference. Perhaps the Pen World Festival attracts people in New York, but that’s New York. I don’t even know of other literary festivals in the US anything like on a scale of Mantova, unless you could term the AWP conference a festival of literature; it is extremely costly and filled not with local people but writing program people, creative writing teachers and students. It’s a business, a commercial networking affair. The events at Mantova were only €4.00 to attend, although many were free. Nearly all were sold out, standing-room only affairs.

The landlord of my bed and breakfast was attending the festival, although he didn’t seem a literary sort, but clearly I can’t judge who attends these sorts of events or why. I unfortunately only had time to go to Muriel’s events, and I was sorry my Italian isn’t better. There were a lot of good-natured questions, a lot of laughter. A sense that everyone was exactly where they wanted to be at that moment, enjoying conversation about a book they had loved (over a million copies sold in Italy…) with the person who wrote it.

I met my Italian counterparts, the two women who had translated Paloma and Renée separately. I felt we were like three necessary shadows, basking in something we couldn’t quite understand, grateful we didn’t have to deal with autograph seekers (of which there were some) or sign several hundred copies of L’eleganza del riccio. But we were there to celebrate success, and appropriately, the food and wine and conversation were commensurate and outstanding (although I shied away from the local dish of asino—donkey meat stew.)

They were out of agnolini, but the ravioli amari were delicious. And even the waitress, as she cleared away our plates, wanted to know about the festival, the writers.

Perhaps it has something to do with the music of Italian, the beauty of the language; you breathe it, like the warm gentle air. It’s part of life. Oh, I know it’s an illusion, and it was a dream for two days, a brief glimpse of the best of all possible worlds for someone who lives and breathes words daily. Still, maybe I should  brush up on my Italian.

Who would have thought the little beast would still be scuffling along so vigorously a year later? “The Elegance of the Hedgehog”: Number 12 on the New York Times Trade paperback bestseller list, number 5 on the Indie Bestseller list, Sales Rank 31 on Amazon (and 632 in the Francophobe UK, pas mal). It seems that such hedgehogly vigor calls for some reflections on the part of the breeder (if a translator can be termed the person who facilitated the creature’s conception and birth into another language…)

Muriel Barbery wrote a great book. Simple as that. Not everyone likes it; my own sister couldn’t finish it. That is the prerogative, and the duty, of Great Books, to be disliked, or misunderstood as much as they are loved and praised. The simplicity of bad books is clear to all; good books provoke controversy and debate. I can still recall the thrill I had after reading a dozen pages or so in the original French; I knew I was on to something that might be great. If the book kept its promise, I told myself, I would like nothing better than to translate it.

It’s hard to explain exactly why there are projects you desperately want to translate, and others that leave you indifferent. I believe it’s not unlike love; wanting to see again a person you think you might fall in love with. Only you fall in love with words. Renée’s self-denigrating irony; Paloma’s wistful gloom. The way the characters come across, through individual words or entire set pieces. And I think I felt that love for the characters’ words because I know, on the best authority, that Muriel Barbery loves words, too, almost more than anything.

I’ve been getting lots of emails from readers, which is very gratifying for a translator who labors alone, in silence most of the time. I worked on the Hedgehog for several months, every morning from six to seven, before going to work. It was a privileged time, the quiet of early morning, the good coffee, the cat still sleeping at the foot of the bed. It was when my brain—my spirit (mon esprit) was at its freshest, undisturbed by noise, by the mindless aggression of other people, in the street, in the bus, at the office. I was at rue de Grenelle, and it was not a bad place to be. Interesting, thoughtful things were going on there. And there was a bit of that euphoria, despite the difficult passages; when I would get to the ones I loved, I knew I was doing what I’d been put on earth to do. (Scuffle, scuffle.)

And humor. Muriel Barbery wrote a very funny book. I was dismayed to see that some readers failed to grasp the entirely tongue-in-cheek treatment of the novel. Of course there are moments that are grave, and sad, but to view this book as a treatise on class in contemporary France, as some have done, is very short-sighted. If you take any of it too seriously—the philosophy, the class relations, Renée and her obsessions about Tolstoy or Ozu or camellias—you will fall flat on the Hedgehog’s prickles. Lighten up, reader.

And for me Muriel’s strength is in the depiction of moments. How to find, if not happiness, a sort of equilibrium, by recognizing the moments that matter. The relationships between people, when they lead to warmth or laughter. A still life. The grimaces–and grace–of a Maori haka dancer. The gouglof you share with a friend. The strains of Satie in the courtyard. That sort of thing; subtle, almost imperceptible sorts of things that may not figure in some people’s definitions of  what makes Great Books, but that make life that little bit more livable, even beautiful.

I’m not digging in the book for these examples; they’re the ones that spring to mind, almost as if I had lived them myself. I cannot go into a lingerie shop without seeing Paloma’s mother fighting with the other woman over that eighty-euro scrap of lace. And as for shrinks:  they all wear brown, and never move a muscle. That was my favorite scene in the whole book, although describing it like that proves nothing; you have to reread it, relive it.

I got very very rich, on this book, as you may expect. A huge bestseller, in English 170,000 copies alone. But you don’t know this when you set out, when you sign a contract; very few translations become bestsellers (Anna Karenina, The Stranger, The Magic Mountain, etc…) So don’t bother with the calculator; figures have nothing to do with my wealth.  No, I got rich on something far better than filthy lucre:  on words, more words, contracts for more great books (check this site for frequent updates!), contact with people, readers, words of praise from others, wonderful, lively exchanges with the author and the editors, encounters with people in Rome and Paris and London who appreciate books and good literature.

Only one person wrote a damning review of the translation, in England, (although she liked the book in French); I confess I lost my cool and wrote back in self-defence. I think she was trying to seem important, to show how well she knew French, and wished she could have done a better job. Who knows. It is a plum of a book to translate (yes it passes the cherry plum test, too); maybe she had translator’s envy. Nevertheless, her damning review filled me with doubt for days. But I suppose you have to have one token bad review, just so you keep on the level.

(My favorite head-shaking moment of mock despair is when I read a reader’s review on Amazon that says, “I didn’t like this book. It was weird. There are too many difficult show-off words. It must be the fault of the translation.”) Passons.

It’s odd, too, to be living in a French-speaking country and to find myself introduced as the “traductrice de l’Elégance du Hérisson.” Most people know the book, and every time I go into my local bookstore there it is, in huge piles by the cash register, its simple white cover with the red trim and now, recently, in paperback. It gives me an odd sort of celebrity in the French-speaking world, but the irony is that I have stacks of copies of the book that no one wants because they’ve all read it in French. So I’m a sort of non-person celebrity, in fact.

I haven’t met Muriel, although I hope to, someday soon (she lives in Kyoto, not exactly la porte à côté). We also worked together on her first book, Une gourmandise, published this week as Gourmet Rhapsody. (Check it out!) A very different book, but filled, succulently, with the love of words.

If anyone cannot see the connection between a hedgehog—basically a snuffly, flea-infested little animal that looks better dolled up in pinneys in Beatrix Potter than in real life—and the rich world of letters, they have forgotten the crucial connecting word:  quill.

3 The shaft of a feather, esp. the calamus; loosely a quill feather. LME. ▸ b A pen formed from a main wing or tail feather of a large bird (esp. a goose) by pointing and slitting the end of the shaft. M16.
4 Any of the hollow sharp spines of a porcupine, hedgehog, etc. E17.

To conclude, I went to see the film “Le Hérisson,” a few weeks ago. It is not the book; it is inspired by the book, as it carefully informs you in the opening credits. It is a visual, cinematographic brushstroke; it has become more Paloma’s story than Renée’s. It does not so much betray the book—although there are some dubious moments—as reinterpret it.

I was immensely glad to be able to do that with the English language–this has been the translation of a lifetime. Besides, I’m not very good with a movie camera.

Today marks the anniversary of my residency in the little village of Buchillon, between Lausanne and Geneva, on the shore of Lac Léman. I could go on about how time has flown, and how incredible it is to think that a year ago I was a confused immigrant uncertain of her future, and now I’m a villageoise who treks through the vineyards to go for a dip in the lake.

But rather in the manner of a Christmas card, I’d like to use the anniversary celebration to relaunch this moribund blog of mine, which could certainly find better things to say than just provide feeble trumpet calls whenever one of my translations is published. After all, that is the job of the publisher or the author; not to belittle my work or say I’m not proud of all the books that have come out and will come out, but I want to use this venue to put my thoughts together about other things–the expatriate life, the Swiss, other people’s novels I’ve read, trips I’ve taken, and then maybe something about translations I’m working on…

One of the most interesting things, after a year, is to see what remains afloat of California. Not that it has sunk, but inevitably my own memories and impressions recede. Some things I miss a great deal, some things I think, thank god I’m not there anymore. There are odd feelings of amputation at various times, when I  do a sort of double take, wondering where my missing limb has got to, or if I’m not missing a limb, then where am I…these odd feelings are usually brought on by watching American films, and it takes me a few minutes after the credits to remember where I am. This last week I watched two excellent films, one Hollywood (”Rendition”) the other independent (”The Visitor”), both of them scathingly realistic reminders of the recent Bush regime. More reassuringly, I follow on the BBC or YouTube Obama’s adventures with flies or exploding tele-prompter screens (My goodness), and am glad that I can be here and not have to apologize or be ashamed any more. Everyone I meet, unanimously, is fascinated by Obama. The only character who exerts equal fascination, in Switzerland at any rate, is Roger.

Federer that is. He is the national soap opera (Nadal last year, his tears at the Australian Open, the recent epic final at Wimbledon, his imminent fatherhood), the reason to be proud to be Swiss (or to be living here). He has put the country on the map far more elegantly than the cuckoo clock or chocolate or disreputable bankers. And he seems to be representative of a younger generation of Swiss–multilingual, obviously, but with excellent English, and a global background (his mother is South African, his wife a Slovak) that is very representative of what the country has become. Dynamic, multicultural, elegant.

But I’m digressing. To get back to California, too; apart from friends, obviously, and the nature which has a wildness and openness you cannot find in Switzerland unless you know how to climb glaciers (and even then…) what I find myself missing the most? Supermarkets.

Alas. That is a miserable confession. I should be praising the twice-weekly farmers’ markets with their garden produce from the Valais or even excellent imports from France or Spain, but they require an amount of time that I do not always have (I like to keep my mornings for work, and they fold up at noon…); but I never ever thought I would miss Whole Foods and Mill Valley Market and Trader Joe’s to such a grouchy, impatient degree. The cracked pepper from the Coop is not as spicy as Trader Joe’s. The fruit and veg at my local French chain Casino makes Safeway look like Harrod’s. And wherever you go, fresh herbs are either not fresh, or gone by noon (cilantro and dill are always missing). These are daily reminders, but they are trifles. I tried to grow my own cilantro but it didn’t like the garden. The rosemary and basil are doing very well. I’ll just have to change recipes. As for cracked pepper…it gives me something to scout for, wherever I go. And a new supermarket, the Swiss institution Migros, will be opening soon just down the road…good stuff, but no booze, a constitutionally dry supermarché. Fortunately I stocked up on a few crates of the village wine…

In one year I have translated five whole books and have two underway and two more waiting. I’ve also done short translations where I’ve learned about petanque balls and Bordeaux winemakers and innumerable sorts of dietary supplements, the specialized vocabulary banging in my head like the heaviest of those petanque balls. But the things I may be proudest of are the little human accomplishments that take one back to childhood and youth–the first time you learn to do something.

When I moved into my little house, skeptics said I wouldn’t last six months. I would have to learn to go up and down a ladder to my mezzanine upstairs (bedroom and study), and light a wood fire for heat. The ladder was a matter of course–just remembering to be neither drunk nor about to pass out from low blood pressure before negotiating the first rung. The wood fire was more of a challenge, but by the time I’d stacked my first new woodpile in February, ready for the next winter, I knew I’d manage. I had to learn to live without a car. It has been nothing but a pleasure. Gone is the expense, the fear of other drivers (except when I’m in someone else’s car), the hassle of parking, the fear of driving at night or in the rain or on icy roads. Independence is equally available by way of my small railway station, an hourly train, and from Lausanne or Geneva trains can take me all over Europe. With time to read.

With summer came two more new pleasures. I finally learned to use a barbecue. I had two barbecues in Mill Valley and never lit either one (they stayed with the respective apartments). Well, for obvious reasons:  too much wind and fog. But here, summer is serious business–it is 28 degrees celsius as I’m writing this–and the smells from neighbors’ grills just became too enticing. I now specialize in lamb souvlaki and paidakia, with oregano from the garden.

Finally:  the bicycle. I have wings. My angel’s wings–I like to think, gallows humor, that the Air France flight that brought me here 14 months ago from San Francisco crashed and I went to heaven. And finally in May I earned my wings. I don’t ride far–it’s a new old-fashioned bike with 6 gears and a plastic basket for going to the…supermarket…but it’s the little circuits I can do around the village which are thrilling. Through vineyards and woods, along the lake, into the medieval village of Saint-Prex  (where Nancy Reagen was once fêted with the sort of oppressive security you find in the films I mentioned above), where I can buy an excellent Bosnian wine (!) and Pain Provençal that make me forget Whole Foods, et al.

I’m still learning, still discovering. Switzerland is not the country I left in 1985; it is far more open and hospitable, and also more dangerous and degenerate. People seem to be tending, almost without noticing, toward a California sort of lifestyle and values — not always the best. There are too many SUVs on the road, and the next village, behind me, is turning into Menlo Park with office buildings and strip malls.

Still, if I hang on long enough, maybe Whole Foods will open up down the road (they’re already in London…) Fine by me if they don’t destroy a vineyard to move in, stay small and sustainable, and are within cycling range.

While I’ve been writing this, the sun has gone down, and there is just a tiny last tender splash of pink on a cloud on a mountaintop across the lake. I curse myself for sitting here looking at a screen when the most beautiful spectacle on earth was taking place outside my window. There will be other days, other sunsets…but, I’ve also learned in a year that no two are ever the same. The constant view of the natural beauty of this place never fails to enthrall me and make me again incredibly grateful (and wonder if I went to heaven).

The old paddle-wheel steamer just went by, the captain tooting his horn, I am told, for a local erstwhile flame.

Programme in the United States: click here.

Amélie’s love affair with Japan and with a young Japanese man.

So when the Nobel Prize secretary Horace Engdahl made his now infamous remarks about Americans being isolated and insular and parochial and resistant to translation, I could only nod my head knowingly, from first-hand experience. In 1997 one of my first serious translations, Onitsha, a novel by a French author well-known in France but largely ignored in the US, was published by the University of Nebraska Press. I had read it in French, loved it, and shopped it to American publishers for three years before it finally found a home at Nebraska. It had been a bestseller in France; but it was, according to the traditional excuse of the declining US (and UK) publishers, “not for us”. And translation was “an increasingly hard sell” — obviously, if you won’t even try. Interestingly, at one point an African-American publisher did nearly buy the rights. In the end Nebraska took a chance. The book did not even get any much-needed reviews, because the major papers had long stopped reviewing translations, particularly from university presses. Perhaps it was perceived as too academic or too difficult.

The author of the book, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, has now won the Nobel Prize for literature. There were still unsold copies of Onitsha to be dusted off in the warehouse (university presses don’t let books go “out of print” i.e. pulp them, as far as I know), but as of this writing, they may be new off the press. I hope so.

My own reaction on learning Le Clézio had been selected was, naturally, one of elation, joy, euphoria. I was visiting another publisher, in Rome, (one who, I might point out, publishes a majority of translations…) and after they gave me the news I walked out into the balmy Indian summer air on Via Camozzi with wings on my feet. It took a while for it all to sink in, to realize that the world, if not the Americans, had been following Le Clézio’s career, that my admiration for the beauty of his work had not been misplaced; simply, American publishers could not bank on his “marketability”…My own perception, as I went on to read other novels by Le Clézio, hoping to find the more “marketable” one, was that he writes, as many Europeans do, in order to convey an idea or an impression, to offer a view of the world, and that language is put to use for this purpose first and foremost, before telling a story or conveying a plot. Alas, most US publishers want the story to sell, most readers want to be entertained, and it is no longer enough for a book to be well-written for it to be read. Quality of writing without plot and likable characters is, even in English from the start, somewhat suspect, like a foreign language in its own right.

Le Clézio’s books are demanding because they ask for the reader to give in not to the story but to the language…to be lulled by its rhythms, to be carried elsewhere in order to experience the fictional world he has created — a fictional world which is always based on the real world of his own life and his own observations — as in Onitsha, which is a fictional adaptation of his journey as a small boy travelling out to Nigeria with his mother to join his father. There is no plot, per se; there is description, memory, experience.

I met Jean-Marie Le Clézio in 1997 when he was awarded the Puterbaugh Prize by the University of Oklahoma. (Another prize, less renowned, but certainly an acknowledgment of his merit and an attempt to make him known to a wider audience — clearly in Oklahoma they are not always isolated or insular, etc…). He had driven there with his wife Jémia; they were living in New Mexico at the time. The University was very hospitable, welcoming, eager to share ideas and intellectual fervour. There were seminars and receptions. This is the way things ought to be everywhere, all the time, I thought, regarding literature. I was hopeful, for the translation, which had just come out, and for my own “budding career” as a translator. I felt an elation similar to the one the other day, and it lasted for several days, as I shared words and ideas with the professors who were invited, with the conference organizers, with local dignitaries and former ambassadors, with the Le Clézios themselves. We gave a bilingual reading. We toured the university library and saw a manuscript annotated by Galileo. We talked about Wilfred Owen. About Mauritius. About the autism of New York publishers. Above all, Jean-Marie Le Clézio said something I will never forget, and which was enough to earn my respect for a lifetime, and fuel my hope that someday he would be justly rewarded.

We had been talking about travel, particularly in the desert, a theme which he has often evoked. And he recalled being somewhere — perhaps New Mexico, perhaps North Africa — totally alone in the desert, on his own, able to open himself to his surroundings without fear. And he said his thoughts turned to the plight of women, and to the fear of deserted places and solitude that a woman’s condition entails, from birth. I cannot recall his exact words, but something to that effect; that a woman can never be utterly alone on the planet — as he had been in the desert — without this element of fear, or risk. For me it was proof of a great empathy — one that I have always found in his work. A consideration of how other people, who are not as fortunate, might perceive their position on earth: that we do not all belong equally, that although we are all equally entitled, some of us have less room on our small planet — women, children, immigrants, gypsies, refugees — the characters who people his novels — to live without fear or hunger.

That, in a nutshell, is for me, at least, the rationale behind the decision to attribute this year’s Nobel prize to JMG Le Clézio. An author’s ability to write exceedingly well and say something exceedingly important, that can change our view of the world. Regardless of nationality, or language, or the need for translation.

In my first job in San Francisco I was in an office tower with a splendid view over the Bay, Alcatraz, Treasure Island…I was the only one working there who did not have a view. I looked onto the heavy wooden front door, and the telephone. I had no window. This lack of view was a badge of my lowly status.

Other jobs, other apartments had better prospects, but never a real View. Some greenery; a lively street; the Acropolis if I turned my head 90 degrees and brought out some binoculars; a yacht harbour full of other yachts and an upward prospect onto a lovely hillside full of rich people in villas; a garden with roses and ferns and gardenias.

As a tourist, I had a view in Siena. My room was the size of a kitchen pantry; I had booked two nights, and on the first day a little kid running across the street with his gelato tripped me up, I fell, and by midnight had an ankle the size of a grapefruit. Fortunately a colleague had given me some dangerously strong pain killers, and the next morning I threw my window open on this:

I felt better, my ankle didn’t hurt at all. The town was mine to discover. By possessing that view, I possessed my experience of the place. And if I had not been able to walk, I would have told the Signora I wanted to stay an extra day, with the windows thrown open onto the view. (Oddly enough, seeing this photograph again today, I realize it is not at all how I remember the view, that I had fabricated in my memory something more vast, more evocative of a distant era, with a church on a hilltop (!) but also, alas, an intrusive crane repairing something…)

The first time I went to Athens I had a view on the Acropolis; but Athens being Athens, the view was less glorious, less green, than Siena. I had a magnificent view the first time I was in Venice, but that was 1974; never again, I was priced right out of the view market. I had a splendid view for an entire summer on the island of Samos, onto the harbour of a small fishing village; but in those days, Greek islands didn’t yet rate as Views like Italy or France. (It seems the more frequented a place, the higher the status of the view.) I don’t recall any views in England or Scotland; Ireland, perhaps. Lots of rainbows.

But now…now I feel like I ought to belong to an Alcoholics Anonymous for views. I am inebriated with my view. Intoxicated, drunk, borracha, methismeni. And like any self-respecting lush, also somewhat embarrassed. Friends come to visit, say things like, I don’t believe it, or, you live here? Here? And I apologize and say, really, I’ve been on the wagon for a week, I only look out the bathroom window onto the next door neighbors’ little boy’s football net. Really, it’s enough.

So when I’m sober I sit and listen to Erik Satie and look onto this view shared over time by Nabokov, Tchaikovsky, Dostoevsky (and no doubt their less glorious and more venal 21st century countrymen), not to mention all the non-Russian celebrities who have trooped through this region and its generous views over time, from Audrey Hepburn to Charlie Chaplin to Richard Burton and David Bowie, etc etc…

Some people get rich, others get famous, sometimes the two go together but as a rule to get a view you have either to a) be rich b) have been born in the place as a local aristocrat or peasant (middle class people don’t inherit views) c) look like Helena Bonham-Carter. I can claim none of those things; I am not rich or famous or notorious, only mildly successful in my profession as a translator (and we all know they live in freezing garrets); I did not marry well, I am not and have never been what passes for beautiful in the pages of our stupid women’s magazines, therefore I could certainly not play the sort of roles required to be Helena Bonham-Carter…

but

in the view lottery, I won the jackpot. Or the soul of E. M. Forster told someone upstairs that it was my turn. Whether it will last for a year or a lifetime, peu importe. I have a view, and it is a big responsibility, believe me. Beyond learning different ways to formulate, “I apologize in advance for my View,” I’ve tried to make it more tatty and realistic by mentally pleading with the neighbours to buy a third car, maybe a horrid SUV to remind me of my neighbours in California, but no dice. Even with their two fairly old ordinary cars they don’t manage to spoil the view; they just keep it from being perfect, so I can deal with it. The rest is perfect, always, incredibly; the mountains are always high, snow and cloud-draped; Evian and Thonon are always twinklingly French in the evening distance; the steamboats plying the lake are always white and nostalgic and graceful; the sailboats are best of all, sailing nowhere in particular, just enjoying being where they are, feeling the blessing of wind and sunlight, suspended in a natural landscape as magnificent as any on our small planet.

But don’t think for a minute it’s postcard predictable or boring. Because there is weather, here, real weather, not that fog stuff that used to try to masquerade as a winter tempest in San Francisco, or that bleaching white California sun, or even that deep blue blazingly hot Greek wind-blasted summer. Here you have clouds, rain, fog, wind, thunder and all that good meteorological stuff that people without Views complain about, but I love it because it gives me my daily soap opera,: what will the lake be up to? Will Thonon be visible? Will the tourists on the Général Guisan be feeling green by now? Shouldn’t those kayakers find refuge? Will the golden light hit the mountains down by the other end of the lake?

What did I do to get this view? Nothing, just hope. And have a fairy godmother as a family member, sheer fate. And I agreed with myself to forfeit a staircase for a companionway, as if I were on one of those boats on the lake… And to opt to live in a village rather than a town, and walk, and take the train. But even then, it doesn’t explain it all…I do know, after two months of learning to live with my view, that this is the way we should all be living. That all our gadgets and devices, all our financial or professional or political pursuits become meaningless in the presence of such splendour. It’s almost religious. It has something to do with the soul, but I’ll need some time to figure that out too; I need to go through the seasons, to see the vineyard wither and die, then come back to life; to feel the cold and damp lifting off the view and into my days; to feel the return of the sun and the promise the view can offer, daily. I think it’s about life. And something timeless–despite being in clock country.

Oh, and there are swans, too. And ducks. And even the odd water-skier, just in case I thought I had managed to leave the century behind.