Tokyo Fiancée
Jan 19th, 2009 by Alison
By Amélie Nothomb (Ni d’Eve ni d’Adam) Europa Editions, January, 2009.
Amélie’s love affair with Japan and with a young Japanese man.
Jan 19th, 2009 by Alison
By Amélie Nothomb (Ni d’Eve ni d’Adam) Europa Editions, January, 2009.
Amélie’s love affair with Japan and with a young Japanese man.
I am a huge Amelie Nothomb fan & read her both in French & in translation (my French not being what it once almost was ). She is a brilliant writer & I like her strangely affectless (or is it just differently affected?) world. Once I start reading, I can’t put her down and as soon as I finish the book, I want to (& often do) reread it immediately. She has a similar, only even stronger, pull than Duras. Maybe because she is absolutely contemporary & yet timeless. And the translation is beautiful: I am in such awe of translators doing the impossible & when doing it as you do, doing it beautifully. For me, it’s like watching a high-wire act. Only a great writer can come close to translating a great writer. And I think of what it must be like to enter the world of another writer & put all your talents, your soul even, at another’s service, what a selfless (& certainly underappreciated) gift to offer. I hope you write a memoir or whatever the genre would be detailing the process of the translation experience, for you, your experience. It would be fascinating: entering someone’s experience who’s entering someone else’s experience. I can only think of you or Lydia Davis successfully creating this kind of work & as much as I adore Davis, you have a kind of luminescent personal presence that would be so important in a work like this.
Hardly anyone looks at the translators & yet where would be without them? Learning Russian, Norwegian, Portuguese, German, French, Chinese, & so on endlessly & well-enough to understand a book well-enough to read without a translator’s guide? The original is best but better a beautiful echo than nothing.
Thank you for your gift to all of us.