THE MAKING OF A TRANSLATOR: AN INTERVIEW WITH CAROL VOLK

BY LEE FAHNESTOCK

Carol Volk is one of the few independent souls endeavoring to earn a living entirely through literary translation. Nine years out of graduate school, her dedication and industry have already produced 10 published books, with four more to appear this year and others underway, along with a considerable array of shorter works in translation and related fields. It seems a very good moment to interview a young translator with excellent training and high enthusiasm, at this early stage in her career.

Lee Fahnestock: Carol, could we lay the groundwork by first discussing some of your publications and how you went about getting the assignments?

Carol Volk: The books are quite varied--non-fiction in several fields and some fiction, most published by university and small presses. Right at the start I was very lucky, when two books on film--The Taste for Beauty by Eric Rohmer and Renoir on Renoir--were assigned to me by an editor at Cambridge University Press, where I had been working as an editorial assistant. Both were originally published in a Cahiers du cinema series. The Rohmer is a collection of essays he wrote for the journal from '48 to '79, the other one a batch of interviews with Renoir. The vocabulary wasn't much of a problem--I had studied film a bit with Robbe-Grillet at NYU. But Rohmer, a truly erudite man, made topical references all over the place, and not even the people at the Cahiers were able to help untangle certain mysteries. The greatest problem, though, arose with film titles--hundreds of them. In retrospect, if I were doing the books now I might ask the Press to help with that, but instead wound up finding English titles for all of them, mostly researched at MOMA.

LF: Asphyxiating Culture, the Dubuffet at Four Walls Eight Windows, was your first published book?

CV: Yes, though it was actually the fourth I had translated. It came to me through the editor, Dan Simon, whom I had known at NYU. There was an incredibly quick turn-around on that one, maybe eight months from start to finish.

Cultural Misunderstandings was the third. It came from the University of Chicago Press in answer to a query letter. It's an interesting book for anyone involved with the French or going back and forth between cultures. It has endured well; I still see it selling. Others have been more technical or academic, for limited audiences--on an architect for instance, or Islamic politics, on the derivation of "text" out of textus through the ancient metaphor of weaving. Yet The Broken Dice and Other Mathematical Tales of Chance, a cross between literature and mathematics, was so well written it made the Voice Lit Supplement's Best Books list.

LF: Can you say something about your contracts and working relationship with publishers?

CV: My name has always appeared on the title page and usually on the book cover; occasionally the copyright is in my name. I generally work for a rate in the normal range per thousand words. A few times I've had royalties: at Cambridge, though not huge, I had a royalty on the paperback from the start, without waiting for the break-even point on sales. It's fair compensation, I think, given that the jobs often take more than simply translation: you do research, read the copyedited manuscript with care, and nowadays you're often asked to proofread.

LF: With a possible five more books to appear during 1995, that's a good solid beginning. And, while reviews rarely mention the translator, you've had some fine notices--"translation... notable for its lucid rendering of the subtleties of the French language"; "accuracy... spirited, simple, and readable"; "evokes the flavor of [the author's] French in an entertaining, informative book." And the New York Times mention of "knowledgeably translated" for the Renoir testifies to the extra research and work you put into it.

Now to back up a bit, how did you come to study French?

CV: It happened almost accidentally. I was an economics major and an art minor at SUNY Albany and during my Junior year did a semester in London, including a trip over to France. That was my first contact with the language--on the bus to Paris from the Channel hovercraft. Someone taught me how to count to 10, and how to say "Where is?" Before that, I'd studied Spanish but no French. The minute I got back to the States I started studying French. I loved it, took everything I could--summer courses, anything--but in the remaining year and a half could only gather enough credits for a minor. It was an instant passion, the first subject I ever loved.

LF: Then when did you decide on translation?

CV: That took a bit longer. After college I went back to Paris with a summer student work permit. I got a job in a youth hotel, and by fall I had friends, I had a life, and didn't want to leave; with my parents' encouragement and a small monthly allowance--the dollar was at 10 francs then, so a little went a long way--I enrolled at the Sorbonne for the Cours de Civilization, which was wonderful. They accepted me for the advanced section, though I'd had only a year and a half of formal study, because my spoken French had picked up so much over the summer. Essentially, I talked my way into it but was way behind when it came to anything written. By the end of the course I still wasn't ready to leave, so for a second year I enrolled in the Licence, which is somewhat like a B.A., except that you study one specialized field. Skipping two, I was able to get into the final year.

LF: On the basis of your excellent record at SUNY?

CV: On the basis of completing the upper level of the Cours de Civ and, again, because my spoken French was very good.

That was when I took a year-long course in translation, a wonderful experience. I was the only native-English speaker, and we were going back and forth between French and English, both directions. The Professor was French as well. She and I would get into arguments about some pretty dusty usage and vocabulary.

That year, I realized that while I enjoyed the literature courses, I was having much more fun doing translations, and seemed to be pretty good at it. I loved sitting in the library of the Sorbonne with all the dictionaries. But it never even occurred to me that I could do it as a profession.

Next I accepted a Teaching Assistantship at NYU and moved back to New York to enroll in the Ph.D. program for French Literature. Since I'd graduated from a New York City public school in Queens at sixteen, without learning a thing, it felt as though SUNY was my high school and my graduate work at NYU--after the broadening years in Paris--was my intensive college experience.

As things turned out, after finishing the M.A., I wanted to work in the real world. I found the job at Cambridge Press, and while there heard that the Humanities Editor had a couple of books in need of translation. Everyone knew I was a francophile, and I sort of jokingly said, "Oh, I'll do them," never dreaming I'd get the assignment.

Actually, I soon decided to quit working there because I was basically typing people's letters all day and had been told when I was hired there was no room for advancement. I figured I could do better. On my very last day there, the Editor, Liz Maguire, offered me the translations. I was so excited, it was overwhelming, a dream come true.

LF: So you holed up and went to work?

CV: Yes. The Renoir and the Rohmer took me about 10 months. Also during that time, with those jobs for Cambridge as credits, I sent out résumés and landed a couple more. So, for the chronology, I did several books and then went back into a succession of publishing jobs, because I didn't think I could keep afloat otherwise. George Braziller--for whom I had done some reports on French books--called out of the blue one day in 1987 with a job offer. It turned out to be a wonderful crash course in literary and art publishing. The next year I did publicity again, for Abbeville Press, and while there did some editing and translation work on sections of Picasso's collected writings.

After Abbeville, I started work in '89 for Art and Antiques, doing profiles of contemporary artists for a monthly column called Openings, and later a book review column. But as Contributing Editor, it meant a change: I was working at home again, with time for extended translation projects, some of them branching out into new material.

LF: Have you initiated any projects?

CV: No, so far they've come to me through word of mouth, or I've chased after them through query letters. But last summer, on a grant from the French government, I went over to clear up final questions on a difficult philosophic book by Luc Ferry for Chicago. While in Paris I also tried to discover some works that I could later propose, though I realize that's a difficult route, because you have to act as agent too.

LF: In your preparation for translation, what was most important? And am I right that your approach is less theoretic than pragmatic?

CV: I have a thirst to be in workshops and would have enjoyed more translation courses, but I sense that a feel for the language is not something that comes from theory. It comes out of living with people in the language. For me, I'd say the most important things have been familiarity with the everyday rhythms of the source language and a sense of rhythm in the target language. The intensive graduate work I did at NYU was also key; for the Masters, we read widely from the 12th century to the 20th in preparation for comprehensive exams. That frame of reference has been indispensable, knowing when somebody is referring even obliquely to Voltaire or Rousseau, being able to recognize the source of a parody. The Ferry opens with a 16th-century trial against a colony of weevils, which feels to me straight out of Rabelais.

Also, since I never knew what I wanted to do in life before I began translating, I studied a bit in many fields: art history (a year at the École du Louvre while studying in Paris), architecture, psychology, math, film, computer science, economics, international relations. Being able to manipulate the vocabularies of different disciplines is a help.

LF: Turning to practical matters, how do you go about your work?

CV: Sometimes I work at home, but mostly at The Writers' Room. It's a sort of communal work space started by writers, an urban writers' colony with 150 dues-paying members and a certain amount of funding. There's a lounge where you can talk, a kitchen, a small but decent reference library with a wonderful volunteer librarian, and 25 desks partitioned off and quiet. There always seems to be a free desk, so you pull out your laptop and get to work. The beauty of it is that it feels like a community. It's a life-saver--working at home every day can be so isolating that you crave a job to see people! There's a good group there, and I find I can concentrate as well or better than I do at home.

LF: How many drafts of a work do you generally do?

CV: At least four. My latest tactic is to do the first draft without looking up too much, leaving in all questions and options. With every break, you risk getting up to make some tea or read the mail, so I keep going. The second time through, I'm more in the looking-up mode. And the third time is for pulling it all together, reading it closely.

I usually set a daily page quota. I put the book on a timetable, the same method I used at NYU. Preparing for the M.A. developed good work habits, which help a lot. Getting through the reading list for comps required 30 pages an hour, taking notes, for six months straight; getting by on translation means at least 10 pages a day, up to 20 if they're shorter. I treat it just like a job: if it takes 10 hours, then it's 10 hours. I have to finish.

LF: Yet you find the energy to work at the U.N.?

CV: I work at the U.N. on an "if and when" basis--meaning I work if they call me. It's often an after-hours job, and because the work is so different, it can almost seem like a vacation. I'm in the verbatim reporting section, for the official record of the Security Council and General Assembly. It requires a combination of translation, transcription, and editing, even rewriting when the spoken English is poor. You sit in for a 10-minute block, taking notes. Then you have 50 minutes with the recorded tape to produce about five pages of finished text before your next "take." It's a struggle to keep up; the editorial standards are extremely stringent and if the meeting lasts a while, you inevitably fall behind. My other editing work has been good training. I submitted a recent translation--The Failure of Political Islam--as a sample to get the job, though I got my foot in the door through a friend. The people there are wonderful, but essentially you do your work and you leave; it doesn't become part of your life.

LF: Compared to literary translation is the pay good? And is the extra training useful?

CV: Well, compared to literary translation the pay is good. I'm not sure the training is relevant to my translation work but it's a bit of extra money, though not reliable--once, the promise of an extended stint was cancelled on short notice due to budget cuts.

LF: You also manage to tuck in articles and book reviewing for various journals, plus occasional shorter translations or children's books?

CV: Yes, just this week, for instance, I did a fascinating interview for Grand Street with the philosopher Paul Verilio in which he discusses cyberspace and cybersex. I had translated an article of his years ago which never got published due to a rights problem. Children's books are also a wonderful change of pace. Last year I really enjoyed working on a World War II memoir written from the perspective of a small boy.

LF: That brings us to the question, where are you right now in your work?

CV: At this moment I'm working on the manuscript of the two novels by Emmanuel Bove to be published this spring by Four Walls Eight Windows--Night Departure and No Place. I did the original work three years ago, but it's taken them some time to get around to the publication; all that's appeared so far is an excerpt in Open City. But I'm also grateful for this chance to re-edit them after the long delay. Ideally, you need a time lag in between to really see what you've done. Working on the novels has been a wonderful and very new experience, fiction is so different. These were the last books Bove wrote before he died in 1945; they're set in World War II, and were written while the war was still raging.

I also just handed in The Broken Man, by the Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun, which The New Press is publishing within the year. It's bare minimum writing too, a kind of existential novel about a cautious, upright man who makes his peace with corruption. Jelloun uses short sentences, constantly repeating the pronouns and omitting conjunctions. That works in French, yet somehow in English it didn't seem to go at all. It was a challenge.

LF: Do you ever ask friends to read the work for you?

CV: For the most part, with non-fiction, I trust myself. When I work on non-fiction, I feel very free--to edit as I see fit, do whatever needs to be done so that it reads well in English. In the first place, you have to restate things until they become clear, even if they aren't in the original. In school, I was good at math and would keep asking the teachers to explain what they meant. When I'd gotten it, I'd think: "Well, why didn't they just say so in the first place?" You often have that sort of task in translation.

And then, I feel there's a sort of intuitive maintenance of style that happens, I mean you keep with the rhythm--there's something about that little tight-rope they're walking, something they do--the exact degree of sarcasm, or irony, or whatever--that you intuitively stick to. It gets under your skin.

But with fiction, it's a lot more intimidating, because the style is more precious. You don't know whether you're going to trample it, you have to be so careful. And in the process you might wind up with something wooden. Going over parts of the Bove and the Jelloun with some fiction-writer friends helped a lot, really freed me to move away from things in the French that felt stilted. On the other hand, both friends questioned the original in more formulaic ways, for confusion of voice or impediments to suspense. French writers are a lot freer about that sort of thing, and to me it seemed perfectly natural. So the question became how much to mess with it.

LF: The Bove is an extraordinary entry to fiction, because it's such fine writing, and devilishly difficult, I'd think, because of its deceptive simplicity.

CV: Yes, it was difficult because it is so simple and yet so ironic. The Jelloun is pared-down as well. With another type of fiction, I don't think the difficulties would be the same at all. A florid style, or something extremely "out there," in one direction or another, is much easier to imitate, and in a way that's what we do--imitate in a different language, in a different cultural context.

Working on fiction, or any work really, there's always the looming possibility of a bad review: one person may love it, another hate it. I fear the critics who compare the words per sentence, the number of commas, etc. in the original and translation, using this as an initial gauge of quality. This sort of analysis can wash over the cultural context: is a short sentence the same in French and in English? Ben Jelloun's short sentences might not play out the same way here, where we tend to use semi-colons. But if you tried to preserve the choppiness, you might be criticized too--publishers want readability in English. The question of translating style is a tricky one.

LF: In other words, to make it read well in English you may have to betray the author's stylistic means?

CV: Yes, a little--the means, perhaps, but not the intent. Otherwise I don't think the reader would keep reading the English.

LF: It sounds as though the contacts you have been carefully building up over your decade of translating, plus the publication credits, are paying off.

CV: I'm at a point now where I'm getting enough university and small press work to keep me busy. I'm just starting a 500-page manuscript for Harvard, the second of a two-volume History of Youth, put together by Seuil. This volume has essays, for instance, on youth in the French Revolution, on the move from workshop to factory, Hitler Youth, America in the 1950s, and so forth. I want to space out the chapters so I'll have time for other things as they come along. You try to leave room for the unexpected, but it's hard to gauge. Just last fall I found myself turning down a wonderful book because I was deep into a less interesting project.

LF: Do you have a personal image of translation?

CV: I always enjoyed math, and I think there's something about translation that is mathematical and musical. There's a puzzle-like quality and also a musical performance side, because there is so much rhythm involved. That's the part I love. When you finally get to the last editing stage, working the English, I find you wind up putting in some of your own rhythms. A friend said recently that he found a sort of consistency in my translations. I'm not sure that should be there, but as long as you are dealing with authors whose sensibility you relate to, it will probably happen to some extent. I know I tend to opt for clarity.

LF: Where would you like to be with this in a year or so?

CV: I would love to work on more fiction and do books for trade publishers, work that's simply more widely read. I had so much fun working on the Tahar Ben Jelloun, though I spent a lot more time than I normally would on a book of that length, which becomes problematic financially. And there are other things: I'm interested in doing Judaica, for instance. Last summer in Paris I found a book on the history of Ashkenazi culture that I'd like to do, learning as I go.

I've been very happy doing translation; there's something very satisfying about it. And yet the reaction from society can be, "Why aren't you doing your own writing? You're working on someone else's stuff." I've taken writing classes, but if I try my hand at original fiction, I want to have the right reasons--not to do it simply because you're supposed to want to. It might become important to feel that things aren't only running through you, that you're more in control. Which could mean choosing your own translation projects or your own writing projects--I have a few ideas, in fact.

LF: And yet you've written for Art & Antiques and others?

CV: Yes, and there's a lot of glamour involved in writing for magazines, but I didn't feel it was my own. With translation, I like plunging into different subjects for a while--though longer than it takes for a magazine article--becoming well-versed, and then moving on to the next. Perhaps this reflects my unquenched desire for a broad education. I've certainly learned a great deal about various subjects and about writing along the way. I like what Gregory Rabassa says, that translation has the fun of writing without the torment. But ultimately, I find translating more satisfying, more akin to writing my own book, more creative.

TRANSLATIONS BY CAROL VOLK

Selected Book Translations

The Broken Man by Tahar Ben Jelloun. The New Press, to appear winter 1995.

The New Ecological Order: Trees, Animals and Man by Luc Ferry. University of Chicago Press (philosophy), to appear winter 1995.

The Craft of Zeus: The Mythology of Weaving and the Woven in the Greco-Roman World by John Scheid and Jesper Svenbro. Harvard University Press. To appear 1995.

Night Departure and No Place, two novels by Emmanuel Bove. Four Walls Eight Windows, to appear 1995.

The Failure of Political Islam by Olivier Roy. Harvard University Press, September 1994.

Gods and Vampires: Return to Chipaya by Nathan Wachtel. University of Chicago Press (anthropology), April 1994.

The Broken Dice and Other Mathematical Tales of Chance by Ivar Ekeland. University of Chicago Press, October 1993. (One of the VLS "Best Books of the Year" for 1993)

Eugene Carriere by Valerie Bajou. Patti Birch Editions, New York (art history), 1993.

The Taste for Beauty by Eric Rohmer. Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Renoir on Renoir: Interviews with Jean Renoir. Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Picasso: Collected Writings, Introduction by Michel Leiris (translation of selected texts by Leiris and others). Abbeville Press, 1989.

Cultural Misunderstandings: The French-American Experience by Raymonde Carroll. University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Joze Plecnik: Architect 1872-1957, edited by Francois Burkhardt, Claude Eveno, and Boris Podrecca. M.I.T. Press, 1989.

Asphyxiating Culture and Other Essays by Jean Dubuffet. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1988.

Translations in Journals and Anthologies

Excerpt from Emmanuel Bove: Night Departure, Open City May 1993.

"Motionless at a Great Stride: In Praise of Folly and Some Swiss Vagabonds," by Nicolas Bouvier. The Literary Review, summer 1993, V. 36, #4.

"A Culture or a Nation?" by Etienne Barilier. The Literary Review, summer 1993, V. 36, #4.

The Game of Love and War, an interview with Paul Verilio, Grand Street, March 1995.

Translation Review, Volume 48/49, 1995.