I met Catherine Piron-Paira last June in Paris at the annual poetry market, and at the time was already aware of Éditions des Lisières, a remarkable independent press committed to translation and multilingualism. I had recently read their latest bilingual English-French release, Seeds in My Ground/Ma terre ensemencée by Jean Paira-Pemberton, and discovered that the translator (or co-translator), Catherine Piron-Paira, was the author’s daughter. Many poems were substantially re-written in their French translation, suggesting a very creative working relationship. The press’ website says the text is “adapted” rather than merely translated, and the book itself indicates that the French version was developed “in collaboration” between Jean and Catherine. A few months later, all three of us scheduled a video chat. Jean and Catherine were then sent the condensed and edited transcript of this interview for approval and final edits, and it is now our great pleasure to bring it to Asymptote’s readers.
Lou Sarabadzic (LS): In the foreword, Catherine, you explain that your mother, Jean Paira-Pemberton, “is a nomad between two languages, two cultures, two countries.” Could you tell us a bit more?
Catherine Piron-Paira (CPP): Mum settled in France in 1952, but she continued going to England for reasons of both business and pleasure. She also went from Strasbourg to Saverne every day for work. There was a place where we went for holidays: Chapeau Cornu, near Lyon. We used to go from Strasbourg to Lyon, from Lyon to Strasbourg. As for “nomad,” how do you feel about that?
Jean Paira-Pemberton (JPP): Well, I have a relationship now with French, which is almost like the relationship with a mother tongue. I think I am completely bilingual. I can use both languages for practically everything, except poetry. Poetry is only in English.
LS: Why do you think that is?
JPP: Because English is my mother tongue, and I have wanted to be a poet ever since I learnt how to write, so it goes back to way before I learnt French. I started to learn French in secondary school, when I was eleven. It is very much a second language. I have never written poetry in French. I have written lots of other texts in French, of course, as part of my job; I was a university teacher, and I published articles and all sorts of things on linguistics in French–my thesis about John Clare’s life was in French. But not poetry.
LS: Can you explain how the translation project for Seeds in My Ground started?
JPP: There was no intention to translate originally. I mean, I write in English, and that’s that. The translating came from Catherine, as far as I remember.
CPP: What happened is that one of our friends, Prue Sheridan, is a painter, and she chose a few poems to illustrate. We wanted to introduce the paintings and poems in French so people could understand what the subject was. We worked like this for about ten poems, and discovered that one of them sounded really good in French, at which point I said: “Well, let’s start again and make real poetry!” because we are both passionate about words.
JPP: It was like re-writing the poems. Almost like writing new poems, rather than translating. Obviously you’re constrained by the meaning, but in a sense it’s a re-creation.
LS: I was very touched by the fact that this book tells so much about a woman’s life, including very moving experiences such as birth and the grief of losing a child, and the fact that it was then translated with another woman from the same family, just as if it was also the transmission of a female experience. It is very powerful to have a mother-daughter creative duo . . . Was this gender dimension something you were actively looking for; was it a way to share something different between women in your family?
JPP: No, I’m not concerned with the woman’s view. I’m concerned with human experience. Whether it is male or female doesn’t make any difference in my mind. Grief is not specific to male or female. Neither is joy; it’s a common experience. There are things of course that are different. A man can’t write about childbirth in the way that a woman can, obviously, because it is not part of his experience. But we write about a lot of things that are not our concrete experience either. Erudition, things I have read, other poets: these are the things that come into it.
CPP: I personally think it changed our relationship. When I think about transmission and my parents, I think about mountaineering, dancing, music, and poetry. Dancing has been transmitted because I dance quite a lot, and my daughter does as well. Music has been transmitted also. Mountaineering was connected to my brother, who died in the mountains, so I actually stopped climbing—but one of my sons is very fond of it. What seems important in my mother’s life is poetry, I think. So we had to open this door. This transmission even extended to my daughter, since she drew the flower that is on the book cover. So there was no feminist intention, but it happened to be a transmission through the feminine line and this gave a new dimension to the structure itself.
LS: Would you say that this project of co-translating Jean’s poems brought you closer?
CPP: Yes, closer as mother and daughter. In some poems I learnt about my mother’s views on life, on the family. I knew some things, but we talked together, and we were able to remember things we did together. It was like a gift. It changed the relationship and it also changed the frequency of which we saw each other, which I’m trying to maintain. If I’m going away or if I have too much to do and I can’t come, I miss it. The week after I’d say, “Let’s find time, now! I need it.”
JPP: But I think we were always very close. I think it’s more an expression of something that was already there.
LSS: Did you meet often to discuss translation choices?
CPP: We translated the book together. Sometimes we just sat there, my mother and I, on our seats, and we were just silent, thinking. She was saying: “This word could be . . .” and then: “No, not quite.” We had to think more, search in dictionaries, and then go silent again. What were we going to choose? The meaning, rhythm or sound . . . ? We’d say “Oh, this damn French language, there’s only one word whereas in English, you have so many!”
JPP: Yes. Going from English to French is a curious experience because French is a kind of—I would say—“monolingual language”, if you could invent a term like that. Practically, French comes from Latin sources, whereas English is a mongrel language—I used to tell the students this. One third of English vocabulary comes from French, one third from Latin, and one third is basically Germanic. So it’s a very rich language; you sometimes have two or three words that are distinguished by usage.
LSS: Catherine, the poems’ inspirations are largely autobiographical, and there is this eponymous poem, “Catherine”. How did it feel, translating a poem that was so close to you? Because you’re not only the translator or co-translator, but also the very subject of the poem!
CPP: The one about my birth? I knew it previously, because it was the poem my mother wrote in my little poetry album. I don’t know about England, but in France, girls often have a little book of poetry and you give it to all your friends. Of course, I gave it to my mother and to my father, and that was the poem my mother put in the book. I don’t know if she had written it before, but this is the day I discovered it. I was very touched by this poem.
JPP: I had written it before.
LS: And how did it feel, Jean, for you to know that your daughter would be translating poems about family relationships and moving experiences in your life?
JPP: I don’t know . . . The fact that the poems exist means that they are public anyway. It’s not just Catherine, there’s nothing hidden there. They’re open to anybody. And the fact that there is common ground doesn’t mean that we understand the other person’s position.
LS: Nature is also a very important theme in the book. It’s even in the title: “Seeds in my ground”.
JPP: I was brought up on a farm; both sides of my family were farmers. On my mother’s side, it was a prosperous dairy farm in Cheshire. My father’s side was partly in Shropshire, partly in Cheshire, and much poorer; they were labourers rather than farmers. I was born into it. And I’m still very close with my cousins in Cheshire who are farmers. We exchange news regularly and we phone each other. I still keep up with that side of the family. “I was a farmer’s daughter / and a daughter of a farmer’s daughter.” It’s the beginning of one of the poems. I’ve always maintained this relationship with nature, spending holidays with my children and grandsons in North Wales, and many months in Aran in Ireland.
LS: This is a bilingual edition. Was it important to you that the poems appeared on the page in both English and French?
JPP: I think it is important, yes, so that it’s accessible to people who mainly read French or to people who mainly read English.
CPP: I have friends who have said, “I heard your mother’s poetry from time to time but I didn’t understand it. Now, I can read it in French and then I look at the English and try to understand more of it.” So they actually try to read in English, whereas they wouldn’t have done so otherwise.
LS: In addition to showing the process of translation, the beauty of bilingual books is that, as you say, it can encourage people to learn another language. Now that the book is out, do you perform bilingual readings?
CPP: We started before the book was launched. My mother reads in English, I read in French, and I also play music and sing with my husband Sylvain. We will be performing in January near Strasbourg (Maud Leroy, Founder and Editor of the Éditions des Lisières, will be there) and in March near Lyon.
LS: Jean, how long did it take you to write these poems? I believe they were written throughout your life.
JPP: Oh, I’ve been writing poems ever since I was about five as soon as I could write. It’s actually one of the reasons why they’re short, in fact, because it went on in my head, not on paper. I wrote them down when it was all finished, or practically. I might change a word or two once it’s written, but very little.
CPP: This is why it’s similar to storytelling. You start to find words in your head. And then eventually, maybe, you will write them down.
JPP: Any tradition, in storytelling or in poetry, is oral. It’s not written. There are poets who write, who would sit down with a blank sheet of paper and write, but it’s not my kind of poetry. John Clare said he found his poems in the fields, and people have taken that literally, but what he meant was that as he was walking around and working, the poems were sort of going on in his head. This if also how it works for me—I was perhaps going to Strasbourg to teach, in the car, and as I was driving along, a poem would be going on in my head. It would stop when I was teaching and start again when I was free and could think for myself and not for the students.
CPP: I feel the same. Writing comes sometimes even when I sleep, and then suddenly I wake up and I write it down. It’s not looking for poetry or storytelling. It just comes.
LS: I’m currently a writer in residence at the Causley Trust, and Charles Causley said exactly the same thing: poetry is not something you look for; it’s right under your nose, everywhere.
JPP: Yes, that is something you find.
CPP: I’m very fond of Charles Causley!
JPP: Me too!
LS: Another poet to translate, perhaps? Catherine, did this recent work encourage you to translate more poetry books?
CPP: No, it made me write more! I sometimes write poems in English and sometimes in French. There are many ways of telling stories, and I understood why I had chosen mine and how it was linked to my mother’s writing.
Listen to a recording of Jean Paira-Pemberton and Catherine Piron-Paira performing:
Jean Paira-Pemberton was born in a Cheshire farmhouse in 1930 near Sandbach in England. She studied French Literature and came to Strasbourg University in France, first as a student then later as a reader in English in 1955. Interested in linguistics, phonetics, and psychoanalysis, she taught English for forty years. Some of her poems were published by Ranam (University of Strasbourg) in 2010, under the title Selected Poems. In 2019 she published a bilingual poetry collection, Ma Terre ensemencée/Seeds in My Ground in France with Éditions des Lisières. Her favourite poets are Shakespeare, John Clare, John Donne, J.M. Hopkins, and Geoffrey Summerfield.
Catherine Piron-Paira is Jean Paira-Pemberton’s daughter and was born in 1962 in Strasbourg. She lives in Saverne, near the Vosges. She dances, makes music, and sings. As a language lover, she is a professional storyteller. She unites instrumental music, songs, and stories in solo shows or duos with her husband Sylvain Piron, such as Contes à l’ouvrage, Les mains qui comptent content demain, and Contes au jardin. She regularly attends workshops and one-to-one sessions to develop her voice and storytelling techniques. Ma Terre ensemencée is her first published translation. To find out more about Catherine’s work, visit her website.
Lou Sarabadzic is an Assistant Managing Editor (Issue Production) at Asymptote. She’s a bilingual French-English poet and translator based in the UK.
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