According to the Index Translationum, a database published by UNESCO, texts written originally in French are the second most frequently translated, with over two hundred thousand titles published since 1979. Though the numbers exhibit a disappointing hierarchy, the fact that French occupies such a large presence is unsurprising; after all, as today’s interviewee, Aneesa Abbas Higgins, informs us: “French is a world language.” Spoken in diasporic populations around the world, the French of today is a linguistic carrier of resistance and individualism just as it once was a language of oppression.
Aneesa Abbas Higgins has translated numerous works from the French, including Seven Stones by Vénus Khoury-Ghata (Jacaranda, 2017) and Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin (Daunt Books, 2020). In her efforts to represent a variety of original French voices, her contributions to English-language readers have been invaluable. Now, in our second feature for Women in Translation Month, blog editor Sarah Moore speaks to Higgins about her most recent translation, All Men Want to Know by Nina Bouraoui (Penguin, 2020), how French female authors are represented in translations, and the challenges of translating today.
Sarah Moore (SM): You translate from the French into English—could you talk about your relationship with French and how you learned it?
Aneesa Abbas Higgins (AAH): I started it at school at the age of eleven—I’ve always loved languages, and I added German, Latin, and Russian over the next few years. I’ve also dabbled in Italian and Spanish and made a real effort to learn Urdu; I even tried Japanese at one point. But French was the one that really stayed with me, and I’ve spent a good part of my life going back and forth between London and various parts of France. I did my MA in French and taught French at an American school in London for more than thirty years, so I’ve spent most of my adult life immersed in French language and literature in one way or another. Learning another language is a lifelong project, and I think of myself as still learning. As a translator, one learns more and more about one’s source and target languages all the time.
SM: How did you come to be a translator?
AAH: Translating was something I’d always thought about. I’ve been fascinated by it all my life and have vivid childhood memories of my father, an Urdu speaker who was working on translating Shakespeare at the time, talking about the endless challenges of conveying such rich, figurative language. I’ve been a reader all my life, and have also always loved to write. So when I decided to retire early from teaching, it seemed like a natural progression. I took some courses in translation and creative writing, sought advice from the wonderfully generous and supportive translation community, and set about researching, translating samples, and pitching books I wanted to translate to publishers. I was lucky enough to find a publisher and obtain a PEN grant for one of those books, and I went on from there.
SM: Which books did you initially want to translate when you began your career?
AAH: Looking back, I was definitely looking mostly at female authors, but I was primarily interested in works that originated beyond the confines of mainstream metropolitan France. French is a world language, just as English is. There are many, many authors who write in French and whose relationship with the language is complex. French, the language of the colonial oppressors, becomes the vehicle for voicing anti-colonial sentiment and raising black consciousness worldwide, in the same way as English has been used by writers from the Indian subcontinent and diaspora. I wanted to help bring more of those voices, the inheritors of the original mantle of the Négritude of Senghor and Césaire, into English. And for me, it’s personal. I’ve always been drawn to writers and books that express what it means, and what it feels like, to be both an insider and an outsider in the society one lives in.
SM: Has your taste in what you enjoy translating changed?
AAH: I’ve always enjoyed a challenge. I love writing that is poetic, elliptical, full of sensory imagery of all sorts. But having said that, I enjoy translating all kinds of styles and writers. Ali Zamir’s prose is richly inventive, an exuberant cacophony of words, voices, and images, whereas Elisa Shua Dusapin’s is taut, concise, spare—every word etched precisely into the fabric of the text. The two couldn’t be more different. Each piece throws up its own challenges, and while there are some voices I find easier to slip into, the most difficult ones are sometimes the most satisfying.
SM: What kind of relationship do you have with the authors you translate? Are they normally involved with your translation?
AAH: I’ve been very fortunate in that I’ve been able to engage in dialogue with almost all the authors I’ve translated. It’s wonderful to be able to email questions and receive the considered answers they usually elicit. Most of it has been by email, but I’ve also had the opportunity to meet one or two of the writers, which is wonderful. So far, communicating with the author has always proved to be richly rewarding and certainly enlightening. I consider it to be one of the great perks of the job!
SM: You have translated Vénus Khoury-Ghata, the prize-winning French-Lebanese poet. What drew you to her work, and what was the process of translating like?
AAH: I was approached to translate Seven Stones by the publisher. I’d already translated a sample for another publisher who’d been considering it, and I knew I wanted to continue, so I was thrilled when it was eventually picked up by Jacaranda—and of course, delighted to be given the opportunity to translate it. I loved the book, both because of its voice—the haunting, hypnotic style characteristic of all Khoury-Ghata’s work—and its setting. The story is very hard-hitting and quite harrowing, but the characters are wonderfully drawn and the desert setting vividly evoked. I’ve travelled a little in North Africa and ventured very minimally into the Sahara, and I’ve always loved books that transport me to that environment. So although I found the subject matter painful, I was happy to immerse myself in Khoury-Ghata’s wonderful prose. The voice came quite naturally to me, which often doesn’t happen. I would love to translate more of her work.
SM: Your translation of Nina Bouraoui’s All Men Want to Know has just been published and received a PEN Translates award. When did you first become familiar with her work? What attracted you to this particular project?
AAH: I was approached by Penguin Viking about this novel. I hadn’t read much of Nina Bouraoui’s work before, but again, I loved both the voice and the setting. I knew from the moment I began working on the sample that I really wanted to translate this book.
SM: Bouraoui’s work is a complex, autobiographical novel, incorporating her childhood in Algeria, her queerness, and her mother’s sexual assault. How did you approach the act of translating such an intimate voice?
AAH: In much the same way as I approach any other voice. I did feel a great affinity with Nina’s persona, largely because her parents’ story is very similar to my own parents’ story. Unlike Nina, I’ve never lived in India (my father’s country), but I recognize much of what she says about being both inside and outside two cultures, about the pain of exile. I also unfortunately recognize the underlying racism of her French grandparents. My English grandparents were very accepting of our family, but there were members of my mother’s circle who were anything but. So that part of the novel wasn’t at all difficult for me. As for the other aspects of Nina’s persona, I think she describes the process of coming to terms with her own sexuality in a way that can be easily understood by anyone, regardless of their sexual orientation. As Nina says, her queerness is not a choice or a condition, it simply is.
SM: What were the other particular challenges of translating this text?
AAH: Nina’s prose has a particular rhythm. She writes long sentences, breaking all the rules and tying strings of sentences together with commas. Deciding which ones to break up with full stops, in order to make them flow more naturally, was sometimes a challenge. Many sentence breaks were added at the editing stage, in addition to the usual juggling and moving around of various elements. There are always compromises in translation, but there are gains as well as losses. So we did have to compromise in places, breaking up Nina’s sentences in order to conserve their flow and meaning. It all had to be done without losing any of the whispering urgency and hallucinatory quality of the original. I hope we’ve succeeded!
SM: The title of the text is taken from the beginning of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. How do you translate a title when there are two sources to contend with—the French novel and an Ancient Greek text translated many times throughout history?
AAH: As you say, there are many versions of Aristotle’s opening statement, which means, I think, something along the lines of: “We all have a natural curiosity, a desire to understand, to know what’s going on. It’s human nature to want to find out the truth.” A bit wordy, to say the least! So, the title is a distillation of the accepted versions of the translation, abbreviated to make it appealing and catchy. There’s a slightly longer version of the phrase in the epigraph: “All men by nature want to know,” but there are many, many versions out there.
SM: This is the first work by Bouraoui translated into English and published in the UK, despite her having written fifteen novels and won the 2005 Prix Renaudot for Mes mauvaises pensées, and All Men Want to Know having spent ten weeks on the bestseller list in France. Why do you think it has taken so long for her to be translated?
AAH: One of her books was translated and published in the US over ten years ago, under the title Tomboy. It’s hard to say why she hasn’t been published before in the UK. There are many excellent French writers, men and women, that fall under the radar and just never quite catch the eye of a publisher ready to take the risk. Bouraoui is like Vénus Khoury-Ghata in that you’ll find a number of academic pieces written about their work, and they are studied in literature courses at schools and universities, particularly in the US, but are maybe considered too “difficult” for the mainstream market—like Duras, perhaps, who was considered obscure and “niche” until The Lover became something of a sensation and people began to take more of an interest. But there were plenty of devotees who’d been reading and translating her for years before that.
SM: Throughout your career, have you noticed particular hurdles in getting work by female writers translated and published?
AAH: When I came into translation, I think translated fiction and women’s writing in particular were already on the way up. There has been a huge push to create more interest in women’s work in all the arts, and it’s about time! Getting any book translated and published can sometimes seem like an uphill struggle; there has been a historical perception of “translated literature” as something exotic and different. Which is completely ridiculous, of course! When I was teaching, I was very impressed by the curriculum that came out of the AP Board in the US. There were always women writers and writers from Africa and the former French colonies on the syllabus, which I don’t think was true at the time in UK secondary schools—writers like Mariama Bâ, for example, who seemed to be better known and more widely available in the US than in France, even. So I’m glad to say the situation is changing, and people are working very hard indeed to ensure that women are at long last able to take their rightful place as leading lights in the literary canon. But the struggle is far from over, and we have to be sure that we keep on fighting for women’s rights all over the world, in every sphere.
SM: How do you feel French female authors are currently represented in translation?
AAH: There is a tendency in the Anglosphere to fall back on the stereotype of the chic, Parisian woman, who is thin and effortlessly elegant, able to juggle family, husband, lovers, career, and of course cook like an angel. There are more than enough books that perpetuate that myth on the market. But at the same time, the stereotype is counterbalanced by a range of highly regarded writers—from Simone de Beauvoir to Virginie Despentes, Marguerite Duras of course, and now Nina Bouraoui. Leïla Slimani has been a big success here and is much admired. She speaks perfect English and uses her voice and platform to speak up for women’s rights both in Europe and in North Africa. So, over all, I feel optimistic. Let’s hope the upward trend continues.
SM: Which other translators of female writers do you particularly admire, or which have influenced you?
AAH: My first influence was the brilliant Barbara Wright, who translated Duras, Sarraute, Pinget and Queneau, and indeed all the writers of the French nouveau roman. I met her while I was working on my MA thesis on Pinget; she was generous and utterly unassuming, and I wish I’d had a chance to meet her again after I began translating, but sadly she died before I came into translation. More recently, I’ve been influenced by many of my more experienced colleagues, people like Ros Schwartz, Sarah Ardizzone, Sophie Lewis, Adriana Hunter, Alison Anderson, and Sandra Smith—all of whom have been incredibly generous and welcoming to a relative newcomer like myself. As for writers, there are too many to count, but in terms of French writers, Marguerite Duras has certainly been a lasting influence for me. I can remember being absolutely devastated as a young teenager by the film Hiroshima mon amour. And of all the books I taught in my years teaching AP French Literature classes, Moderato cantabile was the one I enjoyed teaching the most, and the one I think made the greatest impact on my students. And now, I seem to be drawn towards writers in French who cite Duras as an influence.
SM: How has your experience of translating differed from what you imagined when you first began?
AAH: I’m not sure I knew what to expect, really. I don’t think I actually had any expectations. I just knew I wanted to do it, and now that I’ve been doing it for a while, I know that I love it and hope to continue for as long as I can! It’s been quite a learning curve, working out how to navigate the publishing world, about which I knew absolutely nothing when I began. And I do have to keep honing my digital skills—I couldn’t work without the Internet and my laptop, but I hadn’t realized how important a role social media would play. But the actual work of translation affords me endless pleasures. In some ways, it becomes more difficult with experience. One becomes more aware of one’s own failings, less willing to play fast and loose with the text. Translating Elisa Shua Dusapin, for example, has made me even more acutely aware of the weight, meaning, and resonance of every single word. I always have the feeling, when I’m drafting and redrafting, that somewhere there is another word, or arrangement of words, that is just the one I’m trying to find. It’s sometimes very difficult to finally let go and say, yes, this is the version I’m going to go with. All too often, I go back to it the next day and have a completely different reaction! As with so many things, it’s a case of the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.
SM: What do you feel are the biggest challenges you face today as a translator?
AAH: As a freelancer, one is always wondering just what lies around the corner. Who’d have thought we would be living as we are now, under the new order of this pandemic? There are many, many unexpected challenges now for everyone. I’m just trying to take each day as it comes and keep focusing on the work I have in front of me. I’m very grateful to have any work at all. I do feel it is more important than ever now to make sure the voices from the margins are heard. The current demonization of “migrants” in some political circles is shameful and demeans us all. I’d like to make sure I do what I can to ensure that more people can learn to see their fellow human beings as individuals like themselves, and not just as statistics or as threats to their way of life. Fear makes fools of us all—I believe passionately in the power of literature and books to help break down the barriers that divide us.
SM: Which other French female writers are you excited by at the moment?
AAH: I’d love to be able to bring some of Shumona Sinha’s work into English, and of course more of Elisa Shua Dusapin’s or Nina Bouraoui’s work as well. I can’t wait to read Frank Wynne’s translation of the extraordinary Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter, and I loved Estelle-Sarah Bulle’s Là où les chiens aboient par la queue. Then there’s Leïla Sabbar, Maïssa Bey, Maryam Majidi, Léonora Miano, Fawzia Zouari . . . the list goes on!
SM: What advice would you give to young translators just starting out?
AAH: I’m not sure I’m in a position to give advice, having come to translation later in life, with a long career as a teacher already behind me. But I suppose if I have anything to add to all the advice already out there, it would be to not worry too much if you find yourself pursuing a different career path while you’re dealing with mortgages and hungry, growing children. It’s never too late to become a literary translator, and spending several decades reading as intensely and as widely as you can in both your source and target languages is a great preparation for it. It’s important to be able to write with confidence, too, so it’s a good idea to find a way to keep honing your own writing skills. And it’s probably not a bad idea to add another language to your portfolio—being able to translate from at least two languages can certainly increase your chances of finding work and give you a broader perspective in general. But mostly, I’d say read, read, and read some more.
Aneesa Abbas Higgins is a literary translator based in London, where she taught French in an international school for many years before becoming a translator. Three of her translations have been in receipt English PEN awards and her translation of Seven Stones by Vénus Khoury-Ghata was shortlisted for the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize. Her recent translations include Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin (Daunt Books Publishing) and All Men Want to Know by Nina Bouraoui (Viking).
Sarah Moore is a British editor and translator based in Paris. She is a Blog Editor at Asymptote Journal and runs the monthly poetry events, “Poetry in the Library” at Shakespeare & Company. She is currently studying for a Masters in Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne University.
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