Longtime readers may remember our Close Approximations international translation contest, which saw Asymptote give away more than USD20,000 to twenty-five best emerging translators (over four iterations in 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2019)—some of whose translations we promoted to a wider readership through our partnership with The Guardian. One of my thrills as editor-in-chief is to see texts that we have championed—with money we raised by ourselves, or out of our own pocket, since we are not supported by any institution—find permanent homes with publishing houses. Among these is Alexander Dickow’s translation of Sylvie Kandé’s The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore, which judge Eliot Weinberger picked as runner-up in the inaugural contest back in 2014, and which was finally released as a book with Wesleyan University Press three months ago, eight years after its debut on our website. Naturally, I was curious about the journey Dickow, also a former Communications Manager between 2017 to 2020, undertook to publication. Here is the conversation that ensued after I reached out to him.
—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief
How did you first encounter Sylvie Kandé’s poetry and what drew you to translate her The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore?
In fact, poet Susan Maurer posted an excerpt on a listserv—WOMPO, the Women in Poetry listserv, I believe. I’d rarely encountered a work that seemed to draw at once on so many different registers and languages; it’s an incredibly heteroglossic work. I was impressed enough with the excerpt that I sought The Neverending Quest out shortly after, and then reached out to Sylvie to compliment her on such a remarkable epic. We entered into conversation, and I ended up translating the portion for Asymptote’s contest without the intention of translating the whole book—but then got drawn into the project further, and decided to tackle the entire thing.
Much like, say, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, Neverending Quest offers readers an alternate history—in this case, what would have happened had explorers dispatched in pirogues by Malian Emperor Abubakar discovered America before Christopher Columbus; in the final canto, though, there is a fascinating pivot: from the ordeal of the fourteenth-century voyager to that of the twenty-first-century migrant crossing treacherous waters. What do you think the poet is trying to achieve with this?
As for the comparison with modern-day migrants, it postulates that Abubakar’s outsized heroism (dangerously close to pure folly) is similar to the heroism of these men and women searching for their destiny. A common misperception is that African migration happens because of economic or political desperation. But in fact, that migration, which mostly happens within the African continent, is more a kind of initiation, an Adventure! rather than an act of desperation, and that’s true even when economic or political hardship may be present also. Alassane, the migrant of whose name we are unsure and whose name echoes that of Ulysses, is very much this kind of hero: we see him leaping into the ocean to swim for shore, evading the coast guard and deportation. Does he make it to shore? I don’t know! But he is likely to look more and more like a hero in days which will see huge numbers of climate refugees striving for a home. Alassane is reaching for a new home. Abubakar also, or the people of Mali who accompany him, in their own way. Aren’t we all?
I want to give credit where credit is due: the above response comes as much from hearing Sylvie speak, and from conversations with her, as it does from my own imagination.
The edition that Wesleyan University Press released three months ago sets the French original with your English translation side by side, and it was great to be able to compare the two. It’s thrilling to see how much you were able to get across in the English translation—plus, it also sings! What were some of the challenges you faced in the translation process? I’m eager to find out about the nuances that were perhaps sacrificed, in your opinion.
Nuances I sacrificed: at the end of certain “laisses” (groups of verses of unequal length that constitute the epic’s segments, modeled on the laisses of the Song of Roland for instance), Sylvie turns to metrical verse. I decided that would be a bit jarring in some cases for Anglophone readers. In other works, such as my translation of Max Jacob’s Central Laboratory (Wakefield Press, forthcoming around July 2022), I translate in metrical verse, as well as I can. But it didn’t seem worth the risks in this case. I waffle about whether that was the right decision, and still can’t really decide. Another thing that doesn’t translate as well are the Africanisms of the French, borrowed from linguistic habits of West Africans who speak French, particularly in Senegal. I did my best, but there are obviously no direct equivalents. The same ultimately goes for some ordinary French colloquialisms—slang and the like is always challenging in translation!
Sylvie Kandé was born in Paris to a French mother and a Senegalese father, and in the third canto, she adopts the point of view of a modern-day immigrant. Tell us how you situated the English, tonally and register-wise, in a way that might have differed from your past translations? Judging from the glossary at the end, quite a lot of research went into the work, and I’m curious how that inflected the actual translation itself.
I wanted the English in the third canto to reflect the mixture of “high” epic registers and “low” Francophone vernacular as closely as possible. I honestly don’t know how well I succeeded, though I’m told it’s a good translation! But it’s true that I’ve translated very little slang or colloquial speech in the past (and since, ultimately). That kind of work requires a lot of compensatory translation: when you can’t render an expression, you translate a different textual location colloquially to “balance out” the overall effect, so as to try to capture the original’s register.
To offer an example of this sort of problem, here is how I rendered the following lines:
Alors j’ai pris la mer à la légère
sans un bonnet un croûton un beignet une thune
sans tambour ni trompette sans crier gareSo I took the sea lightly
without a penny a crust of bread a prayer
with neither bells nor whistles without warning
“Bonnet,” “crouton,” “beignet,” and “thune” are all colloquial expressions referring to money or resources in more or less metaphorical terms; a “beignet” is literally a sort of French donut-like pastry, while “une thune” is an untranslatable slang term for cash. I tried in my rendering to capture some of this play with slang, hence the reference to “bells and whistles.” But some of it gets lost along the way: “sans crier gare” is a very colloquial way of saying “without warning,” and the latter English expression doesn’t capture the idiomatic character of the original. However, the use of “bells and whistles” distorted the usual use of this expression in English in an interesting enough way, it seemed to me, to counterbalance the loss of “sans crier gare.” Does it work? You decide, but this gives a glimpse of the intricacies of this translation in just a few lines.
As for research, a lot of that was working with Sylvie (who put the glossary together for the Wesleyan edition), but I also wrote an article on the book, published in the Journal of Narrative Theory, and that required a lot of additional reading—the Sunjata epic of ancient Mali for starters, of course, but also books on epic traditions, articles on African epic, articles on epics by women poets like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and H.D. I learned a lot in translating and researching the book, and although I can’t measure how it contributed to the translation, I suspect it did.
Revision is also a neverending quest—between the excerpt that you submitted to our first translation contest, that Eliot Weinberger picked as runner-up in 2014, to your successful PEN/Heim application in 2018, and now the final published edition with Wesleyan University Press, would you say the text has evolved significantly through these different milestones?
Those particular passages did not evolve enormously, just some details, one of which I changed at the proofing stage—in extremis! The title did hesitate briefly between “Infinite Quest” and “Neverending Quest.” When I write and when I translate, I revise as I go a very great deal, but then mark passages for revision and reconsideration. Then I go back to those locations that I’ve marked and work through them (generally with Sylvie’s input!), before rereading the final result a few times to look for mistakes or ill-considered choices (as Sylvie did also, catching many details I missed). It’s very hard for me to measure how far the text shifted since 2014, to be honest, but that’s a little description of the process!
Could you tell us about the journey to publication as well? I’m sure many of our readers who are also translators—especially those advocating for underrepresented voices—would be interested to hear what you have to say.
It wasn’t easy! Sylvie’s book is nothing if not singular, and in spite of its narrative nature, it gets categorized and treated as poetry. So it took a long time to find a good fit (there’s a lot of lip service about genre hybridity, but when it comes down to it, it’s easier to find homes for things that adhere to genre expectations). One important editor loved it but didn’t think it was narrative enough for the imprint, for example (though I was very pleased at his reception of the text, in spite of this). Major imprints for Francophone novels had similar reactions. 2014, or even late 2013, to 2022: that’s quite a voyage for a translation. About four of those years were the translation itself, I would say, and another four or so to find publication. Even with a PEN/Heim grant in 2018, it still took another two or three years after that to find a home: a very good home, at that; I’m thrilled to be with Wesleyan, which has a record of publishing some of the greatest Francophone poems, like Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.
It took nine years from start to finish. Seems like a long time, but it’s no neverending quest, really!
It has been three months since the book came out on February 1st, 2022—I believe the release coincided with the start of pandemic-related restrictions being lifted in the US, which might have been good timing for the publication, in terms of promoting the work. How has the reception been thus far?
I think it’s been positive so far. It’s hard to measure at this juncture and I don’t know what sales have been like yet, but there has been a review at Brittle Paper, and a wonderful double interview of Sylvie and me from the Poetry Off the Shelf podcast at the Poetry Foundation, put together by Helena de Groot. Sylvie just did a reading yesterday at Grolier Poetry Book Shop in support of the book, and we both appeared last month at Baruch College for a discussion surrounding it also, thanks to Professor Eric Essono Tsimi. These are all encouraging. But you know, I’m an author-translator, so there’s definitely room for more, or: FEED ME SEYMOUR! as the plant in the Little Shop of Horrors says!
Photo Credit: Derrick Creative Photography
Alexander Dickow writes in French and English, and is also a translator. His most recent works include the novel Le Premier Souper (La Volte, 2021) and a book of aphorisms on art, Déblais (Louise Bottu, 2021). His translations include works by Gustave Roud, Henri Droguet, and Max Jacob.
Lee Yew Leong is the founder and editor-in-chief of Asymptote. Winner of Brown University’s James Assatly Memorial Prize for Fiction (2003), he has written for The New York Times and served as a judge for PEN International’s 2016 New Voices Award. Between 2015 and 2017, he curated a weekly showcase of literary translation in The Guardian.
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