Ros Schwartz is an award-winning British translator who has translated over one hundred works of French fiction and non-fiction into English, with a strong emphasis on authors including Dominique Eddé, Aziz Chouaki, and Tahar Ben Jelloun. Her most recent translations are Swiss-Cameroonian author Max Lobe’s A Long Way from Douala (Hope Road, 2021) and Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside (HopeRoad, 2022), and she is part of the team re-translating the works of Georges Simenon for Penguin Classics. Ros was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009.
Earlier this year, I had the honour of interviewing Ros Schwartz to find out about her approaches to literary translation, and in particular, about the art and complexities of translating multilingualism. Owing to histories of colonisation and migration, literatures are increasingly hybrid and multilingual. A work composed in “French” may bear explicit or implicit traces, tones, and vocabularies of other languages, and processes of translation may be embedded within the source text itself. Such linguistic entanglements in source texts challenge the very boundaries of languages and pose distinct challenges for the literary translator. In this interview, Ros Schwartz shares her own experiences about translating multilingualism in creative and innovative ways.
Sheela Mahadevan (SM): Ros, you come from a multilingual background, and you have translated several multilingual works which depict experiences of exile and migration. You also have a Jewish ancestry and have translated a work which relates to this theme, entitled Traduire comme Transhumer (Translation as Transhumance) by Mireille Gansel (Les Fugitives (UK) and The Feminist Press (USA), 2017). How does your own background and experience of migration and multilingualism intersect with your career as a translator, and how does Gansel’s work influence your thinking about translation?
Ros Schwartz (RS): My background has some similarities with that of Mireille Gansel. I too am Jewish—second generation—and my grandparents spoke only Yiddish, so although different from Gansel’s experience, I share that multilingual background common to families descended from exiles. Gansel interweaves her memoir with reflections on the art of translation, constantly interrogating and refining her practice. Her ethos chimes with mine and her approach to translation helped me better articulate my own; by translating the book and being inhabited by it for many months, I was able to engage with Gansel’s ideas in a way beyond that of a casual reader.
SM: You have translated numerous multilingual literatures into English, including the Lebanese Francophone novel Cerf-volant (Kite) by Dominique Eddé (Seagull Books, 2003). The novel depicts multilingual experiences; sometimes the characters speak in French, sometimes they speak in Arabic, and sometimes they translate between the two. The work is also about multilingual writing and casts light on the ways in which another language can haunt the primary literary language. Could you tell us more about your experience of translating this hybrid work? To what extent is it necessary to collaborate with native speakers of the additional language or the author in the translation process?
RS: I worked very closely with the author. We went over the translation together literally line by line, in person, closeted in her Paris apartment. I had her read passages out loud to help me capture the intonations and rhythms. I would never have attempted a translation like this had I not been able to collaborate with the author.
The novel has a different sensibility, and its non-linear narrative took me out of my comfort zone. The reader is plunged straight in and the narrative is a mosaic, which the reader gradually has to piece together. Eddé’s writing functions like an Impressionist painting, with deft brushstrokes that evoke characters, places, and atmospheres. It has disconcerting metaphors: “. . . une bouche à mi-chemin du cœur et de l’oiseau.” Literally: “a mouth half-way between a heart and a bird.” You don’t question it in French, partly because of the music of the language. For the English, I made it slightly more explicit: “a mouth that was shaped like a heart or a bird.”
SM: How do you approach italics when translating multilingual texts? In your collaborative translation of the Moroccan Francophone writer Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel Sur ma mère—a very moving work about the demise of the writer’s mother owing to Alzheimer’s disease—you retained certain Arabic words in your translation, foregrounded visually through the use of italics. How far do you think it is important to employ italics to foreground ‘foreign’ vocabulary when translating multilingualism?
RS: Traditionally, publishers have italicised foreign words, but there is a big debate around what is foreign. For example, we don’t italicise spaghetti bolognese or Schadenfreude. It was Marke Kohn’s book Four Words for Friend (Yale University Press, 2019) that made me reconsider. He writes: “The normal practice in English-language publishing is to put non-English words in italics. [. . .] I want to encourage people to make the most of all the linguistic resources at their disposal [. . .] they should feel that all the words they know are part of their own domain, not that certain ones don’t really belong in it—and that they themselves don’t really belong in the domains where those words come from. [. . .] Italics signify limitations on the free movement of language and the inhibition of fluidity in its use. They smack of othering, the practice of exclusion from in-groups by the use of labels or rhetorical artifice.”
I also note that Nobel laureate, Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah makes no concessions in his novel After Lives, and does not use italics for the many names of everyday objects and items of clothing he mentions.
These two writers have made me change my own practice. In my most recent translation of a novel by Max Lobe (Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside), I have not used italics for Cameroonian words.
SM: In your translation of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel Sur ma mère, you include a glossary of various Arabic words at the end of the work, and some of these words are also explained within the body of the text. What are your thoughts on using glossaries in your translations of multilingual literatures, and how far do editors play a role in this decision?
RS: This is decided in consultation with the publisher. The advantage of glossaries is that they are there at the end for readers who want to use them, but they don’t interfere with the reading experience. In fiction, glossaries are preferable to endnotes or footnotes. You can either decide not to spoon-feed the reader and let them fend for themselves, or help expand their knowledge of the source language culture. I think publishers are sometimes over-neurotic about wanting to explain everything, but I certainly don’t expect readers of my translations to be translators.
SM: How far do you consider the act of translating multilingualism to be an act of multilingual writing? Are there occasions when you, as the translator, become a multilingual writer, and you perhaps retain French vocabulary from the source text in your translation to create a multilingual text? Or perhaps you adopt other creative strategies in the translation to echo the multilingual poetics of the source text?
RS: I’d like to give an example of an instance when I translated something that was in French back into a Cameroonian language. In A Long Way from Douala, there is a food called a bâton de manioc, which translates into English as a “cassava stick.” However, while I was in Yaoundé, Cameroon giving a translation workshop, I had the opportunity to see and taste a bâton de manioc, which is not like a stick at all—it’s more the oval shape of a piece of sweetcorn. I asked my students what this was called in the local language and they told me it was a bobolo, a gorgeously rounded word that I felt was more fitting than the misleading cassava stick. So I translated the French into a local Cameroonian language rather than into English.
SM: A long way from Douala (Loin de Douala) includes a number of words in “Camfranglais.” You describe this as “a hybrid urban slang that includes some English words with a French pronunciation.” Could you explain how you used creativity to translate this hybrid language?
RS: I chose to keep those words in Camfranglais. Because Max wrote this book for a European readership, he made sure that the Camfranglais words were perfectly understandable in the context. So, the word for prostitute, pimentière (literally chilli-pepper seller), comes in a list of synonyms for prostitute. When Max invents, I invent, so he came up with a word for a corrupt female police inspector ‘”salotologue” which incorporates the idea of dirty and -ologist, meaning a specialist. So I translated that as “filthologist bitch”—the sentence needed the extra syllable of “bitch” for rhythm.
SM: You are primarily a literary translator, and you have also contributed to academic works on translation. How far does the theory of translation influence your practice of translation and teaching of translation?
RS: In short, it doesn’t! I began translating before literary translation was taught as an academic discipline, and I have always worked in an intuitive way, which is different for each work I translate. There’s no one-size-fits-all theory that is applicable to every project, but I find theory provides a useful framework and vocabulary for articulating my practice, and I sometimes touch on it when teaching. I am particularly interested in bridging the gap between academia and the practical world of publishing realities.
This interview was funded by a UKRI-Mitacs Globalink Research Award.
Ros Schwartz is an award-winning translator of more than a hundred works of fiction and nonfiction, including the 2010 edition of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. Among the francophone authors she has translated are Tahar Ben Jelloun, Aziz Chouaki, Fatou Diome, Dominique Eddé, and Ousmane Sembène. In 2009 she was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2017 she was awarded the John Sykes Memorial Prize for Excellence by the UK-based Institute of Translation and Interpreting.
Sheela Mahadevan is a doctoral candidate, translator, and educator at King’s College London, where her research on literary translation, translation theory, and francophone literatures is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. She studied French and German literatures at the University of Oxford, obtaining First Class Honours and Distinction, and was awarded a UK-Canada Globalink Award for research into literary translation at Concordia University, Montreal (2021–2022). She was recently awarded scholarships for French translation courses at the British Centre for Literary Translation (2021) and Bristol University (2022). She currently teaches French Literary Translation and Comparative Literature at King’s College London.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: