Asymptote’s 2022 Summer issue featured two new hallucinatory, self-referential stories by Hérve Guibert and translated by translator and writer Daniel Lupo. In this interview, Assistant Editor Meghan Racklin speaks with Lupo on the challenges of translating Guibert’s various styles, ranging from the phantasmagoric to the spare, across his body of work. Their intimate conversation explores Guibert’s evolution as a writer, the role of improvisation in translation, and the relationship between translation and dance.
Megan Racklin (MR): The two Guibert pieces you translated for the latest issue of Asymptote both deal with the way market forces shape the process of writing. How do you see yourself, as a translator, fitting into that broader system?
Daniel Lupo (DL): At least in the United States, literary translation is a minor, severely underfunded sector of the two markets Guibert takes aim at in these stories: periodical publishing and book publishing. Hardly anyone pays their bills from literary translation alone, which means we don’t have to worry about buckling under the demand to produce a new text every week, as Guibert’s photography critic does—although we may very well have to worry about editors like the one in his other story finding our financial expectations “insolent.” In the absence of a profit motive, most translators I know, including myself, translate out of a love of the language, particular authors or texts, the practice of translation itself, or a combination of those. But of course, loving your work and making a living from it shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.
MR: You’ve translated Hérve Guibert’s work extensively, including a wonderful translation of his novel Arthur’s Whims. Can you talk about the relationship between author and translator that develops through this kind of sustained engagement with their work? How do you see the relationship between your voice as a translator and Guibert’s as a writer?
DL: Guibert has a very intense, hypnotic voice. Often after reading him, I can still feel the rhythms of his text reverberating in my head long after the words have faded from memory. When translating him, it’s very easy for me to get lost in his voice, such that it’s only after finishing a draft and going back over what I wrote that I recognize signs of my own voice, my own anglophone quirks and idiosyncrasies that may or may not gel with his francophone ones. But it works both ways: his voice is filtered through my voice as much as mine is filtered through his. That’s something I love about translation: it’s a very intimate process in which the author’s voice and the translator’s voice rub up against and influence each other.
MR: You mention in your translator’s note that the two Guibert pieces you translated for Asymptote seem to be in a somewhat different style than other work of Guibert’s that you’ve translated, and that this presented new challenges. How does a change in style within a single writer’s work trouble the relationship between translator and writer? Did you feel the need to alter your approach to translating the work to preserve either the shift in style or the continuities in voice that nevertheless exist?
DL: Though written around the same time period as Arthur’s Whims (early 1980s), “The Photography Critic” and “The Editor” have the spare, sharp-tongued style of some of Guibert’s later work, such as Crazy for Vincent and To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. Those were among the first books of his I read, so reading these stories felt like returning to the Guibert I was familiar with before encountering Arthur’s Whims, which has a much more convoluted, phantasmagoric style. Sometimes a single sentence in Arthur’s Whims could take me hours to translate, which was never the case with “The Photography Critic” or “The Editor.” The difficulty in translating these stories mostly came in figuring out how to reproduce their staccato character while still maintaining an overall flow from one sentence to the next.
MR: In addition to your translation practice, you’re also a writer—I saw on Instagram that you recently completed a draft of a novel (congratulations!). Has your translation practice influenced the way you write, or vice versa? Do you see your writing in conversation with the work you translate?
DL: Thank you! I’ve been writing longer than I’ve been translating, so I’d say the former has had more of an influence on the latter. Ultimately, I view translation as at once a highly restrictive and a highly generative form of writing. The source text acts as a kind of rigid writing constraint, a structure that the translation has to fit into. But it can also act as an anchor and a source of comfort. A blank page in a translation draft isn’t nearly as intimidating to me as a blank page in a novel draft, since at least in the former I have another, pre-written text to guide me. You could say that translating stages the paradox of writing something that’s already been written. I’m a really slow writer, usually unable to bang out multiple pages or even paragraphs at a time. But I find that rhythm conducive to translating, which demands a word-by-word attention to the source text.
MR: You write about Guibert as writing “close to the body,” which is certainly on display in these pieces, particularly “The Photography Critic,” which is very much about the embodied experience of writing. In addition to your own writing and your translation practice, you’re also a dancer. Dance strikes me as an art form that is especially “close to the body” and its movements. I wonder if you see a relationship between the embodied experiences of writing, translation, and dancing.
DL: Translating feels very similar to dancing choreography to me. Both involve taking something someone else created, internalizing it, and reproducing it as faithfully as possible, with inevitable differences (there’s never been a perfect translation of Don Quixote the novel or a perfect performance of Don Quixote the ballet). Writing is more like a guided improvisation, where you’re given or give yourself a prompt or other incitement to bounce around in (or crawl around in, if you’re like me), then start to refine what you’ve made when you notice a pattern or structure emerging.
Daniel Lupo is the translator of Hervé Guibert’s novel Arthur’s Whims (Spurl Editions, 2021).
Meghan Racklin is a Brooklyn-based writer and an assistant editor at Asymptote. She writes about books and culture. Her writing has appeared in The Baffler, Literary Hub, The Drift, and more. Her work can be found at meghanracklin.com and she is on Twitter @meghan_racklin.
*****
Read more from the Asymptote blog: