A frequent contributor whose thrilling rendition of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s La Folie Elisa recently appeared in Asymptote’s Spring 2024 edition, Wendeline Hardenberg translates contemporary French literature across a spread of genres—from the aforementioned prose to Marie-Claire Bancquart’s poetry, children’s books, and even genre fiction by authors such as Jacques Vandroux. In the following conversation, conducted via email, Wendeline spoke to Assistant Interview Editor Sarah Gear about the challenges and pleasures of translating across the literary spectrum, bookshops as a source of inspiration, establishing her career as a translator, and her ‘Oulipian’ approach to language-learning.
Sarah Gear (SG): What led you to literary translation?
Wendeline Hardenberg (WH): During my first year of college, I was for some reason already thinking about what I might do for an honors thesis later on, and my first idea (I was a Comparative Literature major) was to write a piece of short fiction in English and then translate it into French. I was taking a course called “The Novel Now” that semester, and I brought this idea to the English professor who taught the course. He told me that they didn’t do “creative theses” at Smith. I was a bit deflated, but I immediately decided that meant I had to find someone else’s French text to translate into English instead, and I made that my mission while studying abroad in France during my junior year. Even though at the time there was no Translation Studies concentration at Smith as there is now, the department was supportive of my project and connected me with Nicole Ball, who had taught me French in my first semester and turned out to be a translator herself, as my thesis advisor. It’s hard to say where this intense desire to translate came from in the first place, though I think it may have something to do with my lifelong fondness for words, and my youthful sense that learning more languages meant more opportunities to play with them.
SG: How do you choose the texts you translate?
WH: Many of my translation projects have been chosen by other people, which is unfortunately the best way to make any money. When I’m choosing texts myself, though, I’m always looking for something that I actually want to read, which tends to lead to idiosyncratic and serendipitous choices. My favorite thing to do is to physically browse bookstores in foreign countries and look for what catches my eye. I discovered Vincent Ravalec in 2004 because I saw a bright green book with my name on it (Wendy ou les secrets de Polichinelle) from across the room at the Tschann Librairie in Paris. My relationship with Gwenaëlle Aubry is entirely because I spotted her Perséphone 2014 (with its first chapter numbered 0 and a totally black page two thirds of the way through) in the FNAC at Les Halles in 2016. It’s hard to know in advance whether the things you like will be things that publishers and readers also like, but nothing beats working on the translation of a text that you personally enjoy.
SG: Has there ever been translation work you were offered, that you chose not to accept?
WH: I’m still close enough to being an “emerging” translator that right now I think the answer is no—for a long time I was so eager to be published and paid that I was willing to try my hand at anything that was offered to me. In fact, my very first paid jobs involved translation from English into French, which I can do, but as French is not my native language I prefer to translate from French. It’s a good thing those were more technical translations (museum exhibit descriptions, a PowerPoint for someone’s anthropology conference presentation). I’m only just now deciding that I want to spend my time working toward getting projects I care about out into the world more than I care about just getting published or paid at all.
SG: When you have chosen a book yourself, how do you approach publishers?
WH: For the ones that accept queries via email or Submittable, I work up a sample and then a brief pitch that hopefully explains why I think it would be a good fit for them and why they should be intrigued by this project. Chad Post did a great workshop on how to pitch publishers that’s been very helpful to me as I take advantage of the American Literary Translators Association’s member benefit of getting to do eight-minute Zoom pitches with publishers, some of whom it’s otherwise very hard to get a hold of. This is especially a problem with large commercial publishers, who often will only accept pitches from agents (which translators rarely have) and don’t publicly provide any other contact method.
SG: You translate from a wide range of genres including literary fiction, genre fiction and poetry. What different challenges do these genres present?
WH: They all want something different from you, and they’re all fun in their own way. Literary fiction is probably my favorite, because I feel like it gives me permission to stretch English into whatever shape is required, while still producing a readable text. That same exciting tension exists in poetry translation as well, but you’ll notice that the one poet I’ve chosen to work on, Marie-Claire Bancquart, favors a sort of prose-like free verse. I admire translators who are able to take specific poetic forms from other languages and bring them in English, but I don’t feel qualified! Genre fiction is similarly difficult, because you can’t just translate what’s there—there are all sorts of conventions that vary across languages and genre fiction really expects you to domesticate them. When I was younger, I used to enter the Gutekunst Prize for Young Translators contest every year to work on my German, and in 2014 I even got an honorable mention, but the person who won that year had recognized that the text was from a thriller and had translated accordingly. So even though my translation was very good and quite accurate to the German text, it wasn’t as accurate to the genre.
SG: What would you have to keep in mind for a thriller?
WH: Thrillers in English tend favor taut writing, with short, punchy sentences. From what I’ve seen of the same genre in French and German, that doesn’t seem to matter as much. They’re both much wordier languages than English anyway, and their readers are comfortable with longer, more complex sentences. That doesn’t affect the atmosphere and mood for them, but it does for the English reader, especially if that person has read a lot of thrillers before. The first full book I ever translated was Jacques Vandroux’s Heart Collector, and I would make some very different choices now if I were to do it again. At the time, I was so anxious about doing a good job that I treated it more like literary fiction than the thriller it was, and you can see in the reader reviews on Amazon that some people found that off-putting and unnatural. I gave them accuracy, but what they wanted was genre conventions.
SG: You have translated a number of children’s books from French. Are there any particular issues you have to keep in mind when translating books for younger readers?
WH: With children’s books, there is so much that you just completely throw out the window! Often, it’s more like rewriting than translation, because different cultures talk to their children differently. Something that’s totally normal for a French child might sound bizarre to an American one. The editing process is very heavy, too. Sometimes I’m almost like a French-to-English filter for someone else who ends up doing a lot of revisions. I like to think I’ve gotten better at detaching from the French the more I’ve done this kind of work, though.
SG: Could you give an example of the changes you might make?
WH: Okay, here’s one from a non-fiction children’s book about oceans and marine life that I translated. On every page, there’s a question that a child might ask, and then an answer with three panels of illustration. For one, the question in French is: “Pourquoi faut-il manger du poisson?”, which is literally: “Why is it necessary to eat fish?” That’s such an incredibly French attitude! In the U.S., we know that not everyone does eat fish, and they’re fine! So, in the published English version, the question became simply: “Why do we eat fish?” There’s also a big difference in the caption for the first illustration, because the French has this long-winded description of how fish can be weird, but your dad is always telling you that you have to eat it. In English. . . all it says is “Fish is good for your health”! So, the translation process reflects a lot of cultural differences in how adults talk to children and how that shows up in children’s literature.
SG: How closely do you work with your authors?
WH: That’s very dependent on the author, and often on how strong their English is. I was very lucky to be in contact with Marie-Claire Bancquart before she died in 2019, including having lunch at her home in 2016, but she was content to let me do whatever I wanted because she didn’t feel like she had enough English to have an opinion. Vincent Ravalec is willing to answer questions I have when I’m not sure what something refers to, but he doesn’t ask to see what I’ve done, even though his English has improved over the years. Gwenaëlle Aubry, however, is fluent in English, and I’m in frequent contact with her because when Asymptote was going to publish the extract from Perséphone 2014, her publisher sent her the manuscript and she read it in detail and came back with edits. She’s now done this for every piece from her work that I’ve translated. Olivier and Simone Vandroux (aka Jacques Vandroux) were the same way.
SG: Your translation of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s La Folie Elisa in the most recent edition of Asymptote describes the 2015 massacre at the Bataclan theatre in Paris. Is it difficult to translate texts about subjects like that?
WH: I think the process of translation allows me to hold subject matter at a distance, at least for a while, because initially I’m so focused on specific words and phrases. In later drafts, which are more about rhythm and feel, the full meaning comes back in, but the emphasis is still on conveying the original as best I can, and by that point I’m so inside the text that in many ways I’ve become desensitized to anything that would be shocking to someone just encountering it. That said, this particular text is emotionally heavy, but it isn’t what I’d call graphic, and I might have felt differently if it was.
SG: You also hold a role as a faculty librarian at Southern Connecticut State University. What interaction is there between this work and your practice as a translator?
WH: The simplest answer is that being a faculty librarian gives me time and support for my translation practice. Without this position, I would have to do all translation activities on my own time and my own dime—I wouldn’t have funding to go to conferences, I couldn’t apply for creative activity grants, and my publications wouldn’t help me advance professionally. I have a dual MA/MLS in Comparative Literature and Library Science, and I feel so fortunate that I found a position and a university that reward me for using all that education to the fullest. Sometimes I daydream about being a full-time translator, but I would miss librarianship and working with students the way that I do now.
SG: You are also starting to translate from German and Italian—how easy is it to break into a new language as a translator?
WH: If you’re not translating full time, I’d say it’s pretty difficult, mostly because you have limited time and it’s much easier to pursue work in the second language and culture you know best. During my sabbatical in 2019, I did successfully contact some German publishers and do some samples for them, but that kind of petered out and I haven’t checked back in about why. During that same sabbatical, I also made my first stab at translating an Italian novella (which I still need to rework based on feedback I got from an ALTA Multilingual Workshop), but that has gone nowhere since the publisher pointed me to the author’s agent and the agent hasn’t responded to a single email I’ve written. Still, I like to learn languages as a hobby, and I vaguely intend to translate from every single one, so I’ll continue to pursue it!
SG: I would love to know what languages you are interested in learning next. Would you approach learning a language in a specific way if your aim is literary translation?
WH: I’m an aspiring hyperpolyglot, and because I have a sort of Oulipian way of going about my life, my goal is to learn a language for every letter of the alphabet (so far, I’ve made headway on D through K). I’m sure you don’t want me to list all twenty-six languages, but I’m actively taking classes in Dutch and Japanese, and I’d really like to do Catalan and Lakota next, because I’ve learned a lot of hegemonic languages, and it would be nice to bolster some smaller ones. I think because I’m more interested in reading and translating than I am in speaking and listening (even though I also really enjoy speaking and listening!), I always have the question of whether I can now read a book and convey what it says in the back of mind. Literary language can be very different from everyday speech, but if you’re interested in contemporary literature as I am, you’ll often encounter more oral language while reading so it’s important to learn as much as you can about everything, culture included.
SG: Which language has presented the most challenges?
WH: The difficulty definitely stepped up for me when I started learning languages that don’t use the Latin alphabet. However, I began both Hindi and Japanese in the context of formal lessons, and that helped me get up to speed pretty quickly. For Korean, however, I’ve been doing nothing but Duolingo, and although I definitely know more than zero about it now (which is what I knew when I started), I would never in a million years say anything along the lines of “I know/speak Korean” at the moment. It probably doesn’t help that I rotate through seven languages on Duolingo and only do Korean once a week! I recently had a great time doing an intensive Dutch class in the Netherlands, though, so hopefully something like that for Korean is in my future.
SG: What advice would you give to aspiring literary translators as they look for their first commission?
WH: I’d probably start by recommending that they have other work they’re doing as well, whether that’s teaching, non-literary translation, or something else, because so few people can make a full living on their own from literary translation. But they also shouldn’t give up! They should find texts that they care about and want to champion, get connected with the translation community (ALTA is fabulous for this), start by getting pieces into magazines and journals, and then just keep sending samples out to book publishers. Someone presenting at the recent Write the World online event, hosted by ALTA in May, gave some advice that I keep needing to remember as well, which is that the fantasy of publishers “discovering” your work and reaching out to ask you for it pretty much never happens. I have had a publisher reach out to hire me based on my past work, but it was to offer me a specific project they already had, not to take on a project I had selected myself.
SG: What texts do you aspire to work with next?
WH: I’ve amassed a fairly substantial portfolio of translation samples that I keep sending out in hopes of finding the right home for them, so I always aspire to getting to work on those in full. I also have a lot of books I’ve accumulated during my travels that I would like to read and work up samples for and see what comes of them. I’ve been trying to be more intentional lately about choosing women authors, too, since they’re underrepresented in translated literature, and I can have a role in changing that.
SG: What other contemporary Francophone authors should we be reading?
WH: I’ll put in a plug here for my friend Allison Charette’s translations of Francophone Malagasy literature, namely Beyond the Rice Fields by Naivo and Return to the Enchanted Island by Johary Ravaloson. She noticed that no novel from Madagascar had ever been translated into English and set about righting that wrong herself. I’m still in awe.
Sarah Gear is an assistant interview editor at Asymptote. She holds a PhD in Russian, based on research into the influence of personal and institutional political bias on the circulation of contemporary translated fiction. Her reviews and interviews have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Modern Language Review, Full Stop, and The Glasgow Review of Books. She is based in Scotland.
Wendeline A. Hardenberg (b. 1983) is a faculty librarian at Southern Connecticut State University who pursues literary translation as part of her creative activity. She has published translations of writing by Marie-Claire Bancquart, Vincent Ravalec, and Gwenaëlle Aubry with Asymptote over the years, and her translation of Bancquart’s volume of poetry, Avec la mort, quartier d’orange entre les dents (With Death, an Orange Segment Between Our Teeth), came out with Orison Books in 2023. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
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