The body of work comprising Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste manuscripts represents some of his most illuminating and challenging ideas, condensed into an alter ego who could articulate an evolving analysis of poetry’s intellectual mechanisms, multivalent origins, and immovable rationality. In reflecting on the character’s origins, Valéry had pointed to sudden, surging, “strange excesses of self-awareness,” a rousing that stirred newfound doubts and investigations into his chosen craft, and thus a renewed inquisition into the very acts of thinking, imagining, and inventing. Monsieur Teste became then a companion that would walk alongside Valéry for the remainder of the poet’s life, leaving impressions and musings in the stray forms of philosophical texts, brief aphorisms, and fictional letters. An encompassing collection of these works are now available in a luminous translation by Charlotte Mandell, which we were proud to present as our December Book Club selection. In this interview, Mandell speaks to us about the challenge of working with Valéry’s occasionally-lyrical, occasionally-bareboned style, and what it means to meet translation as its own form of creation.
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Mia Ruf (MR): I want to first talk about Valéry’s own notes in the preface to Monsieur Teste, where he discusses the difficulty of translating this text—in part because of the language he talks about devising. He refers to it as “forced and vigorously abstract” and “with a few traces of that vulgarity or triviality we allow ourselves.” Did you feel that way in translating it? And did you find those aspects to indeed be difficult?
Charlotte Mandell (CM): Yeah, because a lot of the aphorisms are so short. There’s not a lot of context to base the translation on, so you sort of have to guess what Valéry is trying to say. Also, when he talks about abstract words, you have to resist an urge to just be easy and translate whatever you think it is; you have to try to put yourself in his mindset, which is really hard—to see what he meant instead of what I thought he meant. It helped a lot to have the Jackson Mathews translation [Princeton, 1989], so I consulted that, but you made a good point in your review, which is that I tend to make the sentences a little bit longer than Mathews did. He often attempted to make the text a little bit “easier,” and shortened some of the sentences, but I tried to just stay as true as possible to the original—both in terms of the sentence length, and also the way by which the thought unfolds.
While working on this, I had just finished translating Volume 2 of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and there were a lot of similarities between the two processes—the effort to follow a thought as it unfurls in a sentence, trying to stay true to that length. It was definitely not easy. I’m really grateful to Jackson Mathews, I have to say, but then, a lot of times I didn’t agree with what he said. My husband is also a poet, and he actually helped a lot in figuring out some of the more abstract notions. This book was very important to him when he was younger.
MR: The text includes many different texts from Valéry’s corpus that pertain to Monsieur Teste, such as the chapters “Extracts from the Logbook of Monsieur Teste,” and “A Few of Monsieur Teste’s Pensées”—did you find those to be more difficult than the longer, more lyrical phrases, such as those in “A Letter from a Friend”?
CM: Yeah, those are more difficult because of the context. In “A Letter from a Friend,” you have context, and you can sort of figure out more what he’s saying. The more lyrical passages aren’t written in Monsieur Teste’s own words, so those were definitely easier. The “Logbook” was difficult because of how pithy the aphorisms were.
MR: Like, “Seeing is not being. Seeing implies being, not exactly being the seeing.” That would drive any translator crazy.
CM: And I had to resist the urge to make something longer than it was—to gloss over something or to add some of my own ideas into it. I didn’t want to do that; I wanted to make it just as he wrote it. And that’s hard, as a translator, because you want to explain things, to try to make things easy.
MR: It seems to me that the different passages each have completely different demands on the translator—like the “Letter from Madame Émile Teste” versus the “Logbook.” How did you approach going from one to the other, doing vastly different things, and making them still all sound like they were written by Valéry, coming from the same brain?
CM: I like writing in different voices, and I guess that’s one of the reasons why I like being a translator; I don’t have to be me, I can be all these different people. So I really actually enjoy jumping from one style to the other, from one voice to the other—and especially with Valéry.
I don’t actually read ahead. I translate as I go. And in this case, it helped, because I might read like a sentence ahead, but I don’t actually read the whole chapter. I don’t read a book before I translate it. That was helpful, because then my work becomes similar to the process of writing; if I don’t know what he’s going to say next, it’s more like a creative process, and I can just go with each word as it comes, or each sentence as it comes. For me that’s much easier. If I read a book beforehand, I would probably just give up, as it would already be done in my head, but if I’m reading it as I’m translating, then I always want to find out what’s happening next, what the next sentence will be, what the next word will be. Obviously I had read this book back when I was a student, but that was a long time ago, and for this translation, Edwin Frank—from NYRB—had kindly sent me this beautiful used Gallimard edition of Valéry’s works, and I would often leaf through that for inspiration.
MR: Is that the edition where the posthumously published notes first appeared?
CM: Yes, that’s the one. There are really amazing notes and footnotes, and it’s a beautiful book, so that helped a lot. But I think the best aspect of my process was just sort of putting myself in the text as it happens.
MR: Like a deep reading process-as-translation.
CM: Yes, like trying to inhabit the text, and also trying to inhabit the mind of the author as he was writing it.
MR: I also wanted to ask about the switching of voices. I noticed that the speakers who are observing Monsieur Teste kind of assume his line of thought a little bit, or they’re in awe of him, channeling his thinking, or, in the case of Émilie Teste, she talks about being like a figment within his brain. What do you have to do, in your mind, to inhabit a mind within a mind? Is that something you’ve ever done?
CM: I mean, you definitely have to empty out your ego. I wasn’t crazy about the Émilie Teste letter—especially the way she worshipped him so much. But I just had to put that aside, and pretend to be her. I personally can’t imagine worshiping someone quite that much.
But for me, I have to just completely become whatever it is that I’m translating—and that’s one of the reasons why I enjoy it. I’m a Buddhist, and so it’s like a practice for me, just completely having no ego at all.
MR: Right, and she has these bursts of insight that are brushed aside by the priest she consults, and it’s sort of painful to witness, in a way.
CM: I’m wondering if he did that on purpose, to make it seem as if she is actually much smarter than people take her to be. I’m sort of hoping that’s the case.
MR: Have you ever translated something that has been written over such a long span of time? I guess it’s not an extremely long span of time, but it’s roughly a fifty year composition, if you consider all the components.
CM: Yes, I think this is probably the longest that I’ve done. And it is interesting how it changes—it’s definitely different at the end than it was at the beginning: it becomes more abstract. In the beginning, the writing is more understandable, and there are characters and elements that a reader can follow. But then, at the end, it’s these very abstruse, very poetic thoughts. It goes from poetic prose to pure poetry at the end.
There are so many different ways of translating poetry, and there are so many different ways of translating these “Pensées,” so that was hard to grapple with, finding the right word, finding the right way of saying something. And I’m not sure I did, because I think there’s always room for improvement—it can always be retranslated. I think it would be interesting to do lots of different translations of this one book. I wish that there was a publisher that would pay for that.
MR: Do you ever go back and tweak things? Just for yourself?
CM: Yeah, I do. And sometimes I even write to the publisher and ask if they can change things. A translation is never finished. I don’t think any writing is ever really finished, and everything is open to rewriting and revision. I hope that, maybe in a year or ten years, I could revise this again.
MR: I mean, it seems like Valéry was himself in a constant revision process for this character. And you can sort of see that definitely in the preface, when he refers to it as a “monster idea,” and to himself as being kind of crazed with precision at the time. In your word choices, did you try to convey an attitude shift over the course of the text?
CM: No, it wasn’t done consciously. Everything was done through just staying true to the words. It wasn’t anything that I did to convey a shift, or anything like that; it’s the text that makes it obvious, though it was more subtle for me, when I was in the work. It only became more obvious after I read it over, and obviously, after I finish a book, I’ll revise it many, many, many times.
MR: Right. You just sort of took it as it came. I really liked your translation of André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s The Magnetic Fields, and I thought it was really interesting that you tried to assume automatic writing methods as you worked on it. Is that something that you always do? Do you look into how authors compose and assume that?
CM: Not really, no. With The Magnetic Fields, that was special. I’m doing London by Céline at the moment, which is another really difficult book, because he actually leaves a lot of words out, and just sort of assumes that the reader knows what he’s talking about. So he’ll just say like two or three words, and you’re supposed to just sort of fill in the rest on your own, which is kind of maddening because you have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about at times. In cases like this, I am sort of inhabiting the author’s mindset, because Céline also wanted the writing to sound like spoken French, to be not literate-sounding, as if he just dashed it off in a minute or something, even though he did in fact do a lot of editing. So for this work, I am sort of trying to be like him.
MR: Did trying to be like him drive you crazy? He’s really exacting in his poetics, and that seems like it would be maddening
CM: Yes, it’s really hard, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it if I hadn’t already done War—which came out just recently. A lot of what Céline is talking about in London has to do with what just happened in War, so that helps, but it is still very frustrating, and I need other French experts to help me, because I’m not a native French speaker. Since he made up a lot of words, I have to figure out which are the ones he made up and which are the ones he didn’t, and you need a native person to help you with that.
MR: Can you think of an example?
CM: Oh, he had a lot of words for penis. Like “zobar” was one of the words. “Romeo.” I mean, some of them are obvious. You would know that “romeo” was the penis. And then there were some other really weird words that didn’t have to do with the penis, some just sounding like what they’re supposed to mean.
MR: You said in an interview about The Magnetic Fields that you try not to read biographical information; does that include other texts by the author?
CM: No, I’ll definitely read other texts by the authors, but I don’t really like to know that much. I want to know more about the text, so I’ll read things about the text, but I won’t read biographies. The exception was Proust. But I just think that the text is what’s important to me, especially with Céline; he was such a horrible antisemite, and obviously I’m not for that, but he was a great writer, and I think that he was not antisemitic in his novels—at least not in War, and not yet in London, and not so much in Journey to the End of Night. He didn’t really incorporate that into his novels; it was mostly the pamphlets. It doesn’t interest me, what they did as people—it’s the texts that really matter.
MR: In the case of Monsieur Teste, didn’t these writings sort of correspond with Valéry’s big renunciation of writing? Did you try to channel that frustration into this translation, or like a disdain for language in general? I think he talks about how you have to sacrifice your intellect in order to write in the first place. Did that have any bearing on the translation process?
CM: I don’t think he really meant that; he would say these things, but obviously, if he really believed them, he wouldn’t have written anything. But it is interesting that he did give up poetry for that long. One does wonder. And then afterwards to come back with some really amazing poems. But I personally didn’t think about it as I was translating.
MR: Did you carry your knowledge of his poetry into this?
CM: Yes, and it definitely helped. That sort of abstract language, that care for the way images appear, the order of images, I try to keep that. I think it’s important to maintain the order of the images as they appear, and also to stay true to the mind as it unfolds, the thought as it unfolds. I mean, that was the main thing that I tried to do, and that’s the case in nearly all of my translations, really—especially with Proust, just because the sentences and their syntax are so important.
Charlotte Mandell has translated over fifty books, including works by Maurice Blanchot, Jonathan Littell, Gustave Flaubert, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Her translation of Compass by Mathias Énard was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017 and was the recipient of the 2018 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose. In April 2021, she received the honor of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government.
Mia Ruf is a copy editor for Asymptote and a dubbing script writer by trade. She lives in Queens, NY.