Posts filed under 'Alyson Waters'

Translator’s Profile: Alyson Waters

August 3, 2015  |  in Interviews, Translator's Profile  |  by Katrine Øgaard Jensen

Q&A with Alyson Waters, translator from the French and managing editor of Yale French Studies.

Alyson Waters’s translations from the French include works by Louis Aragon, René Belletto, Eric Chevillard, and Albert Cossery. She is the 2012 winner of the French-American Translation Award for her translation of Chevillard’s Prehistoric Times. Waters has received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a PEN Translation Fund grant, and residency grants from the Centre National du Livre, the Villa Gillet, and the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. She teaches literary translation at New York University and Columbia University and is the managing editor of Yale French Studies. She lives in Brooklyn.

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Asymptote: Describe your current/most recent project. Why is it cool? What should we know about it?

Alyson Waters: My current project is a translation of Jean Giono’s Un roi sans divertissement for New York Review Books. The title comes from one of Pascal’s Pensées:  “A king without diversion is miserable; and therefore we see a great number of people constantly about the king whose sole task it is to amuse and avert the thought of the king from himself.” It’s an amazing book, a kind of existential mystery/roman noir. It has a very complicated structure, moving back and forth from the time of the telling of the story to the time of the events, and told in several narrative voices in an almost oral style. There’s a great passage in the book (among many) where the main narrator (or Giono?) inserts in the middle of his story the following:

“Obviously there exists a system of references comparable, for example, to the economic understanding of the world and in which Langlois’ blood and Bergues’ blood have the same value as the blood of Marie Chazottes, Ravanel, and Delphin-Jules. But there exists, encasing the first, another system of references in which Abraham and Isaac move logically, one following the other, toward Mount Moriah; in which the obsidian knives of the priests of Quetzalcoatl logically drive deep into selected hearts. And we are informed of this by beauty. One cannot live in a world where one believes that the exquisite elegance of the guinea fowl’s plumage is pointless. This is just an aside. I wanted to say it, and I did.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Night Visit” by Emmanuel Bove

June 30, 2015  |  in Translations  |  by Alyson Waters

His eyes left the comforting flame of the lamp, seemed to follow the flight of a bird, then landed on me.

What was making me sad? My books—all my books—were sleeping on the shelves. No one had spoken badly of me. My family and friends had no particular worries. I found myself in the midst of all things. So I did not need to fear that events, in my absence, would take a turn I would be unable to change. I was not unhappy with myself. And, even had I been, this intensity of feeling was different.

It was eleven o’clock at night. A lamp without a shade lit my desk. I had not gone out all day. Whenever fresh air has not put color in my cheeks, I don’t feel at ease. My wrists are smoother and I notice, with some displeasure, that the down covering them is silkier, and when I go to bed, my unexpended energy makes me uncomfortable.

I was dozing in an armchair. At the seam where the red velvet meets the wood, golden tacks form a border. One of them was missing and, there, the edge sagged a bit. I sat motionless. My hand tugged at this seam without my being aware of it, as it sought unconsciously to pull out the next tack.

It was only once I had managed to pull it out that I became aware of what I was doing. I felt a small joy at this discovery, as I feel each time I catch myself doing something without realizing it, or when I bring to light a sensation in me of which I was unaware. It makes me as happy as a ray of sunshine or a kind word. Anyone who would criticize me for this tiny joy will never understand me. I think that seeking knowledge of oneself is a pure deed. To criticize me for digging too deep into myself would be to criticize me for being happy.

I have to say, though, that this joy is very fragile. It really is not equal to the joy a ray of sunshine gives us. Quickly it disappears, and I have to look for something else inside me to bring it back to life. Then, in the intervals, it seems that everything is hostile to me and that the people around me, with their simple joy, are in reality happier than I am.

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I was reading when there was a knock at the door. It was my friend Paul. He rushed in and the door, which he had yanked behind him so it would close, stopped half-way.

“What’s the matter, Paul?”

“Nothing.”

His face was pale, and his eyes darker than usual. He dropped onto the sofa, which he knew was soft.

“But what is it?”

He stood, walked around the room as I put my book down, and lit a cigarette, then sat again. He was smoking the way nervous people do, his cigarette drooping from his mouth. From time to time, he would spit out bits of tobacco.

“Please, Paul, tell me what’s happened to you.”

I looked at him. I tried to find a gesture, an expression, something in his bearing that would reassure me. But there was nothing. If he had been holding some object, his fingers would have trembled. He must have realized this because he avoided touching anything whatsoever.

“Paul, I’m your friend. Tell me everything. You know if there’s anything I can do for you, I’ll do it. It hurts me to see you like this, without being able to help you.” READ MORE…