Posts featuring Marie-Claire Bancquart

Across Genres, Across Cultures: An Interview with Wendeline Hardenberg

July 10, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Gear

I want to spend my time working toward getting projects I care about out into the world. . .

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. READ MORE…

Fall 2012: A Whirlwind Blend of Poetry, Fiction, Loud-mouthed Drama, and Phantasmagorical Art

September 8, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Marina Sofia

The pieces from the issue play off of each other’s fears and discoveries so well that it is almost uncanny.

Michael Henry Heim, the translator who introduced to English readers Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being—and my personal favorite, The Joke—dies on 29 September 2012. Not only do we mourn his passing, we regret not being able to publish the interview Heim agreed to months before. Michael Stein of Literalab, who has been researching interview questions for Asymptote when news breaks of Heim’s death, writes a tribute instead, which we publish on Tumblr (this being before the arrival of our blog). On the other hand, Yiyun Li—whom I have been courting since the beginning of Asymptote—finally agrees to grace the pages of our eighth issue (listen to a snippet of her conversation with Clare Wigfall here). Haven’t read Li? Start with “Love in the Marketplace” from A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Sometimes, in my more indulgent moments as editor, I think of that story and channel the question that the narrator asks of her mother, who prides herself on the care she takes to make the very best hard boiled eggs that she has been selling for forty years: Who even notices?

The Fall 2012 issue was the first issue of Asymptote that I encountered when I decided to reconnect with literature after a long hiatus. And I’ll be perfectly candid: as a skeptic who has never been afraid of ghosts, I was somewhat bemused by the Halloween-tinged theme of fear and the supernatural. But when I delved a little deeper I found no Disneyfication of the old pagan ritual but rather an exploration of fear that encompassed both the everyday and the extraordinary. In a whirlwind blend of poetry, fiction, loud-mouthed drama, and even phantasmagorical art, readers encounter the ghosts of of memory, AIDS, old age, Alzheimer’s, lost cultural identity, and so much more.

The pieces from this issue play off of each other’s fears and discoveries so well that it is almost uncanny. Afzal Syed Ahmed’s poem, which begins “In your language every line begins from an opposite end,” responds to Aamer Hussein’s fear of returning to a ‘home’ that no longer feels like home—and not simply because both are translated from Urdu. As Hussein explains, “I’m losing my mother tongue. I’m a vagabond, I carry my home on my back. Now I shall turn this foreign tongue into a whip and lash them with their words.” When discussing in her interview why she doesn’t feel ready to be translated into Chinese, Yiyun Li demonstrates a similar fear of losing one’s language, of being misinterpreted, of being pushed out or forgotten. READ MORE…