Entretien

The work of the translator tends to be unrecognized as well as underpaid, for all that it is the only way foreign authors can be generally read. Without Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe could never have been read in the same way in French. Without Catherine Lauga du Plessis, J.M. Coetzee, author of Disgrace and winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, might still be little known in the French-speaking world. With André Markowicz, French readers since the 1990s have been rediscovering Dostoyevsky and other great Russian writers.

There is a before and an after André Markowicz. In the early 1990s the translator, born to a Russian mother and French father, began translating the complete works of Dostoyevsky for Babel / Actes Sud. By the time he finished the mammoth undertaking in 2002 he had proved something: what people had been reading by Dostoyevsky wasn’t Dostoyevsky. It wasn’t his style, there was nothing of his collision of linguistic registers, which had been smoothed out to obtain a language far too literary for an author whose strokes of the pen were like axe blows. The translator’s involvement, often poorly paid, is not always given due credit. I went to see André Markowicz at his home, in a study bursting with old books in Cyrillic script. André Markowicz is a writer who publishes under the names of others. He spends all day writing. In a spidery hand, using an extra-fine pencil, he writes down poems, too.

How would you define your work as a translator?

Translating is reading with your fingers. You don’t just read the story, but the words as well. It’s more accurate. Translating involves keeping up two levels of reaction simultaneously, emotion and detail, without ever choosing one over the other. As an adolescent, reading Dostoyevsky in Russian, of course I would be hit by the details, but what counted was the breadth of the thing in which I was being immersed. Translation strikes me as being like driving. Taken up with the need to keep an eye on a hundred different things at once, you don’t ask yourself questions that the person sitting next to you may be asking him- or herself with terror. You have to be able to put things out of your mind in order to keep going. Translating is reading in action, turning what you read into actuality.

What was the starting point for you?

I have two languages, Russian from my mother and French from my father. My mother was born in Siberia because her family, part of the Jewish intelligentsia in Leningrad, had been deported there. Culture was fundamental for her. And I have the wonderful luck to have known two “grandmothers”, my real grandmother and her sister. My grandmother’s sister died at the age of 101. She was born in 1890, so she was 14 when Chekhov died. She remembered perfectly when Tolstoy died, too. Her Russian was extraordinary. I can speak that Russian, a language which is no longer spoken. I have kept the precise feeling of it. Later, when I was 15, after I had followed my family to France, I met Efim Etkind, a Soviet dissident, to whom my mother was very close. She had helped organize his coming to France. A specialist in literature, an heir to all the Russian formalists. He was formative for me. Once in France, he had the preposterous idea of setting up a group of translators around the work of Pushkin. I joined the group. The way in which I read texts, in which I perceive style, has been built on the methods of the great Russian formalist writers, not starting out from a theoretical reading, but from an understanding of the need to take form into account. I saw how Efim Etkind read texts. Or rather how he said them (Russian uses the same word for reading and reading aloud). Like many people in the Soviet Union, he could recite poems for hours and hours… He would sit there in an armchair and talk to me about Mandelstam and other poets he had known, such as Boris Pasternak. Everything he said was engraved on my heart. Although afterwards we fell out, I want to pay this tribute to him. Later, I met others who would be important.

Such as?

Françoise Morvan. She wrote to me to ask my opinion on her translations of Russian texts. I wrote back with my translations of early Chekhov stories. Françoise, who didn’t know the Russian originals, sent my work back to me, completely covered in notes and corrections which, for the most part, were quite right. That gave me an insight: in order to translate, you don’t just have to know the language, but life. For instance, I talked about the smell of hay in the rain. I’d translated literally, without realizing that hay left out in the rain is a sign of dereliction, of famine to come. I still had everything to learn, whereas I thought I was a brilliant pupil. That’s why you can’t learn how to translate, any more than you can learn how to live. All you can do is make disastrous mistakes, correct them, and try to do better in future. From the start, there was no doubt in either of our minds that we were going to translate all of Chekhov’s plays together and be caught up by our common passion for an author who is part of our lives.

What led you to Dostoyevsky?

Towards the end of the 19^th century the Russian specialist Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé wrote a well-known study of the Russian novel, Le Roman russe. In it, he grouped together a series of authors who have nothing in common with each other: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev. Dostoyevsky himself said that he wrote poems, not novels. Despite which, he became known as a novelist, and that was thanks to the translations which came before my own. I consider them to be unsatisfactory. But without them I would not be doing my own work, for the simple reason that Dostoyevsky would be unknown.

What was it you found lacking in earlier versions?

The style. When you read the original text alongside the first translations (which came out almost immediately), you realize that you’re not looking at the same author. Dostoyevsky writes obsessively, there is a very striking use of repetition. The early translations took out those repetitions. On the other hand, he also makes up sentences which are not proper written Russian. That’s quite normal; in Russian, nobody tells you how to write properly. But the translators would construct sentences in proper written French. All the same, the ideas were still there. The issues which Dostoyevsky addresses are so crucial: responsibility, the relationship between God and the world, humanist values in modern society, good and evil, the nature of obsession. These are questions of philosophy, not style. So you can read a very bad translation of Dostoyevsky and still be gripped by reading him. The fact that Dostoyevsky’s works had already been translated meant that I was in the fortunate position of a writer putting forward his own vision of that output. I was lucky to be able to work on the style, using the ear that I had for the text in my native language. Now, in Dostoyevsky, as in any writer, style is sense. My translation was not so much a new reading as a way of clarifying a number of points, after a century of reading Dostoyevsky…

Does that approach correspond to the author’s state of mind when he was writing? Did you try to get inside his head?

Yes, it corresponds to his speed of thought and writing. But getting inside his head – I don’t know what that means. He died one hundred and twenty years ago. What did he think? I don’t know. To recreate in another language, French in this case, what I understood in Russian, I and nobody else, that’s how I thought of it: to offer an interpretation, nothing more. What counts for me in Dostoyevsky, quite apart from all of what we know about him, is the way in which he constructs images. At the center of every novel there are one or more key images. Peter Brook uses the expression mot rayonnant, a word that “radiates out”. It gives an aura, vigor, light to the text as whole. It plays a vital part in Dostoyevsky – for me, at least, because the academics do not see the same thing at all.

An example?

Let’s take The Idiot. There are two images. The first is epilepsy, not so much the disease in itself, but the way in which Dostoyevsky describes it in the case of Prince Myshkin. It’s something so strong, so magnificent as to be unbearable. That sublime, unbearable thing is the center of The Idiot, an image of the return of Christ on earth. Well, when Christ returns to earth the result is catastrophic, because the world and Christ are incompatible. The world has to cease to exist. That’s the first impulse. The second is this: the pairing of Rogozhin and Myshkin. How two can be as one. And how, again, this is too much, unbearable. These two images radiate throughout the whole novel. And they must do so in the reader’s imagination. The reader should be constantly in a pathological state of near subjugation, torn between fascination and being unable to go on. That’s a construction that I call poetic.

Do you have to be aware of an author’s life and politics, to be able to translate him or her?

In the first place, there’s no have to about it. Everyone can do as they see fit. Of course, I do know about the life of Dostoyevsky. Of course, I do know about the life of Chekhov. His letters are a constant source of amazement. You can sense his absolutely radiant personality. So, yes, it can be important to know about an author’s life when translating. But for Dostoyevsky, in my view, it isn’t. I have never wanted to translate either his letters or his essays, which leave me with an impression of immense distress. Dosteyevsky was a racist, his anti-Semitism a part of his fundamental racism; moreover, his letters are so hysterical in character that as a correspondent he is capable of expressing one opinion and then its opposite on exactly the same subject, at just the same time. What counts is not what he says, but his determination to embrace what he imagines that the addressee wants to hear. And yet this is the same person who wrote those sublime novels. But when, in The Idiot for instance, he picks up on the same reactionary ideas on the invasion of modernity that he expresses as a journalist or in his letters, he puts them in the mouth of the fool Lebedyev, not of Myshkin or Rogozhin. In other words, Dostoyevsky the person becomes the fool of Dostoyevsky the writer. There you have it: it’s characteristic of Dostoyevsky that he both was and wasn’t the person who wrote his novels.

Is that something you come across frequently?

In The Brothers Karamazov there is an episode which made me feel ill. A tiny little episode. Lise, the handicapped girl, never stops making fun of Alyosha, who is a saintly figure. She says to him, “And it’s true that it’s not only the Jews who cut children’s fingers off?”. “I don’t know,” replies Alyosha. When I read those words, I was profoundly upset. The Brothers Karamazov is one of the greatest novels the world possesses. But I couldn’t translate an author who puts across the idea that Jews really do tend to cut children’s fingers off. And then, perhaps to reassure myself, I worked out an explanation: for Dostoyevsky as a person, this is an episode of no importance. At around the same time, he was writing for an extreme right wing periodical, The Citizen, which called for pogroms and attributed all the evils of Russia to the influence of the Jews. God knows how many survivors of the pogroms in the Ukraine fled to New York… But this episode comes in the first part of the novel. Now one of the key words here is the word “temptation”, and temptation is a theme which recurs in the work until the very end. When Zossima dies and his corpse begins to smell, the word that Dostoyevsky uses to describe the reaction is not “embarrassment” or “scandal”, but “temptation”. When I read that, I understood that this word was central to the text. The Brothers Karamazov is all about trial and temptation: how each of us tempts others and how each, save Christ, gives into temptation.

So Alyosha is not a saint…

With that “I don’t know”, Dostoyevsky tells us Alyosha is no saint. And that every human being, because human, and thus susceptible to temptation, is potentially a killer.

When your translations of Dostoyevsky came out they provoked intense debate. What was it about them that attracted criticism?

I was one of the first translators to become the focus of very personal discussion. What the readers of my generation were arguing about was not so much my translation, in the end, as the ones they’d grown up with. Was my own reading right? At any rate, I can certainly account for it. But the way I translate, not respecting the canonical norms for French literature because the author is Russian, well, that of course upsets those readers who only see foreign literature through the lens of French literature. But it seems to me that we should be able to go beyond this difficulty. For me this is extremely important. It is in this respect that translation is a political act. It is not simply a question of turning what is foreign into French, but of understanding that it should not be the same as we are. Translation should be a process of reception, not of assimilation.

So what you were taking issue with was a colonialist vision of literature…

Broadly speaking, yes. What matters is that a foreign author can become a French author, too, written in French for French-speaking readers, and yet retain his or her specificity. So that French can be a welcoming language. Because not one of the clichés that are trotted out for French is true: a language supposedly logical, rationalist. What’s so rational about Rimbaud and Artaud? At least the debate did serve to establish that questions of style do involve foreign language authors. For me, writers are defined first by their rapport with language, even before their ideas.

A few years ago, the Bayard publishing house launched a new translation of the Bible, treating it as a piece of literature. So is it possible to approach even a religious text in this way?

But which religious text are we talking about? I cannot read Hebrew. But even the slightest word to word comparison with French shows up a huge gap. Henri Meschonnic (1932-2009), who spent his life translating the Bible, showed me that the crucial verse “All is vanity and vexation of spirit” – which in French comes out as “All is vanity and pursuit of the wind” – is mistaken. The Hebrew word is “smoke”, not “vanity”. All is smoke, there’s nothing tragic about it. But what can we do? Wipe out the entire Western tradition? What is really interesting here is the remarkable value of the mistranslation. People quoted me as saying that I was restoring the true face of Dostoyevsky. I never claimed to be doing so much. The earlier translations were clearly inaccurate in terms of style, but they did give a certain face to Dostoyevsky. Mine gave him a different one. Incidentally, that’s why I was so keen to translate his entire fictional output as one great poem – and that, when it comes down to it, is the single original aspect of my approach: my intention was to make that face visible in its strangeness, and that could only be done over its full extent. The first novel I translated was greeted with a raging polemic, which flared up again at the next one, but not so fiercely, and in the end died out altogether for lack of fuel, because everything had already been said: the chaotic Dostoyevsky I was offering to readers, with his jumbled syntax, he’s not Balzac – mind you, they said Balzac couldn’t write, either… One might prefer an author to be more polished, but what I myself was so excited about, in the whole experience, was going beyond the concept of error.

You’ve translated Shakespeare, too. He’s English, not Russian, and he invented a great deal of words. In this case, do you speak English?

I make no claim to be an English specialist. I learned it at school like everybody else and I’ve read it ever since I was a teenager (my father trained in English studies and Shakespeare has always been a part of my life). Once again, the issue at stake is the language in which you translate. I’ve translated from Breton, a language I can understand but which I never speak because I never get the opportunity. I even worked on a translation from Strindberg, with people who spoke Swedish. We did it together, word by word. But it happens that I do read English. And I wanted to translate Shakespeare, just because he’s always been a part of my life. There are some magnificent translations in Russian, in particular by Boris Pasternak. I’ve never heard translations in France that have the same strength. Shakespeare invented a verse for Europe. In France, Shakespeare is translated into prose, unrhymed alexandrines and also free verse. That was the kind of verse I needed. Europe is a kind of common metrical area that extends from the Chanson de Roland to Dante. Broadly speaking, I wanted to take Shakespeare back to the 16^th century, in that meter, before the Romantics turned Hamlet into a callow youth. Hamlet, as we find in the text, is a bulky figure of mature years.

How did that kind of misrepresentation creep in?

Misrepresentation is not the right word. The Romantics brought Shakespeare back to us. Ever since, we’ve connected the travails of youth with Hamlet. But Shakespeare was no Romantic. He didn’t live in that age. Romanticism was born within the framework of a complete reexamination of the individual. In order to exist, the movement required certain founding images. Discussion of the historical accuracy of those images leads nowhere. To say that Goethe wasn’t reading Shakespeare properly is just stupid. On the other hand, I claim descent from a line which does not go back to the Romantic mindset. What I am passionate about is the Middle Ages. From this perspective, there are many things in common to be found. In his first soliloquy Hamlet says: “Oh that this too too sullied flesh would melt, / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,…”. Except that for “sullied” there is a variant: “solid”. So, in French, should the flesh be souillée or solide? It’s a sterile question. In Shakespeare there is a radical difference between two kinds of text: the plays and the poems. There are no textual issues in the poems, because they were re-read with a view to publication. But the copies of Shakespeare’s plays were for performance. There was no copyright at the time. If Shakespeare had published a play that he was still producing, he would have deprived himself of a source of income. In the English of 1600, “sullied” and “solid” could be pronounced the same way. And what is this world where that which is solid is also sullied? It’s the world of the late Middle Ages, the world of the plague, the curse of the flesh. It’s the world of Villon, not of Goethe. The way I see it, the entire meaning of Hamlet is based on the transformation of the flesh. The question is not “To be or not to be”, but “How to be and not to be”. In other words, how to be in such a way that the flesh be not mud. What is so remarkable about Hamlet is that the place of God, the place where the word is made flesh, is not a church, but the theater stage. To say that in 1600 is quite extraordinary.

A short biography of André Markowicz

Born in Prague in 1960, André Markowicz spent the first four years of his life in Moscow. Brought up in France in a family of Russian intellectuals, he began translating under the guidance of the linguist Efim Etkind. Chekhov offered Markowicz an initial opportunity to translate prose, but it was with his translation of the complete works of Dostoyevsky for Actes Sud in the early 1990s that he first rose to prominence. During the same period André Markowicz, whose particular mentors were Antoine Vitez and Mathias Langhoff, began translating for the theatre. Together with his partner Françoise Morvan he translated Chekhov’s plays. He also collaborated with Swedish and Breton speakers, when Strindberg or a lament from Brittany required translation. He has also translated some fifteen works by Shakespeare. At present André Markowicz is working on Dead Souls by Gogol and a translation of Russian Romantic poets for an anthology to be called Le Soleil d’Alexandre. Subsequently, he aims to return to Pushkin, his guiding star, the author who calls for the greatest expenditure of time and effort. “I’ve taken thirty years to translate Eugene Onegin,” he says. “It’s my whole life”.