Barbara Wright: Translation as Art

by Debra Kelly (Editor), Madeleine Renouard (Editor)

Legendary publisher and writer John Calder said of Barbara Wright that she was "the most brilliant, conscientious and original translator of 20th century French literature." Wright introduced to an English-speaking readership and audience some of the most innovative French literature of the last hundred years: a world without Alfred Jarry's "Ubu," Raymond Queneau's "Zazie," and Robert Pinget's "Monsieur Songe" scarcely bears thinking about. This wonderful collection of texts about and by Barbara Wright--including work by David Bellos, Breon Mitchell, and Nick Wadley, as well as a previously unpublished screenplay written and translated by Wright in collaboration with Robert Pinget--begins the work of properly commemorating a figure toward whom all of English letters owes an unpayable debt.

Genres: Nonfiction, France

340 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2013

Reviews

[Scribble Orca · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great translator of whom you've probably not heard and whose translations should be a priority - this collection of critical essays, anecdotes, letters and examples of Wright's work is compelling reading and easily demonstrates what makes her writing rise above and beyond the mechanical grope for a meaning exchange, or presentation pulped for a publisher's view of the public, which characterises what frequently passes for translated work - Barbara Wright makes an art of a science because of her unique background. Just as Gass is a foremost (if not the) proponent of the musicality of language, Barbara Wright, whose early training as an accompanist had already developed her ear for the cadence and rhythms of the written word, strove in her renditions to capture not just meaning (content) but form (sound, shape, structure) of the literature dedicated to her enquiring mind. She entered a symbiosis with the work to be translated, reading other pieces by the author including his or her criticism and literary theory, creating numerous drafts with hand-written notes, polished until the translation represented a linguistically equivalent (or in the case of Queneau's Exercises in Style, an extension of) doppelgaenger embodying the author's aims and spirit, but now in English, and often making stylistic and dictional choices which, when contrasted with other translations of the same material, illuminated the disparity between original version and those translations - a close reading chosen by Kelly for inclusion, of Wright's translation of Beckett's Eleutheria with another, being an embarrassing (and for Wright triumphant) case in point.

Wright attuned herself so closely to the author's work that she risked being seen as having flattened (whatever that might mean) a text: her treatment of Sarraute emulated the writer's distancing and interwined selves, respecting Sarraute's use of language to demonstrate the interference of the commenting narrator with the adult narrator relating childhood events. But for Wright it was critical to either remain both respectful and sensitive to a text, or to take up its mantle and follow it through to its logical conclusion, acknowledged also by the Dutch author Elizabeth Badinter, who commented that Wright's translation had improved the original.

She not only worked with Sarraute, but translated Robbe-Grillet's Snaphots and Towards a New Novel (1965). I haven't read either her translation or that of Richard Howard, the translator more often used for Robbe-Grillet, but given the unnerving disparity between Howard's clod-hopping translation of Dans le Labyrinthe and that of Christine Brooke-Rose, I suggest that Howard, despite his vaunted proficiency, captures less of Robbe-Grillet, even though Snapshots is a non-fictional work. It's a pity that Barbara Wright was never asked to work on In the Labyrinth, because she combines all the best qualities of Christine Brooke-Rose, in accompanying form.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

For those unfamiliar with the name Barbara Wright, read the work of Raymond Queneau, Robert Pinget, and Nathalie Sarraute, and be delighted. The legendary translator died in 2009, age 93, and left behind a corpus of fine translations, ranging from Samuel Beckett to Pierre Albert-Birot to Michel Tournier. In the collection, colleagues and friends such as John Calder and Madeline Renouard share remembrances, while translators and critics serve up excellent essays and close readings of her work. Jill Fell looks at her first serious translation, Ubi Roi, done under the aegis of Stefan Themerson of Gaberbocchus Press, which she helped co-found in its heyday, while Debra Kelly touts her excellent rendering of Pierre Albert-Birot’s Grabinoulor, a modernist monsterpiece sans punctuation still unavailable in complete English translation. The excellent close reading of her Eleutheria rendering (Beckett) offers an excellent insight into her work: she was a “method” translator—emerging herself in the author’s work, or in the case of Pinget and Sarraute, becoming close friends, so she could shift easily into the writer’s style, while making her own imaginative stamp on the text. (Her translation of Queneau’s Exercises in Style contains piece created entirely by her, which easily pass as Queneau originals). Included in this collection is a full-length Pinget movie script translated by Wright, which is a nice trainspottery bonus, but a little tiring for me, and seems to pad out the book where more essays would have been welcome. Otherwise, excellent. Read Wright. By a window, 1950s: