GUEST POST: THAT'S JUST HOW IT IS BY PIERRE AUTIN-GRENIER - ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY ANDREA REECE
Andrea Reece, up-and-coming young translator, explains her translation of French author Pierre Autin - Grenier's That's Just How It Is and why she couldn't stop herself from translating it:
French collection of short stories, GSOH (albeit dark), slightly rebellious and a touch surreal, seeking intrepid UK publisher for a bilingual relationship… So many outstanding French books are translated and published in the UK as this blog shows… but what of the hidden gems that never appear in the 'langue de Shakespeare'?
The European Literature Night Translation Pitch held at the Free Word Centre in June was a superb initiative to remedy this. Eight translators were invited to pitch their translation of a book by a European author not yet published in English before a panel of UK publishers and literary agents and a public audience. I was lucky enough to be invited to participate and delighted that That's Just How It is (C'est tous les jours comme ça, in the original French) got the opportunity to appear before a British audience for the first time ever. And garnered quite a few laughs!
I was so convinced that the book would work in English that I have already translated two-thirds of it (such fun, I couldn't stop!). So perfectly matched is it with the long British tradition of black humour and making light of taboos that it is just crying out (with laughter) for a British readership. I'll let you judge for yourself.
Below, by way of introduction, is an extract from the pitch I gave, followed by my translation of one of the stories:
"This collection of short stories won the French Black Humour Prize in 2011. Set in Lyons some time between the 1968 riots and the near future, it paints a dystopian picture of a police state that crushes individual liberties and where books must carry the warning ‘Reading can lead to serious brain damage’. The stories tip into the surreal when a man eats his boss’s wife and spits out her crocodile handbag, a door-to-door orgasm salesman goes on sick leave, and a retired bullfighter holds a live bullfight in his front room.
The narrator, impoverished writer Anthelme Bonnard, roams his neighbourhood noting down absurdities and abuses of power with the intention of informing the murky, dissident Organisation. Bonnard has Eeyore’s pessimism, Jean Valjean’s humanity and Victor Meldrew’s grumpiness. A French critic described the book as a ‘revolt with a pirouette’. The prose waltzes across the page on the arm of gallows humour. Daily life spins out of control. Will Anthelme Bonnard and his eccentric neighbours finally jettison their slippers and fight back?
The stories have the nonsense and neologisms of Lear and Carroll and the magic realism of Garcia Marquez. They have the Gallic flavour and apartment-block setting of Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, the fantastical surrealism of Marcel Aymé’s The Man Who Walked Through Walls and the dystopian, unbalanced society of George Saunders' Tenth of December. It is three genres in one – short stories, novel and poetry for those who don’t read poems. And finally, as critic John Taylor wrote: 'anyone convinced that modern French literature is humourless has not yet read Pierre Autin-Grenier'.
Corrida
‘Living without bullfighting is not living’; for quite some time now I had been hearing him harp on about the same old thing. You get yourself all worked up with your stories of bullfighting, I was tired of repeating to him, and it’s bad for your health; it’s been years since you kicked the habit and you should be capable of thinking of something else at your age! He would not budge, ‘Life without bullfighting…’. So I was only mildly surprised when, having bestowed a lavish tip on the waiter and as we were about make tracks, point-blank he blurted out: ‘Be at the house at five sharp you’ll see, tonight I’m taking up the cape again’.
At the appointed time I turned up at his apartment block where a handful of anti-bullfighting protestors held back by the municipal police were brandishing two or three banners as they yelled ‘Murderers!’ while in the meantime several people I recognised showed up just as intrigued as I was. Reunion cut short we climbed his spiral staircase four by four to end up, puffing and blowing like old locomotives, in an apartment emptied of all its furniture apart from some folding chairs on which he invited us to take a seat without standing on ceremony. He was dressed in his matador’s costume again; montera in hand he looked more bent over than ever with the ten kilos of gilded embroidery on his shoulders but he cut a fine figure, it has to be said.
We were stupefied, some of us frankly panicked, when the door of the small kitchen suddenly opened releasing into the living room a half-tonne beast already maddened by three sets of banderillas gashing its withers. Our friend’s wife, also in a fever pitch of excitement, put Paquito Chocolatero at full blast on a powerful phonograph. Shudder of anxiety…
For a quarter of an hour, confronted with a bull often lacking brio, aggressive, jerking its head and coming dangerously close, our friend led it on calmly to absolute perfection, disguising his advanced years with an extreme subtlety of movement. Derechazo, bandera and even the orticina invented by the celebrated Pepe Ortiz, he wields the muleta like a butterfly’s wing, his dazzling passes take our breath away. He calls the bull, the beast charges, an imperceptible instant as if frozen in the cradle of its horns then he deals a stunning death-blow a recibir that brings to a delirious end this surely historic bullfighting extravaganza. Exhilarating rapture! Next meeting a fortnight on Saturday; we all agreed to get together for a nice bully beef hash and a few bottles of Grenache.
© Andrea Reece 2015 for the English translation
More of the short stories are available here and further information about Andrea Reece can be found here.