Translating Manchette into English
Donald Nicholson-Smith, who translated into English 3 books by a Jean-Patrick Manchette, the French author of subversive crime fiction, talks about his experience.
... refaire les grands Américains c'est faire autre chose qu'eux.... Que fait-on quand on refait un truc avec la distance, parce que ce n'est plus l’époque du truc? Il y a eu une époque du polar à l'américaine. Écrire en 1970, c'était tenir compte d'une nouvelle réalité sociale, mais c'était tenir compte aussi du fait que la forme-polar est passée parce que son époque est passée: réutiliser une forme dépassée, c'est l'utiliser référentiellement, c'est l'honorer en la critiquant, en l'exagérant, en la déformant par tous les bouts.
-- Manchette interview, Polar 12 (1980; Chroniques, p. 16]
La [traduction] réclame beaucoup de dictionnaires; mais les dictionnaires ne sont rien sans la passion: celui qui, devant un mot aussi simple que pipeline, ne se renseigne pas sur le soubassement géologique de l'action afin de savoir s'il s'agit d'un oléoduc ou d'un gazoduc, celui-là devrait jouer du violon ou aller au travail, plutôt qu'embouteiller la noble profession de traducteur. Alors celle-ci cesserait d'être payée 40 balles le feuillet, ou même 30. Mais bien sûr une telle réforme est impossible, et d'autre part elle est ridicule en face d'une future harmonie sociale où le traducteur, n'en doutons pas, oeuvera gratuitement, et se nourrira de même, dans les pimpants phalanstères.
-- Manchette, Polar 26 (March 1983; Chroniques, p. 263)
ASM: Of the four Manchette novels published in English up to now you are the translator of three, namely Le petit bleu de la Côte Ouest, or Three to Kill (City Lights, 2002); Fatale (New York Review Books, 2011; and Ô dingos, ô châteaux!, or The Mad and the Bad (New York Review Books, 2014). You assisted Jim Brook, your friend and associate, on his translation of La position du tireur couché as The Prone Gunman (City Lights, 2002). And you are now working on La Princesse du sang. This means, setting aside graphic versions, that you have almost singlehandedly introduced Manchette to readers of English. But in an earlier part of your translating career you worked only on scholarly nonfiction. I am curious to know how this shift came about.
DNS: It is true that my chief activity as a translator was once largely confined to academic works, especially in the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis (Piaget, Wallon, Laplanche and Pontalis, etc.). I also put a good deal of effort into translating Situationist writings, including the two programmatic books of Vaneigem and Debord – respectively, the Traité de savoir-vivre and La société du spectacle, both first published in 1967 and of course hugely influential during the "events" of the following year.
I have never really abandoned these "specialities," but around 2000 I ventured into more "literary" pastures (not that Vaneigem and Debord are not literary!), tackling fiction and even poetry in the shape of Apollinaire's Letters to Madeleine. I soon found myself translating novels, especially crime novels.
ASM: How did you come to focus so much on Manchette?
DNS: In the mid-to-late nineties, considering how little French crime fiction was being translated into English, I tried to pitch to publishers the idea of a series that would highlight the new writing that had been going in the genre in the aftermath of 1968 – to import, in other words, the néopolar, along with its forerunners and dissidents. It was an idea, sadly, whose time had not yet come, and it died the death. Today things are very different. Let's come back to this later.
What did result from this otherwise fruitless endeavor of mine was that I began translating Manchette myself. I could not, perhaps, have chosen a more difficult author in the field, but of course, as the inventor of the term néo-polar and the supposed prime mover in this tendency, he was an obvious first choice.
But I had another, more subjective reason for my interest in Manchette. He and I were born within a few days of one another, albeit on opposite sides of the Channel. And while I can hardly be accused of astrological tendencies, I confess that I have always felt an affinity for Manchette that was uncannily reinforced when I read his Journal 1966-1974 and found that we seemed to have been reading the same books and following parallel cultural and political paths. We even discovered the Situationist International at the same time, in 1965, with similar long-term outcomes. So I feel that Manchette is perfectly suited to my ideal goal as a translator: the successful "channeling" of one's author – the ability, as it were, to get inside their head.
ASM: Why do you say "supposed" prime mover with respect to the néopolar?
DNS: Well, because Manchette so thoroughly disavowed the two opposing directions taken by those writers who were clumped together under this label: "J'ai formé ... le mot 'néo-polar' sur le modèle des mots de 'néopain', 'néovin' ou même 'néoprésident' par quoi la critique radicale désigne les ersatz qui, sous un nom illustre, ont partout remplacé la même chose." ("Ravale ta salive, petite tête!" Le Matin, 24 février 1981; Chroniques, p. 200). A clear echo of the Situationists' contemptuous use of the term 'néo-dada'.
In his last interview, in 1991, Manchette elaborates: "Les ouvertures du 'néopolar' ont été progressivement conquises par des littérateurs (d'Art) ou bien des racketeurs stalino-trotskystes gorbachévophiles." ("La Position du romancier noir solitaire", interview with Yannick Bourg, Combo 8.) Of course the narcissism of small differences might well be evoked here, because Manchette's entire inner conversation over the years turned on the (ultimately impossible) sabotaging of literary aestheticism ("le Beau") on the one hand and the increasingly difficult task, on the other, of putting writing at the service of a rapidly receding social revolution.
Here is Manchette, in the same interview, on this last question: "Quand j'ai vu que je n'étais plus capable d'opérer derrière les lignes ennemies avec des romans noirs, j'ai laissé tomber." He is referring to his much-discussed "silence", the moment around 1981 when he ended his ten-volume, decade-long cycle of novels and shifted to bread-and-butter writing, to what he called "industrial art" (i.e. the entertainment industry, or the spectacle).
All this is well known, and I bring it up here only because the above-decribed double conflict within Manchette determines his style/anti-style and all the devices and idiosyncrasies that characterize it and make him such a challenging author to translate.
ASM: Could you give some examples?
DNS: Okay. Let me take "classical style" first and political struggle second and look in turn at how Manchette's perpetual wrestling with each creates special difficulties for his translator.
Here is Jean Echenoz's answer to the question whether Manchette's style may be described as classical. His writing, says Echenoz,
possède tellement sa propre capacité à être classique qu'elle peut finalement en rajouter presque, j'allais dire, hystériquement dans la rigueur littéraire tout en pervertissant insidieusement ce classicisme-là. La question que je me pose, c'est de savoir dans quel sens le mouvement se fait. Manchette partait-il d'une écriture, qui s'autorise – en étant complètement maîtrisée – des jeux extraclassiques, ou bien procédait-il dans le sens inverse? Je ne sais pas très bien. (Interview with Gaëlle Bayssière, Polar special issue, [Paris: Payot/Rivages, 1997], p. 16.)
And here is Alfred Eibel, in an appraisal of Chroniques, on Manchette's complicated attitude to the undoubted "beauty" of Chandler's style: "Faut-il se contenter d'écrire des romans noirs juste avec la tonalité qu'il faut, sans l'once d'une rénovation formelle? L'amateur de littérature générale dira des écrivains de polars qu'ils manquent de panache, de style, qu'ils écrivent platement, écrivent mal. En réalité, ils n'écrivent pas plus mal que d'autres." But for Manchette, Eibel notes, "le genre, sous peine de devenir une forme vide, 'ne peut rester réconcilié avec la beauté [en choisissant] de se replier sur les acquis stylistiques du XIXième siècle, de tomber en dehors de l'honorabilité littéraire.'" ("À Propos des Chroniques de Jean-Patrick Manchette," Polar, special issue, op. cit., p. 39.)
Looking back in 1991, Manchette himself summed up his dilemma in its most extreme form: "ma part de succès littéraire se confond avec ma part d'échec" (Combo interview as cited above).
Echenoz (like others) notes Manchette's way of introducing "maladresses feintes" into otherwise impeccably constructed sentences - "une boiterie surajoutée complètement délibérée, à la limite de la préciosité ... mais une préciosité qui se moque d'elle-même (ibid., pp. 16, 17). The translator, who is already confronted by the near-impossibility of conveying the very connotation of a classical French style, can only echo (even perhaps play up) the various shifts in register whereby Manchette provocatively interrupts the flow of his narration. These include sarcastic asides, collusive winks and nods to the reader, and the very occasional introduction of an authorial first person. The frequent use of humor - Manchette's jocularity has been described as "Molière mis à jour par Marx" – also serves as a technique of distanciation.
One such shift that is continual in Manchette's work is the sudden intrusion of vernacular or even obscene speech into otherwise polished discourse. In his helpful discussion of Manchette's various ploys, Jean-François Gérault quotes a sample of direct speech (!) from Nada which while exploding elegance of style simultaneously telegraphs information about Manchette's (Situationist) political worldview:
Sous mon apparence froide et apprêtée se cachent et bouilonnent se cachent les flammes de la haine la plus brûlante à l’égard du capitalisme technobureaucratique qui a le con en forme d'urne et la gueule en forme de bite. (Jean-Patrick Manchette: Parcours d'une oeuvre [Paris: Encrage, 2000], p. 80.)
Gérault goes on (ibid.) to cite an extreme case of this procedure from chapter 18 of Que d'os which verges on self-parody (and which thank God I have not yet been called upon to translate!):
J'avais la langue suburrale comme une wassingue sale et le front habiliteux. Mes perceptions étaient lancinées et il me semblait que je baignais dans du galipot. J'étais vachement labile et quand Charlotte m'a eu fait lever, ce n'était ni le pied ni l'oarystis, de sorte que j'ai méchamment jaboté et même crié raca sur elle, en titubant comme un ophite, Bref, vous voyez le tableau, et que j'étais camé comme un boeuf.
ASM: Translating slang must be a problem that arises often, and can hardly, I imagine, be confined to Manchette?
DNS: That's true, of course. Try translating San Antonio! But in Manchette's case there is the additional issue of trying to reflect the differing levels of tongue-in-cheekness, so to speak, ranging from humor, as in the passage just quoted, to the disruptiveness that meets his aforementioned need to transgress aesthetic canons.
In addition, as you surmise, Manchette's translator confronts all the usual problems associated with argot, notably the massive and varied extension of slang (or slangs) across the English-speaking world. Manchette's French readers distinguish easily for instance between parigot, verlan, or quaint underworld cant. How are such variations and connotations to be echoed in English? And a major issue (to my mind at least) is the danger of anachronism. With Manchette's novels of the 1970s, specifically, one must eschew the use of colloquialisms that have come into use since that time. As a matter of fact I have just finished translating Jean-Paul Clébert's Paris insolite, from 1952, a work that relies heavily on Parisian vernacular, so I am very much attuned to this problem.
ASM: The most commonly mentioned distinguishing feature of Manchette's style is its comportementalisme, or behaviorism, adopted as a way of purging the text of emotional or psychological content. Is this problematical for the translator?
DNS: Not really, as important as it is. The term itself, incidentally, though widely used in this connection in French, not least by Manchette himself, sounds quite odd to English speakers, whose idea of behaviorism is usually confined to the psychological theories of the likes of B. F. Skinner and his famous black box. As for the style itself, perhaps because it is modeled on Hammett and other Americans, it goes easily enough into English.
ASM: Well, the analogy seems pretty clear anyway: behaviorist theory favors determinism over free will, and Manchette is clearly concerned with the way in which our consumer society deprives the individual and indeed the working class as a whole of agency.
DNS: I quite agree, naturally. But Manchette is in revolt against strict social determinism, whereas behaviorism accepts and seeks to instrumentalize it.
ASM: Which brings us, doesn't it, to the question you were going to address, namely Manchette's second struggle in his writing, that with political commitment – what some have called, in the wake of Barthes, his "engagement manqué"?
DNS: Yes, that's right. Manchette saw (and lived) the years 1968-1974 as holding out the promise of social revolution. As I mentioned earlier, this prospect diminished in his eyes as the decade advanced, and he eventually abandoned his great series of romans noirs partly on the grounds that such writing could no longer contribute – I am simplifying, I know - to revolutionary struggle. For readers of that time the political attitudes with which Manchette infused (or, more accurately, sparsely peppered) his novels were clearly identifiable as such marxisant and largely Situationist postures as opposition to the culture industry and universal commodification. But readers of today in non-French cultures such as the American are far less likely to pick up on Manchette's often allusive references. Much of the - often enthusiastic - discussion of the English-language translations of the novels completely fails to register the nature and context of Manchette's troubled weltenschauung. This is a disappointment to the translator, but there is probably little to be done about it!
ASM: I suppose Manchette's occasional use of détournements, which often have a political intent as well as being a device for keeping classical style at bay, are likely to escape run-of-the-mill readers in a similar way?
DNS: Yes, certainly. It is worth noting by the way that some of his variations on others' texts serves no purpose beyond that of paying homage. Think of the famous incipit of la Position du tireur couché:
C'était l'hiver et il faisait nuit. Arrivant directement de l'Arctique, un vent glacé s'engouffrait dans la mer d'Irlande, balayait Liverpool, filait à travers la plaine du Cheshire (où les chats couchaient frileusement les oreilles en l'entendant ronfler dans la cheminée) et, par-delà la glace baissée, venait frapper les yeux de l'homme assis dans le petit fourgon Bedford.
Then compare and contrast the opening of Chandler's story "Red Wind":
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.
But perhaps I should have said mainly homage, because Manchette cannot resist changing the register here with his joke about Cheshire cats.
Which said, when the Baron, in Chapter 13 of Fatale, (in)appositely quotes verbatim a long passage from Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, the political intention is clear. The same may be said of the quotation from Sade's Juliette that is the closing sentence of the same book: "FEMMES VOLUPTUEUSES ET PHILOSOPHES, C'EST À VOUS QUE JE M'ADRESSE." But it is a fair bet that few readers indeed catch these. The best the translator can do is identify them and follow the original text if it already exists in English.
Curiously, détournements of this kind too in Manchette are a kind of homage – specifcally to Guy Debord, whose Society of the Spectacle is almost entirely made up of détournements of one sort or another. As time passes, and especially when works are translated, an author's original expectation that such references will be recognized can only fade. (In the case of the Debord book, great efforts have fortunately been made, notably by Ken Knabb recently, to trace sources.)
ASM: Are there other trademark characteristics of Manchette's practice that cause the translator to scratch his head?
DNS: You have named one: trademarks! He continually uses a kind of anti-product placement as a way of pointing up the way we experience the advanced capitalist world. By meticulously naming the brands of cigarettes or the makes of automobiles Manchette is as much concerned to mock consumerism as to hew fast to some "behaviorist" modus scribendi. This puts one strongly in mind, unsurprisingly, of Perec's pioneering novel Les Choses. As translator, my policy is always to retain trademarks even when they may now be unrecognizable to the reader. For me, the imperative of keeping a period feel trumps many other considerations. I tend to eschew footnotes, for example, as far as humanly possible. These days, after all, most readers can easily google anything they don't understand.
ASM: In a similar way Manchette seemed to have an almost fetishistic concern for complete accuracy about the models and material particulars of firearms.
DNS: Yes, he did. It is one of his tics – and doubtless much more than a tic. In a late "Note Noire" entitled "Traduc-tueur", in Polar 11 (December 1993), he takes the translator of a novel by Jon A. Jackson in the Série Noire severely to task for a bungled rendering of the properties of Remington's Accelerator ammo (Chroniques, pp. 316f). And in an even later contribution, probably his last, in Polar 15 (May 1995), under the heading "Kanonensong", he offers translators a veritable short course in ballistics, concluding a little wrily: "La prochaine fois nous étudierons les concrétions d'oxyde de fer dans les falaises dans les calcaires diaclasées." (ibid., pp. 359-64).
ASM: Manchette was a prolific translator himself. He published thirty-odd translations, often in collaboration with his wife Mélissa. Have you learned from him?
DNS: Manchette's copious criticism of translations into French has many lessons for the practitioner working in the other direction:
D'une manière générale, il me semble qu'un traducteur de romans noirs (ou un auteur) devrait avoir acquis une documentation "permanente" sur les armes, les véhicules, l'organisation de la police et de la justice, un peu de "criminologie", et puis tous ces petits détails qui font la vie quotidienne (les marques de cigaretttes, de boissons, par exemple, et tout le fatras désormais rangé sous le nom de "culture"). (Ibid., p.317.)
We certainly have our marching orders! But of course our job is not to question Manchette's punctiliousness, but simply to mirror it.
ASM: I would like to ask you about titles. In your translations, Le Petit Bleu de la Côte Ouest becomes Three to Kill and Ô Dingos ô Châteaux becomes The Mad and the Bad. Can you explain?
DNS: Well, titles are often a big issue with translations, and often they are changed quite unnecessarily. Just look at the title changes for books translated from English for the Série Noire – or likewise for foreign films in general, which the French have long had an almost perverse wish to alter completely!
As for Le petit bleu de la Côte Ouest, a title frankly untranslatable because of its multiple possible connotations in French, the solution was easy, because the book already had a good alternative title, Trois Hommes à abattre, used for a film version in 1980 and for movie tie-in editions – hence Three to Kill.
In the case of Ô Dingos ô Châteaux, things were not so simple: once again the original title, a détournement of a famous line from Rimbaud, "Ô saisons, ô châteaux", would not travel. And the alternative Folle à tuer, once again used for a film, posed problems too. I finally opted for The Mad and the Bad, a reference to the Scottish anti-psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who argued that society labeled deviants as either mad or bad, because in the novel Julie is "freed" from what is clearly an anti-psychiatric institution. Naturally many people do not get this, but it does serve to tie the book to its moment, the year 1972, when anti-psychiatry was all the rage.
ASM: Could you possibly give us a thumbnail sketch of today's publishing landscape regarding the translation of French crime fiction in general and of Manchette in particular?
DNS: Well, the situation today is night and day as compared with the late nineties when I was shopping around for a publisher willing to start a series of French polars in translation. In those days I was met with blank stares, or, if I was lucky, the answer that such an idea was a commercial nonstarter, and imported crime fiction in general a hopeless cause in the U.S. and U.K. markets. A few years later the phenomenal sales of Stig Larsson's trilogy precipitated the "Scandi-noir" revolution and little by little thereafter Anglo publishers, new and old, adopted a new attitude altogether.
For a quick (if somewhat discombobulated) bird's-eye view of the current prospects for French crime writing in English translation, let me direct you to some notes put out in August 2015 by the Book Office of the French Embassy's Cultural Services in New York City: "Rethinking the Littérature de Gare: Crime Fiction in France and the U.S.", which may be found online at http://frenchculture.org/books/news/rethinking [etc.]. The authors of this report mention many of the publishers now actively interested. A fuller listing would include Europa, Little, Brown/Mulholland, Pegasus, Akashic, Quercus/MacLehose, Gallic, Bitter Lemon, Toby Press, Melville House, Penguin Random House, Serpent's Tail, New York Review Books and a good many others. The reporters also achieve the not inconsiderable feat of summarizing the development of the polar in France in recent decades without once mentioning Manchette! A very useful link is given to an ongoing inventory of all French crime novels published in English in the last few years.
Understandably, given its promotional mandate, this quick survey takes a very sanguine tone. Even today, however, it is startling to realize just how much first-rate writing remains untranslated. Before 2000 you could almost count the French-language crime writers in English translation on the fingers of one hand: Simenon, of course – and for the longest time; Japrisot; Boileau and Narcejac; a couple of Deanincckxes published in 1991 and 1994 by Serpent's Tail; and what else? – it's hard to say! That situation has since changed, certainly. But consider how few of the following authors from a "wish list" of mine from 1999 have since made it – or made it in any significant way - into English: Bialot, Jonquet, Manchette, Prudon, Ryck, Siniac, Vautrin, Bastid, Picouly, Izzo, Dumal. A,D.G., Mosconi, Syregeol, Amila, Demure, Pouy, Le Corré.... And that particular wish list was restricted to Série Noire authors!
ASM: Well, you have certainly done your bit to rectify the situation! What is the outlook now for Manchette's furher penetration of the Anglo-Saxon realm?
DNS: Four novels are out and in print. In parallel, thanks to the great efforts of the late Kim Thompson and his Fantagraphics Books of Seattle and of the indefatigable Doug Headline, Manchette's son and keeper of his flame, three of Tardi's magnificent BD versions have appeared in English. Given the current climate, it seems reasonable to suppose that the main body of Manchette's work will end up in English before long.
ASM: And you yourself have not hung up your gloves, because you say you are at work on the posthumously published and uncompleted novel La Princesse du sang?
DNS: Yes, but only after some hesitation as to this choice of "the next Manchette to do", because its unfinishedness could put readers off. On the other hand, this very aspect of the book might foster a sharper awareness of its author's life and writing. We'll see.
ASM: Thank you so much for answering my questions.
DNS: The pleasure has been all mine.