A Translator’s Brexit Lament by Ros Schwartz

Britain’s membership of the EU has defined the contours of my life. In 1974, I dropped out of university in England and ran away to Paris. Because the United Kingdom had just joined the European Economic Community (as it was then), I was able to obtain a precious Carte de séjour and a Carte de sécurité sociale, which allowed me to live and work in Paris. I did all sorts of odd — and I mean odd — jobs. My first was as a telephone operator on the Gare d’Austerlitz train information line. There were lots of us in a very big, open room, using antiquated headsets, and it was hard to hear what the caller was saying. My geography of France was rudimentary. When asked the times of the trains to Port Bou, on the Spanish border, I understood “Bordeaux.” Read on.

'A Broken Mirror' (Le Miroir Brisé) by Ananda Devi for Commonwealth Writers.

‘But this perpetual stage we strut and fret across all our lives allows us to make sense of catastrophes as if we were perpetual audience members, even when they cut to our core. It’s as if we needed a Greek chorus of media outlets and social networks to accompany this tragedy and comment on it and drape it with a deceptive disguise, so as to stomach it more easily.’

In this extraordinary year of self-isolation, future uncertainty, and political upheaval, solace found in the writing of others is more and more crucial to our collective understanding of the changing world around us .

As part of adda’s online collection of creative responses to COVID-19, Ananda Devi’s searing piece takes on the ubiquitous juggernaut that is the global pandemic and its destructive consequences on pre-existing inequality, industrialisation, and technology.

Written in the French and translated in to the English by Jeffrey Zuckerman, A Broken Mirror sits among other isolation meditations from writers Olive Senior, Ben Okri, and Mia Couto.

Illustration by Moira Scicluna Zahra.

Les Fugitives wins Arts Council England emergency funding

It is with complete relief and big, heartfelt thanks that we announce Les Fugitives has been granted financial aid through Arts Council England’s National Lottery funded Emergency Fund.

As with many of our fellow indie presses, the trying and surreal times we find ourselves in has landed our already unpredictable industry in deeper waters.

The funding will allow us to keep publishing the books we love at the (mostly) intended schedule, to produce e-books, and to begin producing audio-visual content to compliment both our existing and forthcoming titles.

Included in this will be an exclusive reading from Julia Kerninon, the author of upcoming English debut A Respectable Occupation; a young adult edition and an audiobook of much beloved Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi, together with outreach work in schools and universities, including Mireille Gansel’s seminal memoir Translation as Transhumance, among other titles to publicise creatively

Now so more than ever the engagement from our readers, reviewers, subscribers, and contributors is keeping this indie press going, for all of your continued support - thank you!

Now, Now, Louison announced a finalist for the 2019 Big Other book award for translation

Now, Now, Louison by Jean Frémon, translated by Cole Swensen has been announced as a finalist for the 2019 Big Other Book Award for Translation. The winner will be announced 16 May 2020, all other finalists can be perused here.

French-American Foundation 2020 Translation Prize Finalists - Now, Now, Louison and The Living Days

More congratulations in order this week for Cole Swensen and Jeffrey Zuckerman!

The French-American Foundation prize awards English translations of French works of fiction and nonfiction. Both translators have been announced as Translation Prize finalists for their translations of Jean Frémon’s Now, Now, Louison and Ananda Devi’s The Living Days, respectively.

This year will be the 33rd Annual Translation Prize and the winning translator in each category will be announced on May 6, 2020.

‘The translator, Cole Swensen, is a poet, and this shows through in the translation. I ached with a kind of nostalgia while I was reading this book … there is nothing odd or affected about the translation: it’s simply an immense achievement on the part of the translator, that the translation communicates the language as if through a lens.’ — Helen Vassalo on Now, Now, Louison for Translating Women

’Jeffrey Zuckerman’s translation is perfect in its power and precision, a magnificent gem.’ – Jennifer Croft on The Living Days

Sophie Lewis's translation of Emmanuelle Pagano's Faces on the Tip of my Tongue longlisted for the International Booker Prize

Congratulations (again) to Sophie Lewis for her translation of Faces on the Tip of my Tongue by Emmanuelle Pagano, translated alongside Jennifer Higgins (Peirene Press).

This year’s selection appears rather traditional in terms of genre with no fiction/non fiction cross over, as in the last two years, rendering our beautiful This Tilting World, translated by Sophie Lewis, an impossible contender.

Other longlistees include the anonymously translated The Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azr (Europa Editions), Garbiela Cabezóns’s The Adventures of China Iron, translated by Iona Macintyre and Fiona Mackintosh (Charco Press), and featuring on the longlist twice, Sophie Hughes, for their translations of Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor (Fitzcarraldo Ediitons) and Mac and His Problems by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated alongside Margaret Jull Costa (Harvill Secker).

This year’s longlist was selected by a panel of five judges and the prize is awarded each year to a single book that is translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland.

The shortlist will be announced on 2nd April and the winner revealed on 19th May. 

The shift in sex and power sweeping France, by Natasha Lehrer, Observer Magazine, 23 Feb. 2020

Ne me touche pas… the shift in sex and power sweeping France

‘It’s a paradox I’ve struggled to understand: how is it that a country that has produced some of the most influential feminist thinkers of the 20th century has a legal system that appears to remain in thrall to the male sexual prerogative?’

In advance of our publication of Nathalie Léger’s The White Dress, read the translator Natasha Lehrer in the Observer Magazine, on the sometimes contradictory state of sex and consent in la belle France.

For Les Fugitives, Natasha has also translated Suite for Barbara Loden, published in 2015.

The Governesses longlisted for the Best Translated Book Awards

** UPDATE ** The Governesses has now been named a fiction finalist for the BTBA prize! ** UPDATE **

Anne Serre’s The Governesses, translated by Mark Hutchinson, has been longlisted for this year’s 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Founded and directed by Chad Post of Open Letter Books, Rochester, New York, the award is open to first translations of fiction and poetry published in the US.

The Governesses was first published in the US by New Directions in October 2018 and in the UK by Les Fugitives in April, 2019. A brilliant introduction to the work of Anne Serre, with high hopes, we wish the best of luck to our friends at New Directions and to all other BTBA longlisted titles!