With every translation there is a challenge. For me, for this book, it was most of all the fact that Andrée Michaud’s style and voice are very different from how I write, leading to a first draft that was akin to the book writing a straitjacket on. Michaud is an exceptional stylist, and it is a daunting if not impossible task to trace all the tiny whorls and loops of the author’s prose. A good translation will land very close to its original, knowing where to swerve away to preserve the text’s intention, and when to mimic the French more strictly to convey something crucial. Some translators — including me, usually — often prefer to keep full stops as they are in the original and then punctuate sentences internally as needed, to suit the target language. But this technique could not work for Andrée Michaud’s style, given its unusual grammatical constructions, and resulted in ungainly English sentences confusing to parse, let alone to read in any fluent way. Adhering too closely to the original, both syntactically and stylistically, meant, paradoxically, that the text lost some of its character and verve. Thankfully, Noah Richler was a wise and thoughtful counsellor. He persuaded me that I might confidently step further away from the dictates of the French language while still being true to Andrée Michaud’s intentions in order to retain the novel’s singular voice.
A further note: all quotations of books are from published versions of either the original English or original English translation, except for the quotations from Jean Sioui on page 70 and Étienne Klein on page 241, neither of which have been translated yet. I have done my best to render these with the sensitivity they are due.
I would like to thank Andrée A. Michaud, Noah Richler, Elizabeth Mitchell, Gemma Wain, and Maria Golikova.