Ms. Finck, why did Annie Ernaux go almost unnoticed when she first appeared in German at the end of the eighties?
One of the main reasons is the different literary traditions in Germany and France.
And I think that some of the translations were not good.
Then there is the marketing: At that time, Ernaux was sold as women's literature in terms of the cover and the selection of titles.
She was not presented as an intellectual, serious writer, but as erotic entertainment literature from France.
What is important when translating your texts?
Ernaux has a brittle but also very rhythmic way of writing.
Despite the supposed simplicity, one immediately knows when reading: this is literature.
This is due to the rhythm, the simplicity, the avoidance of idiomatic expressions and the conciseness, the many abbreviations.
If you stay syntactically too close to French in German, for example by becoming too dissolute or copying the relative clauses that are dynamic in French but sound bulky in German, it won't work.
Ernaux also has a flat style ethic: she undertakes not to falsely literarise her prosaic past.
That's right, and I keep wondering how difficult it is to translate that. A banal reason for this is that in literary translation one often tries to render the content as idiomatic as possible. That’s just wrong with Ernaux. Because Ernaux never uses the linguistic cliché, never the most common formulation. With other translations, I detach myself more from the structures of the source text. With Ernaux, above all, the rhythm has to be right, so after the first translation I take a step back to French in order to structurally bring the text as close as possible to the source text.
In an interview, Ernaux remarked that she was free to write because, as a high school graduate, she did not have to fear that her parents would read her texts. But also because she feels “deeply lonely” and “feels unable to keep herself from writing”. Do you feel this basic atmosphere and can it be translated?
Yes, I think it can be translated. The better you know an author, the better you are on the trail. With the first book I translated by Ernaux, I could not understand the mood behind a paragraph every now and then. In the meantime I have developed very fine antennas for it. In her last book, "Mémoire de fille", Ernaux writes about her first sex, which was a kind of rape or sexual transgression. She notes that this is a blank space in all of her books because she has not managed to write about it by then. And in fact I now find these passages in your texts. Is that loneliness? Probably, because she carried this trauma around with her and only reported about it in old age.At the same time, the texts suggest a great tenderness. It also has to come across in German, and sometimes that doesn't depend so much on individual words or sentences.