Translating Makenzy Orcel’s The Immortals by Candlelight
by Nathan H. Dize
“You’re the writer. You must be quite capable of appropriating all the voices that live inside me, because they’re also your voices.”
I first read The Immortals [Les Immortelles] in 2015 during a cold, gray winter in Lyon, France. I had moved to Lyon the fall before to teach Anglophone World Literature at a local university, and in my free time I spent hours scouring the shelves of the city’s many used bookstores. On a date that I no longer remember, I bought a used press copy of Makenzy Orcel’s award-winning debut novel, The Immortals, and took it home to read. I walked down my street on the way home from a local tramway stop. The stop was sandwiched between the university gardens and some vacant lots for sale, down the street from a few bakeries and elementary schools. As usual, the street was lined with white moving vans. All parked in a row, these vans were all the same in appearance. They were the same height. They all had curtains separating the body from the cab as well as a set blacking out the rear windows. On the dashboard of each and every one sat a white candle melting in the sun by day or by the light of a flame at night. Inside the vans sat sex workers of various ethnic backgrounds and origins who would wave to me as I passed by. These mobile vans were the city’s brothels, its unregulated libidinal economy. Every place, whether in a large city or a tiny town, has spaces like this street in Lyon. In The Immortals, set in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, this street is Grand Rue.
As I read The Immortals then and now years later translating it, I am reminded of the stories of people who go unseen, the stories that we ignore, the stories that make us uncomfortable, the stories of people who might not even think they have the right to a story at all. The Immortals is a novel about stories. It is a novel about women telling stories about and with one another. It is a novel dedicated to women who lost their lives in a brief period of time, and who deserve to have their stories recorded, told, and shared in English translation.
At the center of The Immortals is the story of Shakira, a girl seeking freedom from her mother, dogmatic evangelism, and the intricacies of her lived reality through literature. For Shakira, reading is her escape. She falls in love with a novel called L’Espace d’un cillement, In the Flicker of an Eyelid, by Jacques Stephen Alexis about a self-aware young Haitian-Cuban woman nicknamed “La Niña Estrellita.” Although it is tempting to read Shakira as the mirror image of Alexis’s protagonist, she is perhaps more like another character in the novel, a Cuban woman named “La Rubia” who surreptitiously pens her own story in her elaborate handwriting, inspired by her reading the seventeenth-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz by candlelight. Even though the narrator of The Immortals is not a reader herself, Shakira indirectly teaches her that stories can be passed on, immortalized even, through the written word.
I first came to The Immortals as a reader. But like any learner of another language, my story did not begin in 2015 with this novel. As a child I wasn’t much of a reader. I was more of a listener. I still recall my grandfather’s stories of the Eastern Shore of Maryland and his ancestral home on Tangier Island. I remember NPR stories naively overheard in the car about conflicts in Iraq, Kosovo, and Rwanda. I also listened to many a story read to me by my loving parents. In high school, I started seriously reading, reading for myself, at the same moment I started to learn French. The teachers at the international baccalaureate school I attended painstakingly curated our reading lists, ensuring that the curriculum included drama, novels, poetry, and short stories from across the globe. In French class, my Martinican-born teacher refused to teach us a homogenous, France-centric vision of Francophone culture. We read Maryse Condé, gave presentations on Aimé Césaire, and memorized and recited Léopold Sédar Senghor’s “Femme nue, femme noire.”
In those vulnerable and awkward teenage years, I, too, found literature and translation to be my solace. Following my teachers’ lead, I sought out and devoured books about French and Francophone cultures in my high school and early college years in English translation. Although, I grew frustrated. I couldn’t read the lion’s share of the stories I’d hoped to because only certain books in French, mostly novels and mostly from France, were translated and available for purchase or at my local library. I realized that in order to keep reading, to access more stories from the Francophone Caribbean, I would need to learn to read in French and perhaps later, the Creoles from Guadeloupe, Haiti, and Martinique. As I continued to read in French, I started to scrawl translations of parts of novels, pieces of sentences, and verses of poetry, in my spare time. Much like my reading practice, my translation practice was a secret. When I asked my professors about translation, some were supportive, others weren’t. Yet, I remember one of my most trusted mentors telling me that I before translating a work of literature that one should learn as much as possible about that place, their language(s), and its people.
These experiences and lessons are what I have sought to bring to the translation of Makenzy Orcel’s poetic novel The Immortals. When I began this project one night in September 2018, it started out as a surreptitious draft. I kept it from everyone around me and translated page by page, night after night until I had a large portion of the novel done. At a certain point, I thought back to the reader I used to be, the one who needed translation to access more books. Later, I went online to find the contact information for the novel’s French publisher to see if the translation rights were available for the United States, excited by the thought of sharing my reading with others. Sitting at my desk quietly hoping for a positive response, I continued to translate, reminded every day in the United States, and indeed elsewhere, that many of the stories that we have access to are often only the ones that we want to hear. Too many of the stories about Haiti in English are exactly that, what we want to hear and what we permit Haiti and Haitians to say.
Translation is a process, it is almost equal parts writing as it is listening. When I think back to my professor’s advice, I know now that she wasn’t discouraging me from the practice of translation, but instead, she was implying that translation requires a deep cultural knowledge. It requires expertise that includes and extends beyond language. It requires ethical practice. For Haiti, this means that translators have to be attuned to the conditions that scholar and translator Kaiama L. Glover argues leaves Haiti “primed for its denigration” on the global stage.
The January 12, 2010 earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince is, in recent memory, the most poignant example of how Haiti and Haitian stories are mishandled, trotted out on the news, and exploited for the gain of anyone but Haitians themselves. Translating Haitian stories requires an acknowledgement of these conditions because they are the forces the translator must routinely seek to counter. For me, as a white man, a student pursuing a PhD at a prestigious US institution, and a scholar of Haitian culture, it is worth taking a step back and acknowledging that my physical presence in Haiti would most likely tie me to a Christian mission or to a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). Not that any of these things warrant an apology at face value, but they all involve an uneven distribution of power vis-à-vis Haitians, including successful, published authors.
Of the many parts of The Immortals that I could cite in this afterword, I chose the quoted passage above because these words have been my refrain as a translator to not lose sight of the stories within the novel and my responsibility to convey them in language that they merit. The Immortals is a book written and translated by men, yet it is populated with women’s voices, their kinship, and their shared intimacies. In the wake of the earthquake, stories about Haitian women in the international press seldom incorporated the perspectives of Haitian women themselves. To engage with the voices of Haitian women is first to recognize that there is not only one Haitian woman. In The Immortals Haitian women are neither a homogeneous group, nor are they monolithic. In the novel we witness the growth of Shakira and the narrator’s relationship with her, the reciprocity of their love and care for one another as well as their arguments and trivial gripes. The women in The Immortals worship Vodou spirits, practice evangelical Christianity, and some reject theism outright. To translate this novel into English is my attempt, albeit modest, to provide stories of Haitians and Haitian women that audaciously defy the stories we tell in the United States about Haitians. More than a decade after the quake, this work, like translation itself, is an ongoing process.
As I read and translated The Immortals, I kept thinking about the white vans on that street in Lyon. I thought about the candles melting in the cabs, the Black and Maghrebine women sitting there, calling out to the whims of every passerby. When the candles are plunged into darkness, everything becomes imperceptible. When the women move from the cab to the back of the van, into the void, anything can happen and nothing can be seen from the outside. Although Grand Rue, the boulevard that cuts laterally across downtown Port-au-Prince, is not the seventh arrondissement of Lyon, the women in The Immortals in Lyon share a similar story. It is a story that links the dim light of a clandestine hotel room to the obscure belly of a white van. My hope is that translation might help us to see into that void, to understand what happens in that negative space. Translation might be one of the best ways to hear stories of women living their lives, sometimes in the dark, sometimes by the light of a candle.
This essay is a previously unpublished afterword written to accompany the author’s translation of Makenzy Orcel’s The Immortals (SUNY Press, 2020).
Nathan H. Dize is the translator of three Haitian novels: The Immortals by Makenzy Orcel (SUNY Press, 2020), I Am Alive by Kettly Mars (UVA Press, (Fall, 2022), and Antoine of Gommiers (Schaffner Press 2023). He has written or translated for publications such as archipelagos, Caribbean Quarterly, the Journal of Haitian Studies, LitHub, sx salon, and Words Without Borders. He is a founding member of the Kwazman Vwa collective and, as of fall 2023, Assistant Professor of French at Washington University in Saint Louis.
Originally published on Hopscotch Translation
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
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