A bowl is a bowl is a cup

A bowl is a bowl is a cup

by Lara Vergnaud

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I’m ahead of schedule, I realize. I might even finish this translation early, I preen. 

This unfamiliar feeling of impressive (nay, spectacular!) time management will soon prove itself false. Because I am most certainly not ahead of schedule, and this despite having had a decade to finish my translation. 

Let me start at the beginning. It is 2013 and I am a graduate student riding a train reading a book. A novel by the French author Joy Sorman, titled Comme une bête, which can be translated literally as Like a Beast or Like an Animal, or more liberally as Beastly. For the purposes of this essay, I’ll use my working title: Hog Wild. The book recounts the strange evolution of an apprentice butcher named Pim who becomes increasingly obsessed with his craft and the animals on his chopping block. He goes mad for meat. 

The novel is meticulously researched and occasionally repulsive. Sorman cares more about playing with register and structure than classic plot and character development. Accordingly, the story meanders and digresses, it gleefully skids off the tracks and back on again. One publisher read a sample I translated shortly after reading the novel and responded, “I don’t get it. Nothing really happens.” To which I was tempted to retort en effet, which means “indeed” in French, though in English the oft-implied “and so what?” gets lost. I submitted the book to several publishers back then, mostly to glacial silence, though occasionally a beleaguered editor would offer me a kind rejection. Then, every year or so, I would pull Hog Wild out of its virtual drawer, clean up my sample, send it around again. 

This former self strikes me as so naïve now, so eager. She read a French book she loved, which she was going to translate and get published! I wish I could wave her over. Come here, kid, I want to tell you a few things. Though eagerness is an unduly maligned trait, isn’t it? Because I kept submitting my sample, albeit with less frequency and a certain resignation, until 2022, when I finally found an interested publisher in Restless Books (thanks to editor extraordinaire Alison Gore, who is as fascinated by Sorman’s singular style as I am).

A nice little success story, right? Perhaps not as glamorous as Jennifer Croft tirelessly championing Olga Tokarczuk all the way to the Booker Prize,^[1] or as impressive as Jordan Stump quietly, flawlessly, taking Marie NDiaye from indie press to Big 5. But still. Maybe my translator brethren recognize something here? A shared and at times irrational tenaciousness, for example.

I’ve been translating Hog Wild for the past eight months, alongside other projects and, quite simply, parenting. I am always happy to return to this project because after so many years, translating Sorman’s writing comes naturally to me, her stylistic tics familiar and pleasing to replicate, the novel’s near-anthropological level of detail leading to interesting research, vegetarian though I once was. Whereas many translations can feel like labor, like a matter of wrangling and cajoling, this novel has felt—please forgive me—like a joy. 

Little wonder, then, that I was so easily lulled into a false sense of complacency. I forgot that novels are not docile creatures, or at least not to their translators. However proficient your second language, not to mention your first, the repetitive, drawn-out nature of translation, the endless typing and deleting and googling, does something to the brain: you lose sight of the neat delineation between source language and target language. Is this English? Is this correct English? Is this beautiful English?

One month away from my deadline—right about when I started preening—I decided to review my entire translation in one sitting. One final read-through. I got stuck on the first line. A sentence I must have rewritten five or six times in the ten years since I first read Sorman’s novel. It’s perfect, I remember thinking when I returned to my translation last year. Leave it alone. 

Here’s the sentence in my initial sample, 2013:

From the first image he’s in the shot, haloed in white and in dignity, knife in hand. At first, you can only see his chest covered by an apron, his hands gloved in metal. Then the camera recedes, the young man appears in one smooth motion, all the parts are there, feet to head: a butcher. 

And my working draft, 2022: 

From the first image he’s in the shot, girded in white and dignity, holding a knife. You can only see his chest covered with an apron, and his hands gloved in metal. Then the camera pulls back, the young man appears in his entirety, all the parts are there, from head to toe: a butcher. 

It’s… fine? 

But translating is nothing if not revising and often. Obsessively, even? (My brethren are perhaps smiling here in wearied commiseration.)

Here’s the final^[2] version, 2023:

He’s in the frame from the opening shot, swathed in white and dignity, wielding a knife. At first you only see a chest bisected by an apron, and hands gloved in metal. Then the camera pulls back, the young man appears in his entirety, all parts accounted for, head to toe: a butcher. 

I found more mistakes, of course, mainly small. For example: “A solution that prevents coagulation.” Oh Lara, I thought. Did you maybe mean an anti-coagulant? Or a young woman I described as “knotty” instead of “sinewy,” inadvertently and cruelly aging her. There was this gem half-way through the novel: “digital prints on the metallic counter.” Fingerprints, obviously. 

Then, the bowl jumped out at me. How could I have missed this?

Sorman is describing Pim’s morning routine, the daily exhaustion of apprenticing to be a butcher:

For the first two months the nausea is constant, stagnant and gnawing, verging on melancholic: the blood, the smells, the entrails, and the Clorox, but also the fatigue, the early mornings, the bowl of bitter coffee drunk alone at the kitchen table, the stomach incapable of ingesting any food even as the body demands more rest.

In France, it’s not uncommon to drink coffee out of a small bowl. No French reader would think twice. But an Anglophone reader… Wouldn’t you stop? Wouldn’t you wonder—why a bowl? Is Pim out of mugs? Does Pim drink coffee in such volume that he requires a larger receptacle? 

The problem is that the bowl is a trifle, a detail setting the mood for a more important image: exhausted Pim. This time, Sorman (and by extension, me) doesn’t want to send the reader off on a tangent. 

So I swap it with cup. Easy enough. 

Then, doubt sets in.

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One reason the French drink, or drank rather, the tradition subsiding, their coffee out of bowls was to have room to dunk the previous day’s hardened bread (and later, a pain au chocolat, a jam-coated tartine, etc.). There is gastronomic significance, in other words, and, if you like, if you dig deep, a commentary about post-war France and an entire generation forever marked by years of privation, and how they then raised their children to waste not, want not. 

I happen to be married to a Frenchman, which has meant, among other things, a near-annual pilgrimage to the small town in eastern France where his parents live and a stay in their house where I am forever searching for one of four coffee cups they own (all of which I offered them as Christmas presents, and which reside deep in various cupboards, gathering dust). And for over a decade (about as long as I have been translating Joy Sorman), during every visit, every night, my mother-in-law, a child of that post-war generation, has set out four bowls on the kitchen table for the next day’s coffee (or hot chocolate). A habit, I understand now that I’m a mother as well, intended to save time. To minimize the chaos of the pre-school routine, for example. But not just. It’s also arguably a socio-economic marker. Volume and rapidity superseding gourmandize. For decades, my father-in-law worked a “trois-huit”—rotating shifts at the Peugeot car factory, most often the 4 a.m.-12 p.m. slot. Even now, several years into retirement, he drinks his coffee steadily and urgently, with one singular aim: caffeination.^[3]

For over a decade, during every visit to his parents’ home, my husband and I have nonchalantly put away our bowls in the morning and begun the hunt for the coffee cups. And again, it’s only now, as a mother, that I see how that offhanded bowl-mug swapping could be taken as a mild insult, or even how it might symbolize a loss—say, a son precipitously swept away to America.^[4]

In any case, though Hog Wild is not set in the same region as where my in-laws reside, it may as well have been: a blue-collar town entrenched in tradition and with limited job prospects. Does Pim’s bowl tell the Francophone reader all that? Not exactly. There are plenty of other markers throughout the novel, which is why, in part, I’m okay with getting rid of it. 

Quite the digression, you might be grumbling. (Though, I did warn you: like Sorman, I enjoy meandering.) Put more simply, what I’m trying to say is that while a bowl—and here, you can substitute any other object or idiomatic expression or one of the myriads of hidden or not-so-hidden cultural references that thwart the translator—can be just a bowl, it can be many more things still: utilitarian, symbolic, magical; a generational and/or socio-economic flag, a subtle political commentary, an ironic nod, an homage; a powerful weapon in silent, unwitting warfare. So while loss is inevitable in translation (there, I admit it), it is often an intentional act that, if the translator is good at their job, has been well-ruminated. 

Then, because digressions are not so easily brought to heel, I start to wonder: would I have so casually deleted a cultural marker if the novel was set elsewhere? Sub-Saharan Africa or the Maghreb, for example? 

To quote a terrible (brilliant) translation joke: it depends on the context.^[5]

Though, looking back, it turns out I didn’t, actually.

The novel I translated before Hog Wild was penned by Senegalese author Mohamed Mbougar Sarr: the Goncourt Prize-winning The Most Secret Memory of Men. Before that it was a sample translation of Beautiful Abyss, a novel by Tunisian writer Yamen Manai about the unkept promises of the Arab Spring.

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Both works include a passing mention to a local beverage. In the Sarr novel, the protagonist buys a cup of Café Touba, not “Touba coffee,” not the “distinctively peppery coffee popular in Senegal,” not “a brand of coffee named for the Senegalese city of Touba.” In that case, I decided that if the reader is curious, they can look up the drink and easily find, as I did, those characteristics. 

In Beautiful Abyss, the reference is to men sipping their capucins, a local term for an espresso with a splash of milk. In an earlier (published!) version, I translated this as “café au lait,” which was me unconsciously catering to an Anglophone audience, not to mention embarrassingly wrong. I’ve been to Tunisia many times; the cafés are invariably full of young men smoking cigarettes and most definitely not drinking café au lait. In my current version (seeking a publisher! the eager translator exclaimed), the term remains capucin. 

In these instances, I chose to keep the original terms (which, I’m aware, are not the equivalent of a simple bowl) because location is intrinsic to both plots. Whereas in Sorman’s text, setting is secondary, overshadowed by her focus on the body, i.e., the sheer physicality of Pim’s transformation into a butcher. Furthermore, I felt the beverages were serving as flags. You, the reader, are here (in Tunisia or Senegal). I’ve brought you on this journey but I’m not going to slow down and play tour guide. In other words, a desire to introduce and show but not coddle or explain. Or at least that’s the stance I extrapolate from these novels by two authors writing from the supposed margins of “Françafrique,” French-speaking Africa. Both Manai and Sarr make a point of including foreign terms in their works (in Arabic, and Wolof and Serer, respectively), which they occasionally but not systematically gloss. And both chose publishers in their native countries: the Tunisia-based Elyzad Editions for Manai, and the Senegalese Jimsaan, in coordination with French publisher Philippe Rey, for Sarr. 

I suppose the idea I’m dancing around here is that while all translations invariably entail some degree of domestication and foreignization—the goal being to avoid what Antoine Berman dubbed an ethnocentric approach—the former phenomenon doesn’t feel so pernicious when applied to Sorman’s hapless bowl. One reason being that it is less of a deliberate cultural/geographical marker than Sarr and Manai’s beverages. (As the editor of this essay wisely asked: does a bowl make the book?) Another reason is that Sorman, for all her stylistic peculiarities, is firmly entrenched within a Western literary ecosystem—she is writing from the “center.” Making a bowl into a cup might be a debatable solution, but it’s hard to argue that it’s a significant erosion or erasure of French culture. In short: France doesn’t need defending. Or rather, it doesn’t need my defending. 

Far off the rails at this point, I know. Especially as it doesn’t feel quite fair to pitch Sorman’s admittedly unusual novel into a broader conversation about who and what needs or wants defending—advocacy is no doubt the better word—which is part of an even broader discussion about who and what is being translated. 

When I limit myself to the matter at hand (in hand?), I don’t think Sorman would mind me turning a bowl into a cup, namely because of her benevolent indifference to the translation process. This is due, in part, to the passing of time. The young writer who penned Comme une bête in 2013 is far removed from the author she is now, one who has published three more books in the interim. But Sorman is also indifferent because she views the translation as a separate entity all together. During a virtual Q&A we did together two years ago, Sorman told me, “I consider translation to be the creation of another text, a different text, that, in a way, no longer belongs to me. And I like that idea, that it’s beyond my control.” (Manai and Sarr have expressed similar sentiments.)

Hence my confidence to make small changes—like “swathed” instead of “haloed”—and bigger changes—quoting the Rolling Stones instead of a popular French show tune^[6]—and finally, small changes that can feel big, like making a bowl into a cup. It’s not that I’m tossing out the bowl, or the countless other things I modify or replace, casually. The culprit here is not cavalierness, or worse, heedlessness, but rather, redirected fidelity. 

I’m faithful to the source text, of course. I’ll defend its honor to the grave if I have to. (And in the case of Sarr and Manai’s novels, shield it from overzealous domestication.) But the more I translate, the more I find my loyalties lie with the translation. Traduttore traditore? Obviously. Capture the meaning, capture the voice, yes, yes, but also: hell if I’m going to make the reader stumble or lose their way when they’re not meant to. 

Surely I’m allowed this shifting of loyalties. Surely Sorman herself would applaud this faithfulness to the new creation. Surely my translator brethren are nodding in agreement. (I hope you are.) 

After all, a bowl is a bowl is a bowl, isn’t it? Except when it’s a cup.

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NOTES:

[1] Not to mention her other stalwart translator, Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

[2] For now . . .

[3] When I share these thoughts with my father-in-law, who happens to be visiting us during the writing of this essay, hence his cameo, he sighs, not unkindly, and says, “Ne complique pas les choses, Lara. On boit dans les bols car il n’y avait pas des ‘mugs’ à l’époque…” (Don’t complicate things, Lara. We drink out of bowls because there weren’t any mugs back then…”) to which I nod, and then I leave the man alone to finish his coffee, which, incidentally, he is drinking out of a bowl.

[4] Not that I’m celebrating my inadvertent victory, not by any means. My Frenchman drinks his coffee from a sensible mug, yes, but he dunks anything he can into it. A BelVita biscuit, a cookie, a croissant—soggy crumbs be damned—and even (the horror!) Cheerios. Does this daily affront to my resolutely American coffee sensibilities explain my fixation on the bowl in Pim’s tired hands?

[5] How many translators does it take to change a light bulb?

[6] “Beast of Burden” so felicitously hearkening back to the original title, how could I not?

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Originally published on Hopscotch Translation
Tuesday, June 27, 2023

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