French Literature Night at Cornelia Cafe!

Welcome new students!

Theses are completed. Defense dates are approaching. And new students are getting ready for classes to start at NYU! 

Welcome to the program Carrina, Maria, Janet, and Grace!!! 

We look forward to hearing from you :]

“Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in Everything.” -James Thurber

 

Hello from Paris!!! Everyone arrived last week and we are now settling in after an amazing weekend at the AIR Festival in Lyon (Post on that to follow.)

Today we had a quick orientation and a tour of the BEAUTIFUL new NYU Paris location. We can see every monument in Paris from the 8th floor lounge. It’s pretty incredible.  While we’re here we will be taking two classes– Creative Writing and Translation II– both of which begin tomorrow and will meet twice a week for 2.5 hours each.

We have quite a bit planned for the coming weeks here in Paris, but we will try our best to keep you updated on all of our exciting adventures!

A Reading of our Translations

This Friday, May 5, at  7pm at La Maison Francaise of NYU we will be giving a special reading of our translated theses!

 

The semester is coming to an end and we are starting to get excited for our summer session in Paris! Our theses aren’t due until September but we have been working hard on them during our workshops and we’d like to share them. So this Friday at 7pm the six of us will be reading excerpts from our translations at the Maison Francaise. All are welcome as this event is free and open to the public.

The French Publisher’s Agency

Our wonderful friends over at the French Publisher’s Agency have a brand new website! You can view their bestsellers, new releases, rights lists and more. AND since several of us have been working on some of their newer novels you can view our translated samples!!!  (Mine was just posted this week and, if you couldn’t tell, I’m a little excited.)

The French Publishers’ Agency represents the English language rights to a highly selective yet widely diverse list of books from France, ranging from literary fiction and thrillers to sociology and philosophy, and occasionally children’s books and graphic novels. As an affiliate of the Bureau International de l’Édition Française (BIEF), it represents an average of sixty different member publishers each year. Located in New York City, it is an important resource for publishers on either side of the Atlantic, opening doors for contemporary French novelists and provocative thinkers in the English language.

 

Visitors from Paris

This week we are hosting a lovely group of students from La Sorbonne who are studying English to French Translation, and we have invited them to write for our blog! So keep an eye out for their posts. Warning: they might be in French! :]

French Night at Cornelia!

For more info: http://frenchculture.org/books/events/french-literature-night-cornelia-cafe

The Magic of Idioms

English has changed a lot in the last several hundred years, and there are many words once used that we would no longer recognize today. For whatever reason, we started pronouncing them differently, or stopped using them entirely, and they became obsolete. There are some old words, however, that are nearly obsolete, but we still recognize because they were lucky enough to get stuck in set phrases that have lasted across the centuries.

As you may have already read in A running list of translator’s tips, substituting idioms for idioms while translating is important, but sometimes it can be difficult. Here is great article from Mental Floss with a list of 12 Old English words that only survived because they are used in idiomatic phrases. Enjoy!

 

A Translator’s Thesis

It should be obvious by now that the end goal of a student in this program is to be published. We spend hours and hours perfecting the art of translation so that some day we may see our names on the front covers of books that are being sold in real live book stores. In our workshop class this past semester we were all given long assignments that were all our own. We worked together to make corrections and adjustments, but everyone was working on their own piece for the first time. Now our winter break is almost over and it is almost time to submit our Workshop Finals — 5 pages of the book that we are considering for our theses. While some of us have chosen to continue the long pieces that we began to work on in class, others have branched out and found pieces on their own.

I chose to continue working on my long assignment and in a week I will have a total of 14-16 pages completed. While that doesn’t seem like very much, trust me… it is. The book that I am working on is just shy of 200 pages, 80 of which I will turn in for my Thesis in September of this year. The 20 pages that I have translated so far added up to about 8 pages in Word. That means that right now, with my 8 perfect pages, I am 1/10 finished with my Thesis, and with my entire Translation.  And that is crazy.

I admit, the prospect of finishing my first translation on my own is strange and exciting. I already feel like a translator and I have only completed one semester of study. But today when I was sending a sample to the French Publisher’s Agency it really hit me that I am so close to doing this for a living. There is an actual chance, however slim, that this book that I am translating will get published, and I could be the one providing the translation. A year ago I never would have thought that I would get a chance like this. My parents still can’t get over the fact that their little girl will someday be published. As a French major, I was always told that my only career option was to be a teacher/professor. But that’s not the only option, and I am glad that I didn’t listen to the naysayers who thought so little of a Language major.

Chevillard! Chevillard! Chevillard!

So you may be wondering what we do in our Translation Workshops. In the beginning of the semester we all worked on the same pieces at the same time; the first pages of a novel, short stories, etc. Each of us would write a translation on our own and then once together we would work in small groups by comparing our translations and coming up with a single piece. Then, as a whole, we compared all of our versions to finally come up with one unified translation. Take for example Le Lapin by Eric Chevillard, a short story about a rabbit shaped car-seat headrest.

Here is an excerpt from the original French version:

Le Lapin

On fait de ces gadgets aujourd’hui. Celui-ci est une housse pour appui-tête de siège automobile décorée d’une tête de lapin brodée et surmontée de deux grandes oreilles en peluche. On sourit une fois peut-être.

Ça nous envahit, ces objets puérile, idiots, marrants. Tous les gorilles sont garnie de billes de polystyrène, désormais. Tous les éléphants nous versent du thé ou de la camomille. Trouvez-moi un koala sana bretelles, qui n’aura pas non plus une fermeture-éclair sur le ventre.

La cravate n’a rien perdu de son sérieux dérisoire en devenant cette bande dessinée. La chaussette digitée ne fait pas le quadrumane. La pantoufle encombrée de pattes ne sait plus marcher. Elle rampe. Elle se traîne. Nous vivons parmi ces gadgets comme de vieux enfants détraqués.

Celui-ci imite donc une tête de lapin et orné siège conducteur d’une petite voiture bleu, modèle courant.C’est une housse blanche sur laquelle sont brodés deux yeux ronds et une truffe noire. Et encore un grand sourire stupide.

And here is our final translation:

The Rabbit

We make these novelties, nowadays. This one is a car-headrest cover, decorated with an embroidered rabbit head, topped by two big, plush ears. Makes you smile once, maybe.

We’re invaded by these childish, silly, comical objects. All the gorillas are filled with polystyrene beads now. All the elephants pour us black or Chamomile tea. Find me a koala without shoulder straps, or a zipper on its belly.

Ties have lost none of their insignificant seriousness by becoming comic strips. Digitated socks do not give you primate abilities. Slippers encumbered by paws no longer know how to walk. They crawl. They drag themselves around. We live among these novelties like old, unhinged children.

And so, this one mimics a rabbit head and adorns the driver seat of a small, blue car, standard model. It’s a white cover, embroidered with two round eyes and a black nose. And a big, stupid smile.

This piece was definitely interesting to work on. As you can see, Chevillard has a very unique style. This style was further highlighted at French Literature Night at Cornelia Street Cafe, an event organized by Emmanuelle Ertel and Isabelle Milkoff, where excerpts were read from different works of Eric Chevillard in both French and English.

The night began with Isabelle Milkoff and Margaret George reading the first chapters of Prehistoric Times, followed by Philippe Aufort and Tom Radigan reading “Lecture with Slides” from The posthumous works of Thomas Pilaster, and the night ended with Bonnie, Brett, Victoria and Emmanuelle reading The Rabbit.

Isabelle Milkoff and Margaret George read the first chapters of Prehistoric Times

Philippe Aufort and Tom Radigan reading “Lecture with Slides” from The posthumous works of Thomas Pilaster

Bonnie, Victoria and Brett (L-R) on stage for their reading of The Rabbit

Emanuelle addressing the audience at ‘Chevillard! Chevillard! Chevillard!”

You can actually watch the whole thing right here!

It was such an awesome experience to be able to share our translation with the public, and also to hear other people’s translations. French Night was a really fun event for us students and our friends and family (even those who don’t speak French.) Stay tuned for details about the next French Night at Cornelia Street Cafe!