The Translator’s Note

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

I have translated Amaury Deschamps for twenty-six years and this is the first of his novels he has not read in my English.

He read all the others. Not to check them — he could not check them; his English was, by his own cheerful admission, "sufficient for menus" — but because he liked to see the shape of the thing. He would ring me about the paragraph breaks. He had opinions about paragraph breaks in a language he could not read, and he was right about eighty per cent of the time, which infuriated me for a decade and then stopped.

He died in February. The Orchard at Mirevaux was delivered to his French publisher eleven days before.

There are two problems with this translation and I have decided to set them out rather than conceal them, which is not the convention, and which he would have found funny.

The first problem

Chapter nine contains a word that does not exist.

Amerloque is real, though dated and rude. Amerloquerie is not. Amaury uses it once, in the mouth of the grandmother, and it is clearly formed on the pattern of a word for a kind of behaviour rather than a kind of person.

In twenty-six years he invented four words and told me about three of them.

I would normally have rung him. I did in fact ring him, on the fourth of March, and got the recorded message that his daughter has not yet been able to change, which is how I discovered that I had been intending to ring him for a fortnight without admitting it.

I have rendered it as Americanry. It is not right. Nothing was going to be right. I record it here so that a future translator can do better with more distance than I currently possess.

The second problem

The last line.

The French is eight words. I am not going to reproduce it here; you will find it on the final page, and I would rather you met it there.

I have translated it four ways.

Version one was accurate and dead. Version two had the rhythm and lost the ambiguity, which is fatal, because the ambiguity is the entire ending — the sentence can be read as a promise or as a refusal and Amaury constructed forty years of work to arrive at a place where those two things are the same.

Version three, my editor liked. It is a good English sentence. It is not his.

Version four is what is printed.

It is four words longer than the French. Adding four words to the last line of a dying man's final novel is not a decision I expected to make and I have not slept especially well since.

Why I am telling you this

Because in 2011 Amaury sent me the manuscript of Fourteen Winters with a note that said: Do what you like with the last chapter. You are the one who has to live in English.

I did not do what I liked. I was thirty-eight and terrified and I translated it faithfully and it is the weakest of the eleven and we both knew it.

He never mentioned it again. He was not that sort of man.

But in 2019, in a bar in Lyon, after a great deal of wine, he said the thing that I have been carrying ever since, which was: "You keep asking me what I meant. Sylvie. I don't know what I meant. That's why I wrote a novel and not a letter."

A final matter

Amaury's daughter tells me that among his papers there is an envelope addressed to me, unopened, which she found in his desk and which she is holding until I am ready.

I have not asked for it.

I finished the translation first. That felt important, and I could not have told you why, and I think now it was because I did not want to know what was in it while I was still choosing the last four words.

I have written to her this morning.

Sylvie Marchand
Bristol, September