William Rodarmor Quotes

(Speaking about his translation work of a diary by Berthe Weill) When it comes to typographical style, Berthe Weill is happily inimitable. She doesn't waste time on line breaks, so passages with a lot of dialogue look like sheets of mud. And she never met an ellipsis she didn't like. French writers use ellipses fairly often, but we avoid them in English because they... look vague... In my early drafts, I eliminated most of the ellipses, but I restored many of them later. That's because Weill's prose rhythm is closer to Machine Gun Kelly than Marcel Proust, and I realized that the ellipses help smoooth out her darting leaps from topic to topic.

Good writers are an editor's stock in trade (...) You have to treasure them and treat them right.

Like it or not, a translator has to take liberties. How many depends on closely the translator hews to the words of the text. I’m on the side of the reader, so I’d never produce a literal, word-for-word translation, however faithful. My goal is always to produce a text so smooth that the reader isn’t aware it’s a translation. It should read like a book that Mathieu would have written if he were more fluent in English. So I occasionally take liberties, especially with jokes, slang, and idioms. But thanks to email, I can run my textual sins by the author before committing them to paper. Even after some forty books and screenplays, I still love doing translations.

Jokes [are] the bane of every trasnlator's existence.

Like most translators, I’m a ventriloquist, and I work hard to make people sound like themselves, and not like me.

Translating a big book is like getting married: You’re going to spend a long time together. You may put in months weighing each word, often more carefully than the author."

My loyalty as a translator is to both the author and the reader, but in a pinch, I try to help the reader.

[Literary translation work] has all the pleasures of creative writing, and you never have writer’s block.

The sex scenes were the toughest to translate. Sex is notoriously hard to write about, and no easier to translate. My prose probably falls somewhere between puritanical and pornographic. Maybe sex is just better in French.

Food makes history in France, in legend and in fact. (...) But when Charles de Gaulle radioed the French underground that the D-Day invasion was imminent, his message included the key phrase les carottes sont cuites. Literally, this means "the carrots are cooked," and metaphorically "it's all over." What other nation marches to war in the glow of beta carotene?

I hope this collection [of short stories from French authors] does justice to that variety [of distinctive literary voices]. Some of the stories are funny, some are sad, a few are mysterious. The excerpts may seem to end too soon, but that's all to the good. These pieces are neither bonbons nor full-course meals. They're more like hearty appetizers. You're at a bountiful buffet, and you should feel free to come back for more.