In conversation: Marouane Bakhti & Lara Vergnaud

How to Leave the World is Marouane Bakhti’s debut novel, a fragmentary work about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, exploring shame, forgiveness, desire and identity. Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux hails it as ‘a rare book that depicts the isolation and poetry of rural life’. In this conversation, Bakhti discusses the novel’s form and the difficulties and radical potential of translation with his English translator Lara Vergnaud.

Lara Vergnaud: First as a reader and then as a translator, I was struck by the form of How to Leave the World: a series of non-chronological fragments that miraculously form a cohesive narrative. I’d love to hear about your writing process, e.g., how did you fit together the various fragments of thought and memory and dialogue? Deliberately? Organically? Did you know from the outset that the novel would take the form it did?

Marouane Bakhti: Writing this book was first and foremost an act of violence. Writing the fragments that compose it was a very natural process, but constructing the novel itself and standing it upright was extremely difficult. I was terrified of deforming the poetry of the text. I wanted to avoid being literal at all costs. In any case, I don’t think I write to be understood. I like the idea of people getting lost in my book. I think that moments of doubt offer the reader enormous freedom. Creating the narrative structure was a Herculean effort for me. I’m not saying that it’s incredibly sophisticated or anything like that, just that it was all I could manage. I wanted whoever was reading the book to be immersed in the narrator’s sensations. That’s how I tell stories – through the body. I’m quite apprehensive of stories with a beginning and an end, at arms-length from the organic events happening in the characters’ flesh and bones. I had no idea where I was going during the writing process, which is exactly how I was able to write. When it came time to mold the form of the novel, I suffered, truly. I told my editor, ‘Everything’s fine, I’m making progress,’ which wasn’t true. I spent months vegetating. Then one day I printed out the book – every page, every fragment – and spread them on the floor of my apartment. I saw the two deaths, I saw the plane trips, I saw what could serve as the book’s skeleton. In the end, the book is a large collage. 

LV: A novel is always the sum of its parts, right? As a translator, I’m obliged to take the whole thing apart, word by word, and then put it back together, hopefully more or less seamlessly. For this novel, that process entailed being quite brutal with the more poetic aspects, e.g., deconstructing imagery and elements of sound and rhythm, etc. While I don’t often think about the author while translating (too much pressure!), I did find myself wondering, as I was emailing you my many queries of ‘what does this mean?’ and ‘please clarify,’ whether you might be a bit worried. How did you feel about that element of the translation process – the dissection of poetry, one might call it? And more broadly (with my apologies for asking you an impossible question) do you think it’s possible to translate poetry?

MB: It’s impossible to translate poetry. It’s impossible to translate anything. In my mind, you’re like a psychoanalyst. You suggest interpretations. Which is an interesting process in itself, in its own right. This book became something else thanks to your efforts. Knowing that is part of why I don’t cling to the text – I give it up completely. I remember the ‘green night’. The character is walking through Paris, the sun has set, and I wrote ‘nuit verte’, green night. You asked me to clarify. I didn’t know what to say. The night was green, the author knows it, the reader feels it, but how can I explain to my translator exactly how the night was green? I think I responded something along the lines that the night, along the quays, in the lamplight, was tinted green. Now that I’ve had more time to think about it, I think that the green is really the colour of a nightmare. So you see, I do like to dissect my own poetry. That doesn’t mean that I’m able to explain any of it but I’ll happily play along.

LV: I always assume it’s a rather strange process to have one’s words translated into another language. The authors I’ve worked with thus far have been, respectively, benevolently indifferent, somewhat anxious, eager to help, and (for the deceased) entirely uninvolved. You proved to be the ideal kind of author for a translator – receptive and always willing to clarify, but otherwise at a polite distance. How would you qualify your feelings about being translated? And perhaps specifically about the fact that your book is multilingual with phrases notably in Arabic and a few in English?

MB: Lots of my friends were worried on my behalf when they found out the book would be translated into English. They asked what power will you have left over the text once the translator has hold of it? And I always answered them with a smile: ‘None.’ I think it’s important to carefully choose the person to whom you’re entrusting the book, but that’s all, that’s your only room to maneuver. In How to Leave the World, the various languages create chaos. We had to find someone who was accustomed to the cacophony around the main character, and capable of translating it the best way possible.

To be honest, when I learned that the book would be translated into English, I was quite relieved. Enough with the impossibility of Arabic, goodbye all-consuming French. I was thrilled to move away from that dichotomy. Assuming the book is already an affront to French, in terms of a national language, I believe that the process of translation furthers that project. How is translation, in your mind, a political act?

LV: I’m wary of attributing too much power to literature, specifically to literature in translation, because words can only take one so far. Though admittedly and fortunately, in some cases, that is far indeed. I do believe that language is inherently political, notably in the many ways we can and do refer to people and places and events. Take something as seemingly innocuous as the use of passive voice, which enables us to assign blame or not (it suffices to look how the news is being reported right now…), accuse or forgive, welcome or expulse. 

French is such a rigid language in many ways. English is suppler, and more accommodating, linguistically at least. Still, there’s ways to jostle the language, shove even. An example of that in your novel might be the inclusion of Arabic terms without glosses or footnotes, which was a very deliberate decision on my part and one that the editors fortunately seconded. 

MB: Duras translated Chekhov. She’s radical at times, when she explains her method: ‘I cut, I rewrote.’ I get the impression that translation entails respecting the music of a text more than it does the exact meaning. And to do so necessitates a clearly creative dimension to the act of translating. Would you mind sharing what liberty or liberties you took with How to Leave the World?

LV: Ah, I suppose this is payback for me asking you to ‘describe your process’?! 

It always starts simply enough: What does this mean? and how does it sound? All right, but what about the intention? the effect? And then I begin to stray, by which I mean I take any number of creative liberties to capture the sense, of course, but more importantly the voice, so yes cutting and rewriting, when that feels like the most faithful rendering of the music of the text, as you elegantly put it. 

MB: A simple question, to satisfy my curiosity: what word or phrase did you find the most difficult to translate and why?

LV: That ‘green night’ comes to mind! Otherwise, the opening passage was pretty tricky. It sets the tone for the entire novel so I knew I had to get it right, or as ‘right’ as a translation can be. It’s challenging because it begins with three words in English and ends with a French term that is very common and yet difficult to translate. I actually ended up making the passage a bit longer, which is rare, English being a more concise language than French. But in any case, I don’t read my translations after they’re published for fear my mistakes will haunt me… 

To end, what books and authors do you find yourself returning to? 

MB: Second Harvest by Jean Giono broke my heart last summer. It made me so shy I couldn’t write for weeks. Etel Adnan’s poetry is a refuge. CAConrad’s While Standing in Line for Death is a fragmented work I come back to very often. I think La vie matérielle by Marguerite Duras [translated as Practicalities by Barbara Bray] is a book you should keep close for life – it’s filled with excellent advice. I read those books aloud to my lover, my dog, my cat, or my mother. I also send excerpts as voice notes to loved ones. More rarely, I cut a page out of the book and send it to a friend that I think is in need of reading it. I won’t be so bold as try to describe what a good book is but I will say this: it’s one that, upon reading it, prompts you, urgently, to share its beauty with those you love the most.