Leitmotifs, tag lines, and a question for readers

In Adrian McKinty's Sean Duffy novels, it's the protagonist checking under his car for mercury tilt switch bombs. In Fred Vargas' Debout Les Morts (translated as The Three Evangelists), the glue is merde, in its various semantic and syntactic forms--that, and the tag line "il haussa les épaules" ("he shrugged [his] shoulders.")  And Max Allan Collins' Quarry novels always repeat the protagonist's back story, the part about his return from Vietnam to find his wife involved with another man whom he kills in a particularly creative manner and about the reason he avoids prison for the crime.

I've written before about leitmotifs in crime novels, what they contribute to a book's texture, its feeling. (This is not the sort of thing one often reads about in discussions of books.)

Max Allan Collins

"Leitmotifs in fiction are more than quirks," I wrote, "less than plot elements. A leitmotif should, according to a definition of leitmotifs' use in music, be "clearly identified so as to retain its identity if modified on subsequent appearances." Used well, it indicates an author in control of his or her material, with a firm idea of what kind of story he or she wants to tell. Leitmotifs might not come to mind right away if someone asks you what happens in a given novel, but they are part of what a novel is about, part of the world it creates."

Now it's your turn: What are your favorite tag lines and recurring motifs in crime novels or stories? What do such refrains add to a story?

 © Peter Rozovsky 2017

Listening to an audiobook in French

I'm listening to an audiobook in French for the first time, Fred Vargas' Debout les morts, the novel translated into English as The Three Evangelists. My French is far from perfect, yet, to my surprise, the partial attention with which one can listen to audiobooks meshes nicely with the partial understanding imposed by the deficiency of my French. I can let the story roll by, getting the gist, without stopping to agonize over words I don't know, the way I would if reading. Already context has taught me the meaning of a few words or expressions. So I recommend audiobooks for second-language students.

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A Climate of Fear, Vargas' ninth novel featuring Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, is high on my to-read list. And The Accordionist, an English translation of a 1997 novel about the characters known as the Three Evangelists, will appear this summer. In the meantime, here's a two-part interview I did with Fred Vargas in 2013: (http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/search/label/Fred%20Vargas%20interview)

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

It's a famille affaire, or What's with all those eccentric alternative households in French crime writing?

My knowledge of French literature is thin, so maybe someone can tell me the reason for and the history of French crime writing's fascination with plucky, eccentric, down at the heels households.

Daniel Pennac's Malaussène novels, Fred Vargas' Adamsberg novels, and, especially, her books featuring the "Three Evangelists" come to mind. More recently, Pierre Lemaitre's The Great Swindle won France's Prix Goncourt for its story of an epic swindle and counter-swindle that revolve around two wretched veterans of World War I who come together for mutual support.

That sort of thing can get precious and sentimental (though Lemaitre weaves it into a harsh look at social fissures and abuse of power in post-war France. Think of The Great Swindle as a meeting of the Pennac-Vargas and the Manchette-Manotti strands of French crime writing.)

But the eccentric-household novels also include something hard to imagine in American or British crime writing: Economically precarious characters, depicted in all their poverty, but without desperation, horror, sloganeering, or proletarian victimhood or nobility. The closest that Vargas' Dog Will Have His Day comes to the last of these is a passing reference to the protagonists' having come together in a tumble-down house after a recession. (Dog Will Have His Day, published in French in 1996 but not translated into English until 2014, is a sequel to The Three Evangelists, two of whom appear here.)

These characters don't drink themselves to death, and they don't turn up frozen in the street. A character loses her home, and she simply moves in with another character. Unlike their unfortunate counterparts in crime writing from other countries, these characters have driving passions, or eccentricities, that earn them a modest living, keep their minds engaged, or both.  The protagonist of Dog Will Have His Day is a former government functionary who is driven to compile journalistic dossiers and solve mysteries.  Each of the three evangelists, so called because their names are Marc, Mathieu, and Lucien, is a historian with a greater than usual devotion to the period he studies. (I like to think Vargas uses Marc, the medievalist who is a featured sidekick in Dog Will Have His Day, to poke some good-natured fun at her own work as an archaeologist of the Middle Ages.)

So, what's with the eccentric households? Are they too twee for words? Or are they brave declarations that poverty need not mean intellectual or physical death?

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Read the Detectives Beyond Borders interviews with Fred Vargas and with her translator, Sian Reynolds.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

A Detectives Beyond Borders best book of 2015: Pierre Lemaitre's The Great Swindle

A jacket blurb on Pierre Lemaitre's novel The Great Swindle says something like "just as he does in his crime fiction, Lemaitre ... "  The Great Swindle tells of two epic-scale swindles in post-World War I France sparked by two especially odious murders, so why is it something other than crime fiction?

Perhaps because is at least as much a social novel about post-World War I France, about class fissures and political and business corruption, as it is about crime.  Perhaps because the build-up to the central swindles is so leisurely (and so beautifully done and so thoroughly explores the lives of its two central characters and a host of minor ones).  Perhaps because of its ending, which is atypical of crime fiction. Or perhaps because Lemaitre, a two-time winner of the International Dagger Award for translated crime fiction from the Crime Writers Association in the UK, won France's Prix Goncourt for The Great Swindle (Au revoir là-haut in its original French).

Nonetheless, The Great Swindle may remind crime readers of Dominique Manotti in its examination of corruption in France or of Daniel Pennac or Fred Vargas in its portrayal of eccentric households. And it generally avoids the twin dangers of sentimentality and whimsy when it does the latter.The villain of the piece is a weaker character than he could be, too villainous at times, a bit too thoroughly black when a bit of gray might have been called for.  The rest of the characters, even when engaged in outlandish actions, nonetheless--or perhaps because of those actions--combine to present convincing and moving picture of the messiness and the social gaps and broken promises of postwar life.

The translation's English prose is elegant and unobtrusive, a credit to translator Frank Wynne, who is not, a proclamation on his Web site notwithstanding, a terrible man.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

The French are coming! The French are coming!

Amid fascinating new theories I've been reading about the origins of English (Stephen Oppenheimer's Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain could easily include chapters called "No Saxons, Please; We're English," "All Angles," or "Some of My Best Friends are Jutes"), comes crime fiction news about the French:

Fred Vargas' The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, translated by Sian Reynolds, and Pierre Lemaitre's Alex, translated by Frank Wynne, were named joint winners this week of the International Dagger Award for translated crime fiction by the Crime Writers' Association in the UK. The news release announcing the award says the CWA plans to establish a French chapter "in the near future."

Wynne, Lemaitre, and fellow French authors Antonin Varenne and Xavier-Marie Bonnot attended Bristol's Crimefest 2013 along with your humble blogkeeper, so perhaps French crime writing is about to start enjoying a higher profile in the UK and then, perhaps, in America (Alex is to be released in the U.S. in September.)

Whatever its profile in the UK at large, French crime writing has enjoyed an outsize profile at the Daggers. This year marked the fifth time in the International Dagger's eight-year history that the award had gone to a French novel or novels. The award was the fourth for Vargas/Reynolds, following on The Three Evangelists in 2006, Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand in 2007, and The Chalk Circle Man in 2009. Dominique Manotti's  Lorraine Connection, translated by Amanda Hopkinson and Ros Schwartz, was the other French winner, in 2008.

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Your humble blogkeeper interviewed Fred Vargas last month and Sian Reynolds in 2008. It was Reynolds' solution to a bit of untranslatable wordplay in The Three Evangelists that spurred me to start interviewing authors and translators in the first place. I also reviewed The Ghost Riders of Ordebec in the Philadelphia Inquirer in June.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Fred Vargas in my newspaper ...

... not here and now also online! My review of Vargas' latest novel, The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.

My two-part interview with Vargas earlier this month expanded on questions touched on in the review. No surprise there; The Ghost Riders of Ordebec was what made me want to interview her in the first place. Vargas uses her much-ballyhooed quirkiness to good advantage in the book, and she offers a fine explanation for that quirkiness in the interview.

Thanks to Paul Davis for letting me know the review had turned up online.

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In the meantime, I've finished reading Barry Cunliffe's Britain Begins and started his Europe Between the Oceans. It's refreshing to read stories told on such a large scale, combining hard science and informed speculation, told by a master of his subject who is unafraid to admit when the existing state of knowledge simply does not permit a question to be answered.  The man can write, too, and his story is as exciting as any tale of aliens or lost Atlantises, but without the looniness and the unsavory preying on the gullibility of the weak-minded.

Cunliffe takes the longue durée approach to history. That is, he focuses on long-term environmental and geographical structures that underlie and outlast wars, migrations, and other such events of traditional history.  The term longue durée is associated with the Annales School of French historians, coined by Fernand Braudel, author of The Identity of France, the three-volume Civilization and Capitalism, and others.

Among the great man's translators was Sian Reynolds, who, when not translating some of the most influential historical writing of the twentieth century, translates the crime novels of — Fred Vargas.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

"A detective novel belongs to the great family of tales, legends, myths": The Fred Vargas Detectives Beyond Borders interview, Part 2

In the conclusion of her interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Fred Vargas gets inside protagonist Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg's head. She discusses the origin of Adamsberg's name and says detective stories are really myths and tales. (This may explain her penchant for quirky characters.) She discusses her abiding love for secondary characters, reveals that Lt. Violette Retancourt arose from the dead, and finally, shares the joys and agonies of writing a character who insists on recurring, book after book.

(Read Part I of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Fred Vargas.)

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Detectives Beyond Borders: You told L’Express newspaper that “Adamsberg is not a man of intuition.” Why do so many reviewers say otherwise? 

Fred Vargas: I don’t like excessively simple definitions of an human being, real or invented. It is not this adjective I would choose for him (but you know, I still don’t know Adamsberg totally. Sometimes he gets on my nerves — too slow — sometimes he surprises me, and so on.) I would rather say, I suppose, that this awakened dreamer has more possibilities than others of having the doors opened between his subconscious and conscious minds. That’s why, I suppose, ideas come to him in a strange manner. Also because he has an exceedingly strong visual memory.

DBB: Your novels are full of human marvels, the man who talks backwards in The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, for example or Violette Retancourt. Where does this motif come from ? Why is it important to you? 

FV: I don’t know! I have never tried on purpose to create strange characters. But, once again, they come to me like this, they impose their personalities on me. So, I go with it, and sometimes, it may be fun. I suppose also that I am no fan of so-called «normality». 

DBB: One could interpret the name Adamsberg as Adam + berg, the German word for mountain. Adamsberg was born in a village in the Pyrénées. Is he the natural or original man who comes from the mountains? 

FV: That’s a good example. When I chose this name for him (I don’t especially like the sound of French names), I did research, I checked that no one had this name. I realized only later that it could signify «Adam’s berg», Adam’s mountain. And it isn’t at all, of course, a name from the Pyrénées. Original or natural? I would prefer «natural». What I surely wanted (and don’t ask me why!) is that he would be a man from the mountain. 

DBB: You write often about improvised families : the family in The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, the protagonists of The Three Evangelists, Danglard without a wife but with five children whom he loves, Adamsberg and his son. Your novels remind me in this respect of Daniel Pennac’s novels, and maybe also of Michel Foucault, who would talk about new forms of family relations. Discuss, if you would, the role of families in your books, and why they appear so frequently. 

FV: Again, I must «discuss» the thing after the fact, because these strangely composed families come naturally. What is sure is that I don’t want to insert the normal day-after-day life in my novels. Not because I don’t like it, but because, from my instinctive (and intellectual) point of view, a detective novel belongs to the great family of tales, legends, myths, etc., and not to realistic literature. So I am not attracted, in a book, by usual families or situations. Too real. These groups enforce the sensation of writing a small, dreamed tale. 

DBB: You admire Ed McBain for having created eternal characters, who do not change from one novel to the next. How do you manage this with Adamsberg, Danglard, Retancourt while at the same time preserving their interesting, distinguishing characteristics? 

FV: Actually, I deeply admire Ed McBain (and James Crumley, and Donald Westlake and Kinky Friedman and so on) for the exceptional sound of his language. I appreciate encountering his characters, Meyer Meyer, Carella, Bert Kling, but that isn’t my main reason for reading him over and over. His music is. 

The problem with meeting the same characters book after book is a solid one, and I don’t know if it represents an advantage. My first three books introduced different characters each time. Adamsberg appeared in the fourth. Then I abandoned him for three books. Then he decided to come back. So you see that I hadn’t planed to create a recurring hero, (In fact, I had planed nothing. I just wanted, at the very beginning, to write one single book for fun.) 

Then other characters gathered around Adamsberg, important ones and the so-called «secondary ones». I am always sad to have to quit a secondary character at the end of a book (never to see Joss the fisherman again, or the old man who speaks to his sheep, etc.). At the beginning of Seeking Whom He May Devour, I was obliged to kill Suzanne. I realized I was sad to lose her in this way. She remained in my head; I had affection for her. That’s why I decided to make her live again afterwards, by creating Violette Retancourt — without knowing Retancourt would attain such importance (without my authorization). 

And so the group grows, and the more I know them, the more it seems to me painful to abandon them. It is as if I was going to lose old friends, friends I don’t yet know completely. I was puzzled by the Evangelists’ disappearance. That’s why, here and there, one of them reappears sometimes (Marc, or Mathias).

For one book, I decided to create a rival for Adamsberg; I introduced Veyrenc, who would have to leave the scene at the end of the book. In the end he stayed. So you see that I have never had the ambition to create an «unforgettable hero». It is just that I can’t forget them, or they don’t want to let me in peace. It is a link, a real link. But it is difficult, a challenge: how to describe Adamsberg again and again, from book to book, without repeating the same sentences, using the same words. Not easy at all!

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(Read Part I of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Fred Vargas.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Fred Vargas: The Detectives Beyond Borders interview, Part I

Fred Vargas has won three CWA International Dagger Awards for best translated crime novel, and The Ghost Riders of Ordebec could win her and translator Sian Reynolds a fourth this year.

Vargas was born in Paris, trained as an archaeologist and historian, and is known best to crime-fiction readers for her novels about the Paris police commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg and his colleagues, novels that partake as much of the fairy tale as they do of the police procedural. 

In the first part of a two-part interview with Detectives Beyond Borders, Vargas talks about Algeria, about the overlap between her careers as author and scientist, about the real story behind her entirely positive trip to my native land, and about the careers of the title characters in The Three Evangelists. She prefaces her answers with remarks that shed light on her working methods (and, perhaps, on my overly analytical questions), and she quotes another notable figure famous under a name other than the one he was born with:

"Dear Peter Rozovsky, 

"First of all, I am afraid to disappoint you. As Woody Allen said: `I have no answers to your questions, but I have questions to your answers!' 

"I just want to say that I don’t control everything I do when I am writing novels. A large part of the story comes — or, better, imposes itself — during the writing, and takes me along unforeseen ways that I am obliged to follow. Ways where I can meet characters that I had not envisaged previously, for example the old woman, Léone, whom Adamsberg meets in the path in the forest at the beginning of The Ghost Riders of Ordebec. And there it goes. In a way, I don’t have great freedom, because the book and the words want to decide (except for the sound). 

"So, it is difficult for me to `explain' everything, and you will be probably disappointed by my answers!"

Happily, she is wrong. Enjoy the interview. (And read Part II.)

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Detectives Beyond Borders: The dead father in The Ghost Riders of Ordebec was a torturer in Algeria, a sadist but at the same time a wounded victim of that war. What do Algeria – and the word torture – mean for France and the French in 2013? For you as an author of crime novels?

Fred Vargas: Not as an author of crime novels. What the French army did in Algeria, the torture, remains a great shame for a large part of us. It can’t be and musn’t be forgotten, even if I was a child during this war.

DBB: You call the young fire starter in The Ghost Riders of Ordebec so frequently by the diminutive «Mo» that it’s a surprise when someone calls him by his real name: Mohammed. Why did you do this?

FV: Well, when I present a new character, I don’t say if he or she is white or black or Asiatic. I don’t mention his or her religion, either. So everybody thinks, instinctively, «OK, he or she is white and «classical» (Christian or without any faith). But this is not certain!!! Do we know if Danglard, Retancourt, others, come from Christian or Jewish families, for example? No. And I don’t mind. If I explained, in the beginning, that Mo had Arabic origins, I would single him out. Why should I do that? Mo is Mo, first of all.

In fact, a presentation of his origins would be a form of pre-racism, a sort of discrimination, and I hate that, especially now, with our toxic climate here against French people of Arab origin, the new so-called enemies. OK, he is Mo, as Adamsberg is Adamsberg. Later, the reader will understand why his origin will help transform him into an ideal culprit. But that his name is Mohammed does not imply that he practices the Muslim religion or believes in God. We don’t know that.

DBB: The title characters in The Three Evangelists are historians, one of prehistory, one of the Middle Ages, one of World War I. Why those three historical periods.

FV: I am an archaeologist myself. I specialized in the Middle Ages, but I also studied the prehistoric period. And my eldest brother is an historian, too, one of the foremost specialists in the First World War. It was an obvious pleasure for me to play with these professions I know very well.

DBB: I was born in Montreal, and I appreciated the tension, the jokes, and the linguistic misunderstanding between the French and the Quebecois in Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand. Why did you send Adamsberg and his team to Quebec in that book ? If you have visited Quebec yourself, did you experience tension of this kind?

FV: Again, a disappointment for you, with a very simple answer: I am not a great traveler, but I have been to Quebec twice. So, as I wanted to go out of Paris, out of France, I placed the action there, where I had been fascinated by the kindness of people, the great beauty of landscapes. I know the small, ancient path across the forest along the Outaouais River. And I was also very interested in the differences between languages from Quebec and France.

Tensions? Not at all, never. Often, with friends, we laughed together about our different expressions. After the publications, there were some people from Quebec who criticized these jokes about language, thinking that I was mocking them. I was sad about this misunderstanding and wrote an article in Le Devoir to explain that it was respect and curiosity.


DBB: The plague plays an important role in Have Mercy on Us All. You have done research on the plague. What is the relationship between your two careers, as a historian and as an author? What does each take from the other?

FV: I assumed over the years that there was no link between my two jobs. Writing detective stories was a way to forget in a small way the hard scientific work during holidays. But little by little, I understood that, probably, my passion for resolving things, problems, for finding the truth, was at the very heart of the two jobs.

In any case, I try not to exaggerate when I use some historical or zoological knowledge in a book. It must remain a detective story, not become a historical one with lessons and everything boring. I had worked seven years to resolve the plague’s epidemiology, and I was tempted to use this great disease as a symbol of a great fear in a novel, so I did. But as I said, it is not me who choose my ideas, unfortunately, it is the ideas which choose me. And the ideas said : «Well, put the plague in this book.» And I answered : «OK.» I write my scientific papers and books in a very different manner, of course. But even there, I try not to lose the reader’s interest.

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(Read Part II of the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Fred Vargas.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Fred and Ed

I posted six years ago and again in 2011 about Ed McBain's far-flung influence on other crime writers, citing tributes from such authors as Ireland's Ken Bruen, Britain's David Hewson, and Sweden's Kjell Eriksson.

Still, I was gobsmacked when doing research for a review of Fred Vargas' latest novel to find that she, too, reveres the author of the 87th Precinct mysteries. "I am reading him for the third time," she told L'Express two years ago. McBain, she said, would "write a novel with five intersecting stories, and there was no relationship between them."

Quirky, fey Fred Vargas? I thought. Tough, gritty, Ed McBain? But by God, The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, the novel that was the subject of my review and the occasion of Vargas' Express interview, juggles stories big and small, bringing them beautifully to the appropriate degree of conclusion, just as McBain did in Nocturne, the best of the few 87th Precinct books I've read.

And now readers, your question: What are your favorite examples of surprising literary influence?

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(Read the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Fred Vargas.)
© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Algeria is to France and Vietnam to the U.S. as ? is to ?

I'd decided to let Algeria lie for a while until a pair of passages in Fred Vargas' The Ghost Riders of Ordebec made me realize Algeria must have penetrated the French consciousness and conscience the way Vietnam did in the United States.

The character in question (dead by the time the novel begins and invoked for his abominable conduct in the community and toward his family) is said to have had a bullet lodged in his head from the Algerian War, and to have been

"taken off active service and they put him into interrogations. Torturing people." 

Revelations of torture during the war shocked the French public, and the matter still comes up in occasional legal cases.  That Vargas could invoke torture and Algeria in a novel published in 2011 (English translation, 2013) suggests at least some in France are still haunted by the subject, and the character in Vargas' book said to have engaged in torture suggests that Vargas regards torture as the materialization of the worst that France has ever done and torturers as the real-life embodiment of the evil spirit always hinted at in her books.

If Algeria is France's conscience and its nightmare, if Vietnam played a similar role for the United States, what are their counterparts for other countries? And have those counterparts appeared in crime fiction?

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(Read the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Fred Vargas.)
 
© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Fred Vargas' ghosts

Early in The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, Fred Vargas takes her odd, intuitive protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, to Normandy, where he comes up against a police captain almost as unconventional as he is. Neither, for example, can stand being cooped up too long; both, apparently, like to chew over cases while on long walks, not a conventional police technique, at least in fiction.

The Ghosts Riders of Ordebec is Vargas' seventh Adamsberg novel, and her clever turn on small-town cop who resents his opposite number from the big city (Adamsberg is based in Paris) is one way to keep a longish series fresh. How do your favorite long-series crime writers manage that trick?

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The ghosts of the title refer the avenging marauders of a thousand-year-old Ordebec legend and, in the opening pages, Vargas integrates the weirdness seamlessly into the story. I'm no reader of fantasy, but Vargas' world is one that very closely resembles our own, except that beliefs, tales, even professions, from the Middle Ages fit in perfectly. (No accident there; Vargas is a historian and archaeologist specializing in the Middle Ages when she's not writing crime novels.)

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(Read the Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Fred Vargas. Read an interview from earlier in Vargas' career that offers insight into her political involvement. Read a two-part Detectives Beyond Borders interview with Vargas' versatile, award-winning translator, Sian Reynolds.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Sian Reynolds: An interview with Fred Vargas' translator, Part II

Blogging may be lighter than usual for the next day or two. In the meantime, here's an interview from 2008 with Sian Reynolds, translator of Fred Vargas' crime novels, with a brand-new comment from another prominent translator of crime fiction.

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In Part II of our interview, Sian Reynolds discusses the challenges of rendering colloquial French into colloquial English and her approach to a text she is about to translate. She also reveals that readers can look forward to at least one more Fred Vargas translation. (Read Part I of the interview with Sian Reynolds here.)

What is the most difficult problem you have encountered as translator?

In fiction, as already mentioned, I think it has to be dialogue. and particularly such aspects of it as dialect, extreme colloquialism, slang, expletives (of the ‘good grief’ sort) and of course puns and wordplay. You have to find convincing speakable equivalents without sounding either too fuddy-duddy or using current colloquialisms that might date. A particular problem for example, is the common French word ‘un type’ which just means ‘a man’, but the register is more the equivalent of ‘bloke, fellow, chap’ – all of which are today a bit marked as old-fashioned in English, because so many people both sides of the Atlantic now say ‘guy’. On the other hand, peppering the text with too many ‘guys’ runs the risk of making it sound like an American intrusion into otherwise British English, which is what I write. (Of course many French books are translated ‘into American’ as the French say, that is entirely into American English.)

Swearing is another potential pitfall. French colloquial speech uses a number of terms which if translated literally sound rather stronger in English (merde, je m’en fous, etc.) Given what we know about the characters, you have to save four-letter words for times when the context calls for them. The reverse can be true: French translators of say, James Kelman, have been known to tone down the language, arguing that a French equivalent of the character wouldn’t have every other word in the sentence the same f-word.

How do you approach a text you are about to translate? Do you read it through one or more times to get a sense of the work before beginning the formal job of translation? What is your primary task as a translator of fiction?

I always read the text first if it’s fiction. For non-fiction it’s not so essential – you’ll get there in the end. But much crime fiction, as you know, is constructed backwards – as a rule you move back from the discovery of a crime to what occasioned it. You need to know the end to understand the beginning. Then in the course of translating a novel, I probably read the text tens of times in both languages, always noticing more things – (sometimes minor inconsistencies that have slipped in, but are probably only noticed by me, since most readers don’t read a novel many times over.) Your task in general is to do as good a job of conveying the original as possible – but no translation is ever perfect or ‘definitive’, and no two translators will come up with the same solutions.

Translators of poetry often speak of the tension between trying to produce a faithful translation and one that will flow smoothly in its "host" language. To what extent is this tension present in translating fiction?

The biggest question in translating poetry, according to the translators I know, is whether or not to preserve the form of the poem: its metre, rhyme, line length and so on. Views differ strongly. As it happens, in the latest Vargas (This Night’s Foul Work) one character sometimes speaks in 12-syllable alexandrines, (a pastiche of Racine’s plays,) and they were the devil to translate because 12 syllables, with a break after the sixth what’s more, is not at all common in English verse; but it seemed important to keep it, because of all the text references.

On the general question of ‘readability’, all translators in my experience face the same old dilemma: ‘whether to take the reader closer to the author, or the author closer to the reader’, i.e. make it more faithful to the original, or more ‘at home’ in the target language. It’s a matter of genre in some ways. My view is that it’s important that the reader should be aware that he/she is reading a translation, and not imagine that the book was originally written in English. Hence my decisions to keep things like street names and occasional French words in the original. But Fred’s books are very readable – if quirky! – in French, and I try to get as much of that across as possible, so that reading them is (I hope) fun.

A personal note: As a non-fluent speaker and reader of French, I find it easier to read social science than fiction and easier to read the philosophes and publicists of the 18th and 19th centuries than I do Montaigne, whose work I love in English translation. Is this often the case with non-native speakers of French? If so, why (other than Montaigne's meandering sentences)?

You’re right, Montaigne is very, very hard to read in French. Sixteenth-century authors are much more difficult generally than seventeenth and eighteenth because they wrote before French grammarians had set about rationalising the language. Eighteenth-century texts are written in much clearer French. Montaigne’s vocabulary and syntax as well as his own style, make it a real challenge. There are some modern French editions which have ‘modernised’ his French to make it more comprehensible for today’s French readers – worth a look.

With the publication of This Night's Foul Work, four of Fred Vargas' books about commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg and one of three about the Three Evangelists will have been translated into English. Can readers expect more translations of Vargas into English?

You’ll have to ask the publisher that – but at least one more is in the pipeline: I have just finished translating the first Adamsberg story, originally published in 1991.

(Read Part I of the interview with Sian Reynolds here.)


© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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translation

A guest post about Fred Vargas, good books and crime-fiction awards

Loren Eaton, who maintains the I Saw Lightning Fall blog and who comments on this blog from time to time, is taking a break from both pursuits — some nonsense about caring for a new baby. While he takes the 3 a.m. feedings, I'm helping out with a guest post on his blog about Fred Vargas, Siân Reynolds and the ripple of dissatisfaction in some circles when the pair won their third International Dagger Award in four years for The Chalk Circle Man.

Loren has lined up an interesting group to fill in for him while he fulfills his fatherly duties. Read my contribution here. And congratulate Loren on the new arrival.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Fred Vargas in the newspaper

My review of Fred Vargas' The Chalk Circle Man appears here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Merde!

Merde is the glue that holds Fred Vargas' three evangelists together:

"Ils cherchaient. Un autre fou dans la merde."

and

"Dans la merde" demanda-t-il?"

"Précisément. ... Ennui, désillusion, écriture en solitude."

"Mais alors il est dans la merde ... Tu ne pouvais pas la dire tout de suite?"

and

"(L)es trois chercheurs de merde se retrouvèrent tassés autour d'un grand feu."

and

"Ils sont bien emmerdés les médiévistes avec ça."

Marc, Matthias and Lucien, the three "evangelists" of the novel's English title, come together because all are in merde. Too bad that merde, or rather its English equivalent, is frowned upon in American publications. But even then, shit is both far harsher in tone and far narrower in meaning than merde.

Siân Reynolds, who translated Vargas' Debout les morts into English as The Three Evangelists, told Detectives Beyond Borders last year that:

"Swearing is another potential pitfall. French colloquial speech uses a number of terms which if translated literally sound rather stronger in English (merde, je m’en fous, etc.) Given what we know about the characters, you have to save four-letter words for times when the context calls for them."

She renders merde variously as down on his luck or in a bad way, chercheurs de merde as seriously unemployed historians, and "Ils sont bien emmerdés les médiévistes avec ça" as "Not so easy either, for the poor medievalists."

The translation loses the unifying, amusing effect of the repeated merde, both meaning and sound, but what can a translator do except shrug, mutter a quiet merde!, and get on with her work?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Meet your CWA Dagger winners, plus a question for readers

The Crime Writers' Association in the UK presented its International Dagger, Short Story Dagger, Dagger in the Library and Debut Dagger awards tonight in London. (See information on the short-listed titles at the CWA Web site.) The CWA was also to announce its short lists for the Gold (the big prize), John Creasey (New Blood) and Ian Fleming Steel Daggers, about which more later.

Up for the International Dagger for best crime, thriller, suspense or spy novel translated into English for UK publication were:

• Karin Alvtegen, Shadow, translated by McKinley Burnett
• Arnaldur Indriðason, The Arctic Chill, translated by Bernard Scudder and Victoria Crib
• Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire, translated by Reg Keeland
• Jo Nesbø, The Redeemer, translated by Don Bartlett
• Johan Theorin, Echoes from the Dead, translated by Marlaine Delargy
• Fred Vargas, The Chalk Circle Man, translated by Siân Reynolds

Other short-listed authors whose names have popped up at Detectives Beyond Borders include Sean Chercover, Colin Cotterill, R.J. Ellory, Ariana Franklin and Peter James.

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• Colin Cotterill wins the Dagger in the Library award.
• Catherine O'Keefe wins the Debut Dagger for The Pathologist.
• A big huzzah to Short Story Dagger winner Sean Chercover, who becomes the first Noir at the Bar guest to win a Dagger.
• And finally, Fred Vargas and translator Sian Reynolds (a previous Detectives Beyond Borders interview subject) win their third International Dagger in four years for The Chalk Circle Man.

Congratulations to the winners, thanks to Ali Karim for his live Twitter updates, and, on a personal note, an expression of amazement at how quickly the presentations went. At the Oscars, the winner for sound engineering in a short foreign-language animated film would be still be thanking his wife, his producers, God, and the good people of his hometown.

=============

And now, your opinions, please. What was the biggest Dagger surprise? That five of the six short-listed International Dagger books were from Nordic countries? That the one non-Nordic entrant won? That French novels have won every International Dagger? That three of those have gone to a woman named Fred?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The Chalk Circle Man: A mystery by Fred Vargas

Fred Vargas' novels amble far from the investigations that are the staple of the traditional police procedural. At the same time, few crime stories are as apt to leave a reader wondering so ardently whodunnit.

That's because Vargas' near-constant emphasis on her characters' quirks communicates that old French message that everyone has his reasons. Here, Vargas rather skillfully manipulates the reader (OK, she manipulated me) into believing at various times that any of four characters could be the killer, for the simple reason that each of the four has a reason or character trait or behavioral quirk that makes him or her a plausible suspect.

As in Vargas' Have Mercy on Us All, a series of odd messages triggers the mystery. There the messages were odd notes slipped into a modern-day town crier's news bulletins. Here they are visual: a series of mysterious chalk circles that appear in several Paris neighborhoods, each circle enclosing some odd object. Then, one night, a dead body, throat slashed, is found in one of the circles.

The very oddity of the circles lets the intuitive commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg and the analytical lieutenant Adrien Danglard consider any number of possible theories. I'll let you read the book to find out what Vargas makes of theories.

For The Chalk Circle Man, Vargas' English-language publishers went back to the first Adamsberg mystery after earlier having issued books two, four, six and seven (the eight books include six novels, one graphic novel and a collection of novellas.) The reader of the books translated earlier will here learn the secret of Danglard's fifth child (I don't remember the story being told in the later books), and there are some delightful scenes of the single father Danglard and the children he loves. If I recall correctly, The Chalk Circle Man also offers more, and maybe even slightly different, physical description of Adamsberg.

For the most part, though, readers of Vargas in English may be reassured to know that Adamsberg has been Adamsberg from the start: intuitive, occasionally abstracted, infuriatingly prone to appear relaxed when Danglard is anything but, and entranced, upset and always worried by the mesmerizing Camille.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The day of the short(list) Daggers

The Crime Writers' Association has announced most of the short lists for the 2009 Dagger Awards. The International Dagger list for crime novels in translation reflects the continuing popularity of Nordic crime fiction, with three Swedish novels and one each from Norway and Iceland. Fred Vargas and translator Siân Reynolds, already two-time Dagger winners for Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand in 2007 and The Three Evangelists in 2006, are the only non-Nordic contenders on this year's short list.

Shadow by Karin Alvtegen, translated from the Swedish by McKinley Burnett (Steven T. Murray)

Arctic Chill by Arnaldur Indriðason, translated from the Icelandic by Bernard Scudder and Victoria Cribb

The Girl who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson, translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland (Steven T. Murray)

The Redeemer by Jo Nesbø, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett

Echoes from the Dead by Johan Theorin, translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy

The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas, translated from the French by Siân Reynolds

Shortlistees for best short story include Sean Chercover, a guest at the first international Noir at the Bar earlier this year.

Read more about the nominees on the CWA Web site here and in Barry Forshaw's Times preview here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Pierre Magnan's country life

I once stayed at a campground in the Dordogne region of France. On an excursion into the local village, I was regarded with great concentration by some ancient men sitting around a small table outside a shop.

My first thought was that they were suspicious of outsiders. I later guessed that village life gave them time to cogitate at great length on all sorts of things, including ephemera such as passing tourists.

I'm strongly reminded of that encounter about halfway into Pierre Magnan's Death in the Truffle Wood. Magnan sets his book in a village of 900 people in the Basses-Alpes of France. A number of people have disappeared, but the investigation gets underway slowly. Far more to the fore are the mysteries and the hints thereto in the lives of the villagers and of the commissaire called in to investigate the disappearances. This novel, in other words, uses people to create a vivid, unfamiliar (to me) setting.

Though her orientation is generally more urban than this, I'd bet that Fred Vargas reads Magnan. And I'd bet that her readers would like Magnan as well.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Interviews with CWA shortlist picks

The U.K.'s Crime Writers Association has announced the shortlists for its Dagger awards, which are to be presented in London next month.

The lists include two subjects of 2008 Detectives Beyond Borders interviews: Sian Reynolds, nominated with Fred Vargas for the Duncan Lawrie International Dagger for her translation of Vargas' This Night's Foul Work, and Matt Rees, up for the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger for The Bethlehem Murders (The Collaborator of Bethlehem in the U.S.).

Other shortlistees include Colin Cotterill, Duncan Lawrie Dagger for The Coroner's Lunch; Andrea Camilleri and translator Stephen Sartarelli, Duncan Lawrie International Dagger for The Patience of the Spider, and Martin Edwards, Short Story Dagger for ‘The Bookbinder’s Apprentice.’

© Peter Rozovsky 2008