By Jason Steger
The translation bug
When Penny Hueston reviewed Marie Darrieussecq’s third novel, My Phantom Husband, for The Age many years ago — last century, to be precise — she commented generously about the French writer’s translators.
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The English version of Pig Tales, Darriessecq’s debut, by Linda Coverdale was ‘‘remarkable – her word plays are occasionally even better than the original’’. And Hueston said the novel she was reviewing was also ‘‘brilliantly translated ... I found a number of passages more suave and evocative in Helen Stevenson's English than the none the less elegant but plain French original’’. Fast-forward 20 years and Hueston has herself translated six of Darrieussecq’s books for Text, where she is a director and a senior editor.
Last month, Hueston was awarded the 2020 Medal for Excellence in Translation from the Australian Academy of the Humanities for her English version of Darrieussecq’s Being Here: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker. The judging panel said ‘‘the challenges facing the translator of the text are considerable: the need to recreate the spare, stream-of-consciousness style, to move adroitly between tonal registers and changes of voice. These challenges are handled with rigour, subtlety and assurance by Hueston.’’
Hueston started translating when the editors of the now-defunct literary journal Scripsi, Peter Craven and Michael Heyward, decided to produce an edition focusing on French writers. There was one problem — ‘‘neither spoke French’’, Hueston said.
Her latest Darrieussecq translation is Crossed Lines. She says the French writer, who is herself a translator of Joyce and Woolf into French, never interferes with her work and they are the best of friends. ‘‘We have been exchanging lockdown notes,’’ Hueston said.
A local hero
James Boyce is recognised as one of Australia’s best ‘‘independent’’ historians, although he prefers the term "writer" to describe what he does. His first book was Van Diemen’s Land, and for his second, 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia, he won a book of the year award from The Age. He said at the time, ‘‘I write for a general readership. My aim is not to dumb anything down but to write what is serious history in an accessible form, not to assume knowledge.’’ He followed up with Born Bad, his account of original sin, and then Losing Streak, about Tasmania and the gambling industry.
But his most recent book, Imperial Mud, was a big departure. It's about the part of eastern England known as the Fens and the impact of enclosure on common land and the people who lived there. It won the history prize in the East Anglian Book awards last month, and this week, Boyce was up for the overall book of the year award. Unfortunately, the announcement was scheduled for the same day as the rearranged announcement of the Booker Prize.
The Casaubon factor
Jonathan Franzen has a new novel heading our way next year. Credit: Beowulf Sheehan
When it was announced that Jonathan Franzen’s three-volume novel was to be called A Key to All Mythologies, some wag remarked that it was entirely appropriate that the author of The Corrections and other big American novels would choose the same title as that of Edward Casaubon’s never-completed work in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Casaubon is notoriously curmudgeonly, pompous and has a high opinion of himself. My correspondent is entitled to his opinion, of course, but I have always found Franzen remarkably pleasant, and you have to admire the ironic wit in his choice of title. The first volume, Crossroads, will be published in October.