I’d not planned on taking a month and a half away from writing whatever these things are, but life gets in the way. And in all honesty, had I not started reading a certain book today, I probably wouldn’t have started writing this and 6 would have become 7 weeks, and then 7 could have become 8 and so on and so forth. This would have been a shame, for myself. While I have my own personal diary, what I write there is worlds apart from what I write about here, and it would be a shame not to have an almost weekly account of my life in Paris and my engagement with the French language and translation that I can one day, perhaps, look back on.
The book is by André Markowicz; it’s called Partages, and I’ll talk about that in a bit. First I want to talk about Markowicz, who, in the month or so that I’ve known of him, has become someone I greatly respect. Working mainly from Russian into French, he’s translated the entirety of Dostoevsky, all of Chekhov’s plays (with Françoise Morvan, who’s also his partner), Pushkin, and just about every great Russian poet you can name, and all the others you can’t. On top of that he’s also translated the majority of Shakespeare, and has a book of translations of Chinese poetry too.
I first learnt of him in December, when I read his and Françoise Morvan’s translation of The Master and Margarita. This was a book I’d already read at the start of 2023, in an English translation I really didn’t get on with. This annoyed me. As I read it I knew I should have really loved it, but there was something in the prose that just didn’t gel with me. Plus, it’s my girlfriend’s favourite book, and one of the only books she can re-read without diminishing returns; and when someone loves a book so much and then you read it and it has little to no effect on you, that’s a great shame. Not all was lost, however. The version she read was in Polish. Mine was a more recent English one. Then, at the start of December, my best friend told me he was reading it, but in a different English translation to the one I’d read, and absolutely loving it. This made me think that I might as well read it in French and see what happens. So I looked up the French translations and decided to go with the most recent, as mentioned above, by Markowicz and Morvan, published in 2022.
From the first sentences everything clicked. I couldn’t believe how much better it was. Already it goes without saying that it was a totally different book, since it couldn’t be anything but. But I really can’t emphasise enough just how drastically different and how much better this one was compared to the translation I’d read some 11 months before. Where the English was clunky, or the prose stuffy, Markowicz and Morvan had captured the knowing wink and cheekiness that Bulgakov’s story had; something that I hadn’t been able to fully experience the first time round despite knowing it was there, somewhere. Thankfully here I found it, and other than the life they’d breathed into their translation, they’d also pulled off some insane linguistic feats that the translators responsible for the first one I read hadn’t even attempted, like inventing new puns for a bunch of the surnames, which in the original Russian are often ridiculous or scathing wordplays relating to the characters (either made up or inspired by real people). These, in particular, blew me away, and have set a standard for any future projects of mine that I want to try and uphold.
Following this I read Markowicz’s translation of Dostoevsky’s novella, Les Nuits Blanches (White Nights), and began listening to interviews with him and reading as much about him as I could. His approach to translation resonated with me, and listening to him talk was of great solace over a difficult December.
This brings me to Partages, a collection of thrice-weekly Facebook posts he made over the course of 2013, in which he mainly talks about language, current events, and his translation projects past and present. Other than being interesting, I see in it a similar project to what I’m writing here; and it’s gotten me out of the slump with regards to it.
‘What is a translator?’ he asks in one of the first entries. ‘A translator is someone who likes something and wants to share it.’
It’s snowed the past few days in Paris, and while all that remains on the streets after each snowfall is quickly reduced to slush and patches of ice, the grass and paths of the Bois des Vincennes, a short walk from my flat, remain blanketed in white, with the lake at its centre frozen over.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the snow, the ice, since I got back. The morning I left Glasgow it had snowed there as well.
The French word for snow is neige. The French word for ice is glace, while the word for ice on the road is verglas. To freeze is geler. To ice over (or in more common parlance, to become icy) is givrer. Glacé is freezing, icy and frozen, as gelé is too.
The other morning, in the glaring sun and bitterly cold wind, I joined a crowd of onlookers watching a heron gracefully walk across the frozen lake. All the geese were slipping about, while the swans simply sat down, their necks folded back into their white plumage so that their orange beaks made them look like poached eggs; but the heron was unfazed.
The heron, too, has been on my mind ever since.
As has the following passage from Boule de suif, by Guy de Maupassant. It was upon reading this for the first time last year that I truly understood his influence on Joyce, who so perfectly conjures snow in the beautiful and quietly devastating final paragraph of his story, The Dead.1
Maupassant writes: « Un rideau de flocons blancs ininterrompu miroitait sans cesse en descendant vers la terre ; il effaçait les formes, poudrait les choses d’une mousse de glace ; et l’on n’entendait plus, dans le grand silence de la ville calme et ensevelie sous l’hiver, que ce froissement vague, innommable et flottant, de la neige qui tombe, plutôt sensation que bruit, entremêlement d’atomes légers qui semblaient emplir l’espace, couvrir le monde. »
I translate: A curtain of uninterrupted snowflakes shimmered ceaselessly as they fell to earth; it effaced the forms, powdered everything in a moss of ice; and one no longer heard, in the great silence of the calm town buried beneath the winter, anything but the rustling wave, unnamable and floating, of the falling snow—more a sensation than a noise—a mingling of weightless atoms that seemed to fill space, to cover the world.
Sunday morning. I’ve spent the weekend with my sister. Yesterday we had a coffee opposite Wes Anderson and some people I didn’t recognise. My sister didn’t know who Wes Anderson was—I loved this. He didn’t speak French to the waiter and looked very uncomfortable. Snow remains scattered about and the ice seems to only grow worse.
“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” - James Joyce, The Dead.