A Conversation
“I had been literally haunted by a scene in my life: it was the death of my father, who passed away in my arms on the platform of a Paris railroad station. I became focused on writing a page about it. It took me twelve years. Every few weeks, every few months, I would reopen my Word document, I was never satisfied with it, I would tweak it more, modify it, enrich it, and one day I decided that the page was perfect, it was exactly what I wanted. It was at that precise time that the floodgates opened and I wrote another 300 pages in six months. So, one page in 12 years and 300 pages in 6 months. That’s how it all started.”
“While writing has always been in me, generally part of my job, writing fiction for a living never occurred to me. It was a rich man’s dream, and I was too busy… living. I didn’t have time for dreams.”
“I remember one day, when I was moving from an apartment to a house, I went through boxes of papers that I hadn’t opened in thirty years or more and found many pages I wrote as a kid. I had absolutely no recollection of having ever written those pieces. Of course they were childish, of course they were ridiculous, of course they were no good, because inevitably, you have to write a thousand pages before you can be legitimately proud of a single one. So I wrote a lot of garbage, but the urge was there, the urge has always been there. At first, it was all auto-fiction, which I like to call “auto-friction”, because it is so self-satisfactory, so… “self-pleasuring”. Honestly, the process is indecent. You are staging yourself as the hero of a story. I don’t need that! I may have needed it when I was 15, but I don’t need it anymore. I am a finished product. There is only so much that I can write about myself without sounding either over-pretentious, or self-serving. To me, real talent lies not in talking about yourself (after all, we are all finite and we get boring quite fast), but to try and impersonate entities that are as different from you as they can possibly be.”
“I was working for the French government, in charge of cultural organizations abroad, and then, for reasons of my own, I decided to quit the system and do something else. I got into translation by a fluke. What diplomacy taught me was the art of accuracy and of keeping the language within formal boundaries. I have the deepest respect for the administrative language, which is a school for disciplining yourself, for taming the shrew that’s inevitably within you. Practice also taught me something else. While scholars argue about the governing principles of translation, I learned the most compelling principle of all: if I am translating an operator’s guide to a microwave oven from English into French, I must end up with a text that reads like an operator’s guide to a microwave oven. Thomas Scott, a poet whose work I translated from English into French, calls it my Microwave Oven Principle. I guess his bilingual friends told him that my translations read like real French poems.”
“I had started my career in New York, kept some contacts there over the years, and one of the guys working for the United Nations at the time asked me, since I was no longer working for the French government, whether I would be willing to help him translate a whole slew of documents he was not able to handle by himself. This is how I stepped into the translation world, doing work for the U.N. – from Toronto, which was a great situation and a fantastic experience: working from my home office, remotely – a form of employment which has since then become quite widespread. Anyway, at some point the work was getting scarcer, there was not as much, so I started getting worried. I called my contact and I asked him what was happening. He said: “Well, we’re restructuring.” Restructuring never means throwing money out the window, restructuring invariably means saving money, and that meant that the jobs would be fewer and farther apart. So I looked around, decided to be proactive, thinking that I might get a more permanent position in Toronto, and I found one with a wonderful company called Morningstar, which deals with financial research. I thought I would weather the storm for a while until things got straightened out at the UN, but, lo and behold, I stayed 16 ½ years with them.”
“Mostly, I have been working and living in English-speaking countries and societies, and the question I was invariably getting when I was publishing a book was: “What is your book about?” Whenever a francophone asked me that question, I would answer: “Buy the book, you cheapskate! Read it and you’ll find out!” But I could not say that to an English audience, because of the language barrier. English societies were what I was exposed to, and naturally I had a lot more friends who were English-speakers than Francophones. I have always been craving to make my work and whatever I do accessible to them, so at least I could get some feedback, at least we could talk about it without me having to just paraphrase what I wrote. At first I thought that writing in French flowed a little bit more easily: I mastered a little bit more vocabulary, I was a little bit more daring in the way I expressed things, it appeared to be somewhat richer. However, one of the problems with writing is: too many choices, and writing in another language limits your choices, so in a way it streamlines the writing process.”
“One of the books I wrote, called “La Maison” (“The Mansion”, if you will), which was shortlisted for the Trillium Award, was simply a dream I had. I dreamed the whole book in one night. When I woke up, I went to my computer and started writing away. That is completely unique. It only happened to me once. But the process is always the same: I have an idea. Then I build up on it. Characters emerge and develop. Sometimes they take over and I let them when they are clearly telling the truth. Of course, once the book is finished, the characters just disappear. I haven’t had one come back to haunt me. Not yet, anyway.”
