Translation Diary: Daniel Levin Becker on Laurent Mauvignier's "The Birthday Party" (Part 3)
Third pass: Red eyes, blue ink, can’t lose
The third pass isn’t pretty. I suppose it can be, if you’ve left yourself more than a weekend to pore over 640 pages one last time, but it’s not in my professional nature to afford myself such extravagances as “sensible time management,” so here we were. I had a plan. I would have reasoned out all the book’s tricks and traps to the best of my ability, with the help of Nicolas and, for those questions he couldn’t even non-answer, a few indulgent email responses from the author; I would have printed out the whole manuscript, picked out a red pen or two, and absconded to a sparsely furnished suburban Airbnb where I wouldn’t be distracted by the cats and where I could spare my wife the spectacle of me pacing back and forth, unkempt and red-eyed and peanut butter–bearded, repeating a snatch of sentence out loud in the hopes of figuring out whether it sounded a little off or whether I’d just been awake for thirty hours. And I would read the book, reader, as a reader would, a reader who hadn’t already spent the last few months agonizing over its every page. I would listen for missing words and extraneous ones, for hiccups and Gallicisms, for turns of phrase or beats of exposition that were awkward, but not in the way the author had intended. I would pretend I was on vacation, reading for pleasure.
Instead, I got COVID—imagine, reader, a world where not even translators are spared such indignities—which scuttled the middle part of the plan. I still printed out the manuscript, though in an eye-straining light blue because the cyan cartridge was the only one with any ink left in it—at 325 pages in 1.5-spaced 10-point type, this was like the miracle of Hanukkah, only much lamer—and I still cloistered myself, but only in my living room, so the cats got their editorial say after all. They will not be included in my acknowledgments, so I thank them here.
What did I find this time? No surprises, really. Some new perplexities, of course, a handful of final queries. A handful of unnecessary thats. A handful of obscenities that didn’t pop enough for my liking. Some tense shifts that I’d neglected, some constructions that needed contractions. Some words I’d translated too literally: a kind of tablecloth, a part of a car’s lateral paneling. Some patterns I’d been unaware of, whether in the author’s style or in mine, that mostly held water once I verified that they were used more or less consistently. No surprises? Well, perhaps a renewed sense of the power and complex majesty of this novel, its psychological acuity and attention to detail, its tautness in spite of its sprawl. I hadn’t known a 640-page book could be taut, just as I hadn’t suspected I’d be able to read it so soon with fresh eyes, bleary as they were, if only for a moment. In the home stretch, around four in the morning, I read one late chapter as if in a rapture, barely marking the pages at all, transported by the scorched-earth tenderness Mauvignier had managed to cultivate from this birthday party gone terribly wrong, the insight he made space for as we crept grimly toward its explosive denouement. This is beautiful, I thought to myself. Maybe I said it aloud; you’d have to ask the cats. This is a book. Maybe my work here is done.
Shortly afterward, I spent an hour revising a single page.
