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#NIGHT OF REVENGE TRANSLATION FULL#
Are these passages physical corridors, or sections of text? When David descends into the secret passage in Prote’s mansion, and is confronted by mysterious voices and gunshots (coming from cinemas on either side of the passage), a room full of costumes, and a hidden note from Prote revealing that he has already predicted every one of David’s moves, it is no wonder that the reader (or at least, this reader) finds their mind jumping to notions of the text as a treacherous labyrinth prepared by the cunning author in order to bamboozle the translator. This foregrounding of symbolism is also apparent in the multiple chapters about secret passages. Images such as a blank space divided by a line (a painting, a football pitch…), asterisks, eggs, puppets, airplanes, all recur over and over again, so that it becomes impossible for them to go undetected. What I mean by this is that elements of the text such as symbolism and the repetition of themes, which might normally be carefully embedded within the text, and only coaxed out by careful, repeated readings, are here almost thrust into the face of the reader. It is often said that a work’s closest reader is its translator, and I would suggest that Revenge of the Translator seeks to simulate or perform that close translatorly reading. As David and Doris are forced to become pawns in Prote’s game, the translator of the work in which these three characters are contained feels compelled to become involved, eventually insinuating himself into the text, with devastating consequences.
#NIGHT OF REVENGE TRANSLATION SERIES#
While this may initially seem like the perfect ploy on the part of the translator, it quickly emerges that Prote is well aware of Doris’s infidelity, and has left a series of cryptic clues that will lead the translator through a labyrinth fraught with dangers and mysteries. As Prote’s plane heads for New York, Doris (who spends some of her time in the States) is on a flight heading in the other direction for a sojourn with her beau in the author’s mansion. However, matters are complicated by the fact that the two men share more than just a literary relationship: Doris Night, Prote’s young secretary and lover has also been having an affair with the American translator. As David is a New York native, Prote proposes a house swap, allowing the author a chance to scout for locations to substitute those in his French text while providing David with peaceful surroundings in which to work on his translation. Prote has decided that the best way to successfully convey a sense of his novel to an American reader is to completely alter the setting, moving the action from his native Paris to the city of New York. T.), by French author Abel Prote, into English. From here, we move to an appraisal of the text as a whole, and it isn’t long before the translator begins paraphrasing the entirety of the novel beneath the thin black bar on each page.Ĭoincidentally, the fictitious Translator’s Revenge is also about a translator-author relationship, as David Grey, a young American translator, takes on the task of bringing a book, cryptically named (N.d. The translator’s protestations eventually lead to action, as he begins to make alterations to the text, removing ‘stage directions’ that he deems superfluous and at one point excising all of the adverbs and adjectives from a page, so that the author’s prose becomes “almost good, the bastard”. Readers will be instantly struck by the fact that, throughout most of the book, Matthieussent’s text appears beneath this black bar, following an asterisk, which links to another asterisk in the blank space above the bar, supposedly representing the author’s deleted text. The novel opens with a lengthy diatribe from the unnamed translator of a fictitious American novel called Translator’s Revenge in which he bemoans the fact that his hand is not visible in the main text, with his only conspicuous input to be found in the translator’s notes at the bottom of each page, beneath a thin black bar.
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It seems to me that his own novel sits somewhere between Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, which makes sense given the influences Matthieussent attests to within the text. Revenge of the Translator (Deep Vellum) is the debut novel of Brice Matthieussent, a French translator with over 200 books to his name, including works by literary heavyweights like Jack Kerouac, Annie Dillard, and Charles Bukowski. Sometimes it’s in that hardly sterling state that I emerge from a translation session alone, it goes without saying, but just as dazed, similarly disoriented for a moment unable to find a sense of place, a sense of time, a reason for my presence anywhere other than the intimacy of the text.