Kaya Days, our Book Club selection for the month of September, is Mauritian author Carl de Souza’s electrifying bildungsroman, set amidst the 1999 riots on the island nation. In getting de Souza’s world of revolutionaries, music, and fire, Assistant Editor Laurel Taylor spoke to translator Jeffrey Zuckerman on his work on Mauritian novels and his processes of translation, especially when working on texts as experimental as de Souza’s. Their conversation spanned the intricacies of handling the many cultures de Souza brings together in his work, and the ethics which face a translator handling such a text. Look out for our second instalment of Kaya Day‘s interviews next Monday, when Laurel Taylor will be speaking with the Carl de Souza.
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Laurel Taylor LT: How did you first come to Carlo’s work? What was it that drew you in?
Jeffrey Zuckerman (JZ): Oh, this goes back to the beginning of my career in translation. The first book I saw to publication was that of another Mauritian author—Ananda Devi’s Eve Out of Her Ruins. It was as I was reading more of her œuvre and learning more about her compatriots that I started drawing connections. I was put in touch with Nathacha Appanah—whose The Last Brother is absolutely stunning, incidentally— and I asked if she had recommendations for books from Mauritius that hadn’t been translated. This was her answer:
My mind has a list ‘longue comme la semaine’, as we say in Creole, of books that haven’t been translated but then you’ll think I’m pestering you. So just one title which has been snubbed and I don’t understand why. It’s Ceux qu’on jette à la mer by Carl de Souza, published at L’Olivier in 2001. It is a story about Chinese people stranded at sea.
She didn’t add any further info. At the time, I had heard Carlo’s name, but not delved into his work. I managed to lay hands on Ceux qu’on jette à la mer (literally “Those Thrown to the Sea” but which Carl loves the idea of being condensed to “Jettisoned”) about a boat full of Chinese workers from Guangzhou that ends up stranded in Mauritius, and the lives of the men both on and off the boat. I also picked up that short, intense novella of his, Les Jours Kaya, and was blown away by the way in which it wove in and out of the experiences of people across the island, some in the rioting, some at a remove, some forced to make their way through the chaos. It didn’t take long for me to realize what a brilliant, sublime flame of a text it was, or to appreciate the way it was held together by a rhythm akin to Kaya’s songs, and I fell in love with it straightaway.
LT: Carlo himself is multilingual and has recently started writing in English. To what extent did you collaborate on the process of translation? What was your working process with him like?
JZ: I got to visit the island of Mauritius for the first time ever after having translated three novels from there—two by Ananda Devi and one by Shenaz Patel—in late 2018. A few months before that, I got in touch properly with Carl, and in the intervening months, I did sample translations of these two major novels of his, of which he was clearly happy with. Then I came to the island and spent two days at his house, overlooking the island’s sugarcane fields, and over the course of our conversations and drives around the island, it became so clear to me how his books and his personality are a perfect expression of this island and its unique position between an insular space and a teeming nexus of multiculturality. In terms of our process, Carlo has been the best sort of author for a translator to work with; he’s been very clear that he trusts me and wants me to feel free to make the choices that I make—and also very, very willing to answer all sorts of questions, no matter how trivial they may seem!
LT: In the process of translation, I find that many translators often find a through line—my own mentor called it “the interpretant”—to use as a guiding force. One might focus on rhythm, on voice, on form, on style as they translate and use that as the lens they most often refract their own work through. As you were working on Kaya Days, I’m curious what interpretants you found yourself returning to. What sang to you?
JZ: It won’t come as much surprise to hear that I found séggae music, especially Kaya’s, essential to giving me a rhythm or cadence with which to tune my prose. But that was only at the very end, as I was working with CJ Evans to apply a final polish (he’s a very thorough and thoughtful editor—I recommend working with him if you’re lucky enough to get the chance!). In the meantime, it was the welter of disparate cultures and influences underpinning Mauritius that guided me. You can drive down a palm-lined street and suddenly see a sun-bleached Hindu temple; you can round a corner and suddenly be faced with the vibrant blue waters of Blue Bay. There are enclaves, to be sure, but everybody inevitably crosses paths with one another, and this constant intersection both forms and informs Mauritius—as well as the books that Carlo writes. Of course the biggest, well, interpretant is Carlo himself. He’s not a writer I could have translated any earlier in my career; he often writes with the assumption that readers already know everything he’s alluding to, and so there was a great deal of research and self-doubt as I worked through multiple drafts. But when I reminded myself that he was the one behind the words on the page, it was easier to land on answers that made the text sing true. There was one tricky spot where Santee, the protagonist of Kaya Days, is driven around a private estate, and the driver points out a mown stretch of the grounds with a mention of an old relative who’d once been able to “jouer au volant” there; I had only ever heard the word volant in the context of driver’s seat or steering wheel, but with the whole ride, and other mentions of cars throughout the text, the image of pretending to drive seemed odd but not completely improbable. It was only the day before final edits had to be turned in that I double-checked, and realized that it was actually the game of battledore and shuttlecock. Carlo is an accomplished badminton player; his daughter has represented Mauritius in the Olympics; he’s even written a book that encapsulates half a decade of Mauritian history through the eyes of a badminton player. So of course he’d have planted a reference to an older version of the game—and found a way to make it feel natural!
LT: Mauritius is an island which comes from the so-called periphery—though French-speaking, Mauritians are not sitting on the Académie Française. When you’re translating a work like this, from this particular context and into the context of English as colonizing lingua franca, what ethical quandaries did you find yourself facing?
JZ: I was asked by the folks at Two Lines Press whether it should say that I translated this from French or from Mauritian French. At first I genuinely wasn’t sure, and then I realized: while there are particular French words that are only encountered in Mauritius—louquer, which means to look, for example—the French that Carlo writes isn’t as distinct from France French as, say, Quebec French is. And it was published in Paris, by a very respected publishing house; a lot of the linguistic questions of colonialism and postcolonialism had already been grappled with and decided by Carlo himself well before I ever read the book. My job was to make sure I didn’t smooth over or erase the nuances and distinctions that are present in the text. By way of example, the main ethnic groups of Mauritius are Hindus, Muslims, Chinese, and General Population (which is a catchall group). Both Hindus and Muslims are of Indian descent; the distinction is most immediately evident through names (Santee and Ramesh, for example, are very much Hindu names) and maintaining that distinction rather than overstating it was one way of staying ethically honest to the text. Another was to maintain the fluidity of languages present in the text; Kreol crops up here and there the same way it crops up in conversation on the island. And in that context, because the French editors had made Carlo’s book more legible to French readers (they even changed the spelling of a few Kreol words), I saw adding more Kreol to the text as my way of decolonizing Kaya Days—and it really touched my heart to see Carlo run with it, making sure I had the right spellings for it all!
LT: Carlo’s writing is very dense and opaque. When you’re approaching a text with this kind of labyrinthine, almost (but not quite) flow-of-consciousness style, how do you keep track of it all? I’m thinking specifically of the way dialogue in Kaya Days works, but even transitions between point-of-view are abrupt, and I’m curious what your process looked like as you balanced the text.
JZ: Well, on the word level, I can’t even begin to tell you how many messages I traded with the indefatigable Ariel Saramandi and her incredible friend Khatleen Minerve; I asked them about ti-millions (teensy fish, it turns out) and all sorts of plants (should I call a particular palm a latanier or a thief palm?) and about the actual protests (there are stop lights now flat on the ground; were they knocked over by cars careening, or toppled by protesters?). Their names are at the end of the book because of their sheer wealth of knowledge and good humor. Without them I wouldn’t have been able to get through the first draft, and then what felt like half a dozen rounds of revision. For the constant shifts in perspective and switches from narrative to dialogue and back across the many subsequent drafts, I had to set my bullshit meter to high, and every time I got to a spot where I thought, “wait, I’m not sure this quite follows from that,” I went back to the original French to make sure there wasn’t a nuance I’d missed in the mad rush of my first draft. One instance that comes to mind is when Santee was down in the ravine, and overheard the monkey-children:
She didn’t know where they were, she heard their voices echoing from the ravine’s banks: Double-fives, Pass, You’re cheating, Wait, who’s that over there? One of them whispered, It’s Bissoonlall’s sister, but quietly so Ram wouldn’t get mad at them . . .
I had to ask half a dozen friends before one of them realized that they were playing dominos and that was what they’d be calling out. And, as you noticed, spoken language isn’t separated out from running prose, it took a good three or four rewrites to fully tease who was saying what, and when we were in the narrative rather than hearing spoken language. It felt like unpeeling an onion: as I got every semitransparent layer out of the way and got closer to the core of the whole, it only set every problem spot into even higher relief. But once I finally had answers to my last-minute questions from Carlo, I was able to sit back and appreciate the whole thing in a new language. I can’t tell you how lovely it was to reread the whole manuscript the night before we sent it off to the printers and keep thinking, yes, this is right, yes, this is right, oh, yes, this really does flow beautifully . . . and to know that it would now be in the hands of readers who could enjoy it just as much as Carlo’s own compatriots already had.
LT: I’m now curious if you translated the whole book in one go and then went back for full pass revisions, or if you translated a little and then revised. It sounds like the former perhaps? And if that is the case, is that your usual approach in translation, or do you find you have different processes depending on the text?
JZ: I usually do a full first draft, with lots of questions and thoughts and potential word choices embedded into the running text, and then go back through the whole book in each successive round. It does mean that I don’t really have a clear macro picture of the whole book in all its detail until much later drafts, and it’s only at that point, when the whole book feels like it’s crammed into my head, that I can really draw connections between very disparate parts of the text and make sure they all chime.
For example, not even a dozen pages into the book, there’s this bit of text: “Bissoonlall’s out . . . Bissoonlall’s always out . . . Bissoonlall finn al kazino… Those whispers were her only hope of bringing him back home.” When I was doing the first draft, I was too deep into the weeds to register why the Kreol for “Bissoonlall’s gone off to the casino” would be mentioned, and why anybody from Ram’s school would have said that a tween (!) was off to, well, a casino—but in the last third of the text, when Santee, now Shakuntala, finds herself in the ravine, and the narrative moves away from her to Ram, we get the answer: “Women never ventured into the Grande Rivière’s gorges; even children who came only did so behind the grown-ups’ backs. Ram couldn’t even say what exactly it was he’d come here to do [. . .] The other kids from school liked this place, they called it ‘the casino’ for just that reason.” And that was when I realized, oh, so that’s what was going on when one of the kids said that Ram had gone to the casino!
LT: From what you describe, it sounds like in this instance you felt that success in the macro view of the book, but I wonder if there are any scenes in the more micro view that have stayed with you or that you’re particularly pleased with and why those/that particular scene(s).
JZ: I’ve always loved the scene where Santee and Ronaldo Milanac are in the Balfour Garden best. There’s something delightfully fresh about the whole scene—where they go in with Ronaldo being the grown-up, and then Santee becomes the grown-up as she turns into Shakuntala; it’s a rewrite of the Garden of Eden scene crossed with a Bollywood drama, and it’s so deeply rooted in Mauritius itself, from the building that Charles Darwin stayed in (it’s even mentioned in his Voyage of the Beagle, along with the elephant on its premises) to the native plants all around them. It’s a moment of respite and lyricism in a rough-and-tumble tale:
They both laughed, alone in the garden, lying on the grass beneath the bottle palms. It was a garden for laughter just outside the town on fire, each one’s hand was gentle on the other’s skin, their breaths mingled, those were days with no yesterday, days with no tomorrow, and there was no telling who took the other . . .
Jeffrey Zuckerman is a translator of French, including books by the artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Dardenne brothers, the queer writers Jean Genet and Hervé Guibert, and the Mauritian novelists Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, and Carl de Souza. In 2020 he was named a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.
Laurel Taylor is a PhD candidate in Japanese and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her dissertation focuses on the formation of online literary communities and online literary production, and to that end she has received a Fulbright to conduct research in Japan for the next year. Her translations and writings have appeared in The Offing, the Asia Literary Review, EnglishPEN Presents, Transference, and Mentor & Muse.
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