This Translation Tuesday, glimpse into the novelistic invention of Marie-Hélène Lafon’s award-winning Les pays through her protagonist Claire who, much like the author herself, moves from agricultural France to the city. Encountering a certain professor of Greek at the Sorbonne, Claire’s eyes open to this world of “impeccable choreography” and the difference that Monsieur Jaffre brings in his manner and mystique. Translator Dr. Benjamin Eldon Stevens brings us through the landscapes through which Lafon writes, and the feeling he tries to evoke in a translation that bubbles with a kind of intellectual and spiritual wonder.
“The title of Marie-Hélène Lafon’s 2012 novel, Les pays, suggests a humanizing plurality. Ordinarily, ‘les pays’ would refer to ‘countries’ or ‘nations.’ Here it seeks to make of the French ‘countryside’ something more than how the region is traditionally depicted: instead of the simple monolith that may be found in literature of the city, rather a set of places with their own complex histories. This chimes with Lafon’s stated hope to develop a contemporary literature that would lift rural lives—likewise plural—to the level of myth.
Thus Lafon refigures her own upbringing, with her move from countryside to city modeling that of Les pays’s main character, Claire. Like Lafon, Claire has left her childhood home in Aurillac to study classical literature at the Sorbonne. In this excerpt, which starts the second part of the novel, Claire is in her first year at the Sorbonne. Overwhelmed by the work and not helped by other teachers, she yet delights in language, privately calling the coursework ‘cursus’ and its masters ‘mandarins’ (for, implicitly, they are tart). That sparkling delight she finds reflected in Monsieur Jaffre. His love of the material, his home library overrun with ‘paunchy dictionaries,’ a desk under the spreading arms of a—Chekhovian?—cherry tree: such details suggest to Claire that a life of joy is possible, albeit a ‘joy both ardent and austere.’ It is that complex feeling, felt by the author no less than by her character, that I have hoped to capture in this translation.”
—Dr. Benjamin Eldon Stevens
The Greek professor has a woman’s hands, he rubs them together, interlaces his outstretched fingers; his wrists are supple, and Claire thinks that he must play the piano. She imagines him in a large living room, the piano is black and stretches across a patterned rug, the room is studded with books; his daughters would be listening to him, he has three daughters she knows that he has said so, all three in sciences like their mother, they did however do Latin and Greek in high school, through their final year; the eldest a doctor, a geneticist, a PhD candidate, the other two engineers. Two daughters would be seated on stiff armchairs upholstered in pale yellow fabric, like you used to see for sale in pairs in the window of the antiques dealer in Saint-Flour, you did not know the price, which was not posted, behind the senatorial armchairs you could make out gleaming dressers, pontificating armoires and distinguished vanities, you did not stop you never went inside. The Greek professor’s youngest daughter would stand up straight at her father’s side and turn the pages of the score, or the father would play without one; Claire hesitates, she does not know if playing without a score, by heart, is a sign of greater distinction at the piano; she hesitates also on their first names, Anne, Alma, or Sophie, she sees the girls’ hairstyles, smooth brilliant blunt bobs for the younger two, long hair left down the back for the eldest, they are brunettes like their father, the color matte.
Claire resists the temptation of the film; she refers to it as “the film” because the images appear a little despite her, the scene unfolds on its own, she is along for the ride, certain characters, including the Greek professor, have this effect on her, it’s off and running, she slips away she escapes herself she escapes. And she must not. At boarding school in the years prior, she was on firmer ground, playing with the two levels, telling herself the endlessly flowing stories—minutely detailed and always beginning again, branching off in infinite directions—and picking up the thread of class at regular intervals to stay in control of the situation.
But the world had burst open, and the school at Saint-Flour seemed very confined to her now, very cosseted, and very far from the lecture halls of the prideful Sorbonne, where for more than seven months, soon eight, she has been devoted to translating into her own internal language the bewildering idiom used by the mandarins charged with doling out the magisterial literature courses for first-year students. The word “mandarin” was pleasing to her because of the fruit’s familiarity; she didn’t know where she had picked it up, with this range and sense previously unknown to her, in the intermingled flow of new ideas and facts that she had been trying valiantly—since the previous autumn, day after day week after week—to stem, without ever succeeding in cutting off a constant anxious feeling of drowning. The mandarins were no help, they stood at the edge of the Olympic-sized swimming pool, draped in their spotless togas, glutted on themselves and gilded in subtle knowledge; they rushed you into the deep end and would not offer you a safety line. Learned and stilted, they rolled out their impeccable choreography as recognized experts without a care for the student infantry gasping for air at their feet.
The Greek professor stood out from that brotherhood, everyone knew it, the second-year students and degree candidates said so; he was moreover not a professor, he did not have the official title, he had not defended; defended what; Claire didn’t ask and contented herself with understanding that Monsieur Jaffre, in his fifties, was afflicted with incompleteness, had a hidden vice, a surreptitious defect: hence this punishment of leading the Greek course for grown-up beginners, which he dispensed at the rate of six hours per week to those creatures too unenlightened to have embraced the Hellenic cause from the cradle. Rumors made the rounds, Monsieur Jaffre was a rebel, a sort of Prometheus chained to the cause of second-rate students, a Sisyphus of ancient Greek who, despite being of a certain age, threw himself into the game and had even composed a green softcover textbook that Claire kept on her bedside table. The corridors of the Greek Institute thrummed with intrigues that brushed Claire by and stayed obscure to her; she saw only that Monsieur Jaffre was singular and she could understand what he said; through his effective mediation, Achilles, Ulysses, Hector, Priam, and so many others whose names she had hardly heard of a few months earlier had become more familiar to her than all the students enrolled alongside her in the first year of Classics. She surprised herself by thinking about Achilles at the Châtelet Métro station, where the haughty blondeness of a trio of young people, quite obviously Nordic and trying to get to Versailles, to that end bent, their curls all spreading out, over a sibylline map of the R.E.R., had inspired in her, to her great surprise, the irresistible image of Athena placing a hand lightly on the luminous curly locks of her protégé, who was twisted up in impotent frustration and on the point of no return in the first book of the Iliad.
It was once more a question of Achilles, of his fitted greaves, his spear, his javelin, his sculpted shield, in the room at the Louvre where Monsieur Jaffre had convened the students who could join him on a Saturday morning to visit the department of Greek antiquities. Claire discovered that the Louvre was divided into departments and she could hardly collect herself in the echoing labyrinth despite Monsieur Jaffre’s commentaries: in each room, he presented chosen pieces as if introducing dearest friends who were difficult to keep and best served by an approach abstruse or rugged. The pianist’s hands drew supple whorls in the air, accompanying the voice that trilled in a songlike accent, very soft. Claire urged herself to lose none of it, to let none of it float away; she had the presentiment that it would be difficult for her to return to the Louvre on her own without being crushed, without collapsing under the references that she wouldn’t have; she needed to take what was being given, there here now, and make her honey, that was her work as a student; she set herself to not thinking about the living room, the three daughters, the piano scores.
She did not yet know that at the end of the year, between the last day of exams and the posting of results, Monsieur Jaffre had a tradition of inviting his students to his home, for an evening buffet around a Greek table that he set up under the cherry tree in the garden of his house at Clamart, the family home in which he had been born, had grown up, and had always lived after an intermezzo spent teaching at the French high school in Athens. Greece alive, ancient and modern: to him it was soil for the spirit and the heart, a chosen country which he never tired of exploring, down to the smallest nooks and crannies. Hearing him share with a degree candidate, whose mother was Greek and who came from a line of decorated cooks, a recipe whose esoteric name was all she would ever recall, Claire would better understand why and how this little man, dry and voluble, succeeded in rallying to the faltering cause of ancient Greek students for the most part little inclined to lasting unpaid enthusiasms.
The house would surprise her, at least the living room that you crossed to reach the garden, a long narrow room furnished with a couch and worn low benches of a banal modern style, gathered around a television set directly on the parquet; everywhere, on shelves of light-colored wood, books carefully arranged in order of battle; she would divine a regiment of paunchy dictionaries, regrouped on the left flank, and would feel nearly astonished to find the familiar squad of Lagardes and Michards standing at attention among innumerable textbooks of literary history and the dozen volumes of the Pléiade Balzac. She had recently discovered that notorious collection in the library and could hardly take it seriously, so much did it remind her of the cosseted calfskin missal that she had received as a gift in the final year of catechism, in recompense for the imperturbable pertinence of her answers to the three quite predictable questions from the goodly Abbot Roux. No objects or photos in the hall’s library: of wife, of the trio of daughters, you would neither see nor learn anything, Claire would be left hungry for more.
Monsieur Jaffre’s office was upstairs, big window opening on the glory of the cherry tree, its branches bent so far over the work table that, when the season gave its blessing, he need only reach out an arm to avail himself of the amenity while correcting exams. He laughed about the gluttony. Claire thought of the courtyard of her family’s farm and the maple tree on a first-name basis with the front of the house, which filled with moving shadows her summer nights in the small middle bedroom done in floral wallpaper. She thought also of Ithaca, of the return of Ulysses and the marriage bed he long ago carpentered around the trunk of a vigorous olive tree.
The cherry tree lorded and loomed over the whole meagerly apportioned plot that was garden only in name; Monsieur Jaffre was careful with the adjectives reserved for what he referred to as the ritual dithyramb of the cherry tree; it was already there when his parents had bought the house between the two wars, the neighbors advised them to knock it down, his father contented himself with severe cuts and he, for his part, offered vague promises that he did not deign to keep, knowing that people would simply add procrastination to his already high tally of the ditherings inherent in ethereal literary types. Monsieur Jaffre’s smile spoke volumes about his inherited natural fit with the tutelary tree; Claire imagined him as a child, maybe the only son, perched on the cherry tree’s biggest branch and wholly absorbed in reading the inexhaustible series of Contes et Legendes, to which he swore he owed his first thrill at mythology.
In that suburban garden, under the aegis of the cherry tree, Claire had at first stood, then sat, then stood, she had drunk rather little because she lost all sense of measure after a single glass of wine, she had eaten strange things and thought the cheese was good, she had joined everyone in applauding when three much older students had recited in modern Greek a finely cadenced poem, a work by a student’s father, a refugee in France during the dictatorship of the colonels; she would search in the biographical dictionary for who those colonels were, what they had done, and when. She had listened and she had spoken, she did not know any longer either what she had said or to whom exactly but she had spoken with other students farther along in their cursus; privately she loved to employ that word, cursus, which seemed to her at once alert and knowing, but she did not use it out loud. A life like the one Monsieur Jaffre led in this house and in this garden was therefore possible, it consisted of books, it consisted of the tree and of a thousand other lines whose knotting could not be untangled; it had an air of joy, a joy both ardent and austere, that vibrated in Monsieur Jaffre’s very soft voice and lived in the airy gestures of his hands, the hands of a pianist with no piano.
Translated from the French by Dr. Benjamin Eldon Stevens
Marie-Hélène Lafon (b. 1962) is a French professor of Classics and author of some eighteen novels, novellas, and collections of essays, perhaps best known of which are the award-winning novels Le soir du chien (2001; Prix Renaudot des lycéens), Les pays (2012; Prix du Style, Globe de cristal, Prix Arverne), Histoires (2016; Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle), and Histoire du fils (2020; Prix Renaudot). Raised on a farm near Aurillac, in Cantal province in France’s mountainous Massif Central region, like her main character Claire in Les Pays, Lafon was first educated at religious boarding schools in the region before going on to study classical and modern literatures at universities in Paris. Many of her fictions have been set in the agricultural France of her youth, and she has written of envisioning a form of contemporary literature that would lift rural lives to the level of myth.
Dr. Benjamin Eldon Stevens (Ph.D. University of Chicago, B.A. Reed College) has translated excerpts of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s (2016) Perséphone 2014 and Nathalie Azoulai’s (2015) Titus n’aimait pas Bérénice (in Arion, winter 2018 and 2022) and Pedro Larrea’s (2015) Manuscrito del hechicero (as The Wizard’s Manuscript, Valparaíso USA 2017). He has published scholarship on Latin poetry, including a monograph, Silence in Catullus (University of Wisconsin 2015), and on classical receptions, including four co-edited volumes: Classical Traditions in Science Fiction (Oxford University Press 2015), Classical Traditions in Modern Fantasy (OUP 2017), Frankenstein and Its Classics (Bloomsbury 2018), and Once and Future Antiquities in Science Fiction and Fantasy (Bloomsbury 2019). From 2015 to 2022, Dr. Stevens was visiting assistant professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX.
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