In December 2022, Prof Christophe Gagne and Dr Emilia Wilton-Godberfforde met with Sandra Smith, a former colleague at Cambridge. They had previously collaborated on a range of translation workshops for the Faculty and benefited from her contribution of a chapter on Maupassant for their book with Routledge (forthcoming 2025), a work which showcases translations of French and Francophone literature from the early modern period to the present day.
Sandra Smith is an acclaimed literary translator. She has translated all 12 novels by Irène Némirovsky available in English, as well as Camus’ L’Étranger (The Outsider, Penguin UK, 2012). Her translation of Némirovsky’s Suite Française (2006) won the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize for Fiction and the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. Suite Française also won the Independent British Booksellers Book of the Year prize and was voted Book of the Year by the Times. Her translation of Marceline Loridan-Ivens’ But You Did Not Come Back: A Memoir won the National Jewish Book Award in 2017. Six of Smith's translations have been adapted as radio plays on the BBC. Her translation of a biography of Jacques Schiffrin was published by Columbia University Press in 2019. More recent translations include The Prodigal Child by Irène Némirovsky (Kales Press 2021); Inseparable by Simone de Beauvoir (Ecco Press/Harper Collins 2021), a finalist for the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize for fiction; In the Shadows of Paris by Anne Sinclair (Kales Press 2021), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award; and Master of Souls by Irène Némirovsky (Kales Press 2021).
As part of a series of discussions on the task of the translator (and in conjunction with the new lecture series on translation in the Faculty), we decided to publish this fascinating exchange. The discussion begins with questions about Smith’s translation The Necklace and Other Stories: Maupassant for Modern Times published in 2016 by W. W. Norton and Company. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
So how did you get to translate Guy de Maupassant’s short stories?
The publisher contacted me while I was still in England and asked me if I would translate some of Montaigne’s letters. I wrote back and I said, ‘Well, it’s really not my period, but if you have anything more modern, I would certainly be interested. And I do come to New York once a year, and it would be nice to come and meet you.’
So they wrote back and they said, ‘Oh, please, tell us when you’re coming.’ So we arranged a date and I went down to Manhattan, and I got upstairs, thinking I was just going to meet someone, you know, have a contact. They gave me a sheet of paper with a list of authors, and the editor said, ‘Oh, good! You have the list. Who would you like to translate?’
I was completely not expecting that. So I looked at the list, and I chose Maupassant. I had taught Maupassant at Cambridge—when I was teaching the history students, in the good old days when the historians had to study a language, I used to use short stories that were appropriate to history. So I used some Zola and I used Maupassant... I knew a lot of the stories quite well and I knew that the translations of them were quite old, that they hadn’t been re-translated. So I spoke to them about it and they were very keen, and they said, ‘You pick about thirty and we’ll take it from there.’
So I decided, because there were over 300, to take categories—I chose about 10 from French life, 10 about war, the Franco-Prussian War, and 10 on the supernatural, because that was becoming very, very popular at the end of the nineteenth century. And that’s how the book emerged. We gave it the subtitle ‘Maupassant for modern times’ because I wanted to update the language to appeal to a new audience, a new readership, but while keeping a feel for the time and the place, which of course is one of the biggest challenges.
I remember giving a talk about it when I was just working on it and saying that we were going to update the language. And there was an actual gasp from someone in the audience. Like, ‘How dare you!’ So we had a discussion about it and I explained why I wanted to do it that way, and of course, the original is immutable, but language evolves. If you want to bring it to a new readership and make it interesting then you have to evolve in the same way, but without taking too much liberty. So that’s how we worked it out. I didn’t compare most of the stories with previous versions.
It was quite tricky, because Maupassant wrote over 300 stories. I started out with the ones that I knew best and went from there, and read quite a few of the others that would fit into my categories in my mind, and I wrote a very brief introduction to each section, explaining, giving a bit of context.
Do you remember what your rationale was for picking certain ones?
Well, as I say, I knew them from teaching, and you always have favourites. I tried to mix them up in the sense that they weren’t all very serious—some of them are quite funny.
… To give a flavour of Maupassant?
Yes, definitely. The other thing that the publisher did was they asked me if I could recommend someone to edit a version of the translations for the Norton Critical Edition, and since I was at Cambridge, I knew that Robert Lethbridge, who was then I think Master of Fitzwilliam, was an absolute expert on the nineteenth century and Maupassant. And he actually did a critical analysis version of the stories, which has been published in a separate volume. It’s brilliantly done and it was very interesting, because I organised the stories, not chronologically, but by theme. He took all the stories chronologically to show a sequence of evolution of the writer, with really detailed, wonderful footnotes that put it in a historical context as well. So there are the two editions: there’s The Necklace and Other Stories and then there’s the Norton Critical Edition.
And you see those as companion pieces working together?
I do, especially for students. If it’s someone who wants to read French literature for pleasure, they can read the short stories, but if they want more detail, then the critical edition is what they should use, and Robert and I corresponded by email. It was quite funny really because he picked up on a lot of Americanisms. And to me, because I’d lived in Britain for so long, everything sounded right—you know, nothing was particularly British or particularly American.
I remember, even with [Irène Némirovsky’s] Suite Française, I was really surprised—because it was published in Britain, when they published it in America I thought they would change quite a few of the British expressions—they changed one word. They changed ‘gherkin’ to ‘pickle’! Which I thought—okay, it’s 450 pages and that’s what you picked? That’s fine with me! It was very funny.
That’s interesting, the level of translation for another English-speaking audience that has to go on.
Yes. But I remember when I was fortunate enough to get the contract for Suite Française, one of the reasons that they gave me for selecting it was because it kind of sounded mid-Atlantic. It wasn’t very, very British and it wasn’t very, very American. And I think that was appealing to them because they knew they would be publishing it worldwide. Once Suite Française was such a success, they wanted to publish a whole backlist, and they started back with the first novel, which was 1929, David Golder. It was such an odd thing to read the last thing someone wrote first, and then go back.
What I’ve been working on for the last nearly two years now is the correspondence between Camus and Maria Casarès. It’s 1,300 pages long. There are 850 letters. And it is, to me, astounding that they kept those letters. His estate and hers, they kept those letters. When I first started reading them, I didn’t think they should be published because they were so personal. But they had been published in French already, so... You know, there was no point in saying they shouldn’t have been published, because they were. Both estates, I guess, wanted to do it. I did the first third of the book—I have three years to do it. This is coming up to the end of the second year. About eight months ago now, I guess, I had just sent my editor the first third of the book, which is 424 pages. But for the rest of it, I said to the editor, this is really too much for one person, and I managed to get a co-translator for the last two thirds. It’s just such a relief. And now Cory [Stockwell] is doing her letters and I’m doing his letters, which may sound counterintuitive, but I’ve translated so much Camus that I really feel much happier doing his style, and Cory has obviously read the first third, where I’ve translated her letters, and he’s keeping that kind of voice and we’re editing each other’s work.
I know you also do a lot of teaching at NYU—this is a very broad question, but why do you think you are now a good translator? What makes a good translator?
I think there are a lot of things. Teaching really helps, because when you teach literature, you are focusing on an analysis that includes things like lyricism, metaphor, onomatopoeia, all of the things that make something lyrical and add to style. You’re analysing theme and style. And when you’re doing that, you know what you’re looking for. It’s not just a question of the words, it’s how they all work together. This is why I admire people who translate poetry. I just think that is the most difficult thing to translate. And I also think it’s important to have it sound as if it’s written in English. My method, the way I teach, is very much that you do your draft, your first pass, and then you go back and you read it just in English and you edit it. And if something sounds really awkward, then you go back to the original.
One of the things students find extremely difficult is taking enough liberty. I keep telling them, ‘You have to say what it means, not what it says.’ And that’s not easy, because even though I’ve now translated thirty to forty works, I sometimes still have to tell myself the same thing. Students have a hard time with that—they’re either not liberal enough or they take too much liberty, and it’s a very fine balance, because you can’t add anything that’s actually not there, but you can add things that are implied. And of course, there are more words in English than in French, and also they’re very clearly defined in English. So you get a word in French, it could have five or six meanings. Malheur. I came across this when I was doing the Camus. Quatre coups brefs sur la porte du malheur. There’s five or six different definitions in an English dictionary of malheur. So you need the context and you need an instinct for it.
And also you have to remember that it’s always inevitably subjective. How you’re reading it and how you’re interpreting it is how you’re going to translate it. But I do think teaching really helps, not just as a background, but to continue teaching. I was doing some masterclasses for Columbia University when I lived in New York. One of the exercises I did was I took a page of Madame Bovary—I took one translation that was from twenty or thirty years ago, and I took the most modern translation, and I did not tell the students which was which, and the exercise was: firstly, you translate that passage. Don’t look at the others yet. Then look at the others, see what you like from each one, what you would have changed, what you think they should have done, and then finally, which of the two translations do you like best and why? Inevitably, they liked the older translation better than the most modern one that won all the prizes.
Why do you think they preferred that one?
Because they weren’t prejudiced [by thinking] that this is a famous author and has to be better. I think anonymity is a good thing in translation and I think they could see that.
That comparative exercise is always interesting, isn’t it? To try and understand why someone opted for something.
Right. But I think you also have to keep a flavour of the culture and the time—I never say ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’. I always leave Monsieur or Madame. People are going to know what that means if they’re reading the novel, and it just reminds you a little bit that it’s French and it’s that culture, because I think one of the important things about translation is sharing cultures. We need more of that these days. I think it was Julian Barnes who said, ‘I can’t really imagine it being called Mrs Bovary.’ And that sums it up, really. You can leave it, and you can leave Metro, and you can leave a French word if it’s recognisable and it just gives you that sense of it.
I was doing an interpreting exercise that mentioned a croissant, and the person said, ‘And we have crescent-shaped pastries,’ and I thought, in what universe can you not use the word ‘croissant’?
Well, another example one of my students had was the galette des rois. She said, ‘I don’t know how to translate this, but I know what it is.’ And I said, well, leave it in French, and then just put in brackets next to it, ‘The traditional cake of January 6th—or we’ll put it in a footnote. That’s another thing—publishers do not like footnotes in translations, in novels. Non-fiction is different, but in novels, they really don’t like it. If it’s just one or two like that, fine, but if you can somehow weave it into the text, to me that’s perfectly reasonable. That’s not taking too much liberty.
Do you do a lot of research before you translate a text?
Well, sometimes you have to. First of all, I never translate anything unless I’ve read the entire thing and I like it. I have to like it.
… Because you’re going to spend so much time with it.
You have to live with it. I think the quickest thing I ever translated took about four months. That’s a long time. If you don’t really like it, you’re not going to do a good job.
For instance, when you translated Camus, I assume you already knew a lot about Camus, but did you do a lot of research about him as a writer? Did you read a lot of critical work?
Well, I had already, because my senior thesis for my bachelor’s degree in America was on existentialism. Basically it was on Sartre, and Camus didn’t want to be called an existentialist, but I had read a lot. When I applied to Cambridge to do my PhD, I applied to do it on Camus, and they said, ‘We will take you, but we will not take your subject. Find another subject. Too much has been written about him. It would take you more than three years to read it all.’ Malcolm Bowie was my supervisor and he was very interested in very modern literature, so I was working on the Surrealist theatre between the two world wars. I did that for a year, it was successful, I got the Master’s, but I didn’t want to carry on with it for the PhD. I was interested in other things—I took a leave of absence and didn’t go back. I took another turn in my career.
But one thing I did do when I got that commission [to translate Camus’s L’Étranger], because I’d always dreamed about translating that book—I discovered that there was a recording of Camus himself reading L’Étranger on French radio. So I bought the CDs, and what I would do is I would translate a few chapters, and then I would listen to him, and in a couple of places I actually changed the punctuation in the translation, given his interpretation of it. Not many, but that to me was really fascinating, hearing him speak the words, and the emphasis he put on the words, and the rhythms that he gave it. And even now when I’m doing the letters, it’s very, very interesting, because the big controversy about the first line, Aujourd’hui, maman est morte—‘Today’—in his letters, he very, very frequently starts sentences with Aujourd’hui, hier, demain, he’ll give that time reference. And it was interesting to me, many years after translating L’Étranger, to see that this was his normal style of writing in letters, la vie quotidienne, this is how he spoke.
I think that’s really interesting, the sensitivity to the way one novel is written but understanding, if you have a broader knowledge of the author’s writing, their style generically. And that listening to him interpreting his own words adds that other dimension. You get a fuller picture of how the writer is thinking about their own style.
Yes. And also in these letters, I deviated from what the other four [previous] translators did by adding, taking liberty, and saying, ‘My mother died today.’ And my justification for that in my own mind was, first of all, how I interpreted the novel, but also the fact that I wanted to make a distinction between mère and maman, which is very difficult to do. I didn’t want to say ‘Mum’ or ‘Mom’ or ‘Mummy’, because that sounded too childish. So by adding ‘My mother’, it brings the closeness. And also, I thought, well, how would you tell someone? He’s speaking to us in the first person. ‘My mother died today.’ That’s how you would tell them. And now that I’ve been translating the letters, I’m really happy that I did that—I took a chance. Because in the novel, so many people criticise Meursault’s relationship with his mother as being cold and indifferent and distant, et cetera. In the letters, whenever he [Camus] talks about his mother, he’s practically on his knees worshipping her. He absolutely adored his mother. And he talks about her silence in the letters, and about how she was the only one that would understand him, even in silence.
I’m now learning more about Camus through the letters—some things which I don’t want to know, I have to say, because they’re very personal, and it’s a side of him that I would have rather not known about. He could be very depressed and he was very insecure. You don’t want to know those things about someone you really admire. They take it in turns being sort of ‘Do you love me?’ ‘Are you sure you love me?’ ‘Are you not going to leave me?’ ‘I’ll die if you leave me,’ and then being reassured by the other person.
Doesn’t that make him more human?
It does, but even the editor, when he did the first tranche, said, ‘I wish he’d just go visit her already so he’d stop whingeing!’ But other things were very important—I didn’t realise how serious his tuberculosis was, and how that influenced his writing and his life, because the reason they wrote so many letters was because they were apart a lot. He had to go to Cabris or wherever up the mountains for treatment. And of course he was married, and Maria knew that. She was ten years younger than him. He told her right away, ‘I will never leave my wife, I will never leave my children. This is not happening. And if you can’t accept that, I understand.’ And they did actually break up for two years, and then they ran into each other and that was it.
The letters go from 1944 to 1959, and finish just a few days before he died. [They finish in] December ‘59—he died January 4th, 1960. It’s just so upsetting, frightening and spooky that in the last letter he writes to her, he says, ‘Well, I’m driving back to Paris with Michel [Gallimard]. We should get there Monday or Tuesday. Let’s plan to have dinner on Tuesday night, as long as we don’t have any trouble on the roads.’ And then he was killed in a car accident. That was the last letter.
But they wrote to each other so much because there was no email, there was no computer, it was difficult—he talks in one letter about going to the post office. Do you remember going to the post office and getting a cabine and getting the tokens and having to wait in line? He talks about that. I’m up to 1951 now—most of the letters are from 1950, because by the end of 1950, the phone service was much better and they could phone each other, and also, there were planes. They could fly from Orly to Nice. It was a lightbulb moment—‘You could come for the weekend and then the next month I could go to Paris for the weekend.’ She was very busy. She was always working, Maria.
And the other thing I sort of knew about him but hadn’t remembered when I was reading the letters was of course he spoke Spanish. Because his mother was Spanish. So Maria’s native language was Spanish—her father was Prime Minister of Spain for a while and fled when Franco was coming in. She was a young teenager when they moved to France, and she learnt fluent French, though a lot of sentence structure, you can see, is still a bit Spanish. But in one letter, she says, ‘Oh, I’ve been asked to write this article for a pamphlet about the resistance to Franco from France. I’ve written it in Spanish. Will you translate it for me?’ And he says, ‘Yes, sure.’ And I’m like, wait a minute! Camus translating from Spanish to French—of course! His mother was Spanish. But you don’t think about that kind of thing. So I’m learning a lot about him.
But I also always tell my students that research is very important. I know there’s a big controversy about it. There are two schools of thought: [one] where it’s the words on the page, you don’t need or shouldn’t know anything else about the writer or the period, and then there’s a school of thought that says, the more you know about the writer and the period, the more you can appreciate it. I’m of the second school, I have to say.
Do you do a lot of rewrites? Do you come back to the text you’ve translated and rewrite it?
Oh, endlessly. Yes.
I’m sure there must be something that you’ve agonised over and thought was good and then you come back to it and you think, ‘Actually I don’t like that any more,’ and you have to be quite brutal with yourself.
Yes. But the thing is, you can do it endlessly, so you have to stop. So I do my first draft, then I do the edit. Then before I send it to my editor at the publisher, I re-read and edit it again. Then he edits it. Then when his edits come back, I either accept them or I come up with another suggestion—sometimes he just says, ‘This sounds a bit odd. Can you check?’ And I check the text, and yeah, it is odd. Because sometimes they’ve spoken to each other on the phone and they’re making reference to something—where did this come from? But that’s what’s in the letters. Then in theory, you’re supposed to, at the very end of a translation of a novel or whatever, do the proofs. The final proofs. Where you go through what the copy editor has then done to make sure that they haven’t messed up.
And do you find that that happens?
Sometimes. Very rarely. But I have to be honest, I think with this work, because it’s so massive, I won’t do the proofs.
And out of all the works you’ve translated, is there one that you feel a particular affinity with?
It’s difficult, because I won’t do anything I don’t like. Obviously Suite Française, because that was my start, that was what really gave me my break, and people took a chance on me because I hadn’t translated anything. In fact, I wrote a very short translator’s introduction to Suite Française. Just pointing out little things like, ‘This was written in a moment, during the occupation, she didn’t have a lot of ink and paper, she had no reference books, so there are errors, there are contradictions’—just pointing out that this is the reason, if you find this error. And the fact that her daughter only agreed to have it published if we didn’t change anything or correct those mistakes.
And then at the very end I said, ‘I hope I’ve done her justice.’ My editor wanted me to take that sentence out. I didn’t understand why. She said, ‘Well, the critics are going to absolutely jump on that.’
That you didn’t have confidence in your own ability?
That if they don’t like it, they’re going to say, ‘Well, no, you haven’t done her justice,’ or something like that. But I said, ‘No, I’m sorry, I mean this, I really feel I want to say that.’ And they left it in. Fortunately it got good reviews, so they didn’t jump on it.
So that one, definitely, and also L’Étranger, because it’s what it is. I think I’ve only translated two things that I haven’t really, really liked. One I was kind of pressured into doing—I won’t do that again. I won’t take on anything I haven’t actually read. There was another thing that I was kind of roped into doing, and I thought, ‘Well, it’s not that long,’ but it was so difficult. It was Chevillard. But on the whole, I feel I’ve been really lucky with the authors that I’ve been allowed to translate.
I often think that it would be nice, though, to do something like a comedy, or a detective story, something like that, because I tend to get quite serious books. Probably because, with Suite Française, I got a lot of Holocaust material. Et tu n’est pas revenu, by Marceline Loridan-Ivens, that won the National Jewish Book Award. I had the privilege of meeting her—she was amazing, just amazing.
A few years back I was on a panel and I’d come over to speak at this translators’ conference preceding the London Book Fair. The panel I was on was called ‘Translating trauma’, and the other person who was supposed to be on the panel with me got Covid and couldn’t come, so it was just me and the moderator, and it was very difficult. But I always say that if these people have lived through it, I can translate it. It’s important. It’s very important.
One of the more recent things I did was Anne Sinclair. The title was impossible to translate—it was La rafle des notables. Now, in French, when you say rafle, everybody immediately goes, ‘When, where, how, what?’ They understand it, but not in English. You can’t say ‘roundup’. That’s the closest. And also in America, Roundup happens to be a very, very well-known brand name for insecticide. So it can’t be that. And also notables. You know, it can be ‘famous’, ‘important’, ‘influential’. So in the end, we just took a completely different tack and we called it In the Shadows of Paris: The Nazi Concentration Camp that Dimmed the City of Light. That was only a few years ago, and again, people are still coming to me with Holocaust literature, which I feel is important to do but it takes its toll. Even the Camus, the letters, because I know what happened to him, and I’m reading these letters—poor Maria!
You’re involved in that timeline.
You are. It’s very upsetting sometimes. But sometimes she writes six, eight, ten-page letters, because they write three times a day. When I was doing it alone, and there was so much more pressure on me, every time he would say, ‘Oh, Maria, write me a letter, write me a really long letter,’ I would be thinking, ‘No, no don’t, please don’t!’
Have you ever considered writing fiction?
I cannot tell you how many people have asked me that. I wouldn’t feel confident about doing it. And also, I think the things that I might consider writing about would be very personal. I don’t know. A couple of people have asked me to write about my experience as a translator, but again, it’s partly [that it takes] time. There are some really good works by translators about translation.
So you don’t see translation as a form of creative writing?
Oh, no, definitely. I definitely do.
But you wouldn’t go as far as taking that step yourself?
I think it’s a different skill. It’s a different skill to start from scratch and have the ideas, the development of it. I mean, I enjoy the translating so much.
The other side of being a translator that I think is important also is the practical considerations of earning a living. Because translators are notoriously badly paid and a lot of publishing houses don’t want to give royalties.
Well, you said you’ll never do anything you don’t really like—I guess there are a lot of people that have to, because you have to make a living at some point, right?
Exactly. And a lot of literary translators do commercial translation because that does pay, or they teach or do something else, or they’re lucky enough to just have wealthy families or spouses or something, so they can just concentrate on it, but it’s a constant battle to deal with organisations.
There’s a pressure as well that you mentioned, about how long it takes to do literary translation, and the misconception people might have that you can deliver things at speed.
Yes. I actually teach a course on, and I’ve given talks on, contracts. Negotiating translation contracts. You would be amazed—some of the big publishing houses always have a clause—normally, you’re paid 50 percent of the fee on signature, and 50 percent at the end, if approved by the publisher. And approval is strictly up to the publisher. They don’t have to give you a reason, they can give you two weeks to re-work it, and if they still don’t approve it, not only is the contract null and void, you have to give them all the money back that they’ve paid you. I refuse to sign the contract, and I tell my students to refuse to sign a contract like that.
So you effectively work for nothing.
Exactly. So I’ve absolutely refused to do that. This has been for quite a while now because I had a bad experience with one—I had a contract, I had the signature fee, it was all signed, sealed, delivered, everything, and then the publisher called me up and said, ‘I really want this in the next four months. I’ll give you a different book. You can pick the next book.’ And I said, ‘No, this is the one I want to do and we’ve got the contract.’ And she harassed me, really badly, and then on Christmas Eve her lawyer phoned me and said, ‘Don’t bother, because whatever you submit, she’s not going to approve it.’ And I said, ‘No, I’m sorry, this is wrong.’ ‘Well, she says you can keep the signature fee.’ And I said, ‘I’m turning down other work to do her book, so no, she’s got to pay me the whole fee.’ ‘She’s not going to do that.’ Then she pressured the French publisher to put a statement to her lawyer—this is what really upset me—saying that they would be better off getting a different translator because I didn’t really understand the text. And I had to get a lawyer, and I actually did win in the end—I got her to pay the full fee. But I also told the French publisher, don’t you ever ask me to translate anything you publish. I will not. And they said, ‘Well, we were pressured.’ I don’t care. Take it somewhere else. And I’ve never translated anything for them, and it’s a big [publisher].
So now I have a clause that says—I tell my students this as well—you insist on giving them a sample translation, which must be approved by the editor. Then I have a clause that says, ‘‘Acceptable’ is to be defined as to the standard of the original, approved sample translation.’ So obviously if you make a real mess of it, they can say, ‘Look, this is beautiful, this is terrible,’ fair enough. But if it’s the same standard, they haven’t got a leg to stand on, and they do put [the clause] in.
It’s protecting your rights.
Yes—you have to. Also, sometimes I will do a book without royalties if I don’t think it’s going to sell very well in America. Because something can be a big hit in France and I know it’s just not going to hit the same way. For some of the books, it’s just not going to work the same way, and then I’ll say, ‘Okay, I won’t take a royalty but I get a much higher fee.’ Because when you get a royalty it’s always an advance against sales—the publisher pays nothing to you, and in a lot of the big houses they will only give the translator a royalty if the author takes less. So basically the French author is paying for your work. It’s terrible. And it’s not like they’re short of money by any means.
Students become emerging translators and they don’t know the difference between ‘in copyright’ and ‘in the public domain’, and the fact that the laws are different in different countries. They don’t know what subsidiary rights are. They don’t know how to phrase things in a contract to make sure that they’re protected. A lot of the contracts say, ‘You warranty that you will not add or omit anything that is not in the original text.’ Especially anything that might be considered defamatory. But half the contracts you get like that don’t, in turn, warranty you. So I make them put that in, that the publisher warranties that if they’re sued, I’m not involved. Things like that.
There’s another course on finding a publisher, though the two are kind of related. How to write a cover letter, how to do a sample translation, how to do a two-page detailed plot summary, so basically how to pitch it. How to look up the different publishers’ lists online—you’re not going to submit a new translation of Madame Bovary to someone that publishes cookbooks. It’s common sense when you know, but students don’t realise that you can just go online and look up a list, and work out, ‘Oh, they only do detective things. This is historical fiction, they’re not going to want that.’ That’s the other side of translating that I think is important to know about and to pass on.
But once you have a good relationship with a publisher, they tend to come to you, if you’ve been successful. Someone once said this, and I think it’s really good to keep in mind—the best contract is a good relationship. That’s really the best contract that you can have. I even made the publisher for the Camus put a clause in that said that if for any reason I cannot complete the contract, I will keep the money that I’ve been paid so far for the work I’ve done. And they did it. I asked them to do it in four payments.
And had you not been such an established translator, do you think they would’ve not agreed to that?
Probably not. Though they may have, because financially it’s better for them too, to spread it out. I don’t know.
I think a lot of emerging translators get stuck on the ‘No royalties’ because they want to get something in print. I always advise them, ‘Well, if you’re going to do that then ask for a higher fee.’ But here [in Britain], the Society of Authors and the Translation Committee can set a recommended rate. I don’t know what it is now, but it used to be £95 per 1,000 words or something. I think it’s a little bit more now. In America, when the Translators Committee, PEN, tried to do that, they were threatened with a lawsuit by the Monopolies Commission in America for price-fixing. So we can’t do that. What we did instead, this is about six years ago now, [is] put out an anonymous survey to all the translators [asking]—did you get royalties? What were the royalties? Did you get copyright? Was your name on the book? Any other comments? And the rate of pay. And we published that to the translation community. So we weren’t price-fixing, we were just telling everybody what everyone else got, so you could see if you were offered something really low, or something really high.
Cambridge (Robinson College, 10 December 2022)
