How did you come to be teaching French and Francophone Studies at Penn?
I have what looks like a middle-of-the-road French name, but I actually grew up in North Dakota in an Anglo-American family. There must have been a French connection somewhere along the line, but you’d have to go back hundreds of years to find it! My mother had done some French at university, and I was curious about the few French books on the shelf in our house; I chose it over the other language options in junior high and loved it from the start. Before coming to Philadelphia for graduate studies, I majored in French and English at Rice University in Houston, where I had exceptional professors whose teaching, enthusiasm, and encouragement made all the difference in convincing me that the humanities classroom was where I wanted to be. Louisa Shea, Ussama Makdisi, Deborah Harter, Lucille Fultz, Dennis Huston, and others – not a day goes by when I don’t think of them with immense gratitude.
You are an accomplished translator as well as a co-editor of Hopscotch Translation. Can you say more about what fascinates you about translation?
Having spent years immersed in the world of literary translation, I remain fascinated by everything I still don’t know about it! In the translation course that I’m currently teaching for the first time, the students and I are reading This Little Art by Kate Briggs, who writes so engagingly about many of the joys involved in translating: “There is amateurishness, and not-knowing, improvisation and instruction, as well as the reach for specialist knowledge.” Rather than approach translation as something like a set of techniques to be mastered, I’m much more interested in persuading my students how exciting it can be to pinpoint your own specific areas of ignorance (linguistic, cultural, etc.) when you set out to translate a text, since that’s what leads to the most rewarding discoveries.
The pleasures of translation vary greatly in each case, depending on what you’re translating. I especially love translating poetry, since it pushes me to experiment with language in ways that an academic monograph, for example, tends not to. Yet even when you’re translating scholarly prose, you need to be attentive to style as well as to the scholarship itself. For example, I recently finished translating a book by Jean-Christophe Bailly about the history of portraiture, having previously had a go at one about photography. Bailly is a writer with extraordinary range, an essayist-philosopher but also a poet-playwright, and for me as a reader-translator, it’s impossible to dissociate whatever subject he’s writing about (whether it be photography, urban exploration, animal life, or something else entirely) from the rhythmical energy of his language. The recent book in question is a study of the Fayum mummy portraits from Roman Egypt. It was stimulating to try and adapt Bailly’s long, flowing French syntax into something that would be readable in English, but it was also an immense privilege to spend time in the company of those faces and learn about the world they came from.
As for Hopscotch Translation, my co-editors and I launched the site early in 2021 as a forum for commentary on literary translation. We’ve had the good fortune to publish quite a wide range of materials within what might seem at first like a niche field: everything from interviews and essays by award-winning translators to new research on translation history and reviews of recent publications by up-and-coming critics and scholars. Our contributors have included several members of the Penn community, something we very much hope will continue!
What’s your favorite course to teach at Penn?
That’s a tricky question! There are a handful of courses that I’ve taught regularly in recent years, and it’s fun to see the students reshape them each time around. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a soft spot for a course I’ve only taught once so far: FREN 3810, Introduction to Zoopoetics, which focuses on representations of animal life in modern French literature. It was such a wonderful adventure to spend an entire semester on what Jean-Christophe Bailly (or, I should say, his translator Catherine Porter) calls “the animal side.” With luck I’ll have a chance to return soon with a new group of students…