How to Find an Author

Translation: like my publisher, I’m in it for the benjamins. But purely mercenary reasons aside, I should say one of the greatest rewards is stumbling across “new” authors. There’s an innocence, yet also a covetousness, to such occasions: you’re in love, you’re making a discovery that only a minority of English-speakers can share, and in staking out ground with your flag, you’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg—probably the larger part of an entire oeuvre still lies submerged in another language. It’s possessive in the best sense, like when, as a kid, you couldn’t wait to race to the library and check out all a given author’s books because you’d just devoured the last one. But of course, if you love an author, you also want to share him or her with the world.

How do I find the authors likely to interest me? Well, how do you decide what book to read next? The time-honored ways apply: critical histories, serendipitous bookstore finds, tips from trusted friends. I look up interviews with authors I like, then look up the authors they mention as friends, influences, heroes, contemporaries. Really, one read leads to another: epigraphs, quotations, allusions, blurbs, these all whet hungry curiosity with the breadcrumbs of further names or titles to investigate. One of the best things about reading foreign fiction is encountering the strange. Read a lot. Be willing to be surprised.

Because of the relatively small amount of work translated into English (as opposed to the amount translated from it), any authors you find are likely to be “new” only to English speakers, though sometimes they can be young or budding talents even in their home country. (This, like sales figures or an established reputation, can in fact be a selling point to US publishers.) We may feel we live in an international age, but c’mon: roaming charges, DVD regions, voltage variations, and a thousand other details of daily life make the experience of being in any one country quite different from being in another. The truth is, unless you can afford to spend your days following another country’s literary news, the best you can get from abroad is a very filtered view. What’s it filtered by? Professors, pundits, experts, scholars, reporters, reviewers, various government-funded initiatives for international cultural dissemination, authors, translators—think about all the usual people telling you who to read; think about how much you do or don’t ignore them; imagine that number doubled—the US plus another country’s literary establishment—then imagine the intermittent signal from one to the other further staticked by rumor, speculation, misperception, mistranslation, partiality, and gossip. How do we ever manage to get the skinny on another country?

This may sound exceedingly cynical, but what I’m saying is: make up your own mind. Find something you love and champion it. Only you can make it the next big thing. Often there’s a lot of competition among translators for a few big names that not only make it over, but make a splash. Toussaint. Houellebecq. Bernard Henri-Lévy. Don’t be satisfied with what people tell you is big abroad. The people over there think something if not totally different, then definitely more varied. As Americans, we have a certain conception of France, and naturally, we often look to confirm that conception. Publishers who like French stuff are looking the next book that’s somehow quintessentially French. But humans are great rationalizers, and everything that makes it big as French somehow gets added to the general conception of “Frenchness,” even if only as “something not formerly thought of as French.” So much of taste is decided around a dinner table, anyway: an editor goes to Paris, dines with his or her friends, comes back with recommendations. Why shouldn’t your dinner table be a source of informed opinion, provided that you’ve done your research and can eloquently advocate your tastes? Translation is your chance to revamp national reputations—to renovate a cliché. Up till recently, there was no such subgenre as “Scandinavian crime.”

I for one would love to expand the notion of Frenchness to include fabulism, not generally something we’ve looked to France for since, oh, maybe Jules Verne. As a genre, the Francophone fantastic is something of a lost continent for American readers today; the last communiqués from its shores to reach our own date back to the Decadents, or the Surrealists at best. Internationally, its centrality to French letters has been overshadowed by more prominent movements. Existentialism, Oulipo, the nouveau roman, structuralism: thanks in part to their successful exportation, these are the must-sees on any tour of postwar French literature, yet in the 20^th century, a tradition born of the transition from Romantic to Modern also thrived, and evolved to address contemporary concerns. French Decadents were reflected in the dark mirror of their British brethren and in our own American “weird tale,” homegrown name for a somber hybrid of fantasy and horror. But it’s clear the contemporary fantastic, which remains virtually unknown outside France, has much to offer similar Anglophone developments, from the metafictionalists of the 1960s, who playfully appropriated fantastical content, to the contemporary New Weird and New Wave Fabulists. Publications like Fairy Tale Review, or such recent volumes as the Library of America’s two-volume American Fantastic Tales bear witness not only to resurgent interest in the genre but its legitimization as literature.

A bit of advice for budding translators: international rights are a tricky business, and more than one translator has gotten burned by issues of permission. There have even been stories of fickle or unscrupulous authors retracting rights or pitting two translators against each other. Before you dive into the work, do your homework. Who owns the rights: the publisher, the author, or the author’s estate? The older a work is, the harder it may be to track down the rights. Contact the rights department for the publisher in question, and wait patiently for your email to be dug out of spam by an intern. Chances are, answering your query will not be a priority, unless you are coming with a publication contract or some other offer of money (sadly, publications in literary magazines may not always cut it). Then, stand by your author. The translator is writer, critic, and representative. In a way, I was Châteaureynaud’s US agent for a while, when I was trying to build a presence for him with publications in literary magazines. It may not pay much, but it’s gratifying, and a good way, down the line, to make a case for your author to a publisher. So what if your author isn’t even well-known in his or her homeland? The ironies and vagaries of international publishing are such that making it into English could, conversely, make your author big back home.

It’s been a pleasure and a privilege blogging this week at Well-Read Donkey. I am grateful and honored Aggie asked me to drop by, and I hope it’s been as fun for you as it has for me. To paraphrase Beyoncé: if you like it, then you should put a comment on it.

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P.S. If you’re reading A Life on Paper, why not drop by the terrific blog Largehearted Boy for a peek at the soundtrack the author and I have devised for the book? Then stick around for other awesome soundtracks writers have concocted for their creations.

Also, if you’re into supporting excellent writing, I’m in the Clarion Write-a-Thon this summer.You may have heard of the Clarion writing workshop, which has been running for 42 years and has turned out many bestselling and award-winning writers, often in the speculative vein. Funding has been cut for the program this year, and so Clarion has responded by running a "Write-a-Thon" to ensure that the workshop can continue. Sponsor me, and all proceeds go to keeping Clarion alive. What this entails is making a small PayPal donation via my profile page, which can be found here. Even a $5 donation helps Clarion tremendously. Sponsors also have the option of joining the Write-a-Thon forums, tracking my progress, and cheering me on during this six-week event.

Ways of Reading Châteaureynaud and the Fantastic

(Photo of G.-O. C. and me courtesy Christine Bini)

Translators often say that one of the things they like best about their job is research (though writers could claim the same). A proper rendering in the target language involves looking into the subject matter of the source text, with attendant crash courses in history and vocabulary. You can never quite predict the strange side alleys where translating will lead you. While working on the uncollected story “Talking Ape Clobbered by Clowns” (which appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of Epiphany) I stumbled across Heidegger’s concept of Geworfenheit, or “thrownness”: “the accidental nature of human existence in a world that has not yet been made our own by conscious choice.” It seemed to describe perfectly this headlong tale of circus life with a climax in which the hapless heroine’s last words as she is hurled from a speeding motorcycle are “Oh Lord, what is this world where I've been flung?” (When I asked Châteaureynaud about Geworfenheit, he smiled, intrigued, and said he’d never heard of it.) In researching the story “Delaunay the Broker,” I scoured the sites of antique dealers to get visuals of silver sauceboats on pedestal bases and collectible decorated snuffboxes, the better to wrap my head around the objects described in French. I even paid visits to auction houses. On the whole, I’m very thankful to be a translator in the age of Google.

Châteaureynaud wrote “Delaunay” in 1988, and Words Without Borders published my translation in November 2005: the author’s English language debut. The discussion that follows may perhaps be most rewarding for those who've had a chance to read the story. Its plot ****SPOILERS**** is simple: the narrator, antiques dealer Edmond Thyll, obtains the services of the titular Delaunay, a broker noted in the business for being able to procure almost any item, down to the last detail, that a client might demand. Delaunay, is, in essence, that magical figure able to make dreams come true (in this case, within the admittedly narrow bounds of antiquarian collectibles, but chalk that up to Châteaureynaud’s sense of humor). No wonder, then, he excites the curiosity and cupidity of the narrator, who takes it upon himself to violate Delaunay’s sole stipulation: that he never ask where Delaunay gets his goods. Sneaking into Delaunay’s apartment, he finds Delaunay’s unsettling, even horrifying diary of the ordeals he suffers in the other world from which he procures his objects. Naturally, Delaunay leaves Thyll’s service, and in the end Thyll is left alone with a copy he made of the diary, “the only diary of the fantastic in the history of literature,” which it seems he will contemplate for the rest of his days.

There are several ways to read this story. One that immediately leaps to mind is as a variation on an age-old cautionary tale: don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. If curiosity does not, in this case, kill Thyll, it leaves him haunted and bereft. As in fables, action and moral are somewhat predictable, speaking to the perennial, if lamentable human desire to ruin a good thing. But is that all we can get from the story?

Châteaureynaud’s skill at sketching character with economy, sympathy, and precision is such that we might also deepen our appreciation of the tale by subjecting it to a realist reading. The realist short story is generally said to “reveal character,” and the psychological exploration of character and motivation is often cited as a goal of “literary” rather than “genre” fiction (scare quotes denote the "common wisdom" aspect of these definitions, rightly contested). Through this lens, the denouement of “Delaunay” has the inevitability of the well-told tale. Instead of speaking to a universal human failing—-ceding to temptation—-the story plots, step by step, the specific ways in which Thyll’s weaknesses prove his undoing. Right from the outset we get hints of the narrator's character from his behavior: vain, snobbish, easily flattered, grasping, envious, and mistrustful. The latter qualities are expanded on when he reveals how he first became acquainted with the private eye that he hires to follow Delaunay: he’d once hired the same man to follow a former lover. There's also direct reference to the narrator's homosexuality, his attraction to Delaunay, and his inability to have lasting relationships. Seen this way, the story becomes an investigation of the drive to covetousness and curiosity in which the fantastic element is merely a device, comparable to a more realist conceit, to shine a light on the operations of these emotions.

Ah, but what about the mysterious Delaunay, who’s never developed? What about the harrowing world he visits, so coyly referred to as “crossing the bar” (no reference to Tennyson intended)? For realists, this is the elephant in the room, and must at least be boiled down to metaphor, if not psychology. But in the literature of the fantastic, the fantastic is the raison d’être. The abiding richness of a fantastical element may in fact lie in its resistance to explanation and its refusal to be reduced to metaphor. It simply is. As Brian Evenson puts it in his preface to A Life on Paper, “Like Kafka, Châteaureynaud has little interest in explaining away the fantastic or in dulling its claws: the dreamy strangenesses to be found in his stories simply exist and must be taken at face value.”

“Delaunay,” then, presents us with a perfect example of story of the fantastic in its classical form, in which an impossible and inexplicable phenomenon, usually the crux of the tale, is briefly visited upon the protagonist. As critic and Surrealist Roger Caillois would say, the fantastic “manifests itself as scandal, rift, or tear, an uncanny, almost unbearable irruption into the real.” Sometimes the light that shines through this crack lays us bare, leaves us shriven. Other times, darkness comes through instead, making us unsure of the world we think to know when suddenly we find it shrouded in shadow.

Finally—and I owe this reading to my friend Ken Schneyer—“Delaunay the Broker” may be taken as a religious allegory. Any broker is a go-between, but one endowed with the power to fulfill desires becomes, in such a scheme, the intermediary between some unknowable Other, like God, and the world of flawed mortals like the narrator. His diary describes experiences tortured and ecstatic as those of mystics, and that other world where “all things are the same” but “the same as what I cannot say” resembles a Platonic world of forms. But in return, Delaunay asks trust: a leap of faith the narrator can't make. When the narrator betrays this trust, he is left with the writings of the prophet Delaunay: holy writ and scripture, a host and reliquary from which the incomparable, uncapturable spirit has moved on.

If you’ve had a chance to look at this story or any others by Châteaureynaud, what are some of your interpretations? Do you read realist and fantastical work with different mindsets or expectations? Share your personal narratives of reading in the comments section!

The Practical Author

First of all, I'm tremendously flattered to be asked to guest blog for Kepler's books. Second, hello there and hi!

Since I just got back from a rock-climbing expedition (I am a not-particularly-good rock-climber, if you wondered) and since rock-climbing is a skill I learned on behalf of a character, it seems logical to me that tonight I should talk about the practical aspects of research for the writer.

One of the interesting things about being a writer is that you have to know--or at least be able to fake knowing--all kinds of stuff about all kinds of stuff. Quite regularly, I am called upon to discourse on the finer points of animal husbandry, forensic pathology, piloting aircraft, middle management, swordfighting, BASE jumping, maintianing a marriage--

--it might surprise you to know that I am not a qualified expert in any of these fields.

I am, however, perfectly capable of reading books and calling up actual really real credentialed experts and throwing myself upon their mercy (you'd be surprised how many people are thrilled to be asked to calculate the destructive potential of a nickel-iron meteorite at two in the morning). I am capable both of reading some ten thousand pages of text to discover that apparently nobody knows the answer to the historical question I need fielded and so making it up out of whole cloth--and of electroplating a mono-molecular layer of research all over my fiction to make it look like I did my homework.

I am also capable of getting up off the couch and going out and actually learning something, when it comes right down to it.

In the past thirty years, I've learned to ride a horse, rock-climb, kick-box, throw a pot, work-harden wire, swing a sword, shoot a bow and a gun, play guitar, and crawl through caves on my belly, all in the service of fiction. I'm not actually any good at any of those, but it's amazing how much more convincing just getting the texture of the thing in your hand makes the writing. (I draw the line at BASE jumping. That one, I'll place phone calls for.)

This last Worldcon, I was privileged to be at a table with a bunch of other writers comparing notes on the dumbest thing we've done for a story (tie: Steven Boyett (hang gliding) and Walter Jon Williams (cave diving)) and it was actually kind of a relief to realize that it's not just me. A lot of my writer friends consider my boots-on-the-ground technique a little excessive, but I find that for me it leads not just to richer writing but also more ideas. Because every time I learn something, it gets added to the pile of things in my head from which stories spring, and that in itself is kind of awesome.