R J DENT IN CONVERSATION WITH JOHN WISNIEWSKI
To honor National Translation Month, we are pleased to present an interview with the poet, novelist, translator, essayist, and short story writer, R J Dent.
John Wisniewski: R J, could you tell us about your new translation of Le Comte de Lautréamont’s The Songs of Maldoror? What was it like translating this classic?
R J Dent: I was a bit apprehensive when I started because Maldoror had such an impact on me when I first read it. A few years ago, someone said: “Once you’ve read Maldoror, you’ll never forget reading it – and you’ll never recover from reading it.” Having read it several times, and having now translated it, I agree with that.
Translating it was something of a tightrope-walking act; there were four English versions of Maldoror when I started translating it: Rodker’s (1924), Wernham’s (1943), Lykiard’s (1970) and Knight’s (1978). I had to thread my way between all four, using my own vocabulary and not their vocabularies, which wasn’t particularly difficult, as they all used quite old-fashioned language. Although Knight’s was the most recent translation, it was the one I liked the least, mostly because there was so much of Lautréamont’s actual text missing. When I translated Maldoror, I tried to stay as close to Lautréamont’s original text as I could, but I also tried to translate the text so that it became the English text that Lautréamont might have written if he had written Maldoror in twenty-first century English.
John Wisniewski: Are there any particular authors that you like?
R J Dent: Yes. I tend to gravitate to French authors – Pascale Petit, Philippe Djian, Gustave Flaubert, Jean Genet, Georges Bataille – they seem to be able to write about sex and death in a way that the English can’t. French fiction has a psychological depth that’s absent from many English stories. There are exceptions, and there are English authors whose works I enjoy reading: Angela Carter, J.G. Ballard and Anthony Burgess spring to mind. I also enjoy reading Jeremy Reed’s poetry and prose. He has a way of writing that’s totally different to how anyone else writes. I like some American authors too: William S. Burroughs and Cormac McCarthy particularly.
John Wisniewski: When did you begin writing?
R J Dent: I started writing when I was twelve years old. I wrote my first poem then. Then, after spending a few years learning to write properly, I started writing seriously and publishing in 1998 – poems and short stories to start with, and a few essays. In 2005, I had seventy poems and fifteen short stories published and knew I was on the cusp of a career. Then I wrote a novel, Myth, published in 2006. After that I started translating. The Flowers of Evil was my first full-length translation of a French classic. It was only a matter of time before I attempted translating Maldoror.
John Wisniewski: What was the experience of translating Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil like?
R J Dent: My own translation of The Flowers of Evil came out of my frustration with one particular English translation. I was studying Baudelaire at university and the set text was a bilingual edition of The Flowers of Evil. I soon realised that the English "versions” were not even close to the French originals. So I started to translate a few of the poems myself, just to see if I could get a sense of what Baudelaire was actually saying. If I may use an analogy, the translation process was a bit like a facet of archaeology, in that I had a valuable artefact, buried in the soil, and my job, as a translator was to gently brush the soil away until the object was totally uncovered, and could stand there, in another era, pristine and perfect.
To use another analogy, the process involved a form of time travel – I would go back to nineteenth century Paris, and absorb the sights, sounds, smells and textures of whatever was being described. I would then bring that French description back into the present day, having transformed it into twenty-first century English. Those analogies both apply to the process of translating The Songs of Maldoror too. I imaginatively visited the places described so vividly by Lautréamont, and then I brought them back from nineteenth-century France and described them in modern English.
John Wisniewski: Could you tell us about your horror novel, Myth. What inspired you to write it?
R J Dent: As well as French fiction, I love Greek stories, tales, myths, dramas and the few Greek novels that were written years ago – Daphnis and Chloe by Longus being a particular favourite. After I read Robert Graves’ comment about Greek myths having regional variations throughout Greece, I wrote a novel in which English tourists encounter an aspect of a dangerous Greek myth. The myth manifests itself in a way the protagonists had not considered and, as with all myths, it has a devastating and destructive impact. I knew that all myths were metaphors for things that had actually happened, so the novel’s mantra was: every myth is based on a terrible truth, which became the promotional tagline on the promotional poster. Essentially, I rewrote the Bellerophon and chimera myth, setting it on a Greek island in the twenty-first century. Myth is a horror/fantasy novel, and although there’s a lot of graphic violence and sex in it, it was a great deal of fun to write. Ultimately, it prepared me for the horrors I encountered in The Songs of Maldoror.
John Wisniewski: You have also translated the writing of Alfred Jarry. What was that like?
R J Dent: I translated Alfred Jarry’s Speculations into English for the editor of Black Scat Books at his request. He’s a huge Jarry fan and was quite persuasive, so I accepted the job. I’m very pleased with the resulting book. Jarry’s not easy to translate because of the surrealism of his humour – it’s tricky to catch his tone and convey it accurately. However, I’ve had quite a bit of positive feedback, so I think I succeeded.
John Wisniewski: You have also translated the writings of Marquis de Sade. What was the experience like?
R J Dent: Again, he was an author that interested me as a translator. I started with his Last Will and Testament because it’s an important historical document. That was published by Philosophy Now. I then translated a few of Sade’s stories, including Retaliation and The Self-Made Cuckold, both published by New Urge Editions. After that, I translated Sade’s book-length essay, Some Thoughts on the Novel for Oneiros Books. Every so often, I go back to Sade and translate something else. He’s a very interesting writer. A moralist too, surprisingly.
John Wisniewski: How do you choose the written works you will translate?
R J Dent: I only take on translation projects that interest me, by which I mean either authors or books that interest me. That’s it. So far, I’ve translated some very interesting and important authors, including Alfred Jarry, Alcaeus, Charles Baudelaire, the Marquis de Sade, Antonin Artaud, Arthur Rimbaud, Louis Aragon, Georges Bataille, and obviously, Le Comte de Lautréamont.
John Wisniewski: R J, I’d like to talk a little more about your Songs of Maldoror translation? It’s published by Infinity Land Press and due out on 1st October, this year. Could you tell us what is different about your translation of The Songs of Maldoror to any other version of it?
R J Dent: The main difference between my translation of Lautréamont’s classic and other versions is the language I use. I’ve brought The Songs of Maldoror into the twenty-first century for English readers. As for the book itself, that is very different to every preceding edition of Maldoror. Infinity Land Press has made it into something far beyond my expectations. For a start, it’s an illustrated hardback edition, with full colour illustrations created by photographer Karolina Urbaniak. Her illustrations are very dark and very confrontational and they complement Lautréamont’s transgressive text perfectly. There are 37 illustrations throughout, including the cover, which gives an indication of the type of image you’ll see inside the book. Also, the avant-garde writer, Audrey Szasz has written a thought-provoking Foreword to the book, and the poet Jeremy Reed has written an Afterword that is an in-depth look at Lautréamont’s life and death. So The Songs of Maldoror that Infinity Land Press is publishing and launching on 1st October this year is a multi-media artefact, a hardback, illustrated, subterranean literary classic, bookended by two insightful essays written by two of today’s most relevant and exciting writers.
John Wisniewski: Any future plans and projects, R J ?
R J Dent: Yes, lots of projects, some completed, some with publishers, some just started, some waiting to be started. But I’m not going to talk about any of them. I don’t like to talk about them until they’re in book form so that other people can see and read what I’m talking about.
John Wisniewski’s interview with Jack Foley is included in the great weather for MEDIA print anthology Arriving at a Shoreline. In addition, you can find his interviews with Puma Perl and Thaddeus Rutkowski here on the great weather website.