Odette Varon-Vassard

Dear Mrs. Odette Varon-Vassard, I am so glad that you are with us today and I’d like us to start the interview right away. Tell us a little about the beginning, the beginning of your trajectory.

I’m glad too, Mrs. Wiedenmeier, and I thank you very much. Well, my trajectory in translation spans almost thirty years now. I’d say that the first decade, the ’80s, was a decade of pupilage, because translation requires its own pupilage after completing language studies. It’s something different. I started translating in the late ’80s and I can say that for a twenty-year period of time, from ’88 until 2008, I was active in the field of translation in many areas, so to speak.

How did you get started? In which area?

I hadn’t thought about translation. When I returned from my ΜΑ studies in Paris in the autumn of ’81, I received a proposal by a beloved former teacher of mine and a friend later on, a philologist, who had been my tutor in ancient Greek and especially in Thucydides. And what did we do in that course? Translation. What did we learn to do with Thucydides’ texts? First he dictated the text to us and we wrote it down, but then we translated. Well, he, Stefanos Koumanoudis, a very important personality, translated Aristophanes, whom he loved very much. I had attended his small group course of translation of Aristophanes. Then I left all that. I studied in the School of History and Archeology and then I completed my MA in contemporary history at the Neohellenic Institute in Sorbonne. Μy basic studies are in the field of history. After all, even if you wanted to study translation in the ’80s, such studies did not exist. My basic qualification is that of a historian. So, when I returned, Stefanos Koumanoudis suggested that I work with him on a translation. Our cooperation was very clear, he told me, “You’ll do the first draft, we’ll do the editing together and it will be published under my name, because I’m the one the publisher trusts, and you’ll receive a fee”. I said, “Very well”. And we started translating Les Caves du Vatican, The Vatican Cellars, by André Gide for Ypsilon Publications of Thanassis Harmanis, who recently passed away, unfortunately so suddenly. So we did this translation and I started to like it very much. Especially when I went to his house once a week, where he taught me to translate using a pencil. There were no computers yet for us back in ’81-’82. He taught me to translate using a pencil, because when we worked together, we wrote and rubbed out and made corrections and I saw what changed, how it changed and why. It was great pupilage. We translated three books in this way with Stefanos Koumanoudis. The last one came out in ’85-’86. The other two belong in the genre of surrealism, they’re very difficult. One was Breton’s Arcane 17 and the other was Aragon’s Treatise on Style, Traité du style. By the third book he asked, “Do you want it published under your name?”. I said, “No, it’s not my own work yet, all in good time”. It was the last translation that Stefanos Koumanoudis ever did, because he suddenly fell ill and passed away in ’87. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to say that, because I’ve never said or written it and it was really my first pupilage in translation. I wanted to continue my involvement in translation and then, the Center for Literary Translation was created at the French Institute, the CTL, as we called it, Centre de traduction littéraire. It started in ’86, I attended it in ’87. It was a two-year seminar back then and it offered much less than later on, because I attended it at its very beginning. In the first year our teacher was Petros Papadopoulos, an old teacher of the French Institute, an old-timer, a very good educator and a very sweet man. He did an introductory course and in the second year Titos Patrikios and Pavlos Zannas co-taught in the seminar. This was really something, as you can imagine, and it enriched us. The seminar was completed in June of ’89 and around November of ’89 we received our degrees. They were given to us by Pavlos Zannas and shortly after, he suffered a heart attack and passed away so young, which came as a great shock to everyone. My pupilage had already been marked by teacher losses. I received the first scholarship CTL ever granted in ’87-’88. In that year, a scholarship was given for the first time to the two students with the best, so to speak, translated piece of work. In the end, our translations were evaluated. Giorgos Xenarios and I received the scholarships. Thanks to them, we could go to Arles, where things around translation had just started to evolve. The Collège des traducteurs [Editor’s Note: Collège international des traducteurs littéraires] had been created a few years before, and it didn’t have ten rooms like today, it only had three rooms. Arles is in the south of France, a very small town. I went there in November/December, because I wanted to attend the Colloque des traducteurs , the Assises des traducteurs [Editor’s Note: Assises de la traduction littéraire] , as it was called. Just a few years before – that was the third or fourth year this was taking place – they had started holding a conference of translators every November, of French and French-speaking translators, which I really wanted to attend. It really was a great experience. Then I started getting their proceedings every year, I started seeing the way translators talk about their work, and roundtable discussions about writers also began to take place. My translation experiences began to expand, so to speak. I attended Collège two more times, in ’90 and ’92. There weren’t any translation courses there if you went in another season, i.e. it was meant for professional translators. You had to have a contract and you translated the assigned book in the environment of France, since you were translating from French. I met international translators of French literature, I met Markowicz from Russia, the great translator of Dostoevsky and other translators from Latvia, Estonia, Bulgaria, people from Eastern countries who had no way to travel then and that was a way to travel. I gained manifold experiences. I count them, too, as part of the pupilage.

Yes, of course. And in a completely different time from today.

Yes, without the internet, without the opportunity to move so easily, without so many people coming here, without us moving so easily. If you wanted a book, you had to order it. It took Kauffman Publications 45 days to bring you a book.

How come a historian was drawn to this process and you were so intensely involved in pupilage, as you call it, in translation?

All this attracted me very much. I started my dissertation in ’88. Αnd, if I had been a person who would have chosen one path back then, I’d have had to focus on my dissertation. But I walked these two paths in parallel until 2008. Then I said, “Enough, I can no longer do both”. But until then I had walked both of them in parallel. This doesn’t make a career. There is a French expression that says, “I didn’t have a career, but I had a life!”. And I like that expression.

Wonderful. And after…

There was actually a bridge from history to translation, because most of the young Greek historians had returned from France. Most of us had returned from France at the time. English-speaking historians appeared from 1999/2000 onwards, they were the younger generation, we had all been still French-speaking, concentrated around the circle of the Neohellenic Institute in Sorbonne. So we were back and we wanted to translate the great French texts which were still not translated into Greek. Braudel wasn’t translated. As the Society for the Study of Modern Hellenism, we had the journal Mnimon, so we could publish short articles. I translated the first articles by Braudel, e.g. the “Long Duration”, the “Longue durée”, which is a founding article of Braudel’s Annales School and we published it in Mnimon. And then we also published articles by Duby, the amazing medievalist. This is a bridge from history to translation. Most of us did that at the time and many also translated maybe one or two historical books. So in the CV of all Greek historians of my generation there is definitely a little involvement in translation, because we wanted to transfer these texts. 

After these first articles, how did you move on to literature, to literary translation?

Well, as soon as we finished the CTL, we all wanted to translate literature, because that’s what we were taught for two years there. A small publishing house, Roptro, which was just starting out, approached CTL bringing in book suggestions. They wanted to have these books translated in their series and they wanted to assign them to the first CTL graduates. They put the books in the lot to decide who would translate what. I said, “I don’t want to enter the lot, because there’s a book by Flaubert. I want Flaubert!”. Well, they all got something and I got a youth novella by Flaubert, called November. I tucked this novel under my arm and went to Arles in November/December ’88. There, I went to the Municipal Library of Arles every afternoon and read all of Flaubert’s correspondence and other texts about Flaubert and I also borrowed Flaubert’s literature. And from all this I wrote an extensive addendum. This novella was published by Roptro and later by Ypsilon, by publisher Thanasis Harmanis. I loved this novella dearly. And I consider it my first complete translation work. This addendum also contains, among other texts, the passage by Jean-Paul Sartre dedicated to Flaubert. In his major work The Family Idiot, which was left unfinished, there is an entire passage about November. And it has been translated into Greek only in this addendum, because The Family Idiot is not translated. I consider it a complete contribution. I’ve also written an extensive philological introduction, so to speak. That was my first complete translation work.

So that was your first book…

Maybe it was the 2nd or the 3rd one, but it is the first that I consider complete work. I still consider this book important work.

And after that?

After that, I found my favorite author on my own. I had read him extensively in France but hadn’t dared to touch his literary work earlier, because I wanted to feel more confident, to have done things before being able to touch it. He was a completely unknown author in Greece. Everyone in France was saying, “Is it possible? Albert Cohen hasn’t been translated into Greek?”. They were saying that, because Albert Cohen was born in Corfu, where he lived until he was five years old. His family emigrated to Marseille in 1900. And then he spent his adulthood in Geneva until 1981. Albert Cohen wrote two novels in the 1930s and his big success came in 1968 with Her Lover [Belle du Seigneur]. At the end of the month I was in Paris for a conference only on the Belle du Seigneur, because it had been fifty years since its publication, which was very popular at the time. Belle du Seigneur received the Academy Award. This author of Jewish-Greek origin from Corfu hadn’t been translated into Greek or interested no one. I really wanted to translate him. And over my next stay in Arles in 1990, I had Solal with me. Without a contract, without anything. Such things don’t usually happen and I don’t advise anyone to do what I did. But, at the time, we had a way of moving things forward and somehow we achieved some of them. Anyway, that’s how I started translating Solal. I was interested in the two novels of the ’30s. Solal and Mangeclous, which I translated as Karfohaftis. And I managed to get them published, the first by Hatzinikoli, the second by Iridanos Publications. With the second one published by Iridanos, my collaboration with Maria Papadima, who was then a consultant of Iridanos, was inaugurated. As soon as I told her, “I want to do this”, she understood very well and said, “Of course, that’s what we’ll do”. I collaborated with her a lot later. The reception of these books wasn’t so broad in Greece, I think. For many years now, I’ve been trying to have Solal published again, because, for many years, it has been out of print. Hatzinikoli has passed away and the publications don’t exist anymore and the person who manages the stock is not interested in a republication. Actually, to be more precise, he doesn’t have the translation copyright, the copyright is mine. And I strive to achieve that, but a publisher who wants to republish this ready translation hasn’t been found yet. So Cohen is always an open case for me.

You touched upon a lot of interesting things related to our interviews, such as the relationship with the editor or consultant of a publishing house and the copyright. However, I will not dwell on them now, we may return to these issues later if you wish. I’d like to go a little further in your trajectory. You completed your pupilage, you published the first translations of very important authors and we are now in the early 1990s, right?

It is the beginning of 1995. Karfohaftis was published in ’94 and at the beginning of ’95 I defended my dissertation. After that, I was freer.

Freer to do what?

People who have completed a dissertation are normally looking for a place in that field. My dissertation is about Resistance in modern history. But we, a group of translators, graduates of the CTL, started a journal. I’d like to mention Katerina Colette – whose death in 2002 was most untimely, but she was very important in the first years of the journal –, Eugenia Tselenti, Niki Molfeta and a bit later also Georgia Zakopoulou, and then also other friends of ours with different language combinations and other qualifications, such as Miltos Frangopoulos. We started a journal together, without having any idea where this would take us and what it would be, but at the time there was so much ebullience in the field and so much discussion. French translation experts came as guests of the French Institute, they gave speeches, Ladmiral was one of them. Meanwhile, Vanghelis Bitsoris taught translatology at the CTL. We talked, we discussed, he introduced these translation studies scholars, we started to get a little into theory. So it somewhat started at CTL. We would present short texts by CTL seniors who hadn’t yet entered the field with a book translation. Each of us would present a short text, a sample of translation. While it had started there, we soon undertook it as a team, and I took it on myself regarding its publishing, and that’s how the journal Metafrasi [Translation] came out. By coincidence, the bookbinder delivered the first issue to me on September 30th, ’95. September 30th is the International Translation Day. Now we know it, back then we didn’t. It was the first time in ’95 that the National Book Centre of Greece, still in Politia, Kifissia district, organized a big night for translation. So, the bookbinder brought me the copies – the first edition was 1,800 copies – and I took a bag with ten copies to the National Book Centre. Titos Patrikios, Petros Papadopoulos, Chryssa Prokopaki and many others were all there. And I said, “Here, I brought you the journal”. So it has a good birth. 

It gave me the chills! 

I happened to get the journal on that day! It could have been ten days later, but I’m telling you, that’s exactly how it happened.

So a birth with you as a godmother…

Thank you. And all the contributors, of course, because a journal is principally a collective thing. 

Was this journal published for ten years?

Well, the last issue reads Translation ’06/’07, but it came out in the spring of ’08. So in fact the journal was published from September ’95 until May 2008. Eleven issues, as we called them initially, were published, but I think we should call volumes the ones that followed. The last two, which are 300 and 400 pages respectively and regard two years each, ’04/’05 and ’06/’07, are volumes. That’s not good for a journal, I wouldn’t advise anyone to do that. At that point things somehow overwhelmed me. I could no longer manage the material, the time. I followed a very demanding journal concept, which gave it its structure, but it became, so to speak, a corset for me. That is, every volume had to have a tribute to foreign literature, it had to have reviews, it had to have theoretical articles, sometimes also portraits of translators. That wasn’t something we necessarily had to do, but we tried to achieve it. So I may have collected 100-150 pages, but I still couldn’t publish a volume since the other part would be missing. A literary journal doesn’t have such difficulties. As soon as 150 pages of material are collected, the issue is published. It was very difficult and I started getting tired too. By the last volume I was really tired and I felt that the circle was complete, this journal had given what it could give. And I believe… Something that this journal offers today to anyone who finds it – because it is not digitized, nor is it sold anymore – is, I think, that by flipping through it, you gain an insight into what was happening in translation in those years, 1995 to 2008. And those years were vital for our field. That is, we published translation studies texts for the first time, translated by Katerina Colette. We created terminology. How would one translate “ciblistes” and “sourciers” [target-oriented and source-oriented translators]? These terms hadn’t been translated until then. Extensive discussions. The outcome was “pigolatres” and “stoholatres” in Greek. I think the terms were embraced in the corresponding… Such things had to be found back then. Vanghelis Bitsoris also translated for the journal. We published great old texts like The Duty of the Translator by Walter Benjamin, La tâche du traducteur. I don’t remember the…

Die Aufgabe [The Task].

Yes, that one. Giorgos Sangriotis translated it, I don’t remember, is it The Task of the Translator?

Yes, the task.

I think Giorgos Sagriotis reworked his old translation, which existed in the journal Planodion, and I asked permission from its publisher Giannis Patilis to include it. I told him this text needed to be in our journal and he replied, “Of course”. Giorgos Sagriotis worked on it again and we added it. These texts are compiled in those volumes. This journal is, therefore, a first dose of translation studies. Cécile Inglesi-Margellos also translated translation studies texts. It started with one article and, as the years went on, they became more, because translation theory was gaining ground at the time.

I’d like to ask something. The journal and the whole circle around its publication is French-speaking. It’s very important to mention that the French translation studies were the first to come to Greece. However, the journal quickly opened up to other languages. How was it done? How did it happen?

By the second issue already, David Connolly became our collaborator, precisely regarding translation theory. We were neither a CTL nor a French Institute journal, so we had no commitment in that regard. We should remind people that language institutes didn’t communicate back then. Not that they communicate a lot today. Not only the institutes, the language fields in general were very exclusive, each of them was concerned with their own culture. But our journal was only given a little help by the French Institute to get started and nothing further, so there was no commitment in that regard. I understood right away that we had no such restrictions. We, French translators from CTL, were the first core, but from the second issue onwards David Connolly was on the editorial board serving the field of translation theory. That is, I immediately looked for people for both theory and translation from other languages. Only the first two tributes concern French, French literature. I consider the third issue of ’97 – I can show it, I happen to have it here – well, I consider it the first one where the journal’s face was shaped. I created – I say “I”, because here it is “I”, I created it, it is my part – so I created a structure which I tried to retain in all the following issues and which was such a demanding task later on. But for me… Ι was a fan of journals, I loved them and read a lot of them, I loved journals such as Thessaloniki’s Entefktirio, I also read Dentro, Leksi, as well as historical journals, of course. Journals were very much in our life back then, before the internet. I mean printed journals. Today I regularly cooperate with The Books’ Journal, which I also consider a very lively journal. If I only loved translation, and not journals, I wouldn’t have been involved in a translation journal. Many different factors played a significant role, in order for me to do this. I can read you the structure of this issue, which shaped the journal’s face. There was always an editorial which introduced the issue, and in order not to call it “editorial”, we called it “editorial committee’s note”. Each time there was a tribute to literature with five or six authors who hadn’t been translated until then in Greece. It was difficult to find all this without the internet. My husband and I regularly traveled to Paris, and I used to go to the Librairie Compagnie, which had a table of translated literature. I often found things there and at other bookstores. E.g. I also went to the Italian bookstore in Paris, because we had an Italian tribute. Some other times I was more satisfied when I went to Compagnie, and, at the table with foreign literature, I saw authors we had already included in our journal. In that Italian tribute, we had female writers only. It was called “Contemporary Female Italian Writers”. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. We presented them. So I found seven translators of Italian, because each text was translated by a different translator. I won’t read all seven names, but one of them was Sarah Benveniste, a very important translator with extensive translation work. She translates from two or three languages and we also collaborated on other things. That’s when our collaboration started. Poetry was translated by Nikos Aliferis, who has translated the most significant Italian poetry. We had already been in contact with this field. The second section was poetry, poetry only, and we already had Paul Celan. The third concerned translation of the humanities and it had the form of a discussion. We dealt with the problems of how the humanities are translated. And then there were the portraits of translators. Moreover, every issue definitely had articles about translation and reviews about translated books that had been published. Later we also followed the state award-winning books and so on.

Translation reviews are very rare to non-existent.

And very difficult to find. I had a hard time finding them.

Very difficult, of course. However, if I may, I’d like to dwell a little on the portraits of translators, which, as you can understand, interest us particularly in the context of these interviews. Tell us something about them if you want.

I started them – it was my idea – because I felt I wanted to pay tribute to very important intellectuals with multifaceted activity, many times better known for the rest of their activity besides translation. I wanted to trace only their translation aspect. And I started with Aris Alexandrou, known for his unique novel The Box, a landmark novel in modern Greek literature, without so much importance having been given to his translation work. In biographies – in biographical notes, not in his extensive biography, of course, by Dimitris Raftopoulos – in biographical notes one reads “he translated to make a living”. Well, he could have done something else to make a living, he could have taught Russian. Of course, he made a living from it, but he chose it as his permanent occupation. Aris Alexandrou had passed away several years before I made the tribute in 2006. But I had a close relationship with his wife, Kaiti Drosou, who lived in Paris and I loved her very much. I told her I wanted to do this. She replied, “It’s impossible, we have nothing”. I said, “I’m sure we’ll find something”. And, anyway, little by little she entrusted me with various materials and she sent me to Dimitris Raftopoulos, a great scholar of Alexandrou and of the translation work of Alexandrou. He wrote a great text for us and gave us the bibliography, more than eighty literary pieces of work, in various languages and so on. Kaiti Drosou entrusted us with some great photos, and that’s how the first tribute came out. I wanted the second tribute of the issue of ’97 we already discussed to be about our teacher Pavlos Zannas. I collaborated with Alekos Zannas, his son, and with Mina Zannas, his wife, and we were able to have a tribute that shows… I mean, Pavlos Zannas is the translator of Proust, right? He starts translating In Search of Lost Time in the prison of Aegina, because Stratis Tsirkas had told him, “Do this now that you’re in here”. And he translated it up to the middle of the penultimate volume, I think. Its publication was completed by Estia Publications, edited by Takis Poulos, who had also completed the translation work. Regarding Aris Alexandrou, I can mention that he is Dostoevsky’s translator, if I have to mention one out of eighty. Zannas is mainly the translator of Proust, so he’s not involved in many books, but in one major work.

However, I remember another very important portrait, I vividly remember reading again and again the portrait of a major Greek figure, Maronitis. Would you like to say something about that?

Yes, that came out in ’98, exactly twenty years ago, in the fourth issue, which is actually the fourth volume of Metafrasi. Maronitis was translating the Odyssey at the time and it was published by Kastaniotis. Each rhapsody came out in a very thin volume with a black cover and contained both the ancient Greek text and the translation. I used to purchase these rhapsodies one by one and I was crazy about the whole thing; I was reading the Odyssey again after so many years. I say that because today, twenty years later, Maronitis has completed a huge translation project, the whole Odyssey and the whole Iliad, and this has been discussed a lot. But twenty years ago, things weren’t like that. He was just entering what would accompany him for almost the last fifteen years of his life and that was the translation of the Odyssey and the Iliad and some other pieces of work. I encountered him almost at the beginning of this thing, because these thin volumes had a great… And then, the extensive volume came out, which doesn’t contain the ancient text, so these first ones have their value. I was afraid to approach him, because he hadn’t been my professor, I had studied in Athens, he didn’t know me, and he was a very important personage. But when Metafrasi ’97 came out, he wrote about the journal in his feuilleton in the Vima newspaper, which I read every Sunday. Did the journal come to Maronitis’ notice? I hadn’t sent it to him! I wondered, “Has Maronitis noticed the magazine?”, because back then we didn’t think we were doing exceptional things. Many times today I see things, okay, good things, that are trumpeted as exceptional things from the beginning. We didn’t have that feeling at all. And things weren’t promoted the same way. You had to go to the bookstore to get it. You didn’t receive any email from the publisher, “Look! It came out, it came out!”. So I thought, perhaps it is a sign; I’ll dare to approach him. And we really cooperated very well, I’m grateful for the way he welcomed me. We had a very long discussion in two parts about things he had not yet said. Later on, he gave many interviews. Well, not many, he never gave many and he never said much. But he talked about these things. This interview was, I think, among the very first ones of the journal. This conversation I had with him was truly great and it was a different experience, because it was with a living person. The other portraits I did concerned people who had passed away. I was talking to someone alive during his involvement in a translation project and he talked to me about it.

I distinctly remember him saying, “The translator’s breath should not be heard in the translation”. Do you remember?

And so we passed, we opened ourselves to intralingual translation, we created a bridge towards intralingual translation. We reminded our readers that everyone in Greek education, at least in my time, started translating from ancient Greek. What we did was translation, but we didn’t know it. We called the course ancient Greek, but we did translation. So the mechanism of understanding another language and rendering it, started for us from ancient Greek, not from foreign languages. He said some really nice things about it.

And it was a great breakthrough for Greece that he gave us again these two major works, which we had had in a completely different translation…

Translations that are now difficult to read.

…of other, also important Greek figures.

Yes, but translations of their time. You cannot read Kazantzakis at the moment and feel that the text is a translation of today.

This is exactly what Frangopoulos says, I think, also in an issue of the journal, that each generation should do its own translations of the major authors.

It should confront the major works. 

Both intra- and interlingual translation. 

And so we created the bridge towards intralingual translation.

How did it come to an end? How did you decide, if you will, that this would be the end for the journal?

After these eleven volumes had been published, I felt that we had said the basics. I was asking my colleagues, “What other translation studies texts should we include? We have already included the major ones”. Then the translation studies series began. Books started to be published. A bit like in the field of history. I now realize that we have repeated the same project. We published the articles by Braudel, by Duby. Later, there was no reason for us to publish anymore. Everything by Braudel was published by MIET. The same thing happened here. We published the first articles, then the translation studies series began, books were published, books by Landmiral, by Berman… We had no reason to continue. This is the more general picture. The personal reason is that I was tired of walking two paths at the same time and I wanted to focus on my work as a historian, which I have been doing for the last decade. I felt that, for me, this circle was complete. And I think that in life it’s not necessary to continue something just because we are involved in it. Furthermore, I had served the translation field from two other positions in those years. I was at the State Translation Awards of the Ministry of Culture for eight years, which was a lot of work. We read a lot of books, that’s how I was informed about many translators, I met many translators and I asked some of them to work for the journal. In other words, these two were communicating vessels for me. And I also taught translation at CTL and later at EKEMEL [European Center for the Translation of Literature & the Human Science] which took over and used five working languages – French, English, Spanish, Italian, German – for a few years until it also closed. I think it closed around 2010, I don’t remember exactly when. Its time was during the 2000s. I also taught for some semesters in the interdepartmental program Translation-Translatology of the University of Athens, which was also very interesting. I felt that I had given enough and that I wanted to do other things.

And did you do other things afterwards? What did you do next?

Well, I managed to publish my dissertation, which was still unpublished. It is about the Resistance of young people in Greece. It was published by Estia, entitled The Adulthood of a Generation. Shortly after, I managed to compile a selection of my texts about the Jewish genocide and a second book was published by Estia, entitled The Emergence of a Difficult Memory. And now I give seminars and lectures around these topics.

However, the passion for translation, and maybe a set of circumstances, made you get involved in translation again after – if I calculated correctly – ten years. Do you want to tell us something about it?

Yes, it’s the last book I translated, which was published on February 1st, 2018. Estia suggested it to me, I told them I am no longer involved in translation and they – that is, Mrs. Eva Karaitidi – told me, “It’s you who should do this”. I saw it and said, “Okay, yes, I really want to do it”. It’s a very special book by a young, forty-five-year-old author named David Foenkinos, who literally became passionate, there is no other word to describe it, about the work and personality of a young German-Jewish painter, Charlotte Salomon, who leaves Berlin, flees to the south of France, where her grandparents are, and stays there from ’40 to ’42. And she has a good chance of being saved there. In the end, she is not saved, because she is turned in. That’s why she dies, a Frenchman turns her in. She is deported to Auschwitz. There, she could be selected for work, because she is only 26 years old, but because she is pregnant, she is sent straight to the gas chambers and is eliminated. Until then, she has managed to create unique painting work to narrate her short life. She has painted her life, her parents, her mother… There is a traumatic life, there is death, not death, the suicide of her mother when she is very young. She creates amazing painting work, which art critics include in German expressionism. And she is anxious, because she creates this work in a state of urgency. She goes off to a room and wants to finish it. She finishes it, she has great paintings about the arrival of Nazism in Germany. What she describes is not Auschwitz, which she doesn’t know, but the persecutions, the restrictions and what she has experienced in Berlin in the 1930s. She has a hard time being accepted by the School of Fine Arts and when she’s finally accepted and her work in the anonymous competition wins first prize, they cannot give it to her. Well, things like that. This period is very well depicted in the book. She completes this work, she calls it “Life? Or theater?” and she hands it over to someone who preserves it, and this work is discovered by her parents, both German Jews who ironically survived. They discover it and organize the first exhibition in Berlin, I think, in ’61. Then, in the ’70s, they give it to the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, where it is kept, and this year it held a very large exhibition about Charlotte Salomon. Whoever goes online can see her paintings very easily. Well, Foenkinos wrote a very particular book, in a very particular writing style, which narrates her life using completely real elements, but he calls it a novel, because he creates a character. He gives her flesh and bones, he gives her thoughts, feelings. He has written it in a very particular way. Each line ends with a dot and another begins below, the whole book is like that, so when you open it, it looks like a poem, but it’s not a poem, it is prose. He said he could only write it in this way, because that let him catch his breath and move from one line to the next. We had him as a guest on February 1st at Ianos bookstore in Athens and one can watch this event.

Regarding the translation of this book, was there any particular challenge you would like to mention? For example, translating every line into one line respectively is…

We couldn’t translate it into single lines. I saw other translations in other languages, it has been translated into forty languages. Oh yes, I should mention that he said he didn’t expect this book to make such an impact because it was his personal, difficult task, something that was his own thing, while the others are normal novels that do very well, they have the required elements to do well. Yet, without expecting it, this is the book that established him. He won the Renaudot Prize and the Goncourt des lycéens Prize, which is a prize given by high school children. This award is very important in France, because this is how the culture and the reading audience are built. The teenagers seem to have identified with teenage Charlotte and it has been translated… The Greek translation was one of the last ones. Well, I saw other translations, as well. This format wasn’t achieved in any other language. In Greek, after every dot, we continued below on the next line. That’s what we could do, yes.

One last question, at least regarding all that. Are you translating differently today than how you translated Flaubert, or others later on, in the past?

Yes, because my relationship with the French language is different. In the meantime, I lived with my French husband for twenty-four years and spoke French from the moment I woke up in the morning. It’s my language now, I think in French. So when I open a French book, it is now a book in my language, not a book in a foreign language. I transfer it from one language of mine to the other language of mine, but the feeling is very different now. In this book, my effort was to maintain the atmosphere and the poetic spirit in Greek as well. It’s now up to the reader to decide whether I’ve achieved it.

Before thanking you, I’d like you to tell us, if you wish, something for the young people who are just starting out in translation. A piece of advice? A warning? Something they can carry inside.

I don’t feel so old as to give advice or exhortation. I can only say that it has been an occupation and a journey that has enriched me a lot, that I have seen it also enriching colleagues and friends around. It’s no coincidence that both colleagues and friends, while doing other things, sometimes translate something again precisely because translation gives you something else, something special. It’s a very essential… I think it enriches a person a lot. Other than that, one must be able to integrate it into their professional life and see how they’ll manage, because it’s not a profession that offers, by its nature, what a profession should offer.

Dear Odette, we thank you very much.

And I thank you very much.

Thank you for the interview and thank you for what you have offered in our field.

Thank you very much, too.