Villa Albertine, the cultural and educational division of the French Embassy in the U.S., awarded its 2024 Albertine Translation Prize at its New York headquarters on January 28. Eve Hill-Agnus won in the fiction category for her translation of Mariette Navarro's Ultramarine, forthcoming from Deep Vellum Books, and Gregory Elliott was recognized with the nonfiction prize for his work on Frédéric Gros's Pourquoi la guerre? (A Philosophy of War), forthcoming from Verso.
Describing her approach to translating "Ultramarine," which follows an increasingly delusional female captain and her crew crossing the Atlantic, "I decided that the most important thing would be the sound," Hill-Agnus said. "My task would be to translate the sound of the ocean that she recreates in her language.... I just trusted my instinct."
In a recorded message, Navarro praised Hill-Agnus's work. "Translators are the best readers in the world because they notice details," she said. "And they know secrets about my book that I don't even know myself."
Elliott, who could not attend the ceremony, sent remarks delivered by Grey Anderson of Verso Books. "Translators, nonfiction translators in particular, tend to remain invisible unless, or should I say until, they get it wrong," Elliott noted, adding that this recognition was particularly meaningful, as it coincides with his retirement after 25 years of translation work.
The winners were selected from among 18 works supported by the Albertine Translation Fund last year. The fund provides $2,000 toward publication costs for all selected books, and covers half of the translation expenses, up to $5,000, for each selected title. The Albertine Translation Prize is supported by Van Cleef and Arpels, the Florence Gould Foundation, the Albertine Foundation, and the Institut Français.
A panel discussion followed the award ceremony, in which translators and publishers addressed the challenges facing literary translation. Participants included C. Francis Fisher, a translator and poet and the curator of the Colloquy reading series; Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, a jury member for the prize and professor at University of Amsterdam; Anderson, the editor at Verso; and Hill-Agnus. An excerpt of the panel is below, edited lightly for clarity.
Let's begin with the selection process for this year's prize. Alessandra, could you describe how winners are chosen?
Benedicty-Kokken: We have about a dozen people on the jury, and we review approximately 60 titles a year. What's really crucial to what we do, alongside the team at the French Embassy, is taking a book that exists in one public sphere with all its vexed issues and transferring it into another public sphere. It's extremely delicate, extremely dangerous, and without a group of people that care about the book, the author, and the translator, there's no way it could transfer smoothly.
This is for you, C. Francis Fischer. Translation is sometimes described as cultural diplomacy. How does that impact your thinking when curating your reading series across different languages and cultures?
Fisher: I'm particularly interested in poets who write in adopted languages. French has long been a language that people who are not necessarily native speakers have adopted for various reasons—some of which are certainly colonial and fraught, others of which are maybe a sort of love story for language. For example, the poet I translated, Joyce Mansour, grew up speaking English in Egypt, then chose to move to Paris to join the surrealist movement because that revolutionary ethos resonated with her.
Eve, could you talk about translating Ultramarine, particularly regarding how you handled gender in French versus English?
Hill-Agnus: Mariette Navarro told me she wasn't sure at the beginning if the crew would be all female—they're all male. The female captain didn't exist in the beginning. The first scene was actually the crew swimming, and she wanted that image to be observed from above. She had a flash and saw the figure of a woman smoking a cigarette on the deck of the ship—that was her main character. One of her constraints was that she didn't want the captain to have a name because every time she tried to give her one, it became too much of a concrete story, a plot tethered to the here and now. She really wanted it to feel dreamlike and almost metaphysical at times.
Grey, from Verso's perspective, how do you approach commissioning translations? What's your editorial philosophy?
Anderson: We publish about 20% of our list in translation, which for a relatively small independent house is a challenge. We're very grateful for independent grants and external funding. Sometimes books come to us through translators, sometimes through authors. In France particularly, we work with publishing houses that share a similar political and intellectual outlook—La Fabrique would be one example, and Agone another.
Let's address the practical aspects of the translation business. What do translators need to feel supported as professionals?
Fisher: In our current ecosystem, it's absolutely not a viable profession, and that is the great loss of literature. Most translators are academics or they have a day job or they're editors. Everybody has another job.
Hill-Agnus: You're never going to make a lot of money. You're probably making like two or three cents an hour given how much goes into a translation. But what publishers can do is trust translators when they bring a text. It's hard because often that publisher can't read the original text—that's why the translator is there. They have to really believe that this can be something in English and is worthwhile.
How do you handle differences between British and American translations?
Hill-Agnus: Ultramarine exists in two English language translations. It was translated into English for the British market by Corey Stockwell, and then our translation exists for the American market. The British translation came out more swiftly, and it existed before I started translating. I didn't read it until I was done.
Having read both, they feel very different, and that's partly because of my emphasis and my primary goal in translating, which gave the work a certain color. You're in a slightly different world in each text, as though there's two ships crossing different seas in whole different universes. I find that fascinating, and I think it would be terrible to try and squish English to have one version for both markets. It would be really interesting to think about how that might apply to other contexts. I mean, should we have one French translation, for example? The Francophone world is so varied and diverse.
Verso specifically addresses political content in its translations. How do all of you approach this in the current climate?
Anderson: We have a series of pamphlets on Palestine that were commissioned following October 7th and its aftermath. We publish sharp, politically trenchant works from a variety of different perspectives, not shying away from controversy. We have utter contempt for censorship.
Benedicty-Kokken: The last year has been so politically difficult, and what I have noticed on the committee is how subtle the choice can be for someone to turn in a translation of a certain book. The choices made by the translator, the choices we make as a jury—these moved discussions in ways we might not have expected.
How do you think about how literary voices in French have evolved over time, when they are translated and by whom, and how that affects the voice of the author and the original text?
Fisher: I'm really interested in the circulation of translated texts. I translate surrealists, and in French, that sort of language and movement has a much larger cultural relevancy than it does in the United States. When you translate it into English, it has a certain kind of newness, though obviously there are plenty of French surrealists who have been translated. You don't want to sort of domesticate the text, but a great publisher will let you write a translator's note where you can address these sorts of questions.
What about when there's a prior translation?
Fisher: We need more translations of living authors. I'm somewhat of a hypocrite saying that because the person I'm working on is not a living author, and there are some existing translations. But texts deserve to be retranslated because times change and what the text means to contemporary people changes. All texts deserve multiple translations because the more versions of the text there are, the closer you come to something like an original, which is paradoxical and something impossible. Translators can sort of pick up on different threads of an original text. To me, the more versions the better.
If you had one final thought about translation to share with the publishing world, what would it be?
Fisher: The academic space could do a better job of rewarding translators. A lot of universities don't recognize translations as publications for tenure-track jobs. There's a built-in assumption that translation is not a creative act, that it's a secondary act to the original work. Allowing people to turn in translations as their dissertations—these things are changing slowly at certain universities, but the academic space could do a lot more to support translators.
Anderson: We've been lucky to have several generations of really gifted translators who are also experts in the fields from which they translate. I think it will be difficult for those generations to replenish themselves. As has been mentioned, the resources available to people working in the academy, and certainly those outside the academy, are thinner and thinner on the ground. That's a very real concern to which I have no easy answer. Translators require time to read and think about other things. I'm afraid that the future doesn't augur well for them on any of those counts.
Hill-Agnus: Translation is something that requires many layers of work and thought and time. The more we talk about these layers of work, the more people will realize how important it is to fund these things through programs like this and through residencies. In short, we need time and space for translation.
