ÉLISABETH VONARBURG
Élisabeth Vonarburg
ÉV - I never lived in Paris and certainly wouldn’t love to live there, although I like to go there as a tourist! It has its charm, in certain places. I am a country girl at heart. Chance or, as I like to believe, serendipity, brought me to Québec and more specifically to Chicoutimi, thanks to a program of “military cooperation” between France and Canada—various young scientists were sent all over the world instead of doing their military service. I was just part of my then husband’s luggage. But we both wanted to leave France, which in the early Seventies, post-68, was an even shittier place to be than it is now.
NK - Élisabeth, you were born in Paris, France where EVERYONE would love to live and yet you don't. What brought you to Canada, and, specifically, to Chicoutimi, Québec?
ÉV - I never lived in Paris and certainly wouldn’t love to live there, although I like to go there as a tourist! It has its charm, in certain places. I am a country girl at heart. Chance or, as I like to believe, serendipity, brought me to Québec and more specifically to Chicoutimi, thanks to a program of “military cooperation” between France and Canada—various young scientists were sent all over the world instead of doing their military service. I was just part of my then husband’s luggage. But we both wanted to leave France, which in the early Seventies, post-68, was an even shittier place to be than it is now.
NK - You are a fiction and
non-fiction writer, a poet, an editor and a translator (you've translated the
works of Tanith Lee and Marion Zimmer Bradley to French, among others). You are
a lecturer, and for eleven years have been literary director of the science
fiction publication, Solaris. You
hosted the radio show Demain la veille
on Radio Canada, and won Le Grand Prix de
la SF francaise for Le Silence de la Cité/Silent City, and a Philip K. Dick award special citation for In the
Mothers' Land/Chroniques du pays des
mères. You have published...I've lost count of the many dozens of novels
and short stories in French! Some of your work has been translated into
English, German, Japanese and Romanian. What in the world fuels you?
ÉV - I’m easily
bored. But seriously, words fuel me—I did read a lot, still do, although quite
a bit less. Dreams fuel me—I still dream a lot. The world fuels me. And
fortunately “reality” has only a limited hold on me. I fell into SF &
Fantasy and genres in general at fifteen, which was the Golden Age in the early Sixties. I would likely never have
written a line if not for SF. And I have been blessed with what we French call
une heureuse nature, i.e. mostly a
lot of energy. Winding down, now, but still…
NK - Folklore has it that you had
a Big Dream and out of that emerged
your Tyranael series, the initial book Dreams
of the Sea/Les rêves de la mer. Please talk about that dream and that
series.
ÉV - As with many
folktales, that one is true. I had just fallen into SF etc. and begun
voraciously reading everything I could find, a very œcumenical (read: everything and the kitchen sink) approach to
genres, for which I am extremely grateful, in French then in English. After about
a year of that diet, I Had A Dream. Which amounts to one sentence in the
journal I was then keeping. And I could say that all that I wrote from then on
was contained in that one sentence—until I met Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, that is.
I started writing at sixteen,
wrote four complete versions of it, 2000 pages each, first long-hand, then on a
rickety-tick-tick typewriter, and finished the fourth version in 1978. I dabbled
at it for two more versions (incomplete) while growing up and writing other
stuff like Silent City and In The Mothers’ Land. Found out at some
point that the damned thing was still very much alive in my heart and mind and
decided to Finish It for my fiftieth birthday. So it took 34 years. It evolved
from a trilogy (it was a series from the very beginning—I’m a cathedral
builder!) to a pentalogy (five books); it is a loving hommage to classic SF (i.e. what I’d read between ages 15 and 25),
with a few twists of course. It's a planet story (two planets in fact) taking a
thousand years to unfold, with Terrans and Others, mutants, colonists who break
away from Bad Mother Earth, and Diversely Mysterious Stuff. I wanted to stay
true to the original dream and what I’d found (partly) it meant to me, not
betray it by “modernizing” it, i.e. adding all I had learned (and read) in the
interval SF-wise as well as myself-wise (or unwise). It is still the only world
(and story) in which I would like to live, of all those I've created. I
literally lived there for at least fifteen years, from inception to the fourth
version. I grew up with it—it helped
me grow up—in more ways than one.
NK - What are you working on at the moment that would be of
interest to English and French readers?
ÉV - Well, I am always amazed that anything I am interested in
writing can be of interest to anyone but me. But since you asked: a
science-fiction novel (after two pseudo-fantasy series taking place in a
parallel universe, one from a XVIth to a XIXth century and one mostly set in a
XIIIth century). An honest-to-goddess SCIENCE-fiction novel, yeah, with which I
hope to come to grips with what we are currently going through. But I am not an
almost-here-and-now kind of SF writer, I must take wide detours to grapple with
contemporary questions, be it feminism, politics, economics or ecology (which
will all be motifs in the novel). So: two planets, and multi-parallel
universes. Ah: and a black hole!
NK - You are a translator of many books and your writing also has
been translated. Any thought on both processes?
ÉV
- My first translation from English to French dates back to my encounter with
SF: I spent a depressed month of July 1967 translating John Windham’s The Chrysalids. I loved the experience
and later on, it helped. At some point, I had the opportunity of translating for
a Belgium publisher (a novel by Tanith Lee). After that, I begged the literary
editor of Denoël's SF line Présence du Futur to allow me to translate
Tiptree’s Up The Walls of the World and, seeing a sample of what I
could do, she let me do it. Since then I've translated a lot of American,
British and Canadian authors, with the added bonus that at some point I worked
for a French publisher who let me choose
what I wanted to translate.
I love translating. When I have to do it instead of writing, to earn a living, it is still writing. And my luck has mostly held,
translating what I like—not that I choose anymore, but I usually like the
stories I translate. I am very happy about introducing a new readership to them.
Translators are what we call in French passeurs,
people who serve as links between cultures and people. I’m glad I’ve been given
the opportunity to be one, in my modest measure, for the genres I love.
As for being translated, that’s a whole other bag of beans. And
also a comfortable one for me, as I have been blessed with two wonderful
translators, very different, but both excellent, Jane Brierley and Howard Scott, both recipients of the Governor General Award for translation—not for my books
I hasten to add, although they might as well have been, in my opinion! Jane
knew nothing about SF and I educated her while she educated me, much more
importantly, in what translation means when you
are the one being translated. Howard knows and loves SF but I learned as much
from him as from Jane, translation-wise. I collaborated with both of them, as
much as 50%, I’d say, and they were nice enough to let me do it. I certainly
became a better translator for having been translated, thanks to them. And a
better writer, too. Jane has a writer’s soul. It helps. When she and Candas Jane
Dorsey (the then publisher and literary editor of Tesseract Books, and also a
genre writer, and an excellent one) revised In
The Mothers' Land with me, they persuaded me to change some important
things (something that wasn’t in character for one of the protagonists) and
they were so right! I realized then what a really good translator and a really good
literary editor could do, how much they could help a story be the best it can
be. Which is why I bemoan the downward spiraling of quality in both
translators and editors nowadays (and especially with the laxism in
auto-publishing). But that is another rant.
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