Rachel Careau is the translator into English of a new edition of the French writer Colette (1873-1954)'s novel The Pure and the Impure. Her other work include translations of Colette's novels Chéri and The End of Chéri. She lives in Hudson, New York.
Q: Why did you decide to translate Colette’s The Pure and the Impure?
A: Translating Colette’s novels Chéri and The End of Chéri was a revelation to me, because I had not previously read Colette in the original French. Complex yet economical, with an appearance of effortlessness, her prose struck me as very modern.
When I compared Colette’s texts to the existing English versions (by Roger Senhouse and Stanley Appelbaum), I was struck by the wide gulf between the original French and the translations. Her lean style, her syntax, her broad, precise vocabulary, her musicality, had all been lost; the translations were rife with omissions, embellishments, and mistranslations; and the prose felt flaccid and outdated.
When I finished translating those novels, I knew I wanted to translate more Colette, to put to use what I had learned about her style. She’s challenging to translate, and I felt ready to dive once again into the challenge.
I asked several Colette scholars which of her books were most in need of retranslation, and The Pure and the Impure made everyone’s list. It’s an important book, in that Colette considered it both her best and her most autobiographical.
It’s also a book that seems quite prescient, and remarkably relevant today, in its focus on questions of sexual expression and gender identity.
Q: The writer Lydia Davis said of your translation, “Rachel Careau, in her attentive, sensitive translation, avails herself of a wide, rich vocabulary and nimble syntax to match Colette’s own linguistic ingenuity.” What do you think of that description?
A: I am deeply gratified that Lydia Davis saw those qualities in my translation. I worked hard to reproduce those very elements of Colette’s style, both because it’s part of my translation ethos and because earlier translators often failed to do so.
Colette was a sophisticated prose stylist, and I think her writing has frequently been “dumbed down.” She had a fascinatingly varied vocabulary, replete with classical and literary usages, specialized and technical words, zoological and botanical terms, slang and argot, and obscure regionalisms.
The Pure and the Impure gives us urticant, decretal, moucharaby, batrachian, filiform, ocellated, umbilicate, nance—all of them lost in the earlier translation by Herma Briffault.
Syntax reveals how authors think, what is important to them; the order of words, the way ideas unfold in a sentence or across a paragraph, aren’t incidental to the ideas the words express. So I try to attend to the order of words and phrases as closely as I can, given the differences between languages, particularly when the authors themselves are making choices that are nonstandard.
Q: What do you see as the significance of the novel’s title?
A: That’s a question that Colette scholars have been mulling over for decades! Not easy to answer.
Purity as Colette defines it in the book doesn’t have the sexual or moral sense that we might expect; it has more to do with the concept of devotion, of commitment, to an ideal—an ideal that, in this case, finds its expression in gender and sexuality.
Purity seems to be a state “free from anything extraneous to the ruling passion,” as the scholar Elaine Marks put it, but it may or may not be chaste.
Q: How would you describe Colette’s legacy today?
A: I think Colette’s legacy today is threefold.
First, there is her image: She was the most-photographed writer of the 20th century, according to Kathleen Antonioli in her new biography Colette, and there are so many striking and widely available photographs of her that I think her image has become inextricably associated with her name and her work.
Second, there is her example: As a woman she made her own definition, defying societal norms and expectations, flouting sexual and gender conventions, rising to the top of her profession despite the sometimes patronizing assessments of her work, achieving a number of firsts—first woman elected president of the Académie Goncourt, first woman accorded a state funeral in France…Although she eschewed the feminist label, she nevertheless presents an example for feminists to follow.
Third, and most importantly, there are her books: She was considered the greatest 20th-century French prose stylist after Proust (and some would say that as a stylist she exceeds Proust), and she left behind many masterpieces of great insight and artistry, among them Chéri, The End of Chéri, My Mother’s House, Break of Day, Sido, and The Pure and the Impure.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m planning to take a break from translation to return to a project I’ve been working on intermittently for the better part of a decade, a book about my mother, who died by suicide in 1994, when she was 63. It’s evolved formally over time, from a straight narrative to something more fragmentary, collagelike, and associative.
The current form, an accumulation of short texts, feels both more manageable and more interesting to me—I started out in graduate school as a poet, and my more recent work has been prose poetry—and I want to see how the project might develop if I can focus on it without interruption.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Many of us—and this includes me—read Colette in our youth. But I think she’s an author who rewards revisiting later in life, especially in some of the newer translations that have been coming out in recent years.
At the same time, I hope she will gain a new generation of readers, for the intelligence of her insights, the particularity of her observations, and the elegance of her prose.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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