I've frequently been asked how I came to translate Robert Merle's Fortune de France, labeled by Wikipedia as "virtually untranslatable," since Merle's thirteen-volume epic is sprinkled with so many antiquated French words that no translator in his right mind would undertake such a project. Moreover, the novels are situated in a farming region in southwestern France, and are the fruit of a great deal of historical, cultural and agricultural research that finds its way very subtly into the warp and weave of this "swashbuckling" saga. So it's pretty evident that any translator of this novel had to be both an academic and a person whose life experience exceeded the boundaries of academic life.
Heretic Dawn
My own encounter with Merle's work occurred purely by chance. In the late 80's, a student of mine returned from study in Grenoble with a gift: Robert Merle's Malevil. I fell in love with this work, and began translating it for my daughter, Chloë. When I'd completed about half the novel, I sent my translation to Merle, who immediately wrote back, explaining that, alas! a translation of this work existed, but was already out of print. "However," he wrote, "I loved your translation, and wonder if you'd be interested in translating a more recent work of mine." Of course, I jumped at the idea and, a week later, received a copy of Fortune de France in the mail.
I believe my entire life was unconsciously spent preparing me for this work. I was lucky enough to have learned Old French as part of my doctoral studies in the 60's. On the other hand, of the five years I spent in France in my twenties and thirties, three were spent in a tiny farming village in Burgundy, where I learned to work the land and discovered not only this very un-Parisian (agri-) culture but encountered a patois that was very similar to that of the Merle's world. Translating Fortune de France thus became a work of recognition rather than of discovery.
I finished my translation in 1994 and but when I sent it off to him, he explained, "you're very courageous, not to say 'don quixote-esque' to have done this work without contract!" Since he'd bought back the rights to his novel from his publisher there was no one in France to "push" the sale of the book abroad. I now understood why no one in his right mind would have undertaken this project!!!
My translation languished in a desk drawer for eighteen years. In the intervening years Merle and I became good friends and he even took my daughter to lunch in 1995 to celebrate her 21st birthday, but no one ever seemed interested in having his work translated into English, despite its popularity throughout Europe (over 5 million copies sold!). Finally, Adam Freudenheim and Daniel Seton at Pushkin Press, had the imagination and courage to undertake the publication of Merle's epic, and have now made the first three volumes available to the English-speaking world. Maybe I wasn't so crazy after all!
Heretic Dawn by Robert Merle, translated by T. Jefferson Kline, published by Pushkin Press at £9.99.