Translating a Novel of Sadism

By Elisabeth Zerofsky

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Credit ILLUSTRATION BY JULIANNA BRION

"A Sentimental Novel," the final published work of the avant-garde novelist and theorist Alain Robbe-Grillet, appeared in France four months before his death, in 2008, and in English translation last spring. The content of the novel contributed to the lag in its translation: "A Sentimental Novel" (reviewed this summer in Briefly Noted) is a compendium of Robbe-Grillet's sadistic fantasies, which, he said, he had catalogued since adolescence. The work consists of two hundred and thirty-nine numbered paragraphs that form a sort of sadist's rhapsody about the sexual initiation of a fourteen-year-old girl, Gigi. Gigi's travails are recounted in exacting detail, against a lushly imagined mise-en-scène, with elaborate furnishings, torture devices, and a proliferation of young companions.

There are few printable passages, but here is one:

Towards the back wall, the one on which my languorous eyes alight most easily, I distinguish, in the foreground of a picture that is quickly revealed to be a forest landscape of vertical and rectilinear trunks, a sort of basin of water so clear it becomes almost immaterial, an oblong widening of a limpid spring, deep as a bathtub or deeper even, set between gray rounded rocks, soft to the touch, welcoming. A girl is sitting there on a stone polished with age, which to her represents the ideal bench, the water's edge where her long legs dangle in the blue mirrored swirl of this lovely nymphaeum, as natural as it is picturesque, whose temperature must be identical to the air, and to the feminine charms themselves, undulating, liquid already, above the moving mirror and its unforeseen shivers.

The violence crescendos over a hundred and forty repetitive pages, saturating the mind with savage images that steadily override any effort to maintain a protective distance. I had not read the original French, and could therefore only judge the English translation: its descriptions were rendered in highly artful prose, its metaphors elegantly drawn, with a fluidity that can be tricky to preserve when French is translated into English. The novel's brutality was deeply disturbing, particularly in conjunction with its polished control, and yet I couldn't deny my admiration for its craftsmanship.

I had never heard of the translator, D. E. Brooke, but felt certain that this must not be the work of an amateur. Yet a Google search turned up nothing, which seemed odd, even given the name's somewhat generic nature. It occurred to me that D. E. Brooke might be a pen name, considering the contents of the novel, but I had a hard time believing this. The translator makes a strong case in the introduction for the literary integrity of "A Sentimental Novel," and criticizes the American publishers who turned it down, writing that their responses came "from a comfort zone of profound and habitual moral hypocrisy." Surely the author of these words would not shrink away from publishing under his or her own name. I wrote to the publisher that finally accepted the book, Dalkey Archive Press, to ask if it could provide any information about Brooke. Dalkey confirmed that the translator had indeed published under a pseudonym, and that, unfortunately, was all it could tell me.

I set out to uncover the true identity of Brooke, not knowing what, exactly, I would do with the information if I found it. I wrote to several people connected to the French literary world, to ask if they had any knowledge of the translator. Their speculations about the translator's identity were intriguing—one pointed out that "D. E. Brooke" has more than a passing resemblance to the name of the heroine of "Middlemarch"—but offered little to go on. I wrote to Dalkey again to ask whether Brooke would be willing to answer some questions by e-mail, which I would send by way of Dalkey, in order to protect the translator's anonymity. Brooke agreed.

Our correspondence (lightly edited and condensed) follows.

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Q: Why did you feel that it was important that this book be translated and published in the English-speaking world?

A: I remember sitting in a coffee shop with a writer friend who mentioned that Robbe-Grillet's last novel remained untranslated in English, and that this was due to the disturbing nature of the material it contained. I said immediately that I would translate it. The reasons had less to do with the book's contents than with my own history as a reader and my encounter with "La Jalousie" at age fifteen. It was a portal that introduced notions of narrative voice, authorial choice, and the reader's relationship to text in ways that I had not considered, as I devoured my way through more conventional fiction that served a different purpose: allowing me to escape my reality at the time. Any number of other works by twentieth-century authors might have triggered similar reflections and explorations. Only, in my case, Alain Robbe-Grillet was the instigator and, as an adolescent, I remember the excitement produced by the book's propositions: that it purportedly granted greater agency to the reader, supposedly bared the scaffolding of writing. These claims intrigued me and gave me a first taste of something. So my reasons for translating "Un Roman Sentimental" were, you could say, purely sentimental.

Q: How long did it take you to do the translation? What made the project financially possible?

A: How long did it take me? I wish I could give you a precise answer. Probably a little over a year. It will not come as news to you that translating obscure French novels is not what pays the rent. Still, one finds ways of making a living and of working on translations at the same time.

Q: What was it like to spend so much time with this text? Did it affect your state of mind at all?

A: As far as the book itself and the material, a few times I had to walk away and return in a steelier frame of mind to take up a particularly hair-raising passage. But, as you note, the text is literary, and there were pleasures in working with it. As translator, I am a filter for material: it travels through me. As such, there's a residue, but it is difficult to qualify. At best, you might compare the book's effect on me to its effect on any reader: certain images—many, in fact—remain in you, and surge forth unbidden, superimposing themselves in your mind's eye on perfectly anodyne and serene scenes of everyday life.

Q: Why did you decide to publish the translation under a pseudonym? How, if at all, do you relate that decision to the "moral opprobrium" that characterized the reaction to the novel?

A: My decision to translate the book pseudonymously was unrelated to the possible reactions it might elicit in the United States or other English-speaking countries. It was, rather, necessitated by personal reasons having to do with my travels to parts of the world where association with the material could put me at risk.

Q: There is an element of beauty to the text. Did you ever feel any tension or conflict in replicating that stylized beauty when it was being employed to give life to such extraordinarily violent ideas?

A: Once I am translating, my intentions are to convey the tone of what is before me in as precise a language as possible. My task is limited to working with words.  In this novel, even though at times the material was difficult for me to sit with, it was the intricate sentences that were the focus of my attention. The scenes almost only emerged afterward.

That said, the literary qualities of the prose did not strike me as incongruous. Instead, this language produced a comforting distance, a rarefied space in which to work, functioning a little like a sheet of stained glass beyond which the action unfolded. If anything, this is what made the translation possible and pleasurable. I would not, I daresay, have been interested in translating the "Fifty Shades" version of the same narrative.

Q: What do you like about "A Sentimental Novel"?

A: What I liked is his lack of hypocrisy and the artfulness of the prose. Robbe-Grillet admitted that, in writing "A Sentimental Novel," he was conveying the essence of fantasies he had entertained for decades, ever since he was a very young man. I am unconvinced that the only man on the planet with horrifying fantasies was Alain Robbe-Grillet. While there is primal revulsion at the rape of innocence and the various other crimes detailed in this story, conflating act and fantasy in assessing a work of this kind seems to me to reflect a generally upheld social lie that requires the weirder and more disquieting manifestations of the human psyche to be swept under the public rug. The book's lack of hypocrisy is in direct proportion to the rarity of similar avowals, especially in established spheres of social privilege and influence. The resulting schism of minds burdened with shameful, unspoken secrets appears to me to do more damage than what can be laid at the doorstep of this novel, which by its very existence forces us to ponder our relationship to criminal thoughts and fantasies: whether we must not think bad thoughts, not share them, not be exposed to them; whether we must condemn them in ourselves and others; and whether they can even be curtailed or eliminated by these actions. Rather than disown his darkest psyche, Robbe-Grillet erects a shrine to it.

Q: So when you refer to the "habitual moral hypocrisy" of the public in the introduction, what, exactly, do you mean?

A: There are at least four or five answers I could give you, and I fear we would find ourselves wading deep into territory that philosophers who examine good and evil write books about. Nonetheless, here is one answer: in this world, where children are dying daily, killed by weapons made by First World nations, maimed, massacred, their real blood spilled, that anyone can get themselves worked up into a froth over a fable is mystifying to me.

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