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TL;DR

A long VICE France Q&A (16 December 2015) in which Théophile Pillault interviews Francis Kerline, the French translator of Infinite Jest (L’Infinie Comédie, Éditions de l'Olivier, 2015 — nearly two decades after the 1996 English publication). This is the fullest freely-available Kerline primary — where the Books teaser held only a few morsels, here Kerline talks at length about the craft, the money, and the fight. The load-bearing thread is a translator's-desk endorsement of the deliberately-broken-syntax-as-design reading: the reason the job ran long was literary — Des phrases interminables, volontairement mal fichues (interminable sentences, deliberately badly made — gloss ours) — and Kerline's whole method was to stay faithful to that untidiness rather than smooth it, warning his proofreader in advance that his French would seem messy and must not be retouched. Around that sit the biography (Normale Sup dropout → romance-novel rewriter → specialist in the untranslatable: Self, Selby, Lethem), a hard-numbers account of literary-translation economics (48,000 € net over three years; ~1,400 €/month), a production grievance (the endnotes were reassigned to another hand, and a proofreader altered his text), and a counter-attack on a Slate article he calls a règlement de compte (score-settling — gloss ours). Pillault frames Kerline as working under a pseudonym. The piece touches three cruxes — prose-tempo-design (endorses, firsthand, strong), encyclopedic-design (mentions), endnotes-function (adjacency only) — and is otherwise translation/reception-scoped with no home slug.

Key claims

  • The length was literary, not brutal — and the untidiness is deliberate. Asked whether three years on the book was Un combat (a fight), Kerline answers that nothing in it is brutal; the translation ran long for literary reasons: Des phrases interminables, volontairement mal fichues (interminable sentences, deliberately badly made — gloss ours) and references demanding enormous research. He could have gone faster by tidying the wobbly syntax, chopping the long sentences, simplifying the referents or modernizing the language; he refused, because it was a cult novel and he felt a responsibility.
  • The method: stay faithful to the mess, and forbid its correction. Kerline opened by warning the future proofreader, Cyrielle Ayakatsikas, that he would work to be fidèle au style and that his text would therefore semblerait brouillon et mal écrit (would seem sloppy and badly written — gloss ours), and that retouching it was out of the question. On flipping through the printed book he found a corrector had swapped his M. and Mme for M. and Mrs (which dénature certains dialogues — distorts certain dialogues — gloss ours), cut several of his footnotes, and — worse — folded one end-of-novel note into a sentence instead of leaving it at the foot of the page.
  • Wallace's sentences don't resolve. On the destructured long sentences, Kerline says he found the manner quickly but could never write au fil de la plume (off the cuff — gloss ours): he had to take each one apart first (Il fallait que je les décortique d’abord — his verb), know where he was going so as to land on his feet while seeming to improvise. On ne sait ni où la phrase va s’arrêter ni pourquoi elle s’arrête (one knows neither where the sentence will stop nor why it stops — gloss ours) — because that is how Wallace often writes in Infinite Jest.
  • Translation as acting; the translator as writer-not-author. Le travail de traducteur est un travail d’acteur (the translator's work is an actor's work — gloss ours): one interprets the author's role, and the narrative flux (le flux narratif) settles in after about forty pages. A translator est un écrivain … Mais il n’est pas un auteur (is a writer … but is not an author — gloss ours), because the meaning is not his to own; he must reproduce a sense — tone, nuance, impression — and there is no method, only instinct.
  • The faithfulness doctrine. L’idée, c’est d’être absolument fidèle. Ne rien retrancher, ne rien ajouter, ne rien inventer. Imiter (the idea is to be absolutely faithful; cut nothing, add nothing, invent nothing; imitate — gloss ours): place every word of the original where lexicon and grammar allow, and prefer a footnote to any smoothing arrangement (as a reader, a translation with no notes makes him suspicious).
  • The invented neutral argot. Wallace dit que c’est un argot typique de Boston (Wallace says it's a typical Boston slang — gloss ours; indirect reported Wallace claim, paraphrase), which some call fake and largely invented and which was in any case impossible to carry over. So Kerline fabricated un argot neutre (a neutral slang — gloss ours) that nobody really speaks in France — deliberately unlike banlieue speech (On est à Boston — we are in Boston, as he puts it), with a few simple, widely-understood verlan words.
  • Age doesn't matter; the novel's era does. Nearly sixty, Kerline says the translator's age is not the issue — corny slang can come from a thirty-year-old. What matters is the era of the book: he rendered one of Incandenza's film titles as La Religieuse dure à cuire (roughly, the hard-boiled nun — gloss ours), tout à fait désuet (thoroughly dated — gloss ours) and indispensable both for Incandenza's age and for the comic effect of the repeated phrase across the film's long description.
  • The economics of literary translation (hard numbers). Kerline was paid 48,000 € net in four instalments over three years (~1,400 €/month) and calls it a bad deal he could not escape. A translator earns royalties (usually 1 % of pre-tax price), but a translated book sells 5,000–10,000 copies on average and royalties arrive a year late, so the real pay is the advance (à-valoir), proportional to the number of 1,500-character feuillets; here 23.50 € gross (~22 € net) per feuillet. He had counted on the endnotes to recoup, then they were taken from him.
  • The timeline and the endnotes rupture. He set to work about September 2012, expected to finish March 2015, but in late December 2014 an l'Olivier assistant emailed that, to speed things up, she had commandé la traduction des notes à quelqu’un d’autre (commissioned the translation of the notes to someone else — gloss ours), Sans mon avis (without asking me — gloss ours). He calls it contrary to custom and even to law, but he is not litigious; it ended in a shouting match with l'Olivier, pour qui je ne travaillerai plus jamais (for whom I will never work again — gloss ours). He handed in his manuscript in early February 2015.
  • Why France waited ~20 years: cost, not cowardice. Marion Mazauric (Au Diable Vauvert) acquired Wallace's rights before he was a cult author; Kerline supposes editors weren't fighting over him. Why she delayed Infinite Jest for lesser books, ask her — but the answer is cost. There was no particular timidity (Wallace is no scandal author); what publishers look at first is profitability.
  • The Slate feud. Pillault reads Kerline a press quote attributed to Olivier Cohen (l'Olivier's founder): that Francis is tired after three years, full of paradoxes, the man of impossible missions who se met à détester le livre (ends up hating the book — gloss ours). Kerline replies that L’article de Slate est un règlement de compte (the Slate article is a score-settling — gloss ours), written by a friend of Marion Mazauric who never digested that Cohen piqué (swiped — gloss ours) Infinite Jest from her; the quote proves Cohen got trapped, since no editor would say in mid-promotion that his translator hated the book — C’est suicidaire (it's suicidal — gloss ours).
  • Framing (Pillault). The intro sketches Wallace (1962–2008; suicide; depression; Nardil; bandanas; the writer who inventé des mots — invented words), précis the novel (a dystopian America, the Incandenza family and the tennis-prodigy son Hal, the Québécois separatists who covet a lethal video), and reports the edition's figures: 25,000 copies of the French translation printed in summer 2015, two-thirds sold within three months. Pillault says the translator dit s’appeler Francis Kerline, mais c’est un pseudonyme (says his name is Francis Kerline, but it's a pseudonym — gloss ours).

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Infinite Jest's interminable, badly-made sentences are deliberate design — the untidiness is chosen, and the translator's task is to reproduce it rather than smooth it away

  • Crux: prose-tempo-design
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [S — FR] The design claim proper, firsthand: the translation ran long for literary reasons — Des phrases interminables, volontairement mal fichues (… interminable sentences, deliberately badly made — gloss ours) — and Kerline could have gone faster only by arrangeant la syntaxe bancale (straightening the wobbly syntax — gloss ours), which he refused.
    • [S — FR] The method that follows from it: he warned the proofreader he would be fidèle au style so his text semblerait brouillon et mal écrit (would seem sloppy and badly written — gloss ours) and must not be retouched — the intentional messiness protected as design.
    • [S — FR] The sentence-behaviour datum: On ne sait ni où la phrase va s’arrêter ni pourquoi elle s’arrête (one knows neither where the sentence will stop nor why it stops — gloss ours), Parce que Wallace écrit souvent comme ça dans Infinite Jest (because Wallace often writes like that in Infinite Jest — gloss ours), which forced him to take apart (his décortique) each long, twisted sentence before rewriting it to seem improvised.
  • Notes: Firsthand translator/critic voice (Kerline speaks French; his words, quotable verbatim — NOT back-translation). A clean endorsement from the design pole: the broken sentence is read as chosen, and specifically as a thing the translator had to rebuild in French. This is the same conviction the kerline-books-2015 teaser carries (il l'a envisagé ainsi), here far fuller and with the working method attached — and the closest first-person statement to the Kerline design-vs-flaw line the Spirale review-essay carries secondhand and disputes (mal finie, volontairement mal faite there; volontairement mal fichues here; the Spirale essay does not name its interview source, so the identification stays a likeness, not a match).

CONNECTION: A reception/translator-desk sighting of the novel's monumental, encyclopedic, research-heavy construction

  • Crux: encyclopedic-design
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [S — FR] Pillault's intro register: Un univers monumental, obsédé, hilarant, lardé de saillies expérimentales, d’odes à l’addiction, de structures syntaxiques disloquées et d’argot inventé (a monumental, obsessed, hilarious universe, larded with experimental sallies, odes to addiction, dislocated syntactic structures and invented slang — gloss ours). [journalist framing]
    • [S — FR] Kerline on the research burden: the references m’obligeaient un énorme travail de recherche (forced an enormous research effort on me — gloss ours; the source's own loose grammar, obligeaient un without à, preserved).
  • Notes: A mentions-grade sighting, not an argument. The intro's monumental-universe framing and Kerline's research-heavy references describe the encyclopedic texture but advance no claim about what that construction is for (encyclopedic-design's actual crux). Do NOT upgrade. Consonant with the term-density testimony held across the translator cluster (Blumenbach's 28 jargons, Nesi, Sarrazin's caractère encyclopédique).

Themes

Translation as craft and ordeal (three years; the length as literary, not brutal; fidèle au style; the actor's-work metaphor; writer-not-author); the deliberately broken syntax as design (the volontairement mal fichues sentences; the brouillon et mal écrit surface he protected; the sentence that stops for no reason); the faithfulness doctrine (Ne rien retrancher, ne rien ajouter, ne rien inventer; footnotes over arrangements); the untranslatable and the invented neutral argot (the Boston-slang problem; the verlan restraint; the we-are-in-Boston rule); the era-not-age principle (La Religieuse dure à cuire); the economics of literary translation (48,000 € over three years; the à-valoir / feuillet math; the lost endnotes); the production grievances (the M./Mrs substitution, the cut footnotes, the mis-placed end-note); the publishing-history saga (Mazauric's rights purchase; the ~20-year wait explained by cost; the Cohen/Slate règlement de compte); and the framing reception matter (Wallace's biography; the plot précis; 25,000 copies printed; the Bret Easton Ellis backlash as cult-and-schism color).

Cross-references

  • kerline-books-2015 — the direct sibling: the same translator, the same edition, the same autumn. The Books piece is a ~600-word donor-walled teaser; this VICE interview is the fuller free primary and corroborates its central prose-tempo-design argument (the untidiness is deliberate) while adding the biography, the economics, the production grievances and the Slate feud. Note the two carry different signature lines (Books: Enfoiré / il l’a envisagé ainsi; VICE: volontairement mal fichues / règlement de compte) and the Books teaser's title-decision anecdote (Infinie Facétie vs. L’Infinie Comédie, the Dante nod) is absent here.
  • lapresse-infinie-comedie-2015 — the Québec reception notice of the very edition this interview describes from the translator's desk; La Presse credits Kerline in the book-line but does not interview him.
  • spirale-infinie-comedie — the Montréal review-essay that carries a Kerline interview line (mal finie, volontairement mal faite) secondhand and disputes the badly-made verdict; this VICE interview is the closest primary to that carried statement (design-vs-flaw axis), the two sitting on opposite sides of it.
  • esposito-ij-around-the-world — the cross-language round-up whose French section covers exactly this edition (Cohen; L'Infinie comédie; the écrivain maudit saga; 20,000 copies in its first four months — set beside VICE's 25,000 printed in summer 2015, the two agree as print-run vs. sales).
  • The translator-testimony cluster — blumenbach-trashpool-2011, nesi-minimaetmoralia-intervista — the German and first-Italian translators. Where Blumenbach dwells on the 28 technical jargons and Nesi on the annotation and correspondence, Kerline dwells on the deliberately untidy syntax he had to rebuild — the same conviction that Wallace wrote exactly the difficulty he intended, arriving from a third desk.
  • The Russian translators' cluster — pervoe-polyarinov-karpov-2020, polyarinov-lj-2014-2016, dystopia-polyarinov-obsuzhdaya-2018 — the same why-did-it-take-so-long / who-pays economics that Kerline gives for France (cost, not cowardice) recurs in the Russian account of a 22-year wait; the two national delays rhyme as economic, not literary, stories.

Notable passages

Kerline's words unless marked (J = Pillault's framing/questions; the Cohen and BEE spans are third-party, marked). French is the verbatim anchor; the English in parentheses is our gloss (paraphrase). The source's own quoted matter appears in « … » guillemets (with regular ASCII spaces); the note's citation wrapper is curly “ … ” and the guillemets are not reproduced inside the quoted content.

  • “Des phrases interminables, volontairement mal fichues” (interminable sentences, deliberately badly made — gloss ours) — the design claim in one breath.
  • “semblerait brouillon et mal écrit” (would seem sloppy and badly written — gloss ours) — how he warned the proofreader his faithful text would read.
  • “On ne sait ni où la phrase va s’arrêter ni pourquoi elle s’arrête” (one knows neither where the sentence will stop nor why it stops — gloss ours).
  • “Le travail de traducteur est un travail d’acteur. Il s’agit d’interpréter le rôle de l’auteur” (the translator's work is an actor's work; it is about interpreting the author's role — gloss ours).
  • “L’idée, c’est d’être absolument fidèle. Ne rien retrancher, ne rien ajouter, ne rien inventer. Imiter” (the idea is to be absolutely faithful; cut nothing, add nothing, invent nothing; imitate — gloss ours).
  • “Un traducteur est un écrivain … Mais il n’est pas un auteur” (a translator is a writer … but he is not an author — gloss ours), dans la mesure où le sens ne lui appartient pas (inasmuch as the meaning does not belong to him — gloss ours).
  • Reported Wallace claim (indirect): “Wallace dit que c’est un argot typique de Boston” (Wallace says it's a typical Boston slang — gloss ours) — Kerline's indirect paraphrase of Wallace's own assertion about the novel's slang; no direct Wallace quotation appears.
  • “j’ai fabriqué un argot neutre, que personne ne parle vraiment en France” (I fabricated a neutral slang that nobody really speaks in France — gloss ours).
  • On one of Incandenza's films: “j’ai traduit le titre de l’un des films d’Incandenza par « La Religieuse dure à cuire »” (I translated the title of one of Incandenza's films as La Religieuse dure à cuire — gloss ours).
  • “J’ai reçu 48 000 euros nets en quatre fois” (I received 48,000 euros net in four instalments — gloss ours) — the pay, over three years.
  • “commandé la traduction des notes à quelqu’un d’autre” (commissioned the translation of the notes to someone else — gloss ours) — the endnotes rupture.
  • “L’article de Slate est un règlement de compte” (the Slate article is a score-settling — gloss ours); an editor saying his translator hated the book in mid-promotion would be “suicidaire” (suicidal — gloss ours).
  • Olivier Cohen (carried by Pillault, from the Slate piece): “Francis est un peu fatigué par ses trois années sur “Infinite Jest”. Il est plein de paradoxes. C’est l’homme des missions impossibles mais au bout d’un moment, il se met à détester le livre” (Francis is a little tired after his three years on Infinite Jest; he is full of paradoxes; he is the man of impossible missions but at some point he begins to hate the book — gloss ours). [third-party voice; nested “Infinite Jest” printed in curly U+201C/U+201D inside the outer « »]
  • Pillault (framing): “Il dit s’appeler Francis Kerline, mais c’est un pseudonyme” (he says his name is Francis Kerline, but it's a pseudonym — gloss ours).
  • Bret Easton Ellis (English tweet, embedded, cite-as-written): “Anyone who finds David Foster Wallace a literary genius has got to be included in the Literary Doucebag-Fools Pantheon…” — dated September 6, 2012; reproduced with its Doucebag spelling and trailing ellipsis as printed. Pillault uses it as the novel's cult-and-schism color (Ellis the dissident).

Accuracy notes

Cite-as-written throughout (orthography and errors preserved as printed).

  • Wallace's death date is wrong in the source. The intro prints décédé en Californie le 12 décembre 2008 (line 114) — but Wallace died 12 September 2008, not December. à l’âge de 46 ans is correct (b. Feb 1962). Reproduced as printed; the month is the source's error. (The BEE tweet, dated September 6 2012, is unrelated.)
  • The pseudonym claim. Pillault asserts the translator's name is a pseudonym (line 158), with a joking rationale about Wallace's lingering paranoïa. This is this source's claim; the sibling French sources (kerline-books-2015, lapresse-infinie-comedie-2015) and the Spirale/Esposito notes treat Francis Kerline as the translator's working name (he is the established French translator of Self, Selby, Lethem). Recorded as the source's framing; not asserted as resolved here.
  • A pull-quote is duplicated in the body. The sentence Pour les longues phrases déstructurées, [j']…au fil de la plume, précisément parce qu’elles sont longues et que la syntaxe est tordue appears twice: once as an inset pull-quote (lines 288–290, the short form) and once inside the flowing answer (lines 333–336, the full form with j’ai trouvé la manière assez vite mais). A VICE layout artifact (an inset pull-quote repeating a line of the answer), not a transcription error.
  • “m’obligeaient un énorme travail de recherche” (line 228). The source's own grammar is loose (obliger normally takes à); preserved byte-true, not smoothed.
  • The manuscript figures check out against the archive. Footnote: the English IJ was Publié sous une version raisonnable de 1 079 pages, flanquées d’une centaine de notes (line 161) — 1,079 pages is the standard count; the 1 700 pages figure (line 129) is the draft-manuscript length, distinct from the published book. 1996 US publication, the 2005 Time hundred-best-novels listing, and the 46-years-old figure are all correct.
  • Regular ASCII spaces before French punctuation (byte-fact, not an error). The page uses plain 0x20 (not NBSP) before ; : ! ? and inside « » — e.g. l’œuvre de Wallace : son traducteur (line 156), et si je le fais ? » (line 196). Preserved as printed; typographically non-standard but byte-true.

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