L'infinie comédie et la tâche ingrate du traducteur

TL;DR

A Montréal review-essay on Francis Kerline's long-awaited 2015 French Infinite Jest (L'infinie comédie, Éditions de l'Olivier) — a translation-critique, and the sharpest available statement of a prose-design question. The reviewer salutes the achievement as a door into Wallace for francophone readers, but finds the translation over-domesticated: Kerline reaches too readily for French slang, and his presence "s'y fait trop sentir." The heart of the piece is a craft argument. In a France Culture interview Kerline had described Wallace's writing as « mal finie, volontairement mal faite » (our translation: badly finished, deliberately badly made); the reviewer refutes the badly-made verdict, insisting the tottering syntax is precision work — it reproduces the hesitations of a thought doubting itself in the act of stating itself. The ideal translator, the essay closes, would be as invisible as the wraith of James Incandenza, who wanders the novel without ever showing his face.

Key claims

• The difficulty is opacity, not length. Translating "cette brique de 1079 pages (1488 en français)" is daunting less for its size than for its density — puns, neologisms, ironic undertones, hidden citations, and sentences that run nearly a page. The translator's task is to reproduce "la surconscience langagière qui caractérise l'écriture de David Foster Wallace" (our translation: the linguistic hyper-awareness that characterizes Wallace's writing), in which erudition constantly turns to self-mockery.
• The verdict on Kerline: satisfying, but the voice slips. For newcomers the translation is a valuable entry point, but readers who know Wallace risk staying hungry: it "ne parvient pas tout à fait à restituer la virtuosité langagière de l'écrivain", and the translator's effort to appropriate the text shows, so that at times, in the reviewer's words, one no longer quite hears Wallace's voice ("qu'on n'entende plus très bien la voix de Wallace").
• The over-domestication charge (with a Québécois edge). Kerline's immoderate use of argot to render the more oral passages is probably justified for a French readership, but confirms how strange it can be for a Québécois to read a France-French translation. The reviewer half-jokes about wanting Infinite Jest translated into the language of the "assassins des fauteuils rollents [sic]" — the Québécois wheelchair terrorists (the A.F.R.) so central to the novel.
• The title problem. "L'infinie comédie" nods to Dante's Divine Comedy, which reads as marketing; but poetically it is hard to imagine Wallace choosing such an inversion, and "le choix de traduire jest par comédie ne va pas de soi" (our translation: the choice to translate jest as comedy is not self-evident) — the word points to the jester, the king's fool.
• Specific mistranslations. On the very first page Kerline renders "complimentary Nike sneaker" as "flatteuse tennis Nike," missing that "complimentary" means the shoes were a sponsor's gift; Wallace's invented adverbs come out discordant ("cambriolamment parlant"); and the Erdedy marijuana-wait sentence ("Also he considered himself creepy when it came to dope") becomes heavily slangy: « Et puis il se trouvait lui-même craignos, rapport à la dope, et il avait peur que d'autres ne le considèrent également comme tel, rapport à ça. »

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's tottering, difficult syntax is deliberate design, not bad writing — the sentences are built to enact the hesitations of self-doubting thought, thin ice that never gives way, and a translator who reads them as merely botched will mistranslate them

• Crux: prose-tempo-design
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] The reviewer's core claim, against Kerline: "les phrases de Wallace sont retorses, bien sûr, mais il s'agit surtout pour lui de reproduire les hésitations de la pensée qui doute d'elle-même au moment où elle s'énonce." [sec. Le diable est dans les détails]
  • [secondary] The thin-ice figure for how the difficult sentences hold the reader: "on avance dans la phrase comme si on marchait sur la glace mince d'un lac. Or la glace ne cède jamais." [sec. same]
  • [secondary] Kerline's opposed reading (the translator, not Wallace), cite-as-written from France Culture — that Wallace's writing has a "syntaxe bancale, mal fichue" and is "mal finie, volontairement mal faite." [sec. same, quoting Kerline's radio interview]
• Notes: A genuine prose-design disagreement, both poles recorded. The reviewer advances the deliberate-design reading (prose-tempo-design, and the page-length sentence as designed obstacle — adjacent walled-sentence). The counterweight is IN-SOURCE and load-bearing, with a precise shape: Kerline himself grants the wonkiness is deliberate ("volontairement mal faite" — deliberately badly made) but calls the result badly made; the reviewer refutes the badly-made verdict, not the deliberateness — for the reviewer the syntax is precision work enacting self-doubting thought. The essay ties the mistranslations to Kerline having, by his own France Culture admission, never read Wallace before taking the job. Counterevidence clause satisfied (Kerline's opposed view quoted in full).

THEORY: The ideal translator of Infinite Jest should be as effaced as the novel's wraith — an invisible presence rather than an audible domesticating voice

• Crux: wraith-reality
• Stance: mentions
• Evidence:
  • [inference] The closing figure: the wished-for translation is one in which "le traducteur aurait été effacé, presque imperceptible, comme le fantôme de James Incandenza qui erre dans le roman sans jamais laisser voir son visage." [sec. close]
• Notes: A rhetorical use of the wraith as a figure for the self-effacing translator, not an interpretive claim about whether the wraith is real. Recorded as a sighting only (the reviewer treats the wraith as an established feature — "le fantôme … qui erre dans le roman"). Do not read as evidence on the wraith-reality crux's contents; it is a simile.

Themes

Translation and craft (domestication vs. fidelity; slang and register; the invisible translator); prose and design (the deliberate difficulty of Wallace's syntax, the page-length sentence, the wonky-syntax debate); Québec vs. France cultural difference in literary French; the Québécois separatist material (the A.F.R.) and its untranslated resonance; the wraith as figure.

Cross-references

• The critical companion to the celebratory French-release essay «L'Infinie Comédie»: Slate.fr tells the publishing saga and praises the book's readability; Spirale reviews the translation itself and finds Kerline's voice too present. Read together they are the archive's French-reception pair.
• The prose-design debate here (is the wonky syntax deliberate?) is the French-side version of Blumenbach's German craft testimony in Zehn Wahrheiten and the translator craft-notes in Infinite Jest Around the World — all three treat Wallace's syntax and vocabulary as engineered.
• The wraith simile connects to the archive's James Incandenza / wraith material.

Notable passages

French verbatim (guillemets « », accents, œ, and [sic] preserved). English in reader prose is our translation, not a quotation.

• The design argument: "les phrases de Wallace sont retorses, bien sûr, mais il s'agit surtout pour lui de reproduire les hésitations de la pensée qui doute d'elle-même au moment où elle s'énonce."
• Kerline's opposed view: « syntaxe bancale, mal fichue » … « mal finie, volontairement mal faite. »
• The thin-ice figure: "on avance dans la phrase comme si on marchait sur la glace mince d'un lac. Or la glace ne cède jamais."
• The wraith close: "comme le fantôme de James Incandenza qui erre dans le roman sans jamais laisser voir son visage."
• The Erdedy slang: « Et puis il se trouvait lui-même craignos, rapport à la dope, et il avait peur que d'autres ne le considèrent également comme tel, rapport à ça. »