I’ll resist the temptation to squeeze in a reference to doors opening and closing here.
No sooner did I send off my translation of The Adventures of Radisson II to Baraka Books, than I signed a contract with Ekstasis to translate Lori Saint-Martin’s wonderful Les portes closes. The novel is a series of alternating monologues in which both halves of a couple examine close to 35 years of marriage. I reviewed it for ambos some time ago. Back then, I said:
There is a great deal to be fond of in Les portes closes: genuinely profound, well thought-out questions about relationships, characters that stay with us for a long time after we put down the book… In a word, it is impressive. It reminds me of a well-tended garden: considered, but not pretentious. It’s clear that a great deal of thought went into every word choice and yet the writing never feels overdone or self-conscious, just elegant and refined. It’s enough to make you want to call it Saint-Martin’s very own masterpiece.
And a masterpiece it is. It’s easily going to be the best book I have translated so far. Although its perfect word choices do make it somewhat terrifying to translate. We’ll see how I get on. But in the meantime I can’t wait to get started.
(If you’re curious, you can read a few extracts I translated on ambos.)
