Lauren Elkin: ‘Translating De Beauvoir is like a puzzle’

Lauren Elkin, 46, grew up in Long Island, New York, and lived in Paris for more than 20 years before moving to south-east London, where she is now based. She is the acclaimed author of nonfiction books including Flâneuse: Women Walk the City and Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, as well as fiction: her novel Scaffolding, a Parisian tale involving the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, is out in paperback this month (Vintage). Elkin also translates French works – her latest being The Image of Her (Vintage Classics), an adaptation of Simone de Beauvoir’s 1966 novel Les Belles Images, which follows Laurence, a mother and advertising copywriter, who feels adrift in modern life.

How did you feel when you first read Les Belles Images?

I felt chagrined that we haven’t figured things out any better. The novel is so dark. Laurence wants to bring her daughters up differently than she was raised, but doesn’t know what she wants to give them a chance to do. When she’s at her job, she feels guilty for not looking after her children, and when she’s looking after her children, she’s busy daydreaming up slogans for her advertising work. I don’t feel like we’ve resolved that problem today.

Does De Beauvoir offer a solution?

De Beauvoir believed vehemently that the answer to the problem of the second sex is not that women should work instead of taking care of their children, but that we should live in more communal arrangements where everyone does everything. We don’t want to be forcing other women to pick up our laundry or our children so that we can be doing some corporate job. She felt we need to rethink the structure of society.

The book feels so timely. Why do you think that is?

I’ve been calling it a feminist Mad Men – it’s a very 21st-century look at the 20th century. Laurence has a self-awareness that we take for granted now, a critical eye on her period and on the people around her. I think De Beauvoir achieved that cannily by switching back and forth between the first and third person, as though Laurence is living her life and also watching herself live it. That seems such a social media-informed way of going through the world.

Did translating the text pose any challenges?

De Beauvoir is coming from a very literary, very philosophical background, and her work is a very complicated French. So you have to work out the different layers of what she’s saying. It’s like a puzzle, moving those pieces around so that they lay nicely in English.

What are your ideal circumstances for translating?

When I did The Inseparables [also by De Beauvoir] I would translate at night. But lately I have to do it in the daytime. I’ll be too sleepy if I work all day on my own writing and then translate at night, and I’ll end up making mistakes. With this book, the version they gave me to work from was a PDF of a scan of the folio paperback, and so – and I have really bad eyesight – I made some mistakes, where there was an “l” that was actually a “t” or a “t” that was an “l”. That can make all the difference, for instance, if she’s saying “I loved it”, or “I loved him”, or “I loved you”. I couldn’t see! It’s obvious, but definitely translate in the light.

Is it daunting to translate a writer as iconic as De Beauvoir?

Totally. There is this heavy feeling of responsibility. I mean, this book will be assigned in university classrooms.

Your novel Scaffolding deals with psychoanalysis. What interests you about the subject?

I studied Lacan and French theory for my PhD – it was a foundational lens through which we viewed literature. But it also helped me understand what was going on with whatever boyfriend I was having trouble with at the time. Psychoanalysis quickly feels deeply relevant to every aspect of life.

Your work shows a clear interest in feminism and women’s lives. Would you translate a book by a male author?

Totally, if the book was interesting. One of the reviews for Scaffolding that really got under my skin said something like: “It’s a great book, but it’s marred by its enslavement to male minds.” That’s hilarious. I’ve spent 25 years of my writing career working uniquely on women, and I write one book where I talk about Lacan! But that’s the whole point of Scaffolding, that these women are enslaved to these men and trying to find ways out from under them.

How did living in Paris influence your literary life?

I grew up in the States and was not interested at all in American literature. I still am mainly disinterested in American literature. America has always seemed somewhat parochially fixated on its own power and dominance, and just not that interesting formally. It was when I moved to France and started reading Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux and Georges Perec that I woke up to what literature could be. These are the people who really shaped my reading preferences and my writing voice, my sense of what literature I want to make.

Which French book do you think everyone should read?

Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion. It’s the most revolutionary book in the way it gives pride of place to a woman’s obsession with a man, which I think we’re used to seeing as abject or pathetic. But there’s everything in sexual relationships that’s important in the world – power and subjugation and pleasure and desire and politics and gender.

What would you like to translate next?

209 Rue Saint-Maur, Paris Xe by Ruth Zylberman, which is subtitled The Autobiography of a Building. It’s about a building in Paris where Jewish people lived before they were deported to the camps. I want to do it with my friend Natasha Lehrer.

What are you writing next?

I have a nonfiction book coming out next year. It’s called Vocal Break and it’s part memoir of my time in the 90s, training very seriously to be a singer, and part cultural history of women’s singing voices, the voices that opened up my voice and helped me out of musical theatre and into a life as a writer.

Order Scaffolding and The Image of Her by Lauren Elkin from observershop.co.uk to receive a special 20% launch offer. Delivery charges may apply

Photograph by Suki Dhanda