ALU Summer Book Club: Intro to The Rage Letters

In the Montreal of The Rage Letters, a rotating cast of characters find lovers, contend with family, grind through the work day (and sometimes, night), and suffer micro (and sometimes, macro) aggressions at the hands of white Montrealers. The connections between these glimpses of queer, trans, and Black lives become more apparent as you read, turning fragmented stories and vignettes into a vibrant sense of community. Lose yourself in this engrossing read by filmmaker and writer Valérie Bah, sumptuously translated by Kama La Mackerel.

Buy your own copy here on All Lit Up for 15% off with the code INTHECLUB2024 (or find a copy from your local indie using our Shop Local finder).

Read on for our interview with Metonymy Press co-publishers Oliver and Ashley, and translator Kama La Mackerel.

All Lit Up: How did The Rage Letters first come to Metonymy Press? Was it a book you’d happened to read in its original French, or had you heard about it through literary connections? 

Metonymy Press: A couple years ago we (Oliver and Ashley, co-publishers) started making acquisitions decisions by committee, alongside three Metonymy authors and frequent collaborators Kama La Mackerel, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, and H Felix Chau Bradley. It was around then that we also decided it was about time we publish a translation, given we’re in Montreal! We knew Kama read a lot of Quebec fiction so we asked them to keep an eye out for a book that could be a good fit. I remember quite clearly receiving their text when they encountered Val’s book. They were like, I have found the book for Metonymy. It’s like nothing I’ve ever read before and it’s perfect. It was a compelling pitch, and once we had a chance to read Les enragé.e.s, we were also really taken with the text. It turns out Val had Metonymy in mind as a publisher, so everything came together really nicely.

All Lit Up: Kama La Mackerel has provided such a rich translation of Valérie Bah’s work: what does working with a writer-as-translator add to the process?

Metonymy Press: Well, being that this is our first translation, we don’t really have a point of comparison. But Kama and Metonymy have a longstanding and strong working relationship, so that set us up for success. I think what was beautiful about the experience was how communicative Kama is about their process — we learned a lot about their approach and philosophy when it comes to translation, which is something they touch on in their translator’s note at the end of The Rage Letters. But the trajectory was particular, not just in terms of Kama being a writer-translator, but also because it was Kama’s first time translating from French to English (they usually work in the other direction), and also because Val is bilingual. In the end, the author and translator worked closely on the translation, with editorial input from us as well as other editors, and it ended up being very hands-on and collaborative. We are grateful for all the thoughtful conversations, interventions, and care that everyone brought to the project.

All Lit Up: What were the unique challenges or quirks in translating this text?

Kama La Mackerel: I believe every translation project carries with it the challenge of capturing and transposing the author’s narrative voice and overall writing aesthetic. In the case of Bah’s work, the quirks in their use of language — their deadpan humour, their use of sharp rhythm and short sentences, just to name a few — were all a joy to capture and render into English. Working so closely in, with, within their unique and distinctive voice is what made this process so deeply enjoyable for me as a translator. The bigger challenges posed themselves when working with Bah’s use of French. The particularity of this literary text is that it delves into the power dynamics inherent to the French language and uses multiple narrative techniques to both mock and undo these power dynamics. This is achieved very skillfully in French. However, when it came the time for me to translate this linguistic (and political) scaffolding into English, I found it very challenging, because the English language does not carry the same history, the same power dynamics and the same forms of literary resistance as the French language.

All Lit Up: How does translating a book differ when the originating writer also speaks the language of translation? Did you confer with Valérie through the course of the translation?

Kama La Mackerel: It’s an absolute privilege to be able to translate the work of a writer who is actually familiar with the language into which we are translating. It’s an experience very few translators ever have in their careers. And what is even more rare is to have an author work in close proximity with a translator, with intentional forms of intimacy in what becomes an act of co-creation. In the case of The Rage Letters, I was blessed to work very closely with Valérie, where we got to confer and reflect on every smallest intention of the text. For me, this work was collaborative (along with feedback from Val’s co-conspirator Esi Callender, and the co-editors at Metonymy Press) which made this translation a co-creation. So even if I am credited as the translator of this book, I feel that Valérie and I re-wrote it together.

All Lit Up: This book is richly multilingual and features a multiplicity of perspectives; it’s very evocative of living in a bilingual (really, multilingual as well) city with lots of different populations. What are the editing challenges in working on a multi-POV text (versus, say, a singular character in a novel)?

Metonymy Press: We had conversations at a number of stages during the process about language and characters. Some characters’ speech and internal narrative, for example, skewed towards a more anglicized version of franglais, or idioms and syntax that signaled a Haitian Montreal multilingual context — these characters would have lost depth without their linguistic multiplicity. Other characters used more colonial French, and so their translation reflected this affectation. The POV of yet others was translated through as close an approximation in English as the translation could achieve, which often leaned towards something a little further from the original text, but truer to its voice. As mentioned, Kama carefully describes their process of wrestling with the text and implementing these decisions in their note in the back matter. As editors, we had to talk through and follow the author’s and translator’s leads on the intention behind each voice, and make suggestions accordingly. 

It was a tricky process, and the further we got into it, the more we realized as publishers and editors that we had to learn! Although what we grappled with in The Rage Letters was unique to this text, the broader experience of a manuscript unfurling a slew of things (techniques, approaches, history) for us to learn was very familiar.

All Lit Up: The painting on the cover, with its vivid red background, is stunning, and very different from its original cover. How did you arrive at this cover choice?

Metonymy Press: Val and CP Simonise had collaborated before in the context of their respective film work. Val really liked the rich colours in CP’s paintings and they wanted to try something new, in part because the conventions for an English- vs French-language cover differ, and also because it was an opportunity to collaborate with someone else on this new iteration of the work. The conversations happened largely between the two of them, in consultation with us and Kama. CP came up with a few drafts based on visual and sonic moodboards from Val, and we collectively chose which one to move forward with — in large part, from our end, to prioritize image and text interaction. We like to give our authors a lot of leeway when it comes to cover choices. We were really taken with what they came up with, and after a few back-and-forths about font, we were super happy with how it turned out.

All Lit Up: What can readers look especially forward to in The Rage Letters? What is your favourite thing about it?

Metonymy Press: It’s really funny! Val’s style of delivering the interconnected narrative with deadpan humour landed well for us as readers. Many people who are contending with systemic bullshit — anti-Black racism, queerphobia, the weight of late-stage capitalism, etc. — will relate to both the mundane and painful experiences these characters face, but also the ways they bite back (sometimes literally **spoiler alert**). We also love how very Montreal the book is, but not the typical depiction one has had access to in contemporary literature before now, in French or English. The characters are all quite different from each other, but a through-line is a particular unapologetic attitude alongside a clarity of vision and tone. And, if you like a reveal at the end as to how seemingly disparate characters are actually part of a web, then this book is also for you.

* * *

Thanks to Ashley, Oliver, and Kama for answering our questions! Get The Rage Letters here on All Lit Up for 15% off with the code INTHECLUB2024, all summer long.

And keep on top of all summer book club happenings here.