On the Challenges of Translating Humour: An Interview with Neil Smith

All Lit Up: Can you tell us a bit about how you came to translate Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard’s You Crushed It?

Neil Smith: I’m a big fan of Jean-Philippe, as I am of the other authors whose novels I chose to translate. In his books, Jean-Philippe creates characters he calls assholes, but I like his unlikable jerks. I see their flaws, insecurities, and pettiness and think (even though I’m an atheist) that there but for the grace of God go I.

After reading the novel in French, I wrote to a half-dozen publishers in English Canada. As most of them don’t speak French, I translated a few sample chapters and reviews of the book and submitted them with a synopsis. Jay MillAr, the publisher at Book*hug, eventually wrote back to say he was taking a class in stand-up comedy. I figured that was a good sign he was interested.

ALU: The novel deals with the world of stand-up comedy, where timing, tone, and wordplay are crucial. What were the biggest challenges in translating humour to ensure the jokes landed in English?

NS: Jokes and wordplay are some of the toughest things to translate. In a few instances, I had no choice but to move away from the original French to create equivalents that sounded logical and natural in English.

For example, in his one-man show, the comedian Raph Massi complains about stand-ups who slip corny puns into their acts. In the original, he makes a pun on the French words for “dishwasher” (lave-vaisselle) and “armpit washer” (lave-aisselle), two terms that sound alike. Obviously, a literal translation wouldn’t fly in English. To adapt the pun, I first considered using “armadillo” and “armoured dildo,” a naughty play on words that appears in Margaret Atwood’s novel Life Before Man. Finally, however, I opted for something very different from the French. Raph’s pun becomes this: “The present, the past, and the future walk into a bar. It’s tense.” Now, I don’t like to alter meaning in my translations without good reason. Here, though, the pun on verb tenses reflects the very structure of the novel, since You Crushed It features chapters written alternately in the present, past, and future. Plus, the tone of the book is decidedly tense. The English pun, in other words, is meta.

In another performance, Raph tries out a lame bit that mocks baby boomers. He says that although boomers do everything on their iPads, they never learn to use their tablet properly. In the original French, he says that watching them use an iPad is like listening to a little francophone kid trying to speak English. He then imitates the kid butchering English. In my translation, Raph says instead that watching boomers on an iPad is like watching a three-year-old use an Etch A Sketch. He then pretends to be a little kid madly twisting the knobs of the toy. Why the change? First, I like that an iPad somewhat resembles an Etch A Sketch. But, more important, I feel that directly referring to the English language in a translated novel risks pulling readers out of the story.

ALU: The novel is narrated in the future tense and second person, creating an oracle-like effect. How did this perspective influence your translation choices? How do you maintain the same sense of immediacy and inevitability that comes with second person?

NS: The entire novel is narrated by a clairvoyant young woman named Laurie, who, at a house party, tells Raph what will happen if the two of them hook up. The future in the novel is indicated in French mostly by the verb aller (“go”), whereas I opted for the modal verb “will” in English. It’s the difference between “you’re going to do” and “you’ll do,” the latter being more succinct and direct in English.

The English pronoun “you” is cannibalistic, having devoured the archaic words “thou,” “thee,” and “ye” over the years. In French, however, there are still four words to express “you” (tu, te, toi, vous) depending on whether the pronoun is a subject, a regular object, a prepositional object, or a plural. This means that “you” appears in my translation far more than tu does in the French. “You” is so prevalent that I wanted to add it to the novel’s title, You Crushed It, even though it isn’t in the French title, Haute démolition (literally “high demolition”).

When someone is talking to you about yourself and saying “you” over and over, it sounds as though they have secret access to your very being, to your soul. Think back to an argument when someone said to you, “The problem with you is that you’re selfish and narcissistic and you’re cruel.” It sounds true even when you vehemently disagree. That’s the effect I wanted with Laurie’s narration. She knows things that Raph can’t deny. She’s the oracle you speak of.

ALU: In general, as a translator, do you see your role as staying as close as possible to the original text, or do you allow room for creative interpretation to ensure the book resonates with English readers?

NS: My main goal is to sound as English as possible. Sometimes, I can stick closely to the French and still sound English; in other cases, I drift away from the original. In You Crushed It, I tended to anglicize cultural references. As you know, Quebec has a vibrant cultural scene, but its TV stars, comedians, movies, and pop songs, despite being hugely popular here, are far less known in what we refer to as “the rest of Canada.”

When Raph is doing a table read of the first draft of his one-man show, a script editor tells him in the original French that no one expects Raph to “shit out Louis-José Houde on the corner of the table.” Houde, who’s
one of Quebec’s most famous stand-ups, is little known among anglos. In English, I say instead that no one expects Raph to pull John Mulaney out of his ass.

In another scene, a reference to the slim, handsome, dark-haired Québécois actor Éric Bruneau becomes a reference instead to the British movie star Robert Pattinson. A reference to a Québécois comedian who’s lost a lot of weight becomes a reference to the American comedian Jonah Hill, who’s thinner nowadays than he used to be.

At one point, Raph wonders whether people truly like him and says he feels like the character in Le dîner des cons, a French film in which Parisian businessmen pretend to befriend a dim-witted fellow and end up humiliating him. In my English translation, the reference becomes the film Carrie about the timid American high school student pranked at her prom.

Since the original French often touches directly on anglophone culture (“Life Is a Highway,” Ashton Kutcher, Joe Rogan, Home Alone), I felt I had some leeway to adapt the francophone references to the anglophone world.

ALU: Could you walk us through your process? Do you work closely with the original author, or do you prefer to immerse yourself in the text independently before collaborating or asking for clarification? What about in the case of You Crushed It?

NS: I usually translate the whole book before I meet with the author to ask my questions. Truthfully, these meetings are nerve-racking because I never know whether I’ll be on the same page as the author. You hear
horror stories about clashes between translators and writers. So far, I’ve translated three novels into English, each by writers I deeply admire, and, luckily, all three authors have been a dream to work with.

The first novel I translated, The Goddess of Fireflies, is set in the nineties in Chicoutimi. Although its author, Geneviève Pettersen, isn’t bilingual, she did clarify to me the meaning of all the regional slang she used in her book. I’m now translating a heartbreaking novel by Jean-Christophe Réhel, which is called All Kidding Aside and which will be out this summer. So far, our interaction has been smooth sailing.

As for Jean-Philippe, I met with him in a restaurant and, over lunch, asked him my questions and proposed solutions to the tricky problems I encountered in his book. He was fully open to my suggestions. He’s a multitalented guy: writer, actor, director, TV host. Writers are crazy and actors even crazier, so it was with some trepidation that I met with him, but he turned out to be a real sweetheart.

I’m also a fiction writer and have written three books, all of which have been published in several languages. In French, they were co-translated by Paul Gagnon and the late Lori Saint-Martin, with whom I forged a close relationship. I like to give my translators free rein to create a work of art that represents them as much as it does me, the author.

ALU: Lastly, what’s your favourite word or phrase in another language that has no perfect English equivalent? (And what does it mean?)

NS: One of my favourite foreign words appears in You Crushed It, although it’s German rather than French: schadenfreude. It’s of course the pleasure you might feel from someone else’s misfortune. When the comedy career of Raph’s best friend Sam hits the skids, Raph revels in the schadenfreude. Interestingly, the original French text doesn’t use the German word, saying instead that Raph takes “sick pleasure” in hearing about Sam’s troubles.

You didn’t ask this question, but my favourite word in French is libellule, which means “dragonfly.” The four Ls in libellule remind me of the four wings that carry that beautiful creature through the air.

* * *

NEIL SMITH is a writer and translator from Montreal. He has won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the Quebec Writers’ Federation First Book Prize. He has also been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation, the Sunburst Award, the Journey Prize, the Prix des libraires du Québec, and the Canadian Library Association Young Adult Book Award. His fiction has been translated into eight languages.