Disoriental Wins Albertine Prize 2019

The 2019 Albertine Prize, a reader’s choice award for best French fiction in English, has just been awarded to author Négar Djavadi and translator Tina Kover for Disoriental (Europa Editions)!

The laureates received their award during a ceremony at Albertine on June 5, 2019 in the presence of co-chairs, translator and author Lydia Davis and TV personality and literary critic François Busnel. The ceremony was followed by a discussion with Négar Djavadi, Tina Kover and François Busnel, which you can stream anytime on Livestream.

Disoriental, Négar Djavadi’s brilliant début novel, is a kaleidoscopic tale intertwining family narratives, personal recollections and key moments of Iranian history, politics, and culture. Gracefully blending suspenseful family sagas into rich and complex coming of age stories, the book conveys a powerful reflection on the challenges that immigrants face when assimilating into a foreign culture. Order it online at Albertine.com or find it at the store.

The winning titles of Albertine’s inaugural Prix Jeunesse, a reader’s choice award for Francophone youth literature, were also announced on June 5. Click here to discover the winning books.

Négar Djavadi was born in Iran in 1969 to a family of intellectuals opposed to the regimes both of the Shah, then of Khomeini. She arrived in France at the age of eleven, having crossed the mountains of Kurdistan on horseback with her mother and sister. Djavadi is a screenwriter and lives in Paris.

Tina Kover has been a literary translator for over a decade, translating works of both classic and modern literature including Alexandre Dumas’s Georges, the Goncourt brothers’ Manette Salomon, and Mahir Guven’s Goncourt Prize-winning Older Brother. She studied French at the University of Denver and the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and later worked in Prague teaching English as a foreign language. Her translation of Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2018 and the PEN Translation Prize in 2019.

Our Online Book Catalog is Back!

Dear friends,

We’re thrilled to announce that you can now browse our catalog and order books through our website again!

On the new part of our site, where everything is en français, you can either reserve books for pick-up at Albertine or ship* them to your home. Once your reservation or order is sent to us, a bookseller will personally reach out to you to confirm stock, and in the case of orders to be shipped, to process payment.

Please note that a minimum order of $50** is required for shipping. This minimum is waived for Albertine Members.

If our website indicates that the book you want is out of stock, please don’t hesitate to give us a call (212-650-0070), and we’ll make every effort to restock the book for you.

With thousands of titles available in French, and many in English, we’re excited to offer an expansive selection of books that exemplify the diversity and vibrance of classic and contemporary French literature.

Happy reading!
The Albertine Team

*Applies to the continental United States.
**Shipping costs are assumed by the customer. 

An Interview with Frank Wynne, Albertine Prize-Nominated Translator

An interview with Frank Wynne, translator of Vernon Subutex 1 (FSG / Librairie Générale Française) by Virginie Despentes and Animalia (Grove Press) / Règne animal (Gallimard) by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo,  nominated for the Albertine Prize, an annual reader’s choice award that recognizes American readers’ favorite work of contemporary Francophone fiction that has been translated into English and published in the US within the preceding calendar year. Learn more at albertine.com/vote.

Why did you choose to translate these two books?

Not all translators get to pick and choose their work – unless they have a full-time job on the side.  I am fortunate enough to be offered more work than I can take on these days, so I get to choose the titles I translate. I read Règne Animal when it was first published, and before realizing that the rights had been acquired. When I heard rights had been bought by Fitzcarraldo, I got in touch with the English editor, Jacques Testard  (something I rarely do) to tell him how much I loved the book and to hint that I might like to translate it, and was devastated that he was already talking to another translator. Luckily (for me, and in a very different sense for her), the other translator could not take on the book because she was pregnant, so Jacques came back to me. I was thrilled, because the rich, dense, lyrical prose was so exhilarating yet so visceral that I very much wanted to do it. 

When it was first suggested I might translate Vernon Subutex, I said I’d cut my right arm off to be able to do it. No novel could be more different to Animalia and its bucolic tragedy. Vernon is resolutely urban, a dazzling, razor-sharp satire of contemporary French (and world) society. I was drawn to it because it is slangy, staccato, polyphonic – a fresco of a world in crisis, struggling, real…

What did you absolutely want to keep and convey in these translations? Was there any specific segment you struggled with, things you were not able to keep in English?

All translations are different, and what one strives to preserve is different. With Animalia, there is a sense of history, a specificity of language, a panorama that sweeps through a century of human (and animal) suffering. Preserving the tone and register, the subtle nuances of formal and demotic was a real challenge. Never has the fact that I was raised in rural Ireland, among small tenant farmers, and suffocated by Catholicism been more of an asset while working on a translation. With Vernon Subutex, the most important thing to preserve was the energy – capturing Virginie Despentes’ prose is like catching fireflies in a jam jar – infinitely difficult but dazzling. Each chapter shifts in tone and register to reflect the character who is the focus of the scene, this requires a deep-rooted sense of kinship, and kinship with each character (and while some of  Despentes’ characters are repellent, she never loses her empathy and compassion for them). Vernon Subutex is a broad-brush fresco, but one that is most powerful inn its details, of frailty, of suffering, of dreams gone awry, of lives that failed to live up to expectation. But it is also hopeful, joyous, filled with a belief in the power of music and of love. The fact that Virginie and I are about the same age, and, over the decades shared the same musical tastes and maybe the same vices made this a joy to translate

What did you find the most challenging in translating these books?

In Animalia, the challenge was to preserve the sense of the numinous that pervades Jean-Baptiste’s exultant sense of nature, the luminous scenes of Jérôme in the graveyard,  contrast with the fragility of humanity, disease and death – all of which he depicts with bright flashes of humor – and, in opposition to nature, the brute, hulking mechanical force of modernity that crushes animal and human alike, grinds the body and the soul to barren pragmatism and materialism.  With Vernon Subutex, the challenge was to replicate the polyphony of voices, the idioms, the vernacular, the slang, the verlan, the dozens of rich individuals who make up a microcosm of Paris, of France, of the world.

How was the editing process with the authors and publishers?

No translator works alone, the contribution of publishers, line editors, and copy editors is crucial to the process of revision – and it is in revision that translations take on their final form, it is here that they are honed and tested. My editors on both books (Jacques Testard and Peter Blackstock for Animalia, Christopher Maclehose and Robina Pelham-Burn on Vernon Subutex) are people whose eyes and ears I trust, who make my work as good as it can be. With authors, relationships vary – I am always in touch with authors to ask questions, to look for clarifications, but rarely to settle on the final English form of the text. The relationship between author and translator needs to be one of trust; the author needs to feel that the translator “gets it”, and is doing everything in her/his power to recreate not only sense, but cadence, rhythm, humor, register… since no story worth telling should be reduced to a flat approximation.

Do you find important that the translator takes liberties with the text while translating a book? If yes, what kind of liberties?

All translation is an act of interpretation, and therefore requires the translator not merely to transcribe, but to perform – as an actor does a role, or a musician does a score. Each translator’s version of a text would necessarily be different, since what each of us “hears” in the text will depend on so many factors. There are times when individual words, images or similes cannot be directed translated because the denotation or connotation would be different, or because the resonance of the image/idiom would be lost. At such times, a translator has to find a way around, a form of phrasing that generates a similar emotion or reaction in the reader of the English text. There are no hard and fast rules for this – on the one hand, a translation is a whole, a single piece that must hang together; on the other, each word, each nuance, each beat if a phrase must be individually tuned so that the sentences, the paragraphs, the chapters and the whole do justice to the original. 

An Interview with Gretchen Schmid, Albertine-Prize Nominated Translator

An interview with Gretchen Schmid, translator of Kannjawou (Schaffner Press / Actes Sud) by Lyonnel Trouillot, nominated for the Albertine Prize, an annual reader’s choice award that recognizes American readers’ favorite work of contemporary Francophone fiction that has been translated into English and published in the US within the preceding calendar year. Learn more at albertine.com/vote.

Why did you choose to translate Kannjawou? 

I discovered Kannjawou during my year working at the French Publishers’ Agency, which is the New York office of the BIEF. My colleague Alice Tassel had fallen in love with beauty and power of the book and was trying to find the perfect American publisher for it. I suggested that she send it to Tim Schaffner of Schaffner Press, whom I’d met at BEA in Chicago and who I knew had an interest in translated and international literature. Tim was intrigued and asked for an English sample, so I translated a few pages for him and volunteered to translate the rest if he decided to buy it. Luckily, he did! I feel incredibly fortunate to have had the chance to translate Trouillot, who’s one of Haiti’s leading writers. 

What did you absolutely want to keep and convey in your translation? 

Trouillot is also a poet, and he writes with a distinctive lilting rhythm that is incredibly powerful and gorgeous. Translating this lyricism into English was both the most challenging part of translating this book for me and the most important. I did my best—I hope I succeeded! 

Was there any specific segment you struggled with, things you were not able to keep in English? 

One of the main characters, who’s the sort of doyenne of the Port-au-Prince neighborhood in which the book takes place, is called “Man Jeanne” in the original. I generally don’t change names in my translations, but of course “Man” in English connotes a man, not a wise old woman, and I thought it would be confusing to readers to leave it as is. I consulted Linda Coverdale’s excellent translation of an earlier novel of Trouillot’s, Children of Heroes, and discovered that she had chosen to use “Mam” when faced with the same problem. I followed her lead and did the same.

What did you find the most challenging in translating this book?

See my answer above about what I wanted to keep and convey. 

How was the editing process with the author and publisher? 

Pretty light-handed, actually! I asked the author a few questions about his intentions in certain passages, and Tim queried some passages  and words that didn’t seem quite right to him in my first draft, but otherwise I think I got off easy with the editing process. 

Do you find important that the translator takes liberties with the text while translating a book? If yes, what kind of liberties? 

Absolutely. I don’t think translated texts should be awkward or difficult to read in any way, unless of course that was the intention of the original text; making it sound natural in the translated version is very important to me. For example, I often split long French sentences into two, or replace commas with em-dashes or semicolons, to avoid run-ons sentences in English.

An Interview with Teresa Fagan, Albertine Prize-Nominated Translator

An interview with Teresa Fagan, translator of Hold Fast Your Crown (Other Press) / Tiens ferme ta couronne (Gallimard) by Yannick Haenel, nominated for the Albertine Prize, an annual reader’s choice award that recognizes American readers’ favorite work of contemporary Francophone fiction that has been translated into English and published in the US within the preceding calendar year. Learn more at albertine.com/vote.

Why did you choose to translate Hold Fast Your Crown?

I was immediately struck by the energy of the writing, the picaresque nature of the story. It reminded me very much of the comic novels of Saul Bellow, one of my favorite writers. And I knew that it would be a challenge to translate, but an extremely fun challenge! 

What did you absolutely want to keep and convey in your translation?

The author’s voice, and the protagonist’s nature. I wanted to make the characters live in English as vividly as they do in the original French. 

Was there any specific segment you struggled with, things you were not able to keep in English?

Not that I recall!!

What did you find the most challenging in translating this book?

Bringing the real-life figures – Michael Cimino, Isabelle Huppert – to life. One has a bit of wiggle room in fleshing out a fictional character, but to translate the author’s treatment of actual people was daunting. I enjoyed re-watching Heaven’s Gate (and Apocalypse Now), which helped me immensely to internalize Cimino’s and Huppert’s work.

How was the editing process with the author and publisher?

In general, and if possible, I try always to meet the authors of the works I translate. If I’ve met them, get to know them a bit, then I’m better able to “hear” them as I translate their work. I had the very great pleasure of spending an evening with Yannick Haenel and his family, and going to the Aux Petits Oignons café, a favorite haunt of the novel’s hero. Mr. Haenel was very helpful; he answered my questions and weighed in on the translation of the title – actually, one of the more challenging aspects of the project. 

Do you find important that the translator takes liberties with the text while translating a book? If yes, what kind of liberties?

My background is in translating academic monographs and non-fiction, with which there is much less room for taking liberties with the text. But in translating fiction, one must take some liberties in order to capture the essence of the work and convey it to a new, English-language audience. The goal is to allow readers to lose themselves in the story, to believe it, which sometimes means reworking text that might be confusing or lack meaning for them. 

Open Every Day in December

Dear Friends,

Please note that in order to facilitate your holiday shopping, we will be open 7 days a week, 10am-6pm from December 1 through December 24.

We’ll be open afternoons only, 2pm-6pm, from December 26 til December 31 included. We will be closed on December 25 and January 1 all day.

Happy Holidays,
Sandrine, Miriam, Adam, and Jessica

Albertine is closed this Tuesday, February 2, 2021

Due to inclement weather conditions, Albertine will be closed all day on Tuesday, February 2, 2021.
We apologize for any inconvenience. Please stay safe and warm.

Happy readings!

Remembering Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Like everyone in the culturally inclined world, we here at Albertine have been marked by the passing of Lawrence Ferlinghetti with both sadness for the loss of a truly exceptional figure and gratitude for his astonishing long life and body of work. It seems fitting that we should pay our respects in words; but in all honesty, what can we say about the founder of City Lights Books, the publisher of Howl, the flamekeeper of the Beats, and the poet and activist who in his own words set out to create “international dissident ferment” that has not already been discussed? His aura was as boundless as the sky, encompassing generations of artists, intellectuals, radicals, and wanderers. To try to condense it into a paragraph or two seems not only daunting but also simply futile.

So perhaps let’s narrow it down to his direct influence on us at the store. As purveyors of French literature, we are deeply indebted to Mr. Ferlinghetti; and if you read books in languages other than your own, you are as well–even if you are not aware of it. In addition to publishing radical works of American poetry and almost single-handedly ushering in the Beat Generation authors, Mr. Ferlinghetti also published a small galaxy of avant-garde authors from all over the world at a time when doing so was not only unusual but also a highly political act. In the late Fifties, his releasing of works by Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille was provocative to say the least, with the latter’s lyrically pornographic Story of the Eye becoming an iconic book of the American intellectual counterculture for decades to come. He would go on to publish works by authors ranging from Philippe Soupault to Henri Michaux to Laure Peignot to Jean-Jacques Schuhl, with the diversity and fearlessness of his list expanding in direct proportion to the success of his bookstore.

But his contributions to the French language go deeper than this. Mr. Ferlinghetti’s first language was French, and he spent part of his turbulent early childhood in Strasbourg. In addition to advocating for French authors by publishing them, he was also a translator of exceptional skill, with his translation of Paroles by Jacques Prévert–among the most significant collections of 20th century French poetry–maintaining its definitive status even sixty odd years after its publication. Not bad for a humble poet and bookseller.

I could go on and on with other aspects of this remarkable human being, but will close by stressing the fact that Mr. Ferlinghetti–like all truly great people–spent his life trying to convince us to reject the artificial boundaries and borders that are imposed on us by historical, social, and economic forces. He did so simply and elegantly: by championing and promoting the speech and words of others, even if doing so sent him to prison from time to time. The world was graced with his presence for over one hundred years. Let’s celebrate and honor this!

Remembering Philippe Jaccottet

The poet, translator, essayist, and literary critic Philippe Jaccottet died on February 24 at 95 years old.

Philippe Jaccottet was not French, but Swiss–even though he spent most of his life in a village in the South of France, where he moved in 1953 at age 28 following his marriage to painter Anne-Marie Haesler. Not French, but Swiss…this has meaning. His education and culture placed him at a crossroads of influences that, from the beginning, were not limited to French literature; he was not monolingual, but exposed to other languages and literary traditions–namely, those of Germany and Italy. Such was the beginning of his lifelong vocation as a translator and a poet, with mentorial and guiding figures such as Hölderlin and Rilke; or on the Italian side, Ungaretti and Montale, among others.

Philippe Jaccottet also belongs to the generation of European poets who were twenty years old when World War II ended. Haunted by this war’s destruction and death, and confronted with the moral and political bankruptcy that it revealed at the beating heart of European civilization, it was necessary to reinvent an uncompromising poetic speech. Jaccottet did so in his own way with a twofold purpose: to mean what he wrote, staying faithful to a both fragile and unmistakable intimate experience, and to repair our relationship with the world, avoiding nihilism by trusting in signs that still bore witness to a way to live happily within it–far from the new deliriums of consumerist society.

Today, at the time of his death, it is striking to note the degree to which his poetry, which makes use of prose as much as free verse, is in line with the ecological concerns he formulated like many others in the 1960s; and which, in his case, led him to a simple way of life tied as closely as possible to nature and its rhythms–a way of life that was faithful to what was for him the life force of the millennial poetic experience shared in diverse degrees by all the world’s cultures.

Hervé Ferrage

Three books by Philippe Jaccottet will be published this month: La Clarté Notre-Dame (Gallimard), Le dernier Livre de Madrigaux (Gallimard), Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet (Bruit du Temps/La Dogana).

Credit image: Isolde Ohlbaum

At Night All Blood is Black Wins the 2021 International Booker Prize!

On June 3, French-Senegalese writer David Diop became the first francophone writer to be awarded the International Booker Prize, winning for his novel At Night All Blood is Black (ed. FSG, trans. by Anna Moschovakis).

In the words of Booker judges chair Lucy Hughes-Hallett, “This story of warfare and love and madness has a terrifying power. […] We judges agreed that its incantatory prose and dark, brilliant vision had jangled our emotions and blown our minds. That it had cast a spell on us.”

Prior to this spectacular win, At Night all the Blood is Black was also the laureate of France’s Prix Goncourt des Lycéens and the Swiss Prix Ahmadou Kourouma, as well as the Strega European Prize in Italy. We even selected it as a staff pick a few weeks ago–click here to see why we loved it!

In France, the novel is published under the title Frère d’âme by Editions du Seuil.

Learn more about At Night All Blood is Black and David Diop from France Culture here and here, and from the New York Times here and here.

Seeking a Bookseller

Albertine is a bookstore located within the Cultural Services of the French Embassy. Its goal is to promote French literature and as well as inter-cultural dialogue between the United States and France.

Albertine is in need of a Bookseller. The Bookseller would enter into a local contract with the French Embassy. The Bookseller will report to the Director of the bookshop and will work on weekends and holidays.

Primary Responsibilities

Required Skills

Special Requirements

Practical Details

Candidate must be a United States resident and authorized to work in the United States (in possession of a green card, American citizenship). Only applicants meeting these requirements will be considered.

This is a year-long, renewable contract position. Full time: 40 hours/week.

Application Materials

Please send your application (CV and cover letter) by Sunday, August 8 to sandrine@albertine.com