Anne Serre 

The inspirations behind A Leopard-Skin Hat

My book tells the story of an intense, difficult friendship between the Narrator, so called (he has no other name) and his childhood friend, Fanny. The narrator, as the name suggests, spends his life telling stories. Fanny meanwhile suffers from serious mental problems. I wrote the book after the suicide of my younger sister, at the age of 43, with whom I had an intense bond. I wanted to create a memorial to her, one that was as beautiful as possible. 

How I wrote the book    

My sister died in March, and I see from my notebooks that I finished the book in September. That was because the work had already been done, in a way. All through the preceding years, I had been observing her, talking with her, thinking about her misfortune, and wondering to what extent I was partly responsible for it. The book came pouring out, as if fully formed. While writing it, my only concern, I think, was with the composition, the placing of the various scenes. I didn’t have a sense of writing something very special. It seemed to me that I was working in the same way I did with my other books.   

The book that made me fall in love with reading   

It wasn’t one book but a series: The Famous Five, in the French translations by Claude Voilier. Reading them was one of the great joys of my childhood. Naturally, I identified with Claude-Claudine (the French version of George-Georgina) who behaved like a boy and wanted to be given a boy’s name so that she would be treated like a boy. At 13, I wrote my ‘first novel’, The Clan of Eight, which was obviously a childish pastiche of The Famous Five. I even sent it to the publisher of the French series, who took the trouble to reply, very kindly telling me that it wasn’t good enough to publish, but encouraging me to continue writing.    

The book that made me want to become a writer    

Paludes, by André Gide. I read it when I was 16. It was a book quite unlike any I had read. First of all because of its subject matter: the narrator tells you he’s a writer and that he’s writing Paludes. The book I was reading, in other words… And then there was a tone I had never come across before: wry and self-assured, but at the same time ingenious. There was something brazen and slightly crazy about it that really appealed to me. I remember saying to myself: ‘Ah-ha, so one can also write that way!’ 

The book that changed the way I think about the world    

I don’t remember any great revelation, it was more like a series of doors opening from one book to the next – as if I were locked inside a dark house and, every 20 books or so, a shutter would open a crack, a door come ajar, a window open wide. Each time it was the same experience that I had with Paludes: ‘Ah-ha, so one can also write that way! And think that way!’   

A book originally written in French that I’d recommend to English-language readers  

I’d recommend any of Simenon’s Maigret series. Simenon would have us believe that Maigret is a police inspector, but in my opinion he’s a writer in disguise. He has a very orderly life, observes and listens closely, is extraordinarily sensitive to words, falls into a rather strange state when he’s working (he ‘grows heavy’, Simenon tells us), he’s polite yet not very sociable, has a childhood memory (always the same one) that appears in book after book, and he drinks a bit too much (plum brandy)…   

The International Booker-nominated book everyone should read    

Mac and his Problem by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Sophie Hughes, longlisted in 2020. I love Vila-Matas’s work so much that I even published a novel called Voyage avec Vila-Matas in 2017. I hadn’t met him at the time, but I had read all of his books (beautifully translated from Spanish into French) over a period of about ten years. He’s a writer who loves to play, and I wanted to play with him.  

Mark Hutchinson 

The inspiration and process behind the translation of my longlisted book   

Anne is a close friend of mine, so I read all of her books as they first appear, in French. When I’m translating, I do a quick mot-à-mot of the whole thing, and then work it up from there –the whole book each time, over and over, until I have an accurate English facsimile of the French. Once everything is in place, I do what I call the varnishing – that is, I go back over it as many times as is necessary, sentence by sentence, listening to it as a piece of English, buffing and polishing and gathering up any slack. There are always six or seven sentences in a book which you despair of finding an exact equivalent for; these I usually leave for the end. I forget how long I spent on A Leopard-Skin Hat; about four months, I think. The trickiest part was the description of Fanny’s Ascension in the final chapter. 

The book that made me fall in love with reading  

The first book I can remember reading was The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. The first to make a powerful impression upon me was Peter Rabbit, followed by The Wind in the Willows and the adventures of Tintin; then, a little later, The Pilgrim’s Progress and Treasure Island.   

The book that made me want to become a translator      

No particular book springs to mind, though the Tintin albums may have played a part. The first one I read, which was also the first to appear in English, was King Ottokar’s Sceptre, which makes no mention of the translators, Leslie Lonsdale-Copper and Michael Turner. It was only later that I became aware of the books as translations and started comparing them with the French originals.   

The translator whose work I always look out for     

Among contemporaries, Frank Wynne and Michael Hofmann. And for non-fiction, Arthur Goldhammer. Among past-masters, Ralph Mannheim and Barbara Bray. David McLintock‘s translations of Thomas Bernhard are outstanding, particularly the last book, Extinction.   

The book I’m reading at the moment  

I’m currently rereading Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. (Another translator!) What I like about it: the shapes of Nabokov’s sentences, his ear for syntax.   

A work of fiction originally written in French that I’d recommend to English-language readers   

Marianne Moore’s translations of the The Fables of La Fontaine. It was Auden who came up with the idea, and it was an inspired piece of literary matchmaking on his part. She spent ten years working on them, and it’s hard to imagine them ever being surpassed.   

The International Booker-nominated book everyone should read     

Jonas Eika’s After the Sun, translated by Sherilyn Hellberg.   

Why is translated fiction so appealing to a new generation of English-language readers?     

I imagine they are looking for clues to the Good Life.