An interview with Vincent Delecroix and Helen Stevenson, author and translator of Small Boat

Vincent Delecroix 

The inspirations behind Small Boat    

The book is based on a real event that happened in November 2021, when a small boat sunk in the Channel with 29 migrants on board. Despite numerous calls for help during almost all the night, the French navy never sent any help, although it clearly received the calls and even promised to rescue the passengers. 27 died, two women and a child among them. Following this disaster, seven military agents from the operational centre for survey and rescue have been charged for failure to assist persons in danger.  

At the beginning of investigations, audio recordings of the communications between migrants and the young operator in charge at the centre were made public. Their content is terrible. The young woman in charge shows no compassion at all, makes appalling jokes, lies and finally expresses simple irritation, answering roughly and sarcastically to the desperate calls of the shipwrecked. This was the real starting point of my novel, a fiction that tries to imagine how someone with no evil in her, who is just anybody, can act and talk in such an inhuman manner and become a striking example of the so-called ‘banality of evil’, as Hannah Arendt put it. 

But the purpose was neither to formulate a moral judgement nor to just express loud and easy indignation. On the contrary, it was to suspend all moral judgement, and, by writing an imaginary character, to simply try to penetrate a consciousness that could belong to anyone.  

It’s an exploration of the mind. So, the point of view of the writing is strictly hers, except for a short central part that describes the wreckage as dispassionately as possible.  

What does it mean to be a spectator of the wreckage, as we all are? What does it mean to stand at this point, on the shore? How can anyone slip from a common and ordinary behaviour to a calm inhuman position? These were the main questions I wanted to raise, faced with a brutal and dreadful situation. 

How I wrote Small Boat  

I wanted it to be brief. I wrote very quickly, continuously, as I wanted to follow the internal flow of consciousness of the main character’s mind, with their contradictory thoughts and feelings, images and hallucinations, self-justifications, griefs, remembered fragments of her life, hope and fear, rage, confusion and subjective and partial description of the facts. I finished it in three weeks, in some kind of hallucinated state of mind. 

The writing was defined by two negative conditions. First, no prior investigation, just the public facts related in the newspapers and the transcription of the audio recordings: these were the only matters from which I authorised myself to imagine and construct a corresponding character. Second, no pathos, no tears, no shouting or mourning. 

What caused me many difficulties was the short central part of the novel: the description of the wreckage itself. I wanted the scene to be described at the water’s edge, to get across what it is to take several long hours to die in the middle of night, abandoned by everyone, to drown slowly in the cold water. 

On the other hand, I found it easy to penetrate more and more the operator’s mind. This was the most troubling experience, as I progressively realised that I could really be her – and act and speak like she did. At the end of the writing, I had the striking feeling that I had really crossed a small and desperate territory of evil. I was sure that readers would not be able to stay still – this was the purpose – and would experience a deep discomfort, maybe even a moral shock.  

Helen Stevenson 

The inspiration and process behind my translation of Small Boat  

I read reviews of Naufrage in the French press and was curious. Once I’d read the book I rang the French publisher, established that the English language rights were available, and translated some sample pages to present to publishers in the UK. I was surprised that it had been overlooked. A number of publishers said no, when they replied at all, but Pete Ayrton [of Small Axes] said ‘yes, let’s do it’. We’re all so accustomed to reading news pieces about the migrant crossings, we have a way of reading them without really reading. Here was a fictional text that forced the reader to slow down. It raises painful questions about responsibility, about looking away. I remembered reading the news coverage, and seeing a documentary called The Crossing, in which a survivor of the sinking talked about that night – I rewatched it while I was translating. I was really struck by a phrase I read in This Tilting World by Colette Fellous – that the word translate literally means to ferry across.    

The book that made me fall in love with reading  

My favourite book as a child was When Marnie Was There by Joan G. Robinson, about loneliness and friendship. A girl goes to stay in East Anglia to recover from an illness. Alone under a huge sky, over the long weeks of summer, she is befriended by a ghost girl. I loved the way I could experience and recognise both loneliness and its remedy through the process of reading and make-believe.  

The book that made me want to become a translator 

I remember translating D.H. Lawrence in a class at university – a rare writer, in my experience at the time, from the north of England, where I came from. So the formative experience was more the other way around, discovering that a piece of poetic writing in English could be unravelled and made new in another language. It felt like a magic power I wanted to have, to be able to do that. D.H. Lawrence is still my guilty pleasure.  

The translator whose work I always look out for  

For his brilliance, I admire Mark Hutchinson, who has made such wonderful translations of the work of Anne Serre. For her positive example, Mary Hobson, who learned Russian in her sixties so that she could translate Tolstoy and Pushkin!