French Honor Three American Translators
By Michael Scharf -- Publishers Weekly, 6/14/2007 7:41:00 AM
Three American translators, Esther Allen, Jeanine Herman and Donald Nicholson-Smith, have been awarded the insignia of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters--an honor that technically confers knighthood--for their work in preserving and spreading French culture.
The translators were honored last night during a ceremony at the French Embassy's French Cultural Services wing, housed at the former Payne Whitney mansion in New York. Also at the ceremony, Dalkey Archive Press senior editor Martin Riker and University of Illinois Chancellor Richard Herman announced the creation of the University's Center for Translation Studies, based at the Urbana-Champaign campus. Dalkey Archive, which is part of the University, will work with the center to produce, publish and promote translation in the U.S.
Allen, who translates from French and Spanish, is the co-director of PEN World Voices and is an assistant professor at Seton Hall University. She has translated more than 20 books, including Marie Darrieussecq's My Phantom Husband and (with Monique Chefdor) Modernities and Other Writings by Blaise Cendrars.
Herman, who got her start translating French theorist Julia Kristeva while studying with Kristeva at Columbia University, serves as translator for Semiotext(e) and Zone books, both distributed by MIT press. Her recent translations include Julien Gracq's Reading Writing and Kristeva's Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis.
Nicholson-Smith, who emigrated from the UK, has translated works by Guy Debord, Antonin Artaud and Guillaume Apollinaire. His translation of Jean Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis's The Language of Psychoanalysis has been in print since 1974.
During his remarks, Dalkey's Riker unveiled the press's recent title As You Were Saying, a book of seven short stories, each co-authored by one French and one American writer, including Phillippe Claudel, Rick Moody and John Edgar Wideman. The project was conceived by French Cultural Services literary attaché Fabrice Rosié, Esther Allen and and Guy Walter, from the arts research center Villa Gillet in Lyon, France.
Copies of As You Were Saying were distributed to the more than 150 guests, as were copies of the recent French Voices issue of the Literary Review, which has an introduction by Allen, who was the issue's advisory editor.
