— How to Catch An Eel

Anne Garréta has published seven books in French, only three of which have been translated into English, each by Emma Ramadan – Sphinx, Not One Day, and In Concrete – and published by Deep Vellum in 2015, 2018, and 2021 respectively. Garréta’s writing is radically about the individual, suggested by way of experimental, constrained writing intrinsic to the French language. Her books explore themes of desire, intimacy, and love in all its shapes and sizes through the lenses of queerness and gender. On a prose level, Garréta continuously blurs the lines of genre, scene, form, grammar, literary convention, and linguistic usage. In short, reading Garréta forces the reader to reconsider everything they assume a book can and should be. 

Her first novel to appear in English translation, Sphinx, evaluates the way we associate and assume gender, starting with grammar. Garréta offers a genderless love story between an unnamed narrator and the object of their desire, A****. It’s a difficult challenge to conceive of a world without a gender binary when speaking a language which bifurcates every single noun by gender, which French does grammatically, but the novel forces us to consider the imagined frames through which we see relationships. Sphinx creates not so much a world that is separate from gender, but instead a world where language holds a different relationship to gender than is implied by French grammar. 

Published in English translation in 2021, In Concrete leans into ideas about communication – both its perceived limits and its boundless expanse. Garréta again hyper-focuses on the expectations we already have when we pick up a book, and how we immediately transpose them onto a text, limiting language’s potential. Anne Garréta’s In Concrete is about a pair of siblings, Poulette and her older sister, our twelve-year-old narrator. Alongside their swarm of eccentric family members, the sisters end up engulfed in almost charming chaos over a concrete mixer. Through a mirage of language and with wordplay on nearly every line, the novel finds interest in the idiosyncrasies of proper and improper language as shown through familial relationships. Our narrator tells us, “Make no mistake: when I concentrate, I have proper syntax and even spelling. But when there’s too mush rushing around and I have to tell it all in one go, there’s too mush pressure, it bursts out of me, and then my gramma suffers.” In Concrete is an exploration of our ideas of language’s practical importance. Through the siblings, the reader closely observes a family casting aside all assumed rules of language. In Concrete challenges our ideas of what is “good language,” what is its use, and how we limit language by conventional usage. 

Not One Day presents love and yearning undefined by literary convention but instead suspended through it; a new way to see and understand queerness, regardless of the rules of form. Bleeding through concepts of the novel, Not One Day uses vignettes of attraction – women Garréta has desired – which thread through our ideas about fiction and nonfiction. Situating itself as a written work between literary genres, Not One Day offers itself as a testament to the fickle reality of the stories we tell ourselves about queer attraction. Garréta strategically places her writing about desire outside the canon, and Not One Day doesn’t bend itself to fit into a certain literary style, nor is it a point of sorrow that it doesn’t belong. Instead, it’s an embrace into the unrestrained void of non-conformity. 

All of Garréta’s novels are defined by Oulipean concepts, the literary movement into which she was formally accepted in 2000, which includes writers like Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, and Raymond Queneau, the founder of the movement. The collective’s literary works are defined by constraints – like the lipogram in Perec’s novel La Disparition (translated into English as The Void), which was written entirely without the letter E.  Of course, the spectacle of a book written without a vowel is a different reading experience in translation, since the distinctions of the puzzle are clearly felt when the prose is reassembled, but the most clear marks of the constraint and its concept don’t come across in translation. La Disparition has no E in its entirety, but The Void does. Similarly, Garréta’s classically Oulipian novels are ideologically difficult projects to translate, since her books rely on a close observation of the inner workings of the French language. In Ramadan’s translator’s note, she writes, “Translating Anne Garréta’s In Concrete is like trying to catch an eel in one pond and put it in another.” 

At the heart of Anne Garréta’s Oulipian novels is a critique of how the rules we impose on language dictate how we experience and communicate our lives. While each of her novels are centered around a particular constraint, they also look at how social constructs around language limit its potential. How we conceptualize gender may depend on the ways we speak, think, and conduct our lives in a language with a grammatical binary. We tell ourselves stories about our desires to understand them, but we present them in literary forms meant for an audience instead of our own personal contemplation. And then we meet a family who forces us to reconsider every idea we have about the proper use of language until we find the very center of what it means to communicate. In translation, Garréta’s ideas about language expand. The questions Garréta asks of language morph and percolate,  applying themselves to translation as a practice– – how we conceptualize translation, how we view the role of a translator, and ultimately how we assign value to translation within a competitive literary world obsessed with creating a hierarchy. 

Translation begins with the acknowledgment of the limitations of the practice; its own type of Oulipian constraint. It holds within it the idea that what’s produced by its process is never a replica and instead an imitation. Translation is far from the practice of selecting equivalents in a different language. When I spoke with Johnny Lorenz about translation, he pointed out there is, “no precise matching.” Lorenz is the translator of another respected experimental writer, Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, whose novels A Breath of Life (1978) and The Besieged City (1949) were both translated into English for the first time by Lorenz. As an example, Lorenz points to how the word to dream in Portuguese (sonho) is close to the word for sleep (sono), offering a deep tie between the ideas of sleeping and dreaming on a language level, something unshared by their English equivalents. Johnny says, “these linguistic intimacies have an effect on our imagination, our construction of meaning.” As Johnny suggests, although the original destination is impossible to replicate in another language where meaning is suspended differently, instead translation is a celebration of the sacrifice, as well as a hint at rebirth. It’s a practice which offers the potential for radical metamorphosis within language. 

Emma Ramadan, who has by now translated three Garréta novels, writes in her translator’s note to In Concrete, “Even when translating experimental, intricate texts whose wit and charm relies heavily on the mechanics of the language they were originally written in, there are always solutions in translation, there are always ways to bring the spirit, voice, sharpness, and hilarity of the author’s text into a new language.” Using distinctive suggestions made possible only by English word associations and grammar, similar ideas begin to emerge, even if the path there is not a perfect equivalent of the journey in French. Translation becomes about finding the same meaning in a radically different way.

— Sphinx

Garréta reveals that the bounds of language are found in the limits of our imagination and not language itself. Writer Daniel Levin Becker, one of the youngest members of Oulipo, writes in the introduction to Sphinx that Garréta’s conceit in the novel, “use[s] language to question language, to manipulate and master and subvert the mechanics of everyday expression.” While there have been strides to adopt a neutral pronoun in French (an equivalent to the English they/them) – iel or ille by combining the feminine elle and the masculine il – in Sphinx, Garréta is less interested in neutral language than undoing the intrinsic relationship between grammar and gender, writing past it altogether. Instead of writing, their body to get away from using he or she, Garréta writes, this body when the narrator desires A***. When writing in the past tense in French using passé compose, special verbs of movement require gender agreement with nouns. A verb like go (in French, aller) requires identifying if its subject is masculine or feminine. She goes becomes elle a alleé, while he goes becomes il a allé. In French, gender finds itself so deep in language that it’s very literally grounded in its movement. As part of her Oulipean conceit in Sphinx, Garréta simply avoids using verbs that give away gender, getting rid of agreement altogether, and embracing a turn of phrase. Characters don’t come or go in Sphinx; instead, Garréta writes, “then we would separate.” By writing away from gender, Garréta splinters language and embraces a space free of grammatical expectation (and therefore gendered expression) found within language.  The pivot created by Garréta’s decision to avoid gender reveals surprise and delight in the most overlooked of syntax, revealing a secret world of language against which her characters' affair plays out. 

When reading Ramadan’s English translation, Sphinx keeps the oddness of phrase found in Garréta’s French, even though the text is no longer playing the game of avoiding certain verbs and grammatical construction. The English translation offers a way to embrace the prose itself and to be able to look deeper at what Garréta has found underneath. Becker writes in the introduction, “[Sphinx’s conceit] creates a subtly but sometimes chillingly different world, one that arises not so much within the narrative as within our experience of reading it.” Read in translation, this strange upside down world is found in a place where language is splintered from its gendered rules and expectations, coming into even sharper focus.. In translation, this world finds itself at the forefront as it allows Garréta’s language games to gently recede, their marionette strings blending into the background. Ramadan’s translation is not a direct equivalent of what we can experience reading Sphinx in French, but why would we expect that when we read the translation? Instead, we encounter the same meaning Garréta presents in French but even sharper, bolder – different yet clearer when read in English translation. Or as Becker writes, “The vertigo changes but does not disappear.”

— In Concrete

Garréta’s novels force us to reconsider our expectations around translation but particularly our ideas about the role of the translator themselves. Especially the assumption that “good” translations means that we’re unaware of the presence of the translator who made it possible. Ramadan says, “The idea of the invisible translator is equated with a correct or ideal translation. But what does that mean for a book like In Concrete? Does this book preclude a good translation? Is any translation of this book not going to be ideal because the translator is forced to be visible?” Because of how Garréta’s writing is intrinsic to the French language, any strategy to replicate the experience of reading the original books requires a great deal of inventive strategies, particularly In Concrete with its devotion to wordplay and puns. Ramadan explains that translating In Concrete meant, “a lot of invention from my mind as opposed to translating what’s on the page.” Ramadan’s methodology is to embrace the escalated visibility of a translator, effectively rejecting the constraints and limitations imposed on her role. Garréta in translation forces the translator to become exposed to the reader, and so Ramadan makes herself seen when translating In Concrete. 

The strategies used to replicate the experiences of reading Garréta’s original prose in the translation of In Concrete are meant to recreate the feeling of stumbling into a joke, or understanding several dimensions of a pun. Ramadan writes in her translator’s note, that, “My tactic was to exploit the places where English had room for linguistic play as often as I could, absorbing each sentence and contorting it in my head to see if there was room for a joke.” In the translator’s note, Ramadan refers to her notes as saying, “Sex puns. Shit Puns.” Sentences delightfully wander into vulgarity. One of my favorites of this during In Concrete is when bequeath becomes bequeef. Ramadan says that one of her favorite parts of the translation is her use of the word jabroni. “That is very specific to me. I used to be very into wrestling. The Rock is famous for saying it, but the guy [The Iron Sheik] who came up with it is Middle Eastern,” Ramadan, who is Lebanese-American, explains. “Jabroni is a word that tickles me very much, and it happened to fit perfectly in the context of that scene in the book. And what are the odds that another translator of experimental French literature would have an attachment to the word jabroni?” 

As the crux of her work about language suggests, Garréta in translation shows that the expectations and bounds we put on the role of a translator can impair the quality of actual translations. English equivalents to the French puns perhaps cannot be found, and the experience of reading In Concrete can only be replicated in translation through invention and innovation by Ramadan. In Concrete, with its deep ties to language, could never be reassembled without a translator’s vulnerability in allowing a glimpse into their own connection to language.

— Not One Day

This concept – the inescapable yet integral personal association –  folds in nicely and complements the themes of Garréta’s novels, which find their plots often tied up in a person and their reflection set against a metaphorical Gordian knot. Garréta’s novels find their linchpins around obsessions – the unnamed lover in Sphinx, A***; the numerous characters desired in Not One Day; the concrete mixer in In Concrete. But over and over these fixations reveal more about the subjects than the objects of desire. In one of the most beautiful passages of Sphinx, the narrator says, “I was the shadow of a body that ignored me. I was also the source of light that produced that shadow. All that came back to me was a projection of myself. A*** was merely a parasite interposed between my consciousness and my unfailing tendency to diffract the real.” Garréta’s novels in a way are all about attempts to make the self invisible, only to realize how often one is projected, refracted, inescapable. 

Perhaps it speaks to the limits of my own imagination, but reading Garréta in translation, I wonder at times why I’ve returned to Garréta in translation three times now when I know it’s impossible to construct the original Garréta with all its linguistic intimacies from French intact through its translation? I think often of the Garréta we meet in Not One Day, who lays out her literary project in the book’s Ante Scriptum. The voice of the narrator is as close as we’ll get to Garréta, although the speaker still feels like a character, a fictionalized suggestion of the real Garréta. She writes that the project, “comes down to single maxim: Not one day without a woman.” Once a month, she will sit down and write for five hours unceasingly, with the aim to novelize the memory of desire.  At the end of Not One Day, we’ve met twelve women. Eleven are real objects of desire, yet one is fictionalized, forcing us to question how the entire project fits within a binary of fiction or nonfiction. 

While the constraints and the questions of canon are clear, the Ante Spectrum also addresses the worth of the project that becomes Not One Day. The Garréta-like narrator equates desire and literary merit, writing, “And who cares if at the end of your five hours of recollection, nothing will have been consummated? Who cares whether we’ve actually had the women we’ve desired? Writing at the whim of memory twists and turns on uncertainty. Like desire itself, never assured of its end or its object.” Garréta addresses the inherent value of confessional writing about attraction and longing without placing an emphasis on a relational arc or a clear take away from yearning. Why are we placing expectations on how we articulate desire to make it digestible, something to be easily understood with clear resolution, when feeling desire in the moment can be all consuming, confusing, and more often than not – fleeting? Instead of fitting queer relationships into heteronormative conventions which define their value to society, Not One Day isolates queer desire and finds value in this task for the simplicity of documenting an overwhelming and transcending emotion. 

Garréta applies these same criticisms to language: gendered grammar in Sphinx, literary genre during the courses Not One Day, proper language throughout In Concrete. The narrator echoes the unnecessary limitations of formal language during In Concrete, saying, “The bourgeois think vocabulary belongs to them. Even when they don’t understand fuck all. Especially when they don’t understand fuck all.” By playing with the social conventions we limit language to or doing away with them entirely in her writing, Garréta offers a path through which to expand our ideas of language’s true, unrestrained potential. When I read Ramadan’s translations, I consider all of these same questions but with the addition of also considering the translation, which enters the debate with its own cross-examination. 

Later in Not One Day’s Ante Spectrum, Garréta finds herself simply recording the feeling of desire. She writes, “It’s a perfect evening for sitting on the terrace of a cafe, watching women go by. Desire would surely come hurling down its slope, natural and abrupt, and before even realizing it you would probably have accrued additional memories.” This description reminds me of what it’s like to encounter Garréta’s language in Ramdan’s translation: catapulting towards me, unbridled and knocking me over like a gust of wind. Translation is fraught with uncertainty due to the difficulty of its task, and as a reader, we are never assured of the end result or the practicality of reading in translation. But translation always promises to be a unique place where language is nearly entirely free of rules and laws. Like Poulette in the concrete mixer, translation is a place where meaning can be disconnected in one language, mixed up, and come out the other end in an entirely new language, with its takeaways and ideas still intact. When I’m reading translation, every idea I have about what language can do expands. The potential is far beyond the depth of my own imagination. Language is boundless and hurling towards me, if only I’m able to move past my expectations.

I wrote this piece in 2021 and 2022, after I had the chance to speak with Emma Ramadan and Johnny Lorenz about their work as translators. In 2023, I took a position with Deep Vellum, Anne Garréta’s American publisher, which made it impossible for me to publish this essay with a publication. Because I wanted the chance for Emma and Johnny’s commentary on their translation to be able to be read, and because I spent a lot of time thinking and writing about Garréta in translation, I decided to make this essay available on my website, with the disclosure that I am currently employed by Garréta’s publisher and now work with these titles in a professional capacity. I first read Sphinx in 2017 and never really stopped thinking about the novel, so it was a real joy to be able to write this piece and consider everything Garréta’s books offer to a reader.