Laid to waste
The days all seemed much alike. We put on our field clothes. We swapped gossip, we made bets on our victims, spoke mockingly of cut girls, squabbled foolishly over looted grain. …
At the end of that season in the marshes, we were so disappointed that we had failed. We were disheartened by what we would lose, and truly frightened by the misfortune and vengeance reaching out for us. But deep down, we weren’t tired of anything.
Jean Hatzfeld’s Machete Season (Une saison de machettes) is a bone chilling piece of work.
Structured in chapters that alternate between first person accounts from the Hutus who took part in the slaughter of Tutsis, and Hatzfeld’s own account of the history of Rwanda, the genocide and the lives of the perpetrators.
In the French, the language of the Hutus’ “confessions” occasionally strikes as a bit too polished -– not always the likely vocabulary of largely uneducated farmers. But it’s rarely jarring and you quickly move past it, soon mesmerised by the personal voices retelling what it was to head out every day with murder in mind, the growing ease of the slaughter, as clinically strategic and indifferent as a video game kill or chopping the head off tonight’s dinner chicken. The weird hierarchy of genocide – how it soon became just a job, as innocuous a group endeavour as a bake sale.
“A genocide seems extraordinary for someone like you who comes in after the fact; but for someone who was dazzled by the bullies’ big words and the shouts of joy from your colleagues, it seemed like an ordinary thing to do.”
I’ve seen Hatzfeld interviewed a number of times and, as far as I know, no-one’s ever asked him about his editorial policy. The time he spent over there and his subsequent writings make him immune to certain criticisms.
But… the book has recently been translated into English, and while this in itself is a good thing, the result… not so much.
Leopord: Killing was less wearisome than farming. In the marshes, we could lag around for hours looking for someone to slaughter without getting penalized. We could shelter from the sun and chat without feeling idle.
Tuer était moins échinant que cultiver. Dans les marais, on pouvait traîner des heures à chercher quelqu’un à abattre, sans se retrouver pénaliser. On pouvait s’ombrager et bavarder sans se sentir fainéants.
The register’s all wrong – jarring the reader away from the scene, diluting the horror and too smoothing the voices. Wearisome, lag, shelter, chat, idle… Ruthless men in a dumb killing frenzy talking like genteel ladies in 19th century novels – like suburban Wasps on a Sunday hike.
Alphonse: Some amused themselves with their machetes. If a Tutsi had worn out a pursuer in a chase, he would be teased with the point of a machete—it could he nasty for him. It was like demonstrating a bad example, except no one was alive to notice.
Demonstrating a bad example??
What a shame. What a waste. What a shame that (the award-winning) Ms. Coverdale didn’t question her choices more closely, get past the first draft stage; what a shame her editor didn’t intervene.
What a waste of a rare glimpse inside the minds of men at their nadir and, much further on down the scale, what a waste of one of the few opportunities that foreign work gets at publication. (I’m reluctant to use the word “important” but, given the horrific indifference to this episode in human history…).
Pio: For my part, I offer you an explanation: it is as if I had let another individual take my own living appearance, and the habits of my heart, without a single pang in my soul. This killer was indeed me, as to the offence committed and the blood he shed, but he is a stranger to me in his ferocity. I admit and recognize my obedience at that time, my victims, my fault, but I fail to recognize the wickedness of the one who raced through the marshes on my legs, carrying my machete. That wickedness seems to belong to another self with a heavy heart. But someone outside this situation, like you, cannot have an inkling of that strangeness of mind.*
Pour moi, je vous propose une explication : c’est comme si j’avais laissé un autre individu prendre mes propres apparences vivantes, et mes manies de coeur, sans aucun tiraillement d’âme. Ce tueur était bien moi pour la faute commise et le sang coulé, mais il m’est étranger pour sa férocité. Je reconnais mon obéissance de cette époque, je reconnais mes victimes, je reconnais ma faute ; mais je méconnais la méchanceté de celui qui dévalait les marais sur mes jambes, avec ma machette dans la main.
Cette méchanceté était comme un autre moi au coeur lourd. … Mais peut-être que si on est extérieur à cette situation, comme vous, on ne peut entrevoir cette étrangeté d’esprit.
The fellow translator in me wants to find excuses (tight deadlines, overworked, etc.), but I can’t – certainly not for the publisher (in who cynical I can’t help but perceive capitalising on the recent, too late and glossy surge of interest in Rwanda), and not for someone of Ms. Coverdale’s calibre. She’s done much finer and more careful work.
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Comment
- Wohw, thankyou so much for that post. The excerpts from the book really bring home the reality of relying on translations. At first, I read just a little bit and almost jumped to buy it, put once compared I think definatley I will buy the original French version, despite my lack of proficiency. So thankyou, and in the future, I hope that a work so powerful and representative of such a terrible and impacting moment in human history is translated with more care and concern. Good observation about the recent upsurge in interest in the genocide. Excellent blog.
— Abdul-Rahim Apr 11, 6:19am # - I do wish that I could read it in the original French, because reading the English translation was starting to sound like the King James Bible.
— schmutzie Apr 11, 7:10pm # - Thanks for this.
I’m presently reading sock-o Irish/French playwright Samuel Beckett’s novel MALLOY. In translation: in English.
Translated by himself (with Patrick Bowles) in 1955. A native English speaker’s translation of his own work from French.
And it’s…pretty great.
Yet…still….
— moj Apr 15, 5:29am # - Dear Martin!
It’s interesting that Beckett worked with somebody else on the translation of his own words.
And praise-worthy.
Even if the author is obviously in the best position to understand what he was trying to say/accomplish, when translating he’ll necessarily come up against some roadblocks and probably be a lot less transigent—and in turn less successful—than an experienced translator (who’s well practiced in the job of mourning & accepting what will be lost, and with luck devising an eloquent compromise).
Translating Beckett is clearly a less arduous task than translating, uh… oh I don’t know, Apollinaire or someone who was all poetry and cadence and rhyme.
Yet… still… as you say.
— gail Apr 15, 5:26pm # - A wonderful and much appreciated review! Thank you for this. But just to point out that what you are working from must be an advanced galley and not the finished book (the finished version just landed on my desk on Friday) therefore copyediting is not complete and the translation is not final. I am not a translator and cannot judge the quality of Coverdale’s work but I do hope you will reconsider your assement of the translation once the finished book passes your desk.
— Sarah May 9, 4:13pm #
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