Gaëlle Bélem in Translation
Last autumn, Bullaun Press published the novel There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Réunionese author Gaëlle Bélem. Bullaun was founded by Bridget Farrell in 2021, and this was only their fourth book. Since Bullaun represents an intriguing and very welcome experiment – they are the first Irish publisher focused on literature in translation – and since each of their previous books had been excellent, I thought it might be interesting to set up a conversation when Gaëlle arrived in Ireland for the novel’s launch.
The novel – a picaresque, brutal, and mordantly funny tale of a girl’s attempt to escape her sadistic parents’ reign of terror in Réunion in the 1980s – was co-translated by first-time translators Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert, who had recently been a postdoc in UCD; all the more reason to bring author, translators, and publisher to campus! Along with my colleague Mary Gallagher in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, we were able to host all four in the Humanities Institute at UCD, where I’m a resident scholar. We heard readings from the novel in the original French (the novel was first published by Galiimard in 2020) and in its English translation, followed by a fascinating discussion about the difficulties involved in translating the novel’s complex and distinctive linguistic register, which includes Creole words and slang along with Réunionese expressions and insults.
We also got a sense of the ways that the translation nods to the postcolonial legacies of both its source and target cultures; Bridget, for example, described how a reference in the text to an unofficial school was, on the inspiration of her brother Seán (a contributing editor to the novel) translated as a “hedge school.”
During the visit, we were also able to record a podcast episode in the Museum of Literature Ireland for Books and Their Makers, the podcast series that I’m making with MoLI’s help. Gaëlle spoke about how she came to write the novel, and about her influences (Mad Max: Fury Road and Quentin Tarantino joined the more expected literary references); Karen and Laëtitia spoke about the craft and ethics of translation, including the need to preserve a kind of “opacity” in translating between cultures (drawing on some of the ideas that Laëtitia develops in her superb academic book on literary translation).
It was immensely exciting, then, just a few months later, to see There’s a Monster Behind the Door longlisted for both the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the International Booker Prize! This was the first time that a book from an Irish publisher had been longlisted for the IBP – a prize that can make a huge difference in bringing people’s attention to fiction in translation, of which most titles published each year fly under the radar of all but a small number of dedicated readers.
A few months later, the novel was announced as the winner of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for small presses, which has been one of the most reliably interesting prizes around since it was set up by Neil Griffiths in 2017. The judges various described the novel as “a compact, comic tour-de-force,” “darkly funny, acerbic, energetic,” with a “slick translation” and “lively, supple and vigorous” writing.
Bullaun, Fleetwood, and Saint-Loubert have been busy. Just this month, the novel was followed swiftly by Bélem’s second, The Rarest Fruit, a fictionalised biography of Edmond Albius, who was an enslaved orphan raised as a protegé of Ferréol Beaumont, a horticulturalist obsessed with finding the long-forgotten secret of pollinating the vanilla orchid. The novel follows Albius as he takes on his “father’s” passion, discovers the crucial method of hand-pollination that will transform the island’s economy, and makes the disorienting transition from slavery to indentured servitude. On the cusp of freedom, he chooses his Latin surname out of a recognition of the system of racial capitalism (the “pyramid of colours”) that will long outlive Atlantic slavery: “To succeed, you need to live white, think white, be White, have a white name. That colour: his name has to shout it out.”
To readers of Monster, there are familiar pleasures here, and some formal and thematic similarities: the brutally unsentimental picture of childhood and family, the frequent snatches of Creole, the confident oscillation between the individual life and the panorama of colonialism and global conquest (more pronounced in this second novel). The Rarest Fruit delights in its horticultural knowledge, and also sprouts footnotes at every opportunity (most of them authorial ones, although some are added by the translators), delivering information about Réunionese social structures, food, and musical instruments.
The interplay between a maximalist desire to communicate and catalogue the world of the island, on the one hand, and a breezy and often impish storytelling verve on the other: this feels like a key element of Bélem’s authorial signature, and it’s a rare pleasure to be able to see it at work on the larger historical canvas she chooses in this novel. I look forward to seeing the author in conversation in Dublin again this weekend, and to following wherever she goes next.