The Linguist

10 The Linguist Vol/62 No/2 thelinguist.uberflip.com FEATURES How a team at Penguin approached a 10-year project to translate all 75 Maigret novels into English W ith 75 novels and 28 short stories, Jules Maigret is France's most famous fictional detective. But until Penguin Classics recently published a comprehensive collection of the novels by Georges Simenon, the inspector had a somewhat disparate identity in the English language. There were translations by different translators, from different dates, and some were out of print. Then, about 10 years ago, the publisher was given the rare opportunity to acquire publication rights to Simenon's entire oeuvre. As Penguin had published all of the Maigret novels in the past, the editorial team thought hard about what we could do differently to create an ambitious relaunch of the work in English, and to find new readers for these brilliant novels. We took inspiration from the Italian publisher Adelphi, which has created a remarkable cultural space for Simenon since the 1980s. Some of the existing English translations strayed significantly from the original French in plot and detail, most notably the early ones by Geoffrey Sainsbury. It felt imperative to offer contemporary readers quality translations that are faithful to the originals and provide a more consistent reading experience. One of the joys of reading the series is returning to familiar places and details; new translations allowed us to create a more reliable sense of Maigret's world. Series editor Josephine Greywoode assembled a team of translators, 1 who each took on 1-20 books over the decade-long project. In the early days, we all met at the translation centre in the Château de Seneffe in Belgium, along with the Dutch and Finnish translators. Simenon's son, John Simenon, joined us, sharing the correspondence between Simenon and his early translators, and the letters from his second wife, Denise, to his English publishers and translators. The Seneffe meeting helped to establish a unity of tone and offered very interesting background material: Simenon's 'yellow envelopes' on which he did his plotting, for example, and a visit to his hometown of Liège. We also discussed common problems, such as the inconsistencies in the text: if a character turns left down a corridor, then they can't possibly be in the library; if someone is sitting down on one page, how come they're on the other side of the room on the next. We also had to work out what to do about all the exclamation marks and ellipses. In some of the books almost every sentence ends with an exclamation mark or ellipsis, which looks very odd in English. We opted to reduce this punctuation, keeping it only when it seemed necessary. There was talk of more controversial issues, too. Simenon is a tricky author in many ways. His language inevitably reflects expressions which would not be seen as acceptable today. There are disparaging references to various minorities, antisemitism (about which discussions became quite heated) and sexism. An older woman is "good-looking even though she's over fifty", while a particular maid is always referred to as "the fat, spotty maid". As for poor Madame Maigret, she is at her husband's beck and call at all hours of day and night, and she doesn't need entertaining because she keeps herself busy with her laundry and her cooking. However, we are not in the business of retrospective airbrushing, so we had to find a way to deal with these issues. We had strict editorial instructions to translate everything as Simenon wrote it. The discussions at Seneffe were very helpful in navigating the way forward. Simenon wrote in a deceptively simple style and, as translators, we had to resist the urge to embroider or explain the text. "As a rule, I am sceptical about the idea of translation as a pane of glass allowing the reader to see through to the source text. All translations are, of course, reworkings. But in this case, we were aiming more consciously for the pane of glass," explains Siân Reynolds. "Perhaps there has been some kind of alchemy at work to produce an overall Meeting Maigret WORDS BY ROS SCHWARTZ, SIÂN REYNOLDS, SHAUN WHITESIDE AND JOSEPHINE GREYWOODE We are not in the business of retrospective airbrushing, so we had to find a way to deal with these issues

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