Translation Tuesday: an excerpt of Sophie Pujas’s Street Rounds in Paris

This story of anonymous characters intersecting with the urban geography of Paris is the fiction winner of Asymptote’s translation contest – read an extract

By Sophie Pujas and Ruth Diver for Translation Tuesdaysby Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network

Last Translation Tuesday, we brought you the nonfiction winner of our annual Close Approximations translation contest, picked by Margaret Jull Costa. This week, we present the fiction winner: Ruth Diver’s translation from the French of Sophie Pujas’s fiction, which marks the first time her work has been published in English. Judge Ottilie Mulzet, an award-winning translator herself who has translated László Krasznahorkai’s fiction, chose Diver’s entry because it “combines excitingly experimental writing in a wonderful translation. To me the English version reads perfectly, truly attaining that marvellous balance where, as readers, we are well aware of being privy to a textual world otherwise not available to the Anglophone reader: Diver steers well clear of over-domesticization, and yet at the same time, her translation never contains the infelicity of a clumsy rendering. The author’s voice – a combination of lucidity and ironic sympathy for her anonymous characters intersecting with the urban geography of Paris – is captured magnificently. I truly hope this work will find a home with a book publisher.“

– The editors at Asymptote

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