In a nutshell, the challenge of translating Sollers consists of finding a balance between rendering his idiosyncratic prose style without flattening it, on the one hand, and writing intelligible English, on the other. To me, it was absolutely necessary to let the English-speaking reader in on the secret of the Sollers charisma, which is not, as some of his critics may think, because his smiling face and glib personality appear often before the public on French television. Anyone who has really read Sollers in the original has learned to appreciate him because he is a masterful stylist, a unique poetician. His writing is his very identity; I had to convey it.

But I’m writing this book in English, not some mélange of Frenglish and franglais. The last thing I want to do is betray my own native language and lay myself open to the charge of making my English sound odd—the English that sounds like it’s trying to be French, the scandalous ineptitude of the “word-for-word.” These contradictory requirements pulled me in opposite directions. How to make Sollers speak English?

I suppose any translator faces this dilemma, and the success of a translation may well depend on the translator’s skill in making the contradiction simply disappear. I have a hunch that the good translations are the ones where the reader has no clue how hard it was to find that balance.
 
It is the writing of Mysterious Mozart that makes Sollers’s book so fascinating and so different from the many others about Mozart. Difficult writing—I had to resist the inclination to make it easier to understand in English than in French. In other words, I had to preserve the difficulty, at the cost of making my English sound strange. And the sound of Sollers’s writing is precisely where its uniqueness lies. That’s what my English had to capture—a kind of poetic language. There is music in his prose. I hope my readers will hear it.

*****

Armine Kotin Mortimer is a professor of French at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and translator of Mysterious Mozart by Philippe Sollers.