François Pallave translated the first book from English

Translators must be proficient in the “target” language. They mostly specialize in alphabets and are good at original language. Francois Ballet has qualities, though Shepherds, William S. Written by Mervyn, published by Fanlock, this is his first work as a translator. This academic studied at the Sorbonne and obtained a second master’s degree in English composition. He is interested in the American writer. “I’ve read everything about him, and among the writings about his work, I read at length the epic poem “The Folding Cliffs,” a verse epic about the Hawaiian island of Kauai’s resistance against exile. Lepers by the colonists.”

“Such a sense of rhythm!”

During a conference, François meets Alice Tardien, who has taken over the publishing house of her grandfather, Pierre Fanlac. “Alice suggested that I translate one of the three stories from the collection “The Lost Upland”, which includes three short stories already published by Fanlac, including “The Last Harvests of Merle”. They are real authors, very attentive, who worked with me on the revision, were independent, they did not have a distributor, that’s why I read in bookstores and nothing works better than word of mouth.

A pioneer of ecology and an activist against the Vietnam War, Mervyn lived with the shepherds of Caus du Haute-Quercy in the 1970s. He predicted the end of family farming and large-scale capitalism, which is reflected in his story.

“He was well-known and well-integrated in Quercy, and his neighbors, even the elderly, came to my reading of the “Bergers,” which described their lives in a humble, non-judgmental way, but I had never read anything like it in French, even in France!”

François happily began to translate, especially on weekends, where the error-correcting work was long, finding typos and inconsistencies in the English text, which included words from the Provençal patois. “Such a sense of rhythm and eloquence! Mervyn was steeped in Latin, and he translated troubadour ballads from ancient Provençal into his language. His English works with a Romanian. I couldn’t change the text to convey the strangeness of a patois word by translating it into English, so I turned the phrase into French. But we inevitably lose sight of the strangeness of the matter.”

Midi Liber Correspondent: 06 88 24 22 19.