Jennifer Solheim weaves the story of her decade-long translation of Yolaine Simha's I Saw You on the Street into a meditation on the nature of the translator's labor. Solheim looks at history, politics, time and rereading to parse how "translation can become a snake biting its own tail: the translator as writer and reader is simultaneously subsumed and resurrected by the text in the original. Within his cultural limits the author, as an individual, can and, indeed, must extend himself as far as he can to set himself and his art apart from the commonplace, showing all the while whence he comes, doing this through language most of all.
With the translator we have quite the opposite situation. He cannot and must not set himself apart from the culture laid out before him. To do so would indeed be treasonous. A translator, Rabassa goes on to explain, is not simply a writer but also a reader. If a translation is to be a successful one, the translator must be a particularly astute reader, attentive not only to the essentials but also to the cultural context whence the writer comes.
And so we see how translation can become a snake biting its own tail: the translator as writer and reader is simultaneously subsumed and resurrected by the text in the original as a translation task. So the question becomes: how does the translator mount a sensitive, careful reading of a literary work as she writes it from one language into another?
I had corresponded with Simha during a semester-long study abroad in Paris. We never met in personβher debilitating agoraphobia, which served as thematic fodder for I Saw You on the Street , saw to thatβand in August , six weeks after I had returned to the States, Simha committed suicide. Simha left several notes before she took an overdose of barbiturates and jumped into the river behind her house in a farm town two hours outside of Paris.
So it was an understandable impulse to want to translate her work as homage. Since I had come of age in a time when awareness about sexual harassment was all over the US media, I had found my transition to Paris trying, to say the least. In the late s, being followed on the street in Paris was still viewed as a compliment rather than a menace. I Saw You on the Street spoke directly to what had been rendered so beautifully abstract in the works of other French feminists I had read.
