A Conversation with Jean Harris*

Journal of World Literature 3 (2018) 117–125

brill.com/jwl

Delia Ungureanu University of Bucharest and Harvard University [email protected]

Jean Harris, PhD, is a novelist and translator living in Bucharest, Romania. She holds a PhD in British and American literature from Rutgers University (1983) and has published fiction, literary criticism and psychoanalytic studies including The Roots of Artifice: A Study in Literary Creativity with Jay Harris (Human Sciences Press, 1981) and The One-Eyed Doctor: Psychological Origins of Freud’s Works with Jay Harris (Jason Aronson, 1984). She is the 2007–2008 winner of the annual translation grant from the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine for her translation of Şte- fan Bănulescu’s “Mistreţii erau blînzi.” She directed “The Observer Translation Project” (http://translations.obervatorcultural.ro) which has translated Roma- nian fiction into more than seven languages monthly from 2008 to 2009. Harris is the 2010 guest editor of “Absinthe 13: Spotlight on Romania.” Her translations have appeared in The Guardian, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Words Without Borders, Jewish Fiction, Salmagundi, Best European Fiction, Habitus: a Diaspora Journal Diaspora Journal, and “Margellos World Republic of Letters” series from Yale University Press. New Directions published her translation of Norman Manea’s Captives in 2014. Harris’s translation of The Confession, a play by Tatiana Niculescu Bran, will form the libretto for an opera (in composition) by Jeremy Gill. Her translation of Igor Bergler’s novel, The Lost Bible (Editura Rao) is currently seeking a us publisher. du: What sparked your interest in Romanian literature? jh: Literature is my field. When I came to this country, at first I just wanted to learn the language. I figured I would learn like a child, so I started reading fairytales. My Romanian was so limited that I had to translate to grasp what I was reading. I pored over dictionaries. I had manuals for the syntax. Every sentence was an adventure. To keep things straight, I wrote everything down.

* Jean Harris, translator and novelist, [email protected].

By the time I had finished a tale, I was looking at a draft, so I edited it and I started showing what I had in order to ask if I gotten the gist. I remember my husband, Liviu, saying “My goodness, you did that. I cannot believe it!” And he really was right to be surprised because back then I was still shy about conversing. Anyhow, just for fun, I sent the translations to a few friends in the us, including Andrei Codrescu and Julian Semilian, who was translating surrealists back then. They wrote back saying: hey, you are translating, you know that? Julian felt that my Romanian was better than it was. As I was saying, translation was like a magic trick I did in order to understand these stories. In any event, Julian recommended me to the novelist Stelian Tănase, and things got going from there. du: In terms of market rationales, does it make more sense to introduce peripheral literatures like the Romanian one to contemporary literature? jh: You would think so, but the problems of introducing Romanian literature to the American market are very serious. It’s not at all easy. As far as I know, the American is the toughest literary market place, which is difficult for Amer- icans to break into. An American writer who has a book of some merit and some chance of commercial success may need to make a hundred submissions before finding a literary agent, and we are not even talking about publishers yet. Because it is a tough process, even native writers may resort to legitimate services for placing their texts with agents. This whole process can be costly. Just finding an agent can cost you $1,000. du: As a New York novelist yourself who knows the us book market from the inside, as well as an academic with a PhD in British and American literature from Rutgers now living and working in Romania as a translator, what would you say is the current situation of English translations of contemporary Romanian literature? jh: The situation is poor. I cannot speak so much for what is going on in the uk, but it is absolutely certain that languages of small circulation have a harder time than languages of large circulation. The situation of Romanian literature on the us market has improved slightly in the past years, but only in the sense that all literature in translation has acquired more visibility lately. Major improvement belongs more to French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, and Chinese, the last one being obviously a rising power. With regard to Romanian literature, part of the problem is that translation is expensive. The State is not giving a lot of funding right now. Many writers do not have the money to commission substantial translations on spec, which is to say translations that may or may not find agents or publishers. On top of that, not all interested publishers will pay for translation. Some do. For instance, I have translated for Yale and for New Directions, and they both pay. But smaller publishers

Journal of World Literature 3 (2018) 117–125