On Your Feet

"What does it take to translate a short story? Two minds, two languages, two lives? One text becomes two, becomes many, spirals, crumbles, is rebuilt. Jacqueline Feldman's unfolding of the involvement of one work, one life, in another, through words, is a high-wire performance of autocriticism." —Joanna Walsh, author of Girl Online and Vertigo 

Jacqueline Feldman, an American girl in Paris, was lost. Five years in France—and nothing to show for them. But then, with the help of a few extremely close readings—of a story of ventriloquism and political violence, familial obligation and national horror, by the lauded poet Nathalie Quintane—she started feeling a little better. . . .

At once an artist’s book combining evidence of every stage of a highly personal translation process and a series of intense experiments in the composition of bilingual prose, On Your Feet is an innovation in translation studies and in narrative. It is also a searching theorization of the politics of literature—for fans of Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” and Emily in Paris, a chronicle of all that is lost and found again in translation.

On Your Feet features stories by Quintane and Feldman as well as a scholarly work, in French, by Feldman.

Praise for On Your Feet

Translation does very different things, depending on who you ask: it loses or it finds, it distills or it betrays, it’s hospitality or it’s violence. And what does that make the translator, the agent of all or some of these things — who is she? Jacqueline Feldman’s On Your Feet: A Novel in Translations, which takes shape around experimental French writer Nathalie Quintane’s story about the right-wing French politician Marine Le Pen’s visit to a provincial city, explodes the act of translation, leaving our translator-figure as both guide and enigma, at the center of a nested and complexly interwoven set of linguistic, personal, and social encounters for our time. —Lindsay Turner

As much an assemblage of Duchampian readymades as a provocative questioning of what can be called literature, Jacqueline Feldman's On Your Feet: A Novel in Translations brings together heterogeneous components in an endeavor to recreate Nathalie Quintane’s writing and thinking and being in a new language and an attempt, in long stretches of English and then French, to illuminate all the particulars, personal and otherwise, essential to such an endeavor.—Jeffrey Zuckerman

Jacqueline Feldman travaille les langues en poète et en artiste. Elle invente un dispositif (le roman en traductions) à partir d’un récit de Nathalie Quintane, 'Stand up', qui plonge au cœur des embarras de la parole et de la vie politique française contemporaine, et le met en œuvre avec une inventivité et une productivité remarquables, approfondissant un ensemble de réflexions sur l’autorité et la fragilité du geste de traduction, les politiques de la prose, la compagnie des langues, la vie à l’étranger... Elle panse les blessures du langage en créant et en pensant entre les langues. Ce travail d’une grande originalité ouvre des possibles considérables pour la recherche-création. —Tiphaine Samoyault

Jacqueline Feldman’s On Your Feet carves out a new landscape for literature. Giving voice to all that lives, breathes, hovers, and shudders around a translation, her work speaks to the overlapping nature of translating and writing, and lays bare the absurdity of drawing boundaries between the two. —Emma Ramadan

Translation is a cat. Jacqueline Feldman’s feral poetics drops us in the deterritorializing maelstrom of language, politics, and displacement. She is a superreader, whose mystic eyes pierce through the shapeshifting of language into literature, life into art, poet into translator. Dogged by mistakes, specters of untranslatability, infinite suspensions of in-betweenness, Feldman’s syntactic grooves strive for something akin to exhaustion, exhausting words, and milking them for every last, warm drop. Like a cat, landing always on her feet. —yasser elhariry

Jacqueline Feldman’s novel in translations is a book of fangs and footnotes, fautes and fictions. On Your Feet performs an exercise in plural conjugation, and Feldman, as author-translator-reader, stands (on her feet!) to attention, theorizing the limitless nature of translation to make room for more writing, more selves — for new methods of living, working, revolting, and buying notebooks. Like Quintane, Feldman is a poétesse of the comma, and her sentences unfurl an autobiographical politics of deviation: she accretes, she creates, she creases her paperbacks. Translation, Feldman proves, is merely an extreme act of reading. And in this book, Feldman has made a home, or a second country — under the sign of Gertrude Stein — in which the reader can stretch out, stand up, and roam the margins. —Claire Foster

There isn’t a sentence here without a thought in it. —Jordy Rosenberg

I never wanted to learn so much about Marine Le Pen, nor spend so much time thinking about her. Yet, here we are: she is inching closer to power than ever. MLP — what she says, what she means, how she moves and how she speaks — is the untranslatable. Jacqueline Feldman's book is an (unfortunately) urgent puzzle, demanding, sharp yet funny: an American trying to make sense of this most French of texts. —Karim Kattan

je n'ai pas envie qu'on me censure alors je ne vais pas te censurer, toi ! (l'auto-censure suffit...) —Nathalie Quintane

About the Authors

Jacqueline Feldman’s writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, 3:AM Magazine, Triple Canopy, and The White Review. Born in 1990 in Connecticut, she lives in Massachusetts. 

Nathalie Quintane, the author of dozens of books, is regarded in France as “one of the major experimental poets of her generation.” Other English translations of her work include Joan Darc and Tomatoes. Born in 1964 in Paris, she lives in Digne-les-Bains.

Acknowledgements

This work received support for excellence in publication and translation from Albertine Translation, a program created by Villa Albertine.

Excerpts of On Your Feet: A Novel in Translations have been published in The White Review and New Sinews.