Ruth Diver's life in translation

How many of us reading War and Peace, for example, think of the original Russian text and admire the mammoth task of its English translators?

The art of a literary translator is, in many ways, not to call attention to their craft; instead, it’s to create a seamless experience from one language to another.

What they do have to be good at, says Ruth Diver, literary translator, alumna and former University staffer, is recreating the music of the original text and its effect on the reader.

“Does it convey the same sort of emotion or surprise?”

You must also be a very good reader of the source language – in Ruth’s case, French (she’s also fluent in German and Russian) – and have excellent writing skills in the target language.

“A lot of what makes literature interesting is the way authors play with the language, so you need to understand what they’re doing to start with,” she says.

Ruth, who has translated more than a dozen works of French literature into English, has recently gained international attention as the co-translator of the high-profile Gisèle Pelicot memoir A Hymn to Life: Shame has to Change Sides (Et la joie de vivre), co-written by French author Judith Perrignon.

The book was concurrently translated into 22 languages and is topping bestseller lists globally.

“It starts with Gisèle’s discovery of the horrific abuse she endured at the hands of her husband, who drugged and raped her over the course of a decade and invited countless [at least 80] other men to do the same,” says Ruth.

“But it goes all the way back to her childhood and is really the story of how she found the strength to face an open trial and build a new life for herself.”

Both Ruth and co-translator Natasha Lehrer found the work intense.

“Natasha and I were doing a tag team effort to meet a tight deadline, she in France, me in New Zealand. She would translate around 1,500 words a day, then send the document to me to edit, and I would do the same and send it back to her – so much discussion in the comment boxes!”

They were grateful to share the load.

“We were constantly on the phone to each other. Sometimes she would be in tears, sometimes I would be, but we had signed a non-disclosure agreement and couldn’t involve anyone else. I don’t think we realised how big the book would be.”

She says that really hit home at the launch of the English edition at Royal Festival Hall in London.

“There were Natasha and I, sitting in the middle of the stalls, watching our words being read on stage by Juliet Stevenson, Kristin Scott-Thomas and Kate Winslet, national treasures of stage and screen.”

Ruth was also in London to receive the prestigious Scott Moncrieff Prize from the UK Society of Authors, an annual award for translations into English of high-quality, full-length French works. 

The winning work, The Convoy by Rwandan French author Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, is the author’s account of being a 15-year-old Tutsi girl who narrowly escapes being murdered during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Ruth is clearly not afraid of tackling hard subjects.

“Well, I certainly find them satisfying to work on, and it’s so important to treat that sort of text with great care.”

Her “outrageously international” background includes doing all her schooling in French (her father’s UNESCO job was Paris based), a first degree in Russian in the US, and living in Austria and Germany, where she learnt German and had two children.

She completed a masters and PhD in comparative literature, co-registered between the University of Paris 8 and Auckland, later becoming head of comparative literature at the latter. Then a literary translation course came up in London and all the pieces fell into place.

“But I would never have dreamed when I resigned from the University that, within a few years, I’d be translating a phenomenal bestseller and winning the most coveted prize in the industry,” she says. “It’s clearly never too late to reinvent yourself!” 

– Julianne Evans