06/23 – Some news

At the beginning of the year, I told myself “come on, try and write one post a month about your daily life as a translator, it’ll be interesting and it shouldn’t take too long”. Well, that didn’t happen. So here are some jumbled news, taken from the aforementioned daily life, which has been busier than I’d planned:

1/ I’ve handed in my very first novel translation! I can’t say anything about it, which is horribly frustrating (see picture below), but I’m happy with my work. Now, I’m waiting for the publisher’s feedback. And I’m… not entirely relaxed about it.

Carlo Dolci, Allégorie de la patience, 1677.
Carlo Dolci, Allegory of patience, 1677. She clearly can’t take it any longer.

2/ My other big project, a video game, now has a release date! Under the Waves (Parallel Studio) releases on 29 August 2023, and I can’t wait to hear the texts I’ve translated voiced by the various actors and actresses. Here, too, I’ll have to be patient.

3/ Since February, I’ve been working for Jordan Mechner. Yes, THE Jordan Mechner, who created Prince of Persia in 1989, that is the very first video game I’ve ever played. I was thus extremely proud to translate the annex to his fantastic autobiographical graphic novel, Replay (Delcourt, 2023). As funny as it is touching, this tale will be enjoyed by those who find interesting the links between History and our personal stories. If you want to know more about its creation, you can find the annex here.

Learn more about it on Jordan’s website.

4/ My work for the éditions Skira is turning into a regular collaboration. After contributing to a splendid book on photographer Michael Kenna last year, I’ve translated two articles for the catalogue of the exhibition entitled “Leonardo Da Vinci and Anatomy, the Mechanics of Life”, running from 9 June to 17 September at the Clos Lucé. I’m not sure if I’ll some day get used to receiving free author copies, but for the moment it hasn’t ceased to amaze me.

You can order it from here.

And that’s it for today! I’ve been busy since the beginning of this year, which is often good news as a freelancer, but I’ll try not to get buried in the job; my goal: writing more than a single post every six months. Fingers crossed!