The Interview : Jordan Stump

Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl, speaks with Jordan Stump, one of the foremost translators of contemporary French literature. A Professor of French at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Stump has translated nearly forty works by writers including Marie NDiaye, Marie Redonnet, Claude Simon and Honoré de Balzac. His translation of Jardin des Plantes won the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and he was named a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2006. His translations of NDiaye's Ladivine and The Witch received International Booker recognition, with The Witch shortlisted for the 2026 prize; his translation of her The Cheffe won the American Literary Translators’ Association Prize in 2020.

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Thank you Jordan for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with The Wise Owl.

RS: You have said that some books move you so deeply that simply reading them is not enough and that those are the books you translate. What was it about The Witch in particular that compelled you to undertake the journey of bringing it into English?

JS: The Witch is a very rich book, made up of a great many elements, but to my mind it’s above all the story of a woman abandoned by everyone she loved and even by everything she is.  Her husband, her children, her father, her parents’ marriage, her house—all gone.  She ends up being arrested for fraud, for not actually being a witch, but her jailer tries to burn her alive, as one does with witches: she neither is nor is not a witch, she’s nothing, she has no one (the novel ends at the very moment her last human relationship, with Pierrot’s mother, proves to have been severed as well).  The story is excruciatingly sad, but told without a trace of pathos, with a discreet, wry humour, and above all with style, with a kind of self-possessed elegance, and an insistence on telling the tale its own way, not the way we think we want it to be told.  How can one possibly not love that? 

RS: The Witch inhabits a fascinating space between the mundane and the magical, where extraordinary events are narrated with remarkable restraint. What were the greatest challenges in preserving that distinctive tonal balance in translation?

JS: NDiaye always sets her novels in a world that is very recognizably our world: many strange things can happen, but always against the background of a world with absolutely nothing extraordinary about it, almost  uncomfortable in its banality, so much a part of the fabric of modern France at its plainest that it’s almost unsettling to look at.  The action of The Witch, for instance, takes place in an American-style housing development in Lucie’s unnamed small city, in a low-rent tower block in Bourges, and in a fussy, bourgeois house in an anonymous neighbourhood of Poitiers.  I think it’s very important to see those places in my mind as I translate: the relative greyness of the setting is vital to get across, so that none of this seems overly “magical.”   But in the case of one of the novel’s settings, I tried to do the opposite.  Isabelle’s phony “university” is set on a highway outside the city of Châteauroux, between a Peugeot car dealership and an expanse of wheat fields that seems to go on forever.  The university building is very sleek and modern, but in a sense it’s hemmed in by something more elemental, more physical.  The stalks of the wheat fields come right up to the glass walls, and brush against them almost as if they were trying to get in,  Meanwhile, Peugeot’s emblem is a roaring lion standing on its hind legs, and that giant lion hovers over the rows of cars, all with their hoods open as if they were roaring too.  It’s a profoundly uncanny setting, in other words—charged with strangeness and menace in a way that no other place in the novel is—and at the same time it’s described so matter-of-factly that a quick reading will probably miss it.  There I felt a real responsibility to make sure that the reader sees the strangeness overlying the familiarity.

RS: You have described translation as a process of discovering a voice that is "not mine, nor exactly NDiaye's, but the voice of this novel". Could you elaborate on this idea? How do you recognise when you have finally found that voice?

JS: I’m a slow translator—I’m not slow to come up with a first draft, but I devote months and months to the process of revision.  I revise in as many ways as I can—sometimes without looking at the text, sometimes comparing the translation to the original sentence-by-sentence, sometimes backwards, and at least once by listening to the translation read aloud.  Each of those different ways of looking at the text will show me aspects of the writing that I might miss if I’m simply going through it at full speed from first page to last, and brings to mind words or phrasings that never occurred to me before.  For me translation is above all a process  of slow accretion, founded in a continual rethinking of what the text is, how it says what it says, why it says it that way, and what sort of parallels there might be for all of that in English.  I know I’m getting close to completion when I don’t “recognize” a given passage—when I don’t remember where that passage came from, and ideally when the wording surprises me.  The voice can never be exactly the same as the voice in the novel—for one thing, it’s speaking a different language!—but given lots of time and lots of revision I find that the translation’s words can give me the same kind of little shock or delight that I found in the original: then I can begin to see the translation as finished.  But of course a translation is never really finished: for one thing, editors will make suggestions or pose questions that make me go back and retouch what I thought was done (I don’t take every suggestion, but they can be useful), and for another even when I open the published text I can’t stop myself from finding sentences that on reflection I might translate in a different way.  If I were given the chance to revise the published volume, I would leap at it!  Nothing much, just a word here and there—but there’s no such thing as “definitively done” for any translation, or probably for any sort of writing,

RS: Much of The Witch derives its power from ambiguity, emotional silences, and what remains unsaid between its characters. How does a translator preserve those gaps and uncertainties without over-explaining them for a different readership?

JS: My answer here will be identical to what I said above about capturing the tension between banality and strangeness.  It’s all a matter of going through the text again and again, of refining one’s understanding of what the text is doing, of questioning whether one’s own rendering captures that.  Not a terribly interesting answer, I’m afraid, but for me every aspect of translation comes down to the same thing: reread, rethink, rewrite.

RS: You were not initially planning to become a literary translator and have spoken about discovering translation almost by accident through Marie Redonnet's work. What was it about that experience that transformed translation from an intellectual exercise into a lifelong vocation?

JS: In the American academic system, translation is not considered a particularly honourable sort of activity for a professor: the expectation is that one will write literary criticism or theory, and as a newly-hired professor that was of course my intention.  But the University of Nebraska Press was at the time famous for publishing contemporary literature in translation, and by chance the wonderful Bill Regier, then the director of the press, asked me if I happened to know of any new writers in French who hadn’t been translated and should be.  I’d just discovered the astonishing novels of Marie Redonnet, and I immediately began singing her praises to him, so enthusiastically that he asked me if I might like to try my hand at translating her myself.  I hesitated—as I say, that’s not really what professors are supposed to do—and his answer to my hesitation changed my life forever.  “You could write an academic study that will be read by maybe fifty people, or a translation that might be read by many thousands.  If you really care about literature . . . ”  He didn’t finish that sentence, but he didn’t have to: I saw exactly what he meant.  And so I went back to my office, sat down, and started translating, and it was as if a thousand flowers had bloomed in my soul.  It’s one thing to analyse a text, and quite another to make the text happen, or rather to see it happening, to see it in the process of happening, to hear a voice that one loves reconstituting itself, coming into existence in a new form.  I was hooked from that day on!  Now, I’ve written my share of literary criticism, and I certainly don’t mean to disparage it in any way: that’s important work.  But I find the process of making a book exist exhilarating and moving in a way that—speaking strictly for myself—no analysis can rival.

RS: You have suggested that translation can be a way of resisting cultural insularity and encouraging readers to engage with lives and perspectives beyond their own. In an increasingly divided world, what role do you think literary translation can play in fostering empathy and cross-cultural understanding?

JS: When I started out as a translator, Americans were (and of course this is a cliché, and reductive in the way that any cliché is) resistant to reading works in translation—translations were rarely reviewed in the major newspapers, were never big sellers, were a kind of perpetual niche market.  That’s changed tremendously in the past thirty years, but that old reticence before the foreign hasn’t just gone away (indeed, with the rise of Donald Trump and his ilk it’s come back stronger than ever, in a different and more virulent way).  English is such a powerfully hegemonic language, and that can lead to a stultifying sort of insularity: why should one read anything from some other culture when ours is so rich and so monumental?  That insularity is a weakness, not a strength: it leads to conformism, closed-mindedness, stagnation.  This is particularly true of Americans.  For most of the world, the presence of foreign languages in daily life is universal, but for many Americans it’s not hard to go six months without hearing any language other than English spoken.  For that reason I think it’s particularly important to foster translation in the United States: we desperately need to understand, first of all, that other cultures exist, and then that we can learn from them, that “the American way” is only one way of living, one way of thinking or writing.  Politically, culturally, economically, I think there’s a terrible danger in that kind of closedness.  And so I’m delighted to see foreign writing come to occupy a more visible place in the American cultural scene—there are big names like Elena Ferrante or Karl Ove Knausgård, but there is also deep interest in Japanese or Korean writing, say.  All of that is a very good thing, but the pessimist inside me (and he takes up a lot of space) wonders if it really changes anything.  More than anything, I suppose, I would like to see American readers open themselves to kinds of writing that don’t obey the strictures of what is traditionally considered “good writing” in this country.  NDiaye, for instance, does not, most emphatically, write like an American—those long sentences, wandering plots, somewhat unknowable and often unlikable characters, abrupt endings, all of that can present something of a challenge for readers trained on mainstream American writing, and if it troubles them, that’s a good thing, and if they can be open to it that’s even better.

RS: After more than three decades as a translator, what continues to excite and challenge you about the craft? And are there aspects of a writer's voice or style that you still consider fundamentally untranslatable?

JS:  A book that speaks to me still brings about exactly the same kind of excitement and delight that I felt thirty years ago—the exhilaration I felt when I first sat down to translate is still there, unchanged, if it’s the right sort of book.  I’m only interested in translating books with a singular, idiosyncratic voice; more or less everything I’ve ever translated falls into that category, because it’s precisely the singularity of the voice that moves me.  Sometimes, when I’m finding a project difficult, I swear to myself that my next translation will be of just an ordinary book: a straightforward story, a conventional style.  I’ve tried!—but I can never get more than a few pages in before my attention wanes.

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A few years ago I made a vow that, with the occasional exception, most notably NDiaye, I would only translate first novels by unknown writers.   I really love the idea of bringing about the recognition not just of a book but of a writer, not just of a new text but of a new voice; one of the joys of translation is showing people something they wouldn’t have seen otherwise, and if the author is no one they would have heard of, that only makes it more exciting.  I’ve discovered and translated some wonderful books since I made that vow: Rebecca Gisler’s About Uncle, Claire Baglin’s On the Clock, and the one I’m now working on, Emma Doude van Troostwijk’s Those Who Belong to the Day.  The search for new voices is tremendously exciting for me; they’re not always easy to find, but when one does find one it’s like seeing the sun come up after a long night.

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As for what I find challenging, well, I find everything about translation challenging.  I don’t feel like I’ve attained any sort of mastery, any sort of authority; I start every new translation as unsure of myself as I’ve ever been (perhaps more: thinking back, I believe I might have been guilty of a certain overconfidence when I was young).  I still scrabble around blindly for solutions to a text’s difficulties, I still doubt myself on a monumental scale, I still feel like probably anyone could do a better job than me.  That’s just what it is to be human!  Hard to overcome, but not all that hard to ignore: one just keeps going as if one were sure of oneself, and generally things will work out well enough.    

Thank you so much for talking to The Wise Owl about your work and your creativity. We wish you the very best in all your future literary and creative endeavours and hope to read more translations from your pen.

Thank you—it’s been a great pleasure thinking about these wonderful questions.