A journey, both geographic and linguistic, led Paul Eprile to a bookstore in France years ago, where a beautiful cover caught his eye.
“I admit that it was the cover that attracted me because I had never heard of the author – Jean Giono,” said Eprile. “Eventually I bought it and I brought it home with me and it just swept me away right from the start because it was so different from anything I had ever read.”
The book, Les Grands Chemins, or The Open Roads, opened his world to the work of author Giono, one of France’s literary treasures.
“The language was so rich, it was full of idiom, sayings and expressions in French,” said Eprile. “That’s what I really love the most. It’s full of, in effect, social history because those expressions merge from people’s experiences and their connection with the land and each other.”
Eprile, a Clearview resident, and his wife who share a love of France and its language were in Toulouse taking an intensive French university course when he discovered the author. Eprile decided to read more from Giono and went back to the beginning and read Colline, Giono’s debut novel, first published in 1929.
“I thought, I love this so much and I do understand the books… but there are so many levels on which you can understand writing; there’s the literal level, the plot the characters but it was the deeper level, the significance of the vocabulary and the idiomatic expressions that really got to me,” said Eprile.
He set out to understand the text on a deeper level yet and one day, rather spontaneously, he sat down in front of his computer and started to translate it into English.
Colline, or Hill, is the story of the inhabitants of four stone houses on a hill in Provence, the same region where Giono grew up. The resident peasants grapple with nature as a Godlike force as they fight to survive in the natural landscape.
It wasn’t until he was well into the translation that he contemplated the possibility of having it published.
Eprile said Giono himself has said he started out intending to write a novel but ended up writing a poem.
“Even one little misstep and it feels wrong and as the reader you sense that it’s wrong and what people call ‘translatorese’. As the translator, you should disappear and allow the reader to read the book in the voice of the original author,” he said.
Over years, Eprile undertook six complete revisions until the text sang in English, reflecting the poetic qualities of the French version.
Having worked in the industry for many years, Eprile knew that there wasn’t the same market for publishing and translation as there once was. However, he knew some people in the industry so he created a prototype of the book, professionally typeset and bound with a cover featuring the original artwork of his wife Debbie Honickman.
On one trip to France to scope out the landscape depicted in Giono’s work and to get visuals for the artwork, they met with the president of an association dedicated to Giono, headquartered in his house. One of the association’s goals is to expose Giono’s work to a wider North American audience. Through the association, Eprile met American writer Edmund White – another champion of Giono’s work – who referred him to New York Review Books.
Eventually Eprile received notice from the publisher that the translation was masterful and that they wanted him to translate another book by Giono.
“I was jumping up and down for 10 minutes, because this was seven years later. It had taken all this time and I had gotten so involved in it and wow, it was an incredible culmination. From then everything changed.”
Hill was released in English this week. Eprile is attending a promotional event in New York on May 3 and there is a launch of the book at Curiosity House Books in Creemore on May 14, with a reading, book signing and Q&A, beginning at 7 p.m.
The second book is called Melville, is due to be published in 2017.