4.5 The Best Error You Can Make: Brent Hayes Edwards and Jean-Baptiste Naudy on Claude McKay (SW)

What can a French translator do with a novelist who writes brilliantly about the “confrontation between Englishes?” How can such a confrontation be made legible across the boundaries of language, nation, and history? Renowned scholar and translator Brent Hayes Edwards sits down with publisher and translator Jean-Baptiste Naudy to consider these questions in a wide-ranging discussion about translating the Jamaican American writer Claude McKay. They focus especially on the recent translation into French of McKay’s 1941 Amiable with Big Teeth, which paints a satirical portrait of efforts by 1930s Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia. Brent and Jean-Baptiste consider McKay’s lasting legacy and ongoing revival in the U.S. and France. Translating McKay into French, they note, is a matter of reckoning with France’s own imperial history. That history, along with McKay’s complex understanding of race both in the U.S. and abroad, is illuminated in this conversation about one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most celebrated writers. Be sure to check out this episode’s special bonus material for a dramatic, bilingual reading from Amiable with Big Teeth by Jean-Baptiste!

Mentioned in this episode:

Amiable with Big Teeth, Claude McKay (1941)
Les Brebis Noirs de Dieu, Claude McKay, Trans. Jean-Baptiste Naudy (2021)
The Practice of Diaspora, Brent Edwards Hayes (2003)
A Long Way from Home, Claude McKay (1937)
The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985, James Baldwin (1985)
Banjo, Claude McKay (1929)
Home to Harlem, Claude McKay (1928)
Romance in Marseille, Claude McKay (1929)
The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois’s (1903)
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
Mais leurs yeux dardaient sur Dieu, Zora Neale Hurston, Trans. Sika Fakambi
Passing, Nella Larsen (1929)
Quicksand, Nella Larsen (1928)
Cane, Jean Toomer (1923)
Quartier Noir, Claude McKay, Trans. Louis Guilloux (1932)
Dictionary of Untranslatables, Ed. Barbara Cassin et al. (2014)
Phantom Africa, Michel Leiris, Trans. Brent Hayes Edwards (2017)
The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon (1961)

Listen and read:

Audio: The Best Error You Can Make

Transcript: 4.5 The Best Error You Can Make

10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW) – Novel Dialogue

Can a novel with a singular voice also be a chorus? Can it reject the conventions of the novel and still be a novel? Poet, essayist, and novelist Billy-Ray Belcourt tells critic Matt Hooley how his desire to write a novel that “would sound like something else,” led him to produce A Minor Chorus, his experimental debut novel. Together they consider how Billy-Ray’s vulnerable, first-person narrator makes room for other voices, or more precisely, how it becomes “a voice that could focalize the desires of a community.” Billy-Ray discusses how his influences— queer theory, indigenous novelists, and contemporary autofiction—harmonize in his search for a new form. While author and critic trace the circuits of grief and melancholy that run from Roland Barthes to Billy-Ray, their conversation is joyful, reminding listeners that romance and intimacy sustain us and that beautiful sentences matter. His answer to this season’s signature question attests to the way that even the classroom can be refashioned, like the novel, into a chorus. Mentioned in this episode By Billy-Ray Belcourt: A Minor Chorus A History of My Brief Body This Wound is a World Also mentioned: The Summer Day “Arundhati Roy Sees Delhi as a Novel” Rachel Cusk, The Shakespeare and Company Interview “The State of the Political Novel: An Interview with Édouard Louis” “100 Things About Writing a Novel” Mourning Diary Ann Cvetkovich Joshua Whitehead Mourning and Melancholia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1. 10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW) 43:57
2. 10.1 "Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions:” Aaron Gwyn and Sean McCann (JP) 46:37
3. We Better Laugh About It: A Discussion with Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí 47:03
4. 9.5 Who Owns These Tools? Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde (SW) 48:58
5. 9.4 “That In Between Time,” Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary (MAT) 52:05