Gross Margin - and other TLS Translation Awards

This time last night we were celebrating the TLS translation awards, the annual event at which the TLS editor hands out cheques to often unsung heroes who render foreign literature into English - and also tries his best to pronounce properly most of the foreign names.

My pronunciation went not too badly by past standards - with the worst slip a perverse rendering of the English 'Equator' as though it were a small country in South America. There was some small Swedish difficulty too but nothing too memorable, I hope.

So thanks to everyone for their indulgence and Paula Johnson for her patient advice. I decided some time ago that a linguist's life of essentially Latin and Ancient Greek alone had left me with a mind for other languages that can see texts but hardly hear them. The experience last year of writing  On The Spartacus Road (see previous posts and Scotsman review), a book based heavily what I was able and not able to remember while following the Italian route of the Third Slave War, reinforced that feeling into almost a truth. Or perhaps, when I read all those names from Arabic and Basque, I'm simply not being careful enough.

But heck, who cares about the guy with the white speech cards and the cheques in envelopes? We were there to celebrate the winners - which we jollily did with the wonderful Society of Authors,  British Centre of Literary Translation, funders and friends.

Among the most memorable parts of the prize-giving was the chance to hear the young Oxford translator from 'the French' ( as we must say on these occasions) who had won the Scott Moncrieff Prize. Polly McLean, a woman with a CV (I now discover) as remarkable as her stage presence, read from her version of a novella by Laurent Quintreau (pronounced correctly by the prize-giver, lest you were wondering)  called Gross Margin.

This extract - which, like the whole work, in both its languages, lacked any full stops - concerned the efforts of a dysfunctional band of business colleagues to decide which was the most suitable destination for their corporate-bonding weekend.

". . that fat sow, Bremont, she suggests Tunisia, typical, you can tell just by looking at her how much time she's spent in Djerba trying to get laid. I'd have to be completely pissed, or perhaps in a coma, Castiglione would have us all go to Thailand. . to crack our protective shells and give birth to a new group dynamic, Thailand, I might have guessed, I can just imagine her striding through the tropical rain forest in her safari shorts like some scary man-eating back-packer. . Tissier is suggesting Senegal, now there's a surprise, what a loser, poor, poor guy, whores on tap in the hotel complex, developing country, brothel for the west, I love African women, but coming after a a loser like Tissier, no thanks, really. . ."

And so on, through Uzbekistan, Switzerland, Brittany and Australia: something of a change of the sometimes somewhat solemn tone for our awards. McLean is a philanthropist, I discover online  tonight, who works in Africa and has given a well publicised eco-makeover to the Oxfordshire home formerly owned by Graham Greene's wife, Vivien. She has academic expertise in the benefits of meditation ,(surely that must be mediation) in primary schools.

I feel sure we have not heard the last of her.