Bridging the Gaps: On Writing and Revising a Novel in Two Languages

The first time I studied English, I was thirteen. I hated it. I listened to the teacher read out loud an inane list of words. “Though,” “raw,” “knight.” The pronunciations required gymnastics my French tongue seemed unable to perform.

I truly learnt to speak English in Berlin. I was eighteen, working in a hostel and living with an Irish man fifteen years my elder who dated an Italian woman. We’d go for beers, chatting in the only language possible, English—him never speaking slower, me gathering new words as fast as I could, motivated by my upcoming exchange year in California. I had even heard that in the U.S., you could take writing classes. Two of my novels had been published in France and I was excited: soon, writing would be back at the top of my priority list.

In college in Paris, writing papers in English was a stubborn, robotic struggle to get my point across, memorizing scholarly phrases I had never heard anyone say out loud. However, one might consider. As the author reminds us. To conclude.

I needed words of another kind if I were to write fiction in English. Before the first writing workshop, I spent days wondering: How much of myself do I owe to French? Will my voice remain the same if I write in another language? How can I get to know characters who speak in a language that isn’t mine?

My peers provided other answers. In English you can fall in and out of love when in French, there is only one way of falling. The meaning of “whimsical” resembles the sound of the word. Bistro and flâneuse can’t be translated. I learned to remember in which exact circumstances I’d acquire a new verb or adjective. I collected them like jewels.

I had so little intuition in English that I had to ponder every word choice. There were no certainties. I was tiptoeing on a bridge built over the years with mismatched planks. Artificial, IKEA-looking, ready-to-use ones from my English classes in high school; polished wood from my Italian home in Berlin; circumvented, authentic, solid boards compiled over the past few months in California. When I wrote in English, the bridge would sway. I’d stare straight ahead, glancing at my mother tongue when I encountered a word that read like French. Ahead, the path had no end I could see. Yet the bridge hung high.

I’d never reach the other bank. The other side is a womb, it is a home, a couch where you fall asleep as a child listening to adults’ banter and chat, lulled by the language you’ve always known. It is a world you navigate with your eyes closed, because there is nothing to be seen and everything to be felt. You can teach words, but you can’t teach that world.

English, for me, will forever be a story of hanging in between. It doesn’t bother me: there is pleasure in that tension, in that discovery. I don’t live in exile; I haven’t had to flee my home. Happy, lucky circumstances led me to this language. What is at stake isn’t my life, only my voice.

During my time in California and my MFA program at Oregon State University, I barely wrote or read in French. I had convinced myself of a mysterious curse: if I were to return to French, never would I be able to write in English again. Maybe I sensed something else—that as a writer, if I were to go back to my mother tongue, it’d be like sliding into a warm bath. I wouldn’t be at sea anymore. Would I ever be tempted to leave that safe haven again?

I started writing a novel in English. Part of me thought it was madness; part of me didn’t want the journey to end. I was driven by the forgotten story of women jailed at the Parisian hospital La Salpêtrière and sent to Louisiana in the early 1700s to marry French settlers. A first draft of the opening chapter was the last piece I workshopped before graduating and leaving Oregon.

I settled back in Paris and English started to fade. I tried to coax it back. I read and taught fiction in English at Sciences Po and La Sorbonne, revised my novel Pelican Girls in that language, reinvented its structure and characters. I rewrote the entire manuscript ten times until an agent agreed to sign me. And when Sandra Pareja did, we kept working away.

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A month before submitting the book to publishers, Sandra called me. It was December, I had bronchitis. Sandra said: what about the French edition? I had feared that question for weeks. She asked me if I could translate the opening chapter in my mother tongue. Just the first one, a draft. By Christmas? She sounded apologetic. I blew my nose and said I’d do it.

I had already been working as a translator from the English to the French. I knew what it was like to try and give a piece this “afterlife” as Walter Benjamin considers any translation. I grew fonder of that middle ground, this attempt at remaining both creative and respectful of the author’s intentions. Except that if I were to translate my own novel, I no longer had to respect anyone, not even my past self.

I entered the world of my novel through another door. It was ancient, Parisian. When pushed, it creaked. On the other side was La Salpêtrière and its pensionnaires, sœurs officières, gouvernantes. None of these words were italicized. The language had an immediacy, an intimacy that brought those people and places into focus. Oily skin, bluish scars; fruit peel on a wet cobblestone. Even the weather had a different story to tell. I returned to my sources and checked the title of an employee, the precise word for a trade. I replaced paragraphs, expanded descriptions. Flaws showed themselves in the English text and I fixed them.

New sentences appeared. In the opening snapshot, I sat with the women, blinded all over again by the New Biloxi sun. January 1721: the pirogues moved with us. I knew that one of the girls would fall. When she did, sa robe se déploie comme de l’encre, her dress spread like black ink, as it had in English. But in French, the woman didn’t sink, didn’t struggle. Her feet met the ground. She found she could stand in this sea that, until now, had only been defined by its depth.

I realized that all these years, I had been worrying about the wrong thing. English would never entirely disappear if I ceased to write in this language; I was so concerned about losing English that I hadn’t realized I could lose French too. It was like arguing with a sibling, yelling horrendous words because you can, because they are family, ignoring that love is always a choice.

When I sold the novel—titled La Louisiane in French—and went back to work, my mother tongue wasn’t particularly happy to see me again. Its words offered resistance. Over hundreds of pages, I realized what I had been able to overlook when I had rewritten only the first chapter. My vocabulary had atrophied, my synonym bank shrunk, my phrasing sometimes became awkward. I no longer felt at home in French, neither did I in English.

I gathered a pile of books by Marcel Proust, Françoise Sagan and Romain Gary. I bathed in their worlds, walked on Normandy beaches among girls in flower, climbed on sun-drenched rocks by the sea, watched seals doze in the sand of Big Sur. The sentences were luxuriant, rich, in a way that would of course never be mine but that made me want to return to French, to Louisiana, better equipped.

I trudged on those dirty paths, traveled back in time both in French and English. What I learned in the French I sometimes brought into the English, and vice versa; on rarer occasions, the word felt too specific, the image or the verb too culturally unique to make the journey and so I left it there, anchored in the soil where it had first sprouted. Not everything can be grown from a cutting.

I thought about one of my favorite lines by Marcel Proust, in Time Regained: “the one true book, is one that…already exists in every one of us—[the writer] has only to translate it. The task and the duty of a writer are those of a translator.” It comforted me; this process wasn’t so different from what I had known. More than writing two novels, more than taming two different animals, I was wrestling with a two-headed beast. The story was singular, and each language provided the tools to unravel it.

Yet there were some specificities. Body language worked in English, but all the nodding, shrugging and head lifting felt excessive in French. I grew cautious with my instincts, which both helped and led me astray. English bore repetition much better than my mother tongue; revising a paragraph from La Louisiane at the line-level helped me see the echoes I had unintentionally built in my second language.

Writing between two languages felt like looking at each novel with a magnifying glass. It brought me back to when I was a child learning how to draw with my mother, a painter by trade. When I was done with a sketch, she’d take it to the mirror and I’d watch our reflections—our blond hair, her smile and cigarette, my drawing. And just like that, I knew everything that was wrong with it. The mirror revealed it all; it didn’t care to please or flatter. I saw the curve that fell flat, the wrong angles, the too ambitious lines. My mother handed me the eraser, the pencil. After my father gave me my love for reading and writing, she taught me one of the most important lessons about the creative process: that a sketch was only a sketch—that a first draft would and should be revised. My languages worked like the mirror of my childhood.

The texts became fraternal twins. Bilingual ones. They were the result of thousands of choices, marked by the French, U.S. and U.K editors’ suggestions. It was a Find Seven Differences game in my head—except there were a lot more, and the big picture kept changing.

In a few months, Sandra sold the novel in more than twenty countries. I was astonished; I had never imagined that I would one day receive the kind of questions that I usually sent to the authors I translate—when they aren’t dead. But first, foreign editors would ask: from which language should we translate? They’d dare ask the one question I couldn’t answer: which one is your favorite? And, although I don’t have children yet, I’d answer what most parents probably would—that both of them are.

Now that they are out in the world, I’m often asked to explain what differentiates the two. The French editors tightened the text, so I’m tempted to say it’s more straightforward, but I know that’s wrong, because I find the English language a lot more direct. I could list the backstory elements that appear and disappear from one book to the next, describe how the imagery changed. Yet I can’t sum up each novel in a few adjectives. So I try to return to the questions I asked myself in California when I first started writing in English. I find myself wondering what parts of me changed and which parts remained the same, if writing in two languages isn’t like growing, like aging, like the effect of time on all things.

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Pelican Girls by Julia Malye is available from Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.