I always go for the things that are experimental and weird. That was my first real translating experience. It’s a very weird contemporary book of prose poetry. So I got a copy of it in French and started translating Sphinx.ĮR: I did a book of prose poetry, which is coming out next month actually. What kind of difference would come out? I’ve always been interested in translation of Oulipian works and how they change in another language. I was curious about how one would write a genderless book in English versus how one would write one in French. I went looking for it in English and couldn’t find it: it hadn’t been translated. I was really curious to see how someone would have translated the book. I read a book by Daniel Levin Becker called Many Subtle Channels about the Oulipo members in which he mentions Sphinx. Mirene Arsanios: How did you encounter Sphinx? And what made you want to translate it?Įmma Ramadan: When I was in college, I got interested in the Oulipo movement. Our conversation swayed between the translation of the book and Garréta’s narrative itself, which Emma viewed with the intimacy that only a translator can.

I met with Emma to discuss her translation of Sphinx.

This is no small feat, when one considers the entrenched patriarchy native to the French language, where almost all objects are sexed. Garréta’s Oulipian constraint extends itself into a pronoun-agnostic narrative in which the reader is rendered blind to the characters’ gender. The narrator is a young, disillusioned theology student-turned-DJ who falls in love with A***, an African-American dancer living in Paris.

Emma Ramadan is the translator of the Oulipian novel Sphinx, written in 1986 by French author Anne Garréta.

Sphinx anne f garréta