In Conversation with Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes

Marguerite Duras writes about translation in Me & Other Writing (Dorothy, a publishing project), saying, “a book is never simply translated, it is transported into another language.” When I had the chance to interview Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes, the two translators behind Me & Other Writing, we talked about their translations, both together and individually, as well as their relationship to Duras’s writing. The two met while graduate students at The American University of Paris, where they first began to translate Duras. In the fall of 2020, Emma and Olivia each published individual translation projects; Emma published two translations from French-Moroccan writers, A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa (Seven Stories Press) and Straight from The Horse's Mouth by Meryem Alaoui (Other Press) in September, while Olivia published Jean-Luc Persecuted (Deep Vellum) in August. As much as Emma and Olivia could speak to the effects of their co-partnership on their work and each other, I was interested about the effects that translating Duras has had them as readers, translators, and creatives. I wanted to know how Duras’s writing can transport a translator somewhere else.