Novels pile up in every corner of the living room, even covering the couch. To establish his long silhouette, Gérard Meudal, 73, has to make do with a meager stool. On this August afternoon, the translator apologizes for the mess in his Parisian apartment: he has just returned from a poetry festival in Sète (Hérault), and is about to return to his country house in lick.
On August 12, 2022, it was there that he learned with horror that Salman Rushdie, the author he had been translating for fifteen years at the time, had been stabbed by a fanatic during a conference, in Chautauqua, New York. Stupor can still be read in his blue eyes. “I was devastated, convinced that he would not survive”, says the translator.
A month later, while the 75-year-old naturalized American novelist, seriously injured, was still in hospital, Gérard Meudal received the manuscript of The City of Victory, written before the attack. An epic set in the 14th century, in India, and describing a perfectly egalitarian city, founded by a young girl possessed by a deity. The novel will be released on September 6 by Actes Sud editions.
Wave of attacks in the early 1990s
Translating Salman Rushdie is much more than a literary affair. Its foreign publishers and translators also expose themselves to the consequences of the fatwa. Some have paid dearly, sometimes with their own lives. Launched against the writer in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini, after the publication the previous year of satanic verseswhich he considered blasphemous towards Islam, the fatwa sentenced the author to death, but also “all those involved in its publication”. A wave of attacks took place in the early 1990s.
In 1991, Hitoshi Igarashi, Salman Rushdie’s Japanese translator, was murdered in Tokyo, shortly after his Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, was stabbed in Milan. In 1993, in Sivas, Turkey, an angry mob set fire to the hotel where a festival was taking place involving Aziz Nesin, who had translated and published in Turkish (without the author’s permission) extracts from Satanic verses. Aziz Nesin manages to escape, but 37 people die in the fire.
The same year, the Norwegian editor of Rushdie, William Nygaard, was wounded by three bullets outside his home in Oslo. In France, for security reasons, the translator of satanic verses remained anonymous. The French version, published by Éditions Christian Bourgois, is attributed to “A.Nasier”or Alcofribas Nasier, the pseudonym used by François Rabelais (of which Alcofribas Nasier is the anagram).
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