Kim de l’Horizon – A creative cramp: “Blood Book” challenges translators – culture

Be creative and free, said Kim de l’Horizon to the translator of the novel “Blood Book”. Rose Labourie took this to heart for her translation of the novel into French.

It was a sensation: In autumn 2022, the novel “Blood Book” by Swiss author Kim de l’Horizon won the German and Swiss Book Prizes. In the meantime, translators from a wide variety of target languages ​​are working on the text – and are faced with difficult problems.

Various translation hurdles

There is the mother tongue Bern German, which the main character works through in a love-hate relationship. There is an Anglicism-dominated youth language next to antiquated grandmother’s words. But there is also a consistent gender difference.

But above all: The standard language is soaked with sometimes hardly recognizable Helvetisms.

Prompt for creativity

How can the dialect as an everyday language in German-Swiss and the “language of the heart” be transferred to French, for example? Because here the dialects were practically eradicated in the past centuries as inferior language varieties.

Rose Laborie has already found the answers: her translation into French will be published in the autumn. A letter from Kim de l’Horizon, which asked all translators to use the language as creatively and freely as in the original, helped her. Rose Laborie took that seriously.

For a longer dialect passage in the novel, she searched in the almost disappeared dialects of French-speaking Switzerland, in the so-called Patois Romands. With the help of dictionaries, videos and songs like the famous “Ranz des Vaches” (Patois Fribourgeois), Rose Labourie has created her own imaginary dialect. For French speakers it is still just understandable:

“La Barbara Züllig ètè dloin la pluch chaj dè tôt lè fam dcha famy.” (Hetre pourpre)

“dBarbara Züllig is äuä di weisischti Frou gsi i irere Sippä.” (blood book)

This free use of language also fits the narrative I in the novel. Because this wants to evade the compulsion of the unambiguous, the “binary fascism”, as it is called, as far as possible. It is language in particular that allows this freedom, “because the element of language is fluidity,” as the novel puts it.

The «Truckli» becomes the «boîtillon»

Dialect words like “Chrättli” or pet names like “Bärli” have an emotional but often ambivalent memory value for the main character. In order to do justice to the weight of these words in the text, Rose Labourie has compiled her own “Dictionary of the Sea Language” (in “Blood Book” “Sea Language” means the mother tongue). To do this, she used terms from French dialects from all over the world, from Old French, from specialist areas and also from her own imagination.

«Chüschele» translates them as «chucheler» (instead of correctly «chuchoter»). And the “Truckli” of the “Grossmeer” become “boîtillons” in the French text. A technical term from the milling trade that can evoke many associations in French speakers.

Reading the novel, Rose Labourie felt as if she were reading a kind of magic formula that pushed the boundaries of language. With a lot of effort and creativity, she created her very own magic formula for the “Blood Book” in French.