Date: Tuesday 10 November 2026

Time: 14.00 to 15.00

Location: Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub, TCD.

 

Seminar Title: ‘A Masochist's Guide to Translating Boris Vian’.

Speaker: Dr Terry Bradford (University of Leeds, UK)

 

Abstract

This presentation seeks to illustrate how Boris Vian's novels resist machine translation (utterly). A raft of translation challenges will be discussed through examples of solutions that I came up with in the process of translating Trouble dans les andains (Trouble in the Swaths) and Vercoquin et le plancton (Vercoquin and the Plankton), both published by Wakefield Press (US: CA, MA). His polyphonic and idiosyncratic punning, neologisms, specialist terminology, characters' names, intertexts, cultural references, and autobiographical details cannot be translated with any degree of success without research and knowledge of his life and œuvre. Only thus buoyed can one begin to get creative in order to overcome challenges arising in the translation of his surreal, logic-defying, and fiendishly multi-layered work. Reference will be made to Stanley Chapman's translation of Vian's L'Ecume des jours (Froth on the Daydream) in order to compare and discuss the advantages and pitfalls of a differently creative approach, namely "domestication".

Speaker Bio

Terry Bradford teaches French, translation, and interpreting at the University of Leeds in the north of England. Wakefield Press (US) and Liverpool University Press (GB) have published his translations of works by Boris Vian, Léon-Paul Fargue, Clément Pansaers, & Clémentine Mélois. Keruanserai Press (US) are publishing his translation Outside, the Storm(Clémentine Mélois), and Snuggly Books (US) are set to publish two tomes of his translations of short stories by André de Lorde (the "Prince of Terror" of French Literature). He is a regular contributor – of short translations, commentaries, and creative pseudotranslations – to US literary journal Typo: The International Journal of Prototypes, edited by Norman Conquest.

 

The visit of Terry Bradford is made possible thanks to the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Events Fund.

 

For further information on this seminar please email Dr James Hanrahan at HANRAHAJ@tcd.ie.