{"id":6170,"date":"2026-01-14T01:37:01","date_gmt":"2026-01-14T01:37:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/?p=6170"},"modified":"2026-05-21T02:13:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T02:13:17","slug":"no-one-saw-the-nobel-coming-a-qa-with-modianos-translator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/?p=6170","title":{"rendered":"“No one saw the Nobel coming”: A Q&A with Modiano’s translator"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On Wednesday, 18 February, 2026, Another Look will present Nobel prizewinning Patrick Modiano\u2019s 2007 novella, In the Caf\u00e9 of Lost Youth<\/a> (New York Review Books). The event will take place, as always, at 7 p.m. at Levinthal Hall, 424 Santa Teresa Street on the Stanford campus. You can read more about the event <\/em>here<\/span><\/strong>. Meanwhile, Modiano’s eminent translator, <\/em>Chris Cooke, <\/strong>has kindly agreed to answer a few questions about the collaboration.<\/em>(Photo courtesy Chris Cooke)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn novel upon novel Modiano has developed his ability to use almost non-existent documentation \u2013 old telephone numbers, street addresses \u2013 to endow the past with entrancing life and his Parisian cityscape with a singular voice.\u201d ~ Nobel award ceremony speech)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1.<\/strong> You are considered Patrick Modiano\u2019s foremost translator of the Nobel writer into English. How did that collaboration begin<\/strong>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m just one of several translators who have translated Modiano, although I was perhaps early in releasing a translation during the buzz caused by his Nobel win. Many other excellent translators have translated Modiano. Daniel Weissbort translated Rue des Boutiques Obscures<\/em> (Missing Person) in 1980; Barbara Wright translated Voyage de noces<\/em> (Honeymoon) in 1990; these were both important translations of key works, well before Modiano came to international renown. Mark Polizzotti has translated nine or ten, Damion Searls and Frank Wynne have translated or retranslated works in recent years as well.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The situation around my translation was quite unique, in that I had already completed the translation for another, smaller publisher when the Nobel Prize was announced. That publisher had been negotiating the contract for many months, and no one saw the Nobel coming. The French rightsholder immediately cut off negotiations with that small publisher and the book went to \u201cauction\u201d with his other key works. Fortunately for me, NYRB Classics agreed to use the translation I had already completed, although the book was made available in a different translation in the U.K., as MacLehose Press chose to publish a translation by Euan Cameron. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How closely did you work with the author?

<\/strong>I was not in communication with Patrick Modiano while translating the book; when translating living authors, sometimes we exchange with them or send them some questions, other times not. Modiano as reputed to be quite reclusive. Vox<\/em> magazine even once wrote a bit about the adjective \u201cmodianesque,\u201d which they say \u201chas come to refer to a particularly ambiguous person or situation, as a nod to Modiano\u2019s reclusive, mysterious nature.\u201d According to The Guardian<\/em>, the Nobel Academy couldn\u2019t get in touch with him ahead of time to let him know he was the winner of the prize. In the Caf\u00e9 of Lost Youth<\/em> was also one of my first book-length translations, begun in 2011, and back then I wouldn\u2019t have known how to contact him if I tried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. What are the particular difficulties in working with Modiano\u2019s text? What observations have you made about how Modiano\u2019s French translates into your English?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In French, Modiano\u2019s writing is pleasant because of an understated simplicity. He isn\u2019t ornate, his lexicon isn\u2019t overly complicated. Compared to many French authors, his syntax is quite simple: his sentences are on the short side, and he doesn\u2019t string together clauses or pepper the text with commas in the way that many French writers tend to do. Of course, finding a similar flow and simplicity in the English version was a goal for me, but it wasn\u2019t as easy as I had expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I discovered that if I stuck too closely to a sentence structure that mirrored Modiano\u2019s French structure, the resulting English sentences felt quite choppy in places; at times it felt a bit like reading a grocery list. I went here. I did this. Next, I did that. I looked over at the bananas. Then I found the carrots. Et cetera.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To correct for this, and to end up with an English style that flowed in a simple but natural way that felt similar to the flow of Modiano\u2019s French, I found myself having to do the opposite of what we so often need to do when translating literature from French to English: instead of turning a long and overly complex sentence held together by commas into several shorter, simpler sentences, which is quite common, I found myself sometimes having to stitch two or three short sentences together with commas. It was an eye-opener for me to see this difference between the languages, and in how similar structures can \u201cfeel\u201d different in different languages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The project led to some interesting research. First, a few of the characters were based on real people. The patrons of the Cond\u00e9 include several real writers, and the book draws on the Situationist movement in certain ways. Adamov was a playwright and translator, for example, connected with the Surrealist group in the 1920s and the Theatre of the Absurd in the late 40s and 50s. He got himself into political trouble both during and after World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maurice Rapha\u00ebl was also a real writer, this was a pseudonym. He mostly published under the name Ange Bastiani. He wrote some crime novels, and also a kind of argot-laden prose reminiscent of Louis-Ferdinand C\u00e9line. His past was also rather mysterious, and it is said he was a noted collaborator during the War who managed to avoid the worst fates of the \u00e9puration after the fall of Germany and the Vichy government. His first novels are said to have been written while he was in prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 Finally, there are also the connections between several of the characters and their literary preoccupations with movements like the Lettrists and the later Situationist International, concepts like the d\u00e9rive, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even more than these historical and literary references, Modiano\u2019s work often leads to a lot of research into one of his most important reoccurring characters: the city of Paris itself. I often had a map of the city on hand when working on this book, but the project led to some interesting archival work, too: Paris has changed since the days this book takes place. Streets have been renamed, building went on all over the city in the decades that followed the War, new roads and metro stations and parks and squares have since come and gone. Modiano is quite clever at anchoring his stories in the history of the city, using the odd old street name or the earlier incarnation of a station that isn\u2019t there anymore. Another fine technique he uses to focus his novels on an uncertain past that lives in memories and, at least in this case, in old maps and books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Modiano\u2019s entire list has as its primary concern the uncertainty of past time and memory. His protagonists seek proof, but typically end up sifting through fragments, traces, disconnected memories, faulty memories or lacunae. Inevitably, this leads to a text rich in disparate details, any trace that can remain of lives and events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. Modiano has worked with other translators as well as you, including Mark Polizzotti, and Damion Searls. Translation is a hidden world to most of us. How would you describe your different approaches?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

All translators have their own methods, their own approaches, their own idiosyncrasies, and to some extent\u2014in my belief\u2014their own voices. I couldn\u2019t tell you how Mark Polizzotti\u2019s and Damion Searls\u2019s approaches differ from my own approach to a text. I first met both Damion and Mark at the launch event held in Brooklyn for this particular Modiano novel. Damion had translated Une Jeunesse<\/em> (Young Once) for NYRB Classics, and our two translations were released on the same day. Mark was the moderator for our discussion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019d like to learn more about either of their views on translation, they have both written books on the craft: Mark\u2019s book Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto<\/em> was published by M.I.T. Press back in 2018; Damion\u2019s book The Philosophy of Translation<\/em> was published by Yale University Press in 2024. They are both insightful and approachable works, even if the titles sound a bit heavy, and are both infused with their author\u2019s own personalities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

6. Why did you choose to translate In the Caf\u00e9 of Lost Youth<\/em> and not another of Modiano\u2019s many novels?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I discovered Modiano\u2019s novels on an extended trip to France in 2009. I brought several back home with me (Canada at that point) and picked up translations when I saw them. Rue des Boutiques Obscures <\/em>(Missing Person) in Daniel Weissbort\u2019s translation, Du plus loin de l\u2019oubli<\/em> (Out of the Dark) in Jordan Stump\u2019s translation, Dora Bruder in Joanna Kilmartin\u2019s translation. His themes of memory & forgetting, the instability of the past, the traces we leave behind with our lives, these all spoke to me. The feeling that you\u2019ve forgotten something, or somebody, the bubbling up of random, unanchored fragments of memory, the way we at times construct memories from photographs that we don\u2019t actually remember, the way two people who shared an event can remember it so differently, these were all feelings I had long wondered about, and they are all present in Modiano\u2019s work. Having recently completed my first book-length translation, I thought I\u2019d try my hand at translating one of his books. But which one?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Modiano had made his first appearances in English translations long before. A trickle early on, then a handful of translations from Harper Collins and Bison Books in the late 80s and 90s, then a handful from Godine in the early 2000s. He had never really gained much traction, however, and I reflected on why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My take on this led to my choice of In the Caf\u00e9 of Lost Youth<\/em>. One of the principal criticisms I\u2019ve read from people who don\u2019t enjoy Modiano, whether they\u2019ve read him in English or in French, is that he \u201cjust writes the same novel over and over again.\u201d In many ways, this is true, but I feel it\u2019s also missing the point. To me, none of these books are the same, even if there is a fair amount of overlap between them. The themes I\u2019ve mentioned above are always present, but in each work, Modiano explores them from a slightly different angle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I like to think of it this way: when faced with a very difficult (or impossible) question, what is the best way to approach it? From every possible angle. This is how I\u2019ve always read Modiano. Each additional volume helps you connect a few more dots or shade in a bit more of the image, but that image will never be entirely available to you. Still, the more angles you approach it from, the closer you come to seeing something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This led to my choice of In the Caf\u00e9 of Lost Youth<\/em>, which I find to be slightly atypical of him, in that it in a way works as a microcosm of his full book list. What I mean is this: for Modiano to really work for a reader, it\u2019s best to read a bunch of his books. This wasn\u2019t possible in English at the time. The handful that had been translated were mostly out of print and not easy to obtain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Caf\u00e9 of Lost Youth<\/em> offers readers a shortcut to this, in that its multiple narrator format (the student, the detective, Roland, Louki) do this within one single work: each of them approaches the same past from a different angle, from a different perspective, and each one sees it differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By combining their four perspectives, the reader comes closer to seeing a truth, but it remains elusive in certain ways. This shortcut led me to believe that I could offer English-language readers a better taste of what makes Modiano great in a single read, and hopefully he could gain some traction, which would allow more of his work to be translated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, of course, the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded, and suddenly the translations came pouring out and it was moot. Caf\u00e9<\/em> is still one of my favorite Modiano novels, however, and I think that these qualities make it a good place to start, or a good choice for people who only want to read one of his books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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