Alyson Waters
Alyson Waters is a prize-winning translator of French and francophone literary fiction, art history, philosophy, and children's books. She has translated works by Albert Cossery, Louis Aragon, René Belletto, Jean Giono, Eric Chevillard, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Emmanuel Bove, Claude Ponti, and many others. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a PEN Translation Fund grant, and was awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize twice. She taught literary translation at Yale for three decades and currently teaches at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn.
The colors that come to mind when reading Antoine Volodine, both here in The Monroe Girls and in his excellent 2017 novel Radiant Terminus, approach those of Francis Bacon: I see phthalo greens, cadmium red spikes, and the possibly-carcinogenic purples derived from coal tar. As in the work of Bacon, Volodine's fundamental materials seem to carry some kind of psychic weight. Can one describe hell in a non-pejorative sense, as a blurring between the living and the dead, as a matter-of-fact erasure of stability itself with the background hum of electricity and an ever-present urge to howl? If so, this seems to be the territory Volodine is mapping, which I recommend following closely.