William Rodarmor

William Rodarmor in 2012

William Rodarmor (born June 5, 1942) is an American journalist, editor, and translator of French literature. He is notable in the field of literary translation for having won the Albertine Prize, and the Lewis Galantière Award from the American Translators Association.

Quotes

• Good writers are an editor's stock in trade (...) You have to treasure them and treat them right.
  • Markowitz, Rachel (April 17, 2001). How to Survive the Dot-Com Meltdown. Bay Area Editors' Forum. Archived from the original on 2024-08-27.

• I hope this collection [of short stories from French authors] does justice to that variety [of distinctive literary voices]. Some of the stories are funny, somre are sad, a few are mysterios. The excerpts may seem to end too soon, but that's all to teh good. These pieces are neither bonbons nor full-course meals. They're more like hearty appetizers. You're at a bountiful buffet, and you should feel free to come back for more.
  • Rodarmor, William (2008). "Preface". in Rodarmor, William; Livia, Anna. France: A Traveler's Literary Companion. United States: Whereabouts Press. p. ix-xii. ISBN 9781883513184. 

• Food makes history in France, in legend and in fact. (...) But when Charles de Gaulle radioed the French underground that the D-Day invasion was imminent, his message included the key phrase les carottes sont cuites. Literally, this means "the carrots are cooked," and metaphorically "it's all over." What other nation marches to war in the glow of beta carotene?
  • Rodarmor, William (2011). "Preface: An Amuse-Bouche from the Editor". in Rodarmor, William. French Feast: A Traveler's Literary Companion. United States: Whereabouts Press. p. xi-xii. ISBN 9780982785218. 

• Translating a big book is like getting married: You’re going to spend a long time together. You may put in months weighing each word, often more carefully than the author."
  • Bridenne, Miriam (November 9, 2021). William Rodarmor on 2021 Albertine Prize Finalist ‘And Their Children After Them’. Albertine Books. Archived from the original on 2024-08-27.

1971 photograph William Rodarmor in fisherman’s cap aboard Tiki in the South Pacific.

• Like most translators, I’m a ventriloquist, and I work hard to make people sound like themselves, and not like me.
  • Bridenne, Miriam (November 9, 2021). William Rodarmor on 2021 Albertine Prize Finalist ‘And Their Children After Them’. Albertine Books. Archived from the original on 2024-08-27.

• [Literary translation work] has all the pleasures of creative writing, and you never have writer’s block.
  • Bridenne, Miriam (November 9, 2021). William Rodarmor on 2021 Albertine Prize Finalist ‘And Their Children After Them’. Albertine Books. Archived from the original on 2024-08-27.

• My loyalty as a translator is to both the author and the reader, but in a pinch, I try to help the reader.
  • Rodarmor, William (2022). "Translator's Note – Wrestling with Weill". Pow! Right in the Eye!. Wiley. pp. VII-IX. ISBN 9780470443842. 

• The sex scenes were the toughest to translate. Sex is notoriously hard to write about, and no easier to translate. My prose probably falls somewhere between puritanical and pornographic. Maybe sex is just better in French.
  • Bridenne, Miriam (November 9, 2021). William Rodarmor on 2021 Albertine Prize Finalist ‘And Their Children After Them’. Albertine Books. Archived from the original on 2024-08-27.

• Like it or not, a translator has to take liberties. How many depends on closely the translator hews to the words of the text. I’m on the side of the reader, so I’d never produce a literal, word-for-word translation, however faithful. My goal is always to produce a text so smooth that the reader isn’t aware it’s a translation. It should read like a book that Mathieu would have written if he were more fluent in English. So I occasionally take liberties, especially with jokes, slang, and idioms. But thanks to email, I can run my textual sins by the author before committing them to paper. Even after some forty books and screenplays, I still love doing translations. It has all the pleasures of creative writing, and you never have writer’s block.
  • Bridenne, Miriam (November 9, 2021). William Rodarmor on 2021 Albertine Prize Finalist ‘And Their Children After Them’. Albertine Books. Archived from the original on 2024-08-27.

• (Speaking about his translation work of a diary by Berthe Weill) When it comes to typographical style, Berthe Weill is happily inimitable. She doesn't waste time on line breaks, so passages with a lot of dialogue look like sheets of mud. And she never met an ellipsis she didn't like. French writers use ellipses fairly often, but we avoid them in English because they... look vague... In my early drafts, I eliminated most of the ellipses, but I restored many of them later. That's because Weill's prose rhythim is closer to Machine Gun Kelly than Marcel Proust, and I realized that the ellipses ehlp smoooth out her darting leaps from topic to topic.
  • Rodarmor, William (2022). "Translator's Note – Wrestling with Weill". Pow! Right in the Eye!. Wiley. pp. VII-IX. ISBN 9780470443842. 

• Jokes [are] the bane of every trasnlator's existence.
  • Rodarmor, William (2022). "Translator's Note – Wrestling with Weill". Pow! Right in the Eye!. Wiley. pp. VII-IX. ISBN 9780470443842. 

Quotes about William Rodarmor

• Rodarmor's translation is seamless, rendered with that appearance of effortlessness that only the most gifted and painstaking translators can accomplish.
  • Cirillo, Nancy R. (11 September 2008), "Reviewed Work: Diasporas by Stephanie Dufoix, William Rodarmor", Symplokē (University of Nebraska Press) 16 (1/2): 338–341 
• My grown-up novels have been translated into several languages, but my relationship with my translators has always been limited to a few e-mails to clear up some point or other. With William Rodarmor, all that changed! He started by telephoning me to introduce himself, and we very quickly built a relationship of trust. And he got passionately involved with the text, wanting to know everything about everything, including somewhat remote elements of the historical context that would better enable him to understand this or that detail. He literally bombarded me with messages and sometimes tracked me to my lair, because he wound up knowing the book better than I did! And he managed it all with great humor.
  • Prévost, Guillaume (2007). Q&A with Guillaume Prévost. Children's Literature. Archived from the original on 2008-07-20. Retrieved on March 7, 2009.

• As a writer de Villiers had a serious shortcoming: The man could not write. (...) Indeed his French prose is so mechanical, so flat and so replete with Franglais. (...) William Rodarmor's English translation of Madmen is actually better than the original.
  • Luttwak, Edward N. (August 8, 2014). "Book Review: 'The Madmen of Benghazi' by Gérard de Villiers – A sex-packed soap opera full of hard-headed political realism". The Wall Street Journal: p. 11. 

External links

• Profile of Rodarmor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism