Stephanie Smee on translating The Godmother (La Daronne)
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There’s one film at the 2021 Alliance Francaise French Film Festival that immediately stood out to me—The Godmother (La Daronne).
Starring Isabelle Huppert, this dark comedy follows the fed up Patience Portefeux who works as a French/Arabic translator for the Paris Police. When she realises the target of a drug sting is a friend’s son, she steps in to save him, unbeknownst to her colleagues.
Now Patience must find the ditched shipment of top-quality hash in the French countryside before her colleagues do—and when she does, she sees an opportunity. Transforming herself into ‘Mrs Ben Barka’, she poses as a Morrocan drug lord, using her insider police knowledge to connect up with two hilarious small-time crooks—Scotch and Cocoa Puff.
Shenanigans involving rival drug lords, a retired sniffer dog and Patience’s romantic relationship with her Police Chief ensue as Patience races against the clock to shift the drugs.
Given everything I’ve just written, it’s perhaps no surprise that I chose The Godmother as the film for HerCanberra’s annual Ladies Night screening.
But did you know that The Godmother was adapted from a book, La Daronne by Hannelore Cayre, and that the talented translator responsible for the English edition is from Canberra?
Meet Stephanie Smee—full-time translator, former lawyer and passionate bibliophile. Ahead of Stephanie’s Q&A with Alliance Francaise de Canberra’s Nancy Ford-Waites at our Ladies Night this Thursday 11 March (which just released an extra 20 or so tickets! Get yours here), we chatted to Stephanie about all things French and bookish.
You studied Arts/Law at Adelaide University, followed by Honours in French and French legal theory at the University of Sydney. Do you remember the moment that the French language became a passion of yours?
I was always interested in languages, having grown up in a household where I think at least five or six were being taught or spoken. My mother is Swedish and speaks about five languages herself, and my parents met in Geneva, Switzerland, when they were both studying and French was their first shared language, so I guess they, too, had a soft spot for the language.
I made one of those decisions you make at university, after living in Germany for a year after school, that I had more to learn in French than in German, and not enough room in my degree at the time to continue with both so I persisted with the French. And it’s not a decision I’ve regretted!
You enjoyed a storied embarked on a legal career—working as an Associate to his Honour Justice Michael Kirby, and as a solicitor in Sydney and London. What inspired you to make the switch to full-time translation?
While I really enjoyed my legal studies, and the years that I worked as an Associate to Justice Kirby and as a solicitor, particularly the fabulous friends I made, I’m not sure my skills were best utilised in that profession!
I took the opportunity to gain my professional translation qualifications after my second child was born, getting on to 20 years ago now, and first worked as a legal translator before making the switch to literary translation which now occupies me full time.
I have always loved literature, and as one other incredibly accomplished translator has commented before me, it is the perfect job for somebody who loves playing with language and words but who has no talent for original work. That remark, I know, was made tongue in cheek, because of course literary translation is indeed ‘original work’. But it is a special privilege to be able to crawl into the minds of such talented authors and find a way to convey the marvellous voices and images they have created.
Tell us about your journey in translating La Daronne/The Godmother. What were the particular challenges or highlights of this manuscript?
I just loved translating Hannelore Cayre’s work—it was a complete treat. She has such a distinctive style; it’s spikey and ruthless and often hysterical. And it cracks along at a relentless pace.
The plot is tight and Hannelore’s ability to draw a character with just a few brushstrokes of her pen is truly extraordinary. I particularly enjoyed finding the voice of the main character, Patience Portefeux.
I guess the most challenging aspect of the text was getting on top of the slang/street language used by the drug dealers in the narrative, the various descriptions of the “products” they were selling, the shorthand texts they sent to arrange the deals, and so forth. I became quite expert at some aspects of the Moroccan hash cultivation industry! That’s one of the wonderful aspects of a translator’s job… the exposure to so many different fields of knowledge and areas of expertise, some of them more savoury than others!
Your readers might also enjoy my more recent translation of Hannelore Cayre’s The Inheritors—they will recognise her punchy style in a narrative that alternates between Paris on the eve of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 and the modern-day. And it also has a marvellously feisty female lead!
Isabelle Huppert as Patience Portefeux in The Godmother.
And now that it’s a film—what are your thoughts? Does Isabelle Huppert do the character of Patience Portefeux justice? Would you have done anything differently?
I think Isabelle Huppert does a marvellous job with her character of Patience. She is an extraordinary actor and her expressions tell a thousand stories. It probably was a tricky text to adapt to the big screen, in many ways; Hannelore packs a lot of detail into a relatively short book. Of course, she—Hannelore Cayre—was very involved in writing the screenplay, I believe, and I thought the movie did fantastically well to capture the pace of the narrative and the many different personalities in the book.
So much of what lends the book its depth is the social commentary that goes on in Patience’s head; it runs like an electrical current through the text, and that must have been difficult to adapt. But as is often the case, what you lose in some aspects, you gain in others.
A movie is a different beast to a book, and I really enjoyed it. Rather than comment further and have to give spoiler alerts, I can only suggest your readers see the movie AND read the book and judge for themselves!
Naturally, we hear you’re a bookworm. Tell us about your love of literature—what’s are your top three novels (at the moment!) and what’s on your To Be Read pile?
I guess I am constantly reading a mixture of French and English books as I’m always on the lookout for the next translation project!
Some recent English language favourites include Richard Powers’ The Overstory which was truly one of the most remarkable books I have read in a long time. It won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and I can’t recommend it highly enough. I also just love anything written by Elizabeth Strout and I was delighted recently to discover one that I had not yet read, which I promptly devoured, Abide with Me. She is just masterful.
And an absolute favourite from last year, which many of your readers will I’m sure already have discovered, is the wonderful Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss. I inhaled it—it is the sort of book you will not want to put down, and yet you won’t want it to finish. I have given it to so many friends this last six months, I’ve even given it twice to a couple of girlfriends, having forgotten I had already given it to them! And they have all loved her intelligent, insightful writing. It has you snorting with laughter one minute and inhaling a sharp breath of disbelief and sadness the next. Read it.
My TBR pile is enormous. I subscribe to some wonderful small independent publishing houses who specialise in translated literature so I constantly get treats in the mail and can’t seem to keep up!
