Translating Double nationalité

In the novel Double nationalité (2016) by the French-Hungarian novelist Nina Yargekov, a young amnesiac finds herself in an airport with a suitcase and a purse containing two passports, two phones, two wallets, and one moist towelette. The nearly 700 pages that follow chart an uncommonly literal journey of self-discovery, in which she evaluates every conjecture about her identity, no matter how shrewd or absurd, with analytical rigor and absolute sincerity. The result is not only an incisive geopolitical allegory but also a disarmingly funny shaggy-dog story, a rushing stream of consciousness full of intricately tuned swings from deduction to irony to melodrama. And it’s a sprawling bundle of headaches for our friend the translator, whose project this year is to grapple with all its skillfully wrought idioms and register shifts and self-reflexive quirks of language. This fractal lecture will consider such dilemmas both philosophically and practically, with examples from the text.

Daniel Levin Becker is a writer, editor, and translator based in Paris. He has been a member of the literary collective Oulipo since 2009. He is the author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (2012) and What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language (2022) and the translator of books by authors including, most recently, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Éric Chevillard, and Laurent Mauvignier. At the Institute, Levin Becker will be working on an English translation of Nina Yargekov’s Double nationalité (2016), a long novel in which a young amnesiac with dual citizenship slowly pieces together her identity, both personally and geopolitically.

The Rendez-Vous de l’Institut Series is generously supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. You will find a full calendar of the Fellows’ Talk

Host or Publisher Institute for Ideas and Imagination