Sophie Lewis: On translating Angst by Hélène Cixous

Sophie Lewis is a London-born translator and editor. Working from French and Portuguese, she has translated books by Marcel Aymé, Josephine Baker, Hélène Cixous, Annie Ernaux, Violette Leduc, Noémi Lefebvre, Nastassja Martin, Françoise Sagan, Leïla Slimani, Stendhal and Jules Verne; also Victor Heringer, Patrícia Melo, Sheyla Smanioto and Micheliny Verunschk, among others. For six years she was principal editor at publisher And Other Stories, and her most recent in-house position was as managing editor at The Folio Society. With Gitanjali Patel, she co-founded Shadow Heroes translation workshops. Lewis's translations have been shortlisted for the Scott Moncrieff and Republic of Consciousness prizes, and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. In 2022, she won the French-American Foundation's prize for non-fiction translation. In this episode, Sophie speaks about translating Hélène Cixous's Angst, and about the intellectual, ethical, and stylistic decisions that shape a translator's work. We talk about voice and fidelity, humour and idiom, and about what it means to write in English while carrying another language inside the sentence.