Jennifer Solheim is the Associate Director of the BookEnds novel revision fellowship of Southampton Arts at StonyBrook University. Her short stories and essays have appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Pinch, and Poets & Writers. She is the author of The Performance of Listening in Postcolonial Francophone Literature (2018, Liverpool University Press), and holds a PhD in French from the University of Michigan and an MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars.
“No relationship is entirely transparent. More important, our understandings of relationships evolve and shift—knowledge dawns on us, bit by bit with new information, context, and different points of view. How two bodies interact in unseeable places and ways can tell an entire story, whether particular…or universal.”
I’ve always been interested in family and the idea of family and the families we make for ourselves. Family is composed of the people you love most. Therefore, they’re the people most likely to hurt you. I’m interested, then, in how we hurt each other, often without meaning to, just by what we want.
Thanks to an unusual collaboration between two translators, Marguerite Duras’ 1971 novel L’Amour has been translated into English for the first time.
Jennifer Solheim weaves the story of her decade-long translation of Yolaine Simha’s I Saw You on the Street into a meditation on the nature of the translator’s labor. Solheim looks at history, politics, time and rereading to parse how “translation can become a snake biting its own tail: the translator as writer and reader is simultaneously subsumed and resurrected by the text in the original.”
