The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Mailer in Translation: The Naked and the Dead: Difference between revisions

By any reckoning, Malaquais had to be one of the most intelligent and fascinating people the young Norman had ever met. Primarily an autodidact, Malaquais came from a learned family: his father was a Classicist and his mother was a musician, but having left home at the age of seventeen, Malaquais had to earn his living doing manual labor and read and study on his own. Without knowing it, he had followed the educational precepts of Michel de Montaigne (1539–1592) in that he traveled before settling down to reading, books and all that is meant by “education.”

Malaquais is a wizard—a Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov rolled into one. Not a native speaker of either English or French, he achieves a ''tour de force'' in his translation of Mailer’s immense novel. Malaquais faces some linguistic challenges both cultural and semantic that the two languages present. The vagabond years of Malaquais prove valuable in his translation. He understands the use of informal speech as well as that of downright vulgar vocabulary. From his experiences as a laborer in the silver mines in Provence and at Les Halles, the gigantic food market in the heart of Paris, to his friendship and correspondence with André Gide, the translator can communicate in any register. Malaquais is in command of the sophisticated nuances that the French language affords and he applies them to Mailer’s narrative where appropriate.