Please join author and translator Jacqueline Feldman as she launches her new book, On Your Feet: A Novel in Translations, which features a story by Nathalie Quintane. Feldman will read from On Your Feet, and then she'll be joined by philosopher and writer Justin Smith-Rui for a conversation about the project.

L’exercice est de trouver de la place à l’intérieur d’un texte de la même manière que l’a fait, un temps, la poétesse en traduisant son propre nom.

How, in a time of vibrant need, do you surface what is repressed societally—lodged in the political unconscious? By translating it, Jacqueline Feldman has found.

Combining fiction in translation, travelogue, essay, the postcard, and a scholarly monograph, On Your Feet tells the story of a provincial city’s victory over the far-right figure, Marine Le Pen. It is the story of a cat-owning local poet’s valiant resistance and of a US woman—let us say an American girl—making her own, Joan-of-Arc-like entrance into the fray. This novel in translations slows time to take, with precision, the imprint of a moment in French and world history. It was a moment when fascist speech could be distinguished, still, from the great mass, separated out—leaving the moment, like the language, open to intervention.

Making contributions to the theory and practice of translation, which has been considered an applied linguistics, On Your Feet is a searching theorization of the politics of literature. What it offers, to readers of both languages or either, is a new kind of applied literature.
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Jacqueline Feldman, a writer living in Massachusetts. On Your Feet is built around her translation of a story by Nathalie Quintane and received an Albertine Translation Fund grant. Her book Precarious Lease is forthcoming from Rescue Press.
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Published by dispersed holdings, On Your Feet: A Novel in Translations is available at After 8 Books.