Tempestuous is the language we carry in our head, the music of new words and lovers, the cities we dip into on a lost weekend. Jeanne, the eponymous narrator of Arielle Burgdorf’s novel Jeanne, translates from French and Russian to English, swirling alphabets in her mind, loving the exercise of moving from one to another, working into the night. After college, she lifts off to countries as she pleases, severing relationships of all kinds, unsure of her true origins. Her travels lead her into an impulsive marriage with a monied Russian poet named Konstantin. Together, they voyage manically across Europe. All too soon, they are only murmurs of their former selves, leaving Jeanne to wonder how her arty, queerness could be so quickly domesticated by heteronormative convention. As she starts translating her husband’s poetry collection, all power shifts. She enters the marriage vowing to carry streaks of various genders, yet loses those names. That is until a mysterious message arrives in her inbox, calling her back to Montréal.
Jeanne funnels through an adventure/breakdown through psychedelic recollection. She drinks, seldom checks her phone, gets lost in unfamiliar beds, and still attempts to translate manuscripts even when her mind is shattering. There are forces all around. She chases a mysterious lover made of art, avoids her husband, and becomes a ball of deranged energy spiraling through Montreal.
The pages turn so fast.
You describe Jeanne as being “female with long streaks of male.” I think that's so cool. I've always just been a lady who felt like a lady, and I feel like this description gave me an understanding of gender that I hadn't experienced before. It's drawn so beautifully. I don't have a question for that. I just wanted to tell you that.
People's reactions to the gender stuff in the novel are usually very telling about their own gender. Some of my friends who are trans masculine believe Jean is obviously a trans character, and I'm like, not necessarily. But I also wouldn't say that she's necessarily cis. I think of her as someone who's maybe somewhere along a gender journey that's not complete yet, and she's still kind of figuring things out.
I think a lot of the trouble with language is this idea of labeling things, especially with binaries. With sexuality for most people, it's changed too much throughout their life to try and pin it down as one specific thing. I feel that’s true for gender as well. No one's a perfectly masculine man all the time. That’s impossible, right?
You write that when you grow up with multiple languages, there's kind of several consciousnesses at war with each other. Talk about consciousness, language, and the way the book gets a little funky when they all meld together and Jeanne starts to lose it. It’s so fun to read, but also a little scary, in a good way.
I was trying to communicate that right, that she's having this breakdown and then that's becoming a breakdown of language and her ability to communicate what she wants to communicate. But in terms of the consciousness thing, I just find, again, I have so much trouble with labels and this idea of being bilingual. Like, who is bilingual? Is it only someone who was born speaking two languages and grew up speaking two languages and can read fluently in two languages, or can it also include someone who picks up another language later in life? I think it's always a net good to be bilingual, even though it can be very frustrating for some people. The attitude that it's actually a positive is a very new and modern one. For a long time it was like, don't teach your kid French. Don't teach your kid your native language because that's going to confuse them.
As someone who could read the French parts [in Jeanne] but not read the Russian, I felt like there was just this texture instead of meaning. Do you think about how a reader who can’t understand those sections might read them as more of a texture?
Going back to the personalities that languages have, I wanted all of Konstantin's cursing to be in Russian because I felt like there was a harshness to him and to the Russian language sometimes. It was also important to have a character like Nat, who's half Russian and very different from Konstantin to communicate like, not all Russian people are a monolith. But going back to the language part, yeah, I think it's okay. People might not understand every single word in the book, but there's a limit to how much you can kind of do with that before people aren't able to understand it, right before it's illegible.
How did you build the character Jeanne? She's so juicy as a person. You give us mystery, but then you take it away. How did you go about building the plot and characters in Jeanne?
When I was initially starting to write the book, I was dealing with these ideas from translation theory in fiction and embodying different characters and things. And if people don’t know translation theory, I wanted it to still be readable and enjoyable. There's this idea of translators, whether the translation is faithful or not, and it's always phrased this way. It's never about what the author owes the translator. It's about what the translator owes the author and the source text. And so I was like, well, what if we just had a translator who's not completely faithful? What if she was just sleeping around? That was part of it. And then Konstantin is supposed to represent this very kind of antiquated view of translation theory, where it's ‘not art’. The idea that you shouldn't be paid for it, and that the author is the only one who's creative.
There's also a concept in translation theory called abusive fidelity, which is actually supposed to be a positive thing. It's like when you're transforming the text for your own needs as a translator (that's really reducing it). But when I heard that term, I was just like, no one who's ever been abused would just casually use that term. And that made me angry.
As readers, we’re presented with an oppositional force to Konstantin, a writer named Mélusine who mysteriously wrangles Jeanne back to Canada to translate her manuscript. She “doesn’t demand fidelity from anyone. She’s an artist.” When Jeanne reads Mélusine’s manuscript, she notices recurring words. Even if the author's unconscious of it, she uses those words again and again. They're kind of the heart of the work. Of course, everyone has words they love, but when reading over your own manuscript, did you discover any words that are especially important to you?
I think the idea of freedom and liberation is maybe not a word, but a theme that circles around constantly. The question of all my writing is basically like, how can we be freer in our lives?
