As good as her word

Translator's skills allow readers to experience the world's top writers, Yang Cheng reports in Tianjin.

French writer Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in literature earlier this month and the Chinese versions of her works, A Woman's Story and La Place, have seen orders surging on leading bookselling websites, such as Dangdang.

Publishing house Shanghai People's Press announced that it will soon reprint her books, which were originally published in Chinese in 2003, and new copies are expected to hit the market late this month.

The translator of A Woman's Story and La Place, Guo Yumei, a 65-year-old professor of French language and translation at Tianjin Foreign Studies University, has seen her mobile phone become a hotline. This is because her elegant and top-notch translations are appreciated by local readers and her introduction of Ernaux to China has been hailed by both her counterparts and the media.

Commentators note that it is no coincidence that Guo has a deep insight into contemporary French literature — in 2000, she was the translator of Poisson d'Or, a book written by the 2008 Nobel laureate in literature Le Clezio.

Guo says she teaches French and translation, and putting words into another language helps in her work.

She says she appreciates the works of Ernaux because of her use of autofiction, a genre of fictional stories that are heavily influenced by the life experiences of the author.

"Ernaux wrote in the 'first person', and described her own experience, while combining it with fiction … it seems like a 'paradox'," she says.

Invited by the French embassy in 2005, Guo met Ernaux in Beijing during a seminar focusing on her books, where the writer confirmed that her mother was "still alive", while in her books, she wrote that her mother had "passed away".