McKenzie Watson-Fore first came across Natasha Lehrer’s work when she was reviewing her translation of Cécile Desprairies’s autofictional novel, The Propagandist (released by New Vessel Press in October 2024), about a family who collaborates with fascists. A few months later, she was reviewing another book Lehrer had translated—Neige Sinno’s Sad Tiger (released by Seven Stories Press in April 2025)—and realized she was curious about the voice facilitating her engagement with these two French texts. Sad Tiger, Lehrer’s latest English title, is a devastating memoir about the lifelong impact of childhood sexual abuse. You can find Watson-Fore’s review of it at Full Stop.
In this interview, Watson-Fore and Lehrer discuss the relationship between authors and translators, the texts that Lehrer chooses (or is chosen for), and what people don’t think about when they think about translation.
McKenzie Watson Fore: I have so many questions about what it’s like to work as a translator. How closely do you work with the original authors? What is that relationship like?
Natasha Lehrer: It depends. Obviously, if they’re dead, that’s one form of relationship. It’s quite freeing. I’ve made friends with many of the people I’ve translated. It can be a very intimate relationship. Especially with some of the books I’ve translated, you kind of become that person while you’re doing it. Neige [Sinno] and I talk quite a lot. I love meeting up with Chantal Thomas. Colombe Schneck has become a friend.
I feel a real closeness to the writer, but then at some point the writer also feels very close to me, which I wouldn’t necessarily have expected. There’s a lot of trust involved on their part to entrust their book to someone else. English is arguably the most important language that a French writer will be translated into—maybe Spanish too, but probably the biggest readership is in the English language. So it really does matter.
Do authors seek you out? Or is that brokered through the publisher?
The authors can ask, but it’s totally the responsibility and the choice of the publisher. If someone were to say, You know who I’d really love to have… For example, I don’t know if you’ve read Memories of Low Tide? It’s a beautiful book by Chantal Thomas that I translated for Pushkin Press, a UK publisher, about five years ago. A different publisher is bringing out another book by her and she specifically asked for me. So obviously they can ask. But once a writer sells their rights, they’ve given away their rights. They sell the rights for publication in English and it’s a whole legal thing. If you think about when a writer sells the rights to their book to a film company, they don’t have any rights over the adaptation. It’s an interesting concept.
That intrigues me even more when thinking about the relationship. You still work together so intimately, which is great when that affectionate relationship is able to form, but it’s not guaranteed.
It’s not guaranteed. But imagine someone playing a role in a movie of someone who’s alive. They’re going to feel such a closeness, aren’t they? It would be terrible if they had a visceral dislike of that person, but I think generally there’s an openness. It’s quite interesting to think about it in terms of an actor and a real person. There’s such vulnerability in entrusting someone to portray you. And it’s similar with translation: Once a writer accepts that they are going to be translated, they want it to work.
It’s good for the book as well, a writer getting their work more broadly into the world.
Yes. It’s an unusual relationship and there’s vulnerability on both sides that makes it almost bound to work.
I used to not want to meet people. I started out thinking that my relationship was with the text, not the person—which is very snotty, actually—I probably shouldn’t have said things like that publicly, because it’s not really true. Being in touch with the author of the book can be immensely helpful. Neige and I talked a lot while I was working on Sad Tiger. She was very helpful, and she gave me permission when I wanted or needed to move away from the French. It was very important to me that she was happy with the translation. She lays herself so utterly open.
Again, it’s so intimate. Do you often find yourself working on books, like Neige’s, at the far end of the spectrum of intimate material?
It isn’t something I set out to do. But if you think about it, there was Consent [by Vanessa Springora], which is another very intimate book about abuse. People started saying, “Oh, yeah, that’s your specialty now,” even though I’ve actually only done two books that deal with that subject. Springora wrote to me and said, “You know my life better than anyone else in the world, which means you are one of my closest friends now.” It was the most beautiful email. It made me weep. It was so touching, and it was very generous of her, but it’s also kind of true. I mean, you live in their story, and you try to be that person, in a way.
You have to inhabit their language, their way of expressing things, their lens.
You have to see through their eyes. Which, in the case of books like Sad Tiger, is very hard. It was hard for me to get up every day and become Neige and see the world through her eyes.
It’s true in a different way with a book like The Propagandist. Cécile made herself very vulnerable writing that book. I translate a lot of books that fall somewhere on the spectrum between memoir and autofiction, and I really do adore those genres. They suit me perfectly. A lot of the books I’ve translated are somewhere on that spectrum of vulnerability as well. Even going back to Nathalie Léger and her trilogy, those books also discuss very difficult relationships.
During COVID, I remember doing a book club on Zoom about Memories of Low Tide. It’s a beautiful book, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s about a woman’s relationship with her mother, it’s about swimming, it’s about being in the world, and it’s just wonderful. For some reason, my mom was at this book club, and this man said, “I think you owe it to us to discuss how much this reflects your relationship with your mother.” And I was like, “Whoa!? What! No, I don’t!” I am just the translator! But it was funny because he so identified with it, and he wanted to see how I identified with it. It was very curious.
The audacity to say, “I think you owe it to us”!
Oh, it was so funny. So bizarre. And of course, only a man would express anything in such a way. I did not answer his question.
But, all that to say that I have translated a few books about mothers and daughters. I’m a mother and I’m a daughter. And it’s always so interesting to think, how did I get to this place where this is what I’m doing?
So, how did you get to this place? Did you set out to be a translator?
I did eventually set out to be a translator. I’ve been a translator for ten years. My first book came out in April 2015, so precisely ten years.
Happy translat-iversary!
Thank you. I did want to be a translator at that point, but I had no idea how to do it. I had just done a degree in Comparative Literature in French, in Paris, and somehow thought that would—anyway, it doesn’t work like that. It’s very hard. There’s no rule. I was very lucky. I had a chance encounter with somebody at a book group in Paris. A translation reading group had been set up by a publisher and we all had to advocate for a book. I took a beautiful book that I still would love to translate but I haven’t been able to persuade anyone to publish, and a woman contacted me about six months later and said, “Would you like to translate a book?” She set up a publishing company; I translated a book. Neither of us had ever done either of those things before. The book was Suite for Barbara Loden, and it became this kind of cult book. So that was how it happened for me. It feels like if I hadn’t turned up to that thing, I would probably not be a translator today.
Totally! It hinges on those tiny connections.
I’m a big believer in making your own luck, but I can’t really see how I made that, if you know what I mean. That was just pure luck. Now I’m more conscious of the books that I translate, but I definitely was up for anything at the time. I was very lucky.
You mentioned working on the spectrum between memoir and autofiction, which are also genres that I love. What are factors that will make you say, “Yes, that book’s for me”?
Well, insofar as I have a reputation at all, I have a bit of a reputation for translating women writers. So yes, perhaps I’ll just translate women from now on.
Yeah, not a bad reputation to have.
Someone asked me recently, “Would you be interested in translating Polanski’s memoir?” And I said, “You know what? I only translate women.”
Though it would be quite funny if I took a little detour and translated Roman Polanski. That’s a whole big subject and I don’t want to be reductive about it, but—yeah, no. I definitely wouldn’t be up for that.
I translated a thriller, which was fun. I don’t want to go down that route long-term, but occasionally, why not? I often work with the same publishers and they know what I like to do. I think it’s more about language than anything else. When I talk about that spectrum of memoir and autofiction, it’s a genre that is almost by definition very literary, and there’s such joy in translating that kind of language.
I recently translated Colombe Schneck. I don’t know if you’ve read the Paris Trilogy? It’s lovely. I translated it with Lauren Elkin. Lauren and I are friends, and we translated Colombe, who is a friend, and it’s a book about friendship, and it was such a nice project! We did it in a ridiculously short amount of time. We were given three weeks or something, so we both dropped everything and worked like crazy to translate this book together. Colombe is a really fine writer. Her prose is very limpid. In some ways it was different from almost anything else I have done. I love the variety. As long I think a book is good, basically, and I don’t object to its politics or anything like that.
That seems important. Do you translate in collaboration often?
No. That was only the second time. I’d already read Colombe’s novel Deux Petite Bourgeoises and loved it. One day Colombe rang me up out of the blue. She said, “Lauren told me to call you; would you like to translate this with her?” It was total serendipity. Lauren and I are very good friends, and it was so perfect.
To get to work with your friends! Especially on a book that relates to friendship.
Oh, that was what was so glorious about it. It was the most perfect thing imaginable. There was no conflict, no issues. It was a very straightforward collaboration. We kind of shed our egos. It was really nice. We’d like to do something together again one day.
That’s so special. I imagine you have a voice in translation, and Lauren potentially has a voice in translation, but you’re both translating Colombe’s work, so how did you make sure all of it coheres?
All that credit goes to Colombe. Her voice is so clear. I don’t know how many books it would work with. Reading Colombe is like drinking a cool glass of spring water on a hot day. She writes in a way that feels almost artless, but it’s so well constructed that you’re left wondering, How does she do that?
What is it like getting to inhabit so many different writers’ constructions?
It’s a really good way to learn about writing; you live with these books for months on end. I’m in awe of what writers do. The language is mine. But the thing that’s not mine is A) the story, and B) the construction. I don’t do that. My perfect form is one thousand words.
There’s been so much discussion lately about translators being recognized. Your name is on the front cover of both of the books that I have. What are your thoughts on that?
I was looking at a publisher’s website recently and they didn’t even put the names of the translators on their website. Obviously my interest is professional, but I want to know who translated it! I hate the old-fashioned idea of invisibilizing us. I think our names should go on the cover. I’m not as radical as some people who think we should get equal billing and that the book is as much ours as it is the author’s. That’s clearly not true—which I really understood when people started to talk to me about translating trauma. Neige Sinno, Vanessa Springora writing about what happened to them is brave; what I’m doing is not. I’m not exposing what happened to me. I’m not talking about my body; I’m not talking about my experience. It’s a big difference. As a translator, I don’t think it’s right to claim that level of ownership. Maybe with a novel that feels a bit different, but when you’re talking about people’s lives? It seems like an outrageous presumption.
That makes a lot of sense to me. It’s a different thing that you’re doing.
It’s complicated. Every single word in that book is me. Not one single word in that book is written by anyone except me. So, it is my book, but it is also not my book. It is not my story. We have to be able, like Whitman, to contain multitudes: We have to be able to accept that both these statements are true. Because on the one hand, it’s not your book, it’s not your story; but on the other hand, it wouldn’t be in the world without you. Translation is an art. It’s a kind of magic. It deserves to be taken as a thing in itself. I feel like it is important to recognize that all these things are true at the same time; one doesn’t negate the other, but one doesn’t equal the other either.
If we want to advocate for translators’ visibility—which we don’t really need to advocate for anymore, because it’s happened, which is fantastic—but if we want to advocate for it, we have to take the time to talk about it properly, not take shortcuts.
Are there things you wish people knew about your work? What does it actually look like for you to translate a book-length work?
One of the books I’m working on right now is a massive, six-hundred-page book on philosophy. It’s an amazing project that’s taken me so far out of my comfort zone, because I’m not a philosopher. I can’t even believe I dared to do it.
I often translate literary nonfiction that contains quotations and references and requires a great deal of time in the library. That is something people don’t really think about as being part of the translator’s job. Say I’ve got a book that quotes Virginia Woolf in French, I am going to have to go back to Woolf and find the reference.
You turn into a fact-checker.
Yes, you turn into a fact-checker. When you start checking references you sometimes need a certain amount of diplomacy. Effectively, part of your job is being a researcher. You can spend days and days in the library. With my philosopher, I’ve been reading Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, grappling with ideas and writers that I thought I would cheerfully go to my grave without ever having to think about! I’ve become a bit of a philosopher-head because I had to, in order to make sense of what this particular philosopher is writing about in these essays.
It’s really about inhabiting the meaning, tracking down the source material.
It’s fascinating. You read so much, do so much research, you cheat your way into expertise. That’s an aspect of translation that people don’t usually think about.
It’s a stupid thing to say that you can only translate something you have a cultural affinity to. You don’t have to be Japanese to translate a book, for example, but you do need to know something about Japan.
You have to be alert to your own ignorance, even down to a sentence level. I find there’ll be something and I wonder, What does that mean, and then I realize it must be an expression that I haven’t come across. One of my kids once read something I had translated, and I had missed an expression, and I translated it [wrong], because I hadn’t seen that it was an expression. You need to be alert on every single level: for expressions, for cultural references that you’re not familiar with, historical references, literary references, all of it.
You’re really operating on all of these scales: the word, the phrase, the sentence.
And you need to be a good writer. Which doesn’t get said enough. An author needs to have their own way of writing the world, and a translator has to have those skills as well.
One last question: What was the book that you brought to that very first translation group, where you met your first publisher?
Oh! The most wonderful book. I did a masters in Paris, more like an MPhil, and I ended up with, as my supervisor, this woman named Tiphaine Samoyault, and she is, without a doubt, the most brilliant person I’ve ever met in my life. She’s so clever, and so generous with her brilliance, the perfect example of the best of French education. She totally changed the way that I think. And she had just come out with this book a couple of years before. It’s autofiction; it’s about her and Louise Bourgeois; she grew up in a tapestry-making family, and Louise Bourgeois also grew up within a tapestry-making family. It’s called La Main Negative—the negative hand.
Like, the non-dominant hand?
No, I don’t think so. It’s a reference to a film by Marguerite Duras, Les Mains Négatives. The term refers to handprints in prehistoric cave paintings. It’s about collective memory, about the erasure effected by modernity. In Tiphaine’s book it seems to refer to the hand that makes the stitches on a tapestry. Raphael designed several tapestries, huge, room-sized tapestries, and his designs, the drawings for them, are called cartoons. We know that the drawings are by Raphael. But what about all those women who stitched them? Terrible light, probably ruining their eyesight, nobody knows who they were, they’re totally nameless, forgotten. It’s almost a metaphor for translation. Think about it: who made that tapestry? Actually I’ve never thought about it as a metaphor for translation. That’s just come to me.
It’s also elliptically about her life as an academic and as a mother. It’s a feminist book, it’s historical. It is short but extraordinarily capacious. So that is the book that I want to translate, and that was how I talked about it.
McKenzie Watson-Fore is a writer, artist, and critic currently based in her hometown of Boulder, Colorado. She serves as the executive editor of sneaker wave magazine and the inaugural critic-in-residence for MAYDAY. She is currently querying a memoir about growing up evangelical and dating atheist boys. McKenzie can be found at MWatsonFore.com or drinking tea on her back porch.
Natasha Lehrer is a prize-winning writer, translator, and editor. She has a BA in English from Oxford University and an MPhil from the University of Paris 8 in Comparative Literature. She is originally from London but now lives just outside Paris.