Two literary translators, Ruth Clarke and Tina Kover, will go head to head on the same short passage from Virginie Despentes’s Dear Dickhead (Quercus, 2025), each presenting and defending their own English version. Under the watchful eye of French scholar Dr Jess Mallet-Pont, they will compare their choices word by word, opening up the creative intricacies of the translator’s art and revealing just how many decisions lie behind a single sentence.
Dear Dickhead (Cher Connard, Grasset, 2022) is a novel of rage, irreverence and vulnerability. Rebecca Latté, a famous actress in her fifties, and Oscar Jayack, a middling author accused of harassment in the wake of #MeToo, fall into a spiral of mutual antipathy after he insults her online. In a series of scorching, back-and-forth emails they vie for the last word, only to find common ground in addiction, ageing and a changing world as Covid locks down Paris. It is a rich, thorny text for any translator to wrestle with, here rendered from the French by Frank Wynne.