Q&A with Jeanne Sauvage ’26 PhD

Jeanne Sauvage’s dissertation opens the door to the translator’s workshop, turning to translators’ drafts, working documents, correspondence, legal contracts, and invoices to analyze their role in importing U.S. literature to France. She hopes her work offers a counterbalance to the idea of meaning being “lost in translation.”

On May 17, Sauvage was honored at the Graduate School’s Convocation Ceremony with the university’s Theron Rockwell Field Prize, considered to be one of the university’s most prestigious awards.

We sat down with Sauvage to learn more about her research process and her time at Yale. 

Tell us a little more about your dissertation topic. 

In my research, I explored how U.S. literature was translated in France and received by French readers, looking at this process in light of translators’ archives. More specifically, I show how translators collectively invented a ‘French’ U.S. literature. I focused on the idea of the translator’s workshop because I really wanted to show the translator at work. I followed the translator’s paper trail, looking at drafts, working documents, correspondence, legal contracts, and even invoices in order to analyze the material conditions of translator labor. So, I'm really looking at translation not just as a form of literary creation but also as a professional practice.

I also wanted to depart from widespread representations of the translator as someone who was always working in blissful solitude. I explored translation as a networked activity, one that engages not only the translator, but also authors, publishers, agents, and an entire cast of mediators.

Did you focus on a certain era or genre of literature?

Yes, the period I'm looking at is between the 1920s and the 1960s. The 1920s marked the early years of French interest in U.S. literature. This interest grew after World War II: partly due to the U.S. military effort in the liberation of France, the immediate postwar period represented the heyday of the American novel in France. During the German occupation of France, it was forbidden to publish, translate, and circulate Anglophone literature in France, so the French readership had been deprived of that literature.

How did you first become interested in this topic?

Part of it is biographical: I'm French and I moved to the U.S. for my PhD, but my background was originally in American literature. Coming here, I really wanted my dissertation topic to be transatlantic in nature. In terms of my intellectual encounter with translation studies, that happened in my very first year of coursework during my PhD, because my advisor, Alice Kaplan, was teaching a seminar on retranslation, and I fell in love with the discipline.

What are some key findings?

I think the most exciting one was about ‘Gone with the Wind.’ I found the original draft of the French translation, out of sheer serendipity by reaching out to the translator’s son, who had just gotten his hands on the manuscript. That was a very exciting milestone during my research.

In terms of more general scientific conclusions that I've drawn, I was especially interested in seeing how translators not only collaborated but also competed in shaping a canon of U.S. literature in France. They were pretty much working from a blank canvas to invent a French language for U.S. literature because very few American novels had been translated before the 1920s. It was considered kind of a subpar emulation, inferior to British literature.

The translators I worked on had a lot of agency in suggesting books to publishers, which was a very surprising part of my research. I thought that a lot of them were commissioned to translate novels, but often they took the initiative to suggest books.

Did you travel to see some archives in person?

Yes. Translators’ archives are your textbook example of what we call ‘diasporic archives,’ which means that their papers are spread over split collections. As a result, it's rare for a translator to have an archive in his or her own name. So, their papers are all over the place, some in the U.S. and some in France, often scattered among the archives of publishers, authors, and literary agencies.

I was lucky enough to get funding from the Yale MacMillan Center, the RITM Center, the Department of French, and the Yale Translation Initiative to travel and look at these archives in person. And then, of course, when I only wanted to look at a couple letters, the archivists would very kindly offer to scan these documents.

Did you have close relationships with your advisor or other mentors at Yale?

Yes. My advisor, Alice Kaplan, is a translator and a translation scholar herself, so the project really originated under her guidance. She’s an American scholar working on French literature, and I'm a French scholar working on U.S. literature, so I think that kind of double perspective really shaped my own work. The opportunity to work with her informed my decision to come to Yale for my PhD studies.

Did you come to Yale right from your undergraduate studies?

I moved to the U.S. a year before I started grad school because I was interning at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy. That's when I learned more about PhD programs here and decided to apply to Yale. I completed my undergraduate work at the École Normales Supérieure (ENS) in Paris.

What's one thing that you wish people knew about your topic?

I’m fighting against a widespread conception of translation as loss, coming from the proverbial ‘meaning getting lost in translation.’ I'm really trying to work toward undoing the underlying idea of translation as a linguistic matching game, which assumes that there’s a one-to-one equivalence between languages. I don’t find the ‘gotcha’ mentality of translation studies, which consists of pointing out the translator’s ‘mistakes,’ particularly productive.

Instead, I’m trying to circulate the idea that when you’re reading in translation, you’re reading with a translator’s bias, rather than against it. That's an idea that's very close to my heart and vital to my research. I believe that when you’re reading in translation, you’re adding a layer of historical meaning to the text, rather than preventing access to it.

Any final thoughts?

I’d just like to emphasize how helpful the archivists at the Yale Beinecke Library (and beyond) are. They have been a really essential part of my research.