Go to Special Sales HBG USA Home Special Sales HBG USA

That Mad Ache

A Novel

That Mad Ache Open the full-size image

Contributors

By Françoise Sagan

Translated by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Also available from:

On Sale
May 12, 2009
Page Count
320 pages
Publisher
Basic Books
ISBN-13
9780465010981

That Mad Ache, set in high-society Paris in the mid-1960’s, recounts the emotional battle unleashed in the heart of Lucile, a sensitive but rootless young woman who finds herself caught between her carefree, tranquil love for 50-year-old Charles, a gentle, reflective, and well-off businessman, and her sudden wild passion for 30-year-old Antoine, a hot-blooded, impulsive, and struggling editor. As Lucile explores these two versions of love, she vacillates in confusion, but in the end she must choose, and her heart’s instinct is surprising and poignant. Originally published under the title La Chamade, this new translation by Douglas Hofstadter returns a forgotten classic to English.

In Translator, Trader, Douglas Hofstadter reflects on his personal act of devotion in rewriting Francoise Sagan’s novel La Chamade in English, and on the paradoxes that constantly plague any literary translator on all scales, ranging from the humblest of commas to entire chapters. Flatly rejecting the common wisdom that translators are inevitably traitors, Hofstadter proposes instead that translators are traders, and that translation, like musical performance, deserves high respect as a creative act. In his view, literary translation is the art of making subtle trades in which one sometimes loses and sometimes gains, often both losing and gaining at the same time. This view implies that there is no reason a translation cannot be as good as the original work, and that the result inevitably bears the stamp of the translator, much as a musical performance inevitably bears the stamp of its artists. Both a companion to the beloved Sagan novel and a singular meditation on translation, Translator, Trader is a witty and intimate exploration of words, ideas, communication, creation, and faithfulness.

Genre:

Formats and Prices

Price

$21.99

Price

$28.99 CAD

Format

Format:

  1. Trade Paperback $21.99 $28.99 CAD
  2. ebook $13.99 $17.99 CAD

You May Also Like

Mr. Ives’ Christmas
Mr. Ives’ Christmas $17.99 $23.99 CAD
The Wildes
The Wildes $29.00 $38.00 CAD
Madwoman
Madwoman $29.00 $38.00 CAD
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien $19.99 $25.99 CAD
Learned by Heart
Learned by Heart $18.99

Françoise Sagan

About the Author

As a teenager, Françoise Sagan (1935-2004) rocketed to world renown with her prize-winning and bestselling novel Bonjour Tristesse. She went on to write many other successful novels, including A Certain Smile and Aimez-vous Brahms, as well as numerous plays and memoirs.

Douglas Hofstadter is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach. Among his more recent works are Le Ton beau de Marot, a verse translation of Alexander Pushkin’s novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin, and I Am a Strange Loop. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

Learn more about this author