On Your Feet: A Novel in Translations

A novel-in-translations by Jacqueline Feldman, featuring a story by the lauded French poet Nathalie Quintane.

How, in a time of vibrant need, do you surface what is repressed societally--lodged in the political unconscious? By translating it, Jacqueline Feldman has found. Combining fiction in translation, travelogue, essay, the postcard, and a scholarly monograph, ON YOUR FEET tells the story of a provincial city's victory over the far-right figure, Marine Le Pen. It is the story of a cat-owning local poet's valiant resistance and of a US woman--let us say an American girl--making her own, Joan-of-Arc-like entrance into the fray. This novel in translations slows time to take, with precision, the imprint of a moment in French and world history. It was a moment when fascist speech could be distinguished, still, from the great mass, separated out--leaving the moment, like the language, open to intervention. Making contributions to the theory and practice of translation, which has been considered an applied linguistics, ON YOUR FEET is a searching theorization of the politics of literature. What it offers, to readers of to readers of both languages or either, is a new kind of applied literature.