Looking for treasure island

It is not easy to avoid clichés when writing about J.M.G. Le Clézio. Born in Nice in 1940, the recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature is known in the Anglophone world as an ex-experimental novelist. His early work, exploring language and insanity, was praised by Michel Foucault. But since the 1970s his style has become more mainstream and his subjects — childhood, travel and landscape — more lyrical.

Reviewers quibble over the quality of translations, especially when there are two of the same novel in relatively quick succession. Le chercheur d’or (The Prospector) (1985), was translated into English by Carol Marks in 1993, and has now been retranslated by C. Dickson. Setting aside the question as to which of these competent and elegant translations is marginally better, it seems more interesting to consider why, more thanthree decades after it first appeared in France, The Prospector is a promising portal to the imagination of Le Clézio.

He claims that he wrote his first book aged seven, about the sea. He has also written a children’s story called Celui qui n’avait jamais vu la mer (The Boy Who Had Never Seen the Sea), published in France in 1978 and in the New Yorker the year of his Nobel win. The Prospector opens with homage to the sea:

As far back as I can remember, the sound of the sea has been in my ears. Mingled with that of the wind in the needles of the she-oaks, the wind that never stops, even when you leave the coast behind and cross the cane fields, it’s the sound of my childhood.

Dickson’s translation captures the hypnotic ebb and flow of Le Clézio’s prose.  Readers must find their sea legs and become accustomed to a semi-regular swaying about between tenses: ‘It’s as if everything I’m feeling, everything I’m seeing now is eternal.