Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)
Studies - Zoltán Abádi-Nagy: Conversations with Raymod Federman: Take It or Leave It and The Voice in the Closet
Q: Take It or Leave It has a French version, Amer Eldorado that immediately preceded it. How do the two relate to each other? FEDERMAN: First let me explain that the two books were not written one after another, but simultaneously. The French and English versions of this book progressed at the same time, or rather I should say alternated one day to the other as I kept writing. However, Amer Eldorado was published first (in Paris in 1974), and then I spent a couple more years working with the English version which became Take It or Leave It, but which also became quite a different book, in length as well as in structure and in texture. In a way, even though the two books tell basically the same story, they are overlapping texts. This is, of course, another aspect (personal and unique) of my work, the fact that I write both in French and in English, and that I even translate myself from one language to the other. But to answer your question. After I finished Double or Nothing, I wanted to continue the story of the young man who comes to America from France, but this time I wanted to go beyond the threshold of America (Double or Nothing basically relates only the arrival of the young man), I wanted to write the story of the young man in America, his discovery of America. By chance it happened that I was in Paris (directing some graduate program the university had there), and again by pure chance I had found a room in a little hotel called Hotel des deux Continents. I immediately saw the possibility of a dual text, a bilingual novel coming out of this place. What irony! Hotel of the two continents. And so I started writing a novel in French and in English simultaneously. I even visualized the book finished and published in a beautiful bilingual edition where the two texts would echo one another, the two stories overlap and mix, and become one huge text speaking with a plural voice. Not unlike, in fact, what I eventually did with The Voice in the Closet. That does not mean, however, that the French and English texts are exact duplications of one another. I was writing the same story in French and in English, but I was not repeating the same words —the words were different. I was not translating, I was transacting. One day the French would feed the English, and the next day the English would inspire the French. It was maddening, because one text was always ahead of the other, or one 92
