Death of François Hirsch, translator of Milan Kundera and Cormac McCarthy
The unbearable lightness of being, The farewell waltz, The book of laughter and oblivion… Beyond the Czech novelist (naturalized French) Milan Kundera, behind all these bewitching names, there is their French translator, François Hirsch. By the pen name François Kérel, the 95-year-old man died Tuesday, October 12 in Carcassonne.
Born in 1925, François Hirsch’s adolescence takes place between flight and rescue. In the middle of the war and then aged 17, the young man escapes with his mother and his aunt on the roads of France because of their Jewish faith. They found refuge, like 3,000 other exiles, in Chambon-sur-Lignon, a small town in Haute Loire called since, the village of the just. His father was not so lucky, he was sent to Auschwitz in the early 1940s where he was gassed.
From New York to Prague
Back in Paris after the war, François Hirsch began studying law, which he abandoned in favor of languages. He concentrated his activity around Russian and Czech, which he perfected at INALCO in order, from 1965, to pass the UN translation competition. He will then travel for the international organization, to New York and Geneva.
It was as early as 1970, with Laughable loves let him begin this work of almost a lifetime. Combining literary translations and work for the UN, he quickly became the official French translator of Milan Kundera then of Cormac McCarthy, of whom he translated the famous The road (L’Olivier), and all his subsequent novels, including those of “La Trilogie des confins” and The guardian of the orchard. Eternal lover of poets and poetry, he leaves behind his last work of goldsmithing, a translation of the Czech poet, Vítězslav Nezval entitled Prague with the fingers of rain (January 2022, Manifeste editions).