Eve Hill-Agnus: On the Sonics of Translation, the Rhythm of the Writing Life, and Her Translation of Mariette Navarro’s Debut Novel ‘Ultramarine’
I sat down to talk with Eve Hill-Agnus on a brisk January afternoon. Hill-Agnus, who grew up in the United States and is now based in Paris, was visiting New York City and had just emerged from SculptureCenter in Queens. She settled in on a bench to chat with me about her translation of Mariette Navarro’s debut novel, Ultramarine (Deep Vellum, 2025).
The novel takes place during the ocean crossing of a cargo ship, manned by a crew of twenty men along with its captain, a woman. Ultramarine is a strange and operatic tale: when the sailors ask their captain to stop the ship so they can swim in the middle of the ocean, she uncharacteristically agrees. What follows is a dance with the uncanny, rendered in languid, lyrical prose. Upon reading it, I was struck by the way the prose so accurately captured the feeling of being utterly surrounded by water, and I couldn’t wait to have a chance to ask Hill-Agnus about the translation—what she preserved, what she lost in the process, and what the project meant for her.
In addition to being Navarro’s first novel, it also represents Hill-Agnus’s first foray into novel-length translation. Over the course of our conversation, she gave me a behind-the-scenes tour of the process, as well as details about her overall writing practice. A few days after our conversation, Hill-Agnus was named the winner of the 2024 Albertine Translation prize in fiction, which honors translators and American publishers of contemporary French works. A journalist and former teacher, Hill-Agnus’s first translation project is unlikely to be her last—a wonderful prospect for lovers of French literature in translation, especially the strange and speculative.
Corinne Cordasco-Pak: Since Ultramarine is your first novel-length translation project, I’d love to start by asking what drew you to the project.
Eve Hill-Agnus: I’m Franco-American, so French is actually my first language. I was born in Paris and spent my petite enfance—my small childhood—there, but then did most of my schooling and my academic career in the States and, also, in literally the study of the English word. I was an English lit and journalism major, and then I taught English lit and journalism. So really I was always dealing with the written word. I was also a theater person for a long time and went to a small performing arts high school.
I’ve always been moved by literature that is really lyrical. Poetic language moves me deeply. Ultramarine came out in France in 2021. I was there for Christmas, and it had just come out. Every year they have the fall crop, like in fashion, and [Ultramarine] was the huge bestseller, in a literary way. It was in all of the bookshops, and I read it, and from the first page I was completely hooked by the poetry of it. The language was just beautiful, and the rhythms, because the premise, of course, is that it takes place on a ship at sea. And so the rhythms, the tonalities—the sonic qualities mimic the ocean and the rhythm of the waves, which was deeply, deeply hypnotic to me. I loved Mariette Navarro’s use of repetition and I just found every single sentence breathtaking. There was something about that first page—I mean, the epigram—I was just sort of gutted by the whole concept of “the sailor” that she introduces. There’s something very philosophical about what she’s saying. So I was hooked there, and then I was hooked by this kind of strange, not-interior, interior monologue. And then of course, also being drawn to plays and to theater, I was really intrigued by the idea that this was her first novel and that she was actually a playwright. I found that all of the chapters that involved the crew unfurled very much like a play, lines without very much description in between—it was sort of this mix of a poem and a play. I could imagine it playing out like a one-act play. I read it in one go, basically, over two days, and I thought if I could translate this, I would be thrilled beyond belief. I thought, “Everyone should read this.” It was just ideally everything you think of as a translator, where you’re like, “Oh my God, this cannot not exist in English.”
I also started thinking, “If I were to translate this, how would I recreate these sounds? Or recreate the rhythms in the sentences that I so adored on first reading it?” Immediately, I was intrigued and really compelled by that challenge.
CCP: And then, after you decided that this was the project, what happened next?
EHA: I was extremely lucky because Deep Vellum happens to be a press that publishes mostly literature in translation, and that’s so rare in the States. Very few publishers do literature in translation; it’s such a small part of the American market. And Deep Vellum happens to have been founded by someone that I knew in Dallas—I knew [Will Evans] as he was starting the press. I had done some copy editing and proofreading work for him, because I believed in what they were doing, and he said, “You know, if you ever find something that you’d really love to translate, let me know.”
So I went to him and I was like, “I found it! The thing I have to translate or die.” He was like, “Whoa, whoa, okay. Hold on, let’s see if we can get the rights.” It took a little while, and I was really nervous because I was sure that someone else was going to buy the rights. He kept saying, “Relax! It’s fine,” but I was super urgent about it. At the same time, I thought “Well, he probably knows what he’s talking about.” So there was that whole period of me being absurdly anxious that someone was going to sweep in and buy the rights from under us. But eventually we secured the rights in spring 2022.
CCP: That must have been such a relief! Once you actually began the process of translation, what was that like? What aspects of the novel felt most important to preserve?
EHA: Once I started translating it, it became very similar in a lot of ways to writing poetry because I was thinking in such sonic terms. I was playing with a couple of techniques to translate the sounds into sort of an equivalent sound scheme in English. In French, there are certain ways that the language builds rhythm. French words tend to have more syllables, and so you end up with a sort of murmuring. In English, we have so many small, Anglo Saxon words, and so to create the same murmur, I was trying to do things like string together beautiful alliterations. I was looking at the beginnings of words, or trying to focus on internal rhymes so that there could be this nice consonance across phrases. I was having so much fun with that. My main goal was to use techniques to think in a poetic context to recreate what I find to be one of the most important things in this novel: the sound and the ambience that it creates. It’s hard to articulate when you feel like you’re doing that, but I think that translation is extremely embodied. You just feel it. It’s that same ambience: my body is responding to the translated text the same way I do when I read the French.
So I kept working those qualities and I totally questioned myself. Am I focusing on the wrong thing? I’m pretty self conscious about dialogue and making that feel real and natural. I definitely questioned myself, but I was so clear that this was my project, and because I was so convinced that [sound] was one of the most important things in the novel. As a translator, you have your point of view; it’s not an agenda, but your take, and that was mine, so I tried to keep that as my North star and not doubt myself too much. I just thought, “Oh God, I hope that people get it. I hope my publisher’s okay with this. The fact that Deep Vellum is experimental encouraged me, the fact that they always want to open readers up to new experiences. So I was like, this fits everybody’s vision and mission.
CCP: I love learning about those decisions, because the novel felt so atmospheric and expansive, and I found myself losing myself in these beautiful sentences. In preserving that sonic identity of the work, was there anything that you chose to let go of?
EHA: I didn’t have to let go of anything big, thankfully. Sometimes you do, but I think this was a straightforward translation in a lot of ways. It wasn’t like I had to translate an entire cultural context and therefore shift the story into an American context. There were no cultural references. [The novel] takes place in this abstract realm where we’re definitely not talking about the streets or districts of Paris. If anything, the only thing that I had to let go of was a very specific construction in French that is very impersonal. It’s like to say “one” in English, “one doesn’t do this” or “one feels this or that.” Saying “one” in English feels really formal, so I had to give up this idea. [Navarro] uses it quite a bit—in part, I think because there is a bigger impersonal, universal field. I had to find other ways that made sense and wouldn’t be jarring or glaring. Those moments didn’t stand out because I just massaged them into the narrative.
CCP: Did you communicate with Mariette Navarro at all during the translation process?
EHA: I actually didn’t work with her that much for the translation. The questions that I had, I sent through her agents—but interestingly enough, after the fact, we discovered that we live really close to each other in Paris. Since then, I have gone out to coffee with her and she was such a lovely person. It was so delightful to meet her and really interesting to hear more about her own thoughts, because I didn’t know any of this going into it, and to learn about the decisions she made about the novel. In the beginning, the female captain didn’t exist; it was just the crew, and as she thought about the form she wanted [the novel] to take, she wanted the bathing scene to be witnessed from above, from the ship deck, so that means a character there. Things like that are just fascinating to me.
CCP: Is there a passage or scene that you would like to call out, maybe something that you were particularly proud of or something you struggled with?
EHA: I loved the scene where the crew first dips into the water, chapter three. It’s that chapter where they’re first seeing the horizon. That scene is beautiful to me in its abstraction. I also love everything having to do with the pale-eyed figure, or ghost, or apparition. That was fun; I tried to make those scenes as spectral as possible.
As for the most challenging, there were two parts that were the most challenging—other than the technical [naval] aspects. In the letter that she writes, the log with all the super technical language, I was going back and forth finding the terms and the equivalents, making sure it was the right word. Otherwise, the two most challenging things were, one: the scene between the chief mate and the captain in the infirmary. I wanted to get that right, because it was so subtle, ambiguous and yet not. It was about getting the pitch of that scene right, because it’s just like: what comes across comes across with so few means? [Navarro] creates that rapport between the two of them, and it’s like, is there sexual tension? And, if not, at what point does it shift? Is it here? Wait, no, is it there? Is it between them? Finding all the nuances—does he pull back here? Does she pull back here? Deciding in my own mind where those shifts happened and then trying to convey them was something that I took a lot of time on, to try and get as close as I could to what my understanding of that original scene was.
The other part, similarly, was the end. It’s so suggestive and pretty open-ended, and I think a lot of people have a hard time deciding, what are the implications? Is the focus mostly on what she says at the end or what he says at the end? So trying to figure out how to open it up, exactly to the extent that [Navarro] does, which was hard too. It was another scene that had maybe the most at stake in terms of the ambiguity, and letting the translation be ambiguous to the exact degree of [the original].
CCP: Changing topics a bit, can you tell me a little bit about your writing practice in general, professionally or otherwise?
EHA: I’ve mostly been doing journalism. I’ve done creative nonfiction and worked on a collection of essays and one longer nonfiction piece. I’m not sure exactly where it’s going to go, but that’s where I tend to be more experimental. I also have a draft of a novel that I may or may not continue. I definitely enjoy nurturing creative writing for myself on the side, even though journalism is my career.
Recently, I’ve shifted from magazine staff to freelance, and to translation, of course. It’s given me a lot of freedom because I find that there’s a lot more overlap. I can have a voice in really different ways. It’s been really freeing to have that side of my journalistic writing be a lot more fluid recently and shapeshift into different forms.They’re not as dissimilar as maybe they once might have been.
CCP: When you’re working on all of those projects at once, what helps you find balance? Where do you do your work?
EHA: I definitely juggle a lot of different things. At first, it was a question of getting used to the freelance rhythm. It was terrifying not to know when the next project was coming, but I’ve since learned to enjoy the three days in a row when I can just go to galleries, because I know that there’s going to be a heavy period coming soon when I’m putting in longer days. It evens itself out. Now, I tend to work with the same general stable of people, so I know in advance how the projects are gonna be spaced out, and it allows me to juggle. I have the projects where I’m writing, the projects where I’m translating, and the ones where I’m editing. I cycle through and build my day based on the kind of things that I have to do.
I think the most important thing, for anyone, is really just to have the whole Virginia Woolf thing: the room of your own. I have a really tranquil, lovely light-filled writing space, a space to get away from the city. Paris is terrible: there are so many interesting things going on! It’s such a distraction. It’s wonderful. But having that little oasis doesn’t feel like I am sacrificing anything by being there. It’s not drudgery at all. It always feels like a privilege to step into that space.
CCP: As someone who grew up speaking both French and English, what does your reading practice look like?
EHA: I mostly read in English. I’m very selective about the French that I read, so with a novel like this, the style has to really speak to me, because it does take me a little bit longer in French. When something speaks to me like this, of course I devour it, but definitely a much smaller percentage of my reading is in French. A really good friend of mine in Paris, Céline Leroy, is a translator—she translates English to French—and she happens to be one of the main translators of Deborah Levy’s work. [Levy] is a British writer, and I actually really enjoy reading Céline’s translations of Deborah Levy, even though the original is in English. French to me is kind of like dessert; when I’m reading it, I savor it. English to me is a language of lots of things—from literature to the language that I would use for anything—but French feels kind of special to me, so I treat it that way. I actually find that a lot of good things in French do get translated into English.
CCP: As you anticipate the release of Ultramarine in March, what do you see changing in your life or your writing practice? What’s on the horizon for you?
EHA: I would love to translate more of [Navarro’s] work. There’s a novella of hers that I adore that I have been championing for a long time, and I would really like to translate it. I’m really hoping that this project will enable that. And I would love to try my hand at translating poetry.
CCP: My last question is: is there anything that you would like to talk about that you wished I’d asked?
EHA: I did want to mention another translator that I really admire and love, a good friend of mine, Katie Shireen Assef, she also does French to English. She was my second reader and advised me on the translation. She read [the manuscript] and gave suggestions and I’m just so grateful. It felt really good that it was kind of a female-centric team. There was the sea captain herself, then me, and Katie. It really takes a village, and it was meaningful that the translation didn’t happen by itself. I didn’t do it alone.
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Eve Hill-Agnus is a Franco-American writer, editor, and translator based in Paris. A graduate of Stanford University (BA, MA), she has taught writing, literature, and journalism and been on the masthead of a magazine. She is currently a freelance art writer and translator. Following Ultramarine, she hopes to translate more works by Mariette Navarro and continue to introduce idiosyncratic, powerful French poetry and prose to the American market.
