Ne lâche pas ma main /// Don't Let Go

When I first heard that Ne lâche pas ma main, a French crime novel set in Reunion by Michel Bussi (France's third best-selling author), was going to be translated into English and released as "Don't Let Go" I thought 'great'. Then I read the French book and was very disappointed. 

English cover

The crime story itself is decent enough, but:

• Bussi uses a lot of clichés about the island and has only a superficial knowledge of Reunion's social climate and realities gleaned from what I've gathered were only one or two stays on the island;

• Bussi uses some Creole but not always Reunion Creole (other people have said it's from the West Indies: Martinique or Guadeloupe);

• Bussi's timings are completely off (e.g. time taken to drive from Saint Gilles to the volcano, or time needed to walk from the Plaine des Sables to Sainte-Rose). This is somewhat surprising given that the author is also a Professor of Geography!

French cover

Have you read it? What did you think?

More:

Here's a video from 2013 of the author talking about the book (in French but subtitled in English):

A review at Debbish.com on 15 May 2017

A Death in Paradise - a review by Wendy Montrose on 29 June 2017 at Scoop Review of Books

A review at Mysteries in Paradise on 5 August 2017

Michel Bussi’s ‘Don’t Let Go’ is a gripper - review by Ivinder Gill published on 13 August 2017 in The Financial Express.

Publisher's Weekly review

Review on Crime Review website (it's a shame that the British reviewer, who calls herself a translator, writer, editor and reader who speaks French, doesn't know any better than to refer to "Reunion patois").

July 2020 update:

I finally got round to reading the translation of Ne Lâche Pas Ma Main by Sam Taylor. A former journalist, Sam Taylor is the author of four novels and has translated more than sixty books from French, including Laurent Binet’s HHhH, and other novels by Michel Bussi. Overall I thought he did a very good job of translating the book, and as a translator myself (albeit non-literary) it was very interesting to see how he'd tackled certain turns of phrases and French cultural references.  In some reviews of the translation I'd read when it was first published, people had mentioned the number of translator's notes, however these are just faithful translations of Michel Bussi's own footnotes.

However, I did come across a handful of translation errors that were due to a lack of local knowledge (Sam Taylor has obviously never been to Reunion!) and/or research:

• Chapter 5: "smoked rougail" (rougail boucané in French): boucané is smoked meat, rougail is the name of the dish; the dish can't be smoked, only the meat it contains
• Chapter 21: "sailing club in Bourbon"  (club nautique de Bourbon): despite it being mentioned a few pages previously that Bourbon is the former name of Reunion Island, here Bourbon gets referred to as a place name rather than a proper name (a quick map search should have shown that there's no actual place called Bourbon in Reunion)
• Chapter 28: "Creole picnic boxes" (gamelles du pique-nique créole): boxes might be a deliberate choice of wording by the translator, but the gamelles here are actually pots and pans. For a typical Creole picnic people take their cari, cooked the night before or early the same morning, in a cast-iron pan and heat it up over an open fireplace at the picnic location (see here for a picture)
• Chapter 36: "brambles" (ronces): brambles are a temperate zone plant that don't grow in Reunion, a better translation here would have been "thorns"
• Chapters 38, 41 & 49: goyavier gets translated as "guava" instead of "strawberry guava". Despite the similar-sounding name, guava and strawberry guava are two different fruit. Guavas are larger and pale pinky-red inside, whereas strawberry guava are dark red. Knowing this makes it easier to understand (spoiler alert!) why goyaviers are used to imitate fake blood towards the end of the novel.
• Chapter 41: in the local Creole song Z'enfants les Hauts n'a brouillard gets translated as "no fog" instead of "there is fog", and Y appelle Marla becomes "Just call Marla" instead of "It's called Marla". Admittedly this is Reunion Creole and not French.
• In addition, cari gets systematically translated as "curry". Given that many Creole or non-standard French words are printed in italics, and that there are already almost fifty footnotes, it might have been a good idea to add one for cari rather than mistranslating it as curry. I can only presume that Bussi didn't do footnotes for rougail boucané and cari as these dishes tend to be known in mainland France even by people who've never been to Reunion. 

English explanations of several of these terms (such as rougail, cari and goyavier) can be found in my Glossary of some useful words in Reunion Island.

In any case, this small number of mistranslations didn't take away from my overall pleasure of reading an excellent translation (even though I don't really like the story itself, as mentioned above!).