It would still be nice for her books to be translated by someone who has lived experience as a girl.
Wynne has won numerous awards for his translations, including being shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018 for his translation of a Despentes novel. The autobiographical feminist manifesto that first appeared in French in 2006 and in English in 2010 had been out of print, but FSG Originals just released a new translation by Frank Wynne. Thus, I never read Despentes’ King Kong Theory until now.
I was awash in cool ideas and soaking up every possible influence, not yet discerning or disciplined enough to follow the trail or dig more deeply into them. I made a mental note that Despentes and I were on the same page but never looked into her work further. If the audience couldn’t stomach a reversal, wherein the girls get to do all the damage for a change, then those people leaving the theater were just hypocrites and fraidy-cats. Baise-Moi was using the genres of pornography and ultra-gore to point out really obvious facts about the lived experiences of girls that are hard to disagree with. So those are the two things I was thinking about as I watched the mass exodus in the theater that afternoon. Mainly: that sex and violence are found together as often as peanut butter and jelly, and that the entire planet is conspiring to keep girls down. Punk girls know some things about sex and violence. It was subsequently banned in France for almost 30 years. A bunch-meaning there were only a half dozen people left in a theater of about 30. I don’t remember much about Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s Baise-Moi (usually translated as Fuck Me or sometimes Rape Me), except that a bunch of people walked out of it. Nobody ever walked out of these movies, except to pee and then hurry back. This effort was often wildly against the mainstream blockbusters I’d grown up watching.Īmong the gems I discovered that year: Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming’s The Anniversary Party, Terry Zwigoff’s Ghostworld, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Charles Herman-Wurmfeld’s Kissing Jessica Stein¸ and Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko.
Every Saturday afternoon, I’d plunk down a couple of bucks for the matinee showing and get myself a film education that was without any greater context than “here’s what’s playing this weekend”. There was a small three-screen movie theater nearby that ran all the hot indies. In the summer of 2001, I was 19-years-old and exploring independent cinema for the first time.
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