Colette: Pure, Impure, and in Translation
Rachel Careau, in conversation with Elisabeth Ladenson
Colette’s writing has long had a reputation for being difficult to translate. Rachel Careau, translator of Chéri and La Fin de Chéri, recently completed the first new translation of Le Pur et l’impur in nearly sixty years, and only the second since its definitive 1941 publication. Of all Colette’s works, The Pure and the Impure—a wide-ranging, uncategorizable first-person exploration of sex and sexualities, the book that she considered her best and most autobiographical—is perhaps the most challenging. Why? Acclaimed translator Rachel Careau and Columbia French professor Elisabeth Ladenson will discuss Le Pur et l’impur and Chéri and La Fin de Chéri as well as Colette’s writing in general and what makes it, and Le Pur in particular, so difficult to translate.
Rachel Careau is the translator most recently of Colette’s The Pure and the Impure (Norton, 2026). Her previous translations include Colette’s“Chéri” and “The End of Chéri” (Norton, 2022)—a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice—and the Austrian French writer Roger Lewinter’s Story of Love in Solitude and The Attraction of Things (both New Directions, 2016). A 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellow, she lives in Hudson, New York.
Elisabeth Ladenson is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her book Proust's Lesbianism (Cornell UP, 1999) has been translated into French as Proust lesbien and into Spanish as Lesbianismo en Proust. Her book Dirt for Art's Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita was published by Cornell in 2007. She is working on a book called "Proust in the Margins: Jew, Homosexual, Snob."
