Its ability to tackle confronting subject matter has meant that SMALL BOAT is the novel everyone is talking about at the moment. We were able to chat with Helen Stevenson, who translated the Booker-Shortlisted novel, about her experiences working with the acclaimed Naufrage, and how bringing it to the English language could put a stop to the politicization and intolerance of refugees seeking safety in the UK.

"Everywhere people are going under - victims of political unrest, violence, climate crisis impact, poverty, inequality, war."

Do you remember when you first encountered Vincent Delecroix’s work and how did it affect you?

I first came across Naufrage sitting at my kitchen table in December 2023 reading book reviews in the French press. It felt like a piece of writing I had needed to read for a long time. I still find it it extraordinarily troubling and moving. Every night brings further catastrophic ‘migrant’ incidents in the English channel. But instead of sensitising us, layer upon layer of reportage seems to harden us. A novel requires both writer and reader to perform an act of imagination, putting themselves in another person’s place.

Vincent Delecroix has said it would have been ‘indecent’ to try to write from the point of view of an asylum seeker caught up in a ‘small boat’ event. Instead he puts himself – and us - inside the head of the young female radio operative on duty on the French coast that night, who was later accused in the French press of negligence, incompetence, and even inhumanity. The hapless ‘spectator’ becomes the accused, if indirectly. That played on my mind.

What was it about Small Boat that made you want to translate it for a new audience?

When the first call came from the boat to the French rescue station around midnight on the night of 23rd November 2021, the French radio operator said ‘phone the English, you’re in English waters’. The French and English couldn’t agree on who should send help. In the end no one did. The boat went down somewhere near the midline between France and England, with the currents pulling the 29 bodies this way and that. I felt the book would be half complete if it only existed in the French language, in a French edition. We needed both. Comments posted in a major British broadsheet newspaper under a review of Small Boat shortly after publication, confirmed to me that it was a vital piece of writing. Now English speakers can read it too.

Was there anything specific about Small Boat that made you want to translate it?

The novel doesn’t seek to solve the continuing migrant crisis. We need enlightened political solutions for that. But it highlights our anguished position as onlookers, not just of the events in the channel, but of human misery everywhere. ‘Shipwrecked’ doesn’t just refer to people drowning in the water of the English channel because their boat has sprung a leak. Everywhere people are going under - victims of political unrest, violence, climate crisis impact, poverty, inequality, war. People cannot keep their heads above water. If I hadn’t translated Naufrage someone else would have, but I’m glad I did, and I’m really glad I persisted when so many publishers turned it down. In the end it found the publisher it needed, so it was for the best.

Could you speak about any specific challenges about the translation of Small Boat?

It took time to settle on a title. The French title Naufrage means ‘shipwreck’. But it’s a difficult term to translate – it means wreck in general, with overtones of being washed up, finished, done for, sunk, lost at sea, caught up in a disaster. Each time it occurred I had to think about the best translation in the context – or should it be kept the same throughout?

The working title was Save Our Souls (SOS). The last words spoken by the radio operator to the young man who has called her fourteen times over four hours, and is now in the icy water, are ‘You will not be saved.’ And indeed they are not. But Vincent Delecroix is also suggesting that we, as much as she, might be charged with negligence, incompetence, inhumanity, or just hand-wringing and looking-away. Will we, in the wider sense, be saved?

In the end we decided on Small Boat (suggested by Jeremy Harding, who wrote the Introduction). The term most used to describe the dinghies used by migrants, it carries echoes of the plucky, and courageous missions undertaken by people living mostly on the south coast of England in their own little boats, to rescue stranded soldiers from Dunkirk. There’s an irony in that.

Buy your copy of Small Boat today via your local indie!