William Rodarmor

William Rodarmor
Born	(1942-06-05) June 5, 1942 New York
Occupation	French literary translator, Journalist
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	Dartmouth College (BA) Columbia University (JD) UC Berkeley (MJ)
Years active	1970–present
Notable works	Tamata and the Alliance (translator) And Their Children After Them (translator)
Notable awards	Lewis Galantière Award (1996) Albertine Prize (2021)
Spouse	Thaisa Frank (div. 2002)
Partner	Toby Golick
Children	Casey Rodarmor

William Rodarmor (born June 5, 1942) is an American journalist, editor, and translator of French literature. He is notable in the field of literary translation for having won the Albertine Prize, and the Lewis Galantière Award from the American Translators Association.

Rodarmor was born in New York and pursued a bilingual education in English and French. After graduating from Columbia Law School, he tried practicing law but quickly abandoned it in the early 1970s. He then spent the decade traveling, mountaineering, and sailing. He took odd jobs and wrote freelance. Sailing in the South Pacific he met singlehanded sailor and author Bernard Moitessier in Tahiti, leading to Rodarmor's first book translation: Moitessier's round-the-world saga, The Long Way. He would go on to translate over forty more books, including Moitessier's popular Tamata and the Alliance, and multiple books by Gérard de Villiers and Guillaume Prévost [fr; fa; it; pt].

Rodarmor concurrently pursued a career in journalism, including working as an associate editor for PC World in the late 1980s, and as a managing editor of California Monthly (UC Berkeley's alumni magazine) during the 1990s. In the 2000s he turned again to freelance writing.

Biography

Early life and education

William Rodarmor leaping in front of the Eiffel Tower in 1963.

William Rodarmor was born in New York City on June 5, 1942, and attended the Lycée Français de New York, as well as Collège Beau Soleil in Switzerland, becoming bilingual at an early age. He enrolled at Dartmouth College in 1960, but dropped out to serve in the Army from 1961 to 1964. While in the army he learned Russian in California, and served as an Army Russian linguist in Germany. He returned to Dartmouth to earn his B.A. in 1966. He then earned a J.D. degree from Columbia Law School in 1969. He moved to San Francisco and spent one year practicing personal injury law.

Early career and wilderness adventures

Rodarmor abandoned law in 1970, when he was 29, and sailed to Tahiti, as a crew member on a 40-foot ketch from Panama. This would be the first of multiple adventures he embarked on during the next decade; spending the 1970s "rafting rivers and climbing mountains."

While in Tahiti he met Bernard Moitessier, a French singlehanded sailor and popular author. Moitessier asked Rodarmor to translate his round-the-world saga, The Long Way, into English. This translation would be the first of over forty French-to-English book translations that Rodarmor would undertake during his decades-long career in literary translation.

Inspired by Moitessier, in 1971 he sailed 30 days solo from Tahiti to Hawaii.

Afterwards he worked as a National Park Service ranger in Alaska in 1973–1975. He also led wilderness trips for Mountain Travel. He also worked for the U.S. State Department as a French interpreter. In 1974 he joined a mountaineering expedition to Chile.

Journalistic and editorial career

Throughout his adventures in the 1970s, Rodarmor was a freelance writer, writing on topics ranging from sailing and climbing to acupuncture and plastic surgery.

He also worked as an associate publisher for East Bay Review from 1975 to 1978.

In 1982 he went back to school, to pursue a master's degree in journalism at UC Berkeley, graduating in 1984. He noted that he especially enjoyed learning broadcasting from Bill Drummond and long-form writing from Bernard Taper and David Littlejohn.

In 1983 Rodarmor published one of his more notable articles, an investigative piece that brought to light allegations of sexual abuse by guru Muktananda, titled “The Secret Life of Swami Muktananda."

He was an associate editor for PC World magazine from 1986 to 1989, then a managing editor of California Monthly (U.C. Berkeley's alumni magazine) until 1999.

During this time he wrote on a broad array of subjects, ranging from computers to medicine, but with a frequent focus on law. During his tenure at California Monthly, he received the Council for Advancement and Support of Education's 1993 gold medal for Best Article of the Year in higher education reporting for "TKO in Sociology," the story of French sociology professor Loïc Wacquant who spent four years studying boxers in the Chicago ghetto.

After a decade at California Monthly, Rodarmor accepted a position as the top editor of a web-based business publication. He found the new position to be challenging but exciting, starting with a pool of "underpaid" freelance writers of varying skills. He weeded out the less-than-desirable reporters, and fought to raise the pay rate for better writers. "Good writers are an editor's stock in trade," he said. "You have to treasure them and treat them right." In 2001, as part of the dot-com crash the publication went bankrupt, propelling him back into the world of freelance writing and editing.

Personal life

Rodarmor grew up in New York, and has long resided in Berkeley, California. He was married to novelist Thaisa Frank with whom he had a son, Casey Rodarmor (b. 1983), a UC Berkeley gradudate in computer science known for his blockchain expertise. Rodarmor and Frank divorced in 2002.

While studying law at Columbia in the late 1960s he forged a life-long friendship with his classmate Toby Golick (who later became a law professor). Later in life they renewed their romantic relationship. Together, Golick and Rodarmor, won The New Yorker cartoon caption contest in 2010.

Translation work

Since 1970 Rodarmor has translated over 40 books and screenplays from French to English.

Among his numerous authors, Rodarmor has translated several more than once. He started with Bernard Moitessier’s round-the-world saga The Long Way in 1973, and continued the stories of sailing adventures with Tamata and the Alliance in 1995 and A Sea Vagabond’s World in 1998. Between 2014 and 2016, Rodarmor reeled off five spy thrillers by Gérard de Villiers, whose CIA contractor hero Malko Linge has been compared been compared to that of Ian Fleming's James Bond. Rodarmor has also translated series of time-travel books by Guillaume Prévost and fantasy works by Sophie Audouin-Mamikonian.

Reviews and style

Reviewers have characterized multiple translations by Rodarmor as "elegant" and "smooth."

The Wall Street Journal in its review of de Villiers' The Madmen of Benghazi said that Rodarmor's English translation of Madmen "is actually better than the original."

Nancy Cirillo, in reviewing the translation of Stéphane Dufoix's Diasporas, said that "Rodarmor's translation is seamless, rendered with that appearance of effortlessness that only the most gifted and painstaking translators can accomplish."

William Scherman writing about Moitessier's Tamata and the Alliance, called it a "runaway bestseller (...) available in English through the brilliant translation of journalist William Rodarmor."

A. Bowdoin Van Riper in reviewing The Fate of the Mammoth by Claudine Cohen said of the translation that it "reads smoothly and introduces only occasional infelicities."

Multiple reviewers viewed positively Rodarmor's translation of Nicolas Mathieu's bestseller And Their Children After Them, especially for his ability to translate the slang-rich book into American vernacular. Joshua Armstrong writing for the LA Review of Books said that "veteran translator William Rodarmor does a good job capturing this tone, deftly transposing the slangy French dialogue into its 1990s English equivalent." Similarly, Boyd Tonkin writing for the Financial Times notes that "Rodarmor’s salty and supple translation lends to Anthony and his pals the smartass, vulnerable voices of American, not British, rust-belt teens" O'Keefe writing for The Times Literary Supplement said "Mathieu’s handling of quotidian and often gritty subjects is disconcertingly lyrical, and it is rendered well by William Rodarmor’s translation." On the other hand, Thomas Chatterton Williams writing for The New York Times deemed that the narrative had been "somewhat ineptly translated."

Translation philosophy

Rodarmor says that literary translation "has all the pleasures of creative writing, and you never have writer’s block."

He stated that his loyalty as a translator is to both the author and the reader, "but in a pinch, I try to help the reader," prioritizing their experience over producing a word-for-word translation. Along these lines, he favors the "stealth gloss," the practice of discreetly inserting a word or two to clarify an otherwise obscure passage. Similarly, he may expand ambiguous abbreviations. Once in a while he will also make factual corrections (i.e. dates of historical events) with the author's assent. He modulates the use of these approaches depending on the circumstances, mostly abstaining when translating primary sources in order to preserve their integrity. Notably this was the case with when he made the first English translation of the 1933 memoir of Parisian art dealer Berthe Weill.

He says that his goal is "to produce a text so smooth that the reader isn’t aware it’s a translation" and that "It should read like a book that [the original author] would have written if he were more fluent in English." In consequence he takes liberties, especially with jokes, slang, and idioms when the author agrees. He also says that "like most translators, I’m a ventriloquist, and I work hard to make people sound like themselves, and not like me."

Awards

Rodarmor has won several translation awards, most notably the Lewis Galantière Award and the Albertine Prize.

In 1996 Rodarmor won the Lewis Galantière Award awarded by the American Translators Association, for his translation of Tamata and the Alliance by Bernard Moitessier. The award is given biennially for a distinguished book-length literary translation from any language.

In 2001 he received an honorary mention from the Mildred L. Batchelder Award, bestowed by the American Library Association for his translation of Ultimate Game, by Christian Lehmann.

In 2017 he received the Northern California Book Award for Fiction Translation for his translation ofThe Slow Waltz of Turtles by Katherine Pancol.

In 2021 he won the Albertine Prize for his translation of the And Their Children After Them by Nicolas Mathieu. In 2023 he received the Albertine Jeunesse prize for his translation of The Last Giants by François Place. The Albertine Prize, co-presented by Van Cleef & Arpels and the French Embassy, recognizes American readers’ favorite French-language fiction title that has been translated recently into English.

Selected works

Translation works

Fiction

• Gomez-Arcos, Agustin (1984). The Carnivorous Lamb. Godine/Arsenal Pulp Press. ISBN 978-1551522302.
• Belloc, Denis (1991). Neons. Godine/Quartet. ISBN 978-0879238582.
• Belloc, Denis (1992). Slow Death in Paris. Quartet. ISBN 978-0704327870.
• Collard, Cyril (1993). Savage Nights. Quartet Books/Overlook Press. (made into a 1992 film)
• Failler, Jean (2003). Mayhem in Saint-Malo. Editions du Palémon.
• Zeller, Florian (2007). Julien Parme. Other Press. ISBN 978-1590512807.
• Pancol, Katherine (2013). The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-1410467676.
• Lattès, Jean-Claude (2014). The Last King of the Jews. Open Road.
• Spy series featuring Malko Linge:
  • de Villiers, Gérard (2014). The Madmen of Benghazi. Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0804169318.
  • de Villiers, Gérard (2014). Chaos in Kabul. Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0804169332.
  • de Villiers, Gérard (2015). Revenge of the Kremlin. Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0804169356.
  • de Villiers, Gérard (2016). Lord of the Swallows. Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0804169370.
  • de Villiers, Gérard (2016). Surface to Air. Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0804169394.
• Pancol, Katherine (2016). The Slow Waltz of Turtles. Penguin Books.
• Viel, Tanguy (2019). Article 353. Other Press. ISBN 978-1590519332.
• Mathieu, Nicolas (2020). And Their Children After Them. Other Press. ISBN 978-1892746771.
• Salmon, Christian (2022). The Blumkin Project: A Biographical Novel. Other Press. ISBN 978-1590511541.
• Viel, Tanguy (2024). The Girl You Call. Other Press. ISBN 978-1635423259.

Non-fiction and biographies

• Bagnis, Raymond (1973). Fishes of Polynesia. Edipac-Hachette. ISBN 978-0701804091.
• Moitessier, Bernard (1973). The Long Way. Sheridan House. ISBN 978-1493042784.
• Moitessier, Bernard (1995). Tamata and the Alliance. Sheridan House. ISBN 978-0924486777.
• Moitessier, Bernard (1998). A Sea Vagabond's World. Sheridan House. ISBN 978-1574090215.
• Cohen, Claudine (2002). The Fate of the Mammoth. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226112923.
• Bengal; et al. (2004). Illustrations with Photoshop. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 978-0596008598.
• Collandre, Patrick; et al. (2005). Creating Photomontages with Photoshop. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 978-0596008581.
• Bodin, Bertrand; et al. (2005). Assembling Panoramic Photos. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 978-0596009755.
• Dufoix, Stéphane (2008). Diasporas. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0520253599.
• Cypel, Sylvain (2021). The State of Israel vs. the Jews. Other Press. ISBN 978-1635420975.
• Weill, Berthe (2022). Pow! Right in the Eye! Thirty Years Behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226814360.
• Le Clerc, Xavier (2024). A Man with No Title. Saqi Books. ISBN 978-0863569821.

Young adult

• Place, François (1993). The Last Giants. Godine. ISBN 978-0879239909.
• Lehmann, Christian (2000). Ultimate Game. Godine. ISBN 978-1567921076.
• Modiano, Patrick; Sempé, Jean-Jacques (2001). Catherine Certitude. Godine. ISBN 978-2070630066.
• Place, François (2003). The Old Man Mad About Drawing: A Tale of Hokusai. Godine. ISBN 978-1567922608.
• Prévost, Guillaume (2007). The Book of Time. Scholastic. ISBN 978-0439883801.
• Prévost, Guillaume (2008). The Gate of Days. Scholastic. ISBN 978-0439883801. (Part 2 of The Book of Time)
• Prévost, Guillaume (2009). The Circle of Gold. Scholastic. ISBN 978-0439883771.
• Audouin-Mamikonian, Sophie (2012). Tara Duncan and the Spellbinders. Sky Pony Press (Skyhorse Publishing). ISBN 978-1616089696.
• Audouin-Mamikonian, Sophie (2013). Tara Duncan and the Forbidden Book. Sky Pony Press (Skyhorse Publishing). ISBN 978-1616089696.
• Audouin-Mamikonian, Sophie (2013). Indiana Teller: Spring Moon. Entangled (Macmillan Publishers). ISBN 978-1-62266-129-9.
• Charrier, Lisa; Domergue, Agnes (2014). Oh My, Oh No!. Running Press Kids. ISBN 978-0762454099.

Journalistic works

• Rodarmor, W. (Winter 1983). "The Secret Life of Swami Muktananda" (PDF). CoEvolution Quarterly: 104–11.
• Rodarmor, W. (September 15, 1985). "A Brave New You". California Living Magazine, San Francisco Examiner: 18–23.
• Rodarmor, W. (December 1991). "Havoc in the Hills". California Monthly. University of California, Berkeley: 10–13.
• Rodarmor, W. (September 1992). "TKO in Sociology". California Monthly. University of California, Berkeley.
• Rodarmor, W. (December 2001). "Prosecution Complex". California Lawyer. Daily Journal Corporation: 21–27.
• Rodarmor, W. (December 1995). "A Delicate Balance". California Monthly. University of California, Berkeley: 10–14.
• Rodarmor, W. (Winter 2003–2004). "Committed to Justice". Boalt Hall Transcript. University of California, Berkeley: 20–27.

Edited works

• Rodarmor, W.; Milner, Tom, eds. (1985). People Behind the News: Media Alliance's 1985 Guide to Accessible Bay Area Journalists. Media Alliance. OCLC 12174808.
• Rodarmor, W.; Livia, Anna, eds. (2008). France: A Traveler's Literary Companion. United States: Whereabouts Press. ISBN 9781883513184.
• Rodarmor, W., ed. (2011). French Feast: A Traveler's Literary Companion. United States: Whereabouts Press. ISBN 9780982785218.

External links

• Profile of Rodarmor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
• List of Rodarmor's books available at the Internet Archive
• List of Rodarmor's books by Kirkus Reviews
• List of Rodarmor's books in the Open Library