Christelle Dabos’ Here, and Only Here (Ici et Seulement Ici) is a novel about adolescence set in a peculiar school referred to as “Here.” At the school, students are divided into “Tops” and “Bottoms”; a Prince rules over the class on the fourth floor; and a secret society meets to discuss the Armageddon-bringing “schmoil,” a strange substance that runs into the water supply once a week. The book is reflective of Dabos’ own experiences in middle school: a sense of otherness, unspoken social rules, and witnessing the cruelty of other children. In an interview with Librairie Mollat in 2023, the author explained that she didn’t fit in, having a poor sense of how her classmates expected her to interact with them. She was even given a list of ways to be “cooler” to her peers, the lasting impact of which inspired themes of implicit and explicit rules in Here, and Only Here.
Dabos, now an adult, is a critically acclaimed French author, born in Cannes in 1980 and currently residing in Belgium. Her most famous body of writing, the Mirror Visitor series, began as a submission to the Gallimard Jeunesse-RTL-Télérama First Novel Competition, and exploded globally in popularity after being published in 20 languages. For English translations of her novels, Dabos values consistency; her works are translated by Hildegarde Serle for Europa Editions. Serle is intimately familiar with Dabos’ style of writing and worldbuilding, lending credence to her translation of Here, and Only Here. London-based with a degree in French from Oxford University and a Chartered Institute of Linguists Diploma in Translation, Serle can also be found credited as the translator of literary fiction such as Valérie Perrin’s Fresh Water for Flowers and Forgotten on Sunday, Gaëlle Bélem’s The Rarest Fruit, and Lola Lafon’s Reeling, all published by Europa Editions.
The plot of Here, and Only Here is brought to life from the perspectives of four students: Iris, the girl who turns invisible and disappears from everyone’s memory; Pierre, the odd one out who is haunted by the ghost of a boy he killed (the ghost wants him to learn to play the oboe); Madeleine, the “guru” half-possessed by a Voice who prophesies doom and cures minor ailments; and Guy, the boy who is befriended by a new girl of a lower social status and consequently upsets the balance of the class. Their stories, along with that of a substitute teacher who used to be a pupil herself and is terrified yet respectful of the school’s repeating cycle of disappearance, murder, birth, and revolution, intertwine across an entire school year, weaving a perfectly messy tapestry of the middle-school experience.
While crafting the atmosphere of Here, Dabos was inspired by the magical realism of South American authors Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, and José Donoso. The lens of magical realism as a vessel for a story of adolescent turmoil not only creates intrigue among the more serious issues of the novel—bullying, suicidal ideation, and murder, to name a few—but allows for the effects of these events to be represented more physically than would have been possible if Dabos chose a more realistic setting.
For example, the narrator Iris feels a lack of identity in comparison to her older sister, who begins ignoring her once Iris walks into the first day of school Here. This loss of self manifests as Iris becomes completely unnoticeable to her peers, teachers, and family, locked within the walls of Here until she is able to address the truth of her identity and how her actions impact others. Her internal anguish is expressed outwardly in a magical manner that reinforces the magnitude of her feelings, just as one’s own problems appear to be all-consuming at the transition from preteen to teenager.
The entire novel is permeated with a slimy quality, constantly infusing even unrelated passages with themes of the ever-present, stomach-churning schmoil. Dabos’ descriptions are vivid, often visceral and disgusting, which creates a greasy atmosphere contrasting the vulnerability expressed by each narrator in this hostile school––a school actually based on Dabos’ own childhood school in the south of France, with prison-like architecture and filthy outdoor toilets. Serle’s translation conveys Dabos’ crass yet lyrical tone very closely, merely smoothing out grammatical differences between the languages and reshaping short phrases to better preserve meaning. Take this passage excerpted from the perspective of Madeleine, the guru, as she explores life in her new body that undergoes no biological processes:
| Je pique un crayon dans la trousse de Louise, et pas n’importe lequel : son 2B. Je propulse la mine sur ma feuille, à droite, à gauche, en bas, en haut, surtout pas de lignes droites, je gratte du graphite, je dégraisse, je dégorge par le dessin toute la matière que mon corps ne sécrète plus, excréments, menstruations, tout ce que j’ai cessé de ressentir à la surface et en dessous, les démangeaisons, le douloureux, le délectable. À plat, l’ex-corporalité! (Chapter 31) | I pilfer a pencil from Louise’s case, and not any old one: her 2B. I push the tip over my paper, to the right, the left, down, up, anything but straight lines, I scratch with the lead, I wear it down, I clear away, through drawing, all that my body no longer secretes, excrement, menstrual blood, all I’ve stopped feeling on the surface and inside, the itchy, the painful, the delectable. The old body, flattened-out! (152) |
As French is a language filled with redundancies, Serle cuts extraneous words for an anglophone audience: “toute la matière que”—“all the material that”—becomes merely “all that”. At the same time, Serle reimagines French-specific structures to sound more natural in English—“À plat, l’ex-corporalité!” would have been a bit too strange in its direct translation, “To flat, the ex-corporality,” but “The old body, flattened-out!” retains Dabos’ intention of emphasizing Madeleine’s art as a metaphor for herself. In contrast, Serle clearly engaged with Dabos’ sometimes-obscene vocabulary in a manner meant to retain her word choice as closely as possible. She doesn’t mince words for her audience, despite the fact that the French are known for being more open to shocking content in their media than an American audience, for example, would be. Mentions of various bodily fluids are not a one-time occurrence, but rather a running theme of the novel, and in preserving them, Serle continues to demonstrate why she is routinely entrusted with translating Dabos’ works.
Though it’s clear Serle and Dabos have a strong working relationship, Serle has no online presence beyond the fact of her technical background. Reaching out to her via Europa Editions resulted in a curious response:“In general, Hildegarde prefers to remain ‘invisible’ and let her translations speak for themselves” (Personal communication, November 18, 2024). Serle’s decision to remain out of the public’s eye is a bold choice in today’s literary climate that frequently eschews the labor-intensive part that a translator plays in a book. With many translators fighting for recognition of their work—and the push to include translators’ names on book covers alongside the authors’—Serle’s private and mysterious approach to her own translations plays into the hands of a public that wishes to forget the story they’re reading wasn’t always in English.
However, one sole translator isn’t at fault for a pervading mindset of ego-centrism among Anglophone readers. In contrast, the idea of publishing a body of writing anonymously—or under a pseudonym, as is possible in the case of Serle—is far from unheard of. The renowned Italian novelist Elena Ferrante has never revealed her true identity, maintaining the stance that a published book no longer has any need of its writer, be it via commentary, explanation, or justification. Serle’s similar outlook on her translations should not be held to a different standard merely because her craft is the subject of more public scrutiny than that of non-translated works.
Many elements of Here, and Only Here are intended to be comical, but Dabos’ tongue-in-cheek, dark humor may only be fully appreciated by a slightly more mature reader. Serle retains this subtle humor in one such passage, a conversation amongst the top-secret club after they’ve tampered with some valves to allow the schmoil into the water supply:
Number Two:…“I mean, you keep repeating that we must find a solution to the end of the world. But isn’t it we who are causing it, that motherfucking end of the world?”
Number One: “To find a solution to a problem, the problem first has to arise.”
Number Two: “Fuck’s sake.”
Number One: “Science is made of paradoxes.”
Number Two: “I don’t know about science, but you’re so stupid. Hand me the chips and the binoculars.” (173–174)
To a young reader, this conversation may come across as stuffy and philosophical. The humor lies in the reader’s ability to acknowledge how absurd these profound-sounding clichés are coming from a preteen, while the back-and-forth from Number Two, whose self-reflection—comical in itself—devolves into insults and exasperation. Although she originally never intended to publish it, Dabos’ recommendation for readers is to give the book a go only after completing middle school, and I would even say that a few years’ distance from being a young teenager would allow for readers to benefit in the greatest capacity from the author’s insights into this age.
The novel was originally intended not as a full-length book, but rather a single short story. Upon completing what would eventually become the novel’s first chapter, Dabos felt compelled to continue adding new characters to encapsulate the many facets of life at this transitional age. According to an interview she gave on the YouTube Channel La Pensine Mutine, writing this book was a healing process for Dabos, allowing her to explore perspectives that were not all the same as her own experiences in middle school.
Here, and Only Here concludes with a message of hope that invites readers to reflect on their own middle school days. Dabos includes the reader into the narrative, addressing the final chapter to “You,” and asserting that the outcome of our past depends on our decisions in the present. In the end, whether that girl remains invisible or that boy jumps off the roof, well—“it’s up to you” (209).
Dabos, Christelle. Here, and Only Here. Translated by Hildegarde Serle. Europa Editions, 2023.
Camille Coker is a student at Oberlin College who specializes in French, English, and Spanish.