Untranslatable, the debut memoir by Lara Vergnaud, traces the intersections of language, identity, and everyday life through the eyes of a literary translator. As Vergnaud brings novels across linguistic and cultural borders, she navigates her own experiences with illness, infertility, marriage, and the lingering sense of unbelonging shaped by a life between countries and languages. Weaving together personal reflection with the art of translation, the memoir explores what it means to remain invisible while giving voice to others, and how language can both reveal and obscure the self.
Untranslatable will be published on February 16, 2027, by Catapult and is available for preorder now.
Lara Vergnaud is a writer and literary translator specializing in North African literature. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and Words Without Borders, and she has translated more than a dozen novels, including The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, which was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Born in Tunisia, raised in the United States, she now lives in southern France.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Untranslatable, designed by Victoria Maxfield, along with a Q&A with Vergnaud about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I didn’t have much of a vision as I was writing, apart from that I wanted something simple but bold. And also that I wanted the “un” in untranslatable to stand out somehow on the cover. The book asks the same questions over and over: Is everything translatable? Is anything translatable? I wanted the design of the title to reflect that ambiguity.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
At the beginning of the process, I sent a mood board of sorts to the design team, book covers that were mostly minimalistic, restrained, sparse, etc., which is how I tend to write. And a few book covers with birds too, though I feared that might be too literal. Birds are a recurring motif in the memoir, or one bird rather—a red-breasted swallow—as are snakes. They serve as inner voices of sorts, one chirping, the other hissing.
I received the design that is now the cover, and was so taken with it that my editor and I decided there was no need to consider other options. I suggested a few minor changes—the color of the font, the placement of the bird’s wing. Tiny details, but they bring everything together beautifully.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
A bit overwhelming to be honest! That little bird is symbolic of a lot of things for me, so seeing it on the cover felt very intimate in a way. My main reaction, though, was delight. The cover is a perfect match for the book.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
The book does a lot of questioning—about the role of language, about relationships and fidelity, about belonging—but never comes to any neat or clear conclusions. The design, though literal, is similarly ambiguous, cryptic even.
I showed the cover design to a good friend, who hadn’t read the book yet. He responded, “Ah, so the snake is eating the bird!” I laughed, because once you read the memoir, it becomes clear that the bird is carrying the snake, or perhaps the snake is carrying the bird. In any case, they’re a unit, two halves of a whole. But I love that there’s a bit of mystery.