Valerie Martin's extraordinary new book, The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories, is a suite of indelible portraits of artists. There's the arrogant painter who torments his muse in "His Blue Period"; the mercurial Hamlet of "The Bower"; the deluded hack of "Beethoven"; the still-bitter author who faces his ravaged ex-lover (and her final opus) in the title story; the unsatisfiable lesbian poet of "The Open Door"; the printmaker who inhabits a wildly different realm from her spouse in "The Change." Written in crisp, limber prose, these six stories are Goldberg Variations on a shared theme: The only thing harder than being an artist is living with one.

Given this worldview, it may seem surprising that Martin enjoys a long-running affectionate partnership with a literary compatriot, noted translator John Cullen. They're the sort of couple that touch each other unconsciously, a hand brushing a shoulder in passing. They sit side by side on the sofa, listening appreciatively or interjecting details as the other one speaks. Both their voices are tinged with a soft Southern purr; Cullen's has a touch more New Orleans grit, like the chicory flavor in dark-roasted Café du Monde. There's even a hint of physical resemblance; both are slight, fine-boned, and fair. Surely these people were made for each other.

They met in New Orleans when Martin was 19 and Cullen in his early 20s, though it took them two decades to move in together. Meanwhile, Martin married, divorced, raised a daughter, and wrote, supporting herself as a bookstore clerk, welfare caseworker, and writing professor. Cullen roamed throughout Europe, living in Paris, Rome, Florence, Vienna, and Madrid. "You know that blues song, 'All My Life I've Been a Traveler?'" He smiles. "I liked it when I was young. I could fit all my belongings in a little Fiat."

But he often returned to his native New Orleans, where he ran into Martin "again and again." Eventually, he followed her to Massachusetts, where she was teaching. "John had the terror of Yankees," Martin says dryly. Cullen responds, "More terror of Yankee winters. I still have it."

Martin had already published two volumes of stories and three novels. After the breakthrough success of Mary Reilly, a Jekyll/Hyde reimagining (she calls the Julia Roberts film "inescapably awful"), the couple spent three years in Rome. They've lived in the Hudson Valley for nine years now, first in Lagrangeville, now Millbrook, in a tidy, white-porched colonial they share with "a very important cat." They chose the area "because I love Adams," Martin exclaims, lauding the neighboring grocery and garden shop. "Really, it's the reason we live here."

Both writers work at home. They've set up their offices at opposite ends of the house, to minimize the distraction factor. Cullen says, "She's upstairs back, I'm downstairs front. She gets the phone, I get the front door." Their work hours are staggered as well. Martin prefers to work mornings; Cullen customarily starts around 5pm, breaks for dinner, and works until 3am. "It's very, very quiet in Millbrook after 9:30," he states with deep satisfaction, noting that neighbors' incessant lawnmower din is the bane of his downstairs-front workspace.

Cullen is a freelance scout for foreign books, evaluating works in French, Italian, German, and Spanish. "Usually the foreign publisher is pushing hard for an American edition, saying this is an important author, you must print this book." He reads 10 to 20 a year, generally recommending just two or three for translation. There's a fringe benefit to scouting: "If I really like it and find it compatible, I suggest that it should be translated by me."

One such book was The Swallows of Kabul, by Yasmina Khadra (former Algerian army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul took this feminine pseudonym to avoid censorship by the military). Now living in France and writing full-time, Khadra earned international acclaim for his latest novel, The Attack. Set in an Israel ripped from the headlines, it charts an assimilated Arab surgeon's descent into hell when he learns that his beloved wife was a suicide bomber. Cullen's vivid translation debuts this month.

"I learned languages rather quickly as a kid," says Cullen, whose mother was Spanish. He took Latin and Greek ("the foundation") in high school, and studied French at the University of New Orleans. After graduation, he took off for Europe, "not to become a translator, but someone who could read Proust and Dante." He'd done some teaching in grad school, but "hated it," and sought work outside academia. For some years, he worked as an abstracter for oil drilling companies on the Gulf Coast, translating old deeds from the French and Spanish. 

The leap from business translation to literature "was because of her," Cullen says, patting Martin's leg fondly. Martin introduced him to her editor, the legendary Nan A. Talese, who hired Cullen to translate Alice Miller's introduction to Diary of a Young Girl. This led to jobs translating blurbs and reviews, then books by Susanna Tamaro, Margaret Mazzatini, Allessandro Barbaro, Carlos Ghosn, Adolf Holl, and Henning Boetius. Cullen met Yasmina Khadra for the first time in Toronto, since the post-9/11 American government gave him visa trouble.

"He's a very proud guy. They wanted him to jump through more hoops than he was willing to jump through, so he just said no." It remains to be seen whether Khadra will come to America when The Attack is released. Cullen's artistry sometimes seems invisible. Martin cites a rave review in The Nation for a Christa Wolf novel that neglected to mention its translator, though the reviewer took pains to praise Wolf's prose style. "That's my style!" says Cullen, who's surprisingly blunt about how much editorial power a translator wields. "We translators flatter ourselves that authors need a little help that only we can give them."

While careful "never to betray the author's intent," Cullen considers it kosher to prune purple prose. "Yasmina Khadra just needs a bridle sometimes." He also points out that "all Western European languages sound more formal than English if translated literally; you need to loosen it up, find the equivalent diction."

In Martin's story "The Open Door," an American poet in Italy muses, "Would the double entendre on the words 'ice pick' get lost in translation? This seemed amusing, the idea that richness, nuance, got lost in translation. Where did it go? She imagined the land of what was lost in translation, imagined herself in it."

Cullen observes, "You can get a nuance, but it's not the same nuance." For him, the key is rendering the flavor of somebody's speech, or a narrative voice. He spends far more time on a manuscript's first 20 pages than the rest of a text, which he generally covers at four to five pages a day.

Martin does the same thing when inventing a narrator's voice. "It's like trying to tune in a radio," she says. "You know when you've hit it." Narrating in first or third person is "a strategic choice. When I choose first person, it's always in self-defense. The character is trying to justify his existence by telling you a story." ("Call me Ishmael," Cullen grins.) Third person, Martin continues, "allows you to be a little more conscious, more distanced from the character. You can have a bigger palette, characters who don't know things about each other that the reader knows, which is fun."

Cullen reads Martin's books in translation, and praises the French version of Property and the Spanish Salvation. (Martin, who struggles with foreign languages, perused these as well: "If I've written the book myself, I can whiz right along.") They both enjoyed the French book jacket for Property, with the title Maitresse (mistress) above Martin's photo; Cullen displays it in his office.

The couple rarely share work in progress, though they often consult about phrases or synonyms. (Cullen: "I talk about mine more than she talks about hers." Martin: "Well, you would, wouldn't you?") Martin may spend years on a book, while Cullen translates several a year. "Tell you a secret," he says, leaning forward. "Translators aren't paid very well. I estimate my earnings at $1.03 an hour."

Martin smiles indulgently. She's lived every kind of a writer's life, turning out books in obscurity, finding mainstream success with Mary Reilly, challenging expectations with her remarkable follow-up novel, The Great Divorce, and finally achieving literary renown with the prestigious Orange Prize for Property, her tenth book.

A pitch-perfect evocation of a Louisiana slave owner who chafes against her husband's oppressions while unconscious of her own, Property is tight as a corset. The novel grew out of conversations with Cullen "about our education, lies we were told about the Civil War, the myth of the South. I wanted to knock all that down."

Martin is currently writing a novel set in the Hudson Valley, Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana, and Croatia, ancestral home of many Louisiana oystermen. Her novel takes place in 2002, before Plaquemines was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Martin and Cullen have just returned from New Orleans, their first trip since the storm. She calls the experience "sad, shocking," and says, "Everybody should go." Wary of sentimentality, she adds, "It was also fun. Twenty percent of the city looks great. When you drive down Carrollton Avenue, you cross a point where the water stopped. It's eerie to drive through those streets, miles and miles of abandoned houses."

Cullen goes into the kitchen, returning with pitchers of chicory coffee and warm milk as Martin serves fruit salad. Cullen tastes his and pronounces it "excellent." "Thank you," says Martin, dipping her chin with self-conscious enjoyment. Cohabitation with artists does not look so bad at the moment.