FRENCH LITERATURE SERIES Since 1974 the French Literature Series has been published in conjunction with the annual French Literature Conference, sponsored by the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures of the University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, USA. In addition to the scholarly papers selected for publication by the Editorial Board, it also accepts notes on the conference topic. The conference, which is scheduled for the end of March or beginning of April each year, focuses on a pre-announced topic. The deadline for submitting conference papers is November 1; for scholarly notes, the following May 1. Submissions should be prepared according to the MLA Handbook and should not exceed fifteen pages (25 lines per page, double-spacing, with ample margins). Reading time at the Conference is limited to twenty minutes. Scholarly notes should not exceed eight pages. Authors should submit two copies of their contribution, accompanied by return postage if they wish their paper to be returned. The essays appearing in the French Literature Series are drawn primarily from the Conference papers. Authors are informed of the inclusion of their papers in the volume when their papers are accepted for the Conference. Exceptionally, FLS does publish outstanding contributions from authors not participating in the Conference. To be considered for inclusion in the volume, such essays should not exceed twenty typed pages. A style sheet is available upon request or online at .
All communications concerning the Conference should be addressed to the Conference Director, and those concerning the French Literature Series to the Editor, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA. The French Literature Series is published by Editions Rodopi. Communications concerning standing orders or purchase of individual volumes or back volumes should be addressed to: Editions Rodopi B.V. Tijnmuiden 7 1046 AK Amsterdam-Holland The Netherlands Tel.: 31 (0) 20 611 48 21 Fax: 31 (0) 20 447 29 79 Internet:
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Future Volumes and Conference Topics Stealing the Fire in French and Francophone Literature and Film: Adaptation, Appropriation, Plagiarism, Hoax (FLS Vol. XXXVII, 2010)
March 18-20, 2010: French Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalysis in French: Language, Literature, Culture — 38th Annual French Literature Conference
FRENCH LITERATURE SERIES Editor James Day Editorial Board University of South Carolina William Edmiston Freeman G. Henry Paul Allen Miller Marja Warehime
Daniela DiCecco Jeanne Garane Nancy E. Lane Jeffery C. Persels
Advisory Board Michael T. Cartwright McGill University
Pierre Ronzeaud Université de Provence
Ross Chambers University of Michigan
Franc Schuerewegen Université d’Anvers / Université Radboud (Nimègue)
Roland Desné Université de Reims
Albert Sonnenfeld University of Southern California
Ralph Heyndels University of Miami
Marie-Odile Sweetser University of Illinois at Chicago
Norris J. Lacy Pennsylvania State University
Ronald W. Tobin University of California, Santa Barbara
Gerald Prince University of Pennsylvania
Dirk Van der Cruysse Universiteit Antwerpen
Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence’. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. An electronic version of this volume is included in print subscriptions. See www.rodopi.nl for details and conditions. ISBN: 978-90-420-2648-3 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2649-0 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in The Netherlands
(French Literature Series, Volume XXXVI, 2009)
TRANSLATION
in French and Francophone Literature and Film Edited by James Day
Amsterdam – New York, NY 2009
From the Editor This volume of FLS originated with the peer-reviewed submissions selected for our thirty-sixth annual French Literature Conference. Superbly organized by my indefatigable colleague, Jeanne Garane, this event brought together an imposing group of academics and translator-scholars. A published translator herself, Jeanne has provided a detailed introduction with commentary on such issues as retranslation, self-translation, and deliberate mistranslation, along with the inevitable verbal frustrations, the daunting cultural dimension, the insightful solutions, and the problematic market for translations of foreign literature in the U.S. Acknowledgment goes also to the editorial board, which determined final rankings after providing at least two blind evaluations of each submission. In cases where special expertise was required, our international advisory board stood ready to provide counsel. Both the annual conference and FLS are indebted to the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, to the program in Comparative Literature, and to the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of South Carolina for their generous support. James Day
Contents Introduction
ix
Public Language and the Aesthetics of the Translating City Sherry Simon
1
Translation and the Triumph of French: the Case of the Decameron Marian Rothstein
17
This Time “the Translation is Beautiful, Smooth, and True”: Theorizing Retranslation with the Help of Beauvoir Luise von Flotow
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Redefining Translation through Self-Translation: The Case of Nancy Huston Carolyn Shread
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Images et voix dans l’espace poétique de Saint-Denys Garneau: analyse du poème Le Jeu et d’extraits de ses traductions en anglais et en hongrois Louise Audet
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Translation as Revelation Marjolijn de Jager
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Werewere Liking as Translator and Translated Cheryl Toman
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The Great White Man of Lambaréné by Bassek ba Kobhio: When Translating a Colonial Mentality Loses its Meaning Anny Dominique Curtius
115
Traduire la reine Pokou: fidélité ou trahison? Sarah Davies Cordova
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Object Lessons: Metaphors of Agency in Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique Rose-Myriam Réjouis
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Translating Maryse Condé’s Célanire cou-coupé: Dislocations of the Caribbean Self in Richard Philcox’s Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? A Fantastical Tale Rachelle Okawa
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Intercultural Politics: Translating Postcolonial Lebanese Literature in the United States Christophe Ippolito
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Vu d’ici et là-bas: Le roman contemporain français publié en traduction aux États-Unis Cindy Merlin
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FLS, Volume XXXVI, 2009
Translation
Jeanne Garane University of South Carolina
Translation in/and French and Francophone Literature and Film: An Introduction
In March, 2008, a diverse group of scholars gathered at the 36th Annual French Literature Conference at the University of South Carolina to address the theme, “Translation in/and French and Francophone Literature and Film.” The resulting variety in approaches to translation that characterize the essays collected here reflects the current state of Translation Studies as a vast, international, and interdisciplinary field whose scope continues to expand. Despite growing attention to the field in the United States, however, translation continues to be “one of the most important vehicles of cultural transfer, and at the same time one of the least studied” (von Flotow and Nischik 1). As Lawrence Venuti so aptly shows in The Translator’s Invisibility, contemporary English-language translation continues to privilege a kind of fluency that masks the translation as translation. According to Venuti, a “fluent translation is immediately recognizable and intelligible, ‘familiarized,’ domesticated, not ‘disconcertingly’ foreign...” (5). Such an ideology means that a “good” translator makes his or her work invisible in order to produce an “effect of transparency that simultaneously masks its status as an illusion” (5). Under this regime, just as the translated text masks itself as a translation, the translator must efface him- or herself, and stand in the author’s shadow. This “masking” is coterminous with the denial of the translator’s legal status as author, so that translations are not only often effectuated for relatively little pay, but they are also denied the kind of copyright protection afforded to authors of “original works” because
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translations are viewed as derivative and secondary. 1 In the American Academy, this denial means that book-length translations are often not considered as single or even coauthored books in evaluations of scholarly performance, unlike “single-authored” scholarly books or works of fiction. Such a stance is highly ironic, given that, as Venuti points out, while “the fact of translation tends to be ignored even by the most sophisticated scholars,” these same scholars must often “rely on translated texts in their research and teaching” (Scandals 32). At the same time, translations are often taught without any acknowledgement of their status as such. The papers collected in the current volume are intended to add to the growing body of scholarship in the field of Translation Studies and to increase scholarly awareness of translation — in short, to make translation more “visible.” The variety of critical approaches represented here testifies to the current diversity of the field, from feminist translation practices to issues surrounding nationalism, postcoloniality, and globalization, to accounts of personal translational and editorial practices, to analyses of the marketing of translations in the United States. Despite this diversity, one constant concern is the attention to translation as a creative, transformative process that overturns the traditional understanding of translation as an inferior copy of an original. Indeed, as Sherry Simon emphasizes in her opening essay, “Public Language and the Aesthetics of the Translating City,” translation is transfigurative, and cities are the optimal spaces in which the relational nature of translation comes into play. Simon proposes that in today’s multilingual cities, translation is in fact a key to citizenship, since citizenship is the creation of shared social space. As “the index of accommodation and incorporation of languages into the public sphere,” writes Simon in this volume, “translation determines what enters a given cultural system and what remains outside.” Nevertheless, recent new work on the city has paid remarkably little attention to language. However, as Simon shows in her analysis of the visual presence of language as public art in Montreal and Vancouver, “language relations are part of the imaginative world that defines the city.” In “Translation and the Triumph of French: the Case of the Decam–––––––––– 1
See “A Call to Action” in The Translator’s Invisibility, 311-13.
Introduction
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eron,” Marian Rothstein examines language relations in a different historical context. In her analysis of the paratexts surrounding sixteenth-century French translations of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, Rothstein reminds us that the rise of multiple centers of power during the Renaissance replaced the Roman model of a single linguistic center, resulting in nationalist calls for the use of vernacular languages in place of Latin. In this context, translations of the Decameron from Tuscan into French are appropriative acts, instances of cultural conquest, whereby the “original” is consumed through imitation and replaced with an “improved” “French” version that “bests” the source text. Here, the task of translation is to make vernacular French the language of the French nation by displacing the former imperial language, Latin. In contrast to this model of translation as appropriation, Luise von Flotow’s essay, “This Time ‘the translation is beautiful, smooth, and true:’ Theorizing Re-translation with the Help of Beauvoir,” interrogates the very possibility of a final “best” translation of any given text. Instead, through recent critical reappraisals of Simone de Beauvoir’s translated works, von Flotow proposes a feminist view of translation as “a work of seriality and generation” (author’s emphasis), capable of proposing new understandings and readings of source texts by individuals who are able to read differently. Following Littau, Von Flotow proposes Pandora rather than Babel to figure translation as multiplicity, thereby positing translation and re-translation as regeneration rather than as deficiency. Arguing along similar lines in “Redefining Translation through Self-Translation: The Case of Nancy Huston,” Carolyn Shread also calls for a reconceptualization of translation models. Shread uses Nancy Huston’s self-translations as strategic examples for deconstructing binary models of translation which cast translated texts as secondary, inferior, or inauthentic. Critical neglect of self-translation, Shread argues, can be tied to a “monolingual paradigm in which translation compensates for a linguistic lack, while simultaneously erasing the multilingual nature of its task.” Shread argues that self-translation “involves degrees of reciprocal interference” to an extent that undermines the traditional idea of “a hermetic original confined to a single, pure language.” Similarly discarding the idea of a hermetic original in “Images et voix dans l’espace poétique de Saint-Denys Garneau: analyse du
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poème Le Jeu et d’extraits de ses traductions en anglais et en hongrois,” Louise Audet draws on the work of cognitive linguists Charles Fillmore and George Lakoff, and from Gilles Fauconnier’s work on “mental spaces.” Audet posits that the translation of poetry is a process analogical to the construction of “idealized cognitive models,” idiosyncratic mental representations by the translator of poetic texts. Audet likens the semantics of understanding as theorized by Fillmore to the process that takes place in translation as a successful interpretative act. Marjolijn de Jager, the translator of such celebrated African writers as Ken Bugul, Assia Djebar, Werewere Liking, and V. Y. Mudimbe, among others, not only sees translation as interpretation, but “Translation as Revelation.” De Jager discusses three types of revelation — linguistic, cultural, and political — revealing her personal translation practices and what she has discovered in the process. She quotes from the last lines of Robert Frost’s poem “Revelation” in order to articulate her vision of the mission of the literary translator: “So all who hide too well away / Must speak and tell us where they are.” For de Jager, the translator must tell “the reader of a different language and culture what the author of the original text hides away, what she must say, and where she is.” Among those reading de Jager’s translational revelations is Cheryl Toman. In “Werewere Liking as Translator and Translated,” Toman analyzes the ways in which Cameroonian playwright and novelist Werewere Liking redefines orality through the incorporation of Bassa linguistic and cultural elements into French, thereby gaining “ownership” of the French language. Toman concludes that the task of Liking’s English-language translators is to minoritize English as a means to decolonization, just as Liking herself has done with French. In “The Great White Man of Lambaréné by Bassek ba Kobhio: When Translating a Colonial Mentality Loses its Meaning,” Anny Dominique Curtius analyzes the ways in which at least four types of audiences are constituted in a scene where Albert Schweitzer preaches in French to a group of Gabonese. While his sermon is translated into Fang by an interpreter, the English subtitles do not translate the interpreter’s speech correctly. Using Fang speakers herself to translate the interpreter’s speech, Curtius discovers that while the interpreter generally adheres to the intent of Schweitzer’s speech, the anonymous
Introduction
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translator of the English-language subtitles completely subverts Schweitzer’s message through a deliberate mistranslation, unbeknownst to the filmmaker himself, as Curtius discovers in an interview. In “Traduire la reine Pokou: fidélité ou trahison?,” Sarah Davies Cordova uses the tropes of fidelity and betrayal in order to read Véronique Tadjo’s retelling of one of the founding national legends of Côte d’Ivoire. In the legend, Queen Pokou sacrificed her infant son to save the Baoulé people. According to Davies Cordova, Tadjo’s “translation” of this legend into a multifaceted “concerto” at once unmasks the violence inherent in the sacrifice, the violence of the “translation” of the legend from the fluidity of orality to the fixity of written History, and points to the sectarian violence that has erupted in contemporary Côte d’Ivoire. A similar concern with the violence of history informs “Object Lessons: Metaphors of Literary Agency in Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’ and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique.” Here, Rose Réjouis, the translator with Val Vinokurov of Chamoiseau’s Texaco and his Solibo magnifique, examines the question of agency for cultural insider-outsiders such as Walter Benjamin and Patrick Chamoiseau. In order to make the connection between two writers who may at first seem culturally distant from one another, Réjouis takes up the image of Benjamin’s fractured urn in “The Task of the Translator” as a metaphor for a kind of writing that transforms cultural insecurities into cultural agency. Whereas Chamoiseau “writes against a history of colonial terror,” the more discrete insider-outsiderness in Benjamin’s work foreshadows Nazi discourse on Jews as Europe’s “threatening insider-outsiders.” In “Translating Maryse Condé’s Célanire cou-coupé: Dislocations of the Caribbean Self in Richard Philcox’s Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat: A Fantastical Tale,” Rachelle Okawa examines the particular teamwork (or lack of it) that exists between Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé and her husband and translator, Richard Philcox. While Maryse Condé favors a textual “opacity” meant to challenge the reader, Richard Philcox sometimes aims to make Condé’s novels more transparent for his English-speaking readership. As Okawa demonstrates in her analysis of American advertisements and reviews of Condé’s works, Philcox cannot easily escape from the
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demands of an Anglo-American market that favors fluency and transparency rather than opacity. Christophe Ippolito’s “Intercultural Politics: Translating PostColonial Lebanese Literature in the United States” turns the reader’s attention to the negotiation of cultural meaning between audiences in Lebanon and the United States. As the editor of a bilingual edition of poetry by the Lebanese poet Nadia Tuéni, Ippolito gives a practical account of the challenges encountered in the publication of this work, pointing out that the main issue underlying the project was that of the very possibility of translating a culture, specifically the translation of the tensions of the Lebanese civil war in a post-9/11 American context. Ippolito concludes that the negotiation of meaning between two culturally different audiences can be facilitated both by a welldeveloped critical apparatus and by working with a team of translators able to present multiple points of view. Similarly, in “Vu d’ici et làbas: Le roman contemporain français publié en traduction aux ÉtatsUnis,” Cindy Merlin examines the ways in which critics, academics, translators, and editors as “producers of culture” determine the translation, publication, and reception of French writers in the United States. Citing Lawrence Venuti, Merlin reviews the “translation crisis” in the United States, showing that while large, commercial American presses are highly profitable overseas, their investment in the translation of foreign books in the United States is abysmally small. Merlin shows that the translation of French-language novels is left to small presses that often lack the means to market the works to a larger American public. As this overview has shown, the essays in this volume collectively demonstrate that translation is a vital element of cultural and linguistic plurality. As Sherry Simon shows in “Translating and Interlingual Creation in the Contact Zone. Border Writing in Quebec,” translation accompanies cultural and linguistic overlap and draws attention to the fact that “intercultural relations contribute to the internal life of all national cultures” (58). In an era when it is still possible to see bumper stickers commanding us all to “Speak English,” this important point can never be repeated too often.
Introduction
xv Works Cited
Flotow, Luise von, and Reingard M. Nischik. “Introduction.” Translating Canada. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2007. Simon, Sherry. “Translating and Interlingual Creation in the Contact Zone. Border Writing in Quebec.” Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. Ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi. London: Routledge, 1999. 58-74. Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. _____. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
FLS, Volume XXXVI, 2009
Translation
Sherry Simon Concordia University, Montreal
Public Language and the Aesthetics of the Translating City The increasingly visible public artworks in today’s cities are forms of public communication. In Montreal, where art can be a form of signage, the public art of Gilbert Boyer sends fruitfully mixed messages. Contributing to the “spatial francization” of Montreal, Boyer’s playful messages can be read in dialogue with other parodic uses of language in city space, notably Henry Tsang’s “Welcome to the Land of Light” along the sea wall of Vancouver’s False Creek.
________________________ A Montreal vignette. Some years ago during a provincial election campaign, I walked by a campaign poster for a political party whose slogan that year was OSER, (0-zay), “to dare.” Instead of drawing a moustache on the candidate’s face or adding glasses, some joker had done something simpler, but more damaging. This wiseacre scratched out a big L in front of OSER, turning an infinitive into a noun, an O into an OO, a rousing French challenge into an insulting English taunt, and prematurely condemning the candidate to the status of a LOSER. This is the kind of bilingual joke that makes Montreal the home of “language games” of the sort Doris Sommer praises in Bilingual Aesthetics. Sommer’s witty book argues in favour of the excitement and malaise of living with two languages. She praises the “bifocal vision” of those who grow up, as she did, in neighbourhoods where languages meet in “the space of encounters and disencounters, far from any communitarian paradise and close to the messy ground of democratic coexistence” (Sommer vii). She has special regard for
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bilingual jokes, for the way they pinpoint the anxieties of contact. The incident of the “L” would conform nicely to her ideal — especially the way that the “L” frontends the unsuspecting slogan, jarring its phonetic circuitry from French into English. But the turn from “daring” to “losing” plainly exposes the political tensions that lie behind language games. The fact that one English letter has the power to cancel out both the sound and the meaning of the French word has resonance in a city where languages jostle for symbolic dominance. Signage has always had much more than informational value in this city — and those who study branding and lettering in public space have a field day in Montreal. They discover that language is never innocent and that every sign also sends a message pointing to its own language. Despite the official, legislated Francization of Montreal some thirty years ago, when English signs were replaced by French ones, English continues to surface in illicit and sometimes unintentional ways. And so they also learn that signage can turn into art, for instance, when the paint of the fresh French lettering peels away to reveal the undesirable but persistent English letters underneath. These accidental palimpsests, treasured by aficionados, are iconic representations of the history of language in the city. They mark English as a “bygone” language, one whose official right to represent the reality of the city no longer holds. They are graphic illustrations of the ways in which official regulations on signage, however, have only very limited authority. Protection of the French language is a justified and necessary measure in today’s Quebec. However, the protection of the visual aspect of the city is only a small part of a complex linguistic situation. The visible marking of public space is therefore a simplified backdrop to language transactions that are varied and complex, that surge and ebb in unpredictable waves. There is a growing complexity to what we might call “forms of public language” in today’s cities. Our cities offer us, increasingly, an auditory landscape of great diversity. In taxis and on street corners we hear conversations held, sometimes shouted (if they’re on cell phones), in all the languages of the world. Languages once confined to the home or to community venues like church basements are suddenly more apparent in the public sphere. The electronic map produced by the Modern Language Association for the United States counts more than 300 languages in use in the United States, and almost as many for
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the single city of New York.1 This multilingualism confirms the intensity of conversations and transactions across languages and nations, the intensity of an increasingly generalized diasporic culture. Cities are spaces of circulation “in the world,” maintains Alain Médam, according to two dynamics — a centripetal dynamic of convergence, which brings diversity into cities, but also a centrifugal dynamic of dispersion, which means that cities are nodes in an ever-enlarging network of diasporas (35). Babel and babble Multilingualism is often experienced as a random moment of encounter — a cluster of conversations on the sidewalk or in the bus, in immigrant neighbourhoods or at sites like airports, markets, cafés, or parks. These are moments when the maelstrom of languages can be experienced as euphoria and communion (in the multilinguistic anonymity of the café, in the bustling crowds of the market, in the early morning swirl of costume and colour in the airport) — just as they can be understood as disorienting and alienating. “Babble,” according to Natasa Durovicova, carries this double valence, and the strands of languages weaving through cities remind us of this doubleness (72). But the multilingualism of the street, as well as the multilingualisms of the internet, or of community, is no guarantee of citizenship. For nonofficial languages to have a right to expression, they must be translated into the official tongue. Translation, then, is the key to citizenship. Translation is the index of accommodation and incorporation of languages into the public sphere. By performing functions of connectivity and incorporation, translation determines what enters a given cultural system and what remains outside. “Citizenship is, first and foremost, engaged with other people in the creation of shared social spaces and in the discourse that such spaces make possible” (Kingwell 189). There is a long history connecting the idea of public space in the city with the Greek agora, a space of conversation where citizenship, governance, and community were intertwined. Public space has come to stand for the combination of material and discursive conditions that make it possible for citizens to participate together in city life. While –––––––––– 1
The map can be seen at the following address: <www.mla.org>.
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the languages of foreigners, of what were known as barbarians, were excluded from the Greek agora, today’s public spaces must include them. But how are these to be integrated into the sphere of citizenship? For such a connection to take place, we need, according to Mary Louise Pratt, “a new public idea about language” (112) — a renewed recognition of the knowledges that languages carry. Translation can work to intensify the interactions of urban life, to turn city life away from what Richard Sennett calls “non-interactive indifference” (quoted by Cronin 68). For Cronin, this turn involves seeing “multilingual, multiethnic urban space as first and foremost a translation space.” In other words, if translation is primarily about a form of interaction with another language and culture (which in turn modify one’s own), then it is surely to translation that we must look if we want to think about how global neighbourhoods are to become something other than the site of non-interactive indifference... Everything, from small local theatres presenting translations of plays from different migrant languages to new voice recognition and speech synthesis technology producing discreet translations in wireless environments to systematic client education for community interpreting to translation workshops as part of diversity management courses in the workplace, could begin to contribute to a reformation of public space in migrant societies as primarily a translation space. Urbanists have not been known to talk to translation scholars and vice versa but in the context of the challenges posed by ongoing migration, neither party can afford to avoid a dialogue. (68)
Cronin’s idea of seeing city space as a translation space is crucial. Rather than collapsing language differences into the maelstrom of an undifferentiated multilingualism, understanding the interactions of the city as a complex, overlapping weave of translations is to identify a field of discreet practices — each with differing stakes and outcomes. These practices can be studied as a key to the interactions among language communities and among forms of cultural expression. This perception of the city is enabled by recent developments in Translation Studies — which have not only extended the array of objects and practices that fall under its purview but which also have sharpened the focus of analysis. Translation is no longer understood as an unequivocally peaceful and friendly activity, but seen to participate fully in the fraught politics of the moment. In response to an increasingly violent
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world, translation studies has recently been becoming ever more attentive to its sometimes complicitous, sometimes activist role of translation in international affairs — turning attention to the role of translation in global news reporting, in situations of violent conflict, and in the political and cultural life of migrant and diasporic populations. These studies are broadly sustained by the understanding that mediation among languages, as among all cultural forms, necessarily involves displacement. “[I]t is no longer viable to look at circulation as a singular or empty space in which things move [...],” write Dilip Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli. There is a “material culture of circulation” which organizes and shapes passage (392). This is to see translation as more than gatekeeping — indeed, as an enhancement or a transfiguration. These interventions point to the ever-stronger role that translation is assuming in telling histories that go beyond individual texts, that sketch out larger frameworks and circulatory logics. Within these histories, the translator has been given new recognition. The emphasis on the materialities of circulation — the places and circumstances of translation, the encounters between individuals, the anchoring of textual matters not only in the politics of book production but in the social life and cultural interactions of a society — these are grounded in recognition of the singularity of the translation event. The city translated While there has been an explosion of writing on the city since the 1980s, by authors such as David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, Edward Soja, Allan Blum, and Ian Chambers — writing activated in large part by the new importance given to space in the human sciences — there has been a remarkable absence of attention to language. Despite the writings of a group of committed American scholars — Emily Apter, Doris Sommer, Mary Louise Pratt, Domna Stanton, Werner Sollor, Marc Shell, Edwin Gentzler — all drawing attention to the plurilingualism of the American literary past, this attention has not extended into the realm of cities. The important 2004 issue of the journal Public Culture devoted to Johannesburg a few years ago has barely a word on the question of multilingualism in this city (Nuttall). It is this absence which translation can address. Rather than relegating language issues to the realm of sociolinguists who count the numbers of language-
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speakers or to policymakers in bilingual education, it is necessary to study language as a shaping presence in the city. To make sense of the brouhaha of language, of what seems like the shapeless and inchoate wanderings of languages through streets and neighbourhoods, it is necessary to hear these languages within a history of conversations. The city is not a background to language; rather language relations are part of the imaginative world that defines the city. For Alain Médam, there are three types of tensions in the city: the forces of “co” (consensualities), of “diss” (antagonisms), and of “trans” that forge new paths through the city. Translation participates in all three of these dynamics — creating consensus, expressing tension, and contributing to the formation of hybrid realities. These forms of translation are to be explored at different levels of the cultural life of the city — informal transactions and practices of everyday life, official communications, and artistic practices (literature, theatre, cinema) that play with language. In what follows I will focus on the visual presence of language — and in particular on forms of public art that play with visual language — in two Canadian cities, Montreal and Vancouver. The intense visual landscape of the city comprises a wide variety of messages, including not only the expected array of advertisements, political slogans, and graffiti, but also — increasingly — the proliferating messages of public art. Both cities, Montreal and Vancouver, have embraced the idea of public art, both having a relatively high number of works on public view. Integrated into the city landscape, public art engages with both its visual and cultural fabric, offering messages that are more like a commentary on values and meanings. Those public art works that use language as part of their materiality function even more intensely as forms of public communication. Language is not only a visual marker of identity, but also a connection with cultural history. Bringing more than one language into interaction introduces practices of translation that are revealing of the tensions among them. Translation effects are most active in a language-conscious city like Montreal. Montreal The public art work of the sculptor Gilbert Boyer speaks directly to the loose fit between the constraints of formal language and the
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fluidity of personal communication in Montreal. He uses monumental forms and materials to convey the lightness of the spoken word. The mock plaques that he fixes to the façades of buildings, the marble disks that he lays on the ground in Mount Royal park — these are an ironic response to the inflated self-importance of public language in Montreal. He gathers wisps of language, tentative and diaphanous, and gives them paradoxical permanence. Comme un poisson dans la ville [Like a fish in the city; 1988] was a project in which a dozen or so plaques — similar to the ones saying that a famous person was born in this house or passed the night here — were installed above the doors of residential homes. But instead of the expected official message, there is a poetic phrase — describing the weather on one day, or the winds. The 1991 disks on Mount Royal are also covered with spirals of words, this time scraps of conversation. They are capsules of language, in French, bits of the ephemera of daily life: “Let me show you something” — “When I want to read the last pages of a good book, I come here” — “There are tons of goldfish.” There are even bits of conversation: “Will you write to me often? Every day” — “Not far from here Charles and I had an argument. I don’t even remember why.” Though Boyer’s works are a playful presence, making an aesthetic and not a political statement, it is also true to say that they function as an indication of the French cultural reconquest of the city. That Boyer’s messages are only in French marks the temper of the city at the time he produced them. In the 1990s, these inscriptions were part of the relabelling of the city which had begun in the late 1970s. And so, in addition to their casual and even flippant wit, Boyer’s disks carry a secondary message. They are a form of signage announcing that this is now a French city. It is hardly surprising that public art in Montreal refers in serious, humorous, or oblique ways to language issues. Several public sculptures use lettering as motifs or materials, as for example the multilingual sculptural installation by Rose-Marie Goulet in the atrium of Concordia University’s library building.2 Goulet has relied extensively –––––––––– 2
“Commissioned for the opening of the library pavilion in 1992, this extensive installation is spread over four locations, beginning in the square in front of the building, continuing in the entrance hall, above the main stairwell and in the reading rooms of the library. A spiral motif energizes and unifies the pieces. The central col-
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on language for her work in public art. In one piece created for the Montreal subway system, Goulet collaborated with sound designer Chantal Dumas to enhance a photo exhibit with short clips of people speaking in seven different languages. Most spectacularly, her 1992 installation, called “Monument pour L,” uses letters in blue-painted steel to form three separate words, “partirent,” “dérivèrent,” and “horizon,” that are either emerging from or sinking into the land bordering the Saint Lawrence river. These words placed near the shoreline evoke the uncertain trajectory of the immigrant. “They left,” “they drifted,” “horizon.” The words gesture to other shores, from which immigrants to Quebec might have departed. The blue colour suggests the water and the sky, the only companions for a ship’s travelers for many months. While the works I have described so far make very explicit reference to language, other interventions evoke language issues in a more oblique way. In fact it could be argued that a great deal of nonverbal artistic activity is a negative reaction to the omnipresence of language issues — a way of acknowledging the weight of language by attempting to flee it. And so Montreal has seen the emergence of very vibrant and innovative nonverbal art forms like dance and circus. And the invention of innovative ways of referring to language, as in the painter Geneviève Cadieux’s use of braille in one of her paintings (Lamoureux). The art work in one public square in Montreal is called “After Babel” and evokes themes of nonverbal communication. The official description of the sculptures created in 1993 of a human face on a pedestal, a canine form on a pedestal, and another dog on the ground refers to the theme of “nonverbal communication.”3 The ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– umn located in the building’s entrance hall is covered in mirrors and looks like an endless screw of which we cannot tell the beginning or the end. Taking into account the venue’s particular nature, the work constantly highlights linguistic references by the inclusion of fragments of text in various languages, letters and signs set in the very materials of the building” (Concordia University Public Art Collection). 3 The official description reads: “Ensemble sculptural sur le thème de la communication non verbale qui se compose de deux colonnes et de divers éléments figuratifs. Une colonne en bronze est surmontée d’un masque aux traits humains s’inclinant. L’autre, en acier, est surmontée d’une silhouette canine. Une forme animale identique repose au sol, levant la tête en direction du masque. À la base de l’ensemble, deux incrustations au sol représentent deux mains de bronze symbolisant
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mirroring of two unlike cutout figures, each perched on a pedestal — the very human and oversized mask and the stylized dog — initiate a surprising dialogue. While public art has inarguably contributed to what Annie Gérin calls the “spatial francization of Montreal,” identitary politics is always coloured with irony, always undercut by an aesthetic intention. In calling attention to the many ways in which language is foregrounded in Quebec art, prominent critic Johanne Lamoureux insists that language is not a badge of identity but rather the source of multiple aesthetic “effects.” Her 1995 catalogue called “Seeing in Tongues” (“Le bout de la langue”) details the workings of language in the work of Gilbert Boyer, Robert Racine, Raymond Gervais, Barbara Steinman, André Martin, Louise Viger, Lyne Lapointe, Martha Fleming, and Geneviève Cadieux. “It soon becomes abundantly clear that the ‘pieces of language’ deployed here appear to have nothing to do with identity, or at least with language as the emblematic vector of a monolithic cultural identity. Rather, the works assembled betray a fondness for translatability, not for the ‘doubles,’ that translation authorizes but for the discrepancies and tifts that it makes possible and by means of which it produces meaning” (Lamoureux 7). It is significant that Lamoureux explicitly distances this art from a politics of branding. The language, she says, is not an affirmation of identity, not a naive and simplistic declaration of affiliation, but rather part of an inquiry into the ways in which meaning is produced. Art is translational because it understands language as a problem which participates in the aesthetics of creation. Nevertheless, in contexts where language choice is significant, the very fact of French — rather than English — is necessarily meaningful. And so, for instance, when Montreal artist Michel Goulet’s group of ten chairs is installed along a beach in Vancouver (at the Vancouver Sculpture Biennale in 2006), the very fact that the messages on the seats are carved out in French and English will be significant.4 How––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– l’amitié dans le langage des malentendants.” (Artists: John McEwen and Marlene Hilton-More; site: Ville de Montréal — Art public — Collection) 4 Official description: “Echoes incorporates ten of Goulet’s trademark stainless steel chair sculptures. The chair’s location in a public space invites interaction and conversation as a way of overcoming the typically urban alienation it alludes to. Meanwhile, the chairs are all set at different angles along the beach, suggesting the
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ever, the playfulness of the messages and their self-reflexivity undercut this aspect of language-identification and propose rather an interesting conversation among languages. The messages are snippets of poems and echoes of conversations, all open-ended and suggestive: “Géographie de l’usure grandeur nature” — “Faire semblant de toujours faire semblant de” (arranged in a circular pattern) — “Pretense, false, true, story” with arrows pointing from one to the other — “Minor dreams weaved tight” — “Pousser un cri plus loin dans la gorge” — “An ivory tower echoes from before” — “A common story of love and sorrow came to an end HERE” — “All well taken care of differences” — “Sauve-toi salvation you said.” The last is most interesting in terms of dialogue, in that it proposes a false translation. The two languages finally find themselves on the same chair, yet “sauve-toi” (save yourself, get out of here, escape!) is a peculiar way to find salvation. The tentative and ephemeral nature of these messages makes Goulet’s piece very similar in temperament to Gilbert Boyer’s work.5
Vancouver One of the most significant uses of language in a public art sculpture is to be found not far from Michel Goulet’s installation in ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– multitude of perspectives and possibilities open to people in our privileged socioeconomic position.” 5 Michel Goulet is a well-known Montreal artist. His project for the 400th anniversary of Quebec, involving 44 chairs, will have inscriptions from Quebec poets Octave Crémazie, Gaston Miron, Denise Desautels, Félix Leclerc, Gilles Vigneault, Irving Layton — presumably mostly in French. Here, within the context of the city of Quebec, this poetry will be entirely at home — and will hardly have the surprise value that they offer on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Another aspect of language-consciousness has to do with the way that writing is integrated into visual language. Among the many artists associated with the conjunction of words and images, one of the most important in Quebec is Montreal painter Louise Robert. Her paintings have since 1975 integrated words and writing into the very substance of the canvas — words dropped onto the surface of the paint in odd and playful configurations. The words themselves are comical, strange, disorienting. Geneviève Cadieux, À fleur de peau, 1987, uses braille as a form of language. A quote from St-Exupéry in braille alludes to her research into portraiture, scars, the way models are engaged in imagining themselves, in inventing their own figure, even if it implies temporarily losing face... (Lamoureux).
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Vancouver along the sea wall at False Creek. Though Vancouver is not, like Montreal, a city of two languages, the increasing presence of Asian immigrants, as well as the growing power of Native groups, has created new consciousness of these languages. The work of Henry Tsang stands out in this context as an example of the way in which public art can contribute to the city’s imagination and history. Embedded into the railing along the sea wall are inscriptions in two languages — the trading language of Chinook on top, English below. This is Henry Tsang’s “Welcome to the Land of Light,” installed in 1997. The English text is a kind of jargon, a translation from an already mixed language: “Greetings good you arrive here where light be under land” — “Future it be now” — “Here you begin live like new” — “Come to time where people talk different but good together” — “If you heart mind open you receive new knowledge” — “You have same like electric eye and heart mind and talk sound” — “You live fast like light” — “See talk be here there and everywhere at one time” — “Us make this community good indeed” — “You not afraid here” — “Here you begin live like chief” — “World same like in your hand.” The official description of the artwork stresses its luminosity: Aluminum letters spelling out phrases in Chinook (an early coastal trading language) and English are placed along the railing of the sea wall in two parallel lines. Coloured light pulses through an inset fibre-optic cable in the sidewalk directly below the letters. “Welcome to the Land of Light” is a [...] monument to the relationship between those who once lived on the False Creek waterfront and those who will arrive in the future to call this area their home. (City of Vancouver Cultural Services)
The artist’s statement describes the juxtaposition of English and Chinook Jargon as a metaphor for the ongoing development of intercultural communications in this region. Chinook Jargon is a nineteenth-century lingua franca that resulted out of the need for cross-cultural trade. Most of the approximately 500-word vocabulary of this language can be traced to the dialect of the Columbia River Chinook Tribe in Oregon, with influences of English, French, and Nootkan (Nuu-chah-nulth). At its peak, one hundred thousand to one million people spoke the language from the Pacific coast to the Rocky Mountains, from Northern California to the Alaskan panhandle. Like any pidgin, Chinook Jargon was dynamic and flexible, absorbing different
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The impact of this text is striking on a number of levels. Tsang recalls the identity of this territory as a trading zone, where Chinook was the trading language, the “lingua franca,” from Alaska to California in the nineteenth century. As a mixture of native languages from Oregon and Vancouver Island, Chinook, along with English and French, gestures to the fusions of the early West Coast — with its mix of railway workers, European settlers, and native peoples. The “inadequate” English of the translation points to the shortcuts of any vehicular language, grammar sacrificed to the imperatives of immediate communication. This inadequacy becomes a kind of nobility, however, when coupled with the generosity and graciousness of the words of welcome. The words create a literal space of contact, the improper use of English making evident the inaccessible source from which it comes. This is a paradoxical space of contact, as the trading zones of the past are brought into the jarring contemporaneity of the speculative spaces of the present reality of False Creek (where towers of glittering glass condos rise high into the sky, crowding the shoreline and competing with the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies behind). The barter of the past is now a highly sophisticated game of financial daring, taking place on a territory defined by the spiralling price of square metres. The mixing and interaction of languages is disorienting. But the sound of foreignized English is powerful in drawing the viewer back into an imagined past. A later version of this work was shown at the Vancouver Earth festival in 2006, this time with the Chinook under the English. A series of seven banners stretched along the top of the main performance venue, welcoming the participants. The text is in English, but under each section of text is the original Chinook language. The first banner reads: “Good you arrive at city where mountain and building stand up to sky,” and underneath, “Kloshe maika ko kopa town ka mitlite la monti pe hyas house mitwhit saghalie.” Successive banners read: “Here, Water good. Yukwa, chuck kloshe” — “Food, it truly good, like long ago. Mukamuk, yaka delate kloshe, kahkwa ahnkuttie” — “Earth, it not carry bad chemicals. Illahie, Yaka halo lolo peshak la
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metsin” — “Here, you find new home. It small, but green. Yukwa, Maika Klap Chee house. Yaka tenas, keschi pechugh” — “Here, you not fight and begin live. Yukwa, Maika halo mamook puk puk pe elip mitlite” — “Future, it now here. Alki, yaka alta yukwa.” The translation into pidginized English seems particularly appropriate, when it is understood that the original is itself a mixture of languages, the Chinook trading jargon. The prominence of this broken English — again offering words of greeting and welcome — is remarkably effective as a combined historical claim (“we” were here first and can therefore welcome you) but also as a reminder of the very plural nature of that “we” (a combination of historical groups, not only the native Amerindian populations, but also the immigrant workers who, by the end of the nineteenth century, were also inhabitants of the territory).6 The fact that Tsang’s greetings are not presented on their own, but in tandem with their originals is a powerful reminder of the translational nature of cultures in contact. While the messages of greeting speak of “coming together,” the art work accomplishes this gathering through the bringing together of the languages. The mode of imperfect translation (which results in imperfect, approximative English) recalls the ongoing nature of the transaction. Montreal’s language-conscious artists have also paid attention to the “effects” of translation, though they are no doubt more aware of the constraints of the exercise. An early piece by Gilbert Boyer called “Translation” (which may be a French or an English word) takes the form of an installation. The installation is set up to resemble the electronic detection passageways found at airports. Viewers must walk one by one over a panel inscribed with a text taken from a federal government document; in doing so, they pass between a pair of suspended headphones that give off a bewildering mix of noises: mechanical, robotic voices are reduced to a sort of murmur that works against the principle of intelligibility which usually informs them.
–––––––––– 6 The bold and very public banners created by Henry Tsang were in stark contrast to other language-centred art work at the same venue, where, for instance, Peter Morin created tentative, gestural encounters with his own Tahltan language. His drawings showed Tahltan words placed in sled-like enclosures. “A map to the territory,” in charcoal on canvas, was made up of images designed to “create a living space for the Tahltan and Kaska languages... to create a safer space for the students to feel proud of themselves speaking their languages” (2006 visit) .
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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009 The sound track is made up of recorded telephone messages from Canadian airports, in conjunction with snatches of conversation that bespeak a twofold wandering or sense of loss: on the one hand, that of a subject who does not know where she is or his-her interlocutor is; on the other hand, that of the airport as an exemplary site of transit, as a generic standardized locus of transportation and surveillance that easily verges on the paranoid. (Lamoureux 11)
What is highlighted in this piece, as Johanne Lamoureux notes, is the way language is part of the grid of power and control. Languages, like individuals, are made to fit the Procrustean bed that has been predetermined. And so this piece could be considered to exhibit a sensibility in total contrast to that which Boyer will display in his disks. Here, it is the constraining and authoritarian aspect of language which is emphasized — in combination with attributes of governmentality and surveillance. Branding and translation Every city has its specific pattern of translational interactions. As a relatively new city on the west coast, Vancouver’s conversations have much to do with the Pacific Rim, with older and more recent immigrant populations, as well as the increasingly intense conversations with its native populations. But Vancouver — like most large metropolitan cities — has one strong language that dominates all contesting languages. It could be argued that public art has especially resonant meanings in a city like Montreal, where signage participates in the ongoing struggle for language dominance. The visual branding of the city, its Francization, however, is only one facet of the many kinds of translation that have marked the city over the years. Against the backdrop of this very visible marking of public space, a constant reminder of the real and justified need to protect French in Quebec, the city fosters other kinds of language transactions. Translation in fact provides a special perspective on the history of the city. Traditionally the story has been told from one side or the other, from the point of view of nationalism or resistance, majorities or minorities, but the cultural history of Montreal is to be explored through the circuits that have created links among them. In Montreal, to travel across town, between the francophone east and the anglophone west end, is to enact
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the double sense of translation — to move across space and across language. The literary and cultural history of the city is full of crosstown voyages, voyages of forced or voluntary translation, which carry different kinds of lessons, depending on their origin and finality. Though the east-west, French-English divide has long been the main story in Montreal, there are other trajectories and other languages that contribute to this story — immigrant languages, Native languages. As anglophones once crossed the city in search of political inspiration, in search of avant-garde modes of writing, today francophones have, to some extent, begun the contrary voyage. And translations take on new forms and meanings. To recall the example with which I started, can we call the passage from “oser” into “loser” a translation? If it is, it is a deviant translation, one of a proliferating category of unconventional translations that is flourishing across Montreal today.
Works Cited Blum, Alan. The Imaginative Structure of the City. Montreal: McGillQueens, 2003. City of Vancouver Cultural Services. 11 May 2009. . Concordia University Public Art Collection. 10 Sept. 2008. . Cronin, Michael. Translation and Identity. London: Routledge, 2006. Durovicova, Natasa. “Los Toquis, or Urban Babel.” Global Cities. Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age. Ed. Linda Krause and Patrice Petro. New Directions in International Studies. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003. 71-86. Echoes by Michel Goulet. 10 Sept. 2008. . Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, and Elizabeth A. Povinelli. “Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition.” Public Culture 15.3 (2003): 385-97. Gérin, Annie. “Maîtres chez nous. Public Art and Linguistic Identity in Quebec.” Canadian Cultural Poesis. Essays on Canadian Culture. Ed. Garry Sherbert, Annie Gérin, and Sheila Petty. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2006. 323-41.
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_____, and James S. McLean, eds. Public Art in Canada: Critical Perspectives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Germain, Annick, and Damaris Rose. Montreal: The Quest for a Metropolis. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2000. Kingwell, Mark. “Building, Dwelling, Acting.” Queen’s Quarterly 107.2 (2000): 177-99. Lamoureux, Johanne. Seeing in Tongues. A Narrative of Language and Visual Arts in Quebec. Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 1995. Médam, Alain. Labyrinthes des rencontres. Collection Métissages. Montréal: Fides, 2002. Nuttall, Sarah, and Achille Mbembe, eds. Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis. Public Culture 16.3 (2004). Pratt, Mary Louise. “Building a New Public Idea about Language.” Profession 2003. New York: MLA, 2003. 110-19. Sommer, Doris. Bilingual Aesthetics. A New Sentimental Education. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004. Ville de Montréal. 11 May 2009. . Path: La vie à Montréal > Arts et culture > Le patrimoine artistique – Collection d’art public. <www.mla.org>.
FLS, Volume XXXVI, 2009
Translation
Marian Rothstein Carthage College
Translation and the Triumph of French: the Case of the Decameron In the course of the sixteenth century, the status of translation, especially from other vernaculars, changed dramatically. What had been understood as the state of servile rendering of a pre-existing text turned into the very real possibility of the creation of a French version that, based now on the strength and beauty of French, might claim as much aesthetic merit, as much glory, as the original, even when that original was an Italian classic.
________________________ In the first half of the sixteenth century, translations were often the battlefield in a struggle where the French language took on Latin and Italian in hand-to-hand combat. Latin, once neutral, simply the language of learning, was increasingly associated with the Church or with the successor to Rome — the Empire — both perceived as antagonists of Gallican traditions. The centuries-old model of a translatio imperii et studii was based on the recognition of the mutability of human affairs: things change, and as a consequence, the center of power, as of learning, shifts in the course of human history. This view, however, is founded on the assumption, inherited from the Roman Imperium, that at any given time there is a single center of power or learning — or more clearly in the Roman model, a single center of power and learning. Another, competing paradigm, inherited from Italy, can be seen in France starting with the reign of François I (1515-47); it is henceforth clear that worldly power lies not in the hand of one but of several princes. Although the roots of this kind of challenge to the
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Ancients are clearly in Renaissance Italy, for Italians, the center was moving through time, not space, making it a family matter so to speak in a kind of implied continuum. From the Gallican worldview, the change to multiple centers carries an implicit challenge to the Roman/Italian hub, a challenge that takes on a nationalist charge, positing a potential locus of the triumph of French. Where the notion of translatio imperii went, so too did translatio studii, as by 1530, French learning rivaled that of contemporary Italy and was recognized as surpassing it in Greek studies. François Berriot notes that the perceived connection between learning and power can be seen a century or more before the period which concerns us here: La “translatio studii” et la “translation” vont donc de pair, puisque c’est par la traduction que les sciences antiques arrivent à l’université de Paris et dans l’entourage du roi […]. [E]n 1427 Bedford, qui gouverne la France au nom d’Henri VI d’Angleterre, fait très symboliquement emporter outre-Manche le Tite-Live de Charles V. (132)
The spread of printed books changed the nature of learning, both quantitatively and qualitatively. While our modern vocabulary separates scholarship and literary works, the sixteenth-century terms, bonas litteras, belles lettres, do not make such a distinction and so would include both as objects of a translatio studii. Far from the modern dream that it be the transparent conveyance of ideas from one language to another, translation could be potentially an act of appropriation. Under these circumstances, the translation into French of an Ancient or an Italian classic may well be a declaration of intent to outdo, as it were, to conquer. It is in this light that I propose here to examine the case of Boccaccio’s Decameron crossing the Alps. Although a vernacular work, the Decameron was a recognized classic of Italian literature. The very idea that a vernacular literature might have classics is a step along the road of the change away from the view of literary history in which the first is axiomatically the best — a view that had left Renaissance authors deep in the shadow of their Classical predecessors. Humanists’ understanding of the Ancients undercut this by placing them increasingly in a specific cultural context so that they were understood as writing in time, in their own time (even as Virgil, and certainly Homer, continued to be understood allegorically, out of time). Indeed, this attitude made translation more clearly a cultural conquest, since culture might be translated alongside
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language (and when the source text was a vernacular one, this often was the case: see Rothstein, “Homer”). This may account for the fact that lists of major contemporary French literary figures around midcentury regularly include people known mainly or only as translators. 1 The new plurality of excellence, as it appeared to Italians, placed Petrarch and Boccaccio, the authors of new Italian classics, alongside the canonical Greek and Roman masters of verse (Homer and Virgil) and prose (Demosthenes and Cicero). Boccaccio’s name and proper Tuscan usage were soon associated in much the same tone that Ciceronians applied to their master’s Latin — to be taken as an absolute model. Castiglione, in the dedicatory epistle prefaced to his Corteggiano, complains that in just that way some in early sixteenth-century Italy argued that a truly elegant work in the vernacular should use only constructions found in Boccaccio’s works — written a century and a half earlier. 2 Even if Castiglione and –––––––––– 1
Thomas Sébillet, in his Art Poétique, recommends — in addition to Marot and Saint Gelais, his most frequent source of examples — that one look for models of style among translators: Herberay des Essars, Macault, Jean Martin (61). Claude Chappuys’s Discours de la court (1543) names Marot, Brodeau, Heroët, Macault, la Borderie, Salel, Herberay — a list including two translators. A bit later, in his discussion of the Grand œuvre, the epic, French only in translations, we find the names of Marot (Metamorphoses), Salel (Iliade), Heroët (Androgyne[!]), Des Masures (Aeneid), Peletier (Horace’s Ars poetica). Looking back on the reign of François I, whoever is speaking in Rabelais’s voice in the prologue to the Cinq Livre lists six “poëtes et orateurs Galliques”; “Je contemple un grand tas de Collinets, Marots, Drouets, Saingelais, Sallels, Masuels […]” (270). Of the six, Jacques Collin, Salel, and Masuel [Des Masures], fully half, are translators. At the start of the Œuvres of Louis Des Masures is a poem cataloging the poets he has known, including Rabelais, Du Bellay, Peletier, and then Herberay, followed by Salel, Marot, Macrin, Carles, Colin, Jean Martin, all of whom were translators except the neo-Latin poet, Macrin (b2v). 2 “[A]d alcuni chi mi biasimano perch’io non ho imitato il Boccaccio, né mi sono obligato alla consuetudine del parlar toscano d’oggidì, non restarò di dire che, ancor che ’l Boccaccio fusse di gentil ingegno, secondo quei tempi, e che in alcuna parte scrivesse con discrezione ed industria, nientedimeno assai meglio scrisse quando si lassò guidar solamente dall’ingegno ed instinto suo naturale, senz’altro studio o cura di limare i scritti suoi, che quando con diligenzia e fatica si sforzò d’esser più culto e castigato” (Castiglione 72; the idea continues on 73 and 75). English translation: “...to those who blame me because I have not imitated Boccaccio or bound myself to the usage of Tuscan speech in our own day, I shall not refrain from saying that even though Boccaccio had a fine talent by the standards of his time, and wrote some things with discrimination and care, still he wrote much better when he let himself be guided solely by his natural genius and instinct, without care or concern to polish his
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others thrived while ignoring this dictum, translating the Decameron, moving the language of the Master to another idiom, was a task of no little moment. 3 The challenge was all the greater as French, despite its long literary history, could not claim to have authors who equaled the prestige of Petrarch and Boccaccio until the name of Ronsard is regularly suggested in the 1570s. In 1414, before Boccaccio’s Italian works had acquired their canonical status, at the request of Jean, Duke of Berry, Laurent de Premierfait — the best-known translator of his time — completed a French version of the Decameron, based on a Latin version made expressly for him by Antoine Arezzio, as Laurent explains in the preface: Et pour ce que je suis Françoiz par naissance et conversacion, je ne scay plainement langaige florentin qui est le plus preciz et plus esleu qui soit en Italie, je ay convenu avec ung frere [...] Anthoine de Aresche, homme tresbien saichant vulgar florentin et langaige latin. [Anthoine...] pour condigne et juste salaire translata premierement ledit Livre des Cent Nouvelles de florentin en langaige latin et je Laurens assistent avec lui, ay secondement converty en françoiz le langage latin receu dudit frere Anthoine, ou au moins mal que j’ay peu ou en gardant la verité des paroles et sentences, mesmement selon les deux langages, forsque j’ay estendu le trop bref en plus long et le obscur en plus cler langaige afin de legierement entendre les matieres du livre (5). [Because I am French by birth and language, and I have only imperfect knowledge of the Florentine language which is the most precise and choice of all Italy, I made an arrangement with Brother Antoine d’Aresche, a man fluent in vernacular Florentine and Latin, who, for an appropriate sum, translated the aforesaid Book of One Hundred Tales from Florentine into Latin, and I, Laurent, working with him, then turned the Latin of Brother Antoine into French, as nearly as I could, keeping the sense of the words and the ideas according to the ways of the two lan-
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– writings, than when he attempted with diligence and labor to be more refined and correct” (Singleton 3). 3 Years later, Montaigne still felt the pressure of the prestige of the Classics. He remarks that the Theologia Naturalis of Raymond Sebond presented no threats, “mais ceux qui ont donné beaucoup à la grace et à l’elegance du langage, ils sont dangereux à entreprendre: nommément pour les rapporter à un idiome plus foible” (439-40). The words following the colon are a C addition; Montaigne, in 1588, still felt French was weak in comparison with Latin, although this view may be skewed by his exposure to Latin in infancy.
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guages, I made that which was too short longer, and the too obscure clearer so that the matter of the book could be easily understood.]
The distance between the humanist world of fourteenth-century Florence and Laurent’s contemporary Paris is revealed in the transformation of the title, at least in the printed versions, where Decameron (that is, the story of ten days, apparent to anyone with even a smattering of Greek), turns into the meaningless: Liure Cameron autrement surnomme Le prince Galliot, qui contient cent nouuelles racomptees en dix iours par sept femmes & trois iouuenceaulx [...]. Translate de 4 latin en francoys par maistre Laurens du Premierfaict. Boccaccio’s name, although evoked in the translator’s preface, is not included in the title material. Laurent’s preface makes it clear that his own sense of the title was Le Livre des Cent Nouvelles, a work intended to help humans deal with the blows of Fortune. 5 Overall, this is a translation at one remove from the vernacular original, a translation which (advisedly) made claims neither of accuracy nor for the elegance of its French. Without naming Laurent, the text’s next translator, Antoine Le Maçon, comments on this translation: mesmes [surtout] ayans veu par cy devant quelque telle traduction d’aucuns qui se sont vouluz mesler de le traduire, qui y ont si tresmal besogné qu’il n’est possible de plus. Et eulx [les Italiens] pensans que ceste traduction fust
–––––––––– 4
Title as cited from the edition published in Paris by Veuve Michel Le Noir in 1521, which reproduces the colophon of the editio princeps, Paris: Verard, 1485. Di Stefano notes that Decameron and Cameron appear indifferently in the manuscript tradition. Our modern notion of title develops with printing. As manuscripts rarely have something corresponding to a title page, books took their names from the opening lines as is clear from Boccaccio’s terms below. The subtitle, Le prince Galliot, [ms reading: Galeot] is taken directly from Boccaccio, who calls it: “il libro chiamato Decameron, cognominato Prencipe Galeotto.” The reference is to the Arthurian Gallehault, as in Dante, Inferno V.137, who served as the go-between for the love of Guinevere and Lancelot, presenting the tales as performing a Gallehault-like function. See Hauvette. 5 Whether the French collection also known as Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles, written between 1456-67, owes anything to Laurent’s translation of the Decameron remains a matter of scholarly debate. Glyn P. Norton reminds us that the fifteenthcentury French reception of Boccaccio was foremost of the moralist, author of the De casibus virorum illustrium and other Latin works, only secondarily of the vernacular author of the Decameron.
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By that time (1545), Laurent’s language was well over a century old, during which time French had evolved considerably. However, even viewed in terms of early fifteenth-century French, Laurent’s language is ungraceful, in part due to his (probably intentional) servile relation to the source text, i.e., the intervening Latin. As Di Stefano remarks in his edition of the work: “le calque lexical et syntaxique semble l’arme préféré du traducteur” (Boccaccio 1998, xxvi). Still, it moved very early from manuscript to print in 1485, and was republished at least eight times in the half century to 1541. Five years later, however, it was replaced by something very different: Antoine Le Maçon’s modern translation directly from Boccaccio’s Italian, a translation which declared itself to be accurate and furthermore, to be a triumph of French. This claim is supported pragmatically by the fact that it continued to be the basis of the standard French version of the Decameron for some 350 years. 6 The new translator, like many translators of his generation (and like Laurent a century earlier), was in the service of the king. The title page proclaims that he was “conseiller du Roy et tresorier de l’extraordinaire de ses guerres.” He had also been secretary to the king’s sister, Marguerite de Navarre. On the verso of the title page, the privilege brings the work still further into the circle of the royal family, as it is the voice of the king himself that speaks here: 7 –––––––––– 6
It was reprinted, not entirely for its antiquarian interest, by Paul Lacroix (Paris: Flammarion, n.d.) in the early twentieth century. Other twentieth-century French versions declare that they are based on Le Maçon’s translation, although in these the language has been modernized. Such exceptional longevity bespeaks the quality of his achievement. 7 It should be noted that a chatty privilege like this is most exceptional. Usually, they are relatively short and entirely formulaic. Amadis de Gaule is a comparable work in that it, too, was a translation from the vernacular, and Herberay was also attached to the court as extraodinary commissioner of the king’s artillery. And yet there we read simply: “Il est défendu par lettres patentes du Roy nostre Sire, a tous impri-
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Puis naguere nostre treschere et tresamee seur unique la Royne de Navarre, luy avoit commandé traduyre de langaige Tuscan en langaige Francoys le decameron de Bocace, poete et orateur Florentin ce qu’il avait faict en la plus grande curiosité et imitation qu’il luy a esté possible, et suyvant le commendement de nostredicte seur [...]. Affin que par la communication et lecture dudict livre les lecteurs dicelluy de bonne volonté puissent y acquérir quelque fruit de bonne édification. [Then a short time ago our dear and beloved only sister, the Queen of Navarre, had ordered him to translate from Tuscan to French the Decameron of Boccaccio, Florentine poet and and man of eloquence,… which he did with the greatest care and imitation possible to him, and following the orders of our above mentioned sister […]. So that by the communication and reading of the aforesaid book its readers of goodwill may acquire some fruit of good edification.]
We are promised a work prepared for a great patron, Marguerite de Navarre, whose relation to the king is twice referred to in this short passage — nostre treschere et tresamee seur unique and nostredicte seur; a noble lady, herself a published author, of whom it will strive to be worthy by being accurate and by providing its readers with edification. We are assured that the translator has worked with “curiosité,” that is, scrupulously (Cotgrave). Furthermore, Le Maçon has done his part of the work “en la plus grande imitation quil luy a esté possible” [the closest imitation he could]. The choice of the word imitation is a loaded one. Before continuing our examination of the paratexts of this translation of the Decameron, it will be useful to pause briefly to explore what it might have implied to contemporaries reading the privilege. Rhetorically, the distinction between translation and imitation is not always clear. While some mid-century arts of poetry, like those of Thomas Sébillet and Jacques Pelletier du Mans, rather encourage translation, in the Def–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– meurs Libraires & marchans d’imprimer en ce royaume, ou exposer en vente les quatre premiers livres d’Amadis de Gaule dedans six ans à compter du jour qu’ilz seront achevez d’imprimer, sur les peines contenues audict privilège, sur ce depesché, signé. Par le Roy. De la Chesnay: Si n’est par le congé et permission du seigneur des Essars. N. de Herberay qui les traduictz, et eu la charge de les faire imprimer par ledict Seigneur” (Herberay, vol. 1 vii). Some privileges are longer, but no less impersonal and formulaic. See, for example, the edition of Seyssel’s translation of Apian, available on the extraordinary website Les Bibliothèques virtuelles humanistes sponsored by the Université de Tours.
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fence, Du Bellay thunders against the uselessness of translation: O Apolon! O Muses! prophaner ainsi les sacrées reliques de l’Antiquité? [...] Celui donques qui voudra faire œuvre digne de prix en son vulgaire, laisse ce labeur de traduyre [...] à ceux qui de chose laborieuse et peu profitable, j’ose dire encor’ inutile, voyre pernicieuse à l’accroissement de leur langue, emportent à bon droict plus de molestie que de gloyre (91). [O Apollo! O Muses! So to profane the sacred relics of antiquity? Let him who wishes to produce a prize-worthy work in his own vulgar tongue leave this work of translation [...] to those who by painstaking and nearly profitless things, I dare add, useless, even pernicious to the growth of their language, rightly take away more vexation than praise] [bk 1, chap. 6].
These harsh words are perhaps the more astounding from someone who himself did not hesitate to publish his own translation of book four of Virgil’s Aeneid three years later (1552). Judging by the practice of the period, it is hard to discern a sharp border clearly separating imitation and translation. In contradistinction to Du Bellay, by 1540 or so, some texts are proud to proclaim themselves translations. I am thinking here particularly of novels, texts that took considerable liberties with their source, something for which the modern term would be adaptation (which may be the modern rendition of imitation), like Amadis de Gaule, and occasionally texts that have no traceable source, like Gérard d’Euphrate. 8 The Deffence, in the chapter following the one decrying translation, recommends imitation as the most fertile ground for the enhancement of the French language and the French literary tradition. The distinction Du Bellay intends is that between a servile rendering, likely to denature French — as was often the case with translations earlier 9 — and a new class of texts that –––––––––– 8
This latitude is explored in Rothstein (Reading 45-60) and can be seen as well in the similarities of language applied to imitation and translation in the arts poétiques of the period. 9 Claude de Seyssel, in the preface to his translation of Justin’s abbreviations of Trogus Pompeus (1509) — a Latin text prized for its moral value rather than its rhetorical or aesthetic qualities — understands grandeur to be embedded so firmly in the Latin of the text he is translating that only by contorting normal French usage could he do his source text justice: “Si je vais imitant le style du latin, ne pensez point que c’estoit par faute que ne l’eusse pu coucher en d’autres termes plus usités, à la façon des histoires françaises; mais soyez certain, Sire, que le langage latin de l’auteur a si grande vénusté et élégance, que d’autant qu’on l’ensuit plus de près, il en retient plus grande partie” (Longeon 26).
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would be wholly French even as they were firmly founded on a preexisting text in another language. Beyond the familiar Classical recommendations to translate for res and not verba, imitations are aware of and mediate the differences between source and target cultures, differences of which humanist training made educated people increasingly conscious, rendering the nature of res itself subject to translation — or appropriation — by the target culture. Terence Cave proposes that: “In imitation, the activities of reading and writing become virtually identified” (35). Understanding imitation in this sense prepares the ground for victory via translation, that is, for a French version of the Decameron (or any other text) which will be the equal of its source (Cave, Ch. 2 “Imitation”). This is the sort of thing that the king likely has in mind when he praises Le Maçon for having rendered the text “en la plus grande imitation quil luy a esté possible.” The purpose of Le Maçon’s translation was to give Boccaccio’s masterpiece a French voice and a French presence. Le Maçon was successful, but in this undertaking he felt greater responsibility and greater constraint than did his contemporaries translating less imposing works. One can usefully contrast his cautious attitude with a distinctly different tone taken toward their source texts by two other French translations from Italian, both published just a year after Le Maçon’s Decameron. Jean Martin, known for his translations of Sannazaro’s Acadia (1544) and Bembo’s Asolani (1545) — in fact perhaps the best known, best respected translator of the era — explains unapologetically that in translating Colonna’s fifteenth-century Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1546), he found it “d’une prolixité asiatique […] que je ne l’ai entièrement restitué selon l’Italien” (Colonna 9); [an Asiatic excess […] that I have not entirely reproduced from the Italian]. 10 In the preface to his translation of Machia–––––––––– 10 Martin used similar freedom in his prose translation of Sannazaro (see Fontaine). Jean Maugin goes further in his declaration of independence: Je n’ay prins de l’original que la matiere principal, sans m’assujetir aux propos du traducteur antique mal entenduz et pirement poursuyviz [...]. Et si en passant j’ay usé de metaphores, similitudes, et comparaisons, allegué fables, poësies, histoires et inventé vers, excusez le desir que j’ay eu de monstrer qu’en cest endroit le François y est plus propre que l’Espaignol (Weinberg 134, emphasis added). [I took only the main points from the original, without tying myself to the poorly understood and worse followed terms of the old translator […]. And if, in passing, I used metaphors, similes
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velli’s Art de la Guerre (1546), Jean Charrier declares his freedom: pour le soulagement de ceulx qui liront ceste traduction, que de m’arrester en ceste grande timidité de garder estroitement l’ordre de l’autheur: lequel aussi je n’ay suivy de mot a mot pour la diverse facon de parler des langues, estimant qu’il vault beaucoup mieulx declarer fidelement l’intention des autheurs que lon traduit que de s’amuser au langaige nu des paroles [for the relief of those who will read this translation, I did not keep too closely to the order of the author: whom also, I did not follow word for word because of the differences between the languages, considering that it was much better to declare the intentions of the authors one translates than to remain faithful to their words]. 11
These attitudes are far from the respectful tone in which Le Maçon presents his French Decameron. Two epistles preface Le Maçon’s 1545 translation, one from the translator to his patron, Marguerite de Navarre, a public letter intended in part to declare the status of the translator to readers, and one from 12 the printer addressing readers directly. Together the two epistles present the work to follow as something that has, in the etymological sense of traducere, brought an Italian work over the Alps, making it properly French. In his dedicatory epistle, Le Maçon establishes his connection to the court where the Queen of Navarre, earlier, had asked –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– and comparisons, referred to tales, poems, stories, or added verses, excuse the desire I had to show that French is better suited than Spanish to such matters.] Herberay’s introduction to Amadis also proclaims its freedom: “je ne me sois assubjecty à le rendre mot à mot” (I, xiii), [I did not subject myself to translating word for word]. Several times he declares the undertaking to be associated with the verb traduire and the notion of “exalter la Gaule” (xiii), leading the reader to understand the verb in a Latin sense; Herberay intends to carry over the Spanish into a French setting. 11 Machiavelli, (a6v). Machiavelli’s text appears in the same volume with “Onosander Platonique, ancien autheur Grec, a Quintus Verannius, De l’estat et charge d’un lieutenant general d’armée, also translated by Jehan Charrier, “natif d’Apt en Provence.” 12 The general practice in sixteenth-century printing is to treat paratexts as part of the package, so these letters (and sometimes text of the privilege as well, even when it is long expired) are included in successive editions of Le Maçon’s translations. They still appear fifty years and five monarchs later in the 1597 Paris Veirat edition.
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him to read — presumably to sight translate — a tale from the Deca13 meron. He then reminds Marguerite (and readers) that he lived in Italy for a whole year, a fact likely intended to prove that he had spent enough time there to perfect his mastery of Italian. He took the further precaution of showing his translations of the first ten stories to native speakers of both French and Italian who, he tells us, declared, “qu’elles estoient sinon bien, au moins fidelement traduictes” (ã2v) [they were, if not well, at least faithfully translated], echoing the concern for accuracy already noted in the privilege. Le Maçon writes that when the task was first proposed, he questioned whether the French language was a tool that was equal to it. He reminds Marguerite: “j’avoye ouy dire à plusieurs de sa nation [i.e. Italians], qu’ilz ne pouvoient penser ne croire, qu’il fust possible qu’on le sceust bien traduire en Francoys, ne dire tout ce qu’il avoit dit” (ã2r). [I had heard many of his countrymen say that they could neither think nor believe that it was possible to translate it well into French, or to say all that he had said.] Italians did in fact frequently declare France a backward and barbarous nation. But now, the reader is to understand, such accusations are properly a thing of the past. French has made progress: “en ce temps là trop plus que à ceste heure l’opinion estoit, que nostre langue ne fust si riche de termes et vocables comme la leur.” [In those days, more than at present, it was commonly held that our language was not as rich in terms and words as theirs.] We have no way of knowing how much earlier “ce temps là” was, when the project was first discussed. Perhaps it was stimulated by what was to be the last –––––––––– 13
Dedication to Marguerite de Navarre. “S’il vous souvient, ma dame, du temps que vous feiste sejour de quatre ou cinq moys à Paris, durant lequel vous me commandastes, me voyant venu nouvellement de Florence, ou j’avoye sejourné ung an entier, vous faire lecture d’aucunes nouvelles du Decameron de Bocace. Apres laquelle il vous pleut me commender de traduire tout le livre en nostre langue Francoyse, m’assurant qu’il seroit trouvé beau et plaisant” (ã2r). [If you recall, my lady, the time when you were in Paris for four or five months during which you ordered that I, newly returned from Florence where I had spent a whole year, should read you certain stories from Boccaccio’s Decameron. After which it pleased you to order me to translate the whole book into our French language, assuring me that it would be found fine and pleasing.] Annie Parent-Charon suggests that one of the purposes of a dedication was to place the text in a cultural milieu, in this case, in the highest quarters. Reading at the court was a way of reaching a large and influential audience; she estimates the core court in the reign of Henri II at over a thousand people, easily swelling to 6,0008,000. It would have been only slightly smaller in his father’s reign (129, 125).
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reprinting of the old Laurent de Premierfait translation a few years earlier, in 1541. Marguerite’s thinking about her own collection of nouvelles, the Heptameron, whose first tales were written at about the same time, would have added to the urgency of having access to a 14 more modern translation of the Italian master’s work. Le Maçon’s statement depends on readers’ having some degree of consciousness of a changing language, of changes taking place over a fairly short time, probably less than a decade. Evidence of this remains in other translations of the period, mostly of the Ancients, which not infrequently included glossaries of terms coined by the translator, who felt obligated by his task to provide meaningful equivalents for ancient terms. 15 During the last decade of the reign of François I, the lexicon of the French language expanded rapidly, incorporating more abstract and collective nouns, supporting the nascent independence of French as a language of abstract thought. Included were innocent words like plante, légume, both –––––––––– 14 Marguerite de Navarre (33). The connection between Boccaccio and Marguerite is strengthened by the title now associated with the Queen’s unfinished collection of tales; sixteenth-century manuscripts refer to it as Histoires des Amants fortunés et infortunés de la Reine de Navarre (under which title it was first published in 1558) or Les Nouvelles de la Royne de Navarre. It was first called Heptameron in Claude Gruget’s 1559 edition. Salminen, based on her painstaking work with all extant manuscripts and other contemporary material, suggests that Marguerite began work seriously in 1542. The earliest (incomplete) manuscripts are datable to 1545-47. Salminen places the decision to produce a collection of a hundred tales divided into ten days (in effect the decision to follow Boccaccio’s model) to the period spent in Cauterets from September 1546 to March 1547 (35). See Michel François’s edition (“Introduction” vi). Barbara Stephenson, on the evidence of a letter from Marguerite to Chancelier Du Prat in 1526 about Boccaccio, suggests the earlier date, offering it as a correction to Jourda, who places the start of Marguerite’s thinking about the project in 1538 (67). 15 Jean Colin provides such a glossary with his 1541 translation of Herodian, repeating as appropriate, and adding to the glossary he had created to accompany his unsigned version of Cicero’s De l’Amitié (1539) and Plutarch’s De la tranquilité et repos de l’esperit (1538). Louis Meigret produced one in 1547 with his Sallust, as did Jehan Le Blond for his 1548 Valerius Maximus. Claude Gruget presents the one in his translation of the letters of Phalaris (1550) explicitly as a locus of vocabulary expansion. Although it was vernacular text, Jean Martin provided a similar apparatus for his translation of Jacopo Sannazzaro’s Arcadia (1544), “pour relever de peine les lecteurs,” [to make the readers’ task easier] in which he includes information from such sources as Dioscorides, Pliny, Ovid, Flavio Biondo, and others. These glossaries include terms like adolescent, prodige, panthère.
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new collectives, harmonie (in a figurative sense — harmonie de la nature), globe, and perhaps less innocent ones like univers and patrie and enthusiasme. They all are part of a process allowing economical expression in French of ideas previously requiring clumsy periphrases. 16 Much of this lexical growth makes its first appearance in translations, as Sébillet notes in his Art poétique (140). The Queen of Navarre herself had persuaded Le Maçon to undertake the project by insisting, he tells us: qu’il ne faloit point que les Tuscans fussent en telle erreur de croire, que leur Bocace ne peust estre representé en nostre langue aussi bien qu’il est en la leur, estant la nostre devenue si riche et copieuse, depuis l’advenement à la couronne du Roy vostre frere, qu’on n’a jamais escript aucune chose en autres langues qui ne se puisse bien dire en ceste cy (ã2v). [The Tuscans must not erroneously think that their Boccaccio cannot be represented in our language as well as he is in theirs, our language having become so rich and copious since the start of the reign of the King your brother, that nothing has ever been written in other languages that cannot be well expressed in this one.]
This translation is presented as a staging field of the ongoing competition between “leur Bocace” and “nostre langue,” now capable of equaling the accomplishments of any other. 17 The choice of terms, “Tuscans,” and elsewhere “la langue toscane,” reminds us again how politically charged linguistic questions were: Florence is preferred to Rome, a cultural rather than a political challenger. Tuscan carried with it the prestige associated with Florence, and with Florentine political, visual, and verbal culture in the tradition of the great founding triad: –––––––––– 16 So, in the prologue to his fourteenth-century translation (from Latin) of Aristotle’s Ethics, Nicolas Oresme has to explain both ethique (“livre de bonnes meurs/livre de vertus où il enseigne selon raison naturelle bien faire et estre”) and politiques (“l’art et science de gouverner royaumes et cités et toutes communautés”). He goes on to regret the lack of collectives that made it impossible to translate the Latin: Homo est animal. 17 This same competition is rendered more aggressively by the anonymous [attributed in the BnF Catalogue to George de la Forge?] translator of Les Triumphs of Petrarch (Paris: Janot, 1539), “nouvellement redigez de son langage vulgaire Tascan [sic] en nostre diserte langue Francoyse” [newly rendered from his vernacular Tuscan into our eloquent French language]. It can be seen as well in the antagonisms staged between the French translation of Orlando furioso and Amadis discussed in Rothstein (Reading 37).
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Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. For ancient Romans, Italians were those outside the center, a distinction which no doubt encouraged the humanists’ tendency to speak of Tuscan rather than Italian to designate the language at the heart of the Renaissance’s cultural expansion. Erasmus deals with this problem in Latin by avoiding the tinge of barbarism that, for him, still hangs over Italian, referring to the language of the peninsula quaintly as Etruscan. Etienne Roffet, the publisher of the new translation, echoes these sentiments in his own preface, “Aux lecteurs,” printed immediately after the epistle to Marguerite. 18 La nation Francoyse se peult bien vanter aujourdhuy, seigneurs lecteurs, que la presente traduction du Decameron de Bocace nous est une tres grande preuve et tesmoignaige certain de la richesse et abondance de nostre vulgaire Francoys. Car d’autant que par l’industrie et vigilance des bons et doctes personnaiges de ce Royaume il a esté, durant ce regne, traicte et mis en nostre langue plus grant nombre des hystoires Greques et des livres Latins que non pas des Italiens et Tuscans et que ceulx qui veulent rendre jugement sus cecy, tienent et confessent que nostre cothidien langaige se range plus facilement en traduction avecques le Grec, que avec le Latin. [The French nation can pride itself today, my lord readers, that the present translation of the Decameron of Boccaccio provides us with great proof and certain witness of the riches and abundance of our French language. For, although by great industry and circumspection good and learned people of this kingdom, during this reign, have put into our language a greater number of Greek and Latin works than Italian and Tuscan ones, and those who wish to judge these hold that our everyday language is easier to translate from Greek than from Latin.]
Roffet, appealing to a received hierarchy of languages, seeks to link French and Greek directly, as did others in the sixteenth century, bypassing and implicitly surpassing both Latin and Italian. This move, which has a long history leading to Henri Estienne’s Conformité du langage françois avec le grec (1565), is always politically loaded, precisely to support French superiority to Italian, whose claim to glory is that it is the direct descendent of Latin. But, he reflects, “le Toscan –––––––––– 18
The 1545 edition was in folio, intended for an aristocratic market, as Roffet’s use of the title “seigneurs lecteurs” for his readers further suggests. Subsequent printings were in octavo or other smaller formats to reach a broader audience which constituted another market for Boccaccio’s tales. Roffet’s epistle continues to appear, albeit anonymously, in new editions of Le Maçon’s translation clear to the end of the century.
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filz aisné du Latin, n’est moins difficile à tourner en nostre commun parler, que le Latin mesmes.” [Tuscan, oldest son of Latin, is no less difficult to render in our common speech than Latin itself.] French is found to be superior to a worthy opponent, Tuscan, the vernacular with a pedigree. And he continues: Vous avez icy en Francoys le plus beau et plus estimé livre Toscan [...]. Voire, et en Francoys si bon, si courtisan, et si bien presenté que les cachées richesses et incongneuz ornements de nostre parler se peuvent non conferer seulement ains aussi preferer à toutes les autres estrangieres (ã4r). [You have here in French the finest and most admired Tuscan book [...]. More, in such fine, courtly French, and so well presented that the hidden riches and unknown ornaments of our speech can not only be compared but preferred to all other foreign tongues.]
Roffet presents French as having overcome and outdone the Italian of the Decameron in this new and improved version. In these paratexts, the voices of François I, Le Maçon, and Roffet and the reflected voice of Marguerite work in concert to insist that it equals or perhaps improves upon its source text. Arguably, the demonstration staged in the paratexts here of a victory of the target language over the source, prepared the way for the entry into the world scene of original French voices to follow. Certainly, for the moment, the claim is that, in this translation, the Italians have been bested on a terrain of their own making: the source text has been reworked, taken over, possibly even bested, proving to contemporaries that by 1545, French had become a literary medium equal to any.
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Berriot, François. “Langue, nation et pouvoir: les traducteurs du 14 s. précurseurs des humanistes de la Renaissance.” Langues et Nations au temps de la Renaissance. Ed. Marie-Thérèse Jones-Davies. Paris: Klincksieck, 1991. 114-35. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Decameron. Traduction (1411-14) de Laurent de Premierfait. Ed. Giuseppe di Stefano. Montréal: CERES, 1998. _____. Le Decameron de mesire Jehan Bocace Florentin. Trans. Anthoine Le Maçon. Paris: Roffet, 1545. Castiglione, Baldesare. Il libro del Cortegiano. Ed. Bruno Maier. Turin: Uniono Tipografico, 1964. _____. The Book of the Courtier. Trans. Charles S. Singleton. New York: Doubleday, 1959. Cave, Terence. The Cornucopian Text. Oxford: Clarendon, 1979. Charon-Parent, Annie. “Regards sur le livre à la cour d’Henri II.” Le Livre et l’historien. Études offertes en l’honneur du Prof. Henri-Jean Martin. Ed. Frédéric Barbier et al. Geneva: Droz, 1997. 125-32. Colonna, Francesco. Le Songe de Poliphile. Trans. Jean Martin. [Paris: Kerver, 1546]. Ed. Gilles Polizzi. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1994. Cotgrave, Randall. A Dictionary of the French and English Tongues. [London: n.p., 1611]. Columbia SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1950. Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Inferno. Trans. and comm. Charles S. Singleton. 2 vols. London: Routledge, 1971. Des Masures, Louis. Œuvres Poëtiques. Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1557. Du Bellay, Joachim. Deffence et illustration de la langue Francoyse. Ed. Jean-Charles Monferran. Geneva: Droz, 2001. Fontaine, Marie-Madeleine. “Jean Martin, Traducteur.” Prose et prosateurs, Mélanges Aulotte. Paris: SEDES, 1988. 109-22. Herberay des Essarts, Nicolas. Amadis de Gaule. Ed. Yves Giraud. 2 vols. Paris: Nizet, 1986. Hauvette, Henri. “Principe Galeotto.” Mélanges offerts à M. Émile Picot (orig. ed. 1913). Vol. I. Geneva: Slatkine, 1969. 505-10. Longeon, Claude. Premiers Combats pour la langue française. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1979. Machiavelli, Niccolò. L’art de la guerre. [Copy consulted missing title page; colophon]. Paris: Jehan Barbé, 1546. Marguerite de Navarre. Heptaméron. Commentaire et apparat critique. Ed. Renja Salminen. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1997.
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_____. L’Heptaméron. Ed. Michel François. Paris: Garnier, 1967. Montaigne, Michel de. Essais. Ed. Pierre Villey. Paris: PUF, 1965. Norton, Glyn P. “Laurent de Premierfait and the Fifteenth-Century French Assimilation of the Decameron: A Study in Tonal Transformation.” Comparative Literature Studies 9 (1972): 376-91. Peletier du Mans, Jacques. Art Poëtique. Ed. André Boulanger. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1930. Preisig, Florian. Clément Marot et les métamorphoses de l’auteur à l’aube de la Renaissance. Geneva: Droz, 2004. Rothstein, Marian. Reading in the Renaissance: Amadis de Gaule and the Lessons of Memory. Newark DE: University of Delaware Press, 1999. _____. “Homer for the court of François I.” Renaissance Quarterly 59.3 (Fall 2006): 732-67. Sébillet, Thomas. “Art Poétique français.” 1548. Traités de poétique et de rhétorique de la Renaissance. Ed. Francis Goyet. Paris: Livre de poche classique, 1990. 37-174. Stephenson, Barbara. The Power and Patronage of Marguerite de Navarre. Aldershot, UK; Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2004. Weinberg, Bernard. Critical Prefaces of the French Renaissance. New York: AMS Press, 1950.
FLS, Volume XXXVI, 2009
Translation
Luise von Flotow University of Ottawa
This Time “the Translation is Beautiful, Smooth, and True”: Theorizing Retranslation with the Help of Beauvoir Beauvoir is currently being retranslated into English, approximately fifty years after much of her work appeared. The claims made about these retranslations, undertaken after substantial feminist and other criticism of her texts in English, repeat the usual idea that this time, the translation is much improved and provides “access to Beauvoir herself,” who was long obscured by poor translations. Or that these versions of her work are “beautiful, smooth and true.” This study explores two current and gendered ideas about retranslation that may serve to relax such consistent claims about the higher quality of a retranslation. The figure of Pandora, discussed and adapted by Karin Littau (“Pandora’s Tongues”) to theorize translation as an endless, serial activity is useful in this regard, as is the work of psychoanalyst Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (Matrix Halal(a), Que dirait Eurydice?) and her theorizing of the matrice as a locus of metramorphosis, encounter, and the “non-rejection of the non-I.”
________________________ Beauvoir in English The retranslation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe is underway in France, in the hands of translators Connie Bordes and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, and expected in late 2008. Philosophical Writings (2006), a collection of hitherto untranslated work by Beauvoir, collected and edited by Margaret Simons and translated by a team of American academics, has just appeared, as the first in the
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projected Beauvoir Series of eight books. The second book of the series, Diary of a Philosophy Student, translated by Barbara Klaw, appeared in 2006, and a long list of retranslations and new collections of Beauvoir’s work has been announced. A strong resurgence of interest is apparent. It is due not only to the fact that 2008 marks the centenary of Beauvoir’s birth, celebrated in France by various events and publications, among others the feted nude photo of Beauvoir on the cover of Le Nouvel observateur (January 2008). It is also due to the critical focus on the English translations of her work, a focus that dates from the 1980s. Both Simons and Klaw, now involved in the retranslations, published criticisms of existing Beauvoir translations, commenting insightfully on various aspects of the English texts. Simons was among the first to point to the extensive, and unmarked, cuts that had been made in the text of The Second Sex in the course of translation and publication in English, which removed large sections of Beauvoir’s research on women in history, and misconstrued or annulled her philosophical thought. She writes, “No English edition of Le deuxième sexe [...] contains everything she wrote, or accurately translates her most basic philosophical ideas” (559). Klaw studied Beauvoir’s thematics of sexuality in Les Mandarins, published in 1954, and emphasized the groundbreaking aspects of Beauvoir’s writing in this area. However, Klaw’s comparison of the original version and the 1956 English translation reveals censorship of certain passages and a tendency to edit strong language in many others. Klaw writes, The 1956 English translation evidently also judged the novel as too sexually explicit: […] the two scenes evoking oral sex are neatly omitted in the English text and several passages are changed either to attenuate the boldness of the sexual imagery or to strengthen the criticism of women who act upon their desires. (197)
Such discussions and evaluations of the English versions of Beauvoir texts 1 — produced in the wake of 1970s feminism, with its keen interest in the most important forethinker of post-World War II feminism — sharpened critics’ awareness of the power and influence of translation, largely coinciding with the development of a new discipline, –––––––––– 1
Other critiques of Beauvoir translations include those of Cordero, Moi, Alexander, and von Flotow.
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Translation Studies, one of whose interests is this often hidden influence of translation. The criticisms became so detailed that existing Beauvoir translations in English were no longer deemed acceptable as material to cite. In 2000, Melanie Hawthorne, editor of Beauvoir and Sexuality, made clear in her introduction that, due to the uncertain quality of the English translations, “all quotations from Beauvoir’s work in this book are given in both the original French and in English” (8). In other words, the translations were considered too uneven, unsure, untrustworthy to serve as the sole version of Beauvoir’s expression. In what follows, I would like to bring together ideas on translation criticism and the rereading and retranslation it generates, from a womanist/feminist — perhaps matrixial/matricial point of view — and posit translation criticism not so much as an attack on some earlier translator/translation but simply as a new understanding and representation of the source text, in another time and space and culture, and by another individual — who chooses to, and is able to, read differently. But first, a brief reiteration of a typical aspect (viewed today as a failing) of the English translation of Le deuxième sexe published in 1953, by Howard Parshley, a retired professor of biology at Smith College. 2 In my work on his translation, I found that in general, Parshley attenuated and sanitized all references to sexuality, and in referring to the material available on Parshley, it became clear that the work had been rendered by a polite and scholarly elderly gentleman with a certain “horizon,” 3 an attitude about what was admissible in writing. In fact, it could be said that he practiced a particular version of “aesthetic correctness.” It is still not clear to what extent the publishing house Knopf was involved — apart from demanding extensive “cuts and slashes” in the work, so that it could come out in one volume rather than two, and therefore sell better. –––––––––– 2 The coincidences which led to this man becoming Beauvoir’s translator are just one example of the often random ways in which translators are selected. The selection of the new translators of Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe has also been viewed critically in this respect. 3 Berman, in Pour une critique des traductions, explores various “horizons” that may explain the outcome of translation; one of these is the “horizon du traducteur.”
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Besides abridging and sanitizing Beauvoir’s work, Parshley often used simple stylistic means to moderate Beauvoir’s writing on sexuality, as these short excerpts from the chapter entitled “Initiation à la sexualité” show. In this segment, Beauvoir discusses young women’s often traumatic sexual experiences, and refers to the findings of Dr. Wilhelm Stekel, a German sexologist of the 1920s, who reported on his women patients. Beauvoir incorporates statements by women patients and descriptions of sexual encounters that she has culled from Stekel. These are often narratives, told in the first person, or accounts that include direct quotes from dialogue with the patient. Beauvoir argues, for example, that a woman’s anxiety about sex can be the result of her lack of knowledge about her own body, and she cites and paraphrases Stekel’s patients: Toute jeune fille porte en elle toutes sortes de craintes ridicules qu’elle ose à peine s’avouer dit Stekel... Une jeune fille par exemple croyait que son “ouverture inférieure” n’était pas à sa place. Elle avait cru que le commerce sexuel se faisait à travers le nombril. Elle était malheureuse que son nombril soit fermé et qu’elle ne puisse y enfoncer son doigt. Une autre se croyait hermaphrodite. Une autre se croyait estropiée et incapable d’avoir jamais de rapports sexuels. (142)
Parshley’s translation, in turn, paraphrases Beauvoir, and abridges her text in very specific ways: According to Stekel, all young girls are full of ridiculous fears, secretly believing they may be physically abnormal. One, for example, regarded the navel as the organ of copulation and was unhappy about its being closed. Another thought she was a hermaphrodite. (382)
Parshley’s removal of the naïve “ouverture inférieure” is noteworthy here, just as later in the text he censors more vulgar expressions such as “tu as un grand trou.” In fact, in these quotes from dialogues and patients’ accounts, he strikes the individual woman from the narrative, making the text a dryer academic treatise. In the passage above, the deletion of how the girl handles and explores her body — her attempt to introduce a finger into her navel — strikes the personal, helplessly exploratory, element from the text. This makes the text less descriptive, less naïve, more detached, more scholarly. Subsequent narratives by Stekel’s patients are also abridged and changed, thus also eliminating their subjective aspects: for instance,
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hurtful comments and situations that have rendered these women sexually unresponsive, and that they recount verbatim, are turned into polite abstractions. Beauvoir cites women’s memories of their unhappy wedding nights; they quote their husbands as follows: “tu m’as trompé, tu n’es plus vierge” “Comme tu as les jambes courtes et épaisses” “Mon Dieu, que tu es maigre”
which Parshley translates respectively as: “her husband accused her of deceiving him in regard to her virginity” “another husband made uncomplimentary remarks about how ‘stubby and thick’ his bride’s legs were” “Her husband brutally deplored her too slender proportions.” (382)
These politer, more literary formulations that turn the injured firstperson narrator into a silenced third person, with higher register verbs (deceive, deplore) and polite descriptives (uncomplimentary remarks, too slender proportions) and even inverted commas around ‘stubby and thick,’ which the translator may have seen as vulgar terms, create a text that seems far removed from Beauvoir’s more human and subjective source version. When the French and English versions are compared, the differences are apparent, and we may well ask about the effect of such differences multiplied throughout the entire text.
Translation Criticism: a Rare Event Translation criticism is not exactly a booming field of study in the humanities. Nor do professional reviewers, who regularly work with texts in English translation, indulge in such activity. Works translated into English are still generally treated as though they had been written in the language of the target culture, and terms such as “a deft translation,” “a fluent rendering,” or “an awkward version” are often the limit of the reviewer’s comments. Largely, these refer to the readability of the text in the language of translation. It is rare to find scholars or reviewers engaging with the act and the effects of translation. As Antoine Berman, an eminent translation theorist, has pointed out, “le discours critique reste curieusement muet à propos de [la traduction], sauf à la juger ‘bonne’ ou ‘mauvaise’ à partir de son ‘savoir’
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de ses œuvres” (Critique 92). Berman singles out three great critics [“grandes figures de la critique”] who have speculated or commented on translation: Novalis, Benjamin, and Blanchot. However, while Berman describes these great critics as respectively acknowledging translation as a “rare and difficult skill,” as an activity that leads toward the telos of “pure language,” and as an “enigma” produced by “traducteurs, écrivains de la sorte la plus rare, et vraiment incomparable” (Critique 95-96), these writers were better at formulating abstractions about the valuable enigma that confronts them in the form of translation rather than actual translation events and effects. Berman comments again, “cela ne change rien au fait qu’au-delà de ces déclarations de principe, la critique semble indifférente à la traduction réelle” (96). Many others have begun examining this invisible space that translation occupies, and proposed more specific ways of filling it: Lawrence Venuti is perhaps the most voluble American critic on this topic. His article, “The Translator’s Invisibility” (expanded and published as a book in 1995), and other works, Rethinking Translation and The Scandals of Translation, as well as his efforts in editing and compiling the scholarly notes for The Translation Studies Reader, have very much increased contemporary anglophone interest in translation as a powerful engine of cultural transfer and cultural influence. While Venuti leans toward a Marxist critique of the hegemony of powerful translating cultures (often contemporary anglophone and/or postcolonial) that far too easily reduce the imported foreign text to the local — thus effacing both the foreign and the entire process of translation — Berman has more idealistic aims for translation criticism. These two approaches have been presented as examples of the two very different motivations in translation criticism, with Venuti taking an increasingly leftist and moralistic tone and Berman promoting an essentialist and teleological approach, where translation and especially retranslation progress in a linear movement and are “investie d’une mission qui consiste à délivrer la vérité” (Brisset 41). Though different, both approaches strive to define “good” translation, thus also creating the category of “bad” translation. Yet we can also see things more in line with polysystem theories that refuse to judge translations as good, bad, or indifferent, and instead study the phenomenon of translation as a sociocultural and
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historical one; they place translation and retranslation into a precise context, a “scène de communication” (Brisset 47), where the artifacts produced represent another, earlier text, usually for a different language audience, and in that audience’s own mix of contrasting or supportive theories, text genres, and writing styles. The translations may well be highly variable, affected by the “écologie intellectuelle” (Brisset 45, citing Stephen Toulmin) of their time and by “la condition culturelle de la pensée” (Brisset 45, citing Judith Schlanger) — in short, by their respective cultural and ideological contexts. Beauvoir’s translation into English and its reception in the 1950s and 1960s were doubtless subject to exactly such an “écologie intellectuelle.” Feminist Translation Criticism and Retranslation Translation criticism, rare as it is, is one element that mobilizes retranslation; but retranslation also occurs when an older work is intertextually referred to in more recent writing. A piece of contemporary text that cites an older authority causes a look backward, a rereading, a reinterpretation of this predecessor. In the process of this rereading and rewriting, the source text is released from its existing translation, set free from the entanglements that have tied it down to a certain representation, and it goes on to live other lives, for other readers. The push to properly understand Beauvoir through new translations and retranslations was clearly triggered by the look back at Beauvoir by the burgeoning women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which, among other things, searched for and unearthed forethinkers of the movement, and set about re-presenting them. The criticisms of Beauvoir translations convinced readers and publishers alike of the need for or perhaps usefulness of new versions. In this, they are akin to work done on Bible translations at the time — another example of a new intellectual ecology in the wake of the feminist movement (Simon). Since the 1980s, translation criticism with a feminist tinge has played some role in the move to reread and rewrite the work of earlier women writers, translators, and thinkers; from this, a view of translation as an ongoing labour of rereading and rewriting, as a work of seriality and generation — rather than a work of “finitude” or final
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completion — has developed, in both translation criticism and theory. The work of feminist critics who apply feminist/womanist psychoanalytic theory to help understand translation and especially retranslation provides a strong foundation for such thinking. In what follows, I will discuss two important works that apply feminist psychoanalytic thought to retranslation in an attempt to relativize and open up the notion of the final, the “best,” the truest translation. Over the 1990s, Karin Littau worked on various aspects of the Pandora figure, often in relation to her studies of Wedekind, the German expressionist playwright of the early twentieth century, and his Lulu/Pandora character. She immersed herself in the many mythic, literary and other artistic representations of this ostensibly Ur-female figure, and studied the story of Pandora’s box and the linguistic chaos that was unleashed when she, according to the dominant version of the story, defied authority and opened it up. This is the chaos that translation has been seeking to temper and mediate ever since. Citing George Steiner, Littau argues that the story of Pandora is one of two major myths ruling translation; the other is the story of Babel. And yet, the story of Pandora is unclear, quite diffuse, contingent upon retellings by Hesiod (a farmer turned misogynist poet), debatable translations (by Erasmus, among others), and a multitude of different images — in three dimensions, carved in stone, and in two dimensions. On the one hand, Pandora has been represented as Mother Earth with an enormous, overflowing cornucopeia, a deity that oversees fruitfulness and regeneration, as the kind of Ur-female associated with the “Hawwa” [Life, not Eve] of feminist Bible translations (see Korsak on this point.) The other, more dominant version, however, tells how linguistic chaos is the result of Pandora’s female curiosity in defiance of male authority. By opening the jar, when she had been forbidden to do so, she is reputed to have unleashed all of the world’s evils upon mankind; only “hope” remained locked inside, inaccessible. This is the story that has prevailed and largely entered the public sphere, “la condition culturelle de la pensée,” to repeat Schlanger’s formulation. Littau, like so many of her generation, rewrites mythology, here with reference to the traditional bane of translation; yet in Littau’s version, the bane becomes a boon. Through a series of deft juxtapositions and questions, Littau argues that the Pandora figure presents and is presented as a multiplicity, and does not stay within the traditional
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duality (of woman/man, presence/lack of Phallus, right/wrong, good or bad translation). Contrary even to Derrida’s view of translation supplementing a source text, which Littau recognizes as a considerable and important move away from the usual condemnations of translation, she rejects the strict binarism that continues to rule discourses on translation. Instead, she links the multiplicity of Pandora to the multiplicity of women’s psyche and sexuality, as theorized by Luce Irigaray, and comes to the following conclusion: The many Pandora myths lend emphasis not to the impossibility of translation, but the impossibility of putting a stop to endless retranslation, in short, they show us the serial nature of translation; there are always more translations, retranslations. […] [W]hat pan-dora, her name, exposes is a seriality, not just that there never was “one,” but that there is always “one” more, and so on. To translate her name (in her name) is therefore not finally to translate her, to translate her at last, to approximate some original condition, but rather to translate again, to retranslate. (33)
This is a significant reworking, a reconceptualizing of the ongoing activities of rereading and rewriting that mark intercultural activity and exchange. They can work to posit translation and retranslation in terms of generous regenerative processes rather than in the usual terms of deficiencies. Carolyn Shread has applied the psychoanalytic and aesthetic theories of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger to translation and retranslation and shown how the traditional textual border (between original and translation) becomes a threshold rather than a frontier, if the encounter with the unknown/the foreign is posited as a matrixial relationship, or a metramorphic activity. This relationship moves beyond the idealist metaphoric approach to translation — where the one text supposedly replaces the other, yet never does so wholly; it also eschews the more realist metonymic view of translation — where a translation only ever presents a part of the original that then stands for the whole. Ettinger’s metramorphosis 4 applied to translation brings in the female/maternal –––––––––– 4
A neologism that brings together and resonates with the terms “meta,” “mater,” and “morpheus”: “Ettinger’s neologism combines a play on ‘meta’ and an evocation of ‘mater,’ mother or womb, with ‘morphe,’ Greek for ‘form,’ linked also to Morpheus, the Greek God of sleep and dreams. The term refers to processes that do not involve single unities acting through the condensation of metaphor or the dis-
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element that is excised from Lacanian psychoanalytic thought. It uses this “excision” of the inexpressible feminine as a signifying space. Ettinger writes: We are caught in an axiom of equivalence. The Phallus is the value inherited from one signifier to another, each, on top of that, anaphorical to the signifier of a lost unity. So the magic circle is complete. So the Phallus appropriates all. But the Symbolic is larger than the Phallus! — Add metramorphoses to metaphors and metonymies. — Open up a space between Symbol and Phallus (in a psychoanalytic sense). Matrix is in this space: Symbol minus (-) Phallus. (Matrix 5051).
In thinking beyond the domineering Phallus and incorporating the feminine matrix, Ettinger centres on the space of the late prenatal matrixial relations between mother and child/children where dependency is an ethical value. Shread comments that this focus on dependency and interrelatedness “reveals our multiple dependencies and the connectedness underlying the fictions of absolute autonomy” (Shread, “Metramorphosis,” citing Michael Cronin). The theorization and deployment of the matrixial and metramorphic paradigm evoke a feminine Symbolic that welcomes and accepts difference rather than replacing it. Ettinger insists: Matrix gives meaning to the real which is otherwise unthinkable. […] Matrix. The non-rejection of unknown and unassimilated non-I(s) is an unconscious side of the feminine ab-ovo. Matrix: dynamic and temporary assemblage created by non-rejection, without absorption, repeal or fusion. (Matrix 45-46)
Critic Rosi Huhn summarizes: In contrast to metamorphosis, each of the new forms and shapes of the metramorphosis does not send the nature of each of the preceding ones into oblivion or eliminate it, but lets it shine through the transparency, disar-
placement of metonymy; instead they provoke changes that mutually alter the meaning they create without supplanting or deferring the signifier” (Shread, A Theory 8).
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ranges and leads to an existence of multitude rather than unity. (Huhn cited by Shread, “Metramorphosis” 224)
Here the emphasis on “non-rejection of unknown non-I(s)” and assemblages created “without absorption, repeal or fusion,” and Huhn’s comments on the nature of preceding forms “shining through” the new forms in which they are presented resonate with recent concerns of translation and translation studies: the problem of recognizing alterity, of validating and somehow incorporating and reflecting otherness in the translated text, all the while not eliminating or “appropriating” it. From this perspective, translation as a metramorphic activity enables signification within a relationship that transgresses the usual construction of subject boundaries. Here, several comes before the one, as in the late prenatal relationship of “subjectivity-as-encounter,” where “a structure of severality precedes individual consciousness” (“Metramorphosis” 221), and as Shread argues, the term matrix shifts the associations of “the womb as a passive receptacle to that of an active border space, transformed by a co-emerging I and an unknown non-I” (“Metramorphosis” 221). The applications to translation and retranslation are manifold, and obviously related to the seriality, indeed, the infinity, of translation already suggested by Pandora, and elaborated by Littau. First and foremost, the translational relation is seen as one of encounter, exchange, and mutual transformation rather than assimilation, displacement, or rejection. Then, there is a more nuanced approach to the Other, to the unknown, to difference, and the possibility of furthering changes in negotiating practices. Shread sums it up as follows: “Ettinger’s project can be summarized as a theorization of how the matrix offers a locus where meaning is generated rather than foreclosed, transferred rather than buried” (“Metramorphosis” 224). Ettinger’s thinking promotes a view of translation as generative; as a labour that, like all such work and contrary to any notions of solitary grandeur, is dependent upon and in conversation with its cultural environment, all the while exerting an influence on it as well. It is not in any way a labour that must end in the deterioration, dereliction, or final replacement of the original.
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Back to Beauvoir While criticism of translations and retranslations remains rare, the blurb on the back cover of many books has become one important way to encourage readers to read and engage with the new versions of texts — in other words, a marketing tool that often evokes former translations. The new Beauvoir translations — Barbara Klaw’s Diary of a Philosophy Student (2006) and Margaret Simons’s edited collection Philosophical Writings (2006) — are no exceptions. And their “écologie culturelle” is no secret either: both books were produced by a team of American women, and set out to present Beauvoir’s thought before or beyond the influence Sartre may have had on it. They are group projects that place a woman before a man, an aspect that the blurb on the back of Philosophical Writings confirms, as it also calls upon the translation effect: This volume aims at nothing less than the transformation of Simone de Beauvoir’s place in the philosophical canon. Despite growing interest in her philosophy, Beauvoir remains widely misunderstood and is typically portrayed as a mere philosophical follower of her companion, Jean-Paul Sartre. In Philosophical Writings, Beauvoir herself shows that nothing could be further from the truth. One factor contributing to misunderstanding has been the lack of English translations of much of Beauvoir’s philosophical work, or worse — its mistranslation in heavily condensed, popular editions [...]. Philosophical Writings is a major contribution to the renaissance of interest in her work, and to a philosophical curriculum in which women remain underrepresented (my emphasis.)
The purpose of this collection of new translations is clear: it will resituate Beauvoir within twentieth-century philosophy, free her from the subjugation to Sartre imposed by lack of translations or “mistranslations,” and provide additional interpretations, explicitations, and annotations of her thought by a group of women scholars seeking to counter the under-representation of women in philosophy. The fact of retranslation is vital in this project and promises access to “Beauvoir herself.” The blurb for Diary of a Philosophy Student has a similar tone; critic Claudia Card writes:
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This is a magnificent piece of work. It is an engaging read and lets English readers to whom French is not accessible have first-hand access to some now much-discussed evidence regarding the independence of Beauvoir’s thought. The translation is beautiful, smooth, and true. A real coup (my emphasis.)
This piece expresses two important ideas: the first is that readers will have “first-hand access” to evidence regarding Beauvoir’s thought, and the second presents this particular translation as “true.” Such assertions imply that the new translation improves the text, indeed makes available the true original text, and are typical of much of the discourse around retranslation, a discourse that consistently undermines translation by proposing “better” or “truer” versions. Rather than seeing translation as an ongoing, ever-changing, and constantly evolving engagement with texts — where the thresholds and not the frontiers are important — this discourse implies a finality, the possibility of a final true version of a translated text. The idea that English language readers will have “first-hand access” to Beauvoir’s work through these particular translations completely elides the work of the translators. In fact, the trace of the translator within the text is what makes the text “readable” for contemporary audiences. In preparing the text for a readership incapable of reading in French (and in context), the translator’s work is vital to this enterprise of allowing “access” to Beauvoir — but it is never firsthand access. It is always access through the brain, the knowledge, and the words of the translator. Such discourse about “first-hand access” and “true translation” continues the strange assumption, the wishful thinking, that this translation, now, will render the authentic voice of the original, an assumption that has been shown again and again to be wrong. It is reminiscent of the preface to Traduire Freud (1989), a project to render coherent the many diverse versions of Freud in France and that claimed to translate “le texte, rien que le texte.” As translation criticism has repeatedly shown, the text is not separable from the “ecologie intellectuelle.” In the case of Beauvoir translated anew into English, the contextualizations and paratexts may go some way to make this “écologie” visible, or rather present the new text as a part of it. Critics of these translations and of the new Deuxième sexe will hopefully demonstrate
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an understanding and appreciation of the work of translation as well as its contingent, serial, multiple nature.
Works Cited Alexander, Anna. “The Eclipse of Gender: Simone de Beauvoir and the Différance of Translation.” Philosophy Today 41.1 (1997): 112-22. Beauvoir, Simone de. Le deuxième sexe. Paris: Gallimard, 1949. 2 vols. _____. Diary of a Philosophy Student. Trans. Barbara Klaw. Ed. Barbara Klaw, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Margaret A. Simons, and Marybeth Timmermann. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006. _____. Les Mandarins. Paris: Gallimard, 1954. 2 vols. _____. The Mandarins. Trans. Leonard M. Friedman. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1956. _____. Philosophical Writings. Ed. Margaret A. Simons, Marybeth Timmermann, and Mary Beth Mader. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Berman, Antoine. “Critique, commentaire et traduction. Quelques réflexions à partir de Benjamin et Blanchot.” Po&sie 37 (1986): 88-106. _____. Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. Bourguignon, André, Pierre Cotet, Jean Laplanche, and François Robert. Traduire Freud. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989. Brisset, Annie. “Retraduire ou le corps changeant de la connaissance. Sur l’historicité de la traduction.” Palimpsestes 15 (2004): 39-67. Cordero, Anne D. “Simone de Beauvoir Twice Removed.” Simone de Beauvoir Studies 7 (1990): 49-56. Ettinger, Bracha Lichtenberg. Matrix Halal(a) — Lapsus. Notes on painting, 1985-1992. Trans. from French by Joseph Simas. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1993. _____. Que dirait Eurydice? What would Eurydice say? Conversation with Emmanuel Levinas. Toulouse: Paragraphic, 1994. Flotow, Luise von. “Translation Effects: How Beauvoir Talks About Sex in English.” Contingent Loves. Simone de Beauvoir and Sexuality. Ed. Melanie Hawthorne. Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 2000. 1333. Hawthorne, Melanie, ed. Contingent Loves. Simone de Beauvoir and Sexuality. Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 2000.
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Klaw, Barbara. “Sexuality in Les Mandarins.” Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir. Ed. Margaret Simons. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. 193-221. Korsak, Mary Phil. At the Start, Genesis Made New. New York: Doubleday, 1993. Littau, Karin. “Pandora’s Tongues.” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 13.1 (2000): 21-35. _____. “The Primal Scattering of Languages: Philosophies, Myths and Genders.” Paideia Project. 22 March 2008. <www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/ Lite/LiteLitt.htm> . Moi, Toril. Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Le Nouvel Observateur. No. 2252, 3-9 January 2008. Parshley, Howard, trans. and ed. The Second Sex. By Simone de Beauvoir. New York: Knopf, 1953. Patterson, Yolanda Astarita. “Who Was This H. M. Parshley?: The Saga of Translating Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.” Simone de Beauvoir Studies 9 (1992): 41-47. Shread, Carolyn. “Metamorphosis or Metramorphosis? Towards A Feminist Ethics of Difference in Translation.” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 20.2 (2007): 213-42. _____. “A Theory of Matrixial Reading: Ethical Encounters in Ettinger, Laferrière, Duras, and Huston.” Diss. University of Massachusetts, 2005. Simon, Sherry. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Simons, Margaret A. “The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from The Second Sex.” Women’s Studies International Forum 6.5 (1983): 559-64. Venuti, Lawrence, ed. Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. _____. The Scandals of Translation: Toward an Ethics of Difference. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. _____. “The Translator’s Invisibility.” Criticism 28.2 (1986): 179-217. _____. The Translator’s Invisibility: a History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. _____, ed. The Translation Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2000; 2nd ed. 2004.
FLS, Volume XXXVI, 2009
Translation
Carolyn Shread Mount Holyoke College
Redefining Translation through Self-Translation: The Case of Nancy Huston Self-translation is generally viewed as a minor, borderline, eccentric practice within translation studies. Suggesting that self-translation is in fact both more pertinent and more widespread, this article argues for a reconceptualization of translation models, using the example of Nancy Huston’s self-translating practice as a deconstructive lens. Taking selftranslation as a prototype for the ways in which translation may be viewed not as a degenerative process, but rather as creative expansion, this article sheds light on a theoretical aporia in the field of translation studies, while also forging a wider, more generous conception of the goals, art, and ethics of translation.
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Nancy Huston’s self-translation practice is an exemplary case for considering translation in the context of French and Francophone literature. In the field of translation studies, self-translation is generally viewed as an exceptional, minority practice and consequently is not widely discussed. However, I suggest that self-translation reveals something about the nature of all translation and that it is theoretically productive precisely because of its problematic status in relation to the binary categories by which translation is often defined: original/translation; author/translator; source text/target text. With reference to Huston’s work and the controversies it has inspired, I propose we renegotiate many of these terms. Thus, instead of confining self-translation to a distinct and separate space, I emphasize the continuities between self-translation and translation, showing how self-translation
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provides us with a strategy for deconstructing monolithic models of translation. Self-translation, also called auto-translation, was included by G. C. Kálmán in his survey of “Some Borderline Cases of Translation,” as one instance, along with other anomalies such as pseudotranslation and zero translation, warranting further analysis. While Kálmán saw these extrinsic examples as simply overlooked and requiring inclusion within the field of translation, my purpose is somewhat different. I hope that by using self-translation to strategically disrupt standard definitions of translation, this article will contribute to Maria Tymoczko’s call for a new disciplinary understanding: “translation as a cross-cultural concept must be reconceptualized and enlarged beyond dominant Western notions that continue to circumscribe its definition” (310). While my discussion of Huston’s work remains within North-American and European models, it nevertheless serves to unsettle many of the assumptions Tymoczko invites us to question by considering non-Western instances of translation. Without seeking to define self-translation within a closed taxonomy à la Genette, Roman Jakobson’s distinction between the three types of intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translation may be of use in manipulating the otherwise potentially unwieldy concept of self-translation for the purposes of this article. While I discuss both intralingual and interlingual forms of self-translation, I do not consider the many metaphorical uses of the term “self-translation” to describe, for instance, the experiences of women “translating” themselves into patriarchal culture, writers in postcolonial cultures destined to “translate” themselves as a part of the colonial heritage, or transnational migrants living as “translated beings” between multiple cultures, languages, and national identities. 1 These metaphorical uses of selftranslation are distinguished from the practice of self-translation I am –––––––––– 1 Sherry Simon discusses some of the ways translation is evoked as a metaphor in Gender in Translation (134-35). Joanne Akai focuses on the relevance of selftranslation to postcolonial contexts, proposing the argument that “West Indian literature in English can be considered self-translation […] an intricately woven textile of Creole and English: a hybrid writing made possible through the translation of Creole experience into English; oral Creole culture into written English; the Creole language into the English language” (195). Mary Besemeres edited a collection of essays that explore the issue of self-translation specifically with respect to auto-biography, Translating One’s Self: Language and Selfhood in Cross-Cultural Autobiography.
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concerned with here in that they do not result in two written texts, since at least one of the texts is unwritten. Furthermore, I avoid discussion of these metaphors because I sense that their suggestive power derives from an appeal to conventional notions of translation as a derivative, secondary, inferior, inauthentic state, and it is precisely these associations with translation that I wish to contest. Eventually, the redefinition of translation I propose via self-translation may prove to have wider metaphorical implications that are empowering to those groups commonly viewed as impoverished or secondary through their comparison with translation. Debates about self-translation are primarily concerned with literary translation, no doubt because this is where the stakes of authorship, authority, and originality are highest. 2 Despite the considerable impact of poststructuralist thought in the field of literary criticism, theoretical conceptions of translation remain constrained within traditional models in which the author’s sovereignty and creative originality enshrined in the original text are never attainable by the secondary, subservient imitation, reflection, or refraction that is translation. The modesty of this attitude is strikingly different from the bold claims for textual interpretation made by readers emancipated from the authority of the author by poststructuralist thinking, for to paraphrase Roland Barthes, the death of the author has not (quite) yet heralded the birth of the translator. Although we are no longer in the situation that Brian Fitch described in 1983, when “aucun théoricien de la traduction [...] ne s’est adressé jusqu’ici directement au problème du statut de la traduction de soi” (“L’intra-intertextualité” 86), more than twenty years later, selftranslation still represents a theoretical aporia in the field. Rainier Grutman’s entry on “Auto-translation” in the 1998 Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies suggests that “translation scholars themselves have paid little attention to the phenomenon, perhaps because they thought it to be more akin to bilingualism than to translation proper” (17). This explanation is very telling, implying that the reason why self-translation has been neglected is precisely because it challenges a predominant Western monolingual paradigm in which –––––––––– 2 Rainier Grutman comments, “A fairly common practice in scholarly publishing, auto-translation is frowned upon in literary studies” (17).
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translation compensates for a linguistic lack, while simultaneously erasing the multilingual nature of its task. As Raymond Federman points out, even critical responses to iconic self-translator Samuel Beckett fail to attend to the bilingual nature of his œuvre, contenting themselves with just one of the two languages he wrote in, and giving no account of the multilingual nature of his texts: in all the books I consulted, there are no chapters, no long sections, no index entries for bilingualism and/or self-translating. Even more interesting — or perhaps one should say appalling — the index of the Beckett biography (authorized or unauthorized as it may be) does not even contain the words bilingual or bilingualism, translating or self-translating. (8)
Responding to this erasure of the place of translation in writing, the main contention of this article is that by forcing us to reconsider some basic assumptions, a close analysis and bold reading of self-translation have the power to redefine our concepts of translation. One consequence of the marginalization of self-translation as a practice is that it reinforces Western models in which monolingualism, rather than multilingualism, are the norm. Yet in many places in the world, multilingualism is clearly the rule rather than the exception. Critics responding to self-translated texts are forced to acknowledge the extent to which multiple languages may be present, or leave traces, in any given text. Fitch discusses this in relation to Beckett’s writing, explaining “textual activity [...] runs over, back and forth, between language systems, failing to respect the boundaries that normally contain the French and English languages” (Investigation 134). In this reading, a self-translated text is more than the chance contiguity of two languages; instead, it involves degrees of reciprocal interference, which deviate from the assumption of a hermetic original confined to a single, pure language. However, within the framework of conventional models of translation, it is difficult to describe this writing/translating process. Elizabeth Beaujour considered this issue with reference to Jacques Derrida’s bid to renovate theorizations of translation: “As Jacques Derrida has observed, one of the limits of theories of translation is that ‘all too often they treat the passing from one language to another and do not sufficiently consider the possibility for languages to be implicated more than two in a text’ ” (723). This theoretical omission has become increasingly evident as the creative inter-
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facing of multiple languages has gained an expanded presence in the literary scene as a result of postcolonial and transnational cultural expression. In France, from 2002 to 2005, television literary celebrity Bernard Pivot aired a show entitled Double Je, which focused entirely on his interviews with authors bilingual in French and another language. The program reflected the beginning of an understanding of the dependency of “French” culture on its “outsiders.” Theorizing in the United States, English as the hegemonic language is extremely reluctant to acknowledge the place of Spanish-English bilingualism. In both instances there is clearly a powerful investment in keeping the model of self-translation carefully distinct from translation “proper.” Self-translation is further marginalized by its persistent association with a handful of authors chosen to represent the “anomaly.” In the field of French and Francophone studies, most criticism concerns Beckett, who is usually classed as a unique example of the rare art: Brian Fitch claims that Beckett offers “sans doute le seul exemple d’une œuvre presque entièrement bilingue” (“L’intra-intertextualité” 86). One of the motives of this paper is to contest this restricted canon, arguing with Christopher Whyte that “self-translation is a much more widespread phenomenon than one might think” (64). 3 Interestingly, Hokenson and Munson, in The Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary Self-Translation, comment that “within this time span of 1100 through 2000, writers adopt the French language for literary selftranslation with disproportionate frequency” (15), although I venture that at least in the era of global English, English is even more common as one of the languages of self-translation. In any event, once the range of texts considered is extended from French texts to the wider Francophone field, with all its complex linguistic and cultural history, many more instances of self-translation, both practical and metaphorical, are evident. I argue here for the inclusion of Huston, who describes herself as “une écrivaine canadienne et française mais non pas canadienne-française” (“En français dans le texte” 232). –––––––––– 3 Whyte cites Joseph Brodsky (Russian/English), Josep Carner (Castilian/Catalan Spanish), and Sorley MacLean (Gaelic/English). In addition we might add Vladmir Nabokov (Russian/English), Joachim du Bellay (Latin/French), James Joyce (English/French/Italian), Milan Kundera (Czech/English), Elsa Triolet (Russian/English), Romain Gary (French/English), Julien Green (French/English), Andreï Makine (Russian/French), Jorge Semprun (Spanish/French), Hector Bianciotti (Spanish/French), and André Brink (Afrikaans/English).
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Born in the Anglophone Canadian province of Alberta, Huston traveled to Paris for a year abroad, stayed, and made a name for herself as a French author, and later an English author. Huston has received many prestigious prizes in France and is not shy of entering into the media spotlight for debates about her work. Yet her work still suffers from exclusion in the field of self-translation: in 2001, Michael Oustinoff published one of the few books on the topic, Bilinguisme d’écriture et auto-traduction: Julien Green, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, an analysis that does not include a single reference to Huston, even though her work was one of the most celebrated literary phenomena in France while the book was being written. Furthermore, surprisingly, Huston’s name does not appear even once in Hokenson and Munson’s The Bilingual Text, even though they are both researchers in the field of French and Comparative Literature. Yet, I go so far as to argue that Nancy Huston’s bilingual corpus is commensurable with Beckett’s, given the number of her own works she has translated and the depth of her analysis into self-translation as both a linguistic and cultural phenomenon. Unlike Beckett, who started writing in his native English and later shifted to French, for the first ten years Huston wrote only in French, apparently turning her back on her mother tongue, English. However, since the early 1990s she has consistently composed her texts in French and English, and there are now at least ten novels available in both languages, in addition to a host of interviews and other nonfiction publications (see Ducker, for example). Much of Huston’s nonfiction involves in-depth reflections on her own experience and that of other bilingual and bicultural writers such as Beckett and Romain Gary. Huston has written many perceptive essays on questions surrounding the cultural negotiations involved in her dual linguistic status, starting in 1986 with Lettres parisiennes: L’Autopsie de l’exil, an epistolary exchange with Franco-Algerian Leïla Sebbar, and later in Nord perdu (1999), where she explores themes such as “Le faux bilinguisme,” “La détresse de l’étranger,” and “Les autres soi.” In these works, Huston displays a keen awareness of the factors that motivated the “cultural turn” in translation studies, showing how multiple cultures mark the selftranslating author. In arguing for Huston’s place in an enlarged canon, I hope to foster greater recognition of self-translated texts — not only between
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languages, or other sign systems, but also within a single language. As French Studies have come to encompass literature from the Francophone world, there has been too ready an assumption that Francophone literature is immediately accessible and consumable by speakers of “metropolitan” French. By considering the self-translation at work beneath many apparently original “French” texts, from the Maghreb or Antilles for instance, we may begin to understand the full extent of this practice and the stresses and creative effects it produces on a seemingly monolingual surface (see Shread). Conversely, we might also explore the limitations of “metropolitan” French in a wider context: writing on “Les voix parallèles de Nancy Huston,” Christine Klein-Lataud points out that in Cantique des plaines, Huston’s very Parisian French occasionally conflicts with a Canadian landscape: Souvent, là où l’anglais est standard, le français est familier ou argotique. [...] Cela pose un problème au lectorat francophone d’Amérique parce que, comme on le sait, c’est dans ce registre qu’il y a le plus d’écart entre les variétés régionales, et que l’argot parisien détonne parfois dans le contexte canadien qui est celui du livre. (224)
This question of intralingual translation is an important direction for future research into the process of self-translation in terms of the bilingual or multilingual subject and in terms of the larger theoretical implications of the metaphorical uses of self-translation; it challenges French studies to think through its embrace of Francophone literature more critically than it has done to date. While Huston observed that her birth as a writer in French began in 1980 with the death of her mentor Roland Barthes, she only began to self-translate in the 1990s following Plainsong, a novel in which she returned imaginatively to her childhood home in the Canadian Anglophone province of Alberta. In 1993, Cantique des plaines, her translation of the novel into French, threw her into the midst of debates over, and resistance to, the practice of self-translation when it was nominated for the Canadian Governor General’s Award for Fiction in French. Katherine Harrington commented on the controversy as follows: “taking a protectionist stance, the Quebecois community claimed that Huston could not be considered for a Francophone literary prize since she is a native English speaker. They asserted that any ‘French’ novel of hers had in fact to be a translation from English”
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(71). What this argument fails to recognize is that Huston already had a considerable number of books written only in French; ironically, Cantique des plaines was the first to have an English counterpart. Huston’s response to the controversy was a revolutionary claim: “Je revendique le fait d’être l’auteur des deux versions, c’est tout” (“Une Canadienne à Paris, or is she?”). From the perspective of a traditional model of translation, Huston’s response constitutes an almost unbearable challenge — were it not for the possibility of sequestering her among the “self-translators.” In a letter to the Canadian Arts Council, Huston explained: “Cantique des plaines n’est pas qu’une simple traduction de Plainsong; c’est une deuxième version originelle du même livre” (“Une Canadienne à Paris, or is she?”), which is quite simply to propose the heresy of the dual-original. Huston’s stance is not unlike the policy on official documents in the European Union, written in multiple languages, and yet of equal stature, or the Swiss constitution, which exists in both French and German, but which cannot be contested legally on the basis of linguistic differences between the two versions. However, by making this claim not in a bureaucratic or legal context, but rather on the hallowed ground of literary creation, Huston goes for the jugular. Huston’s confrontations along the borders that seek to keep translation in place continued several years later. In 1998, her novel, L’Empreinte de l’ange, was nominated for the French-language Governor General’s Prize and for the translation prize, but the following year, the Canadian Arts Council refused to consider The Mark of the Angel for the English-language award, on the grounds that it was “une version réécrite en anglais.” Thus, the desperate attempt to retain a hierarchy of original and translation, author and translator, continues, despite the increasingly problematic interventions of writers like Huston, who blur boundaries and deconstruct the binaries that inform the predominant definition of translation. The controversies around Huston’s work arose in bilingual Canada, where sensitivity to multilingualism is higher, rather than in “monolingual” countries such as France or the United States, where Huston’s self-translations into another language are simply ignored. Typically, however, when self-translation is not ignored, it is kept under some form of quarantine. Those critics who discuss self-translation in relation to Huston or other self-translators usually propose
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supplementary models to talk about self-translation, rather than inferring that examination of this practice might modify conventional notions of translation. Fitch, for example, proposes intra-intertextuality to discuss the specificities of self-translated texts, 4 McGuire introduces the notion of self-translated texts as parallel texts, 5 and Nicola Danby subsumes self-translation under bilingual writing. 6 All these approaches leave intact the notion of the original text as a discrete, inalienable unit that is the defining feature of Western translation models. In contrast, I suggest that self-translation challenges this dominant definition by inviting our understanding of translation to move beyond a binary framework that does not allow for multiplicity, towards a notion of coauthorship. In the light of Huston’s self-translation practice and that of others like her, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the distinctions of a translation model that prioritizes one side of the binary by insisting that the original determines the translation. One of the distinctive characteristics of self-translation is its daring and ability to take liberties that would be unacceptable to anyone but the “author” of the work. These so-called “infidelities” are allowed so long as they are carefully delimited by the authorizations of self-translators. I advocate an alternative perspective in the tradition of feminist translation scholars such as Susan Bassnett, who reworked the tag of “les belles infidèles” in the 1980s to expose the underlying gender bias and the ways in which, as Lori Chamberlain points out: “such an attitude betrays real anxiety about the problem of paternity and translation; it mimics the patrilineal kinship system where paternity — not maternity — legitimizes an offspring” (456). From this feminist perspective, the focus on the right to claim title to the “original” is replaced by an appreciation of the creative developments by which translations grant texts a genealogy. Furthermore, since –––––––––– 4 “C’est donc dans le rapport entre texte-cible et texte-source que résiderait la spécificité de la traduction de soi et non pas dans la structure interne du texte-cible. C’est le caractère de l’intertextualité qui serait ici en jeu” (“L’intra-intertextualité” 98). 5 “Can one go so far as to re-conceptualize a translation as an extension or amplification of the original? The exploration of Beckett as self-translator, specifically of his poetry, serves to elucidate this notion of the translation as parallel text” (260). 6 “This kind of bilingual writing is only possible through self-translation” (90).
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changes, choices, and developments are inherent to any translation, by abandoning the authorization of the author in favor of the play of the text, translation is able to reconnect with its excluded others — imitation, paraphrase, and adaptation. This expansive, liberating vision of translation is one of the most important consequences of using selftranslation to redefine translation. To examine more fully the question of what has been called liberal or free translation, consider an example from one of Huston’s most extreme experiments in self-translation: her 1998 bilingual text Limbes/Limbo: Un hommage à Samuel Beckett. Here we have two texts, one French, one English, not in separate volumes, but face to face on the page, with all the gaps, elisions, leaps, additions, and extensions of the translation plain to see. Through this innovative publishing decision, Huston expressed the euphoria, liberties, and excitement of living and writing in two languages, along with a testimony of crisis, of tensions and angst, precipitated by linguistic complexity. The following quote demonstrates the asymmetries between the two texts, as well as the extent to which the languages interact at both semantic and phonetic levels: Let’s admit we have a head. (Grumble grumble grumble) Or at least that we want to get a head.
Admettons donc qu’au premier chef... (Marmonne, bougonne, marmotte.) Ou que, du moins, derechef... (42-43)
Even given the French stylistic abhorrence for repetition, the use of a single word in English for three different words in French borders on a form of resistant parody that Huston explores to the limits in this text. The slight volume opens with a striking translation that precedes a terrifying linguistic diatribe, very reminiscent of Beckett’s nihilism: Feeling (rotten word, feeling) so close to old Sam Beckett these days. Close the way Miss Muffet is close to the spider.
Me sens (sale mot, sentir) si proche du vieux Sam ces jours-ci. Proche... comme le Petit Chaperon rouge est proche du loup. (8-9)
While this example might be acceptable within the strict confines of self-translation, as a translation it might be classed as paraphrase or adaptation, rather than translation proper. Yet this process is at work in all translation; I point this out to explode the current category of translation and thereby allow for greater movement in both the origi-
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nal and the translation. For, of course, Huston’s greatest challenge to traditional models of translation is simply to refuse to identify one text as the original by presenting both simultaneously. The conventional strategy of subordinating self-translation to the dominant model of translation is based largely on the assumption of the self-identity of the author/self-translator. Indeed, self-translation is often viewed as “privileged” (Tanqueiro 59) precisely because of an assumed self-knowledge. Tanqueiro ascribes perfect self-transparency to the author of the creative act and thereby distinguishes self-translators from translators: In terms of subjectivity there will be no gap between the author and translator; he will never unwittingly misinterpret his own work [...]. [H]e will know with utmost certainty when he is justified in departing from the original text and when he is not, since he knows perfectly just how he originally concretized his thoughts through words. (59)
Tanqueiro’s approach articulates the widespread notion of the author as autonomous creator, brushing aside collaborative approaches along with the unconscious and other non-rational processes involved in creativity. In stark contrast, in his article “Against Self-Translation,” Whyte expresses the poststructuralist view that: “There is no such thing as ‘the real meaning’ of a text. The author has no special authority [...]. [I]t is not certain that its constructor uses it better than the next man” (68). Man or woman, the argument I am interested in making about the unruly practice of self-translation combines a poststructuralist approach with a complex understanding of subjectivity. Huston’s writing is particularly conducive to this view of subjectivity, for as she has explained in interview, her fictional universe allows her to play out such multiplicity. For instance, in Les variations de Goldberg, the author speaks from the position of thirty different individuals, and in many of her subsequent novels, the narrative is based on a juxtaposition of perspectives. Taking Rimbaud’s formula “Je est un autre” seriously, then, I suggest that even in the instance of self-translation we are concerned with multiplicity in authorship. It is because both writing and translation enable the performance of alternate identities that they are compelling and necessary activities: our need to move beyond individual subjectivities into subjectivities-as-encounter is met in these ways, despite the dominant accounts of writing that posit the
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heroic, self-coinciding individual as the source of creative expression. A recurrent theme in many author’s accounts of self-translation is an emphasis on the difficulty of the task. In her article on Nabokov, Beaujour observes that “many writers who are bilinguals or polyglots find self-translation to be exquisitely painful” (719). In his letters, Beckett described self-translation as a chore: sick and tired I am of translation and what a losing battle it is always. Wish I had the courage to wash my hands of it all [...]. I have nothing but the wastes and wilds of self-translation before me for many miserable months to come. (9)
Whyte states that “self-translation has in my case always been done under duress. It has never been done with either pleasure or satisfaction” (67). Huston herself makes the wild claim that “L’autotraduction, c’est tout ce que je connais en matière de torture politique” (“En français dans le texte” 236). We might well ask, then, what is the source of this discomfort? And further, why do authors feel compelled to endure such an unpleasant task? Firstly, I believe that the difficulty is in part the result of the immense effort required to make space for multiple subjectivity in a culture in which considerable forces combine to constrain severality into discrete, individual, and isolated units. To forge connections among multiplicity: this is one of the tasks of the translator — whether these bonds are within or without the self. Secondly, the fact that the task of translating is neither easy nor pleasant is an important point, particularly in the context of a reconceptualization of translation paradigms. In arguing for a generative view of translation — a view that would replace the current paradigm based on degenerative models of inferior copies — I do not wish to be accused of idealizing translation. Self-translation is painful in part because it also points to conflicts, to points of resistance within subjectivities-in-encounter. In Conflict in Translation, Mona Baker rightly criticized bridge models of translation as failing to take into account the inherent possibility for translation to promote conflict just as much as positively connoted “conversations” or “communication.” I support her argument that it is necessary to review disciplinary narratives that, in the attempt to assert an emerging field of enquiry, may not be entirely honest about the wide-ranging goals and consequences of translation. A generative model of translation should not
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be conflated with this idealized heuristic fiction which has come into being along with translation studies. Rather, the move from discourses premised on loss to an appreciation of the gains of translation also assumes the ethical responsibilities, conflictual encounters, and creative possibilities of growth through translation. Commenting on Huston, Klein-Lataud suggests that “c’est la distance, la non-coïncidence avec soi-même, qui permet la création” (215). Citing the bilingual and bicultural Julian Green, who regularly used the “translated” form Julien in order to maintain a flexible identity, she concludes: “JE est un autre, on le savait, mais la différence de langue favorise cette multiplication” (219). These insights into multiplicity in writing and (self)-translating allow us to move from the singular original text, dominated by, and stubbornly rooted in, the conceit of individual creation, towards a larger conception of authorship, one that has room to allow for the possibility of collaboration and in which author, reader, and translator act as partners in the elaboration of a text that is always unstable, undetermined, open to extension, dissension, and interpretation. This conception of translation, redefined through self-translation, has affinities with Derrida’s view of translation. Derrida’s deconstructive approach shares a conception of translation similar to what I advocate through my rereading of self-translation, inasmuch as his focus on survival as the task of translation, over the traditional concern with the communication of meaning, necessitates a reconsideration of all of the binaries that self-translation contests. Yet, in laying claim to the generative possibilities of translation, the conception of self-translation that I have proposed goes beyond mere survival and plays an important role in drawing attention to the agency of translators. As Tymoczko points out, “enlarging the concept of translation entails the empowerment of translators” (313). In other words, in the decision to translate one’s self lies the ground of a larger claim regarding the power of translators: taking self-translation to redefine translation serves not only to refine our understanding of the translation, but also the agency of those involved in the process. If, then, following the common practice in self-translation, the longtime fear of loss in translation is replaced by a conception of amplification in translation, and if this extension of the “original” is understood not as a lack of faithfulness, but instead as an indication of the indeterminate
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nature of the source text, then the process and goals of translation appear in a different light. My hope is that further research into the neglected area of self-translation will resolve a significant theoretical aporia in the field while simultaneously contributing to a new conception of the goals, strategies, and nature of translation.
Works Cited Akai, Joanne. “Creole... English: West Indian Writing as Translation.” Traduction, terminologie, rédaction 10.1 (1997): 165-95. Baker, Mona. Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account. London: Routledge, 2006. Beaujour, Elizabeth. “Translation and Self-Translation.” The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995. 714-24. Besemeres, Mary. Translating One’s Self: Language and Selfhood in CrossCultural Autobiography. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002. Chamberlain, Lori. “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13.3 (1988): 454-72. Conrath, Robert. “La vitre de l’auto-traduction: Quelques remarques sur l’entre-deux-langues.” Europe 70 (1992): 125-32. Danby, Nicola. “The Space Between: Self-Translator Nancy Huston’s Limbes/Limbo.” Linguistique 40.1 (2004): 83-96. Ducker, Carolyn. “Nancy Huston: Son répondeur dit hello bonjour tout comme les nôtres.” Sites: Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 2.2 (1998): 243-52. Federman, Raymond. “The Writer as Self-Translator.” Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett. Ed. Alan Warran Friedman et al. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987. 7-16. Fitch, Brian. An Investigation into the Status of the Bilingual Work: Beckett and Babel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. _____. “L’intra-intertextualité interlinguistique de Beckett: La problématique de la traduction de soi.” Texte 2 (1983): 85-100.
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Green, Julian. “An Experiment in English/Une expérience en anglais”; “My First Book in English/Mon premier livre en anglais.” Le Langage et son double/The Language and its Shadow. Paris: Seuil, 1987. Grutman, Rainier. “Auto-translation.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Ed. Mona Baker. New York: Routledge, 1998. 17-20. Harrington, Katherine. “Linguistic and Cultural Nomadism: Nancy Huston and the Case of the Bilingual Subject.” Romance Review 13 (2003): 6978. Hokenson, Jan Walsh, and Marcella Munson. The Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary Self-Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome, 2007. Huston, Nancy. Cantique des plaines. Arles: Actes Sud, 1993. _____. “En français dans le texte.” Désirs et réalités: Textes choisis 19781994. Montreal: Lemeac/Actes Sud, 1995. 231-36. _____. Nord perdu, suivi de Douze France. Arles: Actes Sud, 1999. Huston, Nancy, and Leïla Sebbar. Lettres parisiennes: Autopsie de l’exil. France: Barrault, 1986. Jakobson, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” On Translation. Ed. Reuben Brower. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959. 232-39. Kálmán, G. C. “Some Borderline Cases of Translation.” New Comparison 1 (1986): 117-22. Kinginger, Celeste. “Bilingualism and Emotion in the Autobiographical Works of Nancy Huston.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 25:2-3 (2004): 159-78. Klein-Lataud, Christine. “Les voix parallèles de Nancy Huston.” Traduction, terminologie, rédaction 9.1 (1996): 211-31. McGuire, James. “Beckett, the Translator and the Metapoem.” World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma 64.2 (1990): 258-63. Oustinoff, Michael. Bilinguisme d’écriture et auto-traduction: Julien Green, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. Shread, Carolyn. “Translating Fatima Gallaire’s Les co-épouses: Lessons from a Francophone Text.” Journal of Translating and Interpreting Studies 2.2 (2007): 127-46. Simon, Sherry. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Tanqueiro, Helena. “Self-Translation as an extreme Case of the AuthorTranslator-Dialectic.” Investigating Translation. Ed. Allison Beeby et al. Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s Publication Company, 2000. 55-63.
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Tymoczko, Maria. Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. Manchester: St. Jerome, 2007. “Une Canadienne à Paris, or is she?” 27 May 2008 . Whyte, Christopher. “Against Self-Translation.” Translation and Literature 11 (2002): 64-71.
FLS, Volume XXXVI, 2009
Translation
Louise Audet Université de Montréal
Images et voix dans l’espace poétique de Saint-Denys Garneau: analyse du poème Le Jeu et d’extraits de ses traductions en anglais et en hongrois Cet article illustre l’application de l’approche cognitive à l’étude du discours poétique. Le modèle des espaces mentaux élaboré par Fauconnier et Turner permet de prendre en compte les liens entre les éléments formels-conceptuels du discours poétique et leur intégration en une structure cohérente en fonction de l’expérience personnelle du lecteur (monde référentiel). En référence à ce modèle, nous avons illustré la (re)construction des représentations cognitives (images et voix) dans les extraits de traductions du poème de Saint-Denys Garneau.
________________________ 1. Introduction L’image est sans doute ce qui caractérise le mieux la création poétique. Dès les premières réflexions sur la poésie, celle-ci est envisagée comme mimesis, comme représentation. Elle est de fait, au sens le plus général du terme, une image des choses. Ne dit-on pas que la poésie “fait image”, au sens où elle tend à s’émanciper des contraintes du déroulement textuel? Les dispositifs sonores et graphiques, les figures de style, en particulier la métaphore, sollicitent l’effet imageant. Mais la poésie est plus. Pour reprendre les termes de Barbara Folkart: “Poetry is an attempt to get as close as possible to the real-in-theinstant — and imagery is one of the more obvious ways in which poetry engages the real” (62). Sachant, comme nous l’apprennent les
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psychologues cognitifs (notamment S. M. Kosslyn et R. N. Shepard), que l’esprit humain conserve des traces des événements sensoriels qui viennent à sa connaissance et qu’il peut les évoquer sous formes d’expériences internes, nous assumons que le traducteur (re)construit des représentations internes qui préservent des aspects figuraux, les inscrit en mémoire et peut, à la lecture du poème, leur redonner une actualité cognitive. Ce sont ces “événements privés” que nous chercherons, entre autres, à élucider. À l’instar de la communication réussie, la traduction réussie devrait donc présenter une grande analogie des “modèles cognitifs idéalisés”, 1 qui sont la fondation nécessaire à la construction d’espaces mentaux: plus les référents cognitifs (expériences personnelles, sensorielles, affect, connaissances extralinguistiques, attentes sur le texte, etc.) du traducteur se rapprochent de ceux de l’auteur, tels qu’ils se manifestent dans et par le poème, et tels qu’ils sont (re)construits en interaction avec le poème, plus poétique en sera la traduction. Étant donné que nous n’avons pas accès aux processus d’écriture et de traduction, c’est dans les textes (texte source et traductions) que nous tenterons d’inférer les processus menant à la construction des représentations internes suscitées chez les traducteurs par les images (espaces et voix) poétiques inscrites dans le poème. Les traductions finales nous fourniront les indices de ce travail poétique, de l’esthétique des traducteurs, dans la mesure où chaque traduction, considérée comme l’aboutissement d’un processus, devient à son tour poème, c’est-à-dire, combinatoire unique, singulière et cohérente. Nous analyserons d’abord le texte source en référence au modèle des espaces mentaux 2 (Fauconnier, Espaces mentaux; Fauconnier et Turner, Conceptual, The Way), avant de procéder à l’analyse comparative de quelques extraits des traductions en anglais (traduction de F. R. Scott, juriste et poète canadien [1899-1985], de John Glassco, poète et romancier canadien [1909-1981]), et en hongrois (traduction de Gyula Tallér). Cette approche nous permettra de prendre en compte 1) –––––––––– 1 ICMs au sens de Charles Fillmore et George Lakoff; voir par exemple l’ouvrage de Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. 2 Par ce terme, Fauconnier entend: des constructions mentales, distinctes des structures linguistiques, mais construites dans chaque discours en accord avec les indications fournies par les expressions linguistiques. L’espace mental se construit donc au fil du discours (Espaces 32).
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les liens entre les éléments formels-conceptuels du discours poétique et 2) leur intégration en une structure cohérente en fonction de l’expérience personnelle du lecteur (monde référentiel). 2. Poète et peintre D’abord, qui était Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau? Né en 1912, à Montréal, rappelle Hélène Dorion dans sa présentation des Poèmes Choisis (1993), Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau héritera des qualités intellectuelles que l’on retrouve tant du côté paternel que maternel. Très tôt, il montrera une prédilection pour la poésie et s’intéressera à la peinture. Il hésitera longtemps avant de suivre la voie de la poésie et continuera d’ailleurs à peindre toute sa vie, particulièrement sensible aux beautés de la nature. À partir de 1916, il passe ses étés à SainteCatherine de Fossambault, près de Québec, où la famille possède un manoir. Ainsi a-t-il pu dès son enfance vivre en contact étroit avec la nature. Si le poète cherche à “bâtir l’univers”, il s’agira entre autres pour Saint-Denys Garneau de tenter de retrouver la paix de l’enfance. Selon Hélène Dorion, la parution de Regards et jeux dans l’espace en 1937 marque une date importante dans l’histoire de la poésie québécoise, un pas vers son universalité par l’exemplarité de l’aventure intérieure qu’incarne l’œuvre de Saint-Denys Garneau dans son rapport à la modernité poétique: Si son expérience existentielle et métaphysique constitue le centre de sa poésie, Saint-Denys Garneau transcende cette individualité en l’inscrivant à travers un cheminement spirituel et une vision cosmique qui rejoignent l’expérience humaine universelle. Témoignant de la fragmentation, de l’inachèvement, du déchirement, du vide et du repliement du je, cette poésie incarne l’aventure même de la modernité, son constat de rupture et sa lutte contre le malaise d’être au monde, la douleur et la solitude. (17)
Ces thèmes courent comme une rivière sous-terraine dans le poème Le Jeu. Ainsi, au-delà de l’apparente légèreté que suggère le titre, le monde de l’enfance, au-delà également de l’apparente simplicité de l’écriture du poète, se glissent les indices de ce malaise d’être au monde. La lecture du poème Le Jeu nous confirme que cette écriture est caractérisée par sa lisibilité et son dépouillement, une écriture sans
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artifice, en parfaite adéquation avec son contenu. Privilégiant la transparence et l’expression directe, elle ne sacrifie jamais le sens au profit de la forme ou de l’effet poétique. Ainsi, souligne Dorion, l’image estelle, non pas utilisée comme un procédé rhétorique proprement dit, mais intégrée au poème lui-même: “C’est le texte dans son ensemble qui fait image et en constitue le fondement analogique” (17). 3. Une approche cognitive: le modèle de Fauconnier Issu de la linguistique cognitive, le modèle des espaces mentaux développé par Fauconnier est particulièrement bien adapté à l’étude de la poésie. Comme le suggère Teresa Calderón Quindós, 3 la notion d’espaces mentaux a beaucoup à offrir à l’analyse poétique en raison de la nature non-référentielle 4 des représentations cognitives: les espaces mentaux peuvent donc représenter les choses, faits ou relations les plus incongrus, ou insolites, qui (comme dans les rêves, les créations artistiques), ne pourraient exister dans la vie réelle. 5 La faculté de jouer avec cet aspect non-référentiel des concepts et notre habileté à établir de nouvelles relations entre ces concepts ne sontelles pas à la base de notre imagination? Et la littérature est essentiellement imaginative: le texte littéraire, et sans doute encore plus le texte poétique, ne définit-il pas la capacité de l’esprit humain à inventer un univers qui n’est pas celui de la perception immédiate? 4. Analyse du poème en référence au modèle des espaces mentaux Nous procéderons d’abord à l’étude des voix et images dans le texte source en référence au modèle des espaces mentaux. Cette analyse s’effectue en deux étapes correspondant aux aspects (reliés, mais –––––––––– 3 Nous nous inspirerons ici de la méthode proposée par Calderón Quindós dans l’application du modèle des espaces mentaux à l’analyse poétique. 4 Fauconnier précise que l’analyse linguistique en termes d’espaces mentaux n’est pas une théorie de la référence. Il faut donc éviter de tirer la conclusion que les expressions du discours réfèrent aux constructions mentales. Si référence il y a, ajoute-t-il, elle va des éléments abstraits dans les espaces vers des entités du monde réel ou peut-être de “mondes possibles […]” (Espaces 12). 5 Cette caractéristique du modèle de Fauconnier nous semble très proche du concept de la création créative, défini par Dancette comme “la capacité d’intégrer et de concilier des éléments du sens […] disparates, voire incongrus et d’en faire une production concise, unique et cohérente” (4).
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que nous cherchons ici à décomposer) du processus de la réception du discours littéraire: 1) la perception des éléments saillants du discours poétique et 2) la construction progressive d’une représentation cohérente. 4.1. Première lecture: perception des éléments saillants du poème (voir le texte du poème en appendice) La première lecture que nous proposons illustre l’activation des modèles cognitifs à partir de la perception des éléments saillants du poème. Le concept du jeu dans le poème active chez le lecteur un premier “modèle cognitif idéalisé”, comprenant un actant (enfant) et un lieu (chambre): — les enfants sont des êtres humains qui possèdent des particularités physiques et psychologiques identifiables; ils ont une conduite prototypique (ils peuvent être impertinents, semer le désordre, désobéir, etc.); ils font généralement preuve d’une grande imagination et de fantaisie; ils font également partie d’ensembles plus vastes (environnement familial, social, culturel, etc.). Le poème fournit des indices de la spatialité: un lieu fermé (chambre) à l’intérieur duquel un enfant joue seul, et à l’extérieur duquel gravitent d’autres personnes (les adultes, l’observateur-narrateur). Les relations entre ces éléments (enfants, adultes) sont introduites par le biais des images vocales (les voix) inscrites dans le discours poétique: voix de l’enfant, à l’intérieur de la chambre, voix intérieure de l’enfant (monologue intérieur); voix de l’observateur-narrateur, des adultes, voix “clichés” universelles à l’extérieur de la chambre. Les métaphores conceptuelles générées au cours du processus de lecture structurent progressivement le contenu imagé (introduit par les figures métonymiques et métaphoriques). Ainsi des jouets (objets concrets: cubes de bois, tapis, jeu de cartes, etc.) l’on passe aux mots; de l’enfant, au poète, puis, du ludique à la gravité. Finalement, les relations qu’établit le lecteur entre les éléments conceptuels et la structure formelle du poème contribuent au processus d’intégration des représentations cognitives. Dès la première lecture, le lecteur perçoit la disposition graphique, en vers libres, mais où quelques marques de ponctuation semblent délimiter les espaces mentaux (4.2.1). Les vers s’étendent librement sur la page, offrant au lecteur l’image spatiale d’un étalement (à l’image d’une route de
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cartes) où l’enchaînement vers une suite ininterrompue (absence de ponctuation, de rimes) qui se lit presque d’un souffle, suggère une liberté quasi aérienne, en correspondance avec le concept du jeu. 4.2 Construction progressive du sens poétique au fil de la perception des éléments du discours Le discours poétique ne se donne pas d’emblée: à la différence des textes de communication ou de spécialité, le texte littéraire (et poétique) présente des particularités (idiosyncrasies, multiplicité des niveaux de signification [conceptuels et formels], intraréférentialité, etc.) qui exigent du lecteur un plus grand effort cognitif afin de s’en faire une représentation cohérente. Cette représentation s’effectue progressivement (au fil des lectures et des relectures), à partir des indices fournis par le texte, indices auxquels le lecteur associe son propre monde référentiel. Les espaces mentaux sont interreliés en un réseau dynamique, correspondant à la nature gestaltienne de la pensée. Ainsi l’information (sensorielle, conceptuelle, formelle, etc.) “circule” d’un espace à l’autre jusqu’à l’obtention (par intégration, surimpression, compression) d’une représentation globale cohérente. Pour ce poème, nous avons pu délimiter six espaces mentaux (E enfant, E poète) dont l’élaboration progressive et l’intégration, d’abord partielle, puis globale, offrent, selon nous, la clé du poème. 4.2.1 Élaboration des espaces mentaux (E1) Le poème s’ouvre sur la voix de l’enfant “Ne me dérangez pas” (ligne 1, introducteur de “l’espace enfant”). Ici l’usage de la forme impérative du verbe “ne me dérangez pas” place le lecteur dans une position d’obéissance, voire de soumission, nécessaire à la création d’un premier espace mental. Alors que le vers liminaire (délimité par le premier signe de ponctuation) détermine la concentration intérieure de l’enfant “je suis profondément occupé”, “l’espace enfant” (E1) s’ouvre d’abord par un élément suggérant un regard sur l’enfant: le syntagme nominal “un enfant” (ligne 2) pour se refermer au deuxième signe de ponctuation (.) du poème (ligne 5). Les informations temporelles que reçoit le lecteur (expression temporelle descriptive “est en train de”, des locutions “qui sait”,
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“tantôt”) renforcent l’image d’un regard observant l’activité de l’enfant. Ici, dans l’espace de la chambre, la spatialité semble s’étendre par cercles concentriques et par procédé métonymique: village — ville — comté — univers. Le jeu suggère la concentration et de l’enfant et de l’espace. (E2) Le changement dans la durée apporté par le syntagme verbal “Il joue” (ligne 6) (du progressif au présent presque intemporel de l’indicatif) a pour effet de déterminer une progression vers un nouvel espace (E2), qui s’étend de la ligne 7 jusqu’au troisième signe de ponctuation (.) (ligne 19), reprenant, tout en l’élaborant, la description du jeu. Le vers “il joue” introduit l’espace des possibilités créatrices du jeu et du monologue intérieur de l’enfant: “ça n’est pas mal à voir” (ligne 10); “ce n’est pas peu de savoir” (ligne 11); “c’est facile d’avoir un grand arbre” (ligne 17). Dans le lieu fermé de la chambre, un enfant joue seul (il se parle) et crée un monde imaginaire. Les éléments physiques, concrets — “cubes de bois”, “planche”, “cartes”, “tapis”, — se transforment, au gré du jeu de l’enfant, en éléments imaginaires: châteaux, toits, rivière, arbre et montagne. Ces éléments sont renforcés par les allitérations: phonèmes: /s/, /k/, /b/, /p/; ces, cette, ça, ce, etc.; cubes, qui, cartes, cours; bois, arbre; pont, planche, penche; pas, peu, etc. Dans cet espace ludique de création, une lexie, “mirage”, (ligne 15) introduit cependant dans le concept du jeu un élément d’incertitude, de possible déception. Le mirage, apparence à la fois séduisante et trompeuse, n’évoque-t-il pas une illusion, une chimère? (E3) Le vers “Joie de jouer! paradis des libertés!” (ligne 20), introduit un nouvel espace (E3) par le changement de ton: de l’intimité du jeu l’on passe à une nouvelle voix (voix universelle, unanime, sur le paradis de l’enfance? cliché ironique?). Cet espace s’ouvre ici aussi par la forme impérative: “et surtout n’allez pas mettre un pied dans la chambre” (ligne 21), (voix de l’enfant? de l’observateur?) qui s’adresse au monde extérieur à ce lieu (“vous”). On entend une mise en garde contre la menace destructrice du monde onirique de l’enfance. La métaphore “fleur invisible”, (ligne 24), vient renforcer cette notion. (Première intégration) Progressivement, le lecteur aboutit à une nouvelle représentation, un blend tempo-
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raire qui intègre les éléments de ces espaces: du paradis de l’enfance l’on passe à la vulnérabilité de ce monde. Le jeu est un paradis, certes, mais vulnérable. (E4) La ligne 25 s’ouvre par un changement de la voix: “Voilà ma boîte à jouets” où les éléments “voilà” (pronom anaphorique), le possessif “ma” déterminent la voix du poète. Ce nouvel espace (E4), “Espace poète”, qui s’étend des lignes 25 à 35, se referme sur un signe de ponctuation (.). Du domaine de l’enfance, le lecteur passe au domaine du poète. Les indices en sont donnés par la transposition des “jouets” aux “mots”. Et ces mots, que le poète a le pouvoir d’“allier, séparer, marier”, au gré de son inspiration (dont les éléments temporels “tantôt”, “et tout à l’heure” constituent les indices), d’en faire de “merveilleux enlacements” suggèrent presque une étreinte amoureuse? Les lexies “allier”, “séparer”, “marier” orientent l’interprétation vers l’isotopie du mariage (alliance: “engagement mutuel, anneau nuptial”, et peutêtre, par référence intertextuelle, “l’Arche d’alliance”?) tout en suggérant un mouvement (verbes à l’infinitif), mouvement que vient renforcer l’image de la danse (substantif “déroulement”). Les mots du poète suggèrent même la possibilité de ramener les instants de bonheur “le clair éclat du rire qu’on croyait perdu”. Ici les allitérations des phonèmes: l / m / (liquides et bilabiales) viennent renforcer la sensualité des images: pleine, mots, merveilleux, enlacements, allier, marier, déroulement, etc. Les sons d / kl (sonores) marquent le sentiment de vie et de joie: déroulements, de danse, clair, éclat, qu’on croyait etc. Aux vers suivants (lignes 31-35), le rapprochement inusité des lexies “chiquenaude”, “étoile”, “balancer”, “fil”, “lumière”, “tombe” “eau” et “ronds” crée, chez le lecteur, une image nouvelle, “défamiliarisante” qui, exigeant un plus grand effort cognitif pour recréer une représentation cohérente, l’oblige sans doute à ralentir le rythme de sa lecture. Il y a ici émergence d’une image tout à fait singulière, d’une métaphore idiosyncrasique. L’on retrouve l’image spatiale concentrique, mais réservée à “l’étoile (qui) tombe dans l’eau et fait des ronds”. (E5) Le discours entraîne le lecteur vers un nouvel espace (lignes 36-49), refermé par le signe de ponctuation (.) où, certes, l’on entend encore la voix du poète mais intimement associée à celle de l’enfant. L’élément introducteur de cet espace est constitué par une voix: “qui
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donc oserait en douter” (ligne 36). L’association poète/enfant est indiquée par les éléments prototypiques de la conduite des enfants (et des poètes): “pas deux sous de respect pour l’ordre établi” (ligne 37); “la politesse et cette chère discipline” (où l’on sent poindre l’ironie; ligne 38); “des manières à scandaliser les grandes personnes” (ligne 40); “il vous arrange les mots”, (ligne 44; niveau familier); “son espiègle plaisir” (ligne 43); “il met la chambre à l’envers” (ligne 47); “berner les gens” (ligne 49). Ici, ce sont les verbes d’action qui rendent la maîtrise du poète sur les mots: “arranger”, “déplacer”, “agir”, “posséder”, “transformer”, “berner”. Mais les images acquièrent une valeur nouvelle par surimpression: les lexies caractérisant le domaine de la nature (jeu imaginaire de l’enfant, bois, rivière, arbre, montagne) se transforment en éléments métaphoriques, appartenant au domaine du poète. — Sous les cubes de bois / sous les mots — Mettre sous l’arbre une montagne (pouvoir du jeu de l’enfant) / en agir avec les montagnes comme s’il les possédait (allusion intertextuelle à la Création?) — La chambre (lieu protégé du domaine de l’enfant) / il met la chambre à l’envers (lieu de création du domaine du poète) (E6) L’élément “et pourtant” concessif (ligne 50) ouvre un nouvel espace (E6) qui va jusqu’au point final (ligne 56). On y retrouve: — éléments physiques propres au domaine humain: “œil gauche”, “œil droit” (ligne 50; dualité); — traits psychologiques: “rire” (ligne 50); “gravité” (ligne 51); — éléments propres au domaine de la nature: “feuille d’un arbre” (ligne 51-52); — éléments propres au domaine “divin”, transcendant: “de l’autre monde” (ligne 51), renforcés par la lexie “balance” (allusion intertextuelle au jugement du Créateur?). Le rapprochement inusité des lexies: “gravité”, “autre monde”, “feuille”, “balance” et “guerre” plonge le lecteur dans une image nouvelle, singulière, d’où émerge un sentiment d’angoisse. La création poétique est une expérience intérieure empreinte de gravité et, peutêtre, déchirante.
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(2e Intégration) Ici apparaît une fissure (dans son œil gauche quand le droit rit), élément qui n’apparaissait pas dans les espaces précédents. Par l’intégration des éléments suggérés par le texte, et l’établissement des relations entre les espaces mentaux, le lecteur aboutit à une représentation temporaire de cette portion du poème: du plaisir ludique, on passe à la gravité, une gravité “de l’autre monde”, comparable à la guerre. Si le jeu évoque les possibilités de l’acte d’écrire comme lieu d’unification, moyen de créer des liens entre les mots, la tentative échoue. Le poète est ramené à sa douloureuse expérience intérieure. 4.2.2 Intégration en une représentation cohérente Finalement, par le recours au titre, le poème acquiert une richesse de sens grâce aux multiples concepts et relations activées par la lecture et devient l’expression d’une intégration conceptuelle complexe. Le poème semble créer une métaphore cognitive par l’établissement d’associations reliant les mondes de l’enfance et du poète. (Intégration globale) Cette relecture permet d’accéder à une compréhension globale du poème: le jeu n’est pas que ludique, léger, mais empreint de gravité. C’est, pour l’enfant et pour le poète, un acte sacré. Alors que sur l’enfance plane un péril, la menace de la destruction de sa vulnérabilité (le mirage connote déception), l’accession à la transcendance implique, pour le poète, la possibilité d’un déchirement, d’une déchéance.
5. Analyse comparative d’extraits des traductions en fonction des espaces mentaux Dans cette analyse nous chercherons à déterminer dans quelle mesure les traducteurs ont pu redonner une actualité cognitive aux représentations figurées (voix et des images de spatialité) évoquées par le poème. Comment, à partir de leur propre monde référentiel, parviennent-ils à produire un texte où l’on puisse déceler une analogie des représentations cognitives, telles que suggérés par le poème et exprimés dans leur propre traduction? Pour des raisons évidentes d’espace, nous nous concentrerons sur l’analyse comparative des espaces 1 (E1) et 4 (E4).
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LE JEU St-Denys Garneau
THE GAME F. R. Scott
THE GAME John Glassco
JÁTÉK Gyula Tallér
Ne me dérangez pas je suis profondément occupé.
Don’t bother me I’m profoundly absorbed
Don’t bother me I’m terribly busy
Fontos dolgom van, hagyatok!
Un enfant est en train de bâtir un village
A child is busy building a village
A child is busy building a village
Falut épít a gyerek
C’est une ville, un comté
It’s a city, a county
It’s a town, a country
Vagy várost, megyét
Et qui sait Tantôt l’univers.
And who knows Soon the universe.
And who knows By and by the universe.
Sôt: világegyetemet.
Il joue
He’s playing
He is playing
Játszik.
Espace 1 Le vers liminaire du poème où s’entend la voix de l’enfant présente une grande correspondance dans les traductions à quelques différences près (par exemple, les traducteurs ont omis le signe de ponctuation [.] qui délimitait ce vers introducteur). Si l’on peut lire que la traduction de Scott respecte de façon tout à fait mimétique le poème source (disposition des vers, choix des lexies), la traduction de Tallér se démarque. Il inverse les syntagmes, laissant le verbe à la forme impérative hagyatok! — “laissez-moi tranquille” en fin de phrase, souligné par un point d’exclamation. Ce choix trahit davantage l’impatience de l’enfant absorbé dans son jeu que ne le suggère le texte source: la voix de l’enfant y est moins teintée d’agressivité (il ne crie pas) en raison de la concentration que réclame le jeu. La traduction de Tallér rend sans doute compte d’un schéma prototypique d’un enfant plus impérieux que ne le font le texte source et les autres traductions tout en accentuant l’image spatiale de la chambre que les voix viennent illustrer: l’intérieur d’où s’adresse l’enfant aux adultes, à l’extérieur. Tallér introduit également un point (.) après le syntagme verbal Játszik (“il joue”), ce qui donne au vers un caractère plus définitif, moins intemporel.
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Si la traduction de Glassco, sans être aussi mimétique que celle de Scott, est en correspondance avec le texte source, le traducteur se démarque par un choix de lexies, “terribly busy”, plus près sans doute du niveau de langue de l’enfant, “by and by the universe”. Déjà, dans ce premier extrait, l’on peut observer l’une des marques de sa traduction: il attache la plus grande importance à rendre la “matérialité” du syntagme, produisant de nombreuses allitérations: terribly busy, by and by (the universe). C’est par ce choix qu’il donne vie aux représentations figurées du poème. Espace 4 Cet espace est introduit par une voix, celle du poète. L’utilisation du pronom anaphorique renvoie à ce qui précède, le jeu de l’enfant. Dès les premiers vers de cet espace l’auteur choisit de décrire l’activité créatrice et poétique en termes “d’enlacements”, lexie qu’il associe aux verbes “allier, séparer, marier”, suggérant presque une étreinte amoureuse, une alliance “engagement mutuel, anneau nuptial” et, peut-être, par référence intertextuelle, “l’Arche d’alliance, pacte entre les Hébreux et Yahvé”. L’acte de créer est pour le poète un acte amoureux et sacré. Les mouvements fluides de l’amour et de la danse sont à leur tour rendus par les allitérations de liquides: “Voilà ma […] Pleine de mots pour faire de merveilleux enlacements […] Les allier séparer marier, Déroulements tantôt de danse Et tout à l’heure le clair éclat du rire […]”. Scott retient l’image de “weaving marvellous patterns” (“tisser de merveilleux motifs”), sans doute plus concrète, moins chargée en ce qui concerne les connotations et les références intertextuelles. L’entrelacement de fils textiles ou de fibres végétales suggère certes une élaboration, une transformation dont l’aboutissement peut créer de ‘merveilleux motifs’, mais ces motifs tissés réfèrent à des motifs visuels ou, à la rigueur, à des dessins mélodiques ou rythmiques). Les trois verbes du vers suivant “uniting separating matching”, encore une fois plus concrets, s’ils rendent l’aspect dénotatif, ne traduisent pas, selon nous, la charge conceptuelle et imagée du texte source. John Glassco reprend l’image des “merveilleux motifs”, mais ces motifs seront “unis”, “divisés”, “mariés”. Ce choix de lexies rend la charge connotative “mariage”, “alliance”, “étreinte” que l’on trouvait dans le texte source. Les mots qui, pour le poète Saint-Denys Garneau,
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revêtaient le caractère presque sacré d’une fécondité créatrice, avaient le pouvoir de ramener les instants de bonheur, trouvent, dans la traduction de Glassco, une liberté de mouvement: “now they are evolutions of a dance”, “and the next moment”, comme si le poète émerveillé observait de petits êtres sortis de sa boîte. Le traducteur rend la magie de la création poétique. LE JEU St-Denys Garneau
THE GAME F. R. Scott
THE GAME John Glassco
JÁTÉK Gyula Tallér
Voilà ma boîte à jouets Pleine de mots pour faire de merveilleux enlacements Les allier séparer marier,
This is my box of toys Full of words for weaving marvellous patterns For uniting separating matching
Here is my box of toys Full of words to make wonderful patterns
Íme játékos dobozom Tele szavakkal melyekbôl csodálatos ábrákot rakhatok ki Összeillesztem szétszedem egybefûzöm ôket
Déroulements tantôt de danse
Now the unfolding of the dance
S akad itt tánc is olykor
Et tout à l’heure le clair éclat du rire
And soon a clear burst of the laughter
Now they are evolutions of a dance And the next moment a bright burst of the laughter
Qu’on croyait perdu
That one thought had been lost
You thought was lost
Melyrôl azt hittem oda már
Une tendre chiquenaude
A gentle flip of the finger
A light flick of the finger
Egy gyengéd csiklandozás
Et l’étoile Qui se balançait sans prendre garde
And the star Which hung without a care
And the star That was hanging carelessly
És a cillag Mely óvatlanul egyen súlyozott
Au bout d’un fil trop ténu de lumière
At the end of too flimsy a thread of light
At the end of a flimsy thread of light
Egy túl vékony fénysugár hegyén
Tombe dans l’eau et fait des ronds.
Falls and makes rings in the water
Falls in the water and makes circles.
A vízbe pottyan s gyûrüket vet
To be matched divided married
Hirtelen feltörô tiszta nevetés
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Tallér retient l’image de l’“élaboration de merveilleuses formes”, “csodálatos ábrákot rakhatok ki”, qu’il “assemble, démonte, lie”. Dans ce cas, également, l’image, plus concrète, perd la charge connotative et intertextuelle du texte source, et est réduite au seul plan dénotatif. Le traducteur hongrois se démarque en choisissant d’utiliser des verbes conjugués à la première personne, là où le texte source, par l’usage de substantifs (“enlacements” [ligne 26], “déroulements” [ligne 28], et de verbes à l’infinitif (“allier, séparer, marier” [ligne 27]), donne à l’ensemble une valeur plus intemporelle, plus près d’une transcendance, d’un caractère sacré. Tallér réintroduit la voix du poète, une voix beaucoup plus directe, plus affirmée. Si, dans son ensemble, ce choix rend la légèreté du jeu en même temps que l’autorité de l’enfance, la traduction ne parvient pas à rendre l’intensité de l’expérience poétique et spirituelle qui traverse le poème source. Dans quelle mesure les allitérations soutiennent-elles ces images? Bien sûr, comme nous le rappelle Meschonnic, on changera nécessairement de phonologie en changeant de langue, “c’est une déperdition et non une trahison” (88). Il faudrait faire une analyse systématique des textes entiers pour évaluer dans quelle mesure cet important aspect du discours poétique fait système. Mais, à la lecture des traductions vers l’anglais, nous pouvons affirmer que Glassco a un souci de rendre les jeux phoniques et le rythme, même s’il s’éloigne parfois du texte source. Par exemple, il choisit des lexies de niveau plus familier, plus près du langage de l’enfant, mais plus sonores que chez Scott. Cette stratégie lui permet de compenser les pertes inéluctables qu’entrâine la traduction poétique. Si, dans l’ensemble, Scott produit une traduction très fidèle au texte source, une traduction mimétique, il reste sur le plan dénotatif, perdant les valeurs connotatives et intertextuelles du texte source. 6. Conclusion Si la poésie (et le texte littéraire en général) n’est pas constituée d’un langage spécifique, il n’en demeure pas moins que la traduction littéraire constitue une problématique particulière: là où, par exemple, le texte de spécialité et le texte “ordinaire” réfèrent au monde extralinguistique (l’important pour le traducteur est de connaître ces référents), le texte littéraire est intra-référentiel, et tout, des réseaux conceptuels, formels, des images aux textures, y fait sens.
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Nous avons privilégié le modèle des espaces mentaux (Fauconnier) en raison du caractère dynamique de la construction de sens qu’il permet d’illustrer. Partant des éléments du discours, le lecteur construit progressivement des représentations cognitives (des espaces mentaux) en activant l’information conceptuelle (connaissances extralinguistiques, littéraires, intertextuelles, expériences sensorielles, affectives, etc.) contenue dans sa mémoire à long terme jusqu’à l’obtention d’une représentation cohérente. Il y a donc un processus d’appropriation du texte, de construction du sens qui explique l’infinie variabilité des lectures et des traductions. C’est ce dont rend compte l’approche cognitive du discours littéraire et poétique. Nous avons tenté de déceler, dans les traductions, dans quelle mesure il y avait analogie des représentations en ce qui concerne les images et les voix dans l’espace poétique du texte de Saint-Denys Garneau. Nous avons préalablement déterminé pour ce poème six espaces mentaux pour fonder notre étude comparative. Il est évident qu’à partir d’un si petit échantillon nous ne pouvons déterminer quelle est la traduction réussie. Tous les aspects du texte poétique mériteraient d’être étudiés et seule l’étude du poème intégral et des traductions permettrait d’en révéler la systématicité et la cohérence. De même, dans quelle mesure les émotions, les expériences sensorielles, des sensibilités particulières des traducteurs, influent-elles sur le rendu de leurs traductions? Ces questions restent ouvertes. Nous avons voulu illustrer la spécificité de la problématique de la traduction poétique, ainsi que l’apport d’un modèle cognitif à l’étude de la traduction. Appendice — texte du poème Le Jeu de Saint-Denys Garneau Ne me dérangez pas je suis profondément occupé Un enfant est en train de bâtir un village C’est une ville, un comté Et qui sait Tantôt l’univers. Il joue
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Ces cubes de bois sont des maisons qu’il déplace et des châteaux Cette planche fait signe d’un toit qui penche ça n’est pas mal à voir Ce n’est pas peu de savoir où va tourner la route de cartes Ce pourrait changer complètement le cours de la rivière À cause du pont qui fait un si beau mirage dans l’eau du tapis C’est facile d’avoir un grand arbre Et de mettre au-dessous une montagne pour qu’il soit en haut. Joie de jouer! paradis des libertés! Et surtout n’allez pas mettre un pied dans la chambre On ne sait jamais ce qui peut être dans ce coin Et si vous n’allez pas écraser la plus chère des fleurs invisibles Voilà ma boîte à jouets Pleine de mots pour faire de merveilleux enlacements Les allier séparer marier Déroulements tantôt de danse Et tout à l’heure le clair éclat du rire Qu’on croyait perdu Une tendre chiquenaude Et l’étoile Qui se balançait sans prendre garde Au bout d’un fil trop ténu de lumière Tombe dans l’eau et fait des ronds. De l’amour de la tendresse qui donc oserait en douter Mais pas deux sous de respect pour l’ordre établi Et la politesse et cette chère discipline Une légèreté et des manières à scandaliser les grandes personnes Il vous arrange les mots comme si c’étaient de simples chansons
Audet Et dans ses yeux on peut lire son espiègle plaisir À voir que sous les mots il déplace toutes choses Et qu’il en agit avec les montagnes Comme s’il les possédait en propre. Il met la chambre à l’envers et vraiment l’on ne s’y reconnaît plus Comme si c’était un plaisir de berner les gens. Et pourtant dans son œil gauche quand le droit rit Une gravité de l’autre monde s’attache à la feuille d’un arbre Comme si cela pouvait avoir une grande importance Avait autant de poids dans sa balance Que la guerre d’Éthiopie Dans celle de l’Angleterre. Référence: GARNEAU, Hector de Saint-Denys, Poésies. Regards et jeux dans l’espace. Les Solitudes, Montréal, Fides, 1972, p. 33-34.
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Audet, L. Dancette, J. Dancette, et L. Jay-Rayon. “Axes et critères de la créativité”. Meta 52.1 (2007): 108-23. Calderon Quindos, T. “Blending as a Theoretical Tool for Poetic Analysis”. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 3 (2005): 269-99. Dancette, J. “L’élaboration de la cohérence en traduction; le rôle des référents cognitifs”. TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 16.1 (2003): 14159. Fauconnier, G. Espaces mentaux. Aspects de la construction du sens dans les langues naturelles. Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 1984. _____, et M. Turner. “Conceptual Integration Networks”. Cognitive Science 22 (1998): 133-87. _____, et M. Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Folkart, Barbara. Second Finding. A Poetics of Translation. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2007.
“Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau.” www.saintdenysgarneau.com/>.
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2008.
. Migraine-George, Thérèse. “ ‘L’Autre’ ” dans Champs de bataille et d’amour de Véronique Tadjo”. Women in French 15 (2007): 67-83. Perraudin, Pascale. “From a ‘large morsel of meat’ to ‘passwords-in-flesh’: Resistance through Representation of the Tortured Body in Labou Tansi’s La vie et demie”. Research in African Literatures 36.2 (2005): 72-85. Tadjo, Véronique. “À mi-chemin”. 20 mai 2009 . _____. À vol d’oiseau. Paris: Nathan, 1986. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992. Trad. anglaise As the Crow Flies. African Writers Series. Oxford: Heinemann, 2001. _____. Champs de bataille et d’amour. Abidjan/Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Ivoiriennes/Présence africaine, 1999. _____. L’Ombre d’Imana: voyages jusqu’au bout du Rwanda. Arles: Actes Sud, 2000. _____. Reine Pokou: Concerto pour un sacrifice. Arles: Actes Sud, 2004. _____. Le Seigneur de la danse. Abidjan: Nouvelles Éditions Ivoiriennes, 2001. _____. “Sonder l’Histoire”. Le Magazine littéraire 451 (mars 2006): 55. “Véronique Tadjo: Interview sur PlaneteAfrique”. 2003. 1er déc. 2006 . Volet, Jean-Marie. “Francophone Women Writing in 1998-99 and Beyond: A Literary Feast in a Violent World”. Research in African Literatures 32.4 (2001): 187-200.
FLS, Volume XXXVI, 2009
Translation
Rose-Myriam Réjouis Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts
Object Lessons: Metaphors of Agency in Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique The German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin and the French Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau both reach for object-centered disciplines — archaeology and ethnography, respectively — as metaphors for the restoration of their literary objects. For Benjamin, translation is good archaeology: the translator must recover the “way of meaning” in the original text and use it to glue the original to its translation. For Chamoiseau, an ethical ethnography is a dialogic translation that gives agency to both speaker and object. The essay concludes that both writers articulate parallel forms of artistic agency that can make cultural anxiety both visible and productive.
________________________
In Solibo Magnifique, the second novel of the French Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, the hero is an ethnographer. Writing about translation, the German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin evokes archaeology. Out of their rather different contexts, the two authors emerge as anxious and playful cultural insider-outsiders, who turn, respectively, to the shapeliness of material or figural objects and, consequently, to object-centered disciplines — archaeology and ethnography — as metaphors. This common strategy is the point of departure for my
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discussion of Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” (1926) and Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique (1988). 1 In “The Task of The Translator,” Benjamin singles out translation as a distinctive process. To make his point, he likens it to a disciplined reconstruction of something like the integral shape of an original artifact: Fragments of a vessel that are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s way of meaning, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel. (260)
Benjamin uses an object’s passage from fragments to wholeness to clarify translation’s passage from one language to another. A translation must give “voice to the intentio of the original not as reproduction but as harmony, as a supplement to the language in which it expresses itself, as its own kind of intentio” (260). In other words, a translation forges a path from the original text to its “way of meaning.” What it offers to “the language in which it expresses itself” is a new “way of meaning.” Fifty-two years after Benjamin’s death, his image of “fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together” surfaces in an unexpected place, the 1992 Nobel address by the Saint-Lucian poet Derek Walcott. Walcott reworks Benjamin’s vessel as follows: Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragment is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. [...] It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked
–––––––––– 1 “The Task of the Translator” was written in 1921 and published in 1923 in Charles Baudelaire, “Tableaux parisiens”: Deutsche Übertragung mit einem Vorword über die Aufgabe des Übersetzers, von Walter Benjamin [Charles Baudelaire, “Tableaux Parisiens”: German Translation, with a Foreword on the Task of the Translator, by Walter Benjamin]. I am grateful to Michael Jennings, who commented on an early draft of this essay and whose work on Benjamin frames my reading here — just as my treatment of Chamoiseau in these pages has been shaped by my experience translating Solibo Magnificent and Texaco, with Val Vinokur, more than ten years ago. I also wish to thank Jeanne Garane and James Day for their suggestions.
Réjouis
149 heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, illfitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent. (8-9)
Paula Burnett sees in Walcott’s use of Benjamin’s figure his interest in an “image of a whole composed of different but congruent parts,” that is, a metaphor for a “distinctively Caribbean cultural synthesis” (Burnett 26). By way of Walcott, Benjamin’s archaeological artifact — a trope steeped in European Classicism and Romanticism — becomes a metaphor for writing inscribed in a culturally insecure zone, that of the New World descendants of slaves. Walcott’s poetics of cultural synthesis means to transform cultural insecurities (slaves were objects, after all) into cultural agency. Chamoiseau, in his fiction and his poetics of Créolité, extends Walcott’s project of literary restoration by formulating a Caribbean cultural synthesis and by crafting a literary language that integrates Creole, the language of slaves. But this is not the only reason I turn to Chamoiseau. I do so because, unlike Benjamin and Walcott, whose metaphor relies on a literal object (a vessel or vase to be repaired), Chamoiseau turns to more slippery and figurative “objects,” for he seeks his metaliterary model in ethnography — a discipline Michel de Certeau has called a “heterologie,” the study of others, a discipline that George Bataille (who hid the manuscript of Benjamin’s The Paris Arcades when its author fled Paris before the advancing German armies in 1940), Michel Leiris, and Roger Caillois sought to transform in founding their “Collège de Sociologie.” 2 In Chamoiseau’s case, these others have themselves been declared objects and lack the antique artifacts with which to display cultural heft and historicity. Furthermore, Chamoiseau strategically chooses a discipline whose object of study is the animate shards of broken cultural traditions.
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For more on the intersections between avant-garde ethnography and the Caribbean, particularly the work of Michel Leiris in Martinique, see Michael Dash.
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Lydie Moudileno’s study of Chamoiseau’s Solibo in her book, L’Écrivain antillais au miroir de sa littérature: Mises en scène et mise en abyme du roman antillais, draws attention to the fact that Caribbean writers are, like their European peers, concerned with literariness, with figures such as mise-en-abyme, and not just with race, gender, history, and politics. But her focus on metanarratives leads her to emphasize the detective narrative in Solibo Magnifique and discount the significance of Chamoiseau’s use of ethnography. She writes: “Une telle approche permet de ne pas trop privilégier l’aspect ethnographique” (84). The reward of taking into account both the detective and the ethnographic narratives in Solibo is to be able to describe Chamoiseau’s text on its own terms. The detective narrative tells the following story: One evening, in the main public park of Fort-de-France, capital of the Overseas French Department of Martinique, Solibo the storyteller suddenly and mysteriously dies of an “égorgette de la parole” (25) — “snickt by the word” (8) — while speaking to an audience that includes the novel’s narrator, “Patrick Chamoiseau.” The police conduct an investigation — in French, not Creole, which the dark-skinned Martinican police sergeant refers to as “Black Negro gibberish” (67) — and rules Solibo’s natural death suspicious. The police seize and autopsy Solibo’s body and arrest all those who had gathered to listen to him. Violent interrogation results in the death of two “witnesses.” The police understand the reality of the island as consisting of one main question: What do “you do for the béké? [colonial master]” (96) — the question they ask of each of the witnesses. Solibo-asdetective-narrative privileges the argument between dark-skinned and contemptuous Sergeant Bouafesse and the nerdy and genteel Inspector Pilon about how to conduct the investigation. 3 While the civil and civilized Pilon attempts to restrain his colleague’s violence against the late Solibo’s listeners, the earthy sergeant knows far more about Solibo’s world than the inspector does. A focus on the detective narrative reveals that in Martinique, one can either play along and reap the benefits of sociocultural assimilation or resist and be the victims of those who do. The detective novel here is a farce and a tragedy. –––––––––– 3 I want to thank Val Vinokur for this acute insight and for reading every draft of this article.
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Parallel to the detective genre, Chamoiseau also uses the framework of an ethnographic narrative to relate the lethal and misguided investigation and to present an alternative response to Solibo’s life and death. In Solibo-the-ethnographic-novel, so to speak, the heroes are not Bouafesse and Pilon, but rather Solibo the storyteller and his hapless disciple “Patrick Chamoiseau,” the author’s alter ego, a struggling amateur ethnographer who calls himself a “word scratcher” (“marqueur de paroles”) in a self-deprecating euphemism for writer. He signals his ambiguity towards his own discipline near the beginning of the novel by inscribing his narrative in the framework of mourning: “These words are spoken only after the hour of [Solibo’s] death” (8). In doing so, he distances himself from his earlier half-hearted project, wherein Solibo’s stories were ethnographic material discovered during a study of the odd-jobbers of the Fort-de-France market, and instead presents his account as a personal legacy, the record of an impromptu wake. 4 On the one hand, ethnography allows the narrator to give a certain legitimacy to the “objects” of slave descendants — oral culture and such “vortices of behavior” as the Creole wake. On the other hand, he is aware of the nationalism, paternalism, and racism that mark the history of ethnographic discourse. He is also aware of the duplicity of a discipline that usually edits certain objects (the ethnographer’s tent, tape recorders, planes, cars, hotels, cities, national borders) “out of the frame” (Clifford 23). For these reasons, his ethnography is to be neither a classic narrative that celebrates the (white) “anthropologist as hero,” to borrow Susan Sontag’s phrase, nor a counter-narrative, such as Claude McKay’s 1929 novel, Banjo: A –––––––––– 4
Commenting on the wake, Chamoiseau writes: “The wake is for us a melting pot of Creole culture, of its speech, of its orality, and it gave the extraordinary pretext that would allow plantation slaves to gather without spreading the fear that they were plotting to revolt or to burn down a plantation. I even have the feeling that the Creole language, in its whispers, that the Creole culture in its ruses and detours, and that the Creole philosophy, in its underground, clandestine, and fatalist character, all were shaped in the wake’s contours; there, too, was shaped our most painful subjectivity. The wake also is the space of the story teller, our first literary figure, the one who, in the silence, gave us his voice, and who, facing death in the night, laughed, sang, challenged, as if to teach us how to resist our collective death and night” (“Reflections” 391). For more on the significance of “the hero’s death” and the Creole wake in Caribbean literature, see my monograph Veillées pour les mots: Aimé Césaire, Patrick Chamoiseau et Maryse Condé.
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novel without a plot, which imagines a “primitive” practicing a hysterical “reverse anthropology” in France while posing in the nude for white female art students. Chamoiseau’s ethnographer does not strut about as a hero. He is an insider-outsider who is an amateur ethnographer of his native country. He suffers from asthma and seems to be suffocating from self-doubt. Specifically, he doubts his methodology. Asthma, that delicate respiratory condition of first world countries, has become his Homeric attribute. Even his tape recorder seems to have respiratory problems: Who knows what would have become of me if Solibo Magnificent’s personality had not awakened my old curiosity, thus allowing me (through him) again to find sense in writing, though I was still unable to repair this bitch of a tape recorder which since my arrival was interested only in its own bronchitic gasps. One morning, Solibo addressed me with the exhausted insteadof-hello question: Chamzibié-ho? What’s the use of writing?..., then he chatted with me about everything and nothing, the word and the rest, without taking another breath he told me the origin of the market, seventeen undecipherable tales, gave me news (unasked for) of the senile merchants’ financial health, then he spoke to me of charcoal, of yams, of love, of forgotten songs, and memory, of memory. This verbal energy seduced me even then. Especially since Solibo used four facets of our diglossia: The Creole basilect and acrolect, the French basilect and acrolect, quivering, vibrating, rooted in an interlectal space that I thought to be our most exact sociolinguistic reality. (22)
The narrator’s text becomes an alternative ethnography when he does not do what he sets out to do, when instead of presenting the reader a scientific report on the respective basilect and acrolect of French and Creole, he repeatedly interrupts and undermines his narrative to cite Solibo’s words: (Solibo Magnificent used to tell me: “Oiseau de Cham, you write. Very nice. I, Solibo, I speak. You see the distance? In your book on the Watermama, you want to capture the word in your writing, I see the rhythm you try to put into it, how you want to grab words so they ring in the mouth. You say to me: “Am I doing the right thing, Papa?” Me, I say: One writes but words, not the word, you should have spoken. To write is to take the conch out of the sea to shout: here’s the conch! The word replies: where’s
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Here, the ethnographer presents the storyteller as a reader and a theorist. Solibo has read the ethnographer’s (and Chamoiseau’s) earlier book, Maman Dlo, and he offers his critique of the author’s methodology (recording stories traditionally told orally) and his project as a whole. The storyteller views the ethnographer’s attempt to “foreignize” (Venuti 4) written French with the oral playfulness of Creole and Creolisms with skepticism, and he locates the problem of untranslatability within the frame of intergenerational transmission: the ethnographer cannot translate orality into writing. Critics such as Pierre Pinalie-Dracius and Marie José N’ZengouTayo, however, tend to focus on Chamoiseau’s systematic linguistic strategies. They argue that Chamoiseau does not write in Martinican Creole and that his writing is merely a mechanical “montage” (Pinalie-Dracius 22) of a lot of French and a little Creole that produces an “effet-de-créole” (N’Zengou-Tayo 165). 5 Ironically, the shortsighted–––––––––– 5
Ultimately, the readings of Pinalie-Dracius and N’Zengou-Tayo dismiss the author’s creative agency. Pinalie-Dracius argues that Chamoiseau uses both conscious and unconscious “strategies” to creolize his text — which, comically, implies that Pinalie’s scientific analysis must rely on his access to the author’s unconscious. Echoing him, N’Zengou-Tayo argues that “paradoxically,” that is, malgré lui, Chamoiseau is a victim of the tensions between orality and writing and between Creole and French, since he creates a “different” and “personal” (171) language to express himself. I believe, on the contrary, that Chamoiseau’s conscious commitment to literal and metaphorical creolisms is his own (“different” and “personal,” to be sure) productive way of creating meaning in his work. In her comments on my translation (with Val Vinokur) of Texaco, Moya Jones, following N’Zengou-Tayo’s reading of the novel, is critical of the fact that we did not translate his every single literary deviation tit-for-tat (65). She does not recognize that if literary works could be translated so mechanically, we would not need human beings to translate for us. Val and I had to work not only with the fact that English accommodates word play and signifyin’ more than metropolitan and colonial French ever will, but also with the accidents of idiom across languages. For instance, Chamoiseau’s Creole substitution of “bête à feu” (fire animal/creature) for the French “luciole” doesn’t really take off in English because the English is already firefly or lightning bug; since the fact of creolization could not be conveyed in this case, we felt a responsibility to “convey” it elsewhere. Our translation of Chamoiseau is Benjaminian inasmuch as we tried to translate his modes of signification and avoid a mechanical reading of his works.
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ness of such word counting is most clearly exposed in Chamoiseau’s own reading of Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove. He reproaches her in much the same way Pinalie-Dracius and N’ZengouTayo reproach him: Other words of your vocabulary, still numerous, fail to invoke in me anything besides the flavor of other places and other cultures. For instance, saying île, a word we never say or think. Saying village instead of bourg since there are no villages here. This vocabulary reminds me of the time when we used to say colline for fear of writing morne. (“Reflections” 394)
Here Chamoiseau is guilty of the kind of limited criticism that has been leveled at his own writing. He does not pause on the fact that Condé’s novel about Guadeloupe is an anxious “return to the native land.” The returnee’s language is inherently inadequate. He also contradicts his own commitment to idiolects by trying to prescribe what the language of another writer — in this case, one whose sensibility was shaped by an earlier generation and by years in exile — should be like. A statistical approach to Chamoiseau’s use of Creole occludes one of his key achievements: his inflection of the discipline of ethnography as he puts it to new uses. Through the exchange between Solibo and “Chamoiseau,” a dialogue that takes place in the “field,” Chamoiseau is experimenting with a more ethical mode of ethnographic representation: mutual cultural critiques. In a way, he has imagined what Talal Asad, in his reading of Walter Benjamin’s essay on translation, calls a good translation or an “internal critique — that is, one based on some shared understanding, on a joint life, which it aims to enlarge and make more coherent” (157). For Asad, an ideal ethnography is a dialogic translation that leads to reciprocal agency. The exchange between the storyteller and the ethnographer is one between two marginal actors who escape the fate of the detective and policemen who harass them. Hesitating between French and Creole, in Chamoiseau’s novel these latter self-hating insider-outsiders commit tragicomic linguistic acts of violence against others by making them speak French and punishing their Creolisms and by speaking either a distancing Parisian French or a hypercorrect Martinican French. As I
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indicated above, the low/high cultural pairing of Solibo and Chamoiseau is parodied in the dynamics between the earthy, brutal Chief Sergeant Bouaffesse and the uptight, French-educated Inspector Pilon. By representing both mutual cultural critiques as well as disputes, Chamoiseau describes local scenes of action in a local language, 6 in what Karin Barber has called (in speaking of African literature) an act of “linguistic confidence” (19-20). 7 Chamoiseau’s commitment is to a specific local issue: the sociocultural terrorism of colonial institutions in Martinique. If Chamoiseau does not do justice to Martinican Creole, it is because Chamoiseau’s commitment is not to Martinican Creole; it is to idiolects, to individual self-expression, as M. C. Hazaël-Massieux would concur. Echoing Milan Kundera, who described Chamoiseau as writing in a “chamoisisé” French (58), Linda Coverdale, translator of Chamoiseau’s memoir of colonial schooling, School Days, declared to my students that “Chamoiseau writes in Chamoiseau.” Where Walcott borrowed Benjamin’s image of a material archaeology to claim cultural agency for the New World descendants of slaves, Chamoiseau turned to ethnography, imagining exchanges between a Martinican ethnographer and the Martinican storyteller he studies in order to give agency to the ethnographic object (the “native”) and to lay claim to others (pen, paper, tape recorder, books on ethnography). If Benjamin serves to draw attention to the agency latent in the formulation of cultural synthesis for such insider-outsiders as Walcott and Chamoiseau, then these Caribbean authors underscore the insideroutsiderness in Benjamin’s work. To explore the latter, I will conclude with Benjamin’s description of a dream in One Way Street (1928), a collection of short prose pieces Michael Jennings has described as –––––––––– 6
Interestingly, Chamoiseau extends this local scene most effectively by giving this postcolonial self-policing a transnational dimension: Bouaffesse, who at some point literally hits an old man unable to speak French with a French dictionary, is a veteran of France’s war in Algeria, where he was trained to torture. The history of colonial torture haunts diglossia: Speak French or perish. 7 Although Chamoiseau writes in a place that has no indigenous language — since both French and Creole are colonial languages despite the fact that one is “stronger” than the other — his various uses of Creole language and culture embody local forms of resourcefulness.
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both a “montage” and as “a summa of Benjamin’s work in the decade after 1924” (20). In a fragment entitled “No. 113,” Benjamin writes: [Dining Hall.] — In a dream I saw myself in Goethe’s study. It bore no resemblance to the one in Weimar. Above all, it was very small and had only one window. The side of the writing desk abutted on the wall opposite the window. Sitting and writing at it was the poet, in extreme old age. I was standing to one side when he broke off to give me a small vase, an urn from antiquity, as a present. I turned it between my hands. An immense heat filled the room. Goethe rose to his feet and accompanied me to an adjoining chamber, where a table was set for my relatives. It seemed prepared, however, for many more than their number. Doubtless there were places for my ancestors, too. At the end, on the right, I sat down beside Goethe. When the meal was over, he rose with difficulty and by gesturing I sought leave to support him. Touching his elbow, I began to weep with emotion. (“OneWay Street” and Other Writings 47)
In the dream, “Benjamin” is not merely the cultural insideroutsider — that is, not simply the German outsider critic and writer — he is also the racial or ethnic other, the Jew with his defining, inextricable, storied tribe. As such, he is caught between two embodiments of history: the handmade urn, an embodiment of secular high culture (ancient and modern), and his Jewish body, tied to the Jewish relatives and ancestors that have produced it, an embodiment of an archaic (tribal and religious) culture. As a secular Jew, he belongs to both realms to a certain extent without belonging entirely to either. He is therefore an insider-outsider to both. This double identity, which requires a formal acknowledgment (the banquet), is a source of anxiety. It becomes necessary to imagine a site of reconciliation, a task Benjamin extends into his writing with the recording of the dream. Of course, the Holocaust revealed the fragility of this dream of a final reconciliation between Germans and German Jews, as modeled on the complementariness between an exemplary German writer (“Goethe”) and an exemplary German-Jewish critic (“Benjamin”). Benjamin died in 1940 while fleeing from the Nazis. As the classicist Page Dubois writes, for the post-Holocaust reader, this dream is a premonitory condensation of “the precious legacy of European poetry, of ancient objects, and the horror of slave camps and death camps awaiting Benjamin’s fellow German Jews” (35). In Benjamin’s dream, the urn is triumphantly transmitted whole. It is his identity that is coming
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apart at the seams and forces the critic’s body to speak — with tears and dreams — in the hope of patching it together. While Chamoiseau is experimenting with a more ethical mode of ethnographic representation, the form of representation exemplified by this passage problematizes any direct transfer of German high culture to a group of insider-outsiders. If this is so, is the Creole wake perhaps more vital and playful than Benjamin’s anxious and tearful banquet? 8 Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Task of the Translator,” foreshadows his interest in avant-garde intervention, a mode that explores the political dimension of art as event. Chamoiseau, in his experimentation with writing as cultural translation, as ethnography, argues that the “writer-ethnographer,” much like Benjamin’s translator, must intervene and incorporate the other’s ways of meaning into his work: only then can that work aspire to the sublime while allowing itself to be marked by fingerprints. Whereas Chamoiseau writes against a history of colonial terror that has evolved into Martinicans’ self-policing their own sociocultural assimilation into France, Benjamin experienced a cultural assimilation, that of the German Jews, full of shadows of its own. In their respective zones of insider-outsiderness, these two writers signal their commitment to forms of artistic agency modeled on disciplines that underwrite passionate contact with their objects, material or figural. In so doing, they offer literary modes of activism that can make cultural anxiety both visible and productive.
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I want to thank Dale Peterson for a patient and generous reading of this essay and for inspiring this question.
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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009 Works Cited
Asad, Talal. “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology.” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford and George Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. 141-64. Barber, Karin. “African-Language Literature and Postcolonial Criticism.” Research in African Literatures 26.4 (1995): 3-30. Benjamin, Walter. “One-Way Street” and Other Writings. Trans. E. Jephcott and K. Shorter. London: New Left Books, 1979. _____. “The Task of the Translator.” Trans. Harry Zohn. Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913-1926. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. 253-63. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. Éloge de la Créolité. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. _____. “In Praise of Creoleness.” Trans. Mohamed B. Taleb Khyar. Callaloo 13 (1990): 886-909. Burnett, Paula. Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Certeau, Michel de. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Chamoiseau, Patrick. School Days. Trans. Linda Coverdale. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1997. _____. Solibo Magnificent. Trans. Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997. _____. Solibo Magnifique. Paris: Gallimard, 1988. _____. “Reflections on Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove.” Callaloo 14.2 (1991): 389-95. _____. Texaco. Trans. Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997. Trans. of Texaco. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Dash, J. Michael. “Le Je de l’autre: Surrealist Ethnographers and the Francophone Caribbean.” L’Esprit Créateur 47.1 (2007) 84-95. Dubois, Page. Slaves and Other Objects. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Hazaël-Massieux, M. C. “Chamoiseau écrit-il en créole ou en français?” Études Créoles 21.2 (1998): 111-26.
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Jennings, Michael. “Walter Benjamin and the European Avant-Garde.” The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin. Ed. David S. Ferris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Jones, Moya. “Chamoiseau and Matura: Translators and Translations.” Palimpsestes 12 (2000): 61-70. McKay, Claude. Banjo: A Novel Without a Plot. 1929. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970. Moudileno, Lydie. L’Écrivain antillais au miroir de sa littérature: Mises en scène et mise en abyme du roman antillais. Paris: Karthala, 1997. Pinalie-Dracius, Pierre. “Les Stratégies langagières dans Chronique des sept misères de Patrick Chamoiseau.” Antilla Kréyol 9 (1987): 17-24. Réjouis, Rose-Myriam. Veillées pour les mots: Aimé Césaire, Patrick Chamoiseau et Maryse Condé. Paris: Karthala, 2004. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Venuti, Lawrence. Introduction. Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. London: Routledge, 1992. 1-17. Walcott, Derek. The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992.
FLS, Volume XXXVI, 2009
Translation
Rachelle Okawa University of California, Los Angeles
Translating Maryse Condé’s Célanire cou-coupé: Dislocations of the Caribbean Self in Richard Philcox’s Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? A Fantastical Tale As the professional translator of many of his wife’s novels, Richard Philcox routinely faces the challenge of translating Maryse Condé’s “opaque” poetics. Through close readings of elements both in and outside of the actual translation, this study examines how Philcox’s interpretation of Condé’s Célanire cou-coupé is ultimately attuned to both the difficulty of translating her writing’s complexity and to the linguistic and cultural aspects that often mark a Caribbean text. Read together, Condé’s Célanire cou-coupé and Philcox’s Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? A Fantastical Tale, exemplify how the trope of “dislocation” regarding the representation of Caribbean cultural identities evokes a parallel or mirroring discourse in the act of translation itself.
________________________ When considering translation’s potential for committing violence against the original text, Gayatri Spivak, in “The Politics of Translation,” informs readers of the ethical necessity of “translating well and with difficulty” (181): that is, she emphasizes the translator’s need to be attuned to the specificity of the language he/she is translating. If, for example, a translator fails to account for untranslatable proverbs or concepts, or if he/she does not consider the particularities of the historical moment and language in which the author is writing, then the possibility for the misfiring of meaning abounds. Spivak’s warnings are particularly relevant to the challenges that Richard Philcox
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undoubtedly encounters when translating Maryse Condé’s novels. As the now-established professional translator of his wife’s work, 1 Philcox would have to keep in mind the “opaque” poetics that characterizes Condé’s writing, the recent translation debates and trends occurring in Caribbean literature, Translation Studies, and the publishing market at large, and most importantly, the “double bind” embedded in the task of translation itself: both to remain faithful to the original and to make the translation accessible to its intended readership. In this article, I examine Philcox’s difficult task of translating well Célanire cou-coupé from the framework of Condé’s “opaque” poetics: 2 a poetics that asks the reader to labor at understanding her texts due to the intentional “opacity” that characterizes both her writing style and her characters’ identities. In Condé’s fantastic tale, Célanire Pinceau’s “opaque” or unreadable identity emerges from her many geographical displacements, as well as her bodily dismemberment. Célanire wanders from one geographical location to another, moving to, from, and between Guadeloupe, France, Ivory Coast, and Peru. A part of her also resides in the hazy division between the natural and the supernatural, the known and the unknown, with the beginning of her life overshadowed by the presence of her own near-death. As a newborn infant, Célanire had her throat sliced open in the name of a local political figure in a government election in Guadeloupe. Miraculously, she was stitched back together by Dr. Jean Pinceau, the Caribbean counterpart to Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein (Fulton –––––––––– 1
Philcox has translated almost all of Condé’s novels except for Ségou I (translated by Barbara Bray), Ségou II (translated by Linda Coverdale), and La vie scélérate (translated by Victoria Reiter). When Condé’s work was first being translated into English, Philcox had not yet established himself in the field of literary translation. Since then, however, his personal experiences of living in West Africa, and also his in-depth knowledge of the region, have helped him to understand and thus to translate better his wife’s work (“Traduire Maryse Condé” 750). 2 What Philcox finds most difficult in translating his wife’s novels is their lack of transparency. In an interview with Kadish and Massardier-Kenney, Philcox comments on why Condé’s writing is so complex: “[Condé] demande beaucoup au lecteur. Enormément. Elle pense que le lecteur devrait être assez intelligent pour lire entre les lignes. Que ce n’est pas la peine de tout lui expliquer, noir sur blanc. Pour elle, le lecteur est un homme ou une femme extrêmement intelligent. Il y a donc beaucoup de choses cachées dans le texte et aussi une intertextualité énorme. Elle est constamment en train de faire référence à d’autres livres, à du cinéma, à des films” (759).
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201). The complicated formation of Célanire’s “patchwork” (Célanire cou-coupé 322) identity thus bases itself on two different types of “dislocation”: a geographical and a bodily translation or displacement. Framing Célanire’s fragmented sense of self in light of Stuart Hall’s notion of cultural identity as an enigma, a problem, or an always-open question for the Caribbean people allows for a clearer understanding of Condé’s representation of Célanire’s ultimately unfulfilled search for a sense of home and self (Hall 30). If, as Hall suggests, Caribbean identity is based on a series of past dislocations (of conquest, colonization, and slavery, for example), then one can figuratively begin to read Célanire’s “cou-coupé” or “dislocated” neck as signifying the historical and political violence upon which her fractured identity is founded. A similar dislocation occurs in the act of translation itself between the inevitable violence that marks the original text and the endless possibilities for its many readings and interpretations. Philcox’s Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? magnifies these linguistic and cultural tensions by highlighting the complexity of Condé’s novel, even as it aims to make the work more accessible to an English-speaking audience. The Challenges of Translating Maryse Condé Both Richard Philcox and Maryse Condé have written about and/or given extensive interviews regarding their views on the unique situation of author/translator collaboration in which they find themselves. What first makes Philcox’s and Condé’s situation particularly interesting is their contrasting opinions regarding the practice or even the possibility of translation itself. While Philcox views translation as a way of communicating his wife’s writing into another language and culture (“Traduire Maryse Condé” 751), Condé, on several occasions, has remarked upon the fact that to translate is to write and create an entirely different work of art altogether. In an interview with Emily Apter, Condé responds to the question of “How translatable is your work?” with the following comments: I never read any of my books in translation. Writing is not just the creation of content, it is in the sounds, the rhythms. In translation, the play of languages is destroyed. Of course, I recognize that my works have to be translated, but they are really not me. Only the original counts for me. Some
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Philcox and Condé also diverge on their conception of the reader, on how hard they believe the reader needs to work at understanding a text. While Condé likes to “faire travailler le lecteur” (“Traduire Maryse Condé” 751), her husband’s approach to translation and his audience could generally be described as more “market-driven”: he aims to make his translations of what he often feels are his wife’s overly esoteric novels more transparent or clearer for his Englishspeaking readership (751). Of course, it is important to note that Philcox does not support the idea that transparency or clarity should come at the cost of linguistic and geographical displacements within a translated text (“Traduire Maryse Condé” 752). This principle figures prominently in ongoing translation debates and trends in Caribbean Literature. In terms of Translation Studies, the Caribbean region emerges as a particularly apt terrain of investigation for several reasons: for its multilingualism and cultural diversity, for Caribbean writers in general who are aware that they are writing predominantly for an audience outside of the region itself, and for a writer in particular like Maryse Condé, whose work is invested in re-writing English and American texts. In fact, I would argue that within the field of Caribbean Studies, a consensus exists about the importance of remaining sensitive to the region’s linguistic and cultural differences. In “Translators on a Tightrope: The Challenges of Translating Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco,” Marie-José N’Zengou-Tayo and Elizabeth Wilson reiterate the central concerns that translators of Caribbean literature would especially need to be attuned to, such as the region’s complex and varied language register, as well as how a translator’s gender, ideological bent, and knowledge of the region will inevitably influence his/her translation (76-77). In “Crossing the Bridge of Beyond: Translating the Mangroves of French Caribbean Identities,” Pascale De Souza echoes similar linguistic concerns with respect to the challenges of translating French Creolisms into English, while also addressing the translation of paratextual elements, which,
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more often than not, cater to market demands. Examples of paratexts could include jackets, illustrations for the front cover, quotes for the back cover, forewords, introductions, appendices, and afterwords (4243); all of these can distort a translation’s relation to the original. To be a discerning translator, then, is to be conscious of the history and language of the region’s literature and writers. An awareness of translating these important differences is what Lawrence Venuti would refer to as resisting the trap of transparency. As a translator of French into English, Philcox finds himself in an “invisible” position where his translation practices cannot easily escape from the influences of the prevailing ideological demands and concerns of an Anglo-American market and audience. In his book, “The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation,” Venuti explains that a translator becomes invisible when his/her translation lacks any linguistic or stylistic markers linking it back to the original. The translated text would thus read so fluently as to give the illusion of transparency. The potential for committing violence against the original in the act of translation also extends beyond the translator’s control because of the reader’s demand for a fluent or transparent discourse. This demand is a characteristic Anglo-American tendency, and it contrasts with both the French and German models of translation. The danger lies precisely in the rendering of easy reads by fixing an exact meaning on or interpretation of the original text. For Venuti, the response to this trend, and the ethical task of the translator, is first to recognize the ideological constraints in which the translator has been immersed and trained, and secondly to locate strategies of resistance to overcome them. One possible strategy is to choose foreign texts that are less conducive to fluent translating. Condé’s Célanire cou-coupé, to which I now turn, is one such example of a text that resists a facile translation. Paratextual Influences: Reading Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? What lies outside the text often determines its reception to a far greater degree than the actual reading and interpretation of the trans–––––––––– 3
See Germina Nadège Veldwachter’s dissertation, “Politiques littéraires: jeux de miroir, paratextes, et traductions du discours antillais en France et aux États-Unis,” for an in-depth study about the publication, translation, and reception of Caribbean literature in France and the United States.
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lation itself. In the case of Philcox’s translation of Condé’s Célanire cou-coupé, paratexts — such as publishing advertisements, editorial additions in the form of glossaries, and translator prefaces — underscore the multiple ways in which the Anglophone or North American publishing market ultimately influences the reception of Condé’s novel. In the September-December 2004 issue of World Literature Today, Atria Books provides a half-page advertisement for Philcox’s then-recent translation of Condé’s novel. According to Simon and Schuster’s advertisement, Atria Books, one of its many publishing units, has recently started to promote itself as “plac[ing] a strategic emphasis on publishing for diverse audiences, through the acquisition of Strebor Books, the launch of a Hispanic/Latino line, and a copublishing agreement with Beyond Words.” The announcement by Atria Books for their publication of the first hardbound edition of Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? includes two titles from Condé’s past award-winning novels (Segu and Tales from the Heart), a brief summary of the plot, as well as literary praise by both Edwidge Danticat and The New York Times Book Review. Given the noticeable omission of Célanire’s darker side as a “femme fatale” seeking to right all past wrongs at any cost, the Atria Books advertisement raises immediate concerns about the publishing house’s power to distort the representation of her character. Of problematic interest to me here are both the editor’s brief summary of the novel and the praise given by the New York Times Book Review: Inspired by a true story of an infant found with her throat slashed in Guadeloupe in 1995, Maryse Condé’s indelible story blends magical realism and fantasy as the seductive and haunting Célanire solves the mystery of her past. It is impossible to read Maryse Condé’s novels and not come away from them with both a sadder and more exhilarating understanding of the human heart, in all its secret intricacies, its contradictions and marvels. (19)
First and foremost, the editor’s synopsis of Condé’s novel misleads readers by giving the impression that it is Célanire herself who actively pursues and discovers the truth about her birth parents. It is, however, only through the perspective of a secondary character that this information is finally revealed: Yang Ting, a destitute Chinese immigrant to Guadeloupe, informs readers that he is Célanire’s bio-
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logical father. Throughout the novel, Célanire never once acknowledges her awareness of Yang Ting or of this discovery. Like the editor’s summary, The New York Times Book Review also misleads readers when it helps to package and sell Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? by highlighting the translation’s universal appeal. While Condé’s novel is indeed preoccupied with the relationships and tensions that can cause friction between men and women — friction in the context of “la permanence du racisme, la difficulté de vivre ensemble, [et] la perception du mariage mixte dans les sociétés” (“Moi, Maryse Condé” 125) — Célanire’s mindset prevents her from embracing these universal concerns. As a Caribbean woman born in Guadeloupe, raised and educated in France, who also finds herself associated with the French civilizing mission in Africa, before finally returning to Guadeloupe with her French husband and stepdaughter, Célanire harbors internal “contradictions” in terms of the “human heart” that leave her to struggle against her inner desire to create havoc and seek revenge. By providing a universal framework from which to read Célanire’s mysterious past, Atria Books obscures the historical and racial conditions of exile that have always haunted the Caribbean region. To make certain expressions clear, the French version includes at the end of Célanire cou-coupé a glossary of terms of African, Creole, and Spanish origin. As a rule, glossaries are unusual in works of fiction, and for Condé in this instance, the glossary is something of a departure from her “opaque” poetics. On the other hand, a glossary, as a paratextual element, would be useful to clarify all of Condé’s intertextual references, with no intrusions into the narrative. In the light of these issues, it is troubling that Condé’s glossary was ultimately omitted from Philcox’s English translation; a ready-made guide for a reader-oriented text almost presupposes that the glossary was a necessary convenience. A passing remark by Condé during an interview with Kadish and Massardier-Kenney helps to clarify this dilemma when she explains how the appearance of footnotes in both Tituba and Traversée de la mangrove were included at the request of the French editor, rather than by the author herself (756). If Condé would prefer to refrain from integrating explanatory notes into the publication of her novels, then it would logically follow that the French publishing house and the respective editor for Célanire cou-coupé were the ones
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most likely responsible for the added glossary in the French edition. In contrast, American publishing houses tend to dislike editorial comments that might disrupt the aesthetics of a novel’s layout (756), which Philcox’s translation then compensates for by highlighting (i.e., italicizing) all of the text’s foreign words and expressions. These kinds of editorial policies work to further conceal what was or was not originally a part of Condé’s initial creative process. Her desire to retain the local specificities of the geographical places that she is writing about, as well as her overall refusal to simplify the text for the reader, is lost on two levels: in the French original and in the English translation. Working against what often seems like the whims of editorial decisions informed by the commercial policies of various publishing houses, translator prefaces have the power to offer insight into the inner workings of the translated text. Philcox has written prefaces for two of Condé’s translated novels: Crossing the Mangrove and The Last of the African Kings. His “Translator’s Preface” to Crossing the Mangrove exemplifies the aforementioned tension between the desire to respect linguistic and cultural differences found in Caribbean literature and the universal undertones that would render it a more “transparent” translation. For this particular project, Philcox’s biggest challenge lay in finding the appropriate equivalents to Guadeloupean creolisms. In the end, he decided against using Jamaican, Barbadian, and Trinidadian expressions because he felt that the linguistic and geographical displacements inherent in them would have ultimately changed the entire tone of the novel (“Traduire Maryse Condé” 752). He writes in his preface: “What was I going to do with all those Creole expressions? How was I going to render this most Guadeloupean of Maryse Condé’s novels into English? How was I going to translate those distortions of the French language that Creole is so fond of making and at the same time poke fun at standard, academic French?” (vii-viii). The questions that Philcox poses to both himself and the reader evoke the very core of his dilemma. Just how was he going to convey accurately the intimate quibbles between two languages (French and Creole) into a third one (English)? The dilemma resisted easy resolution. After rejecting English-based West Indian equivalents, and also inventing a word or two of his own in English, Philcox eventually decided to displace this linguistic issue altogether
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by finding an equivalent to the tone and register of Condé’s character voices in the work of another writer: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness technique spoke to Philcox as a way to capture both the chatty tone and the inner, psychological drama embedded in each of Condé’s character voices (xiii). The similarities between Woolf’s and Condé’s writing in terms of their sound and conviction provided a translation strategy that, he argues, reflects the novel’s overall purpose and style in filling the characters and the reader with renewed hope and energy (ix). As Philcox himself already acknowledges in his preface to Crossing the Mangrove, the underlying reason for finding a shared tone in another writer’s work and voice for one of Condé’s most Guadeloupean of novels, has to do with the importance of intertextuality in regard to his wife’s writing. In his preface to The Last of the African Kings, Philcox’s concern with narrative tone once again comes to the forefront when he expands upon his previous translation choices. For The Last of the African Kings, Philcox chooses Bruce Chatwin’s The Viceroy of Ouidah as his working translation model for its matching narrative structure and tone (i.e., its terrible irony). For Philcox, the irony in Chatwin’s depiction of the fortunes of the dynasty of an African kingdom is comparable to the sense of derision that pervades his wife’s work: Condé’s The Last of the African Kings is likewise characterized by a distinctly iconoclastic and unorthodox tone (x-xi). Finding an equivalent model for the novel’s terrible irony plays just as significant a role in the notion of intertextuality as pinpointing the inspirational and creative sources that Condé surrounds herself with at the time of writing. As her husband, Philcox is privy to the various influences on Condé’s artistic “psyche” at the moment of creation: what novels she reads, what movies she sees, and what music she listens to (ix). In the case of The Last of the African Kings, it is the influence of African-American music, especially the blues and jazz, that clues him into a possible translation strategy: “Just as jazz is a reworking of African rhythms, so the structure of the book reworks the links between Africa, the place of origin, and its Diaspora of Guadeloupe and South Carolina” (ix). All of the historical and cultural displacements of time, place, and texts that Condé is so fond of reworking become key intertextual sources for better understanding
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her novels in both French and English. 4 Whatever displacements the resulting translations might present, translator prefaces offer informed interpretations based on intimate readings of the original text. Philcox’s prefaces work against the translator’s “invisibility” by allowing his creative and interpretive voice to emerge. His prefaces also bring to light the creative sources and influences unique to each work of art, in turn reinforcing the need to adapt one’s translation practices to each new project. Dislocations in Translation The presence of paratexts, or for this next example, the marked absence of them, points to other translation rifts in Philcox’s Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? In the translated text, the pull towards a fluent or transparent discourse emerges from the very beginning of the novel, when readers are first introduced to Célanire and her missionary life as an oblate in Ivory Coast. Célanire’s status as an oblate is an important element for understanding her unreadability, for by its very definition, the term oblate designates only a partial identification or 5 belonging to a social group. According to Webster’s, an oblate is a person dedicated to the religious life, especially a person living in or associated with a religious community, but who at the same time is not bound by any formal vows. In the French, Condé complicates Célanire’s gender identity by referring to her with the masculine form of the noun “oblat” instead of the feminine one, “oblate.” In Philcox’s translation, however, no such gender modification of the noun is possible in English, and yet, no note of the discrepancy is ever given. Condé’s reference to Célanire as an “oblat” occurs seven times within the first thirty pages of the novel and is often juxtaposed to comments about how much she differs from her missionary companions: her silence, her isolation when writing in her journal, and her overall lack of –––––––––– 4
As a re-write of Emily Brontë’s Victorian novel Wuthering Heights, Condé’s La migration des cœurs is a notable example of all three displacements of time, place, and text. In order to adapt Brontë’s story to a Caribbean context and chronology, Condé’s novel instead opens in Cuba at the very end of the 19th century. 5 Keja Valens argues that Célanire’s many partial identifications (e.g., national, racial, sexual orientation, etc.) prevent readers from pigeonholing her identity and origins. Furthermore, Condé’s representation of Célanire as “une oblat” (40) also troubles her gender status.
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excitement, curiosity, and eagerness to begin the work, are just a few ways in which she stands out. What thus becomes blurred in translation here are the purposeful partial identifications that mark Célanire’s identity in the context of a seemingly minor grammar discrepancy that diminishes the impact of the English version. The disjunctions of translation continue to emerge in the opening lines of the novel in a telling self-interruption of the story by the thirdperson omniscient narrative voice. By questioning the story’s own true beginnings, the narrating voice foreshadows the fragmented narrative to follow, in which the bits and pieces of information revealed by the various secondary characters further complicate how Célanire’s identity will be read. The French text reads: “Au moment où débute cette histoire (mais est-ce le début? Où en est le début? Mystère et boule de gomme!), on avait à peine fini d’enterrer les morts à Grand-Bassam” (15). The following is Philcox’s translation of this narrative interruption: “At the time when this story begins (but is it the beginning? Where in fact does it begin? That’s anyone’s guess!) they had barely finished burying the dead at Grand-Bassam” (3). The narrator’s selfreflection on beginnings or origins highlights the novel’s thematic development of Célanire’s search for her birth parents while demonstrating, at the beginning of Philcox’s version, the rigors and choices of translating. As opposed to Condé’s novel, which opens with a description of Ivory Coast, Philcox’s translation starts off by describing the leader of the African Missionary Society in Lyons, Reverend Father Huchard, and his slanted perception of Célanire. Philcox’s deferral of Condé’s description of Ivory Coast until two full paragraphs later — a depiction of its landscape, climate, and people — does not just ask us to question whether the very definition of translation is exceeded altogether by taking liberties with basic elements of narrative order. It also asks us to consider how this narrative shift once again directs our attention to the heart of the novel’s intrigue. Just like the translated title, Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat?, the change in the novel’s opening lines promises the reader an answer to this very question. We will no doubt find out who slashed Célanire’s throat by the end of the story. Philcox’s re-writing of Condé’s novel underscores the degree to which the English version both mirrors and departs from the French. On the one hand, this instance of guided reading highlights, because of its contrast, how Célanire is most often represented
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through the eyes of others, which heightens her ambiguity. On the other hand, it undercuts all of the novel’s references to the movement between Africa and the New World, initiated by the slave trade. Philcox’s delayed description of the coast of Africa — a place of contact between land and sea; a site of transition and travel — displaces the history of diasporic wanderings common to Caribbean writers and intellectuals such as Condé and her character, Célanire. The initial site of dislocation on Célanire’s body, represented by the scar on her neck, and Philcox’s translation of Condé’s description of it, emphasizes Célanire’s “opacity”: the fantastic powers that she 6 possesses as a “cheval.” While Célanire is entertaining Hakim, one of the Foyer’s guests, she cannot hide her excitement when explaining to him the cultural relevance behind the Guadeloupean costume she is wearing, a matador gown. For personal reasons, she made some modifications to the traditional garb: she added a collaret and omitted the customary madras head tie, gold-bead choker, and earrings. These details reveal the great lengths to which she will go to hide her scar from others. Once revealed, however, the scar’s monstrosity (96) conjures up images of Frankenstein’s creation, especially because of the way Célanire’s neck has been stitched up and patched together. Condé writes: Un garrot de caoutchouc violacé, épais comme un bourrelet, repoussé, ravaudé, tavelé, enserrait le cou. On aurait dit que celui-ci avait été coupé en deux parties égales, puis rafistolé tant bien que mal, les chairs rapprochés par force et bourgeonnant dans tous les sens comme elles le voulaient. (9697) Philcox translates: A purplish, rubberlike tourniquet, thick as a roll of flesh, repoussé, stitched and pockmarked, wound around her neck. It was as if her neck had been slashed on both sides, then patched up and the flesh pulled together by force, oozing lumps all the way around. (61)
–––––––––– 6 In Condé’s novel, the African characters believe that Célanire’s body is the vehicle or means by which evil spirits have been able to cross over from the other side of the ocean. The person whose body enables this crossing over is referred to as a “cheval” or a “horse.” Every “horse” can be potentially recognized by finding the appropriate sign or mark on its body, a task that is not easy to accomplish (33).
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Philcox’s translation tones down the inexplicable power and force that Célanire oftentimes exudes. The choice to translate “bourgeonnant dans tous les sens comme elles le voulaient” as “oozing lumps all the way around” diminishes both her scar and its uncontrollable nature; the omitted words, “comme elles le voulaient,” could have been translated as “[oozing lumps] in whatever direction the flesh chose to go.” Furthermore, Philcox’s translation of the word “un garrot” in the medical sense of “tourniquet” can in no way allude to its two other definitions in Le Robert & Collins: 1) the punishment and/or torture of shackling a prisoner and 2) the withers of a horse or the ridge between the animal’s shoulder bones. The hideous premise upon which Célanire’s throat is initially slashed, the scar on her neck thus translated and read by Hakim as the mark of a “cheval,” and all of the anguish caused by the subsequent destruction and deaths left in her wake are here replaced by the tourniquet’s primary mission of saving a person’s life and healing wounds. The description of the scar reinforces Célanire’s fractured relationship to herself and others. Her constant state of turmoil and unrest is captured by Philcox’s translation, and it reaches its peak when Célanire’s husband takes her to Peru for a vacation at the end of the novel. During the trip, Célanire’s behavior could again be described as odd for a number of reasons: her loss of appetite, her disengagement from prior intellectual interests and humanitarian causes, her nocturnal wanderings and isolation, and most strikingly, her decline in physical health and appearance. She is incapable of speaking or even uttering a sound, and not one medical doctor is able to diagnose her illness. In the French, Condé describes her strange behavior with: “Célanire semblait désarticulée” (325), which Philcox translates as: “Celanire seemed dislocated” (221). In contrast to the translation of “un garrot” as a “tourniquet,” Philcox’s choice of “dislocated,” rather than “disarticulated” or “disjointed,” here departs from the medical definition of “désarticulée.” While “dislocated” can still refer to the physical displacement of a bone in the human body, it also has a less scientific definition in Webster’s: “to put out of place” or “to force a change in the usual status, relationship, or order of; to disarrange or to disrupt.” In this particular example, Philcox’s choice of words helps to create a certain kind of unintelligibility or chaos that parallels his wife’s writing, which Condé herself has characterized as “un tas d’influences
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dans tous les sens […] une sorte de bouillabaisse…” (“Moi, Maryse Condé” 124). In this light, the word “dislocated” brings forth several possible contexts from which to frame and read Condé’s representation of Célanire’s “patchwork” identity: 1) her relationship to Frankenstein’s creation and the stitching of the body back together; 2) her ability to disrupt or unsettle hierarchical relationships of power and dominance; and 3) her inability to find a permanent home. To describe Célanire as dislocated, then, demonstrates the degree to which one word in translation, as Condé mentions in her interview with Apter, has the power to disrupt or unsettle (but here not necessarily for the worse), the play of languages in the original. Conclusion “What constitutes the Caribbeanness of a text?” (xi). Philcox poses this question in his preface to The Last of the African Kings and states that critics would have little reason to call African Kings a Guadeloupean novel, whereas Crossing the Mangrove would be exemplary of such a text. His response to this question echoes the senti7 ments of his wife: that what makes a text Caribbean cannot solely be defined by either the writer’s choice of language (French or Creole) or by elements such as landscape, forms of entertainment, or magical and religious practices (xii). Instead, he argues, “it is very much the inner relationship of the individual to his or her environment, culture, or self” (xii) that plays one of the determining factors in translating Caribbean literature. If, as I have argued throughout this article, Célanire’s relationship to her environment, culture, and self is always one of rupture and disconnect, then Philcox’s translation succeeds in bringing out Condé’s distinctive poetics. It is only by immersing oneself in the “dislocations” of translation from French into English that one can uncover how concepts of tone and intertextuality reveal what constitutes Condé’s Célanire cou–––––––––– 7
In response to Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant’s Éloge de la créolité, and their positing of the Creole language as the sole means of achieving an “authentic” Caribbean poetics, Condé writes in her essay “Créolité without the Creole Language?: “I maintain that all writers must choose whatever linguistic strategies, narrative techniques, they deem appropriate to express their identity. No exclusions, no dictates” (107).
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coupé as a Caribbean text: the permanent feeling of exile that haunts Célanire. It is likewise only by engaging in close readings of the two novels together that one can begin to visualize how neither originals nor translations are ever created in isolation. Furthermore, a translator’s preface can figure as an important bridge between the original and the translation, underscoring the linguistic and cultural differences between the two texts, and also pointing to the new, creative work that has emerged. Attempts to establish aesthetic norms can end up constraining the artist’s creative process, not to mention the reading, interpretation, and translation of the work of art. In his essay, “Translating Maryse Condé: A Personal Itinerary,” Philcox explains how translating his wife’s novels has helped to transform him into an Other (for as he puts it, his work has often forced him into a world not of his own), and also into an author in his own right: I thus become Maryse Condé — “Maryse Condé, c’est moi” — and perform the greatest ventriloquist’s act there is, taking over from the author and playing to the gallery. There she sits on the stage beside me, silent and composed, while I can reach an English-speaking audience with a translation she does not recognize of a text she once wrote in another language. And yet she should know what it’s like, taking an author and adapting her to one’s own voice. After all, she did it to Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights, and I did it to Maryse Condé and Windward Heights. (33-34)
What Philcox refers to here is the way in which the process of translation, the movement or transfer of meaning from one language and culture to another, has the potential to add something new to the original. For what does it mean to be an original anyway? When read together, Condé’s novel and Philcox’s translation become a testament to the intertextual nature of the creative process for both authors and translators alike. With the ongoing dialogues, re-writings, and collaborative efforts occurring among writers, translators, originals, translations, paratexts, and readers, perhaps the limits of translation could best be viewed as the possibilities for new texts and new interpretative meanings.
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Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. Éloge de la créolité. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Condé, Maryse. Célanire cou-coupé. Paris: Robert Laffont, 2000. _____. “Créolité without the Creole Language?” Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity. Ed. Kathleen M. Balutansky and Marie-Agnès Sourieau. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. _____. Interview with Emily Apter. “Crossover Texts/Creole Tongues: A Conversation with Maryse Condé.” Public Culture 13.1 (2001): 89-96. _____. Interview with Lydie Moudileno. “Moi, Maryse Condé, libre d’être moi-même…” Women in French Studies 10 (2002): 121-26. _____. Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? A Fantastical Tale. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Atria Books, 2004. De Souza, Pascale. “Crossing the Bridge of Beyond: Translating the Mangroves of French Caribbean Identities.” Emerging Perspectives on Maryse Condé: A Writer of Her Own. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2006. “Dislocate.” Webster’s New World College Dictionary. 3rd ed. 1996. Fulton, Dawn. “Monstrous Readings: Transgression and the Fantastic in Célanire cou-coupé.” Emerging Perspectives on Maryse Condé: A Writer of Her Own. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2006. “Garrot.” Le Robert & Collins. 6th ed. 2002. Hall, Stuart. “Negotiating Caribbean Identities.” New Caribbean Thought: A Reader. Ed. Brian Meeks and Folke Lindahl. Jamaica: The University of the West Indies Press, 2001. Kadish, Doris Y., and Françoise Massardier-Kenney. “Traduire Maryse Condé: entretien avec Richard Philcox.” The French Review 69.5 (1996): 749-61. N’Zengou-Tayo, Marie-José, and Elizabeth Wilson. “Translators on a Tight Rope: The Challenges of Translating Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco.” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 13.2 (2000): 75-105. “Oblate.” Webster’s New World College Dictionary. 3rd ed. 1996. Philcox, Richard. Preface. Crossing the Mangrove. By Maryse Condé. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Anchor Books, 1995. _____. Preface. The Last of the African Kings. By Maryse Condé. Trans. Richard Philcox. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
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_____. “Translating Maryse Condé: A Personal Itinerary.” Emerging Perspectives on Maryse Condé: A Writer of Her Own. Ed. Sarah Barbour and Gerise Herndon. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2006. SimonSays.Com: The Website of Simon & Schuster, Inc. . Path: Divisions and Imprints. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “The Politics of Translation.” Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, 1993. 179-200. Valens, Keja. “Desire between Women in and as Parodic Métissage: Maryse Condé’s Célanire cou-coupé.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 10.1 (2003): 67-93. Veldwachter, Germina Nadège. “Politiques littéraires: jeux de miroir, paratextes, et traductions du discours antillais en France et aux États-Unis.” Diss. University of California, Los Angeles, 2005. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge, 1995. World Literature Today 78.3 (2004): 19.
FLS, Volume XXXVI, 2009
Translation
Christophe Ippolito Ivan Allen College, Georgia Institute of Technology
Intercultural Politics: Translating Postcolonial Lebanese Literature in the United States As the editor of a recently published bilingual edition of poems by Nadia Tuéni, a Lebanese author, I had to prepare a scholarly edition of translated poems for a cross-cultural audience, negotiating meaning between linguistically and culturally different audiences in both Lebanon and the United States. In the process of editing this translation there were facilitating factors, but the editing and translating also presented challenges that point to issues concerning the relations between translation, on the one hand, and culture, postcolonial studies, and more generally, politics and globalization, on the other hand.
________________________ As Sherry Simon has noted, translations are based on theories of the given cultures that surround them and delineate the markers of identity and difference. The primary issue this study will focus on is the translation of culture. This general issue leads to many others. Based on practical experience with the challenges of editing and translating, this study will address the intercultural operations inherent to such an undertaking, as well as the facilitating factors that allowed this edition to be completed. After providing background on the publishing aspects of this enterprise, on its environment, on the author translated, and on the edited translation, this study will focus on what became the central issue in the editing/translating process, i.e., how is one to negotiate translation of culture in a copublication between a Western, dominant press and a local press (with special attention given here to politics)? Finally, the study will suggest practical solutions to the challenges that arose from this close contact between cultures.
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Some background is necessary here to understand the modus operandi of this translating/editing enterprise. The book contract was negotiated between Syracuse University Press, which had accepted my manuscript (poems and accompanying essays), and a Lebanese publishing company, Dar An-Nahar, owned by the husband of the writer whose work I was editing, Ghassan Tuéni. Through a foundation, he also owned the rights to Nadia Tuéni’s works in French. I was truly a go-between, placed in between two publishers and two cultures. It is also necessary to briefly describe the final product as published. The setting of the poems translated is the Lebanese war. The poems included in Lebanon: Poems of Love and War / Liban: Poèmes d’amour et de guerre are selected from two collections published by Nadia Tuéni (1935-1983), a Francophone poet, in 1979 and 1982, during the civil war in Lebanon. She stands as an example of multicultural identity: she was born to a French Catholic mother and a Druze father from a very old, influential, and prestigious Druze family. She was fluent in Arabic, Greek, French, and English, lived in Lebanon, Greece, France, and the United States, and married the Greek Orthodox Ghassan Tuéni, who was a Beirut representative to the Lebanese Parliament, a newspaper mogul, future cabinet minister, and ambassador to the United Nations. Most of Nadia Tuéni’s works were published in France, by Pierre Seghers and others (Flammarion, Belfond). One of the collections translated was published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert. The two collections selected are very different: the first one, Liban: Vingt Poèmes pour un amour (Lebanon: Twenty Poems for One Love), has nationalist accents and celebrates twenty famous Lebanese locales as being symbolic of an eternal Lebanon; it is translated in its entirety. The second, Archives sentimentales d’une guerre au Liban (Sentimental Archives of a War in Lebanon) deals with the daily reality of war; translation of only twenty poems from this collection has been authorized (they were selected by me as the editor). The volume includes an introduction and forty poems, followed by two essays meant to help the reader understand and contextualize the poems, and a short bibliography. After these preliminary remarks, I would like to address the central issue itself, translation of culture. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere have identified in a founding essay how culture rather than the text itself has finally become the most important reality that a
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translator has to deal with: “neither the word, nor the text, but the culture becomes the operational ‘unit’ of translation” (8). What was often previously considered as secondary became the main factor in the translator’s work. Bassnett and Lefevere have opened up a wealth of questions, many of which are relevant to the practice of editing and translation as analyzed here. Can one translate context and outlook? How is this relevant for the editor’s and translator’s choices, and what role does the experience of the translator play, since most of the time s/he is foreign to at least one of the cultures considered? Can what is taken from a culture be given back to this culture in some way, in the form of responsible, “sustainable translation”? What is not transmissible? Is translating merely stealing a culture by fragments? I cannot address all these questions in the limited space I have, so I will focus on reception and try to analyze whether the process of translating (involving the publisher’s understandable constraints as well as the translator’s and editor’s limitations) allows for a sound understanding of a foreign culture. It is extremely difficult to translate the tensions of the Lebanese civil war — the jokes and terror inspired by the bombs, the dangers on the Green Line that then divided Beirut, the gaze of the victims, evenings on the Corniche or Moinot Street, the fortresses and cemeteries of the Druze mountains, the destroyed mosques and churches, torture, feelings, memories, all things that Lebanese readers would share and understand. Thus, while one should be aware of the trap of what George Steiner has famously called the “fidelity-betrayal syndrome,” how is one to be faithful to the spirit of the work, the nuances, and the cultural context rather than just the written word? How can another culture understand what is sometimes understated or even “invisible” in the translation? In some cases, the difficulties begin with the prejudices against a region of the world. Especially in the current domestic context with regard to the Middle East, it was not an easy proposition to have this translation published in the United States. The response of an American university press was the following (and I quote, but will not give the source here, as this was a private letter): the press “is reluctant to try poetry translation or criticism of Middle Eastern Literature.” Obviously, the fact that these poems addressed the civil war in Lebanon made it necessary to be extremely careful with the political aspects of
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the edition. Especially in a post-9/11 context, the political dimension posed the most delicate problems for the negotiation of meaning. Of course, in my experience as a translator and editor (and the editor’s job is also to supervise and harmonize translation), I have encountered what I would call nonpolitical examples of cultural differences. I could not review here all the issues that arose from minor differences concerning the translated poems themselves. I can give an example, though, and I will let the reader be the judge. This is an example of “foreignization” of the text (I will return to this concept in the paragraph below). In French, one of the poems begins with this line: “Je suis ou ne suis pas, selon la loi du rêve.” The initial translation was “I am or am not, depending on the laws of dreams.” The excellent inhouse editor rightly suggested the following change: “according to the laws of dreams.” I agreed with the translator here, for I thought that the French “selon” was much stronger than “according to” in this poem. “Selon” implies a sense of emergency: the very existence of this voice saying “I” depends on the laws of dreams. And I should say that on all sides, most of the corrections were clearly made with the intention of respecting the author (blanks, spaces, etc.). There has to be some transparency in the translating process when it comes to the body of the text itself, if only to allow for a constructive dialogue between the different actors in the process. But the environment, in my view, lends itself more easily to “foreignization.” One politically marked occurrence of misunderstandings concerned the article of a Palestinian contributor. She speaks of “national disasters constituted by the creation of Israel in 1948 and the Six Day War of June 1967” (Tuéni, Lebanon: Poems of Love and War / Liban: Poèmes d’amour et de guerre 99). The in-house editor suggested that, while no background on the Six-Day War was needed for the American public, an account of the disasters of 1948 should be supplied. I wrote back that I did not see a need for a gloss on 1948 (or for that matter on the Emergency Land Requisition Law of 1949, or the Absentee Property Law of 1950, etc.), as the information on what happened in 1948 (780,000 uprooted Palestinians became refugees) could be found in numerous reference books. I submitted the suggestion to my collaborator, who agreed with me, adding that the phrase “national disaster” in the context of a reference to 1948 was common in Arab countries in the seventies and is still common now, and that it is found
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everywhere, including in official government treaties. As an editor, I was aware I had a choice between two kinds of attitudes delineated by the translation scholar Lawrence Venuti: “foreignizing” or “domesticating” translation (see especially Invisibility 148 ff.). I chose to avoid simply rewriting the text of my collaborator and thus to foreignize. Should I have domesticated, I would not have been faithful to my collaborator’s point of view and would have indeed “efface[d] the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text,” which would have been “rewritten in the transparent discourse dominating the target language culture” (Venuti, Rethinking 5). Clearly, this was a marker of cultural difference I felt I had to reproduce. Some have suggested that Venuti’s distinction is a naive, modernist, and especially elitist division, 1 but I would submit that in this case, it was a sound one, particularly in the postcolonial context and on the global market. In the same vein, I chose to retain some words and expressions that may sound somewhat foreign in English. There was also a minor debate about the actual date of the invasion of South Lebanon by Israel under Ariel Sharon — a military operation also termed “Operation Peace for Galilee.” While the bombing of PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) targets began June 4, 1982, and was immediately followed by PLO mortar attacks, Israeli forces entered South Lebanon on June 6. June 4 is considered by many specialists in Middle Eastern Studies as the beginning of military operations. The contributor mentioned above had selected June 6 as the date of the Israeli invasion, a very symbolic date indeed in the Middle East, especially for Palestinians (June 6 also marks the beginning of the invasion of the West Bank and Jerusalem during the 1967 Six-Day War), and this date is usually the one that is recorded in the history books of Arab countries. I have to add here that one of the two collections, Archives sentimentales, appeared exactly at the time of the Israeli invasion. As is clear, both cultural differences have to do with the international context of the poems. In both instances, I supported my contributor and used the June 6th date in my introduction. A third occurrence of cultural difference had to do with the marketing of the book. The press wanted to have the words “A revolution –––––––––– 1
Robinson, among others, has described Venuti’s theory as elitist in What is Translation?
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of poetic language” on the book’s cover, and they were already in the publisher’s catalog. “A revolution of poetic language” is the title of a book by Julia Kristeva that I quoted in my introduction, although in a specific context (see Kristeva). This quote, I thought, was too heavily “coded” to appear on the cover, for a variety of a reasons, some nonpolitical. Chiefly, however, this phrase would have wrongly associated Tuéni with Mallarmé (the author studied in Kristeva’s book), or with Kristeva’s feminist stance. Moreover, these words were completely inappropriate in the case of the first collection, Liban: Vingt poèmes pour un amour, as this is a very traditional volume, with nothing revolutionary in it. Above all I suggested that the word “revolution” is a very negative one in Lebanon (again, this was a coedition between a Lebanese and an American company). 2 Clearly, the above political issues have to do with the reception of the foreign text or culture, but some political issues also concern the production of the text, i.e., how it should be presented. Collaborating on production, on the whole a necessary aspect of the work, also presents challenges as well as facilitating factors. The challenges listed below concern mainly my introduction. I of course had to be careful with this introduction, and had the historical and religious aspects of it checked by several specialists in both Lebanon and the United States. Some background is necessary here. Ghassan Tuéni, Nadia Tuéni’s husband, is an important political figure in the Middle East and had an interest in being rather careful with the political and religious aspects of the edition, especially since the book was also intended for the Lebanese public, at a time when two of his collaborators were assassinated in Beirut. Among the facilitating factors, paramount was my good personal relation with Ghassan Tuéni, and the fact that we were constantly in contact to negotiate aspects of this bilingual edition. I should mention that I worked at his publishing company over the summer of 2005. Ghassan Tuéni provided useful suggestions and made minor corrections and additions to the volume. For example, I had spoken of a Lebanese poet, Fouad Gabriel Naffah, who I thought might have influenced Nadia Tuéni, and indeed, Ghassan Tuéni revealed to me that –––––––––– 2 I went on to suggest other marketing strategies for the cover, such as a short verse from Tuéni in English. I suggested lines such as “I survive my own ashes” or “a sob keeps vigil.”
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Naffah was a close friend of the couple, confirming here that mentioning Naffah was justified. In addition, Ghassan Tuéni translated the last text Nadia Tuéni published before her death — her testament piece — and suggested it be added to the volume, which was done, and it was an excellent addition at that. Some negotiation of meaning occurred in the area of religion. He insisted that, while his former wife was brought up as a Druze, and while her Druze belief in immortality and reincarnation was important, it was essential to emphasize other familial aspects of her multicultural identity (she was married to an Orthodox Christian and had a Christian mother). I was sometimes under the impression that Ghassan Tuéni wanted to minimize her Druze background. I added some Christian-marked words under his influence, on catharsis and the drama of forgiveness. He was my main source, of course, for biographical information on Nadia Tuéni. But Ghassan Tuéni also invited me to modify some minor political aspects of my text. As an example, I had written a sentence back in 2005 saying that the Taef agreements which ended the civil war in 1989 had not resolved all constitutional issues, far from it. Ghassan Tuéni has had and still has a very important role in Lebanon’s political, domestic, and international life (particularly as a former Lebanese ambassador to the United Nations), and took part in the work that led to the Taef agreements. He suggested writing that the Taef agreements “put an end to violence and constitutional crises,” and I corrected this sentence, with his consent, changing it into “put an end to violence and severe constitutional crises” (as there are other kinds of constitutional crises in Lebanon, these days, the recent delay in electing a new president being the latest example). There was also a debate on the 1982 Israeli invasion, and how it should be emphasized that the Israeli Army did not stay in Beirut but returned to the South relatively quickly. I have spoken thus far of my interactions as an editor/translator with both presses. I now want to give an example of collaborative work between the presses. This has to do with both production and reception, as it concerns the insertion of an image and how to “translate” it from one culture to another. Some preliminary information about a technical aspect of this edition might be useful here. The 2004 contract between Dar An-Nahar and Syracuse University Press that was signed after lengthy negotiations established a copublication in which
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production in toto would be done in Syracuse. The contract added that both parties should maintain a close exchange of ideas, suggestions, and information all through the period of production and distribution. This no doubt facilitated the processing of this collaborative edition and alleviated the challenges that would inevitably arise. There are two photographs on the book’s cover, one of Nadia Tuéni, and an AFP (Agence France-Presse) photograph of the civil war taken in 1976 and describing the aftermath of a bombing in Beirut, with one woman running away in tears among the debris and corpses. Ghassan Tuéni wanted a photograph of Nadia Tuéni, and Syracuse University Press went along with this suggestion and chose from a selection of Nadia Tuéni’s photographs assembled by Dar An-Nahar. This was not an issue. However, the photograph on the cover representing the scene of the bombing stems from an e-mail from Ghassan Tuéni, who remarked that instead of an idealized panoramic view of Lebanon — as suggested by Syracuse University Press — a war scene inspired by Lebanon as represented in Nadia Tuéni’s poetry would probably work best. Under his direction, Dar An-Nahar finally selected a photograph of a realistic scene from the war which, according to Ghassan Tuéni, corresponded perfectly to images that have inspired Nadia Tuéni’s Archives sentimentales. What the collaboration between the two presses indicates here, I think, is the way in which a text’s meaning, image, and identity may be adapted for the consumer in different cultures and markets. The expectations of a poetry reader may push the publisher to place material on the cover that is not necessarily consistent with the general meaning of a text as perceived by people belonging to the source culture. In what follows, I would like to address questions that also have to do with representation, although on a larger scale. In a time of globalization, how can one effectively keep a balance between what is specific to a given culture and what is part of the acceptable lingua franca of globalization? This will be analyzed through examples linked to problems posed by the representation of culture and religion. First, concerning the role of religion that I briefly alluded to earlier, how is one to explain the Druze religion in the limited space of an introduction, given that it plays such an important role in the poems? The Druze religion is all but unknown to the American public. For assistance with my concise account, I relied on the literary director from
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Dar An-Nahar, Farès Sassine, who emphasized a few central points beyond the fact that the Druze are heterodox Shiites. One important point I could never stress enough for the reader was the way this religion — really a way of life — permeates the existence of the people among whom Nadia Tuéni was born. A few words, however accurate they may be, cannot replace the experience of visiting the close universe of the Druze mountains, its medieval castles, its social and political climate, its cemeteries in which different modes of reincarnation are represented by water, sculptures, and the placement of the tombs around them: all things that helped me to understand Druze practices and Nadia Tuéni’s texts. Perhaps this type of information lies beyond the linguistic. It is part, I would submit, of what Maria Pinto calls the “documentary competence” of the translator. This concept, according to Pinto, includes the use of adequate information about the source culture, the translation process itself, and the ability to create new documents (for instance to accompany the translation). But it is also a technical competence that makes it possible to plan and handle the translation process effectively. 3 Further, and here I will only touch on a problem that has been widely studied, 4 how can one represent Lebanese culture, especially during the civil war? Specifically, are elements of a mythical Lebanon, according to Nadia Tuéni, recognizable, or at least perceivable, in the edited book? For instance, many of the places described by Nadia Tuéni are in Druze country, which is “overrepresented” compared to places sacred to Muslims or Christians. Here, Nadia Tuéni expresses her difference as a member of a minority, given that Lebanon is sometimes wrongly seen in the United States as a uniform country in a unified Arab world. But while one would expect Nadia Tuéni to defend (as many did during the war) the point of view of the extended families, minorities, and social groups to which she belonged as an upper-class Druze woman married to a Greek Orthodox Christian, in fact, it seems she is trying to reach out to the other sides of the conflict and express a sense of national unity in a country devastated by war. At the time, she was dying from cancer and succumbed one year after publishing the 1982 collection. It is difficult to “translate” her sense of –––––––––– 3 4
See Pinto, especially 106-10. See, for instance, the works by Ahmad Beydoun and Fadia Nassif Tar Kovacs.
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urgency and particular motivations in the complex context of Lebanese culture, politics, religion, society, or history at the time of the civil war. Also, some of the poems include words describing elements that are essential to Lebanese culture in general or to the context of the civil war in particular. However, one cannot always point to all of these words and their significance in each context. There is nothing like translation to give a feeling of incompleteness and imperfection. One can only hope that this effort in translation will be continued by readers, scholars, and other translators, since only a fraction of Nadia Tuéni’s works have been translated into English. I would like to end by reviewing some of the facilitating factors. The most important challenge was the translation issue itself. What helped here was a kind of diversity that some would probably call a form of hybridity. There were two different translators, one LebaneseAmerican poet and academic, and one American academic for the two collections of poems selected in the book, and this produced two very different cultural approaches to the poems. Of course, the challenge here for the editor was to harmonize their different styles and word choices so as to have a coherent volume. My intent at first was to translate only the 1982 collection of poems, and I had chosen a scholar who had experience with translations but who was not well known. The press introduced an author who had published a translation of the previous 1979 collection of poems, but this translation had not met a wide readership. The press first suggested that since this translator was relatively well known, the book would be more marketable if he were to produce a second set of translations of the 1982 collection. A negotiation ensued. Finally, I retained the translator chosen for the 1982 collection, and the translation of the previous 1979 collection was included in the book, because these two sets of collections — the last two written by the poet — shared the same focus on the Lebanese war. Combining two very different collections (one more traditional, the other more avant-gardist) made sense in this instance. The first one also served as a kind of introduction to the second, but this process, while I agreed to it, was not my first idea. I think the fact that this became a very collaborative enterprise between different points of view helped. I would concur here with Barbara Godard, who thinks that a collective (of) translator(s) works better when it comes to translating postcolonial literatures (see Godard).
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In the same fashion, from the beginning of this project, I was aware that a cross-cultural approach to the edition was the best way to proceed. To alleviate the difficulty presented by this approach, for the two essays published with the poems I retained two very different contributors, which I think allowed for different voices (poetic, academic), different approaches (comparatist, philosophic), different points of view (Muslim, Christian, Palestinian, Lebanese) and different cultures (Francophone, Anglophone, Arabophone) to be better heard in the book. This choice of translators and contributors, and the fact that I worked with both presses, allowed me to maintain a balance. I find myself here in line with what Gayatri Spivak has proposed, regarding the environment of translations that should be, according to her, attentive to the local specificities and differences of the source text and culture (Spivak). I also concur with her that the best way of doing this, and to resolve the challenges posed to the translator/editor by the dominant Western target market, is to include a critical apparatus that is as developed as possible. In the end, and to conclude with a remark on this practice of “in-betweeness” that some have seen as central to the translation and publication of postcolonial works, I would submit that negotiating meaning between linguistically and culturally different audiences was in the case of the edition/translation studied here an ongoing intercultural affair that was best resolved by working with a team in which very different points of view appeared. I understand that each edition and translation is unique, and my aim was not to present a model to be followed. This imperfect edition was also an experience that allowed me to learn hands-on about the problems faced by translators and editors of postcolonial texts originating from multilingual cultures. It is true that politics was at the heart of this enterprise, because politics, including international politics, was essential to the translated text. Other poems may not be so deeply involved with politics. It is also very probable that as an editor and a translator I may lack the necessary distance for analysis. It remains in my view that the role of a conscientious editor of a bilingual edition is not so much to make the different perspectives come together, but to remain attentive in presenting material that is diverse enough to accommodate the different members of the team who themselves represent different audiences.
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Bassnett, Susan, and André Lefevere, eds. Translation, History and Culture. London and New York: Pinter, 1990. Beydoun, Ahmad. Le Liban: Itinéraires dans une guerre incivile. Paris and Amman: Karthala & CERMOC, 1993. Godard, Barbara. “Translation as Culture.” Translation and Multilingualism: Post-Colonial Contexts. Ed. Shanta Ramakrishna. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 1997. 157-82. Kristeva, Julia. La Révolution du langage poétique. Paris: Seuil, 1974. Pinto, María. “Competencias del traductor de textos literarios desde la perspectiva documental.” Terminologie et traduction 3 (1999): 99-111. Robinson, Douglas. What is Translation? Centrifugal Theories, Critical Interventions. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997. Simon, Sherry. “Translation and Cultural Politics in Canada.” Translation and Multilingualism: Post-Colonial Contexts. Ed. Shanta Ramakrishna. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 1997. 192-204. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Tar Kovacs, Fadia Nassif. Les rumeurs dans la guerre du Liban. Les mots de la violence. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1998. Tuéni, Nadia. Archives sentimentales d’une guerre au Liban. Paris: Éditions Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1982. _____. Lebanon: Poems of Love and War / Liban: Poèmes d’amour et de guerre. Ed. Christophe Ippolito. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press and Beirut: Dar An-Nahar, 2006. _____. Liban: Vingt poèmes pour un amour. Beirut: Dar An-Nahar, 1979. Trans. Samuel Hazo as Lebanon: Twenty Poems for One Love. New York: Byblos Press, 1990. _____. Œuvres complètes. Vol. I: Poésies; Vol. II: La Prose. Ed. Jad Hatem. Collection Patrimoine. Beirut: Dar An-Nahar, 1986. Venuti, Lawrence, ed. Rethinking Translation. Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. _____. The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
FLS, Volume XXXVI, 2009
Translation
Cindy Merlin University of Colorado at Boulder
Vu d’ici et là-bas: Le roman contemporain français publié en traduction aux États-Unis Dans le monde de la traduction littéraire aux États-Unis, les critiques, les universitaires, les traducteurs et les éditeurs modèlent l’image de la littérature étrangère. En examinant la réception de l’œuvre d’Annie Ernaux, Jean Echenoz, Jean-Philippe Toussaint et Lydie Salvayre par les critiques et éditeurs américains, cette étude explore brièvement les facteurs qui influencent la sélection des titres traduits et le rôle de ceux qui façonnent, soutiennent ou infirment une certaine représentation du roman français outre-Atlantique.
________________________ Dans La Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu définit la culture comme une entité construite par une élite, ce qu’il appelle les “producteurs de la culture”. De même, aux États-Unis, la culture et la littérature étrangères sont façonnées par une autorité. François Cusset remarquait ainsi alors qu’il était directeur de la French Publisher’s Agency que ce qui permet souvent à des livres français de traverser l’Atlantique, c’est une “distorsion ou une réception un peu en diagonale des textes, récupérés dans une problématique spécifique” (Vantroys 31). Cet article propose donc d’examiner le rôle de ceux qui construisent, confirment ou infirment ces perceptions, de mettre à jour les facteurs qui influencent la sélection des titres traduits et de comprendre les raisons pour lesquelles seuls quelques-uns sont retenus à l’instar de beaucoup d’autres. Le public américain ne s’intéresse pas à la littérature étrangère, du moins est-ce le consensus dans le monde de l’édition européenne.
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Ainsi, lorsque — occurrence rare — cette littérature est disponible en traduction, elle passe dans la majorité des cas inaperçue. C’est ce tableau affligeant qui pousse un certain nombre d’éditeurs, traducteurs et critiques en Europe et outre-Atlantique à dénoncer une crise de la littérature en traduction. Incontestablement, il existe un profond déséquilibre entre l’Europe et les États-Unis: entre 10 et 25% des livres publiés sur le marché européen sont traduits de l’étranger; aux ÉtatsUnis, ce chiffre est inférieur à 3% (Venuti). John O’Brien, éditeur américain, n’hésite pas à parler d’une “crise” de la traduction littéraire. En France, Pierre Lepape note “l’échange de plus en plus inégal entre les États-Unis […] et les autres nations” (24) tandis que Lawrence Venuti remarque: “American publishers reap huge profits from the sale of their books overseas, but they invest appallingly little in the translation of foreign books. […] The implications are potentially far-reaching and deeply troubling”. La littérature étrangère aux États-Unis doit faire face à une réalité doublement sévère. La première difficulté consiste à trouver un éditeur qui accepte d’investir l’argent et l’effort nécessaires à la traduction d’un livre; la seconde difficulté réside dans le fait que les traductions se vendent très mal. Malgré ce contexte exigeant, la langue française se situe remarquablement bien puisqu’elle se trouve en première place parmi les langues traduites vers l’anglais aux États-Unis. Si Knopf, Pantheon et Norton continuent aujourd’hui à publier épisodiquement quelques titres traduits du français, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Grove et Braziller — pourtant très investis dans la littérature étrangère pendant les années d’après-guerre — ont de leur côté cédé la place aux petits éditeurs, tels Dalkey Archive Press, New Press, University of Nebraska Press et Seven Stories Press. Malgré des moyens et une influence limités, ces maisons s’efforcent de maintenir un catalogue cohérent et de suivre la production littéraire étrangère contemporaine, notamment la production française. Toutefois ces petits éditeurs dépendent souvent d’un cercle limité de conseillers et n’ont pas toujours accès à l’étendue de la production littéraire étrangère. Ces conseillers, avec leurs préférences et motivations personnelles, décident ainsi du sort de la fiction française contemporaine aux États-Unis et lui ouvrent les portes des maisons d’édition, ce qui pourrait expliquer la traduction de textes d’une si grande variété. Du reste, la publication d’un texte ne garantit en aucun
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cas son succès commercial, et les petits éditeurs — ceux-là même qui proposent le plus de traductions — ont rarement les moyens de promouvoir leurs livres auprès d’un public non-universitaire. La véritable promotion se fait, essentiellement, par l’intermédiaire de la presse. C’est elle qui approuve et soutient les titres qui, au final, représenteront aux yeux du public américain l’ensemble de la scène littéraire française actuelle. Cependant, ce que les critiques choisissent de mettre en avant dans leurs articles ne recoupe pas nécessairement les intérêts des éditeurs. Le cadre de cette étude se limitant aux romans parus en France après 1980 et dont les auteurs sont français ou originaires de pays francophones, les auteurs étrangers de langue française tels Andreï Makine et Julia Kristeva, tous deux par ailleurs largement traduits aux États-Unis, se trouvent exclus. Selon ces critères, il apparaît que Maryse Condé est la plus traduite aux États-Unis. Elle est suivie de près par Annie Ernaux et Jean Echenoz, qui comptent respectivement huit et sept traductions à leur actif. Viennent ensuite Lydie Salvayre, Claude Simon, Patrick Chamoiseau, Marie Redonnet et Jean-Philippe Toussaint qui ont tous été traduits à cinq reprises; puis Paule Constant, Marguerite Duras, Tahar Ben Jelloun et Hervé Guibert qui comptent chacun quatre traductions à leur actif. 1 Une vingtaine d’écrivains complètent ce tableau. Se partageant la cinquième place, avec trois livres traduits, se trouvent Éric Chevillard, Marie Darrieussecq, Assia Djebar, Christian Gailly, Michel Houellebecq, Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio (récipiendaire du prix Nobel de littérature 2008), 2 Malika Mokeddem, Amélie Nothomb, Christian Oster, Gisèle Pineau, Jean Rouaud et Jean-Christophe Ruffin, 3 tandis qu’on retrouve au bas de la liste, avec deux traductions à leur actif, Marcel Bénabou, Anna Gavalda, Sylvie Germain, Roger Grenier, Jacqueline Harpman, Amin Maalouf, Patrick Modiano, Marie Nimier, Erik Orsenna, Olivier –––––––––– 1
Voir à l’annexe 1 les titres des auteurs dont quatre romans ou plus ont été traduits aux États-Unis. 2 Au sujet de Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio, il faut signaler que bien que seuls trois de ses romans parus en France après 1980 aient été traduits, nombre de ses précédents romans l’ont aussi été: Le Procès-verbal (The Interrogation, 1964), Le Déluge (The Flood, 1967), Terra Amata (Terra Amata, 1969), Le Livre des fuites (The Book of Flights, 1972), La Guerre (War, 1973) et Les Géants (The Giants, 1975). 3 Voir à l’annexe 2 les titres des auteurs dont trois romans ont été traduits aux États-Unis.
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Rolin, Jacques Roubaud, Didier Van Cauwelaert, Tanguy Viel et Antoine Volodine. 4 Des écrivains très différents se partagent donc l’exclusivité des trois premières places du palmarès: Ernaux, Echenoz et Condé. Ils constituent une liste pour le moins éclectique, du roman d’espionnage revisité à l’autofiction et à la francophonie. Par ailleurs, les tendances que l’on peut observer en France ne se confirment pas nécessairement outre-Atlantique. Ainsi, Oster, Toussaint et Echenoz, tous publiés aux Éditions de Minuit, ne rencontrent pas le même engouement aux États-Unis et Marie Redonnet, dont on parle très peu en France, semble être parvenue à pénétrer le marché américain pourtant réputé difficile. Parmi les romanciers traduits aux États-Unis, quatre m’ont semblé mettre en évidence des traits distinctifs et représentatifs des tendances observées. Je me pencherai de la sorte sur l’œuvre d’Annie Ernaux, Jean Echenoz, Jean-Philippe Toussaint et Lydie Salvayre. Chacun d’entre eux interpelle le lecteur américain à sa manière — , Ernaux pour ses récits autobiographiques, Echenoz pour ses parodies policières, Toussaint pour son humour et Salvayre pour son engagement social et politique. L’étude de la réception de ces auteurs aux États-Unis me permettra d’esquisser un rapide état des lieux du roman contemporain français outre-Atlantique et de voir comment celui-ci est perçu et présenté par les critiques et éditeurs américains. Pour promouvoir Annie Ernaux, Seven Stories Press, qui a publié ou réédité la plupart de ses traductions aux États-Unis, met en avant le genre autobiographique, les motifs typiquement féminins, l’écriture rude et dépouillée et le courage de l’écrivain qui n’hésite pas à dire l’interdit. À l’opposé, Dalkey Archive Press vante l’originalité d’une œuvre en rupture avec la tradition littéraire française et minimise l’importance de la matière dramatique féminine au profit de questions sociales plus vastes dans lesquelles une plus grande gamme de lecteurs pourra se retrouver. La presse américaine admet parfois que les romans d’Ernaux côtoient le mélodrame ou d’autres motifs trop connus, néanmoins elle s’empresse de relever d’autres caractéristiques qui –––––––––– 4 Voir à l’annexe 3 les titres des auteurs dont deux romans ont été traduits aux États-Unis.
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font, à ses yeux, leur originalité et qui rachètent leurs faiblesses. 5 Pour compléter ce portrait de la romancière, les critiques ne manquent pas de faire quelques rapprochements avec d’autres “valeurs sûres” de la littérature française, Simone de Beauvoir et Albert Camus. 6 Seconde au palmarès, l’œuvre d’Echenoz plaît outre-Atlantique pour ses aventures typiquement parisiennes, parodies intelligentes du roman d’espionnage saturées d’humour, de références à la culture pop, d’enlèvements et de poursuites à main armée. L’originalité et la valeur littéraire des romans d’Echenoz n’échappent pourtant pas aux critiques qui soulignent la manipulation des traditions du genre romanesque et la précision de l’écriture, 7 mais au final, comme le remarque Caryn James, le lecteur américain retiendra certainement le nom du romancier pour ses personnages détectives amateurs et ses intrigues, échafaudées autour de deux des thèmes favoris de la culture pop, la –––––––––– 5 Citons quelques critiques à titre d’exemples: “Simple Passion […] is part semiotic treatise and part Harlequin romance, and all the better for the combination of high and low. […] [I]t embraces the crazed adolescent behavior that can crop up at any age, yet is intelligent enough to wrap those details in a taut literary shape and defiantly unemotional language” (James, “Who Can…”); “With a spare, almost coded prose style […] Ms. Ernaux makes of her generic topics infinitely original books” (Danto, “When Mother”); “What makes Happening more than a clichéd tale of youthful misadventure and botched abortion is [the character’s] reaction to her pregnancy” (Press, “Vagina Monologues”); “I Remain in Darkness is a small, powerful, and overwritten memoir […]. Too often, […] poignant scenes are dampened by the memoirist’s insistence on spelling things out” (I Remain in Darkness, Kirkus). 6 Ginger Danto écrit ainsi: “Like de Beauvoir, with whom she has been compared, Ms. Ernaux all but relinquishes any pretense of fiction (“When Mother”); tandis que Miranda Seymour remarque: “Some critics have compared [Ernaux] to Simone de Beauvoir, but the reasonable, balanced voice I hear echoing behind her is that of Albert Camus” (6). 7 Au sujet de l’écriture de Jean Echenoz, citons en particulier Warren Motte: “The principal hallmarks of Echenoz’s style are his laconism, his dry wit, and the precision with which he chooses words and images” (“Reading Jean Echenoz” 6); ainsi que Susan Ireland qui écrit dans sa critique de Big Blondes: “Mark Polizzotti’s fine translation does an excellent job of capturing Echenoz’s hallmark style: his clever wordplay, unexpected turns of phrase, and idiosyncratic humor”. Concernant la manipulation des conventions romanesques, citons Izzy Grinspan: “[Chopin’s Move] is a nod to the espionage genre”; ainsi que Paul Kafka-Gibbons: “I’m Gone combines the policier, the cultural essay and the urban sex novel to create a vivid, entertaining hybrid”. Warren Motte écrit également: “In his early novels Echenoz often borrowed basic plot structure from a variety of tried-and-tested genres, recasting it dramatically to his own purposes, and exploiting its potential for parody along the way” (“Reading Jean Echenoz” 6).
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célébrité et le crime (“Guy Noir”). Dalkey Archive Press et New Press vantent le sens de l’humour et du détail du romancier et mettent en avant son Prix Goncourt. Toute comparaison ou toute vignette susceptible de provoquer l’intérêt du lecteur est consciencieusement étudiée et exploitée par les éditeurs et critiques américains au risque d’en arriver à des rapprochements parfois incongrus. Ainsi selon la critique américaine, l’œuvre d’Echenoz se situerait quelque part entre Dashiell Hammett, Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce, John-Patrick Donleavy, Raymond Queneau, Joseph Conrad, Dick Tracy, l’existentialisme et le Nouveau Roman. 8 Auteurs, titres et genres deviennent ce que Pierre Bourdieu appelle des “œuvres-témoins”, des références “consciemment ou inconsciemment retenues parce qu’elles présentent à un degré particulièrement élevé les qualités reconnues, de manière plus ou moins explicite, comme pertinentes dans un système de classement déterminé” (54). Grâce à ces rapprochements, le critique signifie que le livre nouvellement paru partage des traits avec des œuvres établies au patrimoine littéraire international. Il importe peu que ces rapprochements soient surprenants ou discutables, leur rôle se limite à créer des associations dans l’esprit du lecteur, de lier une œuvre nouvelle à une œuvre d’art, un genre nouveau à un genre établi. Jean-Philippe Toussaint, lui aussi comme Jean Echenoz publié aux Éditions de Minuit depuis son premier roman, ne connaît pas autant de succès outre-Atlantique. La presse américaine loue principalement le sens de l’humour de Toussaint; les mêmes adjectifs reviennent invariablement: “charming, humorous, comical, amusing, agreeable, delightful, funny, hilarious, entertaining”. 9 Pour la critique –––––––––– 8
Citons quelques critiques à titre d’exemples: “[In I’m Gone] Ferrer’s solitude is vaguely reminiscent of the lonely characters of Joyce’s Dubliners or even Donleavy’s The Ginger Man” (Paddock 160); “Double Jeopardy […] is a zany adventure story reminiscent of both Conrad and Dick Tracy” (Ireland, Double Jeopardy); “The precision of [Echenoz’s] prose is part Flaubert, part nouveau roman, and his sardonic take on Hammett’s hard-boiled detective fiction is pure art” (James, “Guy Noir”); “[Double Jeopardy is] full of little twists and crackles of linguistic static […]. Raymond Queneau, meet Gilbert and Sullivan” (Double Jeopardy, Kirkus); “I’m Gone cooks up a very French mélange of existential self-making, Queneauvian trickery, and nouveau roman-ish preoccupation with surfaces” (Berrett 82). 9 Citons ici à titre d’exemples: “Television [is] a charming, meandering sliver of fiction” (Press, “Le Boob”); “In this delightful short novel [Television], […] Toussaint has a wonderfully wry, tart sense of humor that permeates the comical social satire”
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américaine, toujours à la recherche d’une caractéristique, d’un genre, d’une école, chaque auteur a sa marque propre. Celle de Toussaint est d’écrire des livres courts, amusants et divertissants qui mettent en scène des personnages simples et humains, désolants de banalité et d’inertie; et ce sont incidemment les mêmes caractéristiques que les éditeurs américains de Jean-Philippe Toussaint mettent en avant dans leurs catalogues. Après les confidences d’Ernaux, les péripéties d’Echenoz et l’humour de Toussaint, l’œuvre de Lydie Salvayre apparaît plus dure, plus critique. C’est une œuvre aux accents clairement sociopolitiques dont l’humour perçant et l’ironie divertissent en même temps qu’ils défient et interpellent le lecteur. Selon la presse américaine, l’ironie, la colère et l’indignation de l’auteur mettent mal à l’aise, confrontent, déstabilisent et accusent. Toutefois, les deux éditeurs américains de Salvayre, Four Walls Eight Windows et Dalkey Archive Press, vont beaucoup moins loin dans leurs catalogues. Selon eux, l’œuvre de Salvayre serait plus impertinente qu’elle ne serait ironique; elle inviterait le lecteur plus qu’elle ne le provoquerait; elle dénoncerait plus qu’elle ne s’engagerait réellement. 10 On pourrait aisément parler de littérature engagée (Motte, “Reading Lydie Salvayre”), néanmoins les éditeurs américains de Salvayre ne misent pas sur cette caractéristique et refusent de contraindre ses livres à cette catégorisation. ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– (Trachtenberg); “[In Television] Toussaint gradually paints an endearingly funny portrait of a mildly obsessive introvert […], most readers will be charmed […]. Very entertaining indeed” (Television, Kirkus); “[In Monsieur] one soon finds Monsieur’s unflappable style amusing and is seduced by his deadpan sense of the absurd” (Danto, “No Zeal”); “From its opening sentence, […] [The Bathroom] carries its deadpan voice like an expert waiter balancing platters. The choreography that follows is elegant and entertaining” (Mendelsohn). 10 Tandis qu’Adam Klein remarque au sujet de Everyday Life, “[The novel] is a wise and caustic take on the corporate office, one that confronts us with the dangers that come with the craving from constancy and job security”, Dalkey Archive Press se contente d’écrire, “Sabotage, alcohol, and kindness become the arsenal in a conflict fought across copy rooms and office parties”. Par ailleurs, Rachel Kushner note au sujet de The Company of Ghosts, “It seems more likely that [Salvayre] resorts to the testimonial because it comes naturally to her as the form in which story, character and biting sociopolitical irony most effectively dwell”, alors que Dalkey Archive Press écrit simplement, “Lydie Salvayre picks at the sores of recent French history, impertinently exposing continuities of authoritarianism”.
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Il ressort de ce rapide état des lieux que les tendances sont plutôt encourageantes: sept romanciers contemporains ont vu au moins cinq de leurs livres traduits tandis que de nombreux autres ont été traduits à trois ou à quatre reprises. Lucinda Karter à la French Publisher’s Agency remarque ainsi depuis quelques années un renouveau du livre français aux États-Unis. Elle écrivait dans La Lettre en septembre 2003 que la littérature française traduite en anglais “ne se port[ait] pas si mal”; en janvier 2005 elle constatait que le public américain montrait un nouvel “intérêt pour la fiction française”, et en août 2005 elle remarquait que le livre français “continu[ait] sa marche en avant, entamant les bastions de la fiction anglo-saxonne avec régularité”. Enfin, elle notait en janvier 2006 un “changement positif dans l’intérêt des éditeurs américains en particulier pour la fiction française, qui [avait] connu un essor aux États-Unis dernièrement”. Plus encore, elle remarquait en janvier 2008 que les États-Unis s’ouvrent à la production littéraire internationale. Nous entrons aux États-Unis […] dans une nouvelle ère d’appréciation des livres venant d’ailleurs. Ces dernières années, plusieurs initiatives tels le Pen Literary Festival, Words Without Borders et World in Translation Month ont déjà annoncé un plus grand intérêt pour la traduction. En 2007, de nouveaux événements n’ont fait que confirmer cette tendance: BookExpo America, Miami Dade College, Pen American Center, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, WWB et Críticas ont présenté lors de la Miami International BookFair une journée dédiée au sujet. C’est le signe évident d’un changement: la mise en valeur des écrivains d’ailleurs et des éditeurs qui les publient. (21)
Où est donc la crise que tant dénoncent? Selon Pierre Lepape, il ne s’agirait pas tant d’une crise de la traduction que d’une crise globale de l’édition. Dans le monde entier, l’édition et la lecture ont pris une nouvelle direction et se retrouvent aujourd’hui partagées entre deux idéaux. D’un côté, le modèle classique de la “libre circulation des affects des idées et de leur universelle confrontation”, de l’autre, le modèle néocapitaliste d’une économie de marché selon laquelle le travail éditorial consiste à “analyser, interpréter et satisfaire les attentes du public en s’ajustant constamment à ses désirs, et à écarter ce qui ne s’y conforme pas” (25). Ce serait donc l’industrie du livre à l’échelle internationale qui serait en péril et les
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inquiétudes des professionnels de la traduction se perdraient dans le fond d’un constat plus alarmant. La responsable des droits étrangers d’une grande maison d’édition parisienne dont je ne suis pas libre de révéler le nom rappelle en effet l’importance du rôle des éditeurs, en Europe et aux États-Unis. C’est à eux que revient la décision de suivre ou de précéder le marché, de prendre des risques et publier des titres novateurs, ou de se plier aux tendances et répondre à une demande préexistante. Elle explique également que, en sélectionnant leurs titres d’après les recommandations d’un universitaire ou d’un critique plutôt que celles d’un professionnel de la traduction littéraire, les maisons américaines font souvent des choix éditoriaux regrettables. Ces choix devraient revenir, selon elle, au responsable des droits étrangers qui remplit le rôle du “passeur”; c’est à lui que doit incomber la responsabilité de concilier les besoins d’une maison d’édition, les attributs d’un auteur, la demande du public et les particularités d’un marché. Néanmoins la réalité américaine veut que le concept et le poste d’“éditeur” (“publisher” en anglais) n’existent plus que dans les petites maisons et la littérature étrangère s’en trouve considérablement désavantagée. Les valeurs incarnées dans les années d’après-guerre par Alfred et Blanche Knopf, Kurt Wolff (qui a fondé Pantheon en 1942) et Barney Rosset (qui a racheté Grove Press en 1952) ne commandent plus le marché de la traduction; François Cusset remarque ainsi: Dans les grandes maisons, le pouvoir de décision a récemment basculé de l’éditorial au marketing. Or, les responsables du marketing sont souvent des gens qui ne viennent pas de l’édition. Ils sont chargés avant tout de garantir les ventes d’un livre, et considèrent avec une espèce de préjugé très américain qu’une traduction est forcément élitiste. Quant aux quelques éditeurs de qualité qui ont réussi à survivre dans l’industrie du livre, ils sont peu nombreux, ont peu de pouvoir et beaucoup moins de marge de manœuvre qu’il y a dix ans. (Vantroys 31)
Par ailleurs, le public américain semble ne s’être jamais défait de l’image de la littérature française des années 1950 et 1960, image paradoxalement négative si l’on considère le succès que le livre français connaissait outre-Atlantique à l’époque. Jacqueline Favero, présidente de la commission des droits étrangers au Syndicat national de
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l’édition, remarque ainsi que le livre français “a longtemps souffert de l’image négative du nouveau roman” (Vantroys 31). François Cusset explique également qu’aux yeux du public américain la littérature française est faite de “nombrilisme et de formalisme” et qu’elle est perçue comme une littérature qui “s’autodétruit, qui ne veut pas avoir de lecteurs et qui a annulé toute histoire” (Vantroys 31). Quelques éditeurs américains considèrent au contraire que la fiction française contemporaine a depuis longtemps dépassé cette tradition. Dan Simon chez Seven Stories Press explique: “la fiction française […] est plus ouverte, plus internationale qu’il y a quinze ans […]. Elle est moins cérébrale, moins formaliste, déterminée davantage par les personnages et le souci de la vraie vie” (Cusset 58). Il reste néanmoins au roman français à prouver aux grandes maisons d’édition qu’il peut de nouveau intéresser le public américain; en attendant, c’est sur les petites maisons que repose l’espoir de la littérature française outre-Atlantique. Annexe 1 Ben Jelloun, Tahar. Corruption. Trad. Carol Volk. New York: New Press, 1995. _____. The Last Friend. Trad. Kevin Michel Cape. New York: New Press, 2006. _____. This Blinding Absence of Light. Trad. Linda Coverdale. New York: New Press, 2002. _____. With Downcast Eyes. Trad. Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Bulfinch Press, 1993. Chamoiseau, Patrick. Childhood. Trad. Carol Volk. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. _____. Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows. Trad. Linda Coverdale. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. _____. School Days. Trad. Linda Coverdale. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. _____. Solibo Magnificent. Trad. Rose-Myriam Réjouis et Val Vinokurov. New York: Pantheon, 1997. _____. Texaco. Trad. Rose-Myriam Réjouis et Val Vinokurov. New York: Pantheon, 1997. Condé, Maryse. The Children of Segu. Trad. Linda Coverdale. New York: Viking, 1989.
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_____. Crossing the mangrove. Trad. Richard Philcox. New York: AnchorDoubleday, 1995. _____. Desirada. Trad. Richard Philcox. New York: Soho Press, 2000. _____. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Trad. Richard Philcox. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992. _____. The Last of the African Kings. Trad. Richard Philcox. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. _____. A Season in Rihata. Trad. Richard Philcox. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1988. _____. Segu. Trad. Barbara Bray. New York: Viking, 1987. _____. The Story of the Cannibal Woman. Trad. Richard Philcox. New York: Atria Books, 2007. _____. Tree of Life. Trad. Victoria Reiter. New York: Ballantine, 1992. _____. Who Slashed Célanire’s Throat? Trad. Richard Philcox. New York: Washington Square Press, 2004. _____. Windward Heights. Trad. Richard Philcox. New York: Soho Press, 1999. Constant, Paule. The Governor’s Daughter. Trad. Betsy Wing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. _____. Ouregano. Trad. Margaret Miller. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2005. _____. Trading Secrets. Trad. Betsy Wing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. _____. White Spirit. Trad. Betsy Wing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Duras, Marguerite. No More. Trad. Richard Howard. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998. _____. The North China Lover. Trad. Leigh Hafrey. New York: New Press, 1992. _____. The War. Trad. Barbara Bray. New York: New Press, 1994. _____. Yann Andrea Steiner. Trad. Mark Polizzotti. New York: Archipelago Books, 2006. Echenoz, Jean. Big Blondes. Trad. Mark Polizzotti. New York: New Press, 1998. _____. Cherokee. Trad. Mark Polizzotti. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. _____. Chopin’s Move. Trad. Mark Polizzotti. Normal, Ill: Dalkey Archive Press, 2004. _____. Double Jeopardy. Trad. Mark Polizzotti. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.
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_____. I’m Gone. Trad. Mark Polizzotti. New York: New Press, 2001. _____. Piano. Trad. Mark Polizzotti. New York: New Press, 2004. _____. Ravel. Trad. Linda Coverdale. New York: New Press, 2007. Ernaux, Annie. Exteriors. Trad. Tanya Leslie. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1996. _____. A Frozen Woman. Trad. Linda Coverdale. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995. _____. Happening. Trad. Tanya Leslie. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001. _____. I Remain in Darkness. Trad. Tanya Leslie. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999. _____. A Man’s Place. Trad. Tanya Leslie. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1992. _____. Shame. Trad. Tanya Leslie. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998. _____. Simple Passion. Trad. Tanya Leslie. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993. _____. A Woman’s Story. Trad. Tanya Leslie. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991. Guibert, Hervé. Blindsight. Trad. James Kirkup. New York: Braziller, 1996. _____. The Compassionate Protocol. Trad. James Kirkup. New York: Braziller, 1993. _____. My Parents. Trad. Liz Heron. New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1993. _____. To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. Trad. Linda Coverdale. New York: Atheneum/MacMillan, 1991. Redonnet, Marie. Candy Story. Trad. Alexandra Quinn. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. _____. Forever Valley. Trad. Jordan Stump. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. _____. Nevermore. Trad. Jordan Stump. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. _____. Rose Mellie Rose. Trad. Jordan Stump. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. _____. Splendid Hotel. Trad. Jordan Stump. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Salvayre, Lydie. The Award. Trad. Jane Davey. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997. _____. The Company of Ghosts. Trad. Christopher Woodall. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2006.
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_____. Everyday Life. Trad. Jane Kuntz. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2006. _____. The Lecture. Trad. Linda Coverdale. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005. _____. The Power of Flies. Trad. Jane Kuntz. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007. Simon, Claude. The Acacia. Trad. Richard Howard. New York: Pantheon, 1990. _____. The Georgics. Trad. Beryl et John Fletcher. New York: Riverrun Press, 1989. _____. The Invitation. Trad. Jim Cross. Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991. _____. The Jardin des Plantes. Trad. Jordan Stump. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001. _____. The Trolley. Trad. Richard Howard. New York: New Press, 2002. Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. The Bathroom. Trad. Nancy Amphoux et Paul De Angelis. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008. _____. Camera. Trad. Matthew B. Smith. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008. _____. Making Love. Trad. Linda Coverdale. New York: New Press, 2004. _____. Monsieur. Trad. John Lambert. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008. _____. Television. Trad. Jordan Stump. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2004.
Annexe 2 Chevillard, Eric. The Crab Nebula. Trad. Jordan Stump et Eleanor Hardin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. _____. On the Ceiling. Trad. Jordan Stump. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. _____. Palafox. Trad. Wyatt Mason. New York: Archipelago Books, 2004. Darrieussecq, Marie. My Phantom Husband. Trad. Esther Allen. New York: New Press, 1999. _____. Pig Tales. Trad. Linda Coverdale. New York: New Press, 1997. _____. Undercurrents. Trad. Linda Coverdale. New York: New Press, 2000. Djebar, Assia. Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade. Trad. Dorothy Blair. London, New York: Quartet, 1985. _____. A Sister to Sheherazade. Trad. Dorothy Blair. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993.
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_____. So Vast the Prison. Trad. Betsy Wing. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999. Gailly, Christian. An Evening at the Club. Trad. Susan Fairfield. New York: Other Press, 2003. _____. The Passion of Martin Fissel-Brandt. Trad. Melanie Kemp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. _____. Red Haze. Trad. Brian Evenson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Houellebecq, Michel. The Elementary Particles. Trad. Frank Wynne. New York: Knopf, 2000. _____. Platform. Trad. Frank Wynne. New York: Knopf, 2003. _____. The Possibility of an Island. Trad. Gavin Bowd. New York: Knopf, 2006. Le Clézio, G. Jean-Marie. Onitsha. Trad. Alison Anderson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. _____. The Prospector. Trad. Carol Marks. Boston: David Godine, 1993. _____. Wandering Star. Trad. C. Dickson. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone, 2004. Mokeddem, Malika. Century of Locusts. Trad. Laura Rice. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. _____. The Forbidden Woman. Trad. K. Melissa Marcus. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. _____. Of Dreams and Assassins. Trad. K. Melissa Marcus. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000. Nothomb, Amélie. The Book of Proper Names. Trad. Shaun Whiteside. New York: Martin’s Press, 2004. _____. The Character of Rain. Trad. Timothy Bent. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003. _____. Fear and Trembling. Trad. Adriana Hunter. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. Oster, Christian. My Big Apartment. Trad. Jordan Stump. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. _____. A Cleaning Woman. Trad. Mark Polizzotti. New York: Other Press, 2003. _____. The Unforeseen. Trad. Adriana Hunter. New York: Other Press, 2007. Pineau, Gisèle. Devil’s Dance. Trad. C. Dickson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. _____. Exile according to Julia. Trad. Betty Wilson. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.
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_____. Macadam Dreams. Trad. C. Dickson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Rouaud, Jean. Fields of Glory. Trad. Ralph Manheim. New York: Arcade, 1992. _____. Of Illustrious Men. Trad. Barbara Wright. New York: Arcade, 1994. _____. The World More or Less. Trad. Barbara Wright. New York: Arcade, 1998. Ruffin, Jean-Christophe. The Abyssinian. Trad. Willard Wood. New York: Norton, 2000. _____. Brazil Red. Trad. Willard Wood. New York: Norton, 2004. _____. The Siege of Isfahan. Trad. Willard Wood. New York: Norton, 2001.
Annexe 3 Bénabou, Marcel. Jacob, Mehahem, and Mimoun. Trad. Steven Rendall. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. _____. To Write on Tamara? Trad. Steven Rendall. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Gavalda, Anna. Hunting and Gathering. Trad. Alison Anderson. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007. _____. Someone I Loved. Trad. Euan Cameron. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005. Germain, Sylvie. The Book of Nights. Trad. Christine Donougher. Boston: David Godine, 1993. _____. Night of Amber. Trad. Christine Donougher. Boston: David Godine, 2000. Grenier, Roger. Another November. Trad. Alice Kaplan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. _____. Piano Music for Four Hands. Trad. Alice Kaplan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Harpman, Jacqueline. I Who Have Never Known Men. Trad. Ros Schwartz. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997. _____. Orlanda. Trad. Ros Schwartz. New York : Seven Stories Press, 1999. Maalouf, Amin. Balthasar’s Odyssey. Trad. Barbara Bray. New York: Arcade, 2002. _____. Origins. Trad. Catherine Temerson. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2008. Modiano, Patrick. Honeymoon. Trad. Barbara Wright. Boston: David Godine, 1995.
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