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Stealing the Fire in French and Francophone Literature and Film: Adaptation,

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FRENCH LITERATURE SERIES

Editor

James Day

Editorial Board
University of South Carolina

William Edmiston

Daniela DiCecco

Freeman G. Henry

Jeanne Garane

Paul Allen Miller

Nancy E. Lane

Marja Warehime

Jeffery C. Persels

Advisory Board

Michael T. Cartwright

Pierre Ronzeaud

McGill University

Université de Provence

Ross Chambers

Franc Schuerewegen

University of Michigan

Université d’Anvers /

Université Radboud (Nimègue)

Roland Desné

Albert Sonnenfeld

Université de Reims

University of Southern California

Ralph Heyndels

Marie-Odile Sweetser

University of Miami

University of Illinois at Chicago

Norris J. Lacy

Ronald W. Tobin

Pennsylvania State University

University of California, Santa Barbara

Gerald Prince

Dirk Van der Cruysse

University of Pennsylvania

Universiteit Antwerpen

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(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 submis-

sions 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 transla-
tor-scholars. A published translator herself, Jeanne has provided a de-
tailed 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 solu-
tions, and the problematic market for translations of foreign literature
in the U.S.

Acknowledgment goes also to the editorial board, which deter-

mined 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 Lan-
guages, Literatures, and Cultures, to the program in Comparative Lit-
erature, and to the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of
South Carolina for their generous support.

James Day

Contents

Introduction

Public Language and the Aesthetics of the Translating City

Sherry Simon

Translation and the Triumph of French:
the Case of the Decameron

Marian Rothstein

This Time “the Translation is Beautiful, Smooth, and True”:

Theorizing Retranslation with the Help of Beauvoir

Luise von Flotow

Redefining Translation through Self-Translation:
The Case of Nancy Huston

Carolyn Shread

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

Translation as Revelation

Marjolijn de Jager

Werewere Liking as Translator and Translated

Cheryl Toman

101

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

131

Object Lessons: Metaphors of Agency in
Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” and
Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique

Rose-Myriam Réjouis

147

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

161

Intercultural Politics: Translating Postcolonial
Lebanese Literature in the United States

Christophe Ippolito

179

Vu d’ici et là-bas: Le roman contemporain français
publié en traduction aux États-Unis

Cindy Merlin

191

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 36

Annual French Literature Conference at the University of South Caro-
lina to address the theme, “Translation in/and French and Franco-
phone Literature and Film.” The resulting variety in approaches to
translation that characterize the essays collected here reflects the cur-
rent state of Translation Studies as a vast, international, and interdis-
ciplinary field whose scope continues to expand. Despite growing
attention to the field in the United States, however, translation contin-
ues 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 Invisi-

bility, contemporary English-language translation continues to privi-
lege 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 shad-
ow. This “masking” is coterminous with the denial of the translator’s
legal status as author, so that translations are not only often effec-
tuated for relatively little pay, but they are also denied the kind of
copyright protection afforded to authors of “original works” because

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

translations are viewed as derivative and secondary.

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 acknowl-
edgement 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 repre-
sented here testifies to the current diversity of the field, from feminist
translation practices to issues surrounding nationalism, postcoloni-
ality, and globalization, to accounts of personal translational and edi-
torial 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 over-
turns 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,” transla-
tion 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.” Neverthe-
less, 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, “lan-
guage relations are part of the imaginative world that defines the city.”
In “Translation and the Triumph of French: the Case of the Decam-

––––––––––

See “A Call to Action” in The Translator’s Invisibility, 311-13.

Introduction xi

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 Decam-
eron from Tuscan into French are appropriative acts, instances of
cultural conquest, whereby the “original” is consumed through imita-
tion 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 im-
perial 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,” inter-
rogates the very possibility of a final “best” translation of any given
text. Instead, through recent critical reappraisals of Simone de Beau-
voir’s translated works, von Flotow proposes a feminist view of
translation as “a work of seriality and generation” (author’s empha-
sis), 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. Criti-
cal neglect of self-translation, Shread argues, can be tied to a “mono-
lingual 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

xii

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

poème Le Jeu et d’extraits de ses traductions en anglais et en hon-
grois,” 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 interpreta-
tive 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 “own-
ership” 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 xiii

translator of the English-language subtitles completely subverts
Schweitzer’s message through a deliberate mistranslation, unbe-
knownst to the filmmaker himself, as Curtius discovers in an inter-
view.

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 Chamoi-
seau’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 con-
nection 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 dis-
crete insider-outsiderness in Benjamin’s work foreshadows Nazi dis-
course on Jews as Europe’s “threatening insider-outsiders.”

In “Translating Maryse Condé’s Célanire cou-coupé: Disloca-

tions 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 Guadelou-
pean 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

xiv

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

demands of an Anglo-American market that favors fluency and trans-
parency rather than opacity.

Christophe Ippolito’s “Intercultural Politics: Translating Post-

Colonial 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 con-
text. Ippolito concludes that the negotiation of meaning between two
culturally different audiences can be facilitated both by a well-
developed critical apparatus and by working with a team of translators
able to present multiple points of view. Similarly, in “Vu d’ici et là-
bas: Le roman contemporain français publié en traduction aux États-
Unis,” 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 collec-

tively demonstrate that translation is a vital element of cultural and
linguistic plurality. As Sherry Simon shows in “Translating and Inter-
lingual Creation in the Contact Zone. Border Writing in Quebec,”
translation accompanies cultural and linguistic overlap and draws at-
tention 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 Differ-

ence. 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. Con-
tributing to the “spatial francization” of Montreal, Boyer’s playful mes-
sages 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

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 pho-
netic circuitry from French into English.

But the turn from “daring” to “losing” plainly exposes the politi-

cal 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 infor-
mational value in this city — and those who study branding and let-
tering 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 Franciza-
tion of Montreal some thirty years ago, when English signs were re-
placed 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 un-
derneath. 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 illus-
trations 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

Simon 3

the single city of New York.

This multilingualism confirms the inten-

sity 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, ac-
cording 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 en-

counter — 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 ano-
nymity 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 multilingual-

isms 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 citi-
zenship. Translation is the index of accommodation and incorporation
of languages into the public sphere. By performing functions of con-
nectivity 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

––––––––––

The map can be seen at the following address: <www.mla.org>.

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 citizen-
ship? 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-interac-
tive indifference... Everything, from small local theatres presenting transla-
tions 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 mi-
grant 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 lan-
guage communities and among forms of cultural expression. This per-
ception 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 unequivo-
cally peaceful and friendly activity, but seen to participate fully in the
fraught politics of the moment. In response to an increasingly violent

Simon 5

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 popula-
tions. 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 cir-
culation” 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 tex-
tual matters not only in the politics of book production but in the so-
cial 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 writ-
ings 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 plurilin-
gualism 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-

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 ten-
sion, 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, cin-
ema) 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 vis-
ual landscape of the city comprises a wide variety of messages,
including not only the expected array of advertisements, political slo-
gans, and graffiti, but also — increasingly — the proliferating mes-
sages of public art. Both cities, Montreal and Vancouver, have em-
braced 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. Transla-
tion 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

Simon 7

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 lan-
guage, 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 aes-

thetic 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 sculp-
tures use lettering as motifs or materials, as for example the multilin-
gual sculptural installation by Rose-Marie Goulet in the atrium of
Concordia University’s library building.

Goulet has relied extensively

––––––––––

“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-

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 “ho-
rizon,” that are either emerging from or sinking into the land border-
ing 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 refer-

ence 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 at-
tempting 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.”

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). <http://
web2.concordia.ca/publicart/works/goulet.php>

The official description reads: “Ensemble sculptural sur le thème de la com-

munication non verbale qui se compose de deux colonnes et de divers éléments figu-
ratifs. 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 ani-
male 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

Simon 9

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 al-
ways coloured with irony, always undercut by an aesthetic intention.
In calling attention to the many ways in which language is fore-
grounded in Quebec art, prominent critic Johanne Lamoureux insists
that language is not a badge of identity but rather the source of mul-
tiple 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 par-
ticipates 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.

How-

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

l’amitié dans le langage des malentendants.” (Artists: John McEwen and Marlene
Hilton-More; site: Ville de Montréal — Art public — Collection)

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

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

ever, the playfulness of the messages and their self-reflexivity under-
cut this aspect of language-identification and propose rather an inter-
esting 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 tou-
jours faire semblant de” (arranged in a circular pattern) — “Pretense,
false, true, story” with arrows pointing from one to the other — “Mi-
nor 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 differ-
ences” — “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 sal-
vation. The tentative and ephemeral nature of these messages makes
Goulet’s piece very similar in temperament to Gilbert Boyer’s work.

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 socio-
economic position.” <http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM201T>

Michel Goulet is a well-known Montreal artist. His project for the 400

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 con-
junction 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, disori-
enting.

Geneviève Cadieux, À fleur de peau, 1987, uses braille as a form of language. A

quote from S

-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).

Simon 11

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. Embed-
ded into the railing along the sea wall are inscriptions in two lan-
guages — 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 al-
ready 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

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

cultural systems of naming as more and more peoples from around the
world came to settle on the West Coast. In the first half of the twentieth
century, the jargon fell out of common use, replaced by the English lan-
guage. (From the Artist’s proposal; City of Vancouver Cultural Services).

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 Califor-
nia 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 “inad-
equate” English of the translation points to the shortcuts of any vehi-
cular language, grammar sacrificed to the imperatives of immediate
communication. This inadequacy becomes a kind of nobility, how-
ever, 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 specula-
tive spaces of the present reality of False Creek (where towers of glit-
tering 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 dar-
ing, 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 se-
ries 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

Simon 13

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 appro-

priate, when it is understood that the original is itself a mixture of lan-
guages, the Chinook trading jargon. The prominence of this broken
English — again offering words of greeting and welcome — is re-
markably 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 work-
ers who, by the end of the nineteenth century, were also inhabitants of
the territory).

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 Eng-
lish) 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.

––––––––––

The bold and very public banners created by Henry Tsang were in stark con-

trast 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 draw-
ings 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) .

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 two-
fold 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. (Lamou-
reux 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 pre-
determined. And so this piece could be considered to exhibit a sensi-
bility 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 conversa-
tions with its native populations. But Vancouver — like most large
metropolitan cities — has one strong language that dominates all con-
testing languages. It could be argued that public art has especially res-
onant 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 re-
minder 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 cul-
tural 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

Simon 15

the double sense of translation — to move across space and across
language. The literary and cultural history of the city is full of cross-
town 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: McGill-

Queens, 2003.

City of Vancouver Cultural Services. 11 May 2009. <http://vancouver.ca/

commsvcs/oca/publicart/>.

Concordia University Public Art Collection. 10 Sept. 2008. <http://

web2.concordia.ca/publicart/works/goulet.php>.

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. <http://www.waymarking.com/

waymarks/WM201T>.

Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, and Elizabeth A. Povinelli. “Technologies of

Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition.” Public Cul-
ture 15.3 (2003): 385-97.

Gérin, Annie. “Maîtres chez nous. Public Art and Linguistic Identity in Que-

bec.” Canadian Cultural Poesis. Essays on Canadian Culture. Ed. Gar-
ry Sherbert, Annie Gérin, and Sheila Petty. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier
Press, 2006. 323-41.

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

_____, and James S. McLean, eds. Public Art in Canada: Critical Perspec-

tives. 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 Vis-

ual 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 Metro-

polis. Public Culture 16.3 (2004).

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Building a New Public Idea about Language.” Profes-

sion 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. <http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/>. 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, espe-
cially 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 antag-
onists of Gallican traditions. The centuries-old model of a translatio
imperii et studii was based on the recognition of the mutability of hu-
man affairs: things change, and as a consequence, the center of power,
as of learning, shifts in the course of human history. This view, how-
ever, is founded on the assumption, inherited from the Roman Impe-
rium, that at any given time there is a single center of power or learn-
ing — 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

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 Ro-
man/Italian hub, a challenge that takes on a nationalist charge, posit-
ing 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 per-
ceived 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 sepa-
rates scholarship and literary works, the sixteenth-century terms, bo-
nas 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 lan-
guage 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

Rothstein 19

––––––––––

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 mid-
century regularly include people known mainly or only as translators.

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.

Even if Castiglione and

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 discus-
sion 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).

“[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 transla-
tion: “...to those who blame me because I have not imitated Boccaccio or bound my-
self 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

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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.

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 regu-
larly 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 pref-
ace:

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 tres-
bien saichant vulgar florentin et langaige latin. [Anthoine...] pour condigne
et juste salaire translata premierement ledit Livre des Cent Nouvelles de flo-
rentin 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 cor-
rect” (Singleton 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.

Rothstein 21

––––––––––

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 Flor-
ence and Laurent’s contemporary Paris is revealed in the transforma-
tion 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 sur-
nomme Le prince Galliot, qui contient cent nouuelles racomptees en
dix iours par sept femmes & trois iouuenceaulx [...]. Translate de
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.

Overall, this is a translation at one remove from the vernacular

original, a translation which (advisedly) made claims neither of accu-
racy nor for the elegance of its French. Without naming Laurent, the
text’s next translator, Antoine Le Maçon, comments on this transla-
tion:

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

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 open-
ing 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 Galle-
hault, 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.

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 fifteenth-
century 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.

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

le mieulx qu’on eust sceu escripre en Francoys ont voulu aussi inferer,
qu’on ne l’eust sceu mieulx rendre en nostre langue qu’il estoit en ladicte
traduction” (ã2r). [Especially those who had seen an earlier translation by
some who wished to be involved with translation and who worked so badly
that it is hard to imagine worse. And the Italians, thinking this translation to
be the best that could be done in French also inferred that it was not possible
to render it better in our language than was done in that translation.]

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 dif-

ferent: Antoine Le Maçon’s modern translation directly from Boccac-
cio’s Italian, a translation which declared itself to be accurate and
furthermore, to be a triumph of French. This claim is supported prag-
matically by the fact that it continued to be the basis of the standard
French version of the Decameron for some 350 years.

The new trans-

lator, like many translators of his generation (and like Laurent a cen-
tury 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:

––––––––––

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 ver-
sions declare that they are based on Le Maçon’s translation, although in these the lan-
guage has been modernized. Such exceptional longevity bespeaks the quality of his
achievement.

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 at-
tached 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-

Rothstein 23

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 acqué-
rir quelque fruit de bonne édification.
[Then a short time ago our dear and beloved only sister, the Queen of Na-
varre, 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 edifica-
tion. 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 contin-

uing our examination of the paratexts of this translation of the Deca-
meron, it will be useful to pause briefly to explore what it might have
implied to contemporaries reading the privilege. Rhetorically, the dis-
tinction 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.

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 profi-
table, 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 profit-
less things, I dare add, useless, even pernicious to the growth of their lan-
guage, 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 them-
selves 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.

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

— and a new class of texts that

––––––––––

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.

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).

Rothstein 25

––––––––––

would be wholly French even as they were firmly founded on a pre-
existing text in another language. Beyond the familiar Classical rec-
ommendations to translate for res and not verba, imitations are aware
of and mediate the differences between source and target cultures, dif-
ferences of which humanist training made educated people increas-
ingly 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 vir-
tually 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 trans-
lations 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-cen-
tury 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 repro-
duced from the Italian].

In the preface to his translation of Machia-

Martin used similar freedom in his prose translation of Sannazaro (see Fon-

taine). 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

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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].

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
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.

Machiavelli, (a6v). Machiavelli’s text appears in the same volume with “Ono-

sander 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.”

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 transla-
tions. They still appear fifty years and five monarchs later in the 1597 Paris Veirat
edition.

Rothstein 27

––––––––––

him to read — presumably to sight translate — a tale from the Deca-
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 con-
cern 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 tra-
duire 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 accu-
sations 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

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 com-
mandastes, 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 6,000-
8,000. It would have been only slightly smaller in his father’s reign (129, 125).

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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
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 pro-
vide meaningful equivalents for ancient terms.

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 ab-
stract thought. Included were innocent words like plante, légume, both

––––––––––

Marguerite de Navarre (33). The connection between Boccaccio and Mar-

guerite 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).

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 expan-
sion. 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 lec-
teurs,” [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.

Rothstein 29

––––––––––

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 periph-
rases.

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 compe-
tition between “leur Bocace” and “nostre langue,” now capable of
equaling the accomplishments of any other.

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:

So, in the prologue to his fourteenth-century translation (from Latin) of Aris-

totle’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.

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).

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 desig-
nate the language at the heart of the Renaissance’s cultural expansion.
Erasmus deals with this problem in Latin by avoiding the tinge of bar-
barism 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.

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 vul-
gaire 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
––––––––––

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.

Rothstein 31

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 im-
proves upon its source text. Arguably, the demonstration staged in the
paratexts here of a victory of the target language over the source, pre-
pared 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.

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

Works Cited

Berriot, François. “Langue, nation et pouvoir: les traducteurs du 14 s. précur-

seurs 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 Pre-

mierfait. 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. [Lon-

don: 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.

Rothstein 33

_____. 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 crit-
icism 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 cur-
rent 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 Et-
tinger (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 Beau-
voir, collected and edited by Margaret Simons and translated by a
team of American academics, has just appeared, as the first in the

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

projected Beauvoir Series of eight books. The second book of the
series, Diary of a Philosophy Student, translated by Barbara Klaw, ap-
peared 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 (Janu-
ary 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 as-
pects 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 every-
thing 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 compari-
son 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 Eng-
lish 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

— produced in the wake of 1970s feminism, with its keen inter-

est in the most important forethinker of post-World War II feminism
— sharpened critics’ awareness of the power and influence of transla-
tion, largely coinciding with the development of a new discipline,
––––––––––

Other critiques of Beauvoir translations include those of Cordero, Moi,

Alexander, and von Flotow.

von Flotow

––––––––––

Translation Studies, one of whose interests is this often hidden influ-
ence 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 Eng-
lish” (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 transla-

tion 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 repre-
sentation of the source text, in another time and space and culture, and
by another individual — who chooses to, and is able to, read differ-
ently.

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.

In my work on his translation, I found that in general, Parsh-

ley 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,”

an attitude about what was admissible in writing.

In fact, it could be said that he practiced a particular version of “aes-
thetic 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.

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.

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.”

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

Besides abridging and sanitizing Beauvoir’s work, Parshley often

used simple stylistic means to moderate Beauvoir’s writing on sexual-
ity, 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 pa-
tients 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 ar-
gues, 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 pa-
raphrases 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 “ou-
verture 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 be-
lieving 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 descrip-
tive, 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,

von Flotow

hurtful comments and situations that have rendered these women sex-
ually unresponsive, and that they recount verbatim, are turned into
polite abstractions. Beauvoir cites women’s memories of their unhap-
py 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 first-
person 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 sub-
jective 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 transla-
tion. As Antoine Berman, an eminent translation theorist, has pointed
out, “le discours critique reste curieusement muet à propos de [la tra-
duction], sauf à la juger ‘bonne’ ou ‘mauvaise’ à partir de son ‘savoir’

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 incompar-
able” (Critique 95-96), these writers were better at formulating ab-
stractions 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 décla-
rations 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 pub-
lished 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 trans-
lation 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 trans-
lation — 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 differ-
ent, 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

von Flotow

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 lan-
guage audience, and in that audience’s own mix of contrasting or sup-
portive theories, text genres, and writing styles. The translations may
well be highly variable, affected by the “écologie intellectuelle” (Bris-
set 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 intel-
lectuelle.”

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 contempo-
rary text that cites an older authority causes a look backward, a re-
reading, 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 read-
ers. The push to properly understand Beauvoir through new transla-
tions 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 fore-
thinkers of the movement, and set about re-presenting them. The criti-
cisms 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 exam-
ple of a new intellectual ecology in the wake of the feminist move-
ment (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 transla-
tion as an ongoing labour of rereading and rewriting, as a work of
seriality and generation — rather than a work of “finitude” or final

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

completion — has developed, in both translation criticism and theory.
The work of feminist critics who apply feminist/womanist psychoana-
lytic 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 Ger-
man 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 transla-
tion 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 enor-
mous, 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 linguis-
tic 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 man-
kind; only “hope” remained locked inside, inaccessible. This is the
story that has prevailed and largely entered the public sphere, “la con-
dition 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 juxtaposi-
tions and questions, Littau argues that the Pandora figure presents and
is presented as a multiplicity, and does not stay within the traditional

von Flotow

––––––––––

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 consider-
able and important move away from the usual condemnations of
translation, she rejects the strict binarism that continues to rule dis-
courses 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 transla-
tion, but the impossibility of putting a stop to endless retranslation, in short,
they show us the serial nature of translation; there are always more transla-
tions, 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 trans-
late 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 ac-
tivities 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

applied to translation brings in the female/maternal

A neologism that brings together and resonates with the terms “meta,” “ma-

ter,” and “morpheus”: “Ettinger’s neologism combines a play on ‘meta’ and an evoca-
tion 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-

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 in-

herited 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 50-
51).

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 depen-
dency is an ethical value. Shread comments that this focus on depen-
dency 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 metramor-

phic 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 un-
conscious side of the feminine ab-ovo.

Matrix: dynamic and temporary assemblage created by non-rejection, with-
out 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 mean-
ing they create without supplanting or deferring the signifier” (Shread, A Theory 8).

von Flotow

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 as-
semblages 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 al-
ready suggested by Pandora, and elaborated by Littau. First and fore-
most, 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 exert-
ing 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 origi-
nal.

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 collec-
tion 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 por-
trayed 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 mis-
translation 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 re-
situate Beauvoir within twentieth-century philosophy, free her from
the subjugation to Sartre imposed by lack of translations or “mis-
translations,” 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 “Beau-
voir herself.”

The blurb for Diary of a Philosophy Student has a similar tone;

critic Claudia Card writes:

von Flotow

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, in-
deed makes available the true original text, and are typical of much of
the discourse around retranslation, a discourse that consistently un-
dermines 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 possi-
bility 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 com-
pletely elides the work of the translators. In fact, the trace of the
translator within the text is what makes the text “readable” for con-
temporary 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 first-
hand 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 contex-

tualizations 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

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 Pub-

lishing, 1956.

_____. Philosophical Writings. Ed. Margaret A. Simons, Marybeth Timmer-

mann, 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 Beau-

voir 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. 13-
33.

Hawthorne, Melanie, ed. Contingent Loves. Simone de Beauvoir and Sexual-

ity. Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 2000.

von Flotow

Klaw, Barbara. “Sexuality in Les Mandarins.” Feminist Interpretations of

Simone de Beauvoir. Ed. Margaret Simons. University Park, PA: Penn-
sylvania 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, Rédac-

tion 13.1 (2000): 21-35.

_____. “The Primal Scattering of Languages: Philosophies, Myths and Gen-

ders.” 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 Beau-
voir 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, Ideol-

ogy. 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: Rout-

ledge, 2000; 2

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 self-
translation 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.

________________________

Nancy Huston’s self-translation practice is an exemplary case for

considering translation in the context of French and Francophone liter-
ature. 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/trans-
lation; author/translator; source text/target text. With reference to
Huston’s work and the controversies it has inspired, I propose we re-
negotiate many of these terms. Thus, instead of confining self-transla-
tion to a distinct and separate space, I emphasize the continuities
between self-translation and translation, showing how self-translation

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 Transla-
tion,” as one instance, along with other anomalies such as pseudo-
translation 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 some-
what different. I hope that by using self-translation to strategically dis-
rupt standard definitions of translation, this article will contribute to
Maria Tymoczko’s call for a new disciplinary understanding: “trans-
lation as a cross-cultural concept must be reconceptualized and
enlarged beyond dominant Western notions that continue to circum-
scribe 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 tax-

onomy 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 “trans-
late” themselves as a part of the colonial heritage, or transnational
migrants living as “translated beings” between multiple cultures, lan-
guages, and national identities.

These metaphorical uses of self-

translation are distinguished from the practice of self-translation I am

––––––––––

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 self-
translation to postcolonial contexts, proposing the argument that “West Indian liter-
ature 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.

Shread 53

––––––––––

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 dis-
cussion of these metaphors because I sense that their suggestive power
derives from an appeal to conventional notions of translation as a de-
rivative, 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 liter-

ary translation, no doubt because this is where the stakes of author-
ship, authority, and originality are highest.

Despite the considerable

impact of poststructuralist thought in the field of literary criticism,
theoretical conceptions of translation remain constrained within tradi-
tional models in which the author’s sovereignty and creative original-
ity 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 de-

scribed 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, self-
translation still represents a theoretical aporia in the field. Rainier
Grutman’s entry on “Auto-translation” in the 1998 Routledge Ency-
clopedia 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 trans-
lation 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

Rainier Grutman comments, “A fairly common practice in scholarly publish-

ing, auto-translation is frowned upon in literary studies” (17).

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 conven-
tional models of translation, it is difficult to describe this writ-
ing/translating process. Elizabeth Beaujour considered this issue with
reference to Jacques Derrida’s bid to renovate theorizations of trans-
lation: “As Jacques Derrida has observed, one of the limits of theories
of translation is that ‘all too often they treat the passing from one lan-
guage to another and do not sufficiently consider the possibility for
languages to be implicated more than two in a text’

” (723). This theo-

retical omission has become increasingly evident as the creative inter-

Shread 55

––––––––––

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 lan-
guage. 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 reluc-
tant 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 associa-

tion 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).

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 self-
translation 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 meta-
phorical, 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).

Whyte cites Joseph Brodsky (Russian/English), Josep Carner (Castil-

ian/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/Eng-
lish), Romain Gary (French/English), Julien Green (French/English), Andreï Makine
(Russian/French), Jorge Semprun (Spanish/French), Hector Bianciotti (Span-
ish/French), and André Brink (Afrikaans/English).

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

Born in the Anglophone Canadian province of Alberta, Huston

traveled to Paris for a year abroad, stayed, and made a name for her-
self as a French author, and later an English author. Huston has re-
ceived 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 Hus-
ton, 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 research-
ers 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 addi-
tion 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 bi-
cultural writers such as Beckett and Romain Gary. Huston has written
many perceptive essays on questions surrounding the cultural negotia-
tions 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 self-
translating author.

In arguing for Huston’s place in an enlarged canon, I hope to

foster greater recognition of self-translated texts — not only between

Shread 57

languages, or other sign systems, but also within a single language. As
French Studies have come to encompass literature from the Franco-
phone world, there has been too ready an assumption that Franco-
phone literature is immediately accessible and consumable by speak-
ers 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 bi-
lingual 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 de-
bates over, and resistance to, the practice of self-translation when it
was nominated for the Canadian Governor General’s Award for Fic-
tion 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 liter-
ary 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”

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

(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 unbear-
able 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 tra-
duction 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 con-
tested 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 trans-

lation in place continued several years later. In 1998, her novel, L’Em-
preinte 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 ver-
sion réécrite en anglais.” Thus, the desperate attempt to retain a hier-
archy 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-trans-
lation in relation to Huston or other self-translators usually propose

Shread 59

––––––––––

supplementary models to talk about self-translation, rather than infer-
ring that examination of this practice might modify conventional
notions of translation. Fitch, for example, proposes intra-intertex-
tuality to discuss the specificities of self-translated texts,

McGuire

introduces the notion of self-translated texts as parallel texts,

and

Nicola Danby subsumes self-translation under bilingual writing.

All

these approaches leave intact the notion of the original text as a
discrete, inalienable unit that is the defining feature of Western trans-
lation 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-transla-
tion practice and that of others like her, it is becoming increasingly
difficult to maintain the distinctions of a translation model that priori-
tizes one side of the binary by insisting that the original determines the
translation.

One of the distinctive characteristics of self-translation is its dar-

ing 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 pater-
nity — 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

“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).

“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, specifi-
cally of his poetry, serves to elucidate this notion of the translation as parallel text”
(260).

“This kind of bilingual writing is only possible through self-translation” (90).

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 — imita-
tion, paraphrase, and adaptation. This expansive, liberating vision of
translation is one of the most important consequences of using self-
translation to redefine translation.

To examine more fully the question of what has been called lib-

eral 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 pub-
lishing decision, Huston expressed the euphoria, liberties, and excite-
ment 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 ter-
rifying 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-

Shread 61

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-transla-
tors from translators:

In terms of subjectivity there will be no gap between the author and trans-
lator; he will never unwittingly misinterpret his own work [...]. [H]e will
know with utmost certainty when he is justified in departing from the origi-
nal 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 author-
ity [...]. [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 poststructural-
ist 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 juxtaposi-
tion 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

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 satisfac-
tion” (67). Huston herself makes the wild claim that “L’autotraduc-
tion, 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 conse-
quences of translation. A generative model of translation should not

Shread 63

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 crea-
tive possibilities of growth through translation.

Commenting on Huston, Klein-Lataud suggests that “c’est la dis-

tance, 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 iden-
tity, she concludes: “JE est un autre, on le savait, mais la différence de
langue favorise cette multiplication” (219). These insights into multi-
plicity in writing and (self)-translating allow us to move from the sin-
gular 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 decon-
structive 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 con-
cern with the communication of meaning, necessitates a reconsidera-
tion 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 transla-
tors. 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 re-
garding the power of translators: taking self-translation to redefine
translation serves not only to refine our understanding of the transla-
tion, but also the agency of those involved in the process. If, then, fol-
lowing 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

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 concep-
tion of the goals, strategies, and nature of translation.

Works Cited

Akai, Joanne. “Creole... English: West Indian Writing as Translation.” Tra-

duction, 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 Com-

panion to Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov. New York:
Garland Publishing, 1995. 714-24.

Besemeres, Mary. Translating One’s Self: Language and Selfhood in Cross-

Cultural 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 Translat-

ing/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.

Shread 65

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): 69-
78.

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 1978-

1994. 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 Liter-

ature 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 Author-

Translator-Dialectic.” Investigating Translation. Ed. Allison Beeby et
al. Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s Publication Company, 2000. 55-63.

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

Tymoczko, Maria. Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. Man-

chester: St. Jerome, 2007.

“Une Canadienne à Paris, or is she?” 27 May 2008 <http://

www.livresse.com/Auteurs/huston-nancy-010226.shtml>.

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 dis-
cours 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 envi-
sagée 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 fi-
gures 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-the-
instant — and imagery is one of the more obvious ways in which
poetry engages the real” (62). Sachant, comme nous l’apprennent les

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 cher-
cherons, entre autres, à élucider.

À l’instar de la communication réussie, la traduction réussie

devrait donc présenter une grande analogie des “modèles cognitifs
idéalisés”,

qui sont la fondation nécessaire à la construction d’es-

paces 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’esthé-
tique 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

(Fauconnier, Espaces mentaux; Fauconnier et

Turner, Conceptual, The Way), avant de procéder à l’analyse compa-
rative 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)

––––––––––

ICMs au sens de Charles Fillmore et George Lakoff; voir par exemple

l’ouvrage de Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.

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).

Audet 69

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 Sainte-
Catherine 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

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

artifice, en parfaite adéquation avec son contenu. Privilégiant la trans-
parence 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 est-
elle, 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,

la notion

d’espaces mentaux a beaucoup à offrir à l’analyse poétique en raison
de la nature non-référentielle

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.

faculté de jouer avec cet aspect non-référentiel des concepts et notre
habileté à établir de nouvelles relations entre ces concepts ne sont-
elles pas à la base de notre imagination? Et la littérature est essentiel-
lement imaginative: le texte littéraire, et sans doute encore plus le
texte poétique, ne définit-il pas la capacité de l’esprit humain à inven-
ter 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 ana-
lyse s’effectue en deux étapes correspondant aux aspects (reliés, mais

––––––––––

Nous nous inspirerons ici de la méthode proposée par Calderón Quindós dans

l’application du modèle des espaces mentaux à l’analyse poétique.

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).

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).

Audet 71

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 cohé-
rente.

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 four-
nit 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 métapho-
riques). 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 proces-
sus d’intégration des représentations cognitives. Dès la première lec-
ture, 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

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 percep-
tion 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, surimpres-
sion, 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 créa-
tion d’un premier espace mental. Alors que le vers liminaire (délimité
par le premier signe de ponctuation) détermine la concentration inté-
rieure 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”,

Audet 73

“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 en-
fant 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 créa-
tion, une lexie, “mirage”, (ligne 15) introduit cependant dans le con-
cept 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), in-

troduit 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) Progressive-
ment, le lecteur aboutit à une nouvelle représentation, un blend tempo-

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 do-
maine 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, ma-
rier”, 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 peut-
être, par référence intertextuelle, “l’Arche d’alliance”?) tout en suggé-
rant un mouvement (verbes à l’infinitif), mouvement que vient renfor-
cer 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 pho-
nèmes: l / m / (liquides et bilabiales) viennent renforcer la sensualité
des images: pleine, mots, merveilleux, enlacements, allier, marier, dé-
roulement, 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, “défamiliari-
sante” qui, exigeant un plus grand effort cognitif pour recréer une re-
présentation 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 concen-
trique, 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

Audet 75

donc oserait en douter” (ligne 36). L’association poète/enfant est indi-
quée 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 plai-
sir” (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 nou-
velle 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 inter-
textuelle 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 nou-

vel 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 nou-
velle, singulière, d’où émerge un sentiment d’angoisse. La création
poétique est une expérience intérieure empreinte de gravité et, peut-
être, déchirante.

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 repré-
sentation 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 lec-
ture 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 compré-
hension 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 sa-
cré. 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 re-
présentations figurées (voix et des images de spatialité) évoquées par
le poème. Comment, à partir de leur propre monde référentiel, par-
viennent-ils à produire un texte où l’on puisse déceler une analogie
des représentations cognitives, telles que suggérés par le poème et ex-
primés dans leur propre traduction? Pour des raisons évidentes
d’espace, nous nous concentrerons sur l’analyse comparative des
espaces 1 (E1) et 4 (E4).

Audet 77

LE JEU
S

-Denys

Garneau

THE GAME
F. R. Scott

THE GAME
John Glassco

JÁTÉK
Gyula Tallér

Ne me dérangez
pas je suis profon-

dément occupé

Un enfant est en
train de bâtir un
village

C’est une ville, un
comté

Et qui sait
Tantôt
l’univers.

Il joue

Don’t bother me
I’m profoundly
absorbed

A child is busy
building a village

It’s a city, a
county

And who knows
Soon
the universe.

He’s playing

Don’t bother me
I’m terribly busy

A child is busy
building a village

It’s a town, a
country

And who knows
By and by
the universe.

He is playing

Fontos dolgom
van, hagyatok!

Falut épít a gyerek

Vagy várost,
megyét

Sôt:

világegyetemet.

Játszik.

Espace 1

Le vers liminaire du poème où s’entend la voix de l’enfant pré-

sente une grande correspondance dans les traductions à quelques dif-
férences près (par exemple, les traducteurs ont omis le signe de ponc-
tuation [.] 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’im-
patience 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 vien-
nent illustrer: l’intérieur d’où s’adresse l’enfant aux adultes, à l’exté-
rieur. Tallér introduit également un point (.) après le syntagme verbal
Játszik (“il joue”), ce qui donne au vers un caractère plus définitif,
moins intemporel.

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 traduc-
tion: 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 repré-
sentations 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 vi-
suels 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,

Audet 79

revêtaient le caractère presque sacré d’une fécondité créatrice, avaient
le pouvoir de ramener les instants de bonheur, trouvent, dans la tra-
duction de Glassco, une liberté de mouvement: “now they are evolu-
tions of a dance”, “and the next moment”, comme si le poète émer-
veillé observait de petits êtres sortis de sa boîte. Le traducteur rend la
magie de la création poétique.

LE JEU
S

-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,

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.

This is my box of
toys
Full of words for
weaving
marvellous
patterns
For uniting
separating
matching

Now the unfolding
of the dance

And soon a clear
burst of the
laughter

That one thought
had been lost

A gentle flip of
the finger

And the star
Which hung
without a care

At the end of too
flimsy a thread of
light

Falls and makes
rings in the water

Here is my box of
toys
Full of words to
make wonderful
patterns

To be matched
divided married

Now they are
evolutions of a
dance
And the next mo-
ment a bright burst
of the laughter

You thought was
lost

A light flick of the
finger

And the star
That was hanging
carelessly

At the end of a
flimsy thread of
light

Falls in the water
and makes circles.

Íme játékos
dobozom
Tele szavakkal
melyekbôl
csodálatos ábrákot
rakhatok ki

Összeillesztem
szétszedem
egybefûzöm ôket

S akad itt tánc is
olykor

Hirtelen feltörô
tiszta nevetés

Melyrôl azt hittem
oda már

Egy gyengéd
csiklandozás

És a cillag
Mely óvatlanul
egyen súlyozott

Egy túl vékony
fénysugár hegyén

A vízbe pottyan s
gyûrüket vet

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 en-
semble, 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’ex-
périence 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 néces-
sairement de phonologie en changeant de langue, “c’est une déperdi-
tion et non une trahison” (88). Il faudrait faire une analyse systéma-
tique des textes entiers pour évaluer dans quelle mesure cet important
aspect du discours poétique fait système. Mais, à la lecture des traduc-
tions 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’en-
trâine 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 extra-
linguistique (l’important pour le traducteur est de connaître ces réfé-
rents), le texte littéraire est intra-référentiel, et tout, des réseaux con-
ceptuels, formels, des images aux textures, y fait sens.

Audet 81

Nous avons privilégié le modèle des espaces mentaux (Faucon-

nier) en raison du caractère dynamique de la construction de sens qu’il
permet d’illustrer. Partant des éléments du discours, le lecteur cons-
truit progressivement des représentations cognitives (des espaces
mentaux) en activant l’information conceptuelle (connaissances extra-
linguistiques, 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 litté-

raire 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 dé-
terminer 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 cohé-
rence.

De même, dans quelle mesure les émotions, les expériences sen-

sorielles, 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 tra-
duction.

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

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 83

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.

<http://www.saintdenysgarneau.com/>

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

Ouvrages cités

Audet, L. Dancette, J. Dancette, et L. Jay-Rayon.

“Axes et critères de la créa-

tivité”. Meta 52.1 (2007): 108-23.

Calderon Quindos,

“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): 141-
59.

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: Univer-

sity of Ottawa Press, 2007.

“Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau.” 25 Aug. 2008. <http://

www.saintdenysgarneau.com/>.

Lakoff, George. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Re-

veal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Meschonnic, H. Poétique du traduire. Verdier: Lagrasse, Fr., 1999.

Saint-Denys Garneau, Hector de. Poèmes choisis. Choix et présentation de

Hélène Dorion. Montréal: Éditions du Noroît, 1993.

FLS, Volume XXXVI, 2009

Translation

Marjolijn de Jager

New York University

Translation as Revelation

The following essay presents a very personal notion of what it means to
be a literary translator. My observations are based on the analyses of
experts in the field — linguists, authors, translators —, on my own ex-
periences as a translator, and on some non-analytic but intuitive insights
that I have gained over the course of the past twenty years. In addition, I
hope to show that literature and all cultural and artistic forms of expres-
sion are political, each in their own way. Thus, translation is for me also
an act of political activism.

________________________

A poem by Robert Frost:

REVELATION

We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.

’Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

“Revelation” — a word that opens many doors, a word that is

itself open to an infinite number of interpretations. In this essay I dis-
cuss three facets of translation and the revelations it aspires to dis-
close. The first of these, of course, are the familiar linguistic discov-
eries that we make during the working process. Secondly, there are the
cultural differences and similarities revealed by the texts through
which, as this translator hopes, we come to know one another better.
Finally, there are the revelations that my work has brought me on a
personal level.

Human language is the one specific characteristic that sets us

apart from other living creatures and should thus, logically, offer our
species a great chain of solidarity. Sadly enough, however, the spoken
word is all too often (perhaps even more often than not?) the great
divider among people even when they speak the same language. We
only have to think of Roland Barthes’s statement that language is a
form of communication intended to avoid communicating; we only
have to think of the political “doublespeak” we hear every day of our
lives, where “friendly fire” and “collateral damage” hide the truth of
violent death. We get in trouble over language and people kill each
other over words. How often do we find ourselves saying: “That is not
what I meant,” “You don’t get it, do you?” “What is that supposed to
mean?” “So what you’re saying is...” followed by having to translate
into our own language that which was just said. These are but a few of
the infinite ways that prove we are not communicating well, or at all.
This comes down to the anecdotal: “I know you think you understood
what you thought I said, but I think what you thought you understood
is not what I said.” And this happens when we are speaking the same
language presumably, although there are, of course, countless forms of
English, including several officially known today as the “New
Englishes” (Crystal). “Any thorough reading of a text out of the past
of one’s own language and literature is a manifold act of interpreta-
tion,” wrote George Steiner in After Babel. He continued, “In the great
majority of cases, this act is hardly performed or even consciously
recognized” (17).

How complex, then, is the interchange and subsequent attempt at

really grasping what is being said or written in a language that is not
our own. The significance of the Old Testament story of the construc-
tion of the Tower of Babel and its dire consequences hasn’t changed

de Jager

much over the millennia. “Translation has played a central (though
often unrecognized) role in human interaction for thousands of years,”
writes David Crystal (11). “

’Tis pity if the case require / (...) that in

the end / We speak the literal to inspire / The understanding of a
friend,” says Frost. How well this pertains to the double task that we
as translators must fulfill, no matter what the literary text or poem,
which is to be literally faithful both to the author’s words and intent as
well as to good writing in the new language, which in my case is
(American) English. Gregory Rabassa, the eminent translator of Latin
American literature, wrote years ago: “Ear is important in translation
because it really lies at the base of all good writing. Writing is not
truly a substitute for thought, it is a substitute for sound. [...] [W]hen a
person writes, he is speaking, and when a person reads, he is listen-
ing” (82). If this is true, as I believe it is, then translators are listeners
first and speakers second. This, too, imposes a double duty on us, and
in the re-writing — that is the re-speaking of what I’ve heard — I rely
heavily on instinct, on the memory, and on both the intellectual and
musical comprehension of what I have heard. Human interaction and
mutual understanding, the final purposes of translation, after all, are
based first on hearing and listening. At the newly opened Quai Branly
Museum in Paris, where some of the floors and hallway walls are cov-
ered with one- or two-line aphorisms, I discovered one that in five
simple words applies marvelously to the translator’s task: “Entendre
avec l’oreille de l’autre.” Once I have heard my text with the “ear of
the other,” I must then hear it again in my own language, which hap-
pens almost unconsciously at first. Only then can I embark on turning
my source text into English first, into fine writing second. This is al-
ways a balancing act, a balancing act that time and experience never
render any easier, as my students used to ask with hope in their voice.
Each author in any language has a different voice; each text is a new
text that poses different problems, even when a same author has
created it. A supposedly and often deceptively “easy” text still holds
pitfalls of one sort or another, nothing can ever be taken for granted,
the one misplaced preposition will obscure meaning, and the one erro-
neous verb tense will alter the established order of action.

Every word, then, must be heard, understood, interpreted and,

finally, rewritten. Contrary to the perception of too many readers,
translators are writers, not verbally clever secretaries. “Writers create

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

national literatures with their language, but world literature is written
by translators,” said the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for literature,
José Saramago, at a gathering in May of 2003 (Appel 40). The ob-
vious imperatives are first the purely technical aspects, that is to say a
thorough knowledge of source language and target language. Included
but more playful and more difficult, too, is working with idioms, word
play, double entendres, and proverbs, the latter being a particularly
common facet of African literature, which forms much of the body of
my translation work, where the literal almost never works and the
search for an appropriate equivalent becomes one of the many great
challenges.

Ideally, the translator should translate into his or her mother

tongue, as I always stressed to my students at NYU. Just to prove that
we don’t always practice what we preach, I myself set a bad example,
since I translate from my third language, French, and from my mother
tongue, Dutch, into English, which is actually my second language.
Since of these two source languages one is Romance and the other
Germanic, I discover time and again how different are the difficulties
that arise when dealing with either one or the other. At the same time,
because the roots of English are approximately 50% Romance (25%
Latin and 25% French) and 40% Germanic, there is an extremely
interesting double exposure that takes place, constantly increasing the
awareness of the intricacies of the English language and its connec-
tions to both of its ancestors. One quickly realizes why, counting the
dictionary’s main entries only, the English vocabulary is almost triple
that of French — 600,000 words in English versus 200,000 in French,
although depending on the researchers, their approaches, and their
conclusions, these are extremely rough estimates and continually un-
der debate. There are two problems here: too often the choice of Eng-
lish synonyms for a French or Dutch word is enormous and the effort
lies in finding the closest one, and inevitably it is never exactly what
the original means. We may find solace in the words of Peter Roget,
of Roget’s Thesaurus fame, who “[n]ever quite intended [it] as a book
of synonyms,” thinking there “

‘really was no such thing’ given the

unique meaning of every word” (Mallon). It is an unalterable fact that
certain words cannot ever be translated, even when the source vocab-
ulary is far smaller than the English. There is an exact word for eve-
rything but not always for the same thing in every language. One very

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common word, for instance, and a favorite example of mine is the
Dutch word gezellig, which means as much as cozy, at ease, warm,
friendly, comfortable, used for an evening with friends, a dinner in a
restaurant, the description of someone’s living room, a specific at-
mosphere, but absolutely untranslatable by one single English word.
How can this be? Are we as humans not more alike than different and
don’t we all know that feeling of gezelligheid? Why, then, does Eng-
lish not have a word for it? But so it is and we must find a way around
it, time and again.

Titles often pose a major problem. Publishers almost always pre-

fer something that will sell, that is to say, something “catchy.” The
translator prefers something beautiful. The first two novels by African
writers that I translated were Le Bel Immonde by V. Y. Mudimbe and
Le Baobab fou by Ken Bugul. I always make an effort to get to know
personally the authors I translate, if only to be able to go to the very
source for answers to whatever queries I will undoubtedly have, and
more often than not I have been fortunate enough to succeed. With the
Mudimbe book, I put together list after list of possible translations of
the word bel and the word immonde. Nothing worked. The results
were either quite plebeian, a bit sleazy, or downright boring. I con-
sulted with Mudimbe, we toyed with various titles, and neither of us
liked what we came up with. He advised me to keep going with the
novel and perhaps I would find something in the text itself. Halfway
through I came upon the phrase “avant la naissance de la lune,” and by
the light of that moon came the revelation. I contacted Mudimbe and
suggested Before the Birth of the Moon. He was as enthusiastic as I,
and it did become the title of the published translation. With Ken
Bugul’s novel, the baobab tree in the title obviously had to be main-
tained, as it is such an important “character” in her book and, having
gone mad and then died, is the primary participant in the final pages.
However, in English the tree simply cannot be “crazy,” “insane,” or
“mad.” It died because the protagonist had left and deserted it: she had
“abandoned” the great tree. And so The Abandoned Baobab was born.
Yet this very same “abandoned baobab” that went mad and died dur-
ing Ken’s absence is also the one that allows her to find her own voice
as it brings her the renewed birth of herself. Irène d’Almeida observes
the following:

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

In the process of self-discovery that she goes through she uncovers things
that are too potent, too serious, too enormous, too sharply against the grain,
too taboo; they are not things meant to be disclosed [read: revealed — MdJ].
That is why [...] Bugul’s publishers demanded that she abandon her real
name Mariétou M’Baye, and choose a pseudonym. M’Baye at first resisted
this form of silencing, but without success; she then decided to take the
name Ken Bugul, which in literal translation from the Wolof means “no-
body wants.” (44-45)

Nobody wants what? This, it, me, her? In fact, the added pronoun

matters little, for it is all about the rejection that the little girl, Ken,
suffers: at the age of five, she is abandoned by the mother (always the
mother, only exceptionally my mother), a void that she later attempts
to fill in a variety of ill-fated ways when she goes to Belgium to study.
D’Almeida again:

She finds in her culture a means to symbolically escape the silencing

imposed on her, for by naming herself Ken Bugul she insures her survival
as a writer born into a new name [...] and continues to unmask the working
of sexual politics in revealing through an interview [...] that the demand she
take a pseudonym was predicated on her being a Muslim woman whose
autobiographical revelations might constitute a scandal. (45)

After she comes back to her village and discovers that her baobab

is dead, she enters upon a long and often painful journey of self-analy-
sis, which she brings to a close with insight and wisdom gained in Ri-
wan ou le chemin de sable, the third volume of her autobiographical
trilogy.

Returning now for a moment to the challenge of finding the, or a,

good title, the two I mentioned above do work in English, I believe. I
will always regret, however, that there seemed to be no good solution
for the wonderful wordplay in Werewere Liking’s title, L’Amour-cent-
vies, in which “cent vies” means a hundred lives, yet also sounds like
“sans vie,” meaning “without life.” In the end I had to settle for Love-
Across-a-Hundred-Lives, whereby the poetic aural sound of the “sans
vie” was lost completely.

It is the translators’ sad but inexorable fate that their work is

never, can never be, perfect. A writer creates, refines, and publishes a
book, then moves on to the next one. When interviewed, many authors
say that once their book is published, they don’t look back but are al-

de Jager

ready thinking of their next creation. How many translators are able to
say the same? Each time I look at a supposedly finished and now
printed translation — which I try not to do too often — I see things I
would do differently today. And even if I were given the chance to re-
vise again, I know that at my next reading I would in all likelihood
find other things I’d want to change. However, this is not only a
striving for perfection but also because, to quote George Steiner once
more:

Language is in perpetual change. [...] [T]here are instances of arrested or
sharply diminished mobility: certain sacred and magical tongues can be pre-
served in a condition of artificial stasis. But ordinary language is, literally at
every moment, subject to mutation. This takes many forms. New words en-
ter as old words lapse. Grammatical conventions are changed under pressure
of idiomatic use or by cultural ordinance. The spectrum of permissible ex-
pression as against that which is taboo shifts perpetually. At a deeper level,
the relative dimensions and intensities of the spoken and the unspoken alter.
This is an absolutely central but little-understood topic. Different civiliza-
tions, different epochs do not necessarily produce the same “speech mass”;
certain cultures speak less than others; some modes of sensibility prize
taciturnity and elision, others reward prolixity and semantic ornamentation.
Inward discourse has its complex, probably unrecapturable history [...]. So
far as language is mirror or counterstatement to the world, or most plausibly
an interpenetration of the reflective with the creative along an “interface” of
which we have no adequate formal model, it changes as rapidly and in as
many ways as human experience itself. (18-19, italics mine)

The original work stands unalterably; the very best we as trans-

lators can do is do our very best, and make peace with the fact that, in
contrast to the creators of the original work, we are only, but marvel-
ously, too, its re-creators and can be nothing else. Poètes manqués.
Yes, but if we do it well, poètes nevertheless.

I’d like to move on to the second aspect, that of cultural revela-

tions. Inevitably and a priori every translation encounters the question
of cultural differences, expressed not only in descriptions of foods,
dress, religious and social customs, for example, but in the very lan-
guage and style of the work, even within the framework of a same
continent such as Europe. When the divide between the two cultures
of source and target languages is wider, the ear needs to be even more
finely tuned, research becomes more unmistakably urgent, and cul-

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

tural sensitivity is a prerequisite. In their art, many African writers by
necessity use not their mother tongue but the official language of their
country — a seemingly permanent remnant of colonialism, even when
in their daily life they speak Wolof, Haussa, Swahili, Lingala, Bam-
bara, Bassa, or any other of the hundreds of African tongues. Those
authors who do write in their mother tongue cannot escape having a
much smaller readership and will most likely remain relatively un-
known outside their own culture. Others use the former colonial lan-
guage but — by their own admission — sometimes with resentment,
reluctance, but more often by making a conscious effort to subvert that
European language through the invention of new forms and vocabu-
lary, as Werewere Liking does, for instance, with her chant-romans,
her “novel-songs.” Still others began in English or French but have
gone back to and now write in their mother tongue, of which Ngugi
wa Thiongo is the best-known example today. Initially writing in
English, he writes in Kikuyu now, then translates his books himself or
has them translated into English. I recently read that Boubacar Boris
Diop is doing the same thing in Senegal, writing in Wolof these days.
Assia Djebar reads and speaks Arabic fluently, but writes in French
only, yet not only the subject matter of her books but the lyricism of
her French, too, reflects a decidedly non-French background. And she
is heavily preoccupied with the sound of her voice and her characters’
voices. Listen to the first stanza of her poem “Raïs, Benthala... Un an
après”:

Écrire, ce serait tuer la voix, l’épuiser, lui faire rendre souffle, la dépouiller

de son ton, de son accent, de son écho, de son déplacement d’air

Écrire, ce serait la coucher — elle, la voix première —, ce serait l’étrangler,

ou la tordre comme linge mouillé sur une corde au soleil,
la piétiner sinon,
l’ensevelir dans la boue, le pus, la pourriture

Écrire, ce serait l’exposer, la brûler pour atteindre ses os invisibles, ses nerfs

arachnéens, son acier étincelant, ce serait...

Écrire

Écrire ma voix, celle d’autrefois qui fourmille encore aujourd’hui dans mes

orteils, sous mes pieds nus qui, chaque nuit, s’affolent jusqu’à la rive
de l’aube

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Écrire la voix de chaque fillette, sa voix tapie dans ses cheveux que masque

le foulard noir luisant, la voix de la jouvencelle au crâne rasé alors que

ses yeux d’épouvante s’élargissent face à vous
face à toi qui, si longtemps après, écris.

[To write, would be to kill the voice, to wear it out, force its last breath,

strip it of its tone, its accent, its echo, its shifting air

To write, would be to lay it to rest — it, the original voice — would be to

strangle it, or wring it like wet laundry on a line in the sun,
or else to trample it,
bury it in mud, pus, rot

To write, would be to bare it, burn it to get its invisible bones, its spidery

nerves, its shimmering steel, would be...

To write...

To write my voice, the one that I once had and still today is tingling in my

toes, beneath my naked feet that spin in panic every night until
they reach the shore of dawn

To write the voice of every little girl, that voice of hers as it lies nestled in

her hair concealed beneath the scarf of shining black, the voice of
the maiden with the shaven skull while her eyes of terror widen as
she faces all of you, faces only you who, so much later, write.]

And then the final lines of the same long poem:

J’écris la langue des morts ou la mienne qu’importe
J’écris une langue offensée

fusillée
une langue d’orangeraie

J’écris français

langue vivante
sons écorchés

J’écris vos voix pour ne pas étouffer

vos voix dans ma paume dressées

Raïs, Bentalha, j’écris l’après.

[I write the language of the dead or my own no matter
I write a wounded language

shot in execution
a language of the orange grove

I write French

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

living language
flayed sounds

I write your voices so as not to suffocate

your voices upright, inside my palm

Raïs, Bentalha, I write the aftermath]. (Djebar 7-14)

It stands to reason that colonialism has left its imprint on much of

the content of African literature, especially in the work of the older
generation. Innumerable are the novels and volumes of poetry dealing
with colonialism, its repercussions, the personal and communal suf-
fering during, and subsequent to, the occupation of the European rul-
ers. In more recent work by a younger generation, we find a growing
concern with life in Africa today unrelated to anything European.
Though frequently disturbing in its preoccupation with today’s politics
as reflected in the various forms of neocolonialism and as practiced by
current and often corrupt dictators, of which Ken Bugul’s La Folie et
la mort is a prime example, it focuses nevertheless on the present and
future possibilities of a renewed, hopeful, and authentically African
life in all its aspects. These are primary and recurring themes in both
Ken Bugul and Werewere Liking, in whose worlds there is an ever-
present emphasis on the position of and attitude toward women, which
we find in much African fiction, but particularly and certainly not sur-
prisingly in the work of female authors.

Assia Djebar wrote the stories that comprise her Femmes d’Alger

dans leur appartement between the years 1958 and 1978. In her
“Ouverture” she writes:

Conversations fragmentées, remémorées, reconstituées... Récits fictifs,

visages et murmures d’un imaginaire proche, d’un passé-présent se cabrant
sous l’intrusion d’un nouveau informel. [...] Je pourrais dire: “nouvelles tra-
duites de...,” mais de quelle langue? De l’arabe? D’un arabe populaire, ou
d’un arabe féminin; autant dire d’un arabe souterrain.

J’aurais pu écouter ces voix dans n’importe quelle langue non écrite,

non enregistrée, transmise seulement par chaînes d’échos et de soupirs. (7)

[Fragmented, remembered, reconstituted conversations... Fictitious ac-

counts, faces and murmurings of a nearby imaginary, of a past-present that
rebels against the intrusion of a new abstraction. [...] I could say: “stories
translated from...,” but from which language? From the Arabic? From collo-

de Jager

quial Arabic or from feminine Arabic; one might just as well call it under-
ground Arabic.

I could have listened to these voices in no matter what language, non-

written, nonrecorded, transmitted only by chains of echoes and sighs.] (1)

Djebar is a master at making you hear the unspoken voice of the

women in Regard interdit, son coupé, the “forbidden gaze” and the
“severed sound” as she titles her essay on Delacroix that closes the
book. When describing the process of translating Djebar’s Femmes
d’Alger I once wrote that:

Not only is woman neither to be seen nor heard, to be appropriated in every
way, to move around ghostlike, fully veiled when outside, sequestered when
inside, but she is to be silent everywhere. It leaves women with nothing but
one another, and other women are then the only ones with whom and upon
whom she can begin to experiment with the sound of her own voice. Among
Djebar’s characters this will be done falteringly for some, passionately for
others. It is this that becomes the ultimate challenge for the translator of her
work: the silences between the lines, the pauses between the notes, the
downcast eye between the open gazes, the quiet that follows the death of a
woman of earlier generations and lies between it and the birth of her great-
granddaughter who will water and tend the centuries-old memory of
woman. (15)

“Memory is a duty,” Boubacar Boris Diop said in an interview

after the publication of his Murambi, The Book of Bones on the Rwan-
dan genocide. Werewere Liking lives up to that in La Mémoire am-
putée, just published by The Feminist Press as The Amputated Mem-
ory. The amputation of memory also leads to silence, for how can you
speak of what you do not remember? And who are we, who can we
be, if we do not have the memory of where we came from, what our
culture is, who we are individually and collectively as people? We
must then become what we are told we should be, because we have no
other information on which to rely and base our growth. Liking con-
sciously and with great pain excavates her memory, digging like an
archeologist for the experiences she had lived without at the time,
comprehending their significance, and by doing so she constructs her
life as an adult woman, finding deeper wisdom with every exhumed
piece, a wisdom she then relays to her own children and grandchil-
dren. In this she follows in her own grandmother’s footsteps.

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

Indeed, the great treasure trove in much of Liking’s fiction is the

figure of the grandmother. Known by some variation of the name
Madjo or Madja, she is mother-mentor-sage and the ultimate example
to be emulated by Liking’s female protagonists. In La Mémoire am-
putée, however, Grand Madja presides over an additional three aunts,
all named Roz. It is a lovely collection of women who form a trinity
of marvelous, stern but compassionate, smart, courageous, and hu-
morous models, although certainly not without flaws of their own.

The question of female subjugation — whose permanent com-

panion is silence — is ever-present in many literatures. The themes of
expected obedience, submission, and resulting silence are everywhere
in the work of Djebar, Liking, and Ken Bugul. And when the female
character resists, whether she does so quietly or revolts openly, she
enters a dangerous world, colliding with established mores and
patriarchal domination, risking rebuke, banishment from the family, or
exile. “You who understand the dehumanization of forced removal-
relocation-reeducation-redefinition, the humiliation of having to fal-
sify your own reality, your voice — you know. And often cannot say
it. You try and keep on trying to unsay it, for if you don’t, they will
not fail to fill in the blanks, and you will be said,” wrote Trinh Minh-
ha almost twenty years ago (80).

Some years ago, in an article in Cahiers de la Villa Gillet, Chan-

tal Thomas discussed the Breton housemaid Bécassine — protagonist
of a comic strip that presumably portrayed the first female heroine in
any comic strip — who made her debut on February 2

, 1905. Thom-

as wrote:

Il y a un désir de servir, et son personnage emblématique, son héroïne par
excellence, c’est Bécassine. Bécassine qui adore ses maîtres, et en particu-
lier sa maîtresse, Mme Grand-Air, Bécassine qui n’est rien d’autre qu’em-
pressement à obéir, soumission aux ordres. Bécassine à qui son créateur n’a
pas dessiné de bouche puisqu’elle n’a jamais rien à répondre, puisqu’elle ne
sait pas dire non. (68)

[There is a wish to serve and its emblematic character, its heroine par ex-
cellence, is Bécassine. Bécassine who loves her masters, especially her
mistress, Madame Grand-Air, Bécassine whose existence is nothing but
eagerness to obey, submissiveness to the given commands. Bécassine whose
creator drew her without a mouth (italics mine) since she has nothing to say
in response, since she doesn’t know how to say no.]

de Jager

Woman may seek refuge inside herself as often in Djebar, she

may pursue a formal education as Ken does in Le baobab fou —
though at what price? — she strives to understand herself with the
help of women guides as in Liking’s novels, or she returns from her
many meanderings — both literal and figurative — as does the narra-
tor of Bugul’s Riwan ou le chemin de sable, who has gained insight
into herself and the surrounding world and is now able to structure an
adult life rich in experience and understanding, where she can both
admire and be critical of the men around her, without being either
threatening to them or threatened by them.

“...So all who hide too well away / Must speak and tell us where

they are,” are the last lines of Robert Frost’s “Revelation,” with which
I began. That, too, is the mission of the literary translator: to tell the
reader of a different language and culture what the author of the origi-
nal text hides away, what she must say, and where she is.

In conclusion, a few words about what I have learned, and what

has, indeed, been revealed to me on a personal level through the act
and art of translation. Almost twenty-six years ago, on our first date,
my husband and I attended a political meeting. As he drove me home
he asked what sort of work I did; I told him I taught French language
and literature, and that I was involved in the beginnings of translation,
“so nothing political like your work,” I said. He answered quite em-
phatically: “Everything is political!” At the time I heartily disagreed.
Not until I began to translate African literature did I realize how right
he had been. Coming from three generations of Dutch colonialists in
Indonesia, where I was born and spent my first decade, reading the
work of African authors was truly a revelation for me. On some level I
had always known the evils colonialism had wrought, but hearing the
personal voices of these writers and the characters they had created,
the pain before, during, and after colonialism became brightly illumi-
nated, a burning torch in what was until then mostly a fog of my own
childhood memories, and I felt compelled, feel compelled, to bring
those voices to a wider audience through the also-political act of
translation. The decades I’ve spent protesting in the streets, joining
demonstrations, and being an activist on behalf of any number of
issues I believe to be of greatest urgency, are dwindling, though cer-
tainly not over. My translation work, however, will go on as long as

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

my head and hands keep functioning, bringing both the voices and
their silences to a different and broader audience, being a link in the
chain. I have also learned a great deal about what it means to be a
woman and for that feel deeply indebted to the work of Bugul, Djebar,
and Liking. If we are lucky, perhaps between all the spoken and writ-
ten words, as Pablo Neruda wrote in one of his poems, “Keeping
Quiet,” we will be able to interpret the “huge silence [that] might
interrupt this sadness / of never understanding ourselves.”

Since I began with Robert Frost, I’d like to end with a few lines

from “Song of Myself” (Stanza 6) by Walt Whitman, another great —
perhaps the greatest? — American poet:

A child said What is the grass? Fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
[...]
...I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white...

“Sprouting alike” — many poets, writers, artists, and musicians

already know that we are all one. The rest of humanity can and must
learn from these writers’ words, written in any language in which it is
able to perceive both sound and silence. It is the translator’s responsi-
bility to smooth the progress of that perception.

de Jager

Works Cited

Appel, Anne Milano. “Out of the Shadows: Unionizing in Rome.” The ATA

Chronicle October 2007.

Bugul, Ken. Le Baobab fou. Dakar: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1984.

Trans. Marjolijn de Jager. The Abandoned Baobab: the Autobiography
of a Senegalese Woman. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991. Rev. ed.
Afterword by Jeanne Garane. Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 2008.

_____. La Folie et la mort. Paris and Dakar: Présence Africaine, 2000.

_____. Riwan ou le chemin de sable. Paris and Dakar: Présence Africaine,

1999.

Crystal, David. English as a Global Language. 1997. 2

edition. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2003.

d’Almeida, Irène. Francophone African Women Writers: Destroying the

Emptiness of Silence. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994.

de Jager, Marjolijn. “Translating Assia Djebar’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur

appartement: Listening for the Silence.” World Literature Today 70.4
(1996): 856-58.

Diop, Boubacar Boris. Murambi, le livre des ossements. Paris: Stock, 2000.

Trans. Fiona McLaughlin. Murambi, The Book of Bones. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2006.

Djebar, Assia. Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement. Paris: Des femmes,

1980. Trans. Marjolijn de Jager. Women of Algiers in Their Apartment.
Afterword by Clarisse Zimra. Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 1992. Paperback ed. 1999.

_____. “Raïs, Bentalha... Un an après.” Research in African Literatures 30.3

(1999): 7-14.

Frost, Robert. “Revelation.” A Boy’s Will. London: D. Nutt, 1913.

Liking, Werewere. L’Amour-cent-vies. Paris: Publisud, 1988.

_____. La Mémoire amputée. Abidjan: Nouvelles Éditions Ivoiriennes, 2004.

Trans. Marjolijn de Jager. The Amputated Memory. New York: The
Feminist Press: 2007.

Mallon, Thomas. Review of The Man Who Made Lists — Love, Death, Mad-

ness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus. The New York Times Book
Review 16 March 2008. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/books/
review/Mallon-t.html>.

Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other:

Writing Postcoloniality and Femi-

nism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

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Mudimbe, V. Y. Le Bel Immonde. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1976. Trans.

Marjolijn de Jager. Before the Birth of the Moon. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1989.

Neruda, Pablo. “Keeping Quiet.” 1958. Extravagaria: A Bilingual Edition.

Trans. Alastair Reid. London: Cape, 1972. 27-29.

Rabassa, Gregory. “The Ear in Translation.” The World of Translation. New

York: P.E.N. American Center, 1971.

Steiner, George. After Babel — Aspects of Language and Translation. Lon-

don: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Thomas, Chantal. “Ne pas répondre: l’enfance, l’écriture, le téléphone mo-

bile.” Cahiers de la Villa Gillet 12 (2000): 63-71.

FLS, Volume XXXVI, 2009

Translation

Cheryl Toman

Case Western Reserve University

Werewere Liking as Translator and Translated

The texts of Cameroonian playwright and novelist, Werewere Liking,
are known for the linguistic creativity and overall difficulty resulting
from Liking’s self-translation from her native Bassa language. As Lik-
ing’s works may also be considered translations of African oralities,
those who translate these same texts into English encounter additional
challenges. This study analyzes how the self-translator and translator
alike deal with various linguistic and cultural realities presented by
African languages upon translating them into French and then into Eng-
lish. Four of Liking’s texts will serve as models.

________________________

One rarely speaks of the African Francophone writer’s “owner-

ship” of the French language. Most critics have claimed that the oppo-
site is true — that French as a language of the colonizer is one that the
African writer has been forced to accept. As Kwaku Gyasi claims,

the early African writers started to write in the languages of the colonizers
without considering all the implications involved in the use of such lan-
guages. In the zeal to destroy the stereotypical images of Africa and to
project their African world view, these writers may have considered the
colonial languages as mere tools or means to achieve their objectives.
(“Writing” 75)

This progression of the language “owning” the writer is thought to be-
gin at a relatively young age, as children acquire French and refine
their expression through schooling in the French system, either in the
home country — most likely a former colony of France — or else in

102

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

France proper. One writer who clearly challenges all of these assump-
tions, however, is Cameroonian novelist and playwright, Werewere
Liking, whose works in French resemble no Western forms of fiction
and whose language and registers are highly distinctive. Self-taught in
French as an adult, Liking had been immersed during her youth exclu-
sively in the language, rituals, traditions, and teachings of her native
Bassa culture of Southwestern Cameroon. It must be said that this
schooling was largely from a feminine perspective, either transmitted
to her by her grandmother or as the result of Liking’s own member-
ship in female secret societies. Although relatively well known for
three decades, Liking’s work in theater, oral performance, and the
novel is notoriously difficult, with Franco-Bassa neologisms being
just one aspect of its complexity. Liking’s travels and research have
also inspired her to infuse into her texts and performance art cultural
and linguistic elements from Mali as well as from Côte d’Ivoire, the
country where she has resided since 1977. Thus, Liking’s works,
whether translated into French by her or into English by others, can be
considered what Gyasi calls a “cultural production” for which he sees
translation as a crucial dimension (“The African Writer” 144). Gyasi

urther claims:

[...] if it is true that there was a time when the Europeans imposed their lan-
guage on their colonized subjects, it is now clear that the imposed language
is being enriched by local vernacular lexical traditions. According to each
individual writer, the European language in Africa is given different hues
and shades. (“Ahmadou” 150)

Although many of Liking’s writings in French have been trans-

lated into English, the linguistic challenges presented by her works
appear to have limited her readership. As Africanist John Conteh-
Morgan explains in his book, Theatre and Drama in Francophone
Africa, “The lack of [Liking’s] wide appeal can be attributed to her
work’s extensive use of an esoteric and highly ritualized language: of
dream, trance, and spirit-possession techniques [...]” (212). However,
the linguistic complexity of Liking’s work is not considered by every-
one to be a detriment. In a more positive light, fellow Cameroonian
writer and scholar Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi hails Liking’s ap-
proach to writing as a “new African literary esthetic” (95). Indeed,
with her intricate style of language, Liking’s goal is to prove that
merely knowing French is insufficient if one hopes to truly understand

Toman 103

her writing, and this can be interpreted as an act of resistance that
qualifies her as having earned ownership of the language. Gyasi fur-
ther explains, “In certain instances, comprehension is denied the mon-
olingual reader who is then forced to recognize the importance of the
other language in the narrative reconstruction of history and reality”
(“The African Writer” 157). Liking’s style is therefore what Gyasi de-
scribes as an “experiment of blending African models with European
[ones] while subverting or ‘violating’ them at the same time,” by us-
ing techniques that “interrupt the narration in French and force the
reader to reconstruct the text” (The Francophone African Text 119).

Through her writing and self-translation, Liking essentially en-

gages in the act of redefining African orality. As both the author and
the translator of her own works, Liking actually assigns a foreign lan-
guage to Bassa oral tradition in defiance of critics such as Joseph Ki-
Zerbo, who warns, “[...] taken out of context, the oral literary text is
like a fish out of water: it dies and decomposes. [...] Do not therefore
uproot oral testimony” (quoted by Conteh-Morgan 8). Ironically,
Liking chooses to take her work “out of context” in various ways, and
this, she feels, has had a greater impact on her diverse audience. In
fact, Liking found audiences in her native Cameroon not diverse
enough, and thus she considers herself more successful because of her
move to Abidjan, the vibrant arts capital of Côte d’Ivoire and French
West Africa. Liking may have found less creative freedom in Came-
roon because she was indeed too close to home — that is, translation
as cultural production simply could not be as widely appreciated for
several reasons. A play such as Liking’s La Puissance de Um, for ex-
ample, is indeed a contemporary version of a Bassa funeral ritual of
confession, reconciliation, and purification. Conteh-Morgan claims
that although the work “aims at provoking the spectator into serious
thought and even creating something of the healing ecstasy of the
model,” her work is entertainment all the same, with non-Bassa Came-
roonians watching with no social obligations. He points out that
Liking’s theatrical production uses paid actors and not priests, and that
non-Bassa spectators are not worshippers, as would be the case in the
actual ritual. According to Conteh-Morgan then, we can say at the
very least that all Cameroonian spectators are not sharing in the same
experience and understanding of the play, and to another extreme,
some may even find the aestheticization of a sacred ritual offensive

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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

(19). In Abidjan, however, Liking’s reception has been overwhelm-
ingly positive. Her performance art has less readily been labeled sac-
rilegious; indeed, it has been praised for being highly innovative.
Gyasi offers an explanation as to what contributes to this success:

Even though the African writer uses symbols and metaphors that touch on a
real African situation to reflect or express an idea, he or she also goes
beyond a particular time and place because, by writing in a foreign lan-
guage, the final product is invested with meanings that apply in varying
degrees to different people and societies. (“Writing” 82)

Liking’s written works almost always originate as oral perform-

ance. Therefore, not only does Liking successfully transform her work
into written form, but she translates it, for the most part, into Bassa-
infused French. The thought of yet another person tackling an English
translation that remains faithful to these already intricate linguistic and
cultural nuances is seemingly a daunting task for even the most expe-
rienced translator. Thus, the purpose of this particular study is two-
fold; it will look at Liking not only as writer/translator herself, but it
will also take a look at those who translate her works into English.
The translations that will serve as references include Marjolijn de
Jager’s translation of Elle sera de jaspe et de corail and L’Amour-
cent-vies (It Shall be of Jasper and Coral and Love-Across-A-Hun-
dred-Lives), and also Jeanne Dingome’s translation of The Power of
Um and A New Earth, which are Liking’s works, La Puissance de Um
and Une Nouvelle Terre, respectively.

If Liking’s texts are already complex for some in their Bassa-

infused French, what additional problems need to be addressed when
this work is translated a second time, into English? Obviously, the
translator of English is using as reference a text that has been trans-
lated initially into French by Liking. Similar to what Liking has done
in French, the translator of English must also convey all the cultural
nuances of the African text within the limitations of what is possible
in English, which in turn may differ from what is feasible in French.
Linguists Vinay and Darbelnet identify some of the potential problems
in translating from French to English alone; namely, taking into
account differences in the two languages regarding metalinguistic in-
formation of message (29), situational equivalence (39), and cultural
lacunae (65). Gyasi also posits that translators of African texts have a

Toman 105

––––––––––

tendency to adhere too closely to the tenets of translation theories
developed in the West, which may result in a translation that gives
primacy to the European languages that the African writer has so
fiercely sought to subvert in the act of writing (The Francophone Afri-
can Text 111).

Furthermore, as both writer and translator, Liking obviously has

an advantage over the translator of English, who, as an outsider to the
initial work, has less linguistic freedom. The goal of the English
translation is first and foremost to preserve Liking’s self-translated
text in Bassa-infused French, and while translation is undoubtedly a
creative process, there are limits to how creative the translator of Eng-
lish can be, if he or she hopes to maintain the integrity of the trans-
lated work. Interestingly, the translator of Liking’s play, Une Nouvelle
Terre, is Jeanne Dingome — a Cameroonian herself, but one from the
Anglophone region of the country. In this excerpt, Liking’s work is
followed by Dingome’s English translation from A New Earth, a play
in which Liking combines and rewrites two Bassa myths, using both
French and Bassa:

Mourir pour mourir, le cri à la bouche. Et je vois rouge de la souf-

france, rouge de la fureur qui libère le Cri.

Heyôôm pour la liberté, la pureté

Heyôôm pour l’amour qui surélève

Heyôôm pour la Vie!!!... (21-22)

If I must die, I will die screaming. And I see blatant suffering,

redhot rage crying:

Heyôôm for liberty, for purity

Heyôôm for ennobling love

Heyôôm for life!!!... (66)

Only in Dingome’s English translation do we find an endnote

added to the text, explaining that the ideophone, “heyôôm,” is a tradi-
tional Bassa victory cry “only imperfectly translated by ‘hurrah’

” in

English (89). According to linguist Philip Noss, Dingome as translator
is left with only three choices as to how to handle the ideophone in her
English translation: she could seek a formal equivalent in English, re-

All references in English from Une Nouvelle Terre or La Puissance de Um are

from Jeanne Dingome’s published translations.

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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

create the discourse in a form and structure familiar to the reader of
English, or alternatively, as she has done, she can simply explain the
accepted meaning of the ideophone (“The Ideophone” 269).

Ideophones exist in every language, but as Noss proves in his

article, “Translating the Ideophone,” there tends to be a higher ratio of
them in African languages (41).

Noss further explains that “ideo-

phones combine perception and concept in a cultural linguistic rela-
tionship between sound and semantics” (42). Even Liking does not
find a suitable translation in French for the term “heyôôm,” but it re-
mains in her original text without explanation, leaving her readers to
gather its meaning from context. Noss claims that one of the reasons
why the ideophone poses such a dilemma for the translator is precisely
because of its incredible adaptability to creative rhetoric (53).

In her written texts as well as in her oral performance, Liking

uses a familiar combination of Bassa and French, but she seems to use
less Bassa in the written form with the exception of ideophones and
proverbs. In the published version of the play, La Puissance de Um,
for example, Liking herself removes a chorus that she had originally
performed in Bassa and replaces it with its French translation, “C’est
la faute à l’Occident” (14), or “It is the fault of the West” (32). It is
unclear as to why Liking decided on this change in the published play;
perhaps it is because the oral performance relies more heavily on a
musicality that is achieved through the retention of certain words in
Bassa. It may, however, be a message that Liking intended for a
Western audience to understand, and the context in which the phrase
is found in the written text, as opposed to the oral performance, would
not allow the reader to know its true meaning had it remained in
Bassa. Since one of the goals of oral performance is to engage its
spectators, Liking must at times find alternative but equally successful
ways of soliciting the reader’s attention, if she wishes her written text
to have an effect similar to that of the oral production. This explains
why Dingome, as translator, feels the need at times to provide

––––––––––

Noss observes, for example, that in a dictionary of Zulu (a language of South

Africa), there are at least three to four ideophones on every page. In Izon (a language
spoken in Nigeria), approximately 9% of recorded words are ideophones. In his last
example, ideophones comprise one in every four entries in the Ghaya-French
dictionary (Ghaya is spoken in the border region of Cameroon and the Central African
Republic [41]).

Toman 107

––––––––––

additional information on how Liking’s written text is distinct from
her oral performance (60).

In all of her works and performance art, it is clear that Liking is

translating both culture and language. Her texts classified as “ritual
theater,” according to Richard Bjornson, are “modern plays that are
intended to fulfill the same healing, community-reinforcing function
that rituals performed in traditional society do” (448). Indeed, we see
this in a text such as the aforementioned La Puissance de Um, in
which the retelling of a funeral rite of the Bassa serves two purposes:
to pay respects to someone the community has lost, while at the same
time having each member, including the deceased, reflect upon his or
her own personal responsibility (or lack thereof) within the commu-
nity and towards others. Liking often uses such a technique in her
writing, ultimately allowing her readers to question their own account-
ability concerning societal problems.

It is helpful for Liking’s readers to understand the cultural nu-

ances embedded in the play’s title. Um is the second most important
deity for the Bassa people, and she is frequently Liking’s goddess of
choice because of her ability to ward off misfortunes while at the same
time being dissociated from any destructive forces, unlike other ex-
amples from Bassa mythology.

Liking’s contemporary model of the

traditional funeral ritual ends with the village returning to a period of
prosperity through the invoking of Um and a symbolic resurrection of
the deceased (59), true to the actual Bassa tradition. However, one of
the liberties taken by Liking as cultural translator was to change cer-
tain elements of the ritual in an attempt to render Bassa women more
powerful, as she believed them to be in precolonial times. For exam-
ple, Liking’s character, Ngond Libii, refuses the stigma assigned to
Bassa widows, which requires that they be silent and endure having
their ears plugged after the death of a husband. Liking’s main charac-
ters are given Bassa names — Ntep Iliga and Ngond Libii, his wife.
The latter, as explained in Dingome’s translation, literally means
“daughter of a slave,” with the term “libii” carrying the most deroga-
tory connotations — that is, the status of a slave of the lowest class

The most important deity for the Bassa people is Ngué, but unlike Um, Ngué’s

power manifests itself as both destructive and constructive forces. See Dingome 10
(comments of Siga Asanga).

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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

(19). However, it is the normally voiceless and supposedly, ritually
silenced Ngond Libii who in fact brings the mourners to the realiza-
tion of their faults, which have led in part to the death of their leader
and to the symbolic death of their rich culture.

Liking’s translation of tradition, culture, and power in her texts is

not restricted to rewriting the Bassa rituals of her own people. As a
woman writer, Liking espouses feminist ideals typical of African ma-
triarchal social structures that differ from Western feminisms, in the
sense that Liking advocates the idea of women and men being equally
different, as opposed to their being considered equal. The belief that is
exemplified in many African cultures is that man and woman are each
other’s complement, and therefore interdependent. Thus, through lan-
guage and her references to various myths and rituals, Liking provides
a translation of these concepts into French. Many French feminist
theorists, such as Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Iriga-
ray, among others, have all spoken about the patriarchal nature of lan-
guage, a debate quite certainly drawing from their own experiences
with Western languages. For example, in her analysis of the sexuali-
zation of language in To Speak is Never Neutral, Irigaray claims: “The
female has not yet created her language, her word, her style” (4). This
assertion poses an interesting challenge for Liking as her own trans-
lator, as she seeks a way of transmitting these cultural nuances of
African matriarchy from Bassa to a seemingly more patriarchal-
oriented language, French. To further complicate matters, various
African languages, unlike French, are genderless. Liking thus ap-
proaches her texts as compilations of symbols and a “craftsmanship of
words,” as Anny-Claire Jaccard has said, where “the word rediscovers
its primordial importance and is considered like a raw material to be
shaped” (159).

In her novel, L’Amour-cent-vies (the story of an African village

in despair, which is to be taken as an allegory for the entire continent),
Liking herself makes a link between motherhood and a painful birth of
a new language. Liking uses the image of a birth by cesarean, the
more violent, medicalized form of birth, as a reminder of how patri-
archy is embedded in language and also as a symbol of the urgent
necessity for a new language to emerge — one in which women have

––––––––––

Translation mine.

Toman 109

––––––––––

a more rightful status. Thus, Liking’s perceived appropriation of male
discourse should be considered, according to Gyasi, as a weapon of
resistance against male domination — a strategy that is parallel to the
African male writer’s appropriation of the colonizer’s language (The
Francophone African Text 96). It is indeed intriguing to hear Liking’s
narrator state: “Je voulais opérer une césarienne sur les mots et leur ar-
racher un enfant vivant, capable de transmettre un secret, le sens de la
parole” (85). [I wanted to do a cesarean on words and pull out a living
child from them, capable of relaying a secret, the meaning of words
(185).]

This very concept of using aspects of the female body and of

the birthing process to illustrate the as-of-yet unattainable reality of a
truly feminine language has also been considered by Irigaray:

The female remains within an amorphous maternal matrix, source of crea-
tion, of procreation, as yet unformed, however, as subject of the autono-
mous word. The coming, or the subjective anastrophe (rather than the
catastrophe), of the female has not yet taken place. And her movements
often remain stuck in mimetic tendencies: whether it’s a defensive or offen-
sive strategy, the female behaves like the other, the one, the unique. As of
yet, she neither affirms nor develops her own forms. She lacks some kind of
growth, between the within of an intention and the without of a thing cre-
ated by the other [...]. (4)

In L’Amour-cent-vies, Liking challenges restrictions imposed by

the French language on the African oral narrative by confusing the
reader as to the true gender of the narrator.

Is this voice representing

a brother/uncle or a sister/aunt?

In the beginning of the text, all nouns

and corresponding adjectives indicate that the narrator is male. “Bien

Translated passages from L’amour-cent-vies and Elle sera de jaspe et de

corail are those of Marjolijn de Jager.

In fact, it is interesting to find that even authors of critical analyses of

L’Amour-cent-vies often take no notice of the gender ambiguity in the text. For
example, Kathryn Wright’s article in Research in African Literatures refers to the
narrator only as “Lem’s sister/aunt” (49).

I say “brother/uncle” and “sister/aunt” because the narrator begins by saying

Lem is his brother, with Lem being the older of the two. However, Lem is the son of
the narrator’s brother, and thus Lem is the narrator’s nephew, biologically speaking.
The narrator later explains that this relationship with Lem has always been brotherly
and not one of an uncle/nephew or perhaps, depending on how the gender of the
characters are perceived later, sister/aunt. See French version, page 17, and the
English translation, page 126.

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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

sûr, je ne suis pas conteur aussi talentueux que mon frère” (10). [Of
course, I am not as talented a storyteller as my brother (120).] In
French, of course, the noun conteur and the adjective talentueux
unmistakably refer to a male subject. At the very end of the work,
however, the narrator questions his own identity, shifting between
possible selves modeled on those of males and females whose origins
are found in African oral tradition. This is also Liking’s way of
emphasizing how African indigenous languages do not necessarily
have equivalents for Western gendered kinship terms. Marjolijn de
Jager’s English translation of the following excerpt skillfully conveys
the Western reader’s frustration at not knowing the sex of the narrator,
a sign of inability to conceive of human beings outside a strict gen-
dered classification:

Cependant, j’en suis toujours à me demander: qui suis-je ? [...]
Étais-je le père, Maghan Kon Fata ou Nyobé-Nyum?
Étais-je le demi-frère, effacé mais ami fidèle, Manding Bori?
Étais-je la méchante marâtre Sassouma Bérété?
Ou l’une des sorcières? [...]
En tout cas, je ne crois pas que j’étais une femme, car mon père ne m’aurait
pas affublé d’un nom d’homme cette vie-ci simplement parce qu’un mara-
bout avait prédit la naissance d’un garçon... Alors que fais-je ici dans ces ju-
pons qui m’embarrassent toujours comme une camisole de force embarrasse
les pieds d’un fou? (155)

And yet, I am still wondering: me, who am I? [...]
Was I the father, Maghan Kon Fata or Nyobé-Nyum?
Was I the half-brother, in the background, but faithful friend Manding Bori?
Was I the wicked stepmother Sassouma Bérété?
Or one of the sorceresses? [...]
In any case, I don’t believe I was a woman, for my father would not have
attached a man’s name to me in this life, simply because a marabou had
predicted the birth of a boy... So what am I doing here in these skirts that
always bother me the way a straightjacket bothers a madman’s feet? (245)

Liking’s allusion to a madman in a straight jacket is very telling.

While the West clings to a binary categorization of gender, there is
evidence that African languages and traditional cultures are less rigid
by comparison. Using the Igbo language as a prime example, Nigerian
feminist scholar Ifi Amadiume explains in books such as Afrikan
Matriarchal Foundations and Male Daughters, Female Husbands that

Toman 111

the fact that various African languages have fewer gender distinctions
makes it possible to see certain social roles as separate from sex and
gender, making it plausible for either sex to fill the roles (Afrikan 30).
Amadiume attributes this to the influence of African matriarchal heri-
tage on language, thereby differentiating African languages from
those in the West, which carry rigid sex and gender association
(Afrikan 29). What Amadiume is thus saying is that gender is essen-
tially a construct of one’s society. However, Liking’s narrator is
caught in a world somewhere between Africa and the West, and this
conflict is symbolized in such manifestations of madness, further illus-
trated by the adept use of language in the text. As Irigaray explains,
classifications such as he, she, and I are “still the reservoir of the
meaning, and the madness, of discourse” (4).

In another of Liking’s novels, Elle sera de jaspe et de corail:

journal d’une misovire, we find similar linguistic intrigue and inter-
play, beginning with Liking’s neologism, misovire. Although in the
novel, Liking pairs up the misovire with a misogynist, the misovire is
not to be understood as a man-hater or the antithesis of the misogynist,
but rather someone who is thus far unsatisfied with the men she has
encountered. “Nos héros nous laisseront sur notre faim” (8) [“Our he-
roes will leave us unsatisfied” (4)]. Elle sera de jaspe et de corail is
focused on the building of a “New Race” — one made of “jasper” and
“coral” — materials that suggest a spectrum of color that stands in
direct contrast to the historically hegemonic and prejudice-laden
Western classification that sorts the human race into White and non-
White. Liking writes:

Il naîtra une Nouvelle Race d’hommes
[...] Et la misovire que je suis rencontrera un misogyne
Et nous vivrons heureux (9)

There shall be born a New Race of men
[...] And the misovire I am now shall encounter a misogynist
And we shall live happily ever after (5)

If we take this “New Race” to be rooted in African feminist

ideals, and if we consider that Africa’s present condition worsened
because of patriarchal systems, it is interesting to analyze why the
misovire and the misogynist would meet. If we consider the misovire
as a product of an African matriarchal world, then the misovire would

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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

still expect that man is potentially her complement as opposed to the
hierarchized patriarchal world in which woman is of a status inferior
to man. Thus, the misovire is analogous to the misogynist in their
respective matriarchal and patriarchal realms. Since the misovire is
analyzing patriarchal Africa through the representative village of Lu-
naï, a land where men and women have allowed themselves to become
“tsetse flies” (11), there can be no suitable complement for the miso-
vire; just as in the patriarchal world of the misogynist, the belief is that
no woman can be at a man’s level. With the creation of the New Race
— one that will free Africa from its current misery and oppression —
the social conditions that create the misovire and the misogynist would
simply disappear into a world apart.

By constructing the word “misovire,” Liking has essentially done

in French what Chinua Achebe deemed in his own texts as examples
of “new English.” Achebe explained in his celebrated essay, “The Af-
rican Writer and the English Language,” that what he considered to be
“new English” was a language “still in full communion with its ances-
tral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings” (446). With
her numerous demonstrations of language inadequacies and their sub-
sequent reconstructions, along with her call for the building of a “New
Race,” Liking most definitely heeds Achebe’s call for the African
writer to dominate the colonial language as he or she deems appropri-
ate.

Jeanne Dingome tells us in the introduction to her English trans-

lation that “Liking revels in verbal artistry” (19), which explains why
this author is so difficult to translate. However, Liking’s self-transla-
tions of her culture into a Bassa-infused French is in many ways a
completely different exercise in translation, since Dingome considers
that “Liking generally lets her imagination meander, culling the im-
ages and the words from a rich web of free associations” (18). Thus,
the task of translators of English, such as Jeanne Dingome and Marjo-
lijn de Jager, is to conceive of the translation of Liking’s texts as what
Gyasi calls a “strategy of literary decolonization,” whereby “the Euro-
pean language is pushed and forced to the position of ‘minor’ lan-
guage and in that sense ceases to be an instrument of domination”
(“The African Writer” 156). Even as a self-translator, Liking, in her
quest for ownership of the French language, essentially shares with
Dingome and de Jager some of these same goals.

Toman 113

Works cited

Achebe, Chinua. “The African Writer and the English Language.” Moderna

Sprak 58 (1964): 438-46. Rpt. in Morning Yet on Creation Day. Ed.
Chinua Achebe. London: Heinemann, 1975. 55-62.

Amadiume, Ifi. Afrikan Matriarchal Foundations: The Igbo Case. Surrey:

Karnak House, 1987.

_____. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African

Society. London: Zed Books, 1987.

Asanga, Siga, Jeanne Dingome, Innocent Futcha, and Nalova Lyonga. Intro-

duction. African Ritual Theatre: The Power of Um and A New Earth.
By Werewere Liking. San Francisco: International Scholars Publica-
tions, 1996. 7-24.

Bjornson, Richard. The African Quest for Freedom and Identity: Came-

roonian Writing and the National Experience. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1991.

Conteh-Morgan, John. Theater and Drama in Francophone Africa: A Criti-

cal Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Dingome, Jeanne, et al., ed. and trans. African Ritual Theatre: The Power of

Um and a New Earth. By Werewere Liking. San Francisco: Interna-
tional Scholars Publications, 1996.

Gyasi, Kwaku. “The African Writer as Translator: Writing African Lan-

guages through French.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 16.2
(2003): 143-59.

_____. “Ahmadou Kourouma: Translation and Interpretation as Narrative

Configurations in the African Text.” Overvold et al. 150-64.

_____. The Francophone African Text: Translation and the Postcolonial Ex-

perience. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.

_____. “Writing as Translation: African Literature and the Challenges of

Translation.” Research in African Literatures 30.2 (1999): 75-87.

Irigaray, Luce. To Speak is Never Neutral. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Jaccard, Anny-Claire. “Des textes novateurs: la littérature féminine.” Notre

Librairie 99 (1989): 153-61.

Kotey, Paul, ed. New Dimensions in African Linguistics and Languages.

Trenton: Africa World Press, 1999.

Liking, Werewere. L’Amour-cent-vies. Paris: Publisud, 1988.

_____. Elle sera de jaspe et de corail. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1983.

_____. It Shall be of Jasper and Coral and Love-Across-A-Hundred-Lives.

Trans. Marjolijn de Jager. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
2000.

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_____. Une Nouvelle terre. Abidjan: Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1980.

_____. La Puissance de Um. Abidjan: CEDA, 1979.

Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi, Juliana. Gender in African Women’s Writing: Iden-

tity, Sexuality, and Difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1997.

Noss, Philip. “The Ideophone: A Dilemma for Translation and Translation

Theory.” New Dimensions in African Linguistics and Languages. Tren-
ton: Africa World Press, 1999. 261-72.

_____. “Translating the Ideophone: Perspectives and Strategies of Transla-

tors and Artists.” Overvold et al. 40-58.

Overvold, Angelina, Richard Priebe, and Louis Tremaine, eds. The Creative

Circle: Artist, Critic, and Translator in African Literature. Trenton: Af-
rica World Press, 2003.

Vinay, Jean-Paul, and Jean Darbelnet. Comparative Stylistics of French and

English: A Methodology for Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Publishing Co., 1995.

Wright, Kathryn. “Extending Generic Boundaries: Werewere Liking’s

L’amour-cent-vies.” Research in African Literatures 33.2 (2002): 46-
60.

FLS, Volume XXXVI, 2009

Translation

Anny Dominique Curtius

University of Iowa

The Great White Man of Lambaréné
by Bassek ba Kobhio: When Translating
a Colonial Mentality Loses its Meaning

This article focuses on a specific scene of Bassek ba Kobhio’s 1994
film Le grand Blanc de Lambaréné/The Great White Man of Lam-
baréné, where Albert Schweitzer preaches Christian principles in
French to a group of Gabonese people in Lambaréné. His sermon is
translated into Fang by an interpreter. Because of English subtitles dur-
ing this sermon scene in the California Newsreel version of the film,
and the absence of subtitles in the original version distributed by La
Médiathèque des Trois Mondes, several types of audiences are consti-
tuted, and several layers of interpretations and innuendos interweave.
This article proposes to explore how a dynamics of mistranslation or
missed translation locks this particular scene into a dead end and raises
two kinds of questions: those concerning the distribution of African cin-
ema beyond African borders, the translation of African languages in
African cinema, and the script in African cinema; and others concerning
matters of mobility, authenticity, and inaccuracy that subvert Albert
Schweitzer’s authority while enriching Bassek ba Kobhio’s discourse
on colonial and postcolonial mentalities.

________________________

“Racoutié [...] avait eu une peur bleue de
Wangrin, parce que celui-ci savait parler
au commandant non pas en ‘forofifon
naspa,’ mais en français couleur vin de
Bordeaux […].” (L’étrange destin de
Wangrin ou les roueries d’un interprète
africain 39)

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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

The central point of this study is a short scene from Cameroonian

director Bassek ba Kobhio’s 1994 feature film, The Great White Man
of Lambaréné. I would like to explore how the original French version
distributed by M3M (Médiathèque des Trois Mondes) and the version
distributed by California Newsreel with subtitles in English articulate
two contradictory discourses about the Christianization of Gabonese
people in Lambaréné.

In the original version, Albert Schweitzer, whose nickname in the

film is “Le Grand Blanc,” “The Great White Man,” preaches the Gos-
pel to the people of Lambaréné and focuses particularly on the neces-
sity of hard work as the only form of redemption for them as colo-
nized people. However, in the English version, the confrontation of
the written text — the English subtitles — and the oral text, that of the
film script itself, manifests another type of discourse. Viewers who are
able to understand both English and French constitute a specific au-
dience. Indeed, in the California Newsreel version, when listening to
the French while reading the English subtitles, these privileged view-
ers realize that an interpreter wisely conceals and manipulates the
Great White Man’s sermon. In this scene, the interpreter is the one
who reveals the Great White Man’s accusation of laziness leveled at
“his” colonized people, but the viewer with knowledge of French
realizes that the doctor never uses belittling terms in his sermon. It is
also this same interpreter who, through his biased translation, admon-
ishes the people of Lambaréné to embrace fully the stereotypes he
attributes to the Great White Man as a way to articulate new strategies
of identity.

Before delving into the analysis of this particular scene, I find it

useful to recall what Ba Kobhio’s film communicates to its audience.

Bassek ba Kobhio looks critically at Albert Schweitzer (1875-

1965) — the physician, the missionary, the philosopher, the theolo-
gian, the musicologist, the organist, and also the 1952 Nobel Peace
Prize winner. Schweitzer created a hospital in Lambaréné in 1913 and
lived there from 1924 until his death; his mission in Gabon established
him as one of the most important spokespersons for colonial projects
in Central Africa. In this film, focusing on the last twenty-one years of
his life in Lambaréné, Ba Kobhio examines Schweitzer’s reinvention
of a colonial Africa fossilized in its dependence on the French Empire.

Curtius 117

––––––––––

Ba Kobhio draws attention to Schweitzer’s cultural arrogance and
paternalism toward the Gabonese people, whom he usually calls his
“primitives,” and the filmmaker also points to Schweitzer’s ambig-
uous love/disdain relationship with the Gabonese people. Thus, pictur-
ing him as both racist and philanthropist, selfish but generous, arro-
gant yet humble, Ba Kobhio explores this intrinsic ambiguity of the
colonizer as analyzed by Albert Memmi in Portrait du colonisé, to the
extent that, by the end of the film, one is at a loss to say whether Ba
Kobhio makes Schweitzer a hard-core colonialist who must be con-
demned, or a sort of humanist in disguise.

In order to build up the ambiguity, Ba Kobhio creates six key

characters whose roles are to destabilize and challenge Schweitzer’s
power by questioning his international reputation in five fields of
expertise: medicine, theology, philosophy, musicology, and philan-
thropy.

In the field of medicine, a young Gabonese physician, Koumba,

challenges the Great White Man. As a boy protected by Schweitzer,
Koumba was told that he should become a male nurse, not a doctor,
because Africa, Schweitzer says, “needs carpenters and farmers, not
doctors.” Years later, when Koumba returns from Europe, where he
studied medicine and law, he openly criticizes Schweitzer’s ethno-
centric vision of medicine, his insensitive treatment of Gabonese
patients, and his dubious administration of the hospital.

In the field of medicine linked to tradition and philosophy, the

traditional healer who does not share the Great White Man’s philoso-
phy of healing, suffering, and medication reinforces Koumba’s posi-
tion. The healer questions Schweitzer’s expertise since, from a tradi-
tional perspective, the Great White Man’s medical knowledge is
fossilized in books, whereas his own is alive.

In turn, two women — a French journalist and Bissa, the Gabo-

nese “wife”

who was given to the Great White Man by the village

At a ceremony that the Great White Man attends for the first time and that fol-

lows his visit to the traditional healer, the village chief accepts to unveil to the doctor
the secret of a powerful medicinal plant, the iboga. Then the chief allows Bissa to play
a key role during this ceremony and offers him Bissa as a sign of friendship. As a
Christian and Westerner, the Great White Man does not take Bissa as his second wife.

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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

chief — question respectively his Nobel Peace Prize and the sense of
his mission in Lambaréné. Whereas the journalist fiercely attacks him
for his brutality against the natives, his ethnocentrism, his use of Afri-
can patients for medical experiments, his doubtful administration of
the hospital, Bissa makes the Great White Man face his own ambigui-
ties about his perceived mission of saving the people of Lambaréné as
a doctor and a missionary.

Similarly, a young Gabonese drummer, whom Schweitzer calls

“le fou du tam tam” (the crazy drummer or the tom-tom geek),

chal-

lenges the Great White Man’s expertise as a musicologist and organ-
ist, and skillfully tries to compel him to reconsider his dislike for Afri-
can music by playing the drum at night every time the doctor plays the
organ. It is not obvious that the drummer succeeds in making him
revise his ethnocentric discourse on the purity and universality of clas-
sical European music, however. Because the Great White Man is
deeply irritated by the unrefined sound of the drum, he will eventually
give the drummer a trumpet as a Christmas present, urging him then to
barter his African instrument for a more acceptable European substi-
tute. By doing so, the Great White Man states his conditions for
accepting to pursue this musical dialogue initiated by the drummer.
The latter accepts to be taught how to play the trumpet, and in a re-
vealing teaching scene, a bridge is somehow built between the Great
White Man and the young drummer of Lambaréné, between Africa
and Europe. In this scene, even though the doctor seems to be the
conductor, the composer, and the primary performer (Higginson 214)
— while the trumpet player is in a subaltern position — it is important
to point out that the ensuing musical scenes of the film represent the
young African man using his trumpet to play “Indépendance cha-

cha” for the people of Lambaréné celebrating independence, blues for

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

It is only on the eve of his death that he allows her to lie in his bed by his side.

At this

point in the film, we learn that she would sleep on the floor when he would occasion-
ally let her enter his room after the death of his wife.

Francis Higginson accurately points out the various ways of interpreting what

the doctor means by “le fou du tam tam.” From Schweitzer’s perspective this could
insinuate someone who is nuts about the tom-tom, someone who is nuts and who
plays the tom-tom, someone who is crazy because he plays the tom-tom, or crazed by
this irrational instrument (213-14).

In 1960, the Congolese singer Joseph Kabasele, alias Grand Kallé, who

founded the famous orchestra African Jazz, composed “Indépendance Cha Cha.”

This

Curtius 119

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

the Great White Man and Bissa, and finally the Gabonese national
anthem for the doctor on the day of his grandiose funeral.

Master of

his new instrument, the trumpet player is able to display publicly his
identity politics, first to the new independent nation, then to the Great
White Man. Indeed, by choosing not to play a Bach symphony but
blues, and then the Gabonese national anthem, he proudly asserts his
agency to Schweitzer and subverts the feeling of inferiority that the
doctor wanted to instill into the consciousness of the people of
Lambaréné.

With the gist of these five lines of reading the film in mind, let us

look at the specific scene, earlier described, where the interpreter
questions the Great White Man’s expertise in theology and mocks his
ability to speak several languages. Because it uses a faulty translation
in the subtitles provided by the California Newsreel English version,
the scene can be read from two significant angles: 1) from an African
perspective of spirituality, and 2) from a European perspective. The
differential status between an African and a European spirituality
results in a clash between a colonial and postcolonial mentality.
Schweitzer himself was a polyglot but, as Bissa clearly states later on
in the film, he never bothered to learn the languages spoken in Lam-
baréné. Hence, in the scene where he preaches the Gospel to the
people, he needs to rely on a Gabonese interpreter to communicate his
message to the villagers, who do not seem to understand the original
French. It is significant that the original version of the film is entirely
in French except for this particular scene of the sermon, which is in
French on the doctor’s side, and in Fang on the interpreter’s side.

song became a song of freedom for several newly independent West African coun-
tries.

Koumba had obtained permission from the village chief to organize a grandi-

ose funeral for the doctor, and to grant him the title of Prince Panther after his death.

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California Newsreel Version

1. Great White Man:

Le message de Dieu est d’une extrême simplicité et

d’une divine complexité à la fois. (God’s message is at the same time ex-
tremely simple and divinely complex.)

Interpreter/subtitles:

Me I understand, but the Bible is too complicated for

you natives.

2. Great White Man: Ce qu’il faut retenir dans toute la Bible est parfois
facile. C’est le travail seul qui sauve.

(What should be learned from the

Bible is sometimes easy. It’s work alone that saves.)

Interpreter/subtitles: Illiterates, just get on with your work, the rest will
follow.

3. Great White Man: Ce n’est pas le sacrifice de Jésus sur la croix qui
sauve, mais le fait de le suivre par un engagement actif. Dans ce sens, le
travail dans toutes les conditions est un acte de salut. (It isn’t just Jesus’s
sacrifice on the cross that saves, but one must follow an active engagement.
In this sense, work in all conditions is an act of salvation.)
Interpreter/subtitles: Fornicator or drunk. You are sure to have a place in
heaven if you work.

4. Great White Man: Amen
Interpreter/subtitles: What has been said is final.

––––––––––

Authorization to reproduce this picture was granted by California Newsreel.

Translations from French into English of the Great White Man’s sermon are

mine.

Curtius 121

––––––––––

This scene clearly shows that one needs to analyze it from the

perspective of four different viewers: a bilingual audience fluent in
French and English, an English-speaking audience, a French-speaking
audience, and a trilingual audience fluent in French, English, and
Fang.

1. The French- and English-speaking audience

From the perspective of a bilingual audience, able to consider

both the original and the English subtitles, the analysis I propose is
that of a privileged viewer-reader. In his sermon in French, Schweitzer
is perceived as the theologian on a mission to Christianize and civ-
ilize, and he is apparently convinced that his message reaches his au-
dience through the translation, something we know is not true, when
we consider the subtitles. This reading of his symbolic power is in-
deed reinforced by the presence of his wife and two nurses all dressed
in white, and sitting on stools higher than those used by the Gabonese
people. However, when one considers the empty gaze of the audience
— their obvious lack of interest for the doctor’s homily and, most sig-
nificantly, one woman smirking and somehow nodding in agreement,
or perhaps in disagreement, with either the Great White Man or the
interpreter — it becomes clear that Schweitzer’s power is being recon-
sidered. At this point the doctor fails to understand that the interpreter
transforms his words, that he is being mocked, and that it is actually
the interpreter who is in command of the message, not Schweitzer. Let
us remember that according to Amadou Hampaté Bâ in L’étrange
destin de Wangrin, the African interpreter never loses face in front of
the colonizer. Most importantly — and this is the postcolonial twist —
as Schweitzer does not show any interest in learning Fang and there-
fore fails to become a true translator-missionary,

he himself maps out

a dynamics that contributes to the failure of his Christianizing mis-
sion, since the interpreter cannily subverts it. Moreover, the posture
and physical appearance of the interpreter, who wears western clothes,
a colonial helmet, and holds a Bible in his hand, confer authority upon
him for the Western viewer.

As Robert Wechsler shows, translation into colloquial language that can be un-

derstood by all is something [Protestant Bible translators] have considered absolutely
necessary to the spread of Christianity.

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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

The scene can be interpreted as follows. In the sentence, “Me I

understand, but the Bible is too complicated for you natives,” the
“me” most certainly refers to the doctor, but the interpreter, by not
translating the sentence properly, steals the position originally occu-
pied by the Great White Man. By stealing his voice and therefore his
colonial power, he substitutes himself for the voice and position of the
Great White Man. In so doing, he establishes a social, religious, and
cultural distance between himself, as the talking subject, and the silent
audience. In this scene, the interpreter can certainly be identified as “a
subject mystified by colonization who adopts the ideology of the
colonizer for himself or for others in order to escape his political and
social conditions,” to cite Albert Memmi in Portrait du colonisé (149-
50). In this case, since the interpreter refuses to be associated with the
vision imposed on him by colonialism, he subverts the Great White
Man’s discourse by reinventing it, and uses to his own advantage the
stereotypes often put forward to identify the colonized, with the words
“illiterates, fornicators, drunks.” Thus, he dissociates himself from the
people of Lambaréné to become the Great White Man’s mimic man,
and even to associate himself with the civilizing mission. In this posi-
tion, the interpreter is what Frantz Fanon calls “l’évolué,” the “sophis-
ticated subject” (Peau noire masques blancs 11). Consequently, the
“me” in “Me I understand” could easily be the interpreter, who lies to
the people of Lambaréné since, as the scene seems to suggest, they are
not fluent (enough) in French to understand the sermon and to realize
that the interpreter misleads them. So, borrowing the notion of subal-
ternity elaborated by Gayatri Spivak in her seminal article “Can the
Subaltern Speak,” I see the interpreter as a subaltern who speaks to
other subalterns, but departs from his subaltern position by misleading
both the Great White Man and the Gabonese, because he understands
the power of language and therefore chooses to speak in tongues, as a
way to manipulate and reinvent the power of language.

2. The English-speaking audience

Viewers who understand only English may not be in a position to

make such an analysis, since they have access only to the subverted
translation provided by the subtitles, which they incorrectly assume to
be the Great White man’s words. As a result, they may not be able to
identify the ideological impact such a complex game played by the

Curtius 123

––––––––––

interpreter can have on the audience. Moreover, they may not be
equipped to grasp how, in this complex linguistic game, the interpre-
ter, the Great White Man, and the people of Lambaréné find them-
selves in a triangle of miscommunication that undermines relations
between colonizer and colonized. On another level, the translation the
interpreter provides, made available through the subtitles, does not
allow the audience who understands only English to read this scene
from a perspective in which the interpreter is not a subject “mystified”
by colonization, but is only interested in mimicking the Great White
Man’s ideology and becoming his accomplice. The audience targeted
by the English subtitles may be seen as unable to perceive the inter-
preter as a postcolonial parasite

who occupies a border zone that

allows him to manipulate and reinvent two realities: the Great White
Man’s authority and the subaltern position of the Gabonese. In this
case, the audience may not grasp that the interpreter associates himself
with the people of Lambaréné by distorting the doctor’s sermon, and
lets them appreciate the extent of the Great White Man’s disdain and
condescendence. More is missed by the audience who is unaware of
the fact that the words “illiterates, fornicators, drunks” are not used in
his sermon. This audience will not likely understand that, according to
the interpreter, beneath the doctor’s well-articulated hermeneutics of
the necessity of hard work for the colonized, there lies a subtext that
refers to their laziness, stupidity, and immaturity. So, as a postcolonial
parasite, the interpreter has the mission to unveil skillfully a theologi-
cal subtext and to reveal its true intent: to reinforce a colonial mental-
ity by using negative stereotypes. In this position, the interpreter is a
threat to the authority, credibility, and respect that the doctor has
gained in the community.

I would like to suggest that both the Great White Man and the

interpreter articulate distorted colonial and postcolonial discourses.

For a further analysis of the intricacy of the concept of parasite in postcolonial

situations, see Mireille Rosello’s Declining the Stereotype (1998) and Postcolonial
Hospitality (2001) as well as Michel Laronde’s Postcolonialiser la Haute Culture à
l’Ecole de la République (2008). Throughout this article, I use the term postcolonial in
instances as “postcolonial trickster” or “postcolonial parasite” to refer to an opposi-
tional strategy that is at play in the colonial setting of the film. Therefore, postcolonial
is not used in the chronological sense of the term, (conquest-colonization-decoloniza-
tion) but to describe the deconstructive strategies that characterize a postcolonial
mentality.

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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

For the missionary/doctor, to strengthen his hermeneutics of the place
of the colonized within Christianity, he would need to rely on negative
stereotypes such as laziness, lack of intellectual sophistication, and
lechery — all constitutive of the essence of the colonized, according
to an ethnocentric colonial mentality. But Schweitzer does not rely on
such a vocabulary. As for the interpreter, it is through an exegesis of
the doctor’s sermon that he suggests that the people of Lambaréné
should live the stereotypes to their fullest, as a postcolonial strategy of
displacement and demarginalization. In other words, the interpreter
supposedly tells the Gabonese that since the Great White Man is
telling them they are illiterate, fornicators, and drunks, then they
should choose to be so, and live the plenitude of the stereotypes.

As a parasite, the interpreter chooses a discursive strategy that

allows him to confuse the issues and to acquire authority as a disrup-
tive go-between. Like all parasites in the biological sense of the word,
he only exists if he inscribes himself into the power dynamics in
which the Great White Man is immersed. His translation is detrimen-
tal to the doctor’s power and provides the community with tools
aimed at dismantling his mission and colonial project.

As a trickster, the interpreter cleverly steals the stereotypes of la-

ziness, stupidity, and lechery, reappropriates them, and, Bible in hand,
wearing his colonial helmet, he gives the illusion of sharing the Great
White Man’s ideology, yet he cleverly subverts the colonizer’s dis-
course. Since his behavior is a form of smuggling as well as a legiti-
mate positioning of border crossing, he is actively speaking from a
“third space” at the junction of a colonial and a postcolonial mentality.
In that situation, he wears a mask that serves to unveil the innuendos
in the Great White Man’s sermon and the very depths of his colonial
mentality. Moreover, as a trickster, he reserves the right to interpret
what he believes to be left unsaid and concealed in the doctor’s ser-
mon, and he uses the most offensive stereotypes to destabilize the
Great White Man in public. If I wanted to bring to an end my analysis
of the various discursive strategies used in this scene at this stage, I
realize that the French original version alone does not allow me to do
so, since it does not allow for a duplicitous discourse of reinterpreta-
tion to be present in the words of the interpreter until the English sub-
titles appear in the film.

Curtius 125

M3M French Original Version

3. The French-speaking audience

Originally in French, the film is primarily intended for a French-

speaking audience, and Fang is only used by the interpreter to trans-
late the doctor’s homily. Therefore, when privileged French and Eng-
lish-speaking viewers watch the M3M original version and try to un-
derstand why the Fang is not translated into French at this particular
moment in the film, they conclude that the French distributor took for
granted that the interpreter’s translation is accurate. On the other hand,
bilingual viewers who believe that the English subtitles in the sermon
scene in the California Newsreel version are correct would tend to
think that the French distributor subverted Ba Kobhio’s supposedly
strategic position and adopted a particular ideological stand by not
providing the French audience with the subtitles that make Schweitzer
look ridiculous. Thus, the French-speaking audience is not given the
opportunity to articulate a critical discourse as the other audiences are.
Consequently, this is how an ideological discourse evolves from an
allegedly technical “mistake,” or how a technical “mistake” gives rise
to the construction of an ideological discourse. At this point only, the
subtitles missing in the French version drastically change the ideolo-
gical meaning. As is the case with the monolingual English audience,

––––––––––

Authorization to reproduce this picture was granted by Bassek ba Kobhio.

126

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

the French-speaking audience is not in a position to encode the colo-
nial-postcolonial dialectics that comes into play in the scene.

4. The Fang, French, and English-speaking audience

The interpretation by a fourth audience fluent in Fang, French,

and English adds a powerful twist to the three analyses proposed so
far. At this stage, reflecting upon the interrelation between languages
in the film, it seemed logical to verify whether the English subtitles
correspond to what the interpreter was saying in Fang in the sermon
scene. And my investigation led to the question of the reception of
such a film by an African audience, a consideration often ignored in
studies of African Cinema. I then looked for Fang speakers who could
provide me with a thorough translation of the different ways the inter-
preter, according to my analyses, allows himself to bypass the Great
White Man’s sermon and challenge his authority. Two Fang speakers
from Gabon and Equatorial Guinea reported the subtitles in the Cali-
fornia Newsreel version to be inaccurate and to depart significantly
from the original text, the doctor’s sermon in French.

1. Great White Man: Le message de Dieu est d’une extrême simplicité et
d’une divine complexité à la fois.
Interpreter: Medzu mese Nzame a nga dzo ne mi ke bo mia bo dzia me, ve
mia yia ne wokh medzu mese a ke mine ekanege

(Tout ce que Dieu vous

recommande de faire, vous devez le faire. Vous devez écouter ce que je vous
transmets.) (You must do everything that God tells you to do. You must
listen to what I’m telling you.)

2. Great White Man:

Ce qu’il faut retenir dans toute la Bible est parfois fa-

cile. C’est le travail seul qui sauve.
Interpreter: Edzam mia yia ne sile ezango, eti e ne foghe, ve ise, ise ete
ede eke mine vole. (Ce que vous devez attendre de Dieu, est que seul le
travail va vous aider.) (What you can expect from God is that work alone
will help you.)

3. Great White Man: Ce n’est pas le sacrifice de Jésus sur la croix qui sauve,
mais le fait de le suivre par un engagement actif. Dans ce sens, le travail dans
toutes les conditions est un acte de salut.

––––––––––

Jeannette Ekomie Cinnamon provided me with the transcriptions in Fang.

Fang informants’ translation into French are followed by my translation into

English.

Curtius 127

––––––––––

Interpreter:

Mia yia ne yem na, adzu Nzame ede mia yia neb o etam, et

mia yia ne yem fen a abwi mam asese me ne eti, Nzame enye a ve me.
(Vous devez savoir que tout ce que vous avez, c’est Dieu qui vous l’a
donné.) (You must know that God has given you all that you have.)

4. Great White Man:

Amen.

Interpreter:

Medzu mese a ndokh man kobe mi, mia yia ne yen na. (Tout

ce qu’il vient de dire, c’est ce que vous devez faire.) (Everything he has just
said, that’s what you have to do.)

Indeed, the Fang as spoken in the film does not translate the

Great White Man’s detailed theological rhetoric, with respect to the
sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and the utmost meaning of work as an
act of redemption. However, it has nothing of the sardonic and insult-
ing thrust of the English subtitles available in the California Newsreel
version. The perspectives of the three audiences analyzed above reveal
that they are oppositional receptors, since each group is limited by its
ignorance of one or two of the other languages and partially knows a
single discourse, which is believed to be the only “truth.” However,
the Fang, French, and English-speaking audience appears to stand
beyond the dynamics of oppositionality that characterizes the three
audiences, since it has the tools to browse through the innuendos of a
discourse that is henceforth articulated from the opposition of inaccu-
racy and authenticity. Interestingly, the crucial sermon scene, which
relies on translation in order to allow Ba Kobhio’s postcolonial
revision of Albert Schweitzer to come full circle, is deconstructed by
another dynamics of translation, that of another translator who, using
inaccurate subtitles, hijacks both Schweitzer and Ba Kobhio. Lost in
translation, Schweitzer is ridiculed, Ba Kobhio’s script is transformed,
and a mysterious

translator, performing within the film and beyond

the screen, takes the place of the interpreter — whom I identified
previously as a postcolonial trickster — to become the real trickster.
But does knowing the truth make my previous analyses inappropriate?
Are interpretations by viewers of the California Newsreel version also
faulty, inasmuch as they are based on wrong English subtitles? My
earlier analyses need not be discarded, since both versions of the film

Neither California Newsreel nor Bassek ba Kobhio was able to identify the

translator. Ba Kobhio informed me that the translation was negotiated between Cali-
fornia Newsreel and the producer.

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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

will continue to circulate, and multiple layers of interpretation will
continue to be intertwined because of the missing (the M3M original
version) or existing (the California Newsreel version) subtitles, and
because of the geographical, linguistic, and ideological boundaries
that the film has crossed. Moreover, is the omniscient Fang, French,
and English-speaking audience in an ideal position to elaborate a
definitive interpretation of the Bible teaching scene? The following
observations of the director of The Great White Man of Lambaréné
speak to the contrary.

In September 2007, I finally communicated with Bassek ba

Kobhio, and here are his written remarks about the sermon scene:

En effet, l’interprète n’est pas fidèle aux propos du docteur. Il choisit
d’interpréter dans le sens qui l’arrange et c’est ça qui est intéressant. Je crois
qu’il y a une erreur que je n’ai pas relevée lorsqu’on faisait la première ver-
sion vidéo, parce que je constate que même sur le DVD produit par l’Or-
ganisation de la Francophonie que je viens de consulter, il n’y a pas de sous-
titres français à cet endroit, alors que la traduction anglaise part des textes
que j’ai dû valider en français.

A greater confusion thus derives from knowing all three lan-

guages. Even if one is now convinced that the California Newsreel
translation is false and that the translator henceforth plays a funda-
mental role in the appreciation of the sermon scene, Ba Kobhio’s
remarks bring us back to a reality, that of a script which uses an
interpreter to convey a postcolonial critical discourse about
Schweitzer’s Christianizing mission. But if one takes into account that
cinematic creation in West Africa allows space for collaboration
among actors, directors, and producers, and that the script is often
negotiated, transformed, reinterpreted by everyone, then, inevitably,
improvisation and différance in the Derridian sense of the term be-
come the norm. From this perspective, one is able to guess the inter-
action that may have been mapped out between the actor who played
the role of the interpreter in the film and Ba Kobhio. It is true, as Ba
Kobhio observes, that in this scene the interpreter is not faithful to
what the doctor says, and yet his lack of fidelity in Fang does not
really generate a postcolonial criticism of Schweitzer’s Christianizing
mission. Consequently, despite the importance of the traditional heal-
er, Bissa, Koumba, the drummer/trumpet player, and the journalist, it

Curtius 129

––––––––––

is the interpreter’s translation in Fang that short-circuits Ba Kobhio’s
postcolonial gaze on Albert Schweitzer in Lambaréné in the 1940s.
Might this be the reason why the California Newsreel translator, dis-
satisfied with the translation

in Fang, decided not to remain subser-

vient to the original text? As a performer, at this specific moment of
the film, the translator barters the position of faithful translator for that
of a cultural agent who produces meaning for a North American audi-
ence and requires that his reinvented English subtitles stand in their
own right. Thus, the postcolonial detour of Bassek ba Kobhio’s film is
not articulated through Fang but through English.

In this scene that generates a weave of polysemic subtexts, each

participant makes innuendos, wears a mask, subverts individual lan-
guages. This is how a postcolonial translation of a colonial mentality
loses its meaning. I can only wish that one day, the California News-
reel trickster-translator will identify himself or herself and reveal to us
the secret of his or her performance.

My deepest gratitude goes to two infor-
mants, Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo from
Equatorial Guinea and Jeannette Ekomie
Cinnamon from Gabon, who provided me
with the translation from Fang. Thank
you to Mamadou Badiane, John M. Cin-
namon and Shelly Jarrett-Bromberg for
their precious help in facilitating the
translation process with these two infor-
mants.

One could assume that this translator shrewdly manipulates and controls the

meaning of the doctor and the interpreter’s words because he understands French and
Fang.

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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

Works Cited

Ba Kobhio, Bassek, dir. Le grand Blanc de Lambaréné. France/Cameroon.

Médiathèque des Trois Mondes (M3M), 1994.

_____. The Great White Man of Lambaréné. France/Cameroon. California

Newsreel, 1994.

Fanon, Frantz. Peau noire masques blancs. Paris: Seuil, 1952.

Hampaté Bâ, Amadou. L’étrange destin de Wangrin ou les roueries d’un in-

terprète africain. Paris: 10/18, 1973.

Higginson, Francis. “The Well-Tempered Savage: Albert Schweitzer, Music,

and Imperial Deafness.” Research in African Literatures 36.4 (2005):
205-22.

Laronde, Michel. Postcolonialiser la Haute Culture à l’École de la

République. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008.

Memmi, Albert. Portrait du colonisé. Paris: Payot, 1973.

Rosello, Mireille. Declining the Stereotype: Ethnicity and Representation in

French Cultures. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England,
1998.

_____. Postcolonial Hospitality. The Immigrant as Guest. Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 2001.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak.” Marxism and the

Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 271-313.

Wechsler, Robert. Performing Without A Stage: The Art of Literary Transla-

tion. New Haven: Catbird Press, 1998.

FLS, Volume XXXVI, 2009

Translation

Sarah Davies Cordova

Marquette University

Traduire la reine Pokou: fidélité ou trahison?

Avec sa “traduction” de la légende de la Reine Pokou, Véronique Tadjo
présente une double critique de la version mimétiquement limitée de
l’Histoire originaire de la Côte d’Ivoire retrouvée aujourd’hui sur la
page du texte des écoliers ivoiriens. Rendant évidente la violence faite
au texte et aux lecteurs de la légende de la Reine Pokou par une telle
version historicisante qui la trahit en y effaçant toute explication du
sacrifice de son fils unique par la mère, Tadjo enregistre dans Reine
Pokou: Concerto pour un sacrifice une multitude de façons possibles
d’appréhender et ainsi de traduire une telle histoire.

________________________

Le mythe est sorti trop tôt de sa cachette. On
l’a déshabillé à la hâte. On l’a défiguré, déna-
turé, nous laissant à jamais pauvre d’un savoir
tellement plus riche. (Reine 85)

Dans leur fiction récente, de nombreuses écrivaines contempo-

raines de l’Afrique subsaharienne reflètent leur société à travers la
thématique de la violence et de ses effets sur la jeunesse d’aujour-
d’hui, se situant ainsi du côté de l’engagement de la littérature.

Comme pour les quarante-quatre signataires du “Manifeste pour une
‘littérature-monde’ en français”, leurs œuvres à elles participent aussi
au “retour du monde dans la littérature” (Barbery et al.). Les signa-

––––––––––

Odile Cazenave dans “Francophone Women Writers” souligne l’écriture enga-

gée des femmes africaines depuis les années 1990.

132

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

taires du manifeste explicitent une littérature-monde en français, qui
en 2006, a primé aux listes des grands prix. Ils écrivent, “Le monde, le
sujet, le sens, l’histoire, le ‘référent’ [...] mis ‘entre parenthèses’ par
les maîtres-penseurs, inventeurs d’une littérature sans autre objet
qu’elle-même, [...] f[ont] retour sur la scène du monde” (Barbery et
al.).

De même, renvoyant souvent à la question de fidélité et de trahi-

son avec un tracé explicite ou implicite des pires moments de violence
historiques qui remonte à l’esclavage et qui descend jusqu’au géno-
cide rwandais parmi tant d’autres événements marquants, sans cepen-
dant expliquer le monde meurtrier, les écrivaines insistent sur la
résilience de l’amour et offrent des notes d’espoir pour un avenir à
reconstruire

avec leurs scénarios qui créent d’autres mondes, ou

d’autres structures pour une “société potentielle” (Femmes rebelles
336).

L’écrivaine franco-ivoirienne, Véronique Tadjo, interroge à tra-

vers ses textes le souvenir et les résonances du passé dans le présent
car elle conçoit l’écriture comme pouvant servir de gardienne du
savoir et jouer le rôle de médiatrice. Selon elle, même si toute litté-
rature est construction de l’imaginaire, elle affecte la réalité tumul-
tueuse et sert encore comme outil de critique sociale

dans le but

d’influencer le monde à venir.

Par le biais d’une re-naissance ou

––––––––––

Les signataires du “Manifeste pour une ‘littérature-monde’ en français” sont

majoritairement du sexe masculin (Barbery et al.). Voir aussi “Dossier” pour la pro-
blématique de la littérature francophone.

Ma paraphrase d’Odile Cazenave, “Writing the Child, Youth, and Violence

into the Francophone Novel from Sub-Saharan Africa: The Impact of Age and Gen-
der” (66, 67). Cazenave élargit le champ décrit par Jean-Marie Volet dans “Franco-
phone Women Writing in 1998-99 and Beyond: A Literary Feast in a Violent World”
où il parle du rôle de la violence dans la littérature des femmes d’Afrique au tournant
du millénaire en tant qu’expression de la réalité quotidienne en Afrique et en France
mais aussi comme arrière-fond à leurs stratégies de survie, de comprendre comment
elles se retrouvent impuissantes face à l’implosion de leur monde et de penser aux
possibilités de l’avenir, comme dans un autre texte de Tadjo, Champs de bataille et
d’amour (1999). Voir aussi l’article de Thérèse Migraine-George qui relève comment
“l’espoir, la célébration de la beauté, de l’amour, de la tendresse et de la simplicité
patiente des gestes quotidiens constituent un impératif éthique, une prise de responsa-
bilité et une forme d’engagement [...]” (81).

J’ai repris de l’anglais un passage au sujet d’À Vol d’oiseau dans “African

Writers series”.

Pour cette notion d’influencer l’avenir, voir le concept de “Scenario planning”

de Kahane et le “Mont Fleur Scenario Planning” organisé par Pieter le Roux en 1992

Davies Cordova

133

d’une co[n]-naissance, que ce soit dans sa littérature pour la jeunesse
où par exemple le masque, seigneur de la danse, après avoir été aban-
donné et vendu avec la venue de l’urbanisme, revit et s’offre en guide
à l’enfant;

dans sa poésie, dont les vers résonnent de voyages

d’amour; ou encore dans L’Ombre d’Imana: Voyages jusqu’au bout
du Rwanda où tant de passages nous interpellent à raisonner autre-
ment, Tadjo ramène le passé dans le présent pour souligner combien il
faut bien écouter, bien se rappeler pour mieux appréhender l’entente et
la transmission du savoir, pour bien traduire, pour ne pas trahir: “Oui,
se souvenir. Témoigner. C’est ce qui nous reste pour combattre le
passé et restaurer notre humanité” (L’Ombre 95) écrit-elle. Ou encore
pour fermer L’Ombre d’Imana:

La violence des hommes a fait la mort cruelle, hideuse. Monstre à tout

jamais dans la mémoire du temps.

Comprendre. Disséquer les mécanismes de la haine. Les paroles qui

divisent. Les actes qui scellent les trahisons. Les gestes qui enclenchent la
terreur.

Comprendre. Notre humanité en danger. (L’Ombre 133)

Qu’il s’agisse du masque dans Le Seigneur de la danse, représentation
symbolique et incorporée de l’esprit en question qui permet de faire
passer et de traduire la nature des choses; ou d’Imana, dieu du Kenya
et du Rwanda, en tant qu’ombre réconciliante dans le texte émanant
du projet collectif: “Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire”; ou en-
core de la Reine Pokou, l’œuvre de Tadjo s’insinue jusqu’au cœur de
la problématique de la fidélité dans le passage d’une voix à l’autre et
de la violence issue de la trahison de la traduction.

Comme d’autres

écrivaines travaillant en plusieurs langues, telle la sud-africaine Antjie
Krog, Tadjo problématise la traduction. Puisque l’étymologie du verbe
“traduire” renvoie au sens de “faire passer”, la traduction implique la
transformation, et le fait de masquer. Inscrire — une forme de traduc-
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

qui a été à la base du programme économique de l’Afrique du Sud au sortir de
l’apartheid.

“Enfant, laisse-moi te dire/un secret:/ne m’oublie pas./Si tu te perds/dans la

ville/ou si tu te sens triste,/appelle-moi/et je guiderai tes pas.// Tam-tam-tam-tam-tam”
(20), Véronique Tadjo, Le Seigneur de la Danse (1993).

Bien que Tadjo ne fasse pas allusion à Radio Mille Collines dans L’Ombre

d’Imana, le rôle de la voix, des messages émis par les médias au Rwanda apparaissent
sous-jacents tout au long de ce travail.

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tion — trahit les langues orales, les légendes d’antan comme
l’explique un griot de Tombouctou dans le texte de Krog, Change of
Tongue: “We are the source of memory. All you have is the voice of
the memory and the imagery thereof. Memory comes to you only in
hearing. If we write the memory, we burn the memory” (323).

Dans

un autre texte où il s’agit aussi de tribulations et de langues — Mother
Tongues — Barbara Johnson souligne la trahison présente dans la
traduction: “to translate is to traduce — the betrayal of the original in
the process of transmitting it is inherent in translation”.

C’est peut-être dans Reine Pokou: Concerto pour un sacrifice,

publié chez Actes Sud en 2004, que Tadjo réunit le plus évidemment
la violence historique à la violence faite au lectorat par les livres
d’Histoire pour rendre implicitement le constat de la situation mimé-
tique en Côte d’Ivoire pendant les premières années de ce millénaire.
D’après le sous-titre de l’œuvre il est clair que l’auteure voudrait jouer
ce concerto pour problématiser le sacrifice ainsi que pour l’insérer
dans le contexte actuel de la Côte d’Ivoire. Par le biais du question-
nement, l’écrivaine, dont le père est Akan, remonte aux traditions
matriarcales des Ashanti et des Baoulé en revenant sur les person-
nages et les histoires qui gèrent une partie de la (re)connaissance
nationale ivoirienne en se demandant comment prêter fidélité à la flui-
dité de la légende lors du passage de l’oral à l’écrit, du mythe à
l’Histoire.

En cernant l’impact des interprètes sur l’histoire elle-

même et sur des générations d’écoliers, Tadjo dissèque le mythe fon-
dateur du peuple baoulé trahi par l’historicité et le réduit à la glorifi-
cation du sacrifice d’un enfant innocent par sa propre mère. Dénaturée
par l’abandon de sa complexité, cette page de l’Histoire ivoirienne
––––––––––

Antjie Krog: (je traduis) “Nous sommes la source de la mémoire. Vous n’avez

que la voix de la mémoire et son image. La mémoire ne vous parvient qu’en écoutant.
Si nous écrivons la mémoire nous brûlons la mémoire” (Change 323).

Cité par Judith Butler dans “Betrayal’s Felicity”, 82.

À la différence d’auteurs tels Sony Labou Tansi (et peut-être peut-on diffé-

rencier selon les lignes démarquant les sexes) Tadjo ne décrit pas la violence physique
corporelle. Même dans L’Ombre d’Imana la violence y apparaît dans son énormité,
dans son élément d’immensurabilité et combien il est difficile de comprendre la
monstruosité de l’homme qui a su rendre la mort cruelle et hideuse. Voir Pascale
Perraudin, “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” pour la
visibilité de la chaire torturée comme moyen de se trouver une subjectivité, une façon
de ne pas être effacée par l’intimité même de cet espace intime de la chair.

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135

n’invoque que la justification de la violence. Comme avec toute
calomnie, la réduction rend ses failles néanmoins perceptibles. Les
versions de Tadjo de la légende élaborent son aspect cathartique et
traduisent les lecteurs en un autre espace, où il y a lieu d’imaginer la
réconciliation. En cooptant la rumeur telle qu’elle circule dans un
espace d’entente et de connaissance, ses versions mènent le doute,
interrogent le savoir traditionnel de l’Histoire, et cherchent un sens au
monde actuel.

Exemplum pour la traduction par ses transformations

et véritable hymne à la littérature en tant qu’essai, Reine Pokou Con-
certo pour un sacrifice délivre la légende de son cadre sur la page des
livres d’Histoire ivoiriens “[...] dans le chapitre sur le royaume ashanti
au XVIII

siècle” qui explique “la naissance du royaume baoulé”

(Reine 7).

En effet, Tadjo réécrit la légende de la reine baoulé et son avène-

ment au dix-huitième siècle et imagine d’autres versions pour contre-
carrer la simple figure héroïque d’Abraha Pokou, qui aurait sauvé son
peuple en sacrifiant son fils unique.

Dans un entretien en janvier

––––––––––

Sonia Lee trouve que les essais-récits des écrivaines d’Afrique parlent d’un

savoir “qui va a l’encontre d’un savoir traditionnel par le fait même qu’il est instruit
par le doute, le questionnement, la subjectivité, et la sagesse qui nait de l’expérience
[...] la diversité, le concret et l’actualité de la pensée féminine constituent un nouveau
savoir pour l’Afrique et pour le monde” (Lee 29).

Mary Ann Caws, dans Surprised in Translation, explique que les traductions

les plus fortuites avec leurs reformulations et ajustements rendent l’enregistrement de
l’oralité plus poétique lorsque la mimésis est évitée.

Dans “Les interviews d’Amina — lire les Femmes écrivains et les littératures

africaines”, Tadjo explique que la légende de la Reine Pokou existe en d’autres ver-
sions dans d’autres pays d’Afrique (Atakpama). Plus récemment, elle se retrouve
aussi dans Humus de Fabienne Kanor (2006), un roman construit à partir d’un chœur
de douze femmes qui racontent comment elles se sont retrouvées à bord du négrier Le
Soleil et pourquoi elles faisaient partie d’un groupe de quatorze femmes qui se sont
jetées par-dessus bord en 1774. La Vieille raconte: “Mon peuple, les Baoulés, ne s’est
pas toujours appelé ainsi. En temps longtemps, ils se disaient ashanti, habitants d’un
royaume fabuleusement riche, situé loin, à l’est du fleuve, là où renaît le soleil. À la
suite de conflits familiaux, ils ont fui leur royaume, transportant bétail, or et enfants.
[...] En tête, il y a cette mère. Reine, assurément [...] lorsqu’un fleuve leur apparaît, si
tortueux, si large, qu’à moins d’un miracle nul homme ne peut le traverser.

“Ô reine, les dieux exigent que tu fasses un sacrifice. [...] Mère Abla, tu dois

leur offrir ton fils. C’est ce que les dieux veulent. [...] Les dieux ont parlé et la reine
s’exécute. Jette l’enfant dans le fleuve tandis qu’un pied-bois s’incline, reliant les
deux berges. ‘Peuple baoulé, encore quelques heures de marche et nous serons arrivés

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2006, l’auteure souligne que cette histoire est devenue Histoire pour
les jeunes lycéens ivoiriens; et combien elle justifie les actions de leur
gouvernement:

[...] il y a aussi le fait que cette histoire se trouve dans les livres scolaires. Je
l’ai redécouverte dans le livre d’Histoire. Quel message est-ce qu’on donne
à cette jeunesse avec cette légende comme elle leur est présentée? Qu’est-ce
qu’on lui signifie quand on répète qu’on a jeté cet enfant dans le fleuve pour
le bien du peuple? Qu’on peut la balancer aussi dans le fleuve? Je voulais
revoir cette légende dans le contexte actuel. (“Entretien”)

Elle relève comment la traduction de la légende en Histoire a margi-
nalisé et fait disparaître l’ambiguïté relayée oralement de génération
en génération selon le contexte et leur époque; comment l’inscription
de l’histoire originelle du peuple ivoirien et de cette mère prête à jeter
le fils qu’elle a attendu si longtemps dans le fleuve Comoé a arrêté ses
possibilités:

La légende telle qu’on l’a couchée sur le papier est une légende dénaturée.
Dans la tradition orale africaine, il y a plusieurs étapes de compréhension
pour l’enfant, l’adulte, et le vénérable vieillard. À l’âge mûr, on comprend
les clés de cette légende. Or cette légende, on nous l’a donnée telle quelle en
lui enlevant toutes ses subtilités. Il ne reste donc que ce sacrifice de l’enfant
que l’on doit accepter. On n’a plus les clés. (“Entretien”)

Ces trois âges de la compréhension, lors desquels le cumul des
connaissances au rythme du souvenir et de l’expérience aboutit au
raisonnement contextuel, hantent l’imaginaire de Tadjo, qui construit
l’ensemble de Reine Pokou: Concerto pour un sacrifice en trois
temps.

Comme le sous-titre l’annonce, le texte de Tadjo se révèle être

aussi un concerto dont les trois mouvements s’intitulent: Le temps de
la légende; Le temps du questionnement; et Le temps de l’enfant-
oiseau. L’écrivaine suggère de nouvelles clés à travers le supplément
de résonances de son concerto qui se compose sur deux registres: à

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

chez nous!’ déclare-t-elle enfin d’une voix sourde avant d’ouvrir la marche” (Kanor
35-36).

Entretien de Désiré K. Wa Kabwe-Segatti et Sarah Davies Cordova avec

Véronique Tadjo à Johannesburg, le mercredi 18 janvier 2006. Voir la postface “Du
Bambara au négropolitain” (à sortir) et l’“Entretien avec Véronique Tadjo”, Lianes.

Davies Cordova

137

partir de la violence du sacrifice et de l’autodestruction, le récit; et de
la violence de la fracture textuelle de la légende, c’est-à-dire la traduc-
tion vers l’écrit. Le prélude anticipe aussi la structure tripartite de
Reine Pokou en avançant les trois tons du concerto de par sa propre
mise en abîme des trois moments lors desquels cette histoire a inter-
pellé Tadjo. À sa première rencontre avec la légende, l’écrivaine
n’avait que dix ans et se représentait “Pokou sous les traits d’une
Madone noire” (Reine 7). Ensuite, au lycée, la reine “prenait ainsi la
stature d’une figure historique, héroïne-amazone conduisant son
peuple vers la liberté” (7). Tadjo dit lui avoir donné “un visage, une
vie, des sentiments” (7) jusqu’au jour où la guerre recommença en
Côte-d’Ivoire et qu’elle lui “apparut alors sous un jour beaucoup plus
funeste, celui d’une reine assoiffée de pouvoir, écoutant des voix
occultes et prête à tout pour asseoir son règne” (8).

“Le Temps de la légende” qui constitue la première partie — une

véritable cantate — reprend, en suivant le genre de la légende, aussi
bien que le style et le ton de l’oraliture, les événements qui auraient
engendré la fondation du peuple baoulé. D’un trait, il y est conté
comment ce peuple vint à se séparer du royaume ashanti lorsqu’il
devait faire face à un monde désuni et dorénavant hétérogène, marqué
par la fragmentation, la mutilation et les différences irréconciliables
promus par ceux voulant asseoir leur droit au pouvoir à l’encontre de
la volonté du roi mourant. À cause de leur propre exil, suite à leur
fuite afin d’échapper aux assassinats commandités par ce nouveau roi,
ces fugitifs s’unissent sous un nouveau nom car les sages, entendant
Pokou répéter “inlassablement ‘Ba-ou-li’: l’enfant est mort!” (31)
déclarent qu’en mémoire du sacrifice d’Abraha Pokou ce peuple de
l’exode s’appellerait “Baoulé”.

La deuxième partie — “Le Temps du questionnement” — se

divise en six “chapitres”, chacun avec son propre titre, mis à part le
deuxième: Abraha Pokou, reine déchue; La traversée de l’Atlantique;
La reine sauvée des eaux; Dans les griffes du pouvoir; Les paroles du
poète. Partie centrale de Reine Pokou, elle se conjugue sur le mode
d’une série de questions ayant trait au déroulement possible et à
l’interprétation de cette légende baoulé fondatrice transformée en fait
historique au sein des livres d’Histoire scolaires de la Côte d’Ivoire.
Au cœur du concerto les six chapitres du “Temps du questionnement”
résonnent entre eux et se répondent rouvrant la fixité rendue par la

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traduction en Histoire au mouvement implicite de toute légende
reprise au fil du passage des générations successives.

Il y est souvent question d’eau et d’autres sacrifices liés à l’eau.

Dans “Abraha Pokou, reine déchue”, la question posée face à cette
reine exilée, dite orpheline de son enfant (35), qui revient comme un
refrain “Les eaux se sont-elles vraiment fendues pour laisser passer le
peuple?” (38) interroge la véracité de la légende. Dès la mise en doute,
l’enfant sacrifié devient l’enfant au trait d’union — enfant-prince;
enfant-roi — comme pour indiquer tout le potentiel de l’enfant non-
interrogé qui se transforme à la fin dans l’imaginaire de l’apothéose en
enfant-oiseau, enfant des airs de l’avenir. Mais avant, un autre scéna-
rio est inscrit parmi les clés possibles de cette légende: Abraha Pokou
folle de son acte, plonge dans les flots du fleuve, rejoint son fils dans
l’océan où elle conquiert “un royaume plus beau encore que celui
qu’on lui avait promis: à présent, mi-femme, mi-poisson, déesse
incontestée de l’univers sous-marin, reine des océans” (46). Amante
puissante aux côtés de son fils — l’enfant-océan — elle cherche à le
préserver du mal. Invité des dieux, cet enfant voyagerait entre deux
mondes, le monde des eaux et celui des airs alors que Pokou apparaît
sous des traits mythiques qui rappellent Mamy Wata, amenant de la
sorte la convergence de deux histoires d’eau et avec cette interdépen-
dance et intertextualité, une co-(n)naisance pénétrante (insight) de la
légende qui manque au degré zéro du récit historique dénaturé.

La section suivante intitulée “La Traversée de l’Atlantique”

débute sur le mode du “Et si” hypothétique pour imaginer ce qui se
serait passé si Pokou avait refusé de donner son fils au Génie du
fleuve. Une série tout autre d’événements vient élaborer un dénoue-
ment selon lequel un village offre l’hospitalité à Pokou et ses partisans
pour qu’ils reprennent leurs forces afin de pouvoir continuer leur route
avec des indications d’un chemin plus sûr pour contourner le fleuve.
Mais l’armée royale qui les a suivis, incendie le village et prend les
survivants ashanti en otages pour les vendre en esclavage. Transportés
au nouveau monde, esclaves assujettis, ils rêvent au voyage du retour
et complotent une insurrection au cours de laquelle le premier enfant
et le fils de sang mêlé de Pokou qu’elle aurait eu sont capturés et pen-

––––––––––

L’Histoire telle que Tadjo la définit ici ressemble au degré zéro de l’écriture

présenté par Roland Barthes, Le degré zéro de l’écriture.

Davies Cordova

139

dus alors que quelques-uns arrivent à s’échapper et à fonder une colo-
nie de marrons. Dans ce scénario, le refus de Pokou de sacrifier son
fils remet éventuellement le choix de mourir entre les mains de ses
fils, qui assument cette responsabilité eux-mêmes avec leurs actes de
rébellion.

Dans “La Reine sauvée des eaux”, Pokou accepte la volonté des

autres et suit la destinée qui lui est réservée. Tenace, elle avance sans
répit, n’arrivant pas à se reposer la nuit, et sombrant dans la folie alors
que l’esprit de son fils la harcèle pour qu’elle le rejoigne. Afin de les
réconcilier, un sculpteur est chargé de réaliser une effigie du prince
sacrifié qui par sa ressemblance ouvre “un chemin entre le monde des
hommes et celui des esprits” (70). Comblée, revoyant son fils dans ses
rêves, Pokou retrouve la sérénité. Une fois leur reine apaisée, le
peuple reprend sa route et se trouve un matin dans une clairière pro-
pice à la vie où, les esprits des lieux ayant accepté leurs offrandes,
“Pokou fonda le royaume baoulé dont le rayonnement s’étendit bien
au-delà de ses frontières naturelles” (73). Par la coercition de son
peuple et de ses fidèles, Pokou suit aveuglément un destin déterminé
par une acceptation des traditions et des substitutions — une statue
pour un fils, le symbole d’un peuple pour un fils — métonymie presti-
gieuse, où le bois sculpté se substitue à l’enfant pour la mère, où
l’artifice de la figurine traduit symboliquement l’esprit de l’enfant.

“Dans les griffes du pouvoir” revient à la question du droit de

succession en s’attelant à la question de l’ivoirité, à ce qui donne droit
de cité ou de citer les lois du pays en tant que citoyen, et aborde donc
la question brûlante, selon Tadjo, de l’actualité ivoirienne:

Reine Pokou est un texte difficile puisqu’il aborde le thème de l’ivoirité.
C’était fantastique d’avoir cette légende qui montrait qu’un peuple fonda-
mentalement ivoirien comme celui des Baoulé venait en fait du Ghana, pays
limitrophe, mais quand même pays hors des frontières. Elle m’a permis de
rappeler qu’il faut relativiser les choses, c’est-à-dire que nous sommes tous
un peuple de migrants. Il y a d’autres raisons pour lesquelles j’ai écrit le
texte, bien sûr. Mais c’est surtout par rapport à l’ivoirité, source des graves
problèmes de la Côte-d’Ivoire. (Lianes)

En effet Karim, le père dont l’existence dans cette version n’est ni
avoué ni même admis publiquement par Pokou, bien qu’il soit le seul
à lui avoir donné un enfant, est musulman et vient du désert. Néan-

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moins lorsque le roi cherche à annihiler Pokou et ses partisans, c’est
vers Karim qu’elle va pour qu’il leur serve de guide. Mais ce sera lui
qui sera accusé ensuite de les avoir trahis lorsque le fleuve Comoé
paraît impraticable. Karim plaide contre un tel acte d’enfanticide en
soulignant combien d’après sa loi, la vie est sacrée. Mais elle lui
répond qu’elle ne lui doit rien puisque l’enfant appartient au peuple, et
qu’elle doit se plier à la volonté de ses dieux afin d’asseoir sa souve-
raineté.

Dans ce scénario, le peuple attise le désir de Pokou pour le pou-

voir qui dépasse son bonheur maternel et s’exaspère en crise sacrifi-
cielle. La convergence de colère et de rage collective déclenche le
mécanisme du bouc émissaire qui, d’après René Girard et Xavier Gar-
nier, repose sur un revirement qui permet toutes les alliances contre la
victime unanimement désignée comme la cause unique du désordre.

Ce n’est plus Pokou qui est responsable, mais Karim, qui les a menés
à leur mort. Victime innocente, père d’un fils tellement voulu, Karim,
l’étranger à la scène — l’exclus de la cène — est exécuté afin de
ramener à la paix une communauté frustrée.

Cette mé-connaissance

(le non reconnu) qui ressemble au meurtre traduit Karim en bouc
émissaire des Baoulé à venir et suggère comment l’Autre se retrouve
dans la position de victime pour des questions d’identité et d’assise de
pouvoir.

Finalement “Les paroles du poète” interrogent la part de vérité de

la dimension mythique de cette légende. En soulevant les questions
que cache l’immobilisation de la légende, le griot se penche sur
l’aspect symbolique de la personne sacrifiée, pour essayer “de com-
prendre comment un tel acte a pu être glorifié”.

Personnage positif

dans l’œuvre de Tadjo, le griot ne correspond pas à l’historien de la
geste officielle mais au serviteur de la collectivité communale. Il se

––––––––––

Voir “Usages littéraires de la rumeur en Afrique” de Xavier Garnier: “On leur

reproche [aux rumeurs] de véhiculer des stéréotypes rétrogrades et archaïques, de
mettre en jeu la logique du bouc émissaire, de jouer sur des pulsions racistes, bref
d’être irrationnelles et immorales” (14).

Le fait qu’il est vu comme un homme justement condamné et non pas comme

la victime et le bouc émissaire souligne la relation métonymique de la victime au bouc
émissaire. Pour le mécanisme du bouc émissaire voir René Girard, Les Origines de la
culture.

Véronique Tadjo: Interview sur PlaneteAfrique (2003).

Davies Cordova

141

demande si ce ne serait qu’une série de positions symboliques qui
chercherait à asseoir un pacte de paix, un partage du pouvoir. Allégo-
rie du sacrifice actuel des jeunes Ivoiriens, les paroles du poète
donnent l’alerte au danger de ce mythe qui suit son chemin dans la
tête des enfants-soldats d’aujourd’hui pauvrement formés par cette
histoire à l’école, des enfants devenus les pions et le butin de guerre
des luttes de leurs aînés.

L’enseignement de cette légende à l’état réduit et brutal tel que

les livres scolaires la livrent aux jeunes Ivoiriens leur fait vivre et
accepter le sacrifice non consultatif et passif comme acte normal. Ces
manuels glorifient la violence par leur réduction du sacrifice à un acte
héroïque, et écartent par le silence toute trace de la violence faite aux
mères. Tandis que le rituel de la répétition des actes simplifiés par
l’écriture engage à l’apprentissage de la violence, la trahison textuelle
commise par la reproduction infidèle effectue la mutilation de la jeu-
nesse. De l’ordre d’une violence symbolique, cette fracture historici-
sante réduit la signification de la figure de l’enfant sacrifié à une
synecdoque alors que la légende racontée dans toute sa complexité
serait allégorique et permettrait l’ouverture sur différentes paraboles à
tirer de l’original, sur différentes interprétations selon les contextes
socio-historiques auxquels le peuple ferait face. Le réexamen de cette
Histoire sert de prétexte — de pré-texte (d’avant-texte) — pour revoir
le passé et les valeurs transmises par une historicité sélective qui
structure le rapport actuel au passé. Aucune fidélité à l’esprit de la lé-
gende semblerait possible si celle-ci devait rester une partie prise des
livres d’Histoire de la Côte d’Ivoire, où le manque d’opacité de la ver-
sion écrite la fidélise autrement: par rapport à sa reproduction. La sté-
réotypie la rend identique à elle-même et l’identifie à la vérité. Pokou
est dorénavant si bien connue que son acte est passé dans le savoir de
tout un — it’s common knowledge.

Comme avec tout simulacre, le

geste ainsi figé sur la page de cette héroïne a perdu son ambiguïté.

Ainsi la transposition de la légende en fait historique opère en

tant que calomnie. La perte des éléments-clés de son oralité originelle
engendre la trahison de la transmission du savoir, car l’Histoire né-
glige la mémoire collective, fait défaut et manque à la jeunesse. Sans

––––––––––

Pour ces notions de fidélité et de trahison dans la traduction voir “Betrayal’s

Felicity” de Judith Butler (82-87; surtout 82).

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forclore, les versions analogiques du concerto pour un sacrifice font
de la place aux connotations et s’ouvrent à la multiplicité et à
l’optimisme. En libérant le récit de l’Histoire et de l’arbitraire du lan-
gage, avec l’incorporation d’autres détails repris au fil des siècles,
Tadjo fait de sorte que son texte va dans le sens opposé de l’Histoire
— en amplifiant au lieu de simplifier. Reine Pokou concerto pour un
sacrifice plaide pour la reconnaissance d’autres niveaux interprétatifs
qui raisonnent différemment.

Alors que le récit du sacrifice sert de volet de départ, les pages du

“Temps du questionnement” récrivent le récit selon différentes lo-
giques historiques. Les alternatives qui y sont proposées reprennent
les éléments-clés et chers à Tadjo de la culture ivoirienne tels Mamy
Wata, la sculpture, l’art, et la musique. À tour de rôle, ces “chapitres”
improvisent d’autres suites et imaginent d’autres scénarios à cette
légende sacrificielle avant de proposer le merveilleux de la figure de
l’apocalypse dans “Le Temps de l’enfant-oiseau”. Une cantate par le
rythme de sa poésie et de sa prose aux qualités oniriques de
l’apocalypse,

cette dernière partie de Reine Pokou réutilise la tech-

nique des aperçus et des descentes des airs du deuxième roman de
Tadjo, À Vol d’oiseau, et rappelle le rôle du Masque si présent dans
l’imaginaire de l’écrivaine ainsi que dans le cycle des saisons en Côte
d’Ivoire. Ce volet redonne sa complexité à la légende avec l’image
d’un enfant qui, comme l’oiseau-lyre, s’envole jusqu’au soleil. Il s’en
prend au serpent qui rampe et frappe sans raison. Agent symbolique
de violence lui-même, il vainc la bête pour aller de l’avant avec
l’avenir où le sacrifice du serpent remplace celui de l’enfant. Cette
renonciation du sacrifice humain évoque la possibilité qu’a l’homme
de résister au mécanisme mimétique, à la logique du bouc émissaire.
Personnage sans âge, sans genre, humain et oiseau, tout et un, cet
enfant-oiseau réunit la “force de l’étonnement” et “le pouvoir de se
renouveler” (Reine 90). Dépassant le passé dans le présent, l’enfant
sacrifié revit. En effet, “Le temps de l’enfant-oiseau” finit avec
l’enfant qui rit et lève les bras au ciel. Révélation d’événements à
venir, cette coda renvoie avec l’apothéose non pas à l’Histoire, mais
au transcendant surréel de la légende. L’enfant-oiseau, en opposition à
l’enfant-océan, devient l’élu de la progéniture d’un avenir autre, et

––––––––––

Selon le Gradus, le thème de l’apocalypse est la révélation d’événements à

venir (60).

Davies Cordova

143

signale la possibilité d’un redémarrage à partir d’une page d’Histoire
tâchée qu’il faut tourner.

Afin de sortir de l’impasse de la logique de la violence contre les

enfants, l’écrivaine applique la lentille narrative à la médiation du
conflit social. Elle y explore plusieurs états émotionnels humains et
les relie aux structures profondes qui soutiennent les genres de textes
en jeu: l’Histoire, la légende, le mythe, ainsi que leur registre de la
langue orale ou écrite, de prose ou de poésie. En rapportant à
l’Histoire la dimension romanesque du réel, elle rappelle que le récit
n’a pas besoin d’être référentiel pour être vrai,

et que la fidélité à la

légende est un renouvellement continu des formes traditionnelles qui
comprend, parmi ses codes narratifs, le merveilleux. Ainsi pour ne
plus livrer les jeunes au leurre de l’Histoire sans ambages, Véronique
Tadjo donne le change à la trahison textuelle de la traduction historici-
sante en rhabillant le mythe avec les ailes légendaires d’un autre
savoir fidèle à la vie et à l’espoir.

––––––––––

Si l’on adaptait la linguistique de Chomsky, où il s’agit de la transformation

qui relie les deux niveaux de la structure syntactique — deep structure (information
syntactique) et surface structure (ce qui permet de convertir l’oral à l’écrit) pour
l’appliquer aux difficultés de la traduction que ce soit d’une langue à une autre, ou
d’un genre de texte à un autre, ce serait bien le passage, la transformation qui relie la
version à l’original. Ce que Tadjo nous propose alors serait un thème, la traduction de
l’Histoire vers l’étrange, l’opaque, et donc l’inverse du parcours de la version (en tra-
duction de l’autre langue vers sa propre langue). Antjie Krog ajoute une explication
de ces règles de Chomsky en exergue à A Change of Tongue, 5.

D’après Lee, dans “L’essai au féminin” le savoir des écrivaines d’Afrique est

“[u]n savoir qui n’explique pas le monde mais interroge et élucide le réel à partir
d’une éthique tournée vers la vie et l’espoir” (27).

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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

Ouvrages cités

Atakpama, Gnimdéwa. “Véronique Tadjo, auteure de Reine Pokou, Concerto

pour un sacrifice”. Amina 420 (avril 2005): 41. Les interviews d’Amina
— lire les Femmes écrivains et les littératures africaines. 20 mai 2009
<http://www/arts.uwa.edu.au/AFLIT/AMINATadjo05.html>

Barbery, Muriel, Tahar Ben Jelloun, et al. “Pour une ‘littérature-monde en

français’: le Manifeste”. Le Monde des Livres (16 mars 2007): 1.

Barthes, Roland. Le degré zéro de l’écriture. Paris: Seuil, 1953.

Butler, Judith. “Betrayal’s Felicity”. Diacritics 34.1 (2004): 82-87.

Caws, Mary Ann. Surprised in Translation. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2006.

Cazenave, Odile. Femmes rebelles: naissance d’un nouveau roman africain

contemporain. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996.

_____. “Francophone Women Writers in France in the nineties”. Beyond

French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in
France, 1981-2001. Éd. Roger Celestin, Éliane Dalmolin, et Isabelle de
Courtivron. New York: Palgrave, McMillan, 2003.

_____. “Writing the Child, Youth, and Violence into the Francophone Novel

from Sub-Saharan Africa: The Impact of Age and Gender”. Research in
African Literatures 36.2 (2005): 59-71.

Davies Cordova, Sarah, et Désiré Wa Kabwe-Segatti. “Entretien avec Véro-

nique Tadjo”. Lianes 1 (2006). 20 mai 2009 <http://www.lianes.org>.

“Dossier. 2006: année des francophonies. Défense et illustration des langues

françaises. ” Le Magazine littéraire 451 (mars 2006): 28-65.

Dupriez, Bernard. Gradus, les procédés littéraires (Dictionnaire). Paris:

10/18, 1995.

Garnier, Xavier. L’Éclat de la figure: Étude sur l’antipersonnage du roman.

Bruxelles: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2000.

_____. La Magie dans le roman africain. Paris: PUF, 1999.

_____. “Usages littéraires de la rumeur en Afrique”. Notre Librairie: Revue

des littératures du Sud 144 (avril-juin 2001): 14-19.

Girard, René. Les Origines de la culture. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2004.

Johnson, Barbara. Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Transla-

tion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Kahane, Adam. Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listen-

ing, and Creating New Realities. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004.

Kanor, Fabienne. Humus. Continents noirs. Paris: Gallimard, 2006.

King, Adèle. “Véronique Tadjo. Reine Pokou”. World Literature Today 80.2

(Mar-Apr 2006): 63.

Davies Cordova

145

Krog, Antjie. A Change of Tongue. Johannesburg: Random House, 2003.

Lederach, John Paul. The Moral Imagination: the Art and Soul of Peace-

making. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Lee, Sonia. “L’essai au féminin”. Notre Librairie: Revue des littératures du

Sud 144 (avril-juin 2001): 26-29.

Mbembe, Achille. “Francophonie et Politique du Monde”. Le Nouvel Obser-

vateur 24 mars 2007. <www. nouvelobs.com>.

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 <http://aflit.arts.uwa.edu.au/

IneditTadjo2.html>.

_____. 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. 1

déc. 2006

<http://www.planeteafrique.com/Amis/InterviewVeroniqueTadjo.asp>.

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 Cha-
moiseau, an ethical ethnography is a dialogic translation that gives
agency to both speaker and object. The essay concludes that both writ-
ers 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 archae-
ology. 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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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

discussion of Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” (1926) and
Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique (1988).

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 arti-
fact:

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 transla-
tion 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 Wal-
cott. 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

––––––––––

“The Task of the Translator” was written in 1921 and published in 1923 in

Charles Baudelaire, “Tableaux parisiens”: Deutsche Übertragung mit einem Vor-
word 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 expe-
rience 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, ill-
fitting, 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 archipel-
ago 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 — be-
comes 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 ar-
mies in 1940), Michel Leiris, and Roger Caillois sought to transform
in founding their “Collège de Sociologie.”

In Chamoiseau’s case,

these others have themselves been declared objects and lack the an-
tique artifacts with which to display cultural heft and historicity. Fur-
thermore, Chamoiseau strategically chooses a discipline whose object
of study is the animate shards of broken cultural traditions.

For more on the intersections between avant-garde ethnography and the Carib-

bean, particularly the work of Michel Leiris in Martinique, see Michael Dash.

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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 Carib-
bean writers are, like their European peers, concerned with literari-
ness, 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 dis-
count 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 eth-

nographic 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 in-
cludes 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-as-
detective-narrative privileges the argument between dark-skinned and
contemptuous Sergeant Bouafesse and the nerdy and genteel Inspector
Pilon about how to conduct the investigation.

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 Soli-
bo’s world than the inspector does. A focus on the detective narrative
reveals that in Martinique, one can either play along and reap the ben-
efits of sociocultural assimilation or resist and be the victims of those
who do. The detective novel here is a farce and a tragedy.

––––––––––

I want to thank Val Vinokur for this acute insight and for reading every draft

of this article.

Réjouis 151

––––––––––

Parallel to the detective genre, Chamoiseau also uses the frame-

work 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 hap-
less disciple “Patrick Chamoiseau,” the author’s alter ego, a struggling
amateur ethnographer who calls himself a “word scratcher” (“mar-
queur de paroles”) in a self-deprecating euphemism for writer. He sig-
nals 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.

On the one hand, ethnography allows the narrator to give a cer-

tain 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 ethnog-
rapher’s tent, tape recorders, planes, cars, hotels, cities, national bor-
ders) “out of the frame” (Clifford 23). For these reasons, his ethnogra-
phy 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

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, chal-
lenged, 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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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

novel without a plot, which imagines a “primitive” practicing a hys-
terical “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 deli-
cate 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 person-
ality 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 bron-
chitic gasps. One morning, Solibo addressed me with the exhausted instead-
of-hello question: Chamzibié-ho? What’s the use of writing?..., then he
chatted with me about everything and nothing, the word and the rest, with-
out taking another breath he told me the origin of the market, seventeen un-
decipherable tales, gave me news (unasked for) of the senile merchants’ fi-
nancial health, then he spoke to me of charcoal, of yams, of love, of forgot-
ten 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 sociolin-
guistic 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 Water-
mama, 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

Réjouis 153

––––––––––

the sea? But that’s not the most important thing. I’m going and you’re
staying. I spoke but you, you’re writing, announcing that you come from the
word. You give me your hand over the distance. It’s all very nice, but you
just touch the distance...”). (27-28)

Here, the ethnographer presents the storyteller as a reader and a
theorist. Solibo has read the ethnographer’s (and Chamoiseau’s) ear-
lier book, Maman Dlo, and he offers his critique of the author’s meth-
odology (recording stories traditionally told orally) and his project as a
whole. The storyteller views the ethnographer’s attempt to “foreign-
ize” (Venuti 4) written French with the oral playfulness of Creole and
Creolisms with skepticism, and he locates the problem of untranslata-
bility within the frame of intergenerational transmission: the ethnog-
rapher cannot translate orality into writing.

Critics such as Pierre Pinalie-Dracius and Marie José N’Zengou-

Tayo, 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” (Pina-
lie-Dracius 22) of a lot of French and a little Creole that produces an
“effet-de-créole” (N’Zengou-Tayo 165).

Ironically, the shortsighted-

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 Pi-
nalie’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 be-
lieve, on the contrary, that Chamoiseau’s conscious commitment to literal and meta-
phorical 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 Vino-
kur) 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 metro-
politan 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 ani-
mal/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 transla-
tion 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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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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’Zengou-
Tayo reproach him:

Other words of your vocabulary, still numerous, fail to invoke in me any-
thing 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 con-
tradicts 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 ethnog-
raphy as he puts it to new uses. Through the exchange between Solibo
and “Chamoiseau,” a dialogue that takes place in the “field,” Chamoi-
seau is experimenting with a more ethical mode of ethnographic rep-
resentation: 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

Réjouis 155

––––––––––

indicated above, the low/high cultural pairing of Solibo and Chamoi-
seau is parodied in the dynamics between the earthy, brutal Chief Ser-
geant Bouaffesse and the uptight, French-educated Inspector Pilon. By
representing both mutual cultural critiques as well as disputes, Cha-
moiseau describes local scenes of action in a local language,

in what

Karin Barber has called (in speaking of African literature) an act of
“linguistic confidence” (19-20).

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 de-
scribed 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 archae-

ology 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 “na-
tive”) 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 insider-
outsiderness 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

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.

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 re-
semblance 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, how-
ever, 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. (“One-
Way Street” and Other Writings 47)

In the dream, “Benjamin” is not merely the cultural insider-

outsider — that is, not simply the German outsider critic and writer —
he is also the racial or ethnic other, the Jew with his defining, inextri-
cable, 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 re-
quires a formal acknowledgment (the banquet), is a source of anxiety.
It becomes necessary to imagine a site of reconciliation, a task Benja-
min 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 con-
densation 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

Réjouis 157

––––––––––

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 represen-
tation, 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?

Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Task of the Translator,” fore-

shadows his interest in avant-garde intervention, a mode that explores
the political dimension of art as event. Chamoiseau, in his experi-
mentation 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 his-
tory of colonial terror that has evolved into Martinicans’ self-policing
their own sociocultural assimilation into France, Benjamin expe-
rienced a cultural assimilation, that of the German Jews, full of shad-
ows of its own. In their respective zones of insider-outsiderness, these
two writers signal their commitment to forms of artistic agency mod-
eled 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.

I want to thank Dale Peterson for a patient and generous reading of this essay

and for inspiring this question.

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Works Cited

Asad, Talal. “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthro-

pology.” 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. Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. 253-63.

Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. Éloge de la Cré-

olité. 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 Mas-

sumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Chamoiseau, Patrick. School Days. Trans. Linda Coverdale. Lincoln: Univer-

sity 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.” Calla-

loo 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 Cen-

tury. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Dash, J. Michael. “Le Je de l’autre: Surrealist Ethnographers and the Franco-

phone 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.

Réjouis 159

Jennings, Michael. “Walter Benjamin and the European Avant-Garde.” The

Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin. Ed. David S. Ferris. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Jones, Moya. “Chamoiseau and Matura: Translators and Translations.” Pal-

impsestes 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 Cha-

moiseau 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, Subjec-

tivity, 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 out-
side of the actual translation, this study examines how Philcox’s inter-
pretation of Condé’s Célanire cou-coupé is ultimately attuned to both
the difficulty of translating her writing’s complexity and to the linguis-
tic 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 Transla-
tion,” 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 his-
torical 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,

Phil-

cox would have to keep in mind the “opaque” poetics that character-
izes Condé’s writing, the recent translation debates and trends occur-
ring 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:

a poetics that asks the reader to labor at understanding her

texts due to the intentional “opacity” that characterizes both her writ-
ing style and her characters’ identities. In Condé’s fantastic tale, Céla-
nire Pinceau’s “opaque” or unreadable identity emerges from her
many geographical displacements, as well as her bodily dismember-
ment. 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 natu-
ral and the supernatural, the known and the unknown, with the begin-
ning 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. Mi-
raculously, she was stitched back together by Dr. Jean Pinceau, the
Caribbean counterpart to Mary Shelley’s Dr.

Frankenstein (Fulton

––––––––––

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).

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).

Okawa 163

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 origi-
nal text and the endless possibilities for its many readings and inter-
pretations. 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 them-
selves. 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 lan-
guages is destroyed. Of course, I recognize that my works have to be trans-
lated, but they are really not me. Only the original counts for me. Some

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people say that translation adds to the original. For me, it is another work,
perhaps an interesting one, but very distant from the original. (2)

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 English-
speaking 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 lin-
guistic and geographical displacements within a translated text (“Tra-
duire Maryse Condé” 752). This principle figures prominently in on-
going 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 re-
gion 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 lin-
guistic 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 Car-
ibbean 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,

Okawa 165

––––––––––

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 (42-
43); all of these can distort a translation’s relation to the original.

To be a discerning translator, then, is to be conscious of the his-

tory 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 influ-
ences 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 transla-
tor 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 pre-
cisely 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 transla-
tion.

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-

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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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 — under-
score 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 copub-
lishing 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 sum-
mary 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 prob-
lematic 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 real-
ism 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 ac-
tively 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-

Okawa 167

logical father. Throughout the novel, Célanire never once acknowl-
edges her awareness of Yang Ting or of this discovery. Like the edi-
tor’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 ten-
sions 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 fic-
tion, 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 inter-
textual 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 neces-
sary 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 com-
ments 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 re-
tain 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 transla-
tion.

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 litera-
ture and the universal undertones that would render it a more “transpa-
rent” translation. For this particular project, Philcox’s biggest chal-
lenge 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 Guadelou-
pean 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 lan-
guages (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

Okawa 169

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 Light-
house. 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 Gua-
deloupean 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 Afri-
can 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 Phil-
cox, the irony in Chatwin’s depiction of the fortunes of the dynasty of
an African kingdom is comparable to the sense of derision that per-
vades 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 pin-
pointing 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 Gua-
deloupe 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.

Whatever displacements the

resulting translations might present, translator prefaces offer informed
interpretations based on intimate readings of the original text. Phil-
cox’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 mission-
ary 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
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 si-
lence, her isolation when writing in her journal, and her overall lack of

––––––––––

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 19

century.

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.

Okawa 171

excitement, curiosity, and eagerness to begin the work, are just a few
ways in which she stands out. What thus becomes blurred in transla-
tion 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 third-
person 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 iden-
tity 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 interrup-
tion: “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 self-
reflection on beginnings or origins highlights the novel’s thematic
development of Célanire’s search for her birth parents while demon-
strating, at the beginning of Philcox’s version, the rigors and choices
of translating. As opposed to Condé’s novel, which opens with a de-
scription 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 para-
graphs later — a depiction of its landscape, climate, and people —
does not just ask us to question whether the very definition of transla-
tion 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 ques-
tion. 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 high-
lights, because of its contrast, how Célanire is most often represented

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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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. Phil-
cox’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
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 mod-
ifications 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. (96-
97)

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)

––––––––––

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).

Okawa 173

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 Céla-
nire’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 rela-

tionship 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 “disar-
ticulated” or “disjointed,” here departs from the medical definition of
“désarticulée.” While “dislocated” can still refer to the physical dis-
placement 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 writ-
ing, 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 representa-
tion of Célanire’s “patchwork” identity: 1) her relationship to Frank-
enstein’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 Gua-
deloupean novel, whereas Crossing the Mangrove would be exem-
plary of such a text. His response to this question echoes the senti-
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, Céla-
nire’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 transla-

tion from French into English that one can uncover how concepts of
tone and intertextuality reveal what constitutes Condé’s Célanire cou-

––––––––––

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).

Okawa 175

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 transla-
tor’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 con-
straining 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 trans-
form 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 transla-
tion 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 transla-
tion, the movement or transfer of meaning from one language and
culture to another, has the potential to add something new to the origi-
nal. 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 collab-
orative efforts occurring among writers, translators, originals, transla-
tions, 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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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

Works Cited

Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. Éloge de la créo-

lité. 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 Man-

groves of French Caribbean Identities.” Emerging Perspectives on Mar-
yse 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 Cé-

lanire 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 Con-

dé: 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, Termi-
nologie, 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.

Okawa 177

_____. “Translating Maryse Condé: A Personal Itinerary.” Emerging Per-

spectives 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. <http://

www.simonsays.com>. 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 Postco-
lonial Studies 10.1 (2003): 67-93.

Veldwachter, Germina Nadège. “Politiques littéraires: jeux de miroir, para-

textes, 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 Leba-
non 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 trans-
lation, 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 trans-
lating, 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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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 founda-
tion, 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 cul-
tures. It is also necessary to briefly describe the final product as pub-
lished. 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 multi-
cultural identity: she was born to a French Catholic mother and a
Druze father from a very old, influential, and prestigious Druze fam-
ily. 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 ac-
cents and celebrates twenty famous Lebanese locales as being sym-
bolic 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 introduc-
tion 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 cen-

tral 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

Ippolito 181

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 transmis-
sible? 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 (in-
volving the publisher’s understandable constraints as well as the trans-
lator’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, eve-
nings 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 Ameri-
can 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.” Obvi-
ously, 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 para-
graph 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 in-
house 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 be-
tween the different actors in the process. But the environment, in my
view, lends itself more easily to “foreignization.”

One politically marked occurrence of misunderstandings con-

cerned 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 Ameri-
can 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 Ab-
sentee Property Law of 1950, etc.), as the information on what hap-
pened 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

Ippolito 183

––––––––––

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 “domesti-
cating” 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 tar-
get language culture” (Venuti, Rethinking 5). Clearly, this was a mark-
er of cultural difference I felt I had to reproduce. Some have suggested
that Venuti’s distinction is a naive, modernist, and especially elitist
division,

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 inva-

sion of South Lebanon by Israel under Ariel Sharon — a military op-
eration 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 mili-
tary 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 begin-
ning 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 6

date in my introduction.

A third occurrence of cultural difference had to do with the mar-

keting of the book. The press wanted to have the words “A revolution

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 non-
political. Chiefly, however, this phrase would have wrongly associ-
ated Tuéni with Mallarmé (the author studied in Kristeva’s book), or
with Kristeva’s feminist stance. Moreover, these words were com-
pletely 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 “rev-
olution” is a very negative one in Lebanon (again, this was a coedition
between a Lebanese and an American company).

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 re-
ligious 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 politi-
cal and religious aspects of the edition, especially since the book was
also intended for the Lebanese public, at a time when two of his col-
laborators 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 cor-

rections and additions to the volume. For example, I had spoken of a
Lebanese poet, Fouad Gabriel Naffah, who I thought might have in-
fluenced Nadia Tuéni, and indeed, Ghassan Tuéni revealed to me that

––––––––––

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.”

Ippolito 185

Naffah was a close friend of the couple, confirming here that men-
tioning 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 politi-

cal 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 politi-
cal, 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 constitu-
tional 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 re-
ception, 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 con-
tract between Dar An-Nahar and Syracuse University Press that was
signed after lengthy negotiations established a copublication in which

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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 run-
ning 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 re-
marked 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 pres-
ses indicates here, I think, is the way in which a text’s meaning,
image, and identity may be adapted for the consumer in different cul-
tures and markets. The expectations of a poetry reader may push the
publisher to place material on the cover that is not necessarily consis-
tent with the general meaning of a text as perceived by people belong-
ing 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 ear-

lier, 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 as-
sistance with my concise account, I relied on the literary director from

Ippolito 187

––––––––––

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 relig-
ion — 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 reincarna-
tion 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 con-
cept, 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.

Further, and here I will only touch on a problem that has been

widely studied,

how can one represent Lebanese culture, especially

during the civil war? Specifically, are elements of a mythical Leba-
non, 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 de-
fend (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

See Pinto, especially 106-10.

See, for instance, the works by Ahmad Beydoun and Fadia Nassif Tar Kovacs.

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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

urgency and particular motivations in the complex context of Leba-
nese 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 Lebanese-
American 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 schol-
ar 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 be-
came 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).

Ippolito 189

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, aca-
demic), different approaches (comparatist, philosophic), different
points of view (Muslim, Christian, Palestinian, Lebanese) and differ-
ent 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 bal-
ance. I find myself here in line with what Gayatri Spivak has pro-
posed, 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 inter-
cultural 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 edi-
tors 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 neces-
sary distance for analysis. It remains in my view that the role of a con-
scientious editor of a bilingual edition is not so much to make the
different perspectives come together, but to remain attentive in pre-
senting material that is diverse enough to accommodate the different
members of the team who themselves represent different audiences.

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Works Cited

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 per-

spectiva documental.” Terminologie et traduction 3 (1999): 99-111.

Robinson, Douglas. What is Translation? Centrifugal Theories, Critical In-

terventions. 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, Ideol-

ogy. 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 étran-
gères 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, récu-
pérés 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 in-
fluencent 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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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

Ainsi, lorsque — occurrence rare — cette littérature est disponible en
traduction, elle passe dans la majorité des cas inaperçue. C’est ce ta-
bleau 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 désé-
quilibre entre l’Europe et les États-Unis: entre 10 et 25% des livres
publiés sur le marché européen sont traduits de l’étranger; aux États-
Unis, ce chiffre est inférieur à 3% (Venuti).

John O’Brien, éditeur

américain, n’hésite pas à parler d’une “crise” de la traduction litté-
raire. 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 poten-
tially 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 tra-
duction d’un livre; la seconde difficulté réside dans le fait que les tra-
ductions se vendent très mal. Malgré ce contexte exigeant, la langue
française se situe remarquablement bien puisqu’elle se trouve en pre-
mière place parmi les langues traduites vers l’anglais aux États-Unis.
Si Knopf, Pantheon et Norton continuent aujourd’hui à publier épiso-
diquement 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, Uni-
versity 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 con-
temporaine, 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 motiva-
tions personnelles, décident ainsi du sort de la fiction française con-
temporaine 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

Merlin 193

––––––––––

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 véri-
table promotion se fait, essentiellement, par l’intermédiaire de la
presse. C’est elle qui approuve et soutient les titres qui, au final, repré-
senteront aux yeux du public américain l’ensemble de la scène lit-
téraire 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.

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),

Malika

Mokeddem, Amélie Nothomb, Christian Oster, Gisèle Pineau, Jean
Rouaud et Jean-Christophe Ruffin,

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

Voir à l’annexe 1 les titres des auteurs dont quatre romans ou plus ont été

traduits aux États-Unis.

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).

Voir à l’annexe 2 les titres des auteurs dont trois romans ont été traduits aux

États-Unis.

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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

Rolin, Jacques Roubaud, Didier Van Cauwelaert, Tanguy Viel et An-
toine Volodine.

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 sem-

blé mettre en évidence des traits distinctifs et représentatifs des ten-
dances 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 engage-
ment 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 lec-
teurs pourra se retrouver. La presse américaine admet parfois que les
romans d’Ernaux côtoient le mélodrame ou d’autres motifs trop con-
nus, néanmoins elle s’empresse de relever d’autres caractéristiques qui

––––––––––

Voir à l’annexe 3 les titres des auteurs dont deux romans ont été traduits aux

États-Unis.

Merlin 195

––––––––––

font, à ses yeux, leur originalité et qui rachètent leurs faiblesses.

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.

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 cri-
tiques qui soulignent la manipulation des traditions du genre roma-
nesque et la précision de l’écriture,

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

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 youth-
ful 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 mem-
oirist’s insistence on spelling things out” (I Remain in Darkness, Kirkus).

Ginger Danto écrit ainsi: “Like de Beauvoir, with whom she has been com-

pared, Ms. Ernaux all but relinquishes any pretense of fiction (“When Mother”); tan-
dis que Miranda Seymour remarque: “Some critics have compared [Ernaux] to Si-
mone de Beauvoir, but the reasonable, balanced voice I hear echoing behind her is
that of Albert Camus” (6).

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 pre-
cision 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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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 sus-
ceptible de provoquer l’intérêt du lecteur est consciencieusement étu-
diée 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.

Auteurs, titres et genres deviennent ce que Pierre Bourdieu

appelle des “œuvres-témoins”, des références “consciemment ou in-
consciemment retenues parce qu’elles présentent à un degré particu-
lièrement élevé les qualités reconnues, de manière plus ou moins
explicite, comme pertinentes dans un système de classement déter-
miné” (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 rapproche-
ments 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 princi-
palement le sens de l’humour de Toussaint; les mêmes adjectifs
reviennent invariablement: “charming, humorous, comical, amusing,
agreeable, delightful, funny, hilarious, entertaining”.

Pour la critique

––––––––––

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 Don-
leavy’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 […]. Ray-
mond 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).

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”

Merlin 197

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

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 invite-
rait le lecteur plus qu’elle ne le provoquerait; elle dénoncerait plus
qu’elle ne s’engagerait réellement.

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 por-
trait 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 ele-
gant and entertaining” (Mendelsohn).

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, imperti-
nently exposing continuities of authoritarianism”.

198

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 mon-
trait 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 produc-
tion 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 Inter-
national 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 tra-

duction 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 clas-
sique 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, inter-
préter 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

Merlin 199

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’édi-

tion 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 recommanda-
tions d’un universitaire ou d’un critique plutôt que celles d’un profes-
sionnel 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 de-
mande 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 pe-
tites 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 com-
mandent 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 ma-
nœuvre 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 fran-
çais connaissait outre-Atlantique à l’époque. Jacqueline Favero, prési-
dente de la commission des droits étrangers au Syndicat national de

200

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

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 tra-
dition. Dan Simon chez Seven Stories Press explique: “la fiction fran-
çaise […] 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 fran-
çaise 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: Bul-

finch 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.

Merlin 201

_____. Crossing the mangrove. Trad. Richard Philcox. New York: Anchor-

Doubleday, 1995.

_____. Desirada. Trad. Richard Philcox. New York: Soho Press, 2000.
_____. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Trad. Richard Philcox. Char-

lottesville: 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: Heine-

mann, 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: Uni-

versity 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 Sto-

ries 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 Ne-

braska Press, 1994.

202

FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

_____. 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: Bra-

ziller, 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 Ne-

braska 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.

Merlin 203

_____. 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 Ar-

chive 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: North-

western 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. Lon-

don, New York: Quartet, 1985.

_____. A Sister to Sheherazade. Trad. Dorothy Blair. Portsmouth, NH: Hei-

nemann, 1993.

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FLS, Vol. XXXVI, 2009

_____. 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: Univer-

sity 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: Univer-

sity 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.

Merlin 205

_____. Macadam Dreams. Trad. C. Dickson. Lincoln: University of Ne-

braska 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. Lin-

coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

_____. To Write on Tamara? Trad. Steven Rendall. Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 2004.

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Document Outline

Contents
Introduction
Public Language and the Aesthetics of the Translating City
Translation and the Triumph of French: the Case of the Decameron
This Time “the Translation is Beautiful, Smooth, and True”: Theorizing Retranslation with the Help of Beauvoir
Redefining Translation through Self-Translation: The Case of Nancy Huston
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
Translation as Revelation
Werewere Liking as Translator and Translated
The Great White Man of Lambaréné by Bassek ba Kobhio: When Translating a Colonial Mentality Loses its Meaning
Traduire la reine Pokou: fidélité ou trahison?
Object Lessons: Metaphors of Agency in Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique
Translating Maryse Condé’s Célanire cou-coupé: Dislocations of the Caribbean Self in Richard Philcox’s Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? A Fantastical Tale
Intercultural Politics: Translating Postcolonial Lebanese Literature in the United States
Vu d’ici et là-bas: Le roman contemporain français publié en traduction aux États-Unis

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