Alistair Rolls

‘Traduit de l'américain’ from Poe to the Série Noire: Baudelaire's greatest hoax?

This article reviews the new light shed in 1952 on Charles Baudelaires translation and critical analysis of Edgar Allan Poe by W.T. Bandy, which exposed the French poets plagiarism of American sources. Our aim here is to suggest that Baudelaires Poe project, with its wilful problematisation of originality and translation, author and translator, preempts Marcel Duhamels own translation project of 1945, the Série Noire. We compare these two Parisian translation projects as two major hoaxes of French literature and two foundational stages in the development of French crime fiction. Indeed, we suggest that Baudelaires original translation praxis is an act of anticipatory plagiarism (of Duhamels praxis) just as he himself considered Poes poetry to be anticipatory plagiarism of his own work.

Translating national allegories: the case of crime fiction

The title of this special issue represents an attempt to chart the interrelationship of three sites of tension, each of which might easily justify its own discrete study: first, the translation of crime fiction; second, the translation of national allegories, including here the markers of specific national identities, or culture-specific items; and third, the articulation of the national in crime fiction, including the importance of place in the latter. As Peter Flynn, Joep Leerssen and Luc van Doorslaer (2015) note, translation studies and imagology, which is to say, the study of the ways in which national (stereo)types are constructed, are both necessarily focused on the transnational, the translational; indeed, these disciplines, taken together or individually, depend on borders, typically national but also other geographic or linguistic ones, in order to assess the kind of transfers necessary for cultural mobility. For Flynn, Leerssen and Doorslaer, the tendency among scholars to overlook national characteristics over the last 20 years has led to a rather ‘vaguely termed intercultural hermeneutics’ (2015, 1). They note further that imagology derives from literary studies, and they place their emphasis on a certain ‘literary canonicity’whose guarantee of historical longevity assists the construction of ‘ethnotypical perceptions’ (2015, 4). Canonicity also influences translation choices as well as, often, being facilitated by translation. While the question of crime fiction’s relationship to the canon is not yet entirely settled, its successful adaptation to translation markets is long since proven. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, Flynn, Leerssen and Doorslaer consider crime fiction interesting by virtue of its very conventionality (2015, 13). One of our aims in this issue is to support the notion of crime fiction’s relevance to the fields of translation studies and imagology; our second aim is to focus on what happens, what sometimes fails to happen and what is lost, and sometimes gained, when national characteristics described in crime fiction are translated; and our final aim is to show how translation can force us to rethink the genre as unconventional, or perhaps as a series of conventions that mask the tendency of individual crime novels to refuse to be contained. Like the walls of the locked room, the conventional borders and bordering conventions of crime fiction are designed to be breached. With this in mind, we shall begin here by saying a little about our three concepts before aiming to convey what happens when they are brought together.

Jeux textuels et paratextuels dans J’irai cracher sur vos tombes: au-delà du canular

Abstract The novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, which was famously written by the black American author Vernon Sullivan and translated into French by Boris Vian only to be outed subsequently as a hoax, is generally understood precisely as a simple prank or canular. A close reading of the text, however, reveals multiple layers of mise en abyme, which correspond to the work’s equally thickly layered paratextual frame. This article explores the various reflexive devices used throughout the novel, considering them in the framework of its preface, foreword, afterword, and various newspaper articles and legal documents. This book, which is as underrated as it is famous, and in which the diegesis vies for space, at times subtly and at others flagrantly, with the ever-encroaching real world of the hors-texte, in fact raises a number of questions about literary creation, parody, authorial power, and translation. In this way, J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, by testing any number of limits, goes beyond those of an innocent prank.

Blended Learning and Disciplinarity: Negotiating Connections in French Studies in Regional Universities.

In this article, we outline the challenges facing French Studies in regional Australian universities resulting from an increasingly vocational curriculum and doubts about the cost-effectiveness of language learning in higher education. These pressures have resulted in a process of discipline restructuring and significant cuts in the numbers of staff teaching French Studies. The other major consequence outlined is the dislocation that has taken place in the link between teaching and research as academics with interests in the traditional aspects of French Studies have found their roles restricted to the delivery of low-level communicative language classes. Despite these considerable challenges, we offer a hint of optimism to colleagues in the discipline based on evidence from an increasing body of research into the impact of approaches to language teaching that combine traditional face-to-face instruction and online learning. In our opinion, this blended approach offers French Studies in the regions, not to mention other language disciplines, an opportunity to address the efficiency agenda and, at the same time, help to rebuild disciplinary breadth by re-establishing the link between teaching and research.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking: fashion, fetishism and modernity in Boris Vian's L'Ecume des jours

This article analyses an instance of leg fetishism in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours (1947). The aim is to show how the protagonist’s fixation on a pair of nylon stockings can be read as a negotiation of the problems of modernity: the ambivalence that the French feel towards the Americanisation of their culture in the postwar years is shown to be located at the heart of this fetish. Fetishism will then be located within recent theories of the ‘everyday’. Once the modernity of the text has been established, it will be analysed comparatively as a cultural icon: models for the novel’s content will be sought in postwar issues of the fashion magazine Elle. This, in turn, will lead into a discussion of a ‘fashion reading’ of L’Écume des jours, incorporating Georg Simmel’s essay of 1904.

Pratiques Scandaleuses : Présences et absences dans les traductions françaises de Jim Thompson

ABSTRACT The Série Noire was born out of literary scandals (Henry Millers Tropic of Cancer and Kathleen Winsors Forever Amber) and traded on them. Marcel Duhamels mission statement of 1948 promised readers violence and depravity. Its early focus on translations of so-called American thrillers also led to scandalous cases of French authors masquerading as Americans (Boris Vians role in the Vernon Sullivan affair shocked Paris in 1946 and shone light on the practices of Duhamels team). In time it also became famous for its colorful treatment of the original texts that it translated for its French readers. In this article we reassess to what extent the criticisms of Série Noire translation infidelities are warranted. Certainly, there has always been a degree of mythmaking at work in assessments of Duhamels practices, but, more than that, discussion of publishing scandals often overlooks details that spoil a good story. Discussion of the trajectory in French translation of Jim Thompsons Pop. 1280 is an interesting case in point. The story of the original texts transformation under Duhamels pen is surprising, but arguably the failure to tell the whole story is itself equally scandalous.

Ex Uno Plures: Global French in, on and of the Rue Morgue and the Orient Express

Abstract In the following paper, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express are considered, and compared, as exemplars of what Andrea Goulet has labelled “Global French,” which is to say that both texts convey non-English, and especially French, language use through their own original English. Both texts will be shown to be born in, stage, and depart from primal linguistic scenes: the Babelian confusion of Poe’s multiple foreign witnesses will be embodied in the impediments that keep them from the scene of the crime; in Christie’s case, the multilingual investigation on board the Orient Express will stand in place of stilted and curtailed conversation held, in the Global French of Christie’s English, on the platform of another train. As sites of original translation and communicative excess and failure, these classic texts are about language first and crime second; indeed, the murder on Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express embodies taking place but, ultimately, does not take place at all.

Interconnecting Translation Studies and Imagology

This collection embraces a couple of key tensions. It seeks the new critical possibilities that attend work at a new nexus, but also makes room for readers either focused on the dynamics of transla...

Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky, In translation: translators on their work and what it means

focus only on the cultural elements that would appear to be transferable. Transfert de langue, transfert de culture is a valuable addition to the field of Australian fiction in translation. It complements the works of Cain (2001), Gerber (2014) and Frank (2007) by focusing on the translation of a specific text. The process-oriented discussion offered by Vuaille-Barcan is certain to appeal to translators who may not have a strong theoretical background. By combining theory, contextualisation and practice, the author allows for a successful convergence between her audience, her research and the themes developed in the novel. The question of the visibility/invisibility of the translator is anything but new, but Vuaille-Barcan’s work offers some recontextualisation. Her answers are supported by a demonstrably strong understanding of the discipline as a practitioner. The numerous examples of her translation of Southern Steel (Cusack 2015) are not language-specific. On the contrary, they are highly transferable to other genres and languages thanks to the copious explanations provided. Of particular relevance are the discussions concerning the implicit/explicit as well as the conscious/unconscious influences shaping the work of the translator. For Vuaille-Barcan, the discipline of translation intersects with the Humanities. This is reflected in her references to the scholars who most influence her practice – semiologists, psychologists, philosophers and translation scholars – thus illustrating the academic spectrum along which her work rests and to which her scholarship contributes.

Translating Peter Temple’s An Iron Rose into French: Pierre Bondil shares his translation practice with Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan and Alistair Rolls

Pierre Bondil was born in France in 1949. He studied English before embarking on a career in teaching, first in high school and later in higher eduction, where for 15 years he taught English and Fi...