Angela Kershaw

Introduction: Global landscapes of translation

Metaphors are powerful theoretical tools: they have the power to change our perception and thus to create a new reality (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 145). Following Richard Boyd (1979), James St Andre...

Sociology of literature, sociology of translation: The reception of Irène Némirovsky's Suite française in France and Britain

This article uses Irène Némirovskys posthumously published novel Suite française (2004 [in French] and 2006 [in English]) as a case study to investigate the ways in which the market for translated literature functions in Britain today. The article raises methodological questions relating to the analysis of the function of the translated literary text in the target culture, proposing that work in the sociology of translation should be brought into dialogue with research into contemporary publishing, and that questions raised by polysystems theory remain relevant to such a dialogue. It suggests that an analysis of the reception of the translated text in the target culture should pay attention to paratextual elements and to modern marketing strategies in order to assess how translated fiction is currently presented to the British reading public. The example of Suite française demonstrates that, under certain commercial and cultural conditions, translated fiction in English can become a bestseller.

The War Novel in the Post-War Years in France and Britain: Comparative Perspectives

This chapter offers a comparative study of the dominant conceptions of the war novel in post-war France and Britain, 1945–51. It contrasts British hesitations about war as a subject for quality literature with the central role of war writing in the development of post-war French literature. Three factors defined the post-war reception of translated French war fiction in Britain: enthusiasm for France on the part of British opinion-formers such as Cyril Connolly and John Lehmann; their belief in the desirability of international cultural exchange; and publishers’ desire to give British readers access to a side of the war they had not experienced directly. Drawing on discussions of transnational, transcultural, and cosmopolitan memory, the chapter explores why war fiction from another country should be of interest to domestic readers and suggests that translated war fiction can function as a form of prosthetic memory.

Layers of Translation: Multilingualism in War and Holocaust Fiction

This chapter considers the functions of multilingualism and translation within texts even before they are translated. In the war novels examined in Chap. 5, the presence of the translating language—English—in the French source text poses particular problems for translation. In the more complex case of Holocaust novels by translingual writers, multilingualism is an aesthetic resource used to convey trauma. Multilingualism cannot resolve the problem of Holocaust representation, but can function as what Michael Rothberg terms ‘traumatic realism’. In Andre Schwarz-Bart’s Le Dernier des Justes, translation remains when language breaks down in the face of horror. In Anna Langfus’s fiction, instability and confusion around the languages characters are speaking draw the reader’s attention to language as the medium of communication of trauma.

The Goncourt Prize and the Second World War in France and Britain, 1945–51

Of the seven novels awarded the Goncourt prize in France between 1944 and 1949, five were war novels. This chapter examines the translation into English and reception in Britain of Elsa Triolet’s A Fine of Two Hundred Francs, Jean-Louis Bory’s French Village, Jean-Louis Curtis’s The Forests of the Night, Robert Merle’s Weekend at Zuydcoote, and Francis Ambriere’s The Exiled. Translational interventions within the texts and their paratexts, including word-level translation choices, abridgement, the addition of prefaces, and the discourses generated in reviews reframed these French texts for a British audience. Whilst the novels retained a prosthetic memorial function for British readers, domestic myths about the war were reinforced by translatorial interventions such that foreign texts were not allowed to challenge dominant British war memories.

Translating the French Resistance in London and New York

After the fall of France in 1940, London and New York functioned as zones of hospitality for emigre French writers who established French-language journals and publications and used existing domestic publishing structures to maintain French culture in exile. The publication of French literature in wartime London and New York, in French and in English translation, illustrates the opportunities and the ambivalences of hospitality. Translational and editorial interventions in the versions of Joseph Kessel’s L’Armee des ombres published in full and as extracts in these cities show that ideological interventions take place as wartime texts circulate even amongst allies. Haakon Chevalier’s English translation of Kessel’s book shows that the politicisation of translation is as much about the choice of text as the choice of words.