Jean Anderson

Strategies for strangeness: crime fiction, translation and the mediation of ‘national’ cultures

ABSTRACT The tensions between the strange (foreign) and the familiar (domestic), and the issue of finding a balance between them, are well known to translators. Taking crime fiction as an exemplary field, this study explores translation decisions as part of a continuum alongside authorial and even editorial strategies for the mediation of ‘national’ (understood as including local and/or regional) cultures. Taking examples from Icelandic and French crime writing, this analysis focuses on the role played by food in representing nations, and explores some of the differences between well- and lesser-known cuisines in respect of representing nations both in the original and in translation.

La dernière adresse : Possessions, Dispossession and the Preservation of Memory

Jean Anderson’s chapter explores “the identity challenge resulting from dispossession” in the context of autobiographical and fictional texts by Lydia Flem, Helene Le Chatelier, Pierrette Fleutieux and Annie Ernaux. The transition from family home to retirement home is part of many women’s lives as they outlive both their partners and their physical and/or mental capacity to lead independent lives. As memories of the past become paramount, a change in living conditions (“downsizing”) creates a tension between two opposing impulses, preserving and discarding. Anderson’s analysis demonstrates how material possessions act as “memory keepers” that become “a means of final communication, a ‘derniere adresse’ of considerable value in binding generations together through their mediated narratives.”

Another “Unknown” Nobel Winner?: Reflections on Translations of Patrick Modiano’s Work

As was also the case with the 2008 French/Mauritian Nobel Prize winner, J.-M.G Le Clézio, the announcement of the 2014 laureate, French author Patrick Modiano, created a flurry of bemused commentary in literary media throughout the English-speaking world. Who was this writer? Shortly after the news broke, New York Times columnists Alexandra Alter and Dan Bilefsky commented: “He is not widely known outside France. One of his novels, Missing Person, won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1978, but has sold just 2,425 copies in the United States.”1 They pointed out that Modiano’s first U.S. publisher, David R. Godine, had experienced low sales of the three books already available in that country and that reprints planned following the Nobel announcement would triple the total print run overnight. Rather damningly, they regretted that the selection of Canadian Alice Munro in 2013, seen then as a signal that the Swedish Academy was moving away from its often criticized tendency to shun widely read authors “in favor of obscure Eurocentric writers,” was being negated by its choice of Modiano. What they did not underline, however, was a basic conundrum: “widely read” (subtext: by Anglophones) authors like Munro are available in English because they write in that language. Modiano, although little translated into English—just a handful of titles of his total of nearly thirty books—is not just widely read in French but has received a significant number of international as well as national awards, including the 2012 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the Institut de France’s Prix mondial Cino Del Duca in 2010 for lifetime achievement, the 1978 Prix Goncourt for Rue des Obscures (translated as Missing Person), and the 1972 Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française for Les Boulevards de ceinture, not to mention the Prix Roger-Nimier and the Prix Fenéon for his début novel Place de l’étoile in 1968, when he was just twenty years old. As critic AlanMorris has put it, he haswon “prettymuch every award there is available to a French writer.”2 Alter and Bilefsky, in condemning Eurocentrism, are at the same time highlighting their own Anglocentrism, and the way in which international prizes can raise awareness of outstanding, if allophone, writing.With a refreshingly different point of view, TheGuardianbook columnist Emma Brockes points out that, “there are lots of theories about Nobel ‘bias,’ few of them involving the possibility that writers from non-English-speaking countries, many of whom readers in the west have neither read nor heard of, might actually be quite good.”3