Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan

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.

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.

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...

J’irai cracher sur vos tombes and the Série Noire

The aim of this article is two-fold. On the one hand, it is designed to revisit and shed new light on a question that has long been the focus of Boris Vian studies, which is to say the relationship between the actual author and his virtual, pseudonymous Other, Vernon Sullivan, via a close reading of the most famous of the Sullivan novels, J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946), and especially the liminal passage between the novel’s paratext and diegesis. On the other hand, it will argue that this famous parody of the Serie Noire is rather a pseudo-parody insofar as its deployment of pseudonymy exposes not the reality but the myth of a Parisian publishing phenomenon founded on the translation of American thrillers. In this way, J’irai cracher sur vos tombes will be reread as an allegory not only of French noir’s emergence from the Liberation of Paris but, more broadly, of France’s position vis-a-vis the United States. We shall first examine the theory of pseudonymy with a view to teasing out a more appropria...

Serializing Sullivan: Vian/Sullivan, the Série noire and the effet de collection

In 2010, 51 years after his death in 1959, Boris Vian entered the canon of French literary immortals: he was published in Gallimard’s prestigious Bibliotheque de la Pleiade collection. Arguably, however, these are the complete fictional works of two authors: French writer Boris Vian and his black American pseudonymous creation, Vernon Sullivan. For critics like Edmund Smyth this must have represented long overdue recognition of the qualities of the latter’s work. As Smyth notes: [a]lthough for many years critics tended to downplay the significance of Vian’s ‘paraliterary’ works, preferring the more literary L’Ecume des jours (1946) and L’Automne a Pekin (1947), in recent times there has been a reappraisal of his noir novels, to the extent that they have been thoroughly assimilated into his varied and substantial œuvre. (2006, 48) There is, however, a rub in this repatriation of Sullivan: it erases the identity of this creative Other. In the Pleiade edition the Sullivan novels are interspersed, chronologically, among the Vian novels. Our aim here is to reveal how the creation of a powerful Vian series has stifled Sullivan’s authorial identity. This process has included a complex relationship with Gallimard’s Serie noire, translation and branding. To understand the impact of this relationship we will briefly compare his case with that of Douglas Kennedy, a contemporary example of another authorial identity forged and then reforged in French translation.

«Ridges on the floors of Hell»: traces ou palimpsestes dans le désert de The Dead Heart

The Dead Heart is American author Douglas Kennedys first novel. It was first translated into French in 1997 as Cul-de-sac. It was this translation that made Kennedy a household name in France and that gave The Dead Heart its identity as a roman noir. In the space of just 20 years the novel has been translated twice into French and adapted twice more, as a film and now as a graphic novel. Elsewhere, we have analyzed this trajectory from the perspective of retranslation and the ostensible differences between the two translation Skopoi, and the use of paratextual branding to target specific reading publics. Focusing on the graphic novel allows us here to go beyond the problematics of translation and to broaden the scope of our study of textual adaptation. It also allows us to reassess the originality of the source text.

Traduire en français une œuvre australienne: L'exemple du roman Southern Steel de Dymphna Cusack

L’Australienne Dymphna Cusack (1902–1981) fut l’auteure prolifique de douze romans (dont un en collaboration avec Miles Franklin), de huit pieces de theâtre, de trois recits de voyage et de deux livres pour enfants et connut de son vivant un succes indeniable, en Australie comme a l’etranger . En effet, ses livres furent publies dans trente-quatre pays .1 En France, quatre de ses romans ont ete traduits et publies . Ecrivaine engagee, socialiste, feministe et pacifiste, elle joua un role majeur dans le combat nationaliste pour la reconnaissance de la litterature australienne . Les recentes theories sur la traduction litteraire, et l’approche post-coloniale en particulier, mettent en relief l’importance de sauvegarder, dans la mesure du possible, les marqueurs culturels et le melange des codes linguistiques . Cette exigence se fait d’autant plus ressentir quand l’enjeu pour le texte de depart est la construction ou l’essor d’une litterature distincte des modeles litteraires europeens . Je voudrais presenter ici comment j’ai aborde la traduction en francais du deuxieme roman de Dymphna Cusack, Southern Steel, paru en 1953 .2 Les theories de la traduction que j’ai etudiees m’ont incitee a considerer l’acte traductif comme un projet specifique qui determine des strategies adaptees . Je suis partie du principe que le texte de depart avait ete redige avec une intention precise par un auteur donne, a une epoque donnee, dans une langue-culture donnee, et tous ces parametres devaient etre analyses . Je passerai d’abord en revue les conditions de production et de reception du texte d’origine et de sa traduction ainsi que les fonctions dominantes du texte de depart, afin de preciser le type de traduction envisage . J’examinerai ensuite la langue utilisee dans Southern Steel, les differents registres ou variations employes, afin de developper des strategies de traduction adaptees . Je reflechirai enfin aux enjeux culturels de la traduction, c’est-a-dire

Une seule ou plusieurs femmes-truies? Une lecture virtualisante de Truismes de Marie Darrieussecq

Depuis la parution de Truismes de Marie Darrieussecq en 1996, une approche critique a prolifere selon laquelle l’histoire serait celle d’une metamorphose. La double identite de la protagoniste, la dualite de cette heroine oscillant entre femme et truie, a ete trop seduisante pour que ses lecteurs se demandent si cette pluralite du texte ne serait pas plutot illusoire. Loin d’une transformation, ce que nous voyons dans ce roman est plutot la mise en scene d’une activite de mutation sans debut ni fin, et ou toute la structure textuelle fournie par l’auteure tendrait a capturer sur la page quelque chose de foncierement a-structure. Nous nous proposons d’offrir une lecture virtualisante, qui cherche a expliquer l’identite textuelle tout en tenant compte de la nature ouverte, multiple et dynamique du roman. La virtualisation, selon Pierre Levy, “se presente comme le mouvement meme du ‘devenir autre’ – ou heterogenese – de l’humain”. Aussi seront abordees l’identite fluide de la protagoniste – la facon dont la femme-truie n’est jamais ni femme ni truie, mais mouvement, desir et devenir perpetuels – et l’autoreflexivite du texte qui tend toujours vers l’exterieur ou l’intertexte pour mieux eclairer son contenu. Nous verrons que l’approche du texte litteraire preconisee par Barthes dans “La mort de l’auteur” ou Le Degre zero de l’ecriture, qui nous permettra d’analyser le corps de la protagoniste en tant que desir de lire et d’etre lu, c’est-a-dire la force desirante du texte, se revelera proche d’une lecture deleuzienne de la femme-truie comme devenir-animal. Car le devenir de la femme-truie est emblematique selon nous du devenir du texte. La narratrice previent ainsi le lecteur des la premiere page: