Michael Boyden

A Silent Spout: Paul de Man's Moby-Dick

Abstract This article discusses a 1945 Flemish translation of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick that has been attributed to the literary critic Paul de Man and yet has been unduly neglected by de Man scholars. The article takes issue with the claim that the Moby-Dick translation entails a radical break with de Man’s newspaper writings of previous years. De Man’s motivation for translating Moby-Dick is considered in relation to the reception of the book in the framework of the Conservative Revolution in Europe. It is further shown that de Man probably took inspiration from a 1941 French translation by Jean Giono, which proved a vehicle for warring ideologies in occupied France. Analysis of the de Man translation focuses both on the paratextual framing and on passages where his own perspective disrupts the univocity of the text. The purpose of drawing attention to the continuities between de Man’s wartime journalism and the Moby-Dick translation is to arrive at a better understanding of the pervasiveness and fractured nature of the totalizing ideologies shared by many intellectuals in wartime Europe, which offered a fertile breeding ground for, but were by no means reducible to, the Nazi doctrines.

Translating the American West into English: The Case of Hendrik Conscience's Het Goudland

This essay analyzes the US adaptations of Het Goudland (1862), an adventure novel about the California Gold Rush by the Flemish writer Hendrik Conscience (1812–1883). Contrary to other European writers of Western romances, Conscience refrained from romanticizing the West. Rather, he approached the hunt for gold as a symptom of moral decay in Belgian society at a time of intense social change. During the early 1880s, Het Goudland was adapted for an American audience in two English translations, The Boys of the Sierras (1883) and Off to California (1884). The translational changes reveal how the work was refunctionalized to fit into an emergent monolingualized vision of the West as a site of American self-realization. We argue that Consciences novel was submitted to a threefold domesticating strategy to adjust its depiction of California and its inhabitants to an increasingly dominant Anglo-Protestant vision of the frontier: (1) the multilingualism of the original was flattened out; (2) Consciences very negative portrayal of the West as a lawless nonplace was neutralized; and (3) the Roman-Catholic framework of the book was downplayed even while its eschatological dimension received added emphasis. Thus, the essay demonstrates that the American West as a cultural space was made not only within the borders of what is now the United States, but that this cultural construction depended in part on a selective engagement with international and multilingual traditions.