Translingual Francophonie and the Limits of Translation (Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature) 0367549123, 9780367549121

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Translingual Francophonie and the Limits of Translation

Translingual Francophonie and the Limits of Translation proposes a novel theoretical lens for the study of translation as theme and practice in works by four translingual, francophone authors: Vassilis Alexakis, Chahdortt Djavann, Nancy Huston, and Andreï Makine. In particular, it argues that translation allows for the most productive encounter with otherness when it is practiced in its estuarine dimension. When two foreign bodies of water come into contact in an estuary, often a new environment is created at their shared border that does not, however, invalidate the distinctiveness (chemical, biological, geological etc.) of either fresh or sea water. Similarly, texts translated from one language to another, should ideally not transform into but rather relate to their new host’s linguistic and cultural codes in ways that account both for their undiluted strangeness and the missteps, gaps, and discontinuities, the challenging yet novel and productive articulations of relationality that proliferate at the border of the encounter. Ioanna Chatzidimitriou is assistant professor of French at Muhlenberg College. Her research interests lie in translingual francophonie, translation studies, and contemporary France. She has published widely on contemporary francophone authors and is currently co-editing an essay collection titled Vassilis Alexakis: chemins croisés.

Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature

This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Taking a comparative approach to literary studies, this series visits the relationship of literature and language alongside a variety of interdisciplinary and transnational topics. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics. Spanish Vampire Fiction since 1900 Blood Relations Abigail Lee Six The Limits of Cosmopolitanism Globalization and Its Discontents in Contemporary Literature Aleksandar Stević and Philip Tsang Romantic Legacies Transnational and Transdisciplinary Contexts Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan Holocaust Narratives Trauma, Memory and Identity Across Generations Thorsten Wilhelm Translingual Francophonie and the Limits of Translation Ioanna Chatzidimitriou

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Translingual Francophonie and the Limits of Translation

Ioanna Chatzidimitriou

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Ioanna Chatzidimitriou to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-54912-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09116-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

To the memory of my mother, Anna AnastasiadouChatzidimitriou, who taught me to love books.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1

Andreï Makine and the Limits of Domestication

24

2

Nancy Huston’s Estuarine Ecosystems and the Minor

68

3

Vassilis Alexakis and the Limits of Self-Translation

101

4

A Native Informant in the Estuary: Chahdortt Djavann and Iran

143

Conclusion

177

Works Cited Index

185 197

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Acknowledgments

I sincerely thank Muhlenberg College for years of summer research support without which this book could not have been written. Many thanks to all Muhlenberg College colleagues who participated in the Mellon-supported reading group Stuart Hall and Critical Cosmopolitanism: Implications for Teaching and Learning about Diversity in Spring 2016. Our conversations were instrumental in giving final shape to this book’s introduction. My gratitude goes out equally to all anonymous peer-reviewers who have read my work on translingual francophone authors and translation over the years and have provided invaluable feedback. Thank you, finally, to Taïeb Berrada for reviewing the manuscript and for asking me one day back in the early 2000s if I had ever heard of a Greek francophone author by the name of Vassilis Alexakis. This simple question, the likes of which life partners ask each other numerous times a day, set me out on the path of my most beautiful intellectual adventure to date. Thank you!

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Introduction

Notwithstanding its title, this project does not care to describe the limitations of the translational phenomenon. It does not subscribe to messianic views or interpretations of translation as the singular communicational modality of our interconnected, globalized world either. It rather seeks to interrogate the contours of the translative act and its political and social impact in translingual, non-postcolonial French language writing. The title’s limits refer more to the liminality of spaces in which translative phenomena usually arise than to the limitations that translation may impose on the breadth and complexity of the encounters that dominate them or the extent to which those same liminal spaces participate in the construction of both difference and presumed homogeneity. Semantically, etymologically, and pragmatically related, the words threshold, boundary, frontier, limit, and liminality all point to both the possibility for reaching over and exchanging and the restrictions placed upon what’s often viewed as a transgressive act, one of exiting one’s designated sphere. Translation is by definition related to this lexical grouping. It transcends linguistic boundaries, it questions frontiers, but it also limits its own reach by involving a predetermined group of linguistic codes. It is a liminal practice too not only because liminality is “transitional in-betweenness” but also because as a practice translation is “barely perceptible or capable of eliciting a response” (Merriam Webster dictionary online). Translation involves a series of necessary operations which more often than not remain unacknowledged; in fact, as I will discuss in more detail later, we tend to value the erasure of the process as a prerequisite for the communicational efficacy of the product. As indispensable as translation is in a globally cosmopolitan world where boundaries, frontiers, liminal experiences, and limits both abound and are transgressed, we often remark on its potential or limitations without fully engaging its operational modalities. How does translation perform its etymological promise of “bearing across”? How can we conceptualize the complexities of the concomitant dilution and reinforcement of national and linguistic identities as codes switch and cultures come into contact? Drawing on many theories of translation that have grappled with these same questions as well as on theoretical reflections on

2 Introduction the cosmopolitan and global conditions, this book argues that thinking translation as a cultural estuary provides a novel lens through which to investigate translative acts in translingual francophone environments as the radically relational phenomena that they are, in other words, as fully fledged social and political actants. To state a recent example, on Sunday, 9 February 2020, the American Academy of Motion Pictures awarded the Best Picture Oscar to Bong Joo-ho’s Parasite. Parasite was the first ever non-English language motion picture to receive the honor. Central to this event is the acknowledgment by the economic and universal-culture-producing machine that Hollywood is that translation (as film subtitles in this instance) does not disqualify human stories from circulating freely and accruing economic and cultural value. Especially when, as Justin Chang notes in an LA Times article published at the conclusion of the 2020 Oscars, the stories told have universal reach: “Bong is one of those filmmakers who tells stories in a cinematic idiom so fluent and accessible that conventional language barriers, for all intents and purposes, cease to exist” (“It’s Just the Oscars—But My God, It Matters that Parasite Won Best Picture”). Because Parasite is an excellent film, American movie-goers will for once ignore the subtitling obstacle and go see a foreign movie. In fact, Chang says that instead of focusing on the subpar best picture awards of the past I’d much rather think about all the Korean-non-conversant moviegoers who, having slept on Parasite all season long, will finally, grudgingly force themselves to surmount “the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles,” in Bong’s unimprovable phrase, and watch the damn thing. They’re in for a treat. In a 10 February 2020 New York Times round table about the film, Manohla Dargis noted that Parasite’s consecration bespeaks a Hollywood diversification of sorts. She was, however, quick to add that the film’s success may equally owe to a smart marketing move: …these folks clearly don’t mind reading subtitles, though it’s worth noting that apparently Neon, which distributed Parasite in the States, didn’t send out screeners until later in the awards race, which was smart. It tried to get voters to watch Parasite in the theaters, where it could keep you delightfully captive. (“What the ‘Parasite’ Landslide Says About the Oscars: Our Critics Weigh In”) Subtitles and translation appear in both critiques as the insurmountable obstacle that this particular film, unlike many other non-Englishlanguage films, was able to overcome. The LA Times credits the thematic universality of Parasite whereas the NY Times critic seems to favor the theatrical experience as the universalizing modality that

Introduction  3 permitted voting members of the Academy to look beyond the language barrier. The common denominator in both analyses is that this watershed event occurred not thanks to but in spite of translation. The Academy seems to suggest that if the twenty-first-century cosmopolis is to grow larger and less restrictive, at least on the level of artistic exchange within a centralized, English-language dominated market, it will be on the basis of immediate access to shared human experiences (social class strife; the magic of the silver screen, etc.) that transcends or bypasses language. Limited to a function of transposition, translation is denied its political potential as it finds itself subject to the imperatives of comprehensibility and understanding. Parasite is meaningful in this type of cultural economy not because it actualizes its difference within a strange environment—the very definition of natural estuarine formations—but rather because it is marketed as an already familiar entity. It is a transnationally successful cultural product, a cosmopolitan agent, if you will, because its translatability remains unquestioned while its role as a transparent relational link between its native culture and Hollywood’s America erases its ambiguity as potentially simultaneously polis and cosmos, regional and global, foreign and native. The film’s subtitles function as the clearly visible, physically present acknowledgment that both poles of these binaries exist but that they are neatly positioned into culturally and linguistically unalloyed spaces.

The New Cosmopolitan In the past 30 years or so, theoretical works on what we could term “new cosmopolitanism” have challenged us to think of the cosmopolitan in ways that account both for the rise and intensification of nationalisms around the globe and the new forms of globalization that international financial markets have made possible. In this first part of the introduction, I would like to take a closer look at the architecture of these works’ central arguments, with particular attention paid to their positioning along the cosmos/polis binary; second, I will examine two modalities of thinking the cosmopolitan which, I believe, come close to undoing dichotomies and bringing us closer to uttering the difference universally—not without some internal contradictions which I will attempt to flesh out; and third, I will turn my attention to the nation-state and the concept of “estuarine translation” as promising conceptual and practical frameworks in our efforts to define the new cosmopolitan. Theorists of the cosmopolitan have generally cast their reading of cosmopolitanism in terms of the local and the global—“cosmopolitanism” being lexically structured along that very tension between “cosmos” and “polis,” the world and the specific political entity of the “polis.” This inherent duality of the cosmopolis has taken on different names and slightly different nuances over the past three decades. One way to think of the

4 Introduction binary is through the juxtaposition of the politically and culturally minor and major. Reading the new cosmopolitan through this particular lens means addressing the issue of minority rights. Stephen May has passionately argued for the defense of minority linguistic rights while conceding that “…a group-based approach can accommodate a view of ethnic and cultural groups as dynamic and fluid while still retaining some sense of distinct cultural identity” (114). This particular nuance in his argument addresses the concern of cosmopolitan theorists, such as Jeremy Waldron, who suggest that any defense of minority rights presupposes a world that “divides up neatly into particular distinct cultures, one to every community, and, secondly, the assumption that what everyone needs is just one of these entities—a single coherent culture—to give shape and meaning to his life” (“Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative” 781– 82). The critique of minority rights has gone as far as Abdelkébir Khatibi’s contention that fighting for minority rights is equivalent to an atavistic acceptance of one’s inferiority (“La loi du partage” 12–13). More recently, Susan Koshy coined the term “minority cosmopolitanism” which fundamentally seeks to reconcile the two extremes of the minority/majority spectrum by bringing “to the fore what is often obscured in customary invocations of the minority: its centripetal and centrifugal energies: its centripetal capacity to intensify affiliations…and its centrifugal capacity to extend these affinities outward into inventive affiliations” (594). Another approach to the conflictual interconnectedness of the minority/majority paradigm is from the angle of the plural/particular binary which has been cast over the years more in terms of a range than a strict dichotomy, without, however an overt invalidation of the binary’s poles. Bruce Robbins and Kwame Anthony Appiah have both claimed that cosmopolitanism is both plural and particular. In his introduction to Cosmopolitics, Robbins suggests that “[l]ike nations, cosmopolitanisms are now plural and particular” (2).1 Appiah notes in his introduction to Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers that “…we need take sides neither with the nationalist who abandons all foreigners nor with the hard-core cosmopolitan who regards her friends and fellow citizens with icy impartiality. The position worth defending might be called (in both senses) a partial cosmopolitanism” (xvi–xvii). Those defending the particular’s submersion within the plural have had an unlikely champion in Julia Kristeva’s defense of Montesquieu’s esprit général, 2 in other words the particular community’s civic duty to abandon its identity for the larger societal good. David Hollinger has read multiple pluralisms, in essence, the particular, as one pole of a binary whose other pole is the universal understood as the extreme cosmopolitical and has situated cosmopolitanism somewhere in between: Cosmopolitanism shares with universalism a suspicion of enclosures, but the cosmopolitan understands the necessity of enclosures

Introduction  5 in their capacity as contingent and provisionally bounded domains in which people can form intimate and sustaining relationships, and can indeed create diversity. (“Not Universalists, Not Pluralists: The New Cosmopolitans Find Their Own Way” 231) This spatial configuration of the particular/plural binary calls forth the third theoretical framework within which voices of the cosmopolitan have articulated the structuring tension between cosmos and polis, that of location and its correlate dislocation. The paradigm of the wandering intellectual is clearly inadequate in a neocolonial world dominated by economic inequality due to unregulated, and most importantly, uneven capital flows. Craig Calhoun argues that “cosmopolitanism is a presence not an absence, an occupation of particular positions in the world, not a view from nowhere or everywhere” (“Social Solidarity as a Problem for Cosmopolitan Democracy” 294). His argument is that cosmopolitan elites misrecognize themselves as rootless when in fact they are very much rooted in a supra-national class formation of privilege. In “Colonial Cosmopolitanism,” Peter van der Veer positions cosmopolitanism temporally: “… I do not see [cosmopolitanism] as a view from nowhere, but as a view from somewhere and from sometime, namely from the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century” (165). In his study of superstars in the Global South, such as Vargas-Llosa, Rushdie, Allende, Mukherjee, etc., Tim Brennan suggests that their success results from their rendering the foreign locality particularly palatable—strangely familiar is the expression he uses, borrowing from Freud—because they mediate it through appetites, anecdotes, language, and taste that they share with their usually monolingual, metropolitan, Western readers (6). In other words, they reterritorialize the foreign local within a shared, cosmopolitan frame of reference. Stuart Hall and Suresh Canagarajah have argued for a situational cosmopolitanism, one that evolves and thrives on contact zones. Hall prefers the term vernacular (“Political Belonging in a World of Multiple Identities” 30); Canagarajah settles on the dialogical (Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations 196). Beyond terminologies, however, theirs is a practical cosmopolitanism that anchors itself in time and space and the particular, although, Hall makes sure to point out that unless a clear democratic framework is present to guarantee both difference and equality for all parties involved, the whole edifice inevitably falls apart. This brings the conversation to the larger binary structure that informs the three substructures referenced thus far. In fact, one could argue that these structures are all permutations of the master-dichotomy that pits the national against the universal. Nation-states, whose dominance, incidentally, Kant could not have predicted when reviving cosmopolitanism as the guarantor and sine qua non of perpetual peace, have structured our political communities for the past two centuries. There is

6 Introduction not much evidence to suggest that they will not continue to do so for the foreseeable future notwithstanding their reconfiguration in novel assemblages and alliances in Europe and elsewhere. In fact, as Scott Malcomson3 has suggested, the new cosmopolitanism, the ethical cosmopolitan that will move away from the Empire, will rise outside the West where nationalism is an imperative for wealth redistribution and social justice. On the other hand, the coeditors of the landmark 2000 Public Culture volume devoted to cosmopolitanism point out in their introduction that [t]he cosmopolitanism of our times does not spring from the capitalized “virtues” of Rationality, Universality, and Progress; nor is it embodied in the myth of the nation writ large in the figure of the citizen of the world. Cosmopolitans today are often the victims of modernity, failed by capitalism’s upward mobility, and bereft of those comforts and customs of national belonging. (582) Both these readings of cosmopolitanism critically engage the nation as the lone political formation of true cosmopolitan belonging. Although the editors of the Public Culture Cosmopolitanisms volume reject the wandering intellectual of the Enlightenment as the avatar of today’s privileged traveler who can unroot and reroot at will, they make room for the nation-as-universal: No true universalism can be constructed without recognizing that there is a diversity of universals on which analyses are based, and that these are often in fact quite particular—not universals at all, but rather interpretations devised for particular historical and conceptual situations. (583) I would like to argue that these “particular universalisms” are another way of conceptualizing the nation which, as Etienne Balibar has suggested, tends by nature toward a particular universalism: “…tout nationalisme comporte en lui-même un élément d’universalisme, une prétention plus ou moins messianique cependant que tout universalisme théorique (qu’il soit scientifique, religieux ou social) contient toujours un particularisme occulte” (“…all nationalisms contain within them an element of universalism, a rather messianic pretension, whereas all theoretical universalism (scientific, religious, or social) always contains a hidden universalism”; “Internationalisme ou barbarie” 24 4). Whether a citizen of one’s nation, a diasporic subject in a nation different from one’s nation of citizenship, a refugee, a stateless person, a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay, or an immigrant in a lawless transit zone, our existence is defined by our location or dislocation in relation to the nation-state. And whether located in the West or in the Global East and South, whether informed by the history of colonial expansion or that of resistance against

Introduction  7 it, the common measure by which our “cosmopolitanism” is defined is our willingness and ability to extend beyond the nation. This paradox need not necessarily be one.5 By the mid-2000s, Françoise Lionnet along with Shu-mei Shih and, a few years earlier, Walter Mignolo with their concepts of minor transnationalism and diversality respectively suggested similar ways out of the nation/universal binary impasse and toward a definition of the cosmopolitan that explodes the restrictive (and regressive) center–periphery structural dichotomy. Turning their attention to the major/minor binary, Lionnet and Shih observe in their introduction to Minor Transnationalism that “[t]he minor appears always mediated by the major in both its social and its psychic means of identification” (2). As an alternative space of encounter, they suggest the transnational which “is not bound by the binary of the local and the global and can occur in national, local, or global spaces across different and multiple spatialities and temporalities” (6). In particular, they privilege minor transnational exchanges that bypass the colonial or neocolonial center and allow participants to “take a horizontal approach that brings post-colonial minor cultural formations across national boundaries into productive comparisons, and engage with multiple linguistic formations” (11). Minor transnationalism does not, however, underestimate or occult the national: “… minor transnational subjects are inevitably invested in their respective geopolitical spaces, often waiting to be recognized as “citizens” to receive the attendant privileges of full citizenship” (8). Walter Mignolo, whose reading of cosmopolitanism is rooted in the history of coloniality, has equally privileged those liminal encounters by theorizing them into the concept of border thinking or border epistemology: “…the alternative to separatism is border thinking, the recognition and transformation of the hegemonic imaginary from the perspectives of people in subaltern positions. Border thinking then becomes a ‘tool’ of the project of critical cosmopolitanism” (735–36). Critical cosmopolitanism then opens the door for the ideal cosmopolitan project, that of universalizing diversity, or diversality: If you can imagine Western civilization as a large circle with a series of satellite circles intersecting the larger one but disconnected from each other, diversality will be the project that connects the diverse subaltern satellites appropriating and transforming Western global designs. (745) Both minor cosmopolitanism and diversality seek to undo the binaries that have dominated theoretical reflection on cosmopolitanism in the modern era by suggesting frameworks within which the center and periphery dichotomy would unravel. Under closer scrutiny, however, one cannot fail to detect in their ideological formations not so much

8 Introduction a difference in kind but in degree. Whether it be Lionnet and Shih’s horizontal movement or Mignolo’s intersecting satellite circles, the importance of the vertical axis or the central circle respectively is not invalidated. It is rather acknowledged and then marginalized in the development of the theoretical apparatus. In fact, Lionnet and Shih as well as Mignolo go to great lengths to discuss the prevalence of the colonial model as the constitutive element of the current political and economic geostrategic realities. Is it, then, enough to emphasize border thinking or the transnational in minor key when sketching out the new cosmopolis? It is certainly important to shift from opposing poles toward a range of differences and nuances when constructing a new model for cosmopolitanism—neither entirely cosmos, nor entirely polis—but is it sufficient? Does this configuration, more relational, less oppositional, help us move toward a global society predicated upon principles of equality and social justice? I would like to suggest that the space within which the new cosmopolitan can be best articulated is the nation-state, albeit a reconfigured, more dynamic, less nationalistic nation-state, and that the theoretical—and radically practical—modality more apt to make our societies truly cosmopolitan is estuarine translation. Whether we turn to the United Nations as the most cosmopolitan political tool available to us today or to the European Union, currently the largest political and economic unification experiment, the nation-state itself is not in question. What is in question rather is either facilitating exchanges or guaranteeing human rights across borders. Borders are not going anywhere, in fact, there is plenty of evidence across the globe that they are multiplying. Whether borders are communal, national, or regional, their meanings and practical functions are predicated upon the nation-state model (circulation of people, goods and information, security, etc.). Furthermore, the intensification of the globalization project has made clear that capital flows and finance markets are far more nationally rooted than we may generally think. Capital’s very survival is inscribed within its ability to self-multiply and that happens through investments in capital-producing projects. Those are, by definition, local— not in the sense that they are necessarily confined within the national borders of a specific nation-state but rather because they involve local labor rooted in specific geopolitical locations. Even financial markets, this new form of unrestrained capital, have very specific, localized effects such as the recent real estate bubble in the USA and the great recession that followed. As Saskia Sassen has convincingly shown in her work, on the winning side of this equation, those who benefit from the new finance-based, global, rootless economy often invest in the most rooted of all capital—real estate in major metropolitan or “global” cities (“The Global City: Introducing a New Concept”). Another obvious example of the unrooted capital’s very local effects is to be found in multinational corporations’ intensely extractive practices in the Global South, whereby

Introduction  9 land is purchased, traditional labor on the land interrupted—agricultural or other—extraction of riches maximized (minerals, water, etc.) to the point of irreversible land degradation which, in turn, forces indigenous ­ populations out and onto the route of the economic refugee (“Migration Is Expulsion By Another Name in World of Foreign Land Deals”). As much emphasis as contemporary theories of transnational mobility and practices of de- and reterritorialization place on movement and its ensuing creation of mobile and virtual spaces, there is an argument to be made about the placedness of human experience. We belong to multilayered spaces where identities intersect or interrogate one another but we also occupy places with territorial specificities that should not be overlooked. This becomes a particularly salient point for those to whom the privilege of placedness is denied. An asylum seeker in a transit zone not only retains but probably, in fact, multiplies by virtue of her unstable coordinates her spaces of cultural, social, spiritual, etc. belonging. What she may not access, however, is what we tend to obfuscate when we analyze mobility, which is the right to reinscribe one’s self within the mundane, the quotidian, and the rooted. And this right has less to do with the nostalgia of the place left behind and far more to do with the basic Arendtian right to have rights. Paradoxically, that same perverse bureaucratic, population-management and control biopolitics that threaten her life by instructing security apparatuses to not help her when she finds herself stranded at sea, also ensures her survival if she makes it to shore and is given political status that guarantees her a place, this time around, in a biopolitics of second-class citizen exploitation. From that place of political and social existence she can then resist the biopolitical machine through a deployment of the particular network of spaces to which she belongs. As Seyla Benhabib has noted: Every democratic demos has disenfranchised some, while recognizing only certain individuals as full citizens. Territorial sovereignty and democratic voice have never matched completely. Yet presence within a circumscribed territory and in particular continuing residence within it, brings one under the authority of the sovereign whether democratic or not. The new politics of cosmopolitan membership is about negotiating this complex relationship between rights of full membership, democratic voice, and territorial residence. (Another Cosmopolitanism 34) The nation-state, as Lionnet and Shih, among many others, suggest (8), is the only guarantee we have for citizenship rights which are a strong correlate, if not a sine qua non, of human rights.6 The Global South and East have very little to gain and a lot to lose if they argue their case for equitable distribution of human and natural resources from any position other than that of national sovereignty. But they can certainly do so while privileging the horizontal exchange model that Lionnet and Shih suggest or through the lens of Mignolo’s border epistemology. We certainly need

10 Introduction to decolonize our epistemological tools, but there is little benefit from doing so while still oscillating between nation and universe, minor and major, local and global, particular and plural. Politically situated within the nation-state, firmly rooted in the single political framework that allows for a seat at the table, forming horizontal and lateral alliances, calling the center out for its abuses by using its own rhetoric and practices against it subaltern or minor voices can engage the cosmopolis in terms not necessarily equal—that would be radically utopian—but terms that certainly guarantee them a place for enunciation. And what about the nation-state itself before it enters the global scene? Should we theorize the nation as a neat, coherent political category that has resolved all internal contradictions and advances on the world “scene” as a unified force? Probably not as that would amount to a totalizing view of human community. Nations are in many respects imagined, sometimes artificial human societies. And there is no chronological hierarchy, no actual “before” and “after” the moment a nation enters the global scene—nations become what they are as they negotiate their place within the world (a process very much informed by global and regional geostrategic interests and power differentials). This is a synchronic process as much as it is a diachronic one: the community’s past informs its current character while its cultural contours are molded as it argues itself into the world. And this is where the need for translation becomes urgent. Accepting the nation-state as the political unit of the cosmopolis, having, in other words, contracted the “cosmos”/“polis” binary into a single continuum, does not mean that we have erased difference, or, to borrow from Mignolo, that we have abandoned our claim to diversality. Difference and, most importantly, the right to difference is at the very heart of the nation-state formation. Let me turn, once again, to Etienne Balibar. In an interview he gave on his recent book titled Des Universels, he suggested the following: Translation and conflict are the two dialectical poles, if you will, of my work on the violence of the universal. I believe that being nothing determinate is no life, and I recognise that it is not easy to be several things at once…The cosmopolitanism we need requires a certain form of identity malaise, which I will venture to call an active, or acting one. (Interview with Jean Birnbaum) What if, then, interlocutors structured communication within their immediate and larger communities, local, regional, national, international along the principles of translation or “carrying over,” a crossing of borders that entails this identity malaise of which Balibar speaks because it means both loss and the creation of a larger unit? Why not, in other words, think of the cosmopolis as a constant ebb and flow of cultural, linguistic, political, etc. identities that decline and regrow within the regulated framework of political and national units, nation-states that themselves experience

Introduction  11 micro-climatic ebbs and flows? The cosmopolis experienced as nationally rooted translational practice allows us to conceptualize both the complexity of its multiple shapes and identities (linguistic, cultural, political, economic etc.) but also, and crucially, the possibility for reaching across that does not necessarily mean loss of the particular while highlighting the imperfections, vulnerabilities, qui pro quos, and misunderstandings that are the universal denominator of our particular experiences. To use a metaphor that may help conceptualize the theoretical paradigm that I propose, I suggest that translational practices already in use in contact zones, within nations, across borders, and in liminal spaces of no rights create and sustain a linguistic, social, and cultural ecology similar to that of an estuary: ebb and flow of dissimilar material that create ecosystems to which new varieties of life adapt. Most importantly, although the frontiers of the ecosystem may be somewhat difficult to sketch out, they are certainly there as they separate fresh water from seawater, both necessary elements for the life of the estuary and yet threatening, totalizing forces whose maintained tension is life-giving as much as it structures the limits of life’s expansibility. This theoretical articulation builds onto Etienne Balibar’s mathematical and geological metaphor of the fractal border, an incomplete border that is neither open nor closed, a border that separates and distinguishes on the one hand and links and mixes on the other. Balibar developed this concept to account for the incompleteness of the Franco-Algerian border—too much Algeria in France, too much France in Algeria (“Algeria, France: One Nation or Two?”). It is not hard to see, however, that, to a certain extent all borders are fractal. What I am attempting to do here, then, is to study the role of translation in the creation of the estuarine ecosystem as a cosmo-national space that fractal borders make possible.

Translation Studies and the Estuary The cosmopolitan nation-state is a place where spaces of complex networks of communication are made possible by virtue of its expansionist and retractive adjustment mechanisms as it tries to negotiate, on the one hand, its own internal tendencies toward nativism and, on the other hand, its de facto participation in a global economy of capital and human mobility. For translation to make sense as a valid analytical tool in this environment we need to take a close look at the history of the concept as well as that of the epistemological field within which it has operated over the past 60 years or so, that of translation studies. Conceptually constructed as a reflection of its own etymology, translation (from the Latin translatio: to bear across) has traditionally been defined as the process by which a text in one language crosses the linguistic barrier of its original culture and is recast in the linguistic medium of a different culture. From the early-day debates on fidelity (is the task

12 Introduction of the translator to stay as close to the original as possible or is the original more of an impetus for creation within the confines of the receiving culture?) to the more modern concern with the ethnocentric power of domesticating translations (translations that sound like originals in the target language), the emphasis has been placed on two separate yet related theoretical principles: translatability and a de facto dichotomy between original and translation. In other words, there is a source text, a target text, and the inherent ability of language to recast the former in the form of the latter. A few comments on these assumptions: one particularly problematic aspect of translatability is that it calls upon structuralist understandings of language function which we can—and should—interrogate as potentially limiting. The idea that we all share similar pathways whereby we access language tends to decontextualize language use and essentialize communication. To reference Bourdieu’s habitus, human experience is both structured by and structuring of its social realities. And if indeed human activity is defined by structures that accurately predict normative behavior as well as deviations from the norm, the very existence of structuring forces calls into question their stability: the structuring impulse inevitably leads to deconstructive moves which sustain it by calling forth acts of reconstruction and so on. It would not be particularly revolutionary to suggest that not only is there a linguistic and cultural remainder7 when we translate but, in fact, what we think of as the act of translation is really a series of acts of silencing and voicing that relate only tangentially to either the source or the target text. Paul de Man made that argument years ago when he suggested that “the translation belongs not to the life of the original, the original is already dead, but the translation belongs to the afterlife of the original, thus assuming and confirming the death of the original” (The Resistance to Theory 85). What de Man did, following in the steps of Walter Benjamin, was to bypass the dichotomy by creating a referent that he ontologically positioned beyond language—Benjamin famously suggested that both original and translation point to some pure form of language which the translator is tasked with bringing forth. Although not structuralist by any means, such readings of translation transform the original/translation dichotomy into a tripartite structure that elides the tension two artificially opposed terms inevitably create by means of transferring it onto a third one. In “A Touch of Translation: On Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’,” Samuel Weber has suggested a way out of this restrictive triangulation: What translation does is not communicate meaning but point to— signify—the movement of symbolization itself, as it is at work already in the original, and then more obviously between the original and its displacement, repetition and dislocation by and as translation.

Introduction  13 Translatability is the never realizable potential of meaning and as such constitutes a way—a way of signifying—rather than a what. (75) What translation theory in its structuralist, post-structuralist, postcolonial, and recently post-translation phases8 has had to grapple with is that very notion of the remainder, what is lost and potentially created, the lack and excess of meaning and expression which Benjamin and de Man theorize as a third term and Weber theorizes as the process of symbolization. What, then, if we addressed the question of the remainder without for a minute assuming translatability? What I would like to suggest is that we move beyond the study of untranslatables as marginal lexical or discursive elements that require heavy annotation, if they are to indeed relocate within a different linguistic environment; in other words, I suggest that we move beyond reading untranslatables as exceptions to the rule of translatability. I would argue that what most impedes the act of intercultural communication is our expectation of translatability. Our belief in universally shared human values and social places and spaces that are similarly structured across human societies makes the encounter with linguistic (and I would add cultural) otherness problematic insofar as we search for negotiating tools that simply do not exist. We then internalize communicational failure as an insurmountable difference which leads to conceptualizing the remainder as an external, foreign element that we either expulse to an entirely different ontological sphere—as de Man and Benjamin did—or we codify as silence, the ineffable, the non-verbal, the difference-as-alterity in our universal sameness. By the middle of the twentieth century, Victor Segalen, a French doctor and writer was attempting a clean theoretical break with the Orientalizing francophone literary tradition. In his Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity, he suggests that the encountering of difference should not necessarily result in an effort to understand and know it: “Exoticism is not an adaptation, a perfect comprehension of what lies beyond one’s self, that one would fully embrace, but rather a total and immediate perception of an eternal incomprehensibility” (21). Foucault would later argue in Histoire de sexualité, I: la volonté de savoir (The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction) the centrality of the knowledge modality in structuring power discourses. Moving away from the need to know means also moving away from the hegemonic impulse to assimilate. Although not meant as a reflection on the act of linguistic translation, Segalen’s understanding of exoticism, of encountering cultural otherness as an event structured around the principle of perceiving incomprehensibility presupposes a certain degree of untranslatability. Difference need not be understood to be appreciated. And although perception is rooted, subjective, and limited, perceiving “eternal incomprehensibility”—to requote Segalen—suggests a degree of synchronic and

14 Introduction diachronic relationality. Similarly, untranslatability is a relational event insofar as it clearly requires at least an attempt at comprehension.9 This echoes Emanuel Levinas’s primordial responsibility for the other that the emergence of her face, the singularity of her life’s event, creates for me, the minute I encounter her (Totality and Infinity). Levinas situates the birth of that responsibility before language and so do Segalen’s incomprehensibility and my understanding of untranslatability, as an ethical imperative to be in relation with the other without necessarily knowing more than the event of her existence. In this case, the remainder of the translative act is recast no longer as lack or excess but rather as the very condition of relationality. If we fully accept our inability to comprehend, we de facto position ourselves within the remainder, or better yet we are the remainder. In practical terms, this means that what I don’t understand in the other’s attempt to communicate with me is no longer an impediment to relationality but the very condition of its possibility. Take Benjamin’s argument that “all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages” (“The Task of the Translator” 75). The example Benjamin uses is that of the German word “brot” (bread) which cannot truly be translated as “pain” in French because speakers of the two languages think of entirely different things when using these two words in context. The translational remainder here is impossible to carry over unless we were to assume that readers of both source and target texts had experienced full cultural immersion in both linguistic communities and were therefore able to recall that vast network of metonymic associations that Benjamin implies in his analysis. But would these hypothetical readers then require translation? Probably not. What happens, then, with the vast majority of readers who are expected to access “brot” in all its signifying salience through “pain”? One possibility is the use of annotation— intertextual or in the form of footnotes. There are several ways to do this: keep the word “brot” in the original language and parenthetically explain what it means or translate it and add a note detailing what connotations the word “brot” would have for the reader of the original text. Another is to fully domesticate the text and thereby erase the source text, in other words, give the reader the impression that she is reading a text originally written in French, in which “pain” is probably a baguette. Another yet, the one that a theory of untranslatability within translation would be advocating for, is to keep the word “brot” as is, without annotation, without parenthetical explanations, shocking in its foreignness as it negotiates its place within the target text. This is by no means a revolutionary idea. It has been widely practiced, widely theorized, and widely contested. Most notably, Lawrence Venuti has suggested that: In foreignizing translation, the ethnocentric violence that every act of translation wreaks on a foreign text is matched by a violent

Introduction  15 disruption of domestic values that challenges cultural forms of domination, whether nationalist or elitist. Foreignizing undermines the very concept of nation by invoking the diverse constituencies that any such concept tends to elide. (The Translator’s Invisibility 147) On the opposite side of the argument and in direct response to Venuti, Douglas Robinson has maintained that: Foreignism it turns out isn’t foreign at all; it’s the language of the parents lecturing, teachers teaching, ministers preaching. It is the language of authorities imposing an alien set of behavioral norms on a subordinate group—a condescending doubletake that wields alterity like a velveteen stick. (What Is Translation: Centrifugal Theories, Critical Interventions 94) Venuti then sees foreignizing translation as a way to unsettle hierarchies and hegemonies within the target culture whereas Robinson alerts us to the possibility of reinforcement of these same hegemonic powers because a foreignizing text is by definition elitist and therefore excludes those same constituencies that Venuti suggests foreignizing translation brings into the fold. If we accept, as I have suggested, that untranslatability is a condition of relationality we could interpret the presence of “brot” in the target language using an entirely different lens. To do that, let us go back to the metaphor of the estuary and a quick overview of estuarine stratification fundamentals: The density of water depends on the temperature of the water and the amount of salt dissolved in the water. More salt makes the water denser and colder water is denser than warm water. Cold salty water is the densest and warm fresh water is the least dense. All bodies of water have the least dense water on top and the densest water on the bottom. Water will always arrange itself so that there is an increasing density toward the bottom. In an estuary, the fresh water flowing in is found at the surface because it has no dissolved salts and is much less dense than the salty water in the ocean. The fresh water will mix with the ocean water and there will be less difference in density. (Rhode Island Office of Marine Programs) However, “sometimes there is a big difference in density between the surface layer and the bottom layer. The big difference in density will prevent mixing between the surface and bottom layers. This condition is called stratification” (Rhode Island Office of Marine Programs). Stratification leads to hypoxia or anoxia because no dissolved oxygen makes it to the bottom water layer. This may result in the death of creatures living in the bottom layer.10

16 Introduction In an estuary, the initial contact between essentially different bodies of water results in sedimentation. The laws of physics will not allow for the two layers to mix immediately.11 Following contact, the mixing process that will eventually lead to the production of the unique, brackish estuary water, is set in motion.12 If environmental conditions are not favorable, then long-lasting sedimentation and the ensuing death of life may occur. Let’s think of the source and target languages as salt and fresh water. The shock of contact will retain them in their separate cultural spheres, with their specific densities unalloyed by the strangeness of otherness, delineated by a dividing line which, in time, loses its contours. In the estuary, it is over time that dissolved salts from the bottom layer make their way to the top layer and oxygen makes its way from the top layer to the bottom layer. Note that for that unique estuary environment to come to life, the two competing bodies of water do not transform into each other; rather they share elements of their chemical composition (bottom layer) or facilitate the flow of necessary chemical components (top layer), progressively becoming one. “Brot” does not have to change its linguistic essence and become “pain.” “Brot” can very well exist in the cultural environment of “pain” (or vice versa), relate to “pain” in ways that initially will be undecipherable but which, eventually will create an ecology of relatable difference. The brackish water that will result from this prolonged relation-in-difference in the case of translation is what has been traditionally termed “the remainder,” or the space of identity malaise that Balibar has theorized. In a world of “layered simultaneity,” to borrow Jan Blommaert’s term (Discourse 237), language’s role is more salient than ever. As Suresh Canagarajah points out in his introduction to The Routledge Handbook of Migration and Language, technology allows us to compress the time/space continuum and therefore not simply cross but rather collapse boundaries and bring to bear diverse ties, identities, etc. in a single interaction or relationship (16). Positing untranslatability as an operating principle for this collapse of boundaries helps us avoid two oversimplifications: first, the elision of nation and place as structuring powers; second, the understanding of languages as sets of repertoires which we combine and restructure at will. These analyses tend to gloss over the hierarchical structuring of languageuse in bilingual and multilingual communities. They inadvertently refuse to see that power dynamics predicated on the one hand, on legal or illegal residency, nationality, and citizenship, and on the other hand, national, majority, native, heritage, and foreign languages are very much at play. Assigning the single meaning of crossing over to the prefix “trans” (as in translanguaging, transnationalizing, translingual, etc.) is no less politically totalizing than the very disenfranchisement of multilingual communities that it purports to counter insofar as it effaces differences between the rooted place and virtual space, language use and language politics,

Introduction  17 comprehension and untranslatability. Along these lines, in “Deleuze and Translation,” Barbara Godard suggests that: [l]anguage…is not separated from meaning left to circulate freely in some transcendent beyond, but embedded within complex material and social semiotic practices…of sedimentation and flux, reciprocally implicated in the perception of and shaping by contingent circumstances—geographical location and political force. (61) In “Deterritorialising Translation Studies: Notes on Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux,” Janine Hopkinson echoes Godard’s emphasis on contingency while discussing translation as textual multiplicity: The antigeneology approach [that Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome model suggests] is significant: rather than focus on origin and movement away from origin, the rhizome approach seeks to consider interrelations, establish connections among variables that are themselves constantly variable. (11) Inspired by the work of Deleuze and Guattari, both theorists place emphasis on the effects of lateral, horizontal, rhizomatic growth that bypasses the original/translation binary while situating the translative event in concrete and variable sociopolitical frameworks (one of the most salient, counter-hierarchical structuring principles of the rhizome being precisely its paratactic growth pattern: and + and + and). Meaning, then, is not the principle entity that makes it across: in fact, in a rhizomatic structure, the signifying content of the word “across” itself loses some of its force. What a rhizomatic translation communicates, if anything, is the universally felt uneasiness, the disruption of expectations and assumptions that encountering otherness in an unstable, ever-changing border environment governed by often intransigent, exclusionary laws, rules, and regulations produces. This is akin to a brilliant, if largely depoliticized, definition of the translator’s subjectivation as rhizome that George Steiner articulated in After Babel: Good translation…can be defined as that in which the dialectic of impenetrability and ingress of intractable alienness and felt ‘at-homeness’ remains unresolved but expressive. Out of the tension of resistance and affinity, a tension directly proportional to the proximity of the two languages and historical communities, grows the elucidative strangeness of the great translation. (412–13) Whether conceptualized as expressive dialectic, a double-exposed photograph,13 a decentering force,14 or a progressive dissolution of being,15 translation has often been theorized as a border-defying cultural

18 Introduction phenomenon, an operation that occurs at contact zones, where total and hybridized entities have to negotiate, shift, and readjust to configure mutually acceptable forms of communication. The estuary metaphor takes these theoretical approaches further: while valuing and exploring the borders along which one culture, language, and body politic bleed into another, it also sheds light on the processes by which this mixing is produced and examines carefully what transformations occur outside the brackish water areas, in what appears to remain unalloyed but never quite is. Just as the cosmopolitan nation is not only plausible but, at least for the foreseeable future, the only existing framework within which to experience our brand of modernity (postcolonial, globalized, and hyper-capitalist) as ethically as possible, so is translation as estuarine relationality an effective tool with which to gauge the ethics of the political, social, linguistic, and affective transformations that those who negotiate borderlines must undergo as they attempt to adjust to shifting realities.

Delimiting the Estuary By acknowledging time, length, expertise, and market exigencies, I have limited this book’s corpus to case studies of francophone translingual authors who either self-translate or practice/thematize translation in their writing. I chose to focus on Andreï Makine, Nancy Huston, Vassilis Alexakis, and Chahdortt Djavann in particular because they represent a wide array of linguistic and cultural backgrounds in the translingual market foregrounding in their work both their national origins, their current national belonging, and their cosmopolitanism. Furthermore, they do not emerge from postcolonial settings and thus free my analysis from a strictly postcolonial framework. With an awareness of its historical and linguistic limitations, the book is concluded with an interrogation of the project’s applicability in the field of postcolonial francophone critique and theory by reflecting on the intersections between translation as an estuarine ecosystem and the historical dimension of coloniality. Chapter 1, Andreï Makine and the Limits of Domestication, focuses on four works by Andreï Makine: three novels that constitute a thematic trilogy and an essay. Le testament français (1995) is the story of a recent Russian immigrant to France who reconstructs his Russian childhood and adolescence with an emphasis on his relationship with his francophone grandmother. Drawing from Jacques Derrida’s theory of monolingualism and Abdelkébir Khatibi’s concept of bilangue, this chapter discusses the narrator’s search for a third language that would negotiate the incommensurable space separating his French from his Russian cultural sphere. Khatibi’s bilangue and Derrida’s monolingualism (of the other) question our ability to ever possess the language that we speak foregrounding the implications that subscription to a single language may have on historical narratives accounting for social and political power imbalances in spaces where hegemonic discourses exploit existing

Introduction  19 linguistic power differentials (Francophone North Africa is their clear referent, but their analysis is valid for most colonial spaces). Although far from being a post-colony, early-twentieth-century Russia is squarely in the orbit of French cultural imperialism. Instead of leading to a symbiotic coexistence, the French graft, a metaphor to which the narrator returns time and time again, retains its foreignness until he is physically in France and able to put his grandmother’s Parisian stories in context and perspective. The Russian past recedes into the background when the narrator is ready to fully root himself in French. This act of linguistic and cultural domestication forecloses on the estuarine potential of the graft/host binary by simply reversing its poles—French is now the host with Russian performing as a memory graft. Le Testament français is the first of three novels that have been studied under the general title of the “French trilogy”; the other two are Requiem pour l’Est (2000) and La terre et le ciel de Jacques Dorme (2004). All three establish narrative links between the Soviet Union, Russia, and France while also featuring, as does Le testament français, multilingual characters who have lived in several countries and have thus had to navigate diverse cultural environments. Most importantly, they chronicle the progressive stifling of the marginally estuarine space that the grandmother, Charlotte, was allowed to create in Le Testament français toward an utterly hypoxic stratification in Cette France qu’on oublie d’aimer, a reactionary essay about the 2005 French riots. Charlotte’s ability to inhabit two worlds by maintaining the tension that never allows one to ontologically shift into the other while making mutual enrichment possible is no longer valued in a text that reads dissidence, productive silences, and uncomfortable feelings of isolation in the face of new coexisting multiple identities in reductive, almost dystopian terms. In Chapter 2, Nancy Huston’s Estuarine Ecosystems and the Minor, I study Nancy Huston’s use of translation through a close-reading of Trois fois septembre and Limbes/Limbo for which the author’s theoretical reflections on the bilingual condition create a compelling framework. Trois fois septembre reads translation as an incomplete act of communication. The novel foregrounds meta-linguistic commentary, silence, and the untranslatable as privileged access points to the bilingual and bicultural relationship between a French mother-and-daughter couple residing in the USA. The vivid tapestry of white, European privilege, complete with private schools and New England countryscapes, is punctuated by memories of the Holocaust and the Vietnam war. The gradual melding of both French and English into a liminal space of incomprehensibility forcefully questions power differentials across lines of historical narrative and race. The author’s practice of forcing both hegemonic languages into palimpsestual self-effacing equally dominates Limbes/ Limbo, a dual-language text, written in English and French, the two languages mirroring each other on facing pages. I argue that the practice of constant de- and re-territorialization of cultural and linguistic spaces

20 Introduction that the work performs (we are never quite sure which page is the original and which page is the translation) creates a palimpsestual structure within which two hegemonic languages minorize each other, creating new meanings with clear politically dissident potential. Ultimately, the estuarine environment in Huston’s work is one that privileges an indepth interrogation qua subversion of the power of global languages to convey meaning in their capacity as guarantors and proliferators of Eurocentric and logocentric understandings of Reason. Vassilis Alexakis is the most consistently self-translating of the authors studied in this book. He writes in either French or Greek and then translates toward the other language. What Chapter 3, Vassilis Alexakis and the Limits of Self-Translation, argues is that his self-translations are variably successful exercises in creating estuarine ecosystems. Meaning is produced for Alexakis’s narrators in what the self-translation silences, in the annotations or deletions that it occasions, and in the spaces that it creates for liminal linguistic and historical events to position themselves while shifting and reconfiguring—or, conversely, reinforcing and sedimenting—the receiving language’s and culture’s expectations. Although not foreignizing, the translation of La langue maternelle, originally written in Greek, unsettles the expectations of French readers to the extent that it undermines the larger political mythology of Greece as the European foundational event. Drawing from the historian Giannis Voulgaris’s work on contemporary Greek history and Georgios Babiniotis’s reflection on the political ramifications of Greek diglossia, I read La langue maternelle’s self-translation into French as a political event that questions the very foundations of the contemporary European edifice. I  then shift my attention to Les mots étrangers, a novel in which we follow the bilingual (French and Greek), European narrator’s effort to learn Sango, the dominant indigenous language of the Central African Republic. While so doing he creates a GreekCentral African minor linguistic community of fraught belonging, casting a Eurocentric, interpretative net over cultures and practices of the Central African Republic which he eventually visits. The self-translation into Greek invites the false identification of one downtrodden people (Greeks) with another (citizens of the Central African Republic). Instead of creating an estuarine environment of relationality, the act of translation objectifies, in most instances, a third, African, indigenous language and its culture as the absolute border between two European languages (French and Greek), thus reconfiguring but without essentially altering linguistic hierarchies of the colonial and neocolonial eras. Languages are expected to relate not because stable, authoritative meanings, products of the fields of power within which they were initially articulated, are transferred from one linguistic, social, and political environment to another (with its own economy of systems of oppression and resistance in place), but because the inevitable contact into which they are brought in an interconnected, globalized, cosmopolitan world defines

Introduction  21 them as the paradoxical systems that they are: entities of unquestionable internal stability on the one hand and self-erasing adaptability on the other. Most of Chahdortt Djavann’s work, which I study in Chapter 4 (A Native Informant in the Estuary: Chahdortt Djavann and Iran), is structurally and ideologically dependent upon a stable and universal enunciative position that, at least at first glance, erases by virtue of its absolute authority the estuarine possibility that colliding differences produce. However, in many of her novels where Iran and theocracy are pitted against the West and democracy, the tension between the two is not simply resolved by preferring the democratic West over an Islamist Iran—although the characters very clearly gravitate toward the former. The narrative voice often creates a third enunciative position that is supposed to negotiate the distance between the two poles of the binary. In this chapter, I examine whether the initial clash of difference between the past and the present, Iran and the West, and French and Farsi produces estuarine relational conditions, under which circumstances and to what extent. A close reading of La muette, a text which maintains and reinforces the third-term relational structure that the 2006’s Comment peut-on être français first introduces and Je ne suis pas celle que je suis and La dernière séance develop and enhance serves as a foil: La muette dilutes the estuarine potential of the initial conflict between silence and speech that it stages by reducing its own material production into a commercial object aimed at satisfying the expectations of the host cultural and political economies by shedding light on the atrocities perpetrated by nondemocratic regimes.

Notes

22 Introduction methodological and normative point of view, cosmopolitanism and nationstate are not mutually exclusive: The nation state was originally formed out of local units to which people were fiercely attached. They considered those local attachments “natural” and the nation-state to be soulless and artificial…thanks to national rituals and symbols, that eventually changed completely. Now today many people consider national identity to be natural and cosmopolitan or world identity to be an artificial construct. They are right. It will be an artificial construct, if artificial means made by humans. But they are wrong if they think artificial origins prevent something from eventually being regarded as natural. It did not stop the nation-state. (8) 6 Notwithstanding my insistence on the nation as the de facto space within which to articulate a discourse on rights, I find Etienne Balibar’s articulation of an aspirational “diasporic citizenship” very compelling: What I have in mind is not a global citizenship or citizenship of the world, as if it could be considered a single constituency, but rather a citizenship in the world, or an increasing amount of civic rights and practices, in the world as it is, the complex system of spaces and movements that we call “the world,” for which we are trying to invent a civilization. (“Toward a Diasporic Citizen? From Internationalism to Cosmopolitics.” 224) 7 In Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context, Tejaswini Niranjana reads in the translational remainder the potential for minoritizing standard dialects: “good translation is minoritizing: it releases the remainder by cultivating a heterogeneous discourse, opening up the standard dialect and literary canons to what is foreign to themselves, the substandard and the marginal” (11). 8 In the introduction of Translation’s 2011 inaugural issue, the editors argued for ushering in an era of post-translation studies: We propose the inauguration of a transdisciplinary research field with translation as an interpretive as well as operative tool. We imagine a sort of new era that could be termed post-translation studies, where translation is viewed as fundamentally transdisciplinary, mobile, and open ended. The “post” here recognizes a fact and a conviction: new and enriching thinking on translation must take place outside the traditional discipline of translation studies. The time is past when we can maintain the usual borders of translation studies, just as the time is past when in a more general way we can close the borders of certain disciplines and exclude translation discourse from entering their intellectual space. We are convinced that today – at least in the humanities but surely in principle for all academic fields – exchange and dynamic discourse are fundamental. (8–9) 9 In their introduction to Whose Cosmopolitanism, Nina Glick Schiller and Andrew Irving examine “shared understanding” within the framework of critical cosmopolitanism: The term “critical cosmopolitanism”… signals a rejection of universalizing narratives of cosmopolitanism and an affirmation of a stance towards human openness that is processual, socially situated, aspirational, self-problematizing and aware of the incomplete and contested nature of any cosmopolitan claim. This stance allows it the possibility that difference, uncertainty and otherness can be simultaneous with, rather than opposite to, shared understanding. (5)

Introduction  23 In his contribution to this same volume, Andrew Irving revisits “understanding” from an ethnographic perspective: …our shared understanding of the words people use to articulate their experiences does not in itself provide sufficient grounds for understanding how that world is inhabited in someone’s being and body, insofar as only part of the word is located in the shared social world, meaning that we cannot therefore equate our general comprehension of a word with that of another person or as a means of identifying with them. (136) 10 The NOAA offers the following definition for hypoxia: The amount of oxygen in any water body varies naturally, both seasonally and over time. This occurs due to a balance between oxygen input from the atmosphere and certain biological and chemical processes, some of which produce oxygen while others consume it. Stratification in the water column, which occurs when less dense freshwater from an estuary mixes with heavier seawater, is one natural cause of hypoxia. Limited vertical mixing between the water “layers” restricts the supply of oxygen from surface waters to more saline bottom waters, leading to hypoxic conditions in bottom habitats. 11 In Basics of Environmental Science, Michael Allaby discusses the creation and persistence of saltwater and freshwater channels within estuaries: Sand that has been transported many miles by river is deposited where fresh water and sea water meet. Because sea water is denser than fresh water the two do not mix readily and tend to flow in separate channels. The configuration of these channels is determined by the topography of the estuary itself; they may flow side by side or form a wedge, in which fresh water rises over the sea water. On an incoming tide, freshwater and seawater currents often flow in opposite directions and marine fish can move considerable distances inland by keeping to the saltwater channel. (35) 12 In the introductory chapter to The Estuarine Ecosystem: Ecology, Threats and Management, D. S. McLusky and Michael Elliott emphasize the indeterminant, ever-changing character of the estuarine environment: “The river flow, tidal range and sediment distribution in estuaries are continually changing and consequently estuaries may never really be ‘steady-state’ systems, and may be tending towards a balance that they never achieve” (8). 13 As José Ortega y Gasset suggests: “[t]he shapes of the meanings of the two [original and translation] fail to coincide as do those of a person in a double-exposed photograph. This being the case, our perception shifts and waves without actually identifying with either shape or forming a third” (“The Misery and the Splendor of Translation” 51). 14 In Pour la Poétique II. Epistémologie de l’écriture. Poétique de la traduction, Henri Meschonnic insists on the decentering effect of translation: “On…oppose [à la notion de la transparence] la traduction comme réénonciation spécifique d’un sujet historique, interaction de deux poétiques, décentrement, le dedans-dehors d’une langue et des textualisations dans cette langue” (“We… oppose [to the notion of transparency] translation as a specific re-enunciation of a historical subject, as an interaction of two poetics, as decentering, as the inside-out of a language and its textualizations” 307–08). 15 In La blessure du nom propre, Abdelkébir Khatibi has argued that “[t]raduire, c’est tendre vers la dissolution de son être dans cet écart violent entre deux langues” (“[t]ranslating is tending toward the dissolution of the self in the violent gap between two languages” 45).

1

Andreï Makine and the Limits of Domestication

Le Testament français as faltering estuary Le Testament français (Dreams of My Russian Summers) was the French literary event of 1995. Makine’s novel received the two most prestigious French literary awards for the year, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis (shared with Vassilis Alexakis for La Langue maternelle) as well as the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens. The first part of Le testament français spans roughly five years in the life of a Russian boy who spends his winters in an unnamed industrial city by the Volga and his summers in Saranza, a fictive town in the Russian steppe, with Charlotte, his maternal grandmother with whom he and his older sister speak primarily in French. He negotiates the difficult passage from childhood to adolescence while becoming progressively more aware of the complexities inherent in his bilingual and bicultural conditions. The second part of the novel finds Aliocha in Paris, struggling author who, very much like Makine himself, has to sell his French-language fiction to publishing houses as Russian works translated into French since no publisher wants to invest in a translingual Russian author writing in French. Once financially stable, he tries to send for his grandmother to join him in a city that she hasn’t visited since the outbreak of World War II. The novel ends with news of Charlotte’s death in Saranza accompanied by a farewell letter in which she reveals to the narrator that his mother was in fact a Russian Gulag prisoner who entrusted her son to Charlotte’s daughter soon after his birth. My reading of Aliocha’s story begins along the analytical lines  of many critical assessments of the novel, namely that Le Testament français views the translingual condition in purely binary terms, two parts of a fissured whole which can only be reconciled within a third space, and in Aliocha’s case, it is one of literary expression. It then seeks to complicate this initial reading in two ways: first, by examining the role of translation in the narrative, suggesting that instances of codeswitching, theoretical reflections on the translative act, or intra-textual annotation point more to a simple reversal of the binary’s poles than to the promised creation of a third space. As I will show, this is primarily

Andreï Makine  25 due to intentionally domesticating border-crossing translational events (geographical, linguistic, cultural, etc.). In fact, I am suggesting that the foundational event of choosing to write the book in French does not equal singular domestication of foreign experiences (mostly Russian and Soviet in Aliocha’s case) within French linguistic, cultural, and political environments. Quite on the contrary, a story that seeks to justify its enunciation in French because it assumes that telling a mostly Russian story in that language implies a concomitant rejection of Russianness, often goes to great lengths to domesticate the narrator’s interpretation of Frenchness within radically Russian and Soviet contexts. The one character, as I will argue, who, living as the narrator does between and within two different linguistic and cultural systems, successfully creates estuarine conditions for her multiplicity to thrive is Charlotte herself. The second complication that this chapter introduces into the binary constructedness of the narrative is a diachronic one. Le testament français is the first in three novels that have been studied under the general title of “French trilogy”; the other two are Requiem pour l’Est (2000) and La terre et le ciel de Jacques Dorme (2004). All three establish narrative links between the Soviet Union, Russia, and France while also featuring, as does Le Testament français, multilingual characters who have lived in several countries and have thus had to navigate numerous different cultural environments. I am adding a fourth book to this list, Andreï Makine’s 2006 essay Cette France qu’on oublie d’aimer, a look at the state of French cultural and political affairs at the time of the 2005 French riots (clashes between underprivileged French youth and police in the suburbs of many major French cities) which brought a number of questions on identity, the less-than-successful integration of young French people of color with immigration backgrounds, police violence, and the meaning of the French Republic to the forefront of public and political discourse. Adding this essay to the trilogy allows me to read the progressive stifling of the estuarine space Charlotte created in Le testament français toward the utterly hypoxic stratification of Cette France qu’on oublie d’aimer. Charlotte’s ability to inhabit two worlds by maintaining the tension that never allows one to ontologically shift into the other while making mutual enrichment possible is no longer valued in an essay that reads dissidence, productive silences, and uncomfortable feelings of isolation in the face of new coexisting multiple identities in reductive, almost dystopian terms. Makine’s increasingly limited reading of the contemporary French cultural landscape shapes a particularly problematic context within which to situate his narrators’ account of their countries’ traumatic past. In Le testament français, positioned as a member of the postmemory generation,1 Aliocha tells the histories of the two World Wars and the Russian Civil War as they were experienced and then narrated to him or in his presence by his parents and grandparents. As is the case with his

26  Andreï Makine own childhood memories, his postmemories are experienced either in translation or within a comparative cultural framework. To underscore the significance of bilingualism in postmemorial narrativization, I will briefly turn to Marianne Hirsch and her definition of postmemory as translation. When discussing our reading of images in The Generation of Postmemory: Language and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, she notes the following: It seems to me that this may be the clearest articulation of what we fantasize and expect of surviving images from them past;…That they require a particular kind of visual literacy, one that can decode the foreign language that they speak…The work of post-memory would thus consist of “learning [a foreign language]”…to be able to translate [affect] from the past into the present and the future, where [it] will be heard by generations not yet born. (52) If, as Marianne Hirsch suggests, prolonging the affective life of images that represent a traumatic past into the present and future requires learning a foreign language and practicing translation, a bilingual subject who experiences past trauma narrativized in languages already coexisting in translation can scarcely avoid the complexities resulting from her competing affective affinities for those languages as they intersect with the affectively charged learning of the language necessary to translate the past into the future. Notwithstanding the significant role images play in Le Testament français, a reading of the novel to which I will return, I would argue, following Marianne Hirsch, that the work of postmemory requires a certain degree of adaptation even when transmission occurs in narrative form without the need for interlingual translation: “Postmemory’s connection to the past is… mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection and creation” (5). In postmemorial texts, history defers to affect while maintaining an overwhelming presence that invests the reading experience with truth value. Following along the argument-line that most critiques of postmemory have developed, namely its very real potential for distorting and revising the past, 2 I would like to suggest that in Makine’s texts postmemory casts so long a heroically tragic shadow that the present can only seem lackluster, diminished, and confused. In Le Testament français, this is in direct relation to the narrator’s need for a third language that will allow him to reconcile his competing linguistic worlds. His inability to inhabit both Russian and French at the same time, to move in and out of their distinct linguistic spaces while acknowledging each language’s resistance to become the other through the act of translation ultimately leads to the neutralization of both through the creation of his literary idiom. As the nouveau riche Russian entrepreneur of the early 1990s appears vulgar and insignificant

Andreï Makine  27 when compared to the unnamed yet heroic—because remembered as such—dead of World War II, so does contemporary French slang sound insufferable when compared to a prose that carries clear echoes of Proust and sacralizes literature.3 The idea that translation ultimately points to the universality of human language is certainly not a new one. The vessel metaphor that Walter Benjamin used in “The Task of the Translator,” pointed explicitly to the existence of a “greater” language, one that is pieced together as the translator negotiates modes of signifying in two linguistic codes which ultimately morph into fragments of something larger (78). I would argue that a careful reading of Benjamin’s essay doesn’t necessarily suggest the existence of a universal language but rather the potential for a fragmented linguistic experience which exceeds the confines of individual codes and that is precisely where the universality of human experience lies.4 The issue with reading translation as a universalizing event, one that, in its most reductive rendering, reveals our commonalities and glosses over our differences, is that by so doing we defer to a higher cognitive power, as it were, canceling translation’s potential to signify the very process of cognition. If we accept, as most interpretations of Benjamin’s vessel suggest, that a third language or space is the ideal toward which all translations should aspire, we assume a transcendental entity tasked with assigning meaning and value to subordinate units which we assume to be fixed and incapable of self-reflection. What may sound very abstract in theoretical terms, becomes fairly concrete when we look at specific book markets and the role of translation within defined linguistic, political, and cultural contexts. As a francophone writer, Makine enters a literary space which, as Pascale Casanova has shown in La République mondiale des Lettres, has a long-standing tradition of viewing its reach as universal. Literary works written in the French language at the four corners of the earth come to Paris to accrue cultural value.5 Writing in French in geographical regions beyond the European continent, a choice that is clearly linked to the history of coloniality and inscribed within the cultural and political specificities of post- and neo-coloniality for many non-hexagonal, multilingual writers, is viewed as naturally deriving from unique, essential qualities of the French language. Those may range from the global reach of its literary canon, to the Cartesian rigor of its syntax, to the musicality of its prose, all arguments that assume a Eurocentric, colonial reading of language. French then is the transcendental entity that we often read in Benjamin’s “greater” language making of Makine’s choice to write in it an endorsement of (a) its universality as vehicle for his literary expression and (b) the fixity and correlate inflexibility of both languages his characters speak: Russian and everyday French. The author makes a revealing point when answering a question Murielle Lucie Clément asked him in an interview about his choice to write in French. He admits to a practical necessity—he

28  Andreï Makine writes in French because his audience is francophone—and then adds the following: “…le français, le russe, le chinois, l’anglais etc. sont des dialectes de la langue poétique qui est unique. Adopter tel ou tel dialecte linguistique ne change pas grand-chose” (“…French, Russian, Chinese, English, etc. are dialects of a single poetic language. Opting for this or that dialect does not change much” 129). The author implicitly questions here the significance of both the historical and pragmatic dimensions of language production. By erasing those specificities, he suggests that the translation of the poetic idiom into one of the dialects happens in some sort of cultural vacuum. And yet the necessary identification of the poetic language with one of the dialects—in Makine’s case early twentiethcentury, literary French—is an event with specific cultural repercussions, chief among which is the continuing perception of French as a universal language: if poetic language is the idiom of which all national languages are dialects, it follows that the code in which one chooses to articulate poetic language is de facto positioned as superior because cognitively broader than all human tongues, able to express them and, therefore, universal. In this vertical structure, translation is an instrument of equilibrium maintenance, a tool that reinforces the existing power structure by underscoring the need for transposing a higher, unified, universal, and therefore total order of expression (poetic language) into fragmented, partial, particular, and therefore limited idioms. In the case of Makine’s prose, and in Le Testament français in particular, this is further complicated by the constant oscillation between the narrator’s two languages, Charlotte’s French and the Russian of his family’s past and present. Aliocha notes several times that translation from one of his idioms into the other does not work because the cultural environment of the target language has no space within which to incorporate the meanings of the translated text, experience, or words. If, as the book suggests, to ease that tension Aliocha must bypass both languages and invent a third one capable of accounting for the aporias of his bilingualism, it stands to reason that this new idiom is able to produce spaces within which those impossible transpositions become feasible. What this suggests, however, is no longer a translational negotiation between languages but the incorporation and integration of both within a third one, as authoritative as it is abstract. Such a language is broader, less culturally contingent, and cognitively superior both to Charlotte’s French and to Russian. This language is no other than Aliocha’s (and Makine’s) literary French. In other words, the “greater” language that rises above nationally, historically, and culturally defined tongues marginalizes not only Russian but also Charlotte’s French and, along with it, the estuarine environment of productive cultural tension that Charlotte embodies. The text thus refuses to inhabit the interstices of bilingualism and biculturalism that it interrogates thematically, performing as sedimented translation.

Andreï Makine  29 My reading of sedimented translation aims at qualifying the domesticating vs. foreignizing paradigm that has dominated recent debates in the field of Translation Studies. Oft quoted in these conversations are Antoine Berman’s L’épreuve de l’étranger and Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility. Although the ideological positioning of the two works is somewhat different—Venuti focuses more on translation’s potential to unsettle existing cultural and political hierarchies while Berman orients his analysis toward the ethical implications of the translative act—both authors reflect on translation’s potential to subsume otherness into sameness. Lawrence Venuti examines the political implications of what he calls the translator’s invisibility, in other words the insistence of the editorial establishment on fluency. As he suggests “…the translator’s invisibility at once enacts and masks an insidious domestication of foreign texts, rewriting them in the transparent discourse that prevails in English and that selects precisely those foreign texts amenable to fluent translating” (16–17). This practice in turn reinforces ethnocentric literary, linguistic, and cultural paradigms. After affirming foreignizing translation’s disruptive power, he offers a glimpse of what his translation politics of resistancy look like: A translated text should be the site where a different culture emerges, where a reader gets a glimpse of a cultural other, and resistancy, a translation strategy based on an aesthetic of discontinuity, can best preserve that difference, that otherness by reminding the reader of the gains and losses in the translation process and the unbridgeable gaps between cultures. (306) The deliberate elision of those gaps and discontinuities that ultimately erases foreignness is, according to Antoine Berman, the hallmark of a bad translation: “J’appelle mauvaise traduction la traduction qui, généralement sous couvert de transmissibilité, opère une négation systématique de l’étrangeté de l’œuvre étrangère” (“A bad translation I call the translation which, generally under the guise of transmissibility, carries out a systematic negation of the strangeness of the foreign work”; 17; Heyvaert 5). Like Venuti, Berman acknowledges the inherent danger in all acts of translation to extract and assimilate: “Dans la traduction, il y a quelque chose de la violence du métissage…l’essence de la traduction est d’être ouverture, dialogue, métissage, décentrement. Elle est mise en rapport, ou elle n’est rien” (“There is a tinge of the violence of cross-breeding in translation…The essence of translation is to be an opening, a dialogue, a crossbreeding, a decentering. Translation is a ‘putting in touch with’ or it is nothing”; 16; Heyvaert 4). Douglas Robinson has questioned both Venuti’s call for increased attention to translation’s dissident potential and Berman’s emphasis on relationality. He has read in both theorists’ work a certain elitism.6 Notwithstanding the potential for elitist retreat

30  Andreï Makine in translation which discourages engagement or for paternalistic and therefore potentially ethnocentric ethics of inclusivity and multicuturalism, both dissidence and relational openness are values worth considering within the context of violence mitigation as we navigate the estuarine waters of translation. In After Babel, George Steiner suggested that his view of translation “as a hermeneutic of trust (élancement), of penetration, of embodiment, and of restitution, will allow us to overcome the sterile triadic model [literalism-paraphrase-free imitation] which has dominated the history and theory of the subject” (319). A legitimate objection to Steiner’s analysis is that it accepts without seriously questioning the power of hegemony as guarantor of the hermeneutic model’s success. Penetration, embodiment, and restitution do not occur in a political vacuum neither do they allow for equitable transnational cultural exchanges. At the same time, however, Steiner’s text points to the sterility, as he calls it, of theoretical reflection on translation that seeks to position itself along the literalism/adaptation continuum. Choosing to bypass the obvious colonial undertones of a text which equates penetration with the need to overcome a perceived sterility, I will focus on the problematic relationship between violence and the debate on fidelity which Steiner foregrounds, echoing, in many ways, the arguments put forth in defense of domestication or, conversely, foreignization. Whether we turn to Benjamin’s metaphysically tinged “greater language” and its attendant erasure of “lesser” languages or Itamar Even-Zohar’s immanent, historically contingent polysystem of interlocking cultural repertoires, violent displacement emerges as an operational inevitability. By disentangling analysis from the fidelity debate, as George Steiner inadvertently does, we can ultimately study violence as a progressively productive, non-teleological event. The value of violence is not transmission of meaning in a more or less disruptive way from one language, one cultural context to the other, but rather acceptance of the instability at the borders of difference. If we read an end to the violence of translation either by foreignizing or domesticating, being loyal or disloyal to the other’s text, we foreclose on conceptualizing difference as an estuarine phenomenon, a continuing clash with otherness that results both in progressively producing novel environments, attitudes, cultural and political capital, and perpetuating friction. Jacques Derrida’s and Abdelkébir Khatibi’s dialogical reflection on the multilingual condition7 has greatly informed the theoretical construct that I have termed “estuarine translation.” In Le monolinguisme de l’autre, Jacques Derrida suggests that we never possess the language that we speak (70). The speaking subject is split between its desire to ensure its oneness and language that keeps insisting on its otherness. Linguistic otherness, according to Derrida, is conditioned not only by language’s inherent multiplicity, but also by the paradox of linguistic normalization: what is meant to regulate forcefully in fact reveals all relevant

Andreï Makine  31 irregularities (69). To avoid madness, the speaking subject must invest its seemingly futile enterprise within the horizon of a promise: that of a more perfect language that would ultimately ensure its unity. The ironic assumption which radically separates Derrida’s perfect from Benjamin’s greater language is that the code it uses to self-articulate, is one, in other words, other (126). In fact, the subject may never speak the promise of the perfect language because by doing so it unilaterally imposes language as otherness, canceling, by the same token, its own performative power. Derrida’s definition of monolinguisme certainly owes much to his personal history as a franco-maghrébin. He explicitly states that there is no natural native language to inhabit and that, consequently, there are as many exile stories to be told as there are exiles (112–13). Exilic stories resist systemic pressures by destabilizing language’s authority over official discourses, questioning the value of referentiality as a communicative modality. This line of thinking logically concludes in a radical dissociation of language from meaning as it morphs into an entity that is purely self-referential or sacred (“Des Tours de Babel” 248). In this type of linguistic landscape, interlingual translation is either obsolete or must undergo fundamental redefinition. In “Des Tours de Babel” and L’oreille de l’autre Derrida questions the dichotomy between original and translation, suggesting that the promise and potential of a text’s translation lie, at least to a certain extent, between its own lines. By recognizing its own alterity and internalizing it, language moves beyond its purely referential function and therefore successfully exits the self/other conundrum: the issue no longer is whether language is other, but rather harnessing the productive tensions that its otherness creates as the subject enters the speaking instance. The speaking subject may use its own lack of unity to initiate a dialogue, to negotiate its ontological status as enunciator, and, finally, to redefine language not as the metaphysical longing for perfection that Derrida’s promise entails, but rather as estuarine dynamism: the monolangue, inescapable though it may be, can be theorized as a negotiable space of eidetic pluralism, one within which exiles clash, languages proliferate, strangeness is maintained while fully negotiated and productively rich silences account for establishing and maintaining rather than impeding or disrupting communication. Abdelkébir Khatibi, a Moroccan sociologist and philosopher and Derrida’s long-time intellectual interlocutor, wrote in “Un étranger professionnel” that he is in search of a plasticité, a space adjustable to the powerful influx of words that is language (128). In Amour bilingue he spoke of the balancement euphorique that is the double flux of the bilangue (52–53). In agreement with Derrida that “toute unité est depuis toujours inhabitée” (“all unity has always been uninhabited” 109), he uses the concept of bilangue not so much to say that there exists a space of linguistic harmony, but rather to suggest that negotiating that space, “rythme[r] la séparation,” is at the heart of the matter. In Amour

32  Andreï Makine bilingue, that rhythm involves two languages: French and the Moroccan dialect (darija), the mother tongue. Are these languages comparable to Derrida’s monolangue, languages of the other? To the extent that they require constant negotiation, that they engage the host body of the speaker in truly political terms, we may speak of two separate monolingualisms and of the bilangue as internal resistance. Furthermore, it is difficult to read Derrida’s Le monolinguisme de l’autre—a response to Khatibi’s Amour Bilingue—in any context other than the politics of colonialism and postcoloniality—although neither text aims explicitly at a postcolonial critique. As Réda Bensmaïa has noted in “Multilingualism and National ‘Character’: On Abdelkébir Khatibi’s ‘Bilanguage,’” what Khatibi achieves with bilangue is to make the subaltern mother tongue audible without ever claiming an illusory return to origins. In that respect, Derrida and Khatibi both suggest models of resistance that persistently voice the silences of their exilic conditions. Although Andreï Makine’s Le Testament français interrogates, in no uncertain terms, the significance of origins in processes of identity formation, it does so while also questioning the principle of indeterminacy and the silences that it produces. The narrator’s predilection for binaries is exemplified by a scene in which Aliocha and a friend watch a prostitute and her clients, two soldiers, having sex in an abandoned boat through two separate portholes: through the first one the narrator sees nothing but the woman’s head and torso while through the second one the clients and the lower half of the woman are seen engaged in sexual intercourse. Aliocha comments on the uncanny vision: Ce premier hublot. Et le deuxième. Cette femme aux paupières lourdes de sommeil, son habit et sa coiffure très ordinaires. Et cette autre…Dans ma jeune tête affolée, aucun lien ne pouvait associer ces deux images. Impossible d’unir ce haut d’un corps féminin avec ce bas (“The first porthole. And the second. The woman whose eyelids were heavy with sleep, her dress and her hairstyle very ordinary. And the other…In my shocked young head no link could associate these two images. Impossible to join this upper half of a woman’s body to that lower half! 237). (Strachan 164) The repeated use of the coordinating conjunction et which produces all the desired effects of parataxis (brevity, simplicity, directness) thematically underscores in this particular passage the distance that separates one part of the equation from the other. Although his logic dictates the synthesis of the two, he forecloses upon the possibility of a sum value. It is worth pointing out that he is swayed twice from one porthole to the other as waves from the Volga river break on the small boat whence he and his friend are watching the sex scene unfold. In both instances, he is forced to move away from the lower part of the woman’s body, toward

Andreï Makine  33 the  upper  part which is consistently described as unperturbed by the commotion visible through the second porthole. Even when on uncertain footing, at a moment when the oscillating motion of the waves reunites the divided whole, the narrator opts for a return from the “croupe blanche” to the “femme en chemisier blanc” or “femme aux cheveux frisés” without acknowledging lexically, metaphorically, or otherwise, the continuity between the two entities. One could argue that his insistence upon the woman’s fragmentation is a subtle commentary on a sexually inexperienced teenager’s refusal to accept what he perceives to be the venality and violence of intercourse in the context of sex work. In an article titled “The French Testament: Andreï Makine and Translation,” Eden Liddelow has put forth an equally intriguing reading of the boat scene as metaphor: A translator (who often works one way only, into the mother tongue) must have fully been where he’s coming from. This narrator, like the women’s [sic] split image, is only half present to his Russian self. The two portholes represent the worst side of the bilingual position, two incompatible images which cannot be resolved into one. (172) And later: “Ultimately, if one can get through the emotional minefield of bilingualism, the binocular vision of translation will produce a shaky vision” (175). This interpretation relies heavily on a perceived need for cohesion as the two halves reunite. The same can be argued for readings which foreground the young man’s efforts to mentally and emotionally negotiate the rupture in the narrative fabric of the lovemaking fantasy: he must cohesively relate what he has just witnessed to the form and content of his sexual fantasies. The narrator’s involuntary physical oscillation between the two portholes, however, suggests that as significant as the tableaus behind the portholes are, the perceiving subject’s positioning is equally crucial. In other words, what he sees cannot be disassociated from the multiplicity, uncertainty, and variability of the viewing stance. Indeed, contextualizing this passage within its immediate narrative environment further emphasizes the significance of subject positioning when discussing binary structures. Before taking him to the boats on the Volga and to the singular vision of the bisected female body, Pachka, Aliocha’s somewhat odd, certainly unpopular and clearly insightful friend, had asked him to climb up a tree and observe the open-air dance floor on which their classmates, and, just a few moments before, Aliocha himself, were dancing. Hesitant at first, the narrator finally joins his friend and begins to observe an activity, in which he frequently participates, from an uncanny vantage point. The oscillating bodies of the dancers, “à la fois absurde[s] et doté[s] d’une certaine logique” (“at one and the same time absurd and endowed with a certain logic”) prompt the following reflection: “Je sentais qu’en résumé ce tournoiement me rappelait insidieusement quelque chose. ‘La vie !’ me suggéra soudain une voix

34  Andreï Makine muette et mes lèvres répétèrent silencieusement ‘La vie…’” (“In short, I felt all this whirling about reminded me insidiously of something. ‘Life!’ a silent voice suddenly suggested to me, and my lips repeated silently, ‘Life…’”; 232; Strachan 161). Although not multiple or shifting, the tree branch prefigures the small boat on the Volga inasmuch as it undermines the hitherto stable meaning of a common experience (integrity of the human body, dancing). It differs from the prostitute scene insofar as it helps the narrator synthesize instead of fragmenting yet it mirrors it in its creation of a knowing stance, that of Aliocha, which, being external to the events described, has the power to either enter their realm or remain at a distance. What Aliocha chooses is, first, to enter the world of the dancers (once he realizes that what he sees on the dance floor is “life,” he jumps down to join the friends with whom he had come to the dance) and, then, conversely, to maintain not only the distance that separates him from the prostitute and her clients but also the fragmentation of the woman’s body. When he later associates the prostitute’s body with the graft metaphor that he uses throughout the novel to speak of his relationship with the French language, the link between this seemingly very Russian series of experiences and his bilingualism comes into sharper relief: La greffe française que je croyais atrophiée était toujours en moi et m’empêchait de voir. Elle scindait la réalité en deux. Comme elle avait fait avec le corps de cette femme que j’espionnais à travers deux hublots différents…Et pourtant je savais que les deux femmes n’en faisaient qu’une. Tout comme la réalité déchirée. C’était mon illusion française qui me brouillait la vue, telle une ivresse, en doublant le monde d’un mirage trompeusement vivant…. (249–50) The French implant, which I thought had atrophied, was still within me and was preventing me from seeing. It split reality in two. As it had done with the body of that woman I had spied on through two different portholes…And yet I knew that the two women were only one. Just like my shattered reality. It was my French illusion that confused my vision, like an intoxication, giving the world a deceptively lifelike mirage as its double…. (Strachan 174) Two observations are worth making here: first, the establishment of a causal link between the French graft and the bisected prostitute; second, the misreading of the French graft as “illusion.” The chapters of Le Testament français that tell the stories of Aliocha’s childhood and adolescence, before his emigration to first Germany and then France, are organized by both dominant language and dominant geographical and cultural environments: some of those stories happen in Charlotte’s Saranza during the summer, an imagined town in the middle of the Russian steppe, some take place in the unnamed industrial town on the Volga where the narrator and his sister spend the school year first with their parents and, following

Andreï Makine  35 their parents’ passing, their paternal aunt and her husband. From a linguistic point of view, although the two languages are never entirely separated by geographic location, the summers are Francophone and the school year is Russophone. Since the prostitute episode is, following the above organizational principle, a clearly Russian memory, there is no mention of the French language, French culture, Charlotte, Charlotte’s stories about France, or the graft as Aliocha relates his experience. And yet in the passage quoted above the graft is posited as the agent that performed the bisection of the woman’s body. Furthermore, there is a logical contradiction in the narrator’s use of metaphors: reality cannot be “torn apart” by a French graft which is defined as an illusion or a fog of sorts that impedes clear vision. The forced and belated causal link that the narrator establishes between the graft and the prostitute scene is paradigmatic of his disinterest in inhabiting multiple, fragmented, or non-sequential social, linguistic, and affective structures. Although by using the illusion or mirage metaphor the narrator is by no means spinning the reality of his French graft positively, he is certainly softening the contours of a non-resolvable binary such as the irreconcilable two halves of a female body. One can mitigate the effects of an illusion or mirage when one restores focus, a process dependent on subject positioning or point of view. The prostitute’s body, divided as it is by a material obstacle, does not allow for restoration or reconstruction of its integrity even when the point of view changes (the waves that cause the narrator’s change of vantage point). The graft, however, and by extension the French language and culture, when viewed from a different subject position, one that resembles the tree branch, that allows for a full view of an albeit confusing whole, can regain meaning and provide a revealing truth: the meaning of life (dance-floor episode) or, if we zoom out and look at the book’s expressed interest in a new language, Makine’s literary French: a language that is still rooted in the history of the graft but which has enough distance from the narrator’s both French and Russian histories to tell stories with the authority of the bird’s eye view offered by the young Aliocha on the tree branch. According to the narrator’s interpretation then, the French graft must first renounce its disruptive, dissecting agency, recast itself as illusion, and finally yield the power of vision to the narrator’s invented literary code— still of French expression. This transformation creates the necessary conditions for reentry into his bilingual condition by means of providing distance from his two languages no longer in tense competition but rather entangled in a life-affirming dance. When in Paris, toward the end of the narrative, Aliocha reflects back on the Atlantis of his childhood (another recurring metaphor the narrator uses to speak of Charlotte’s France): Je compris à ce moment-là que l’Atlantide de Charlotte m’avait laissé entrevoir dès mon enfance, cette mystérieuse consonance des

36  Andreï Makine instants éternels. À mon insu, ils traçaient, depuis, comme une autre vie, invisible, inavouable, à côté de la mienne. C’est ainsi qu’un menuisier façonnant, à longueur de jours, des pieds de chaises ou rabotant des planches n’aperçoit pas que les dentelles des copeaux forment sur le sol un bel ornement scintillant de résine…. (308–09) What I now understood was that ever since my childhood, Charlotte’s Atlantis had enabled me to glimpse the mysterious consonance of eternal moments. Without my knowing it, they had traced the pattern of another life, as it were; invisible, inadmissible, alongside my own. Thus a carpenter who spends his day making chair legs or planning planks does not notice that the lacework of the shavings forms a beautiful ornament on the floor, shining with resin…. (Strachan 215) It is once again distance, this time imagined as both spatial and temporal, that alone can assign meaning to competing elements that the narrator constructs as poles of a binary opposition—in this particular case, refuse versus object created with a utilitarian intent. The narrator arrives at such moments of profound understanding when moving away from the contact zone(s) of his perceived binaries. Before reaching the conclusion that the only way to make sense of his bilingualism and biculturalism is to invent a third language in which to tell his story, he often interrogates the importance of silence. When the enchantment of Charlotte’s Atlantis begins to lose some of its veneer for the now older Aliocha, he finds that words which once had the power to enchant him, have now lost their meaning. In fact, verbal communication seems to do nothing more than hide what is important: L’indicible ! Il était mystérieusement lié, je le comprenais maintenant, à l’essentiel. L’essentiel était indicible. Incommunicable. Et tout ce qui, dans ce monde, me torturait par sa beauté muette, tout ce qui se passait de la parole me paraissait essentiel. L’indicible était essentiel (The unsayable! It was mysteriously linked, I now understood, to the essential. The essential was unsayable. Incommunicable. And everything in this world that tortured me with its silent beauty, everything that needed no words, seemed to me essential. The unsayable was essential; 175–76). (Strachan 121) Privileging the silence that follows incomprehensibility is a promising intellectual and affective positioning when negotiating tensions between the two poles of a binary. Aliocha identifies the ineffable as intimately linked to what is essential. Where he parts ways with Derrida’s and Khatibi’s definition of self-interrogating silences is in his pursuit of silence’s verbal codification. For Aliocha, silence is not a productive force, but rather a tool for transcendence of what is banal and meaningless. At the end of that same summer, during a long walk, Charlotte remembers a train in her

Andreï Makine  37 native France that sounded pretty similar to the Koukouchka, the train that one could hear slowly move through the steppe from her Saranza home. Immediately thereafter, the narrator concludes: “Je marchais à côté d’elle, muet. Je sentais que la ‘Koukouchka’ serait désormais le premier mot de notre nouvelle langue. De cette langue qui dirait l’indicible” (“I walked beside her in silence. I sensed that ‘Kukushka’ would henceforth be the first word in our new language. The new language that would say the unsayable”; 193; Strachan 133). His sincere concern about the trivial nature of words results not in reimagining verbal communication through the privileged lens of silence but rather in codifying it as and within language. The fact that literary French is the language that speaks the ineffable further problematizes the narrator’s view of what is “essential”: what is truly meaningful resides in rarefied iteration of one single language. Aliocha’s predilection for literary French follows a period of significant engagement with both French and Russian as linguistic codes in estuarine coexistence. When Charlotte tells the narrator and his sister stories from the historic 1910 Paris flood, while the three of them are sitting on a Russian apartment’s balcony, in a small town somewhere in the interminable (as the narrator puts it) Russian steppe, Aliocha does not fail to remark on the moment’s incongruity: Et sur notre balcon, une Française nous parlait de la barque qui traversait une grande ville inondée et accostait le mur d’un immeuble…Nous nous secouâmes en essayant de comprendre où nous étions. Ici ? Là-bas ? Dans nos oreilles s’éteignait le chuchotement des vagues (And on our balcony a Frenchwoman was talking about a boat crossing a great flooded city and drawing alongside the wall of an apartment building…We shook ourselves, trying to understand where we were. Here? Back there? The whispering of the waves in our ears fell silent; 32). (Strachan 14–15) These stories undo linear time and superimpose one narrative upon another creating contact zones where multiple realities coexist without becoming assimilated into each other’s space: La réalité russe transparaissait souvent sous la fragile patine de nos vocables français. Le président de la République n’échappait pas à quelque chose de stalinien dans le portrait que brassait notre imagination. Neuilly se peuplait de kolkhoziens. Et Paris qui se libérait lentement des eaux portait en lui une émotion très russe (Beneath the fragile patina of our French words, Russian reality often showed through. The President of the Republic was bound to have something Stalinesque about him in the portrait sketched by our imagination. Neuilly was peopled with kolkhozniks. And the slow emergence of Paris from the waters evoked a very Russian emotion; 44). (Strachan 23–24)

38  Andreï Makine The narrator and his sister lack access to precise signifieds for their French signifiers. Historical reconstruction for them is a fraught and approximate process. The only referents to which they can attach Charlotte’s very personal construction of the Atlantis are the contents of the “Siberian suitcase,” a collection of French newspaper and magazine clippings which date back to the Belle Époque. The narrator spends much of his time over his Saranza summers contemplating images of Charlotte’s France, affectively and intellectually reacting to them with varying degrees of engagement. Some he likes, some subjugate him by their beauty and mystery, and some refuse to share their meaning with him. In all cases, these images share two significant characteristics: first, Aliocha never finds out the criteria according to which these images were chosen; second, notwithstanding the narrator’s reaction, they all constitute detailed instances of ekphrastic writing in the novel. In Andreï Makine: L’ekphrasis dans son œuvre, Murielle Lucie Clément suggests that ekphrasis in Makine’s work foregrounds intercultural and intertextual links that would have otherwise remained invisible (21). I would like to take Clément’s argument in a different direction and look at instances of ekphrasis which are almost exclusively linked to the Siberian suitcase, a whimsical historical archive of sorts, as an example of post-memorial reconstruction. In “La littérature au temps de la post-mémoire: écriture et résilience chez Andreï Makine,” Stéphanie Bellemare-Page analyzes as examples of post-memorial narration those textually codified instances when the narrator listens to his parents and their friends, or later his aunt, her husband, and their friends recount personal memories of devastating moments in the history of twentieth-century Russia (51). Although the images of the Siberian suitcase are not all linked to traumatic events in French history, they do perform postmemorial reconstruction insofar as they emphasize the aesthetic over the historical dimension of the document. In “‘La simultanéité du présent’: Memory, History and Narrative in Andreï Makine’s novels Le Testament français and Requiem pour l’Est,” Julie Hansen, notes an oft occurring process in Le Testament français: “…the narrator first attempts to access the past by cataloguing historical facts. This is portrayed as a frustrated effort resulting in thoughts of death, until the threat of oblivion is finally overcome by aesthetic evocation” (888). Hansen makes this comment in reference to the narrator’s discussion of les trois élégantes, a picture of three beautiful women who have a profound effect on his adolescent sensibilities. This reading of history escaping into aesthetics clearly echoes Marianne Hirsch’s (and some of her critics’) contention that “[t]he fragmentariness and the two-dimensional flatness of the photographic image…make it especially open to narrative elaboration and embroidery, and to symbolization” (38). These two complimentary readings of history as postmemorially elaborated aesthetics can then serve as a critical entry point to Aliocha’s

Andreï Makine  39 encounter with the image of World War I soldiers departing for the front. In a long ekphrastic passage, the narrator describes them in great detail insisting on the fact that they looked old (according to the accompanying text, they were among the last draftees of the grande guerre) yet peaceful and, although certain to die in an uneven battle, surprisingly defiant: “Dans ce défi, je sentis comme une nouvelle corde de l’harmonie vivante qu’était pour moi la France. Je tentai tout de suite de lui trouver un nom: orgueil patriotique? panache? Ou la fameuse furia francese que les Italiens reconnaissaient aux guerriers français?” (“This defiance felt like a new chord in the living harmony that for me was France. I tried at once to find a name for it. Patriotic pride? Panache? Or the famous furia francese that the Italians recognized in French fighters?”; 178–79; Strachan 123). As this moment of affective connection with the past passes, he notices that the soldier who had commanded his attention the most “redevenait un personage d’une vieille reproduction aux couleurs grises et bistre. C’était comme s’il avait détourné son regard pour me cacher son mystère que je venais d’entrevoir” (“became once more a figure in an old reproduction of a painting in gray and bister tints. It was as if he had averted his gaze to hide from me that mystery of his, of which I had just caught a glimpse”; 179; Strachan 123). The narrator’s need to narrativize the image, visible both in his compulsion to name the soldiers’ boldness and in the production of ekphrasis, is characteristic of his tendency to translate the ineffable into verbal expression. The estuarine uncertainty of either the untranslatable or the nonverbal in most cases produces codification in the narrator’s “new” language, the traditionally “beautiful,” literary French in which Le Testament français is written.8 References to historical events in the narrative, such as the one described above, or the visit of tsar Nicholas II to Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, or the historic 1910 Paris flood, or even the scandalous death of Félix Faure, President of the French Republic, in the arms of his mistress are puzzle pieces of Charlotte’s Atlantis, of this mythical France in which the narrator participates linguistically but which culturally remains in tension with his Soviet reality. With his access points limited to the Siberian suitcase archive and Charlotte’s stories, his postmemorial reconstruction of France depends heavily on aestheticization of the available sources. Even when he is able and willing to read French history at the school library, the France that emerges from his studies is a heavily censored one that privileges the Revolution and the Commune but erases what could potentially clash with Soviet state ideology. Translation from one cultural context into another, notwithstanding his linguistic fluency in both French and Russian, proves particularly challenging. When reflecting on Felix Faure’s death, for example, he remarks: “‘Le président est mort à l’Élysée, dans les bras de sa maîtresse, Marguerite Steinheil…’ Cette phrase avait l’air d’un message codé provenant d’un autre système stellaire” (“‘The president died at the Elysée Palace, in the arms of his

40  Andreï Makine mistress, Marguerite Steinheil…’ This sentence seemed like a coded message coming from another planetary system”; 112; Strachan 75). As he notes, it was far easier for a Soviet youth of his time to imagine Stalin in Yalta, in Churchill’s company, than in the company of his own wife. This profoundly strange signifier, phonetically decodable but semantically empty, is assigned to an unstable signified, such as France, Atlantis, or graft, all of them malleable and changeable because they have been existing only as narrativized fractions of an unattainable historical referent. And yet, these signifiers are positioned within a text written in standard, literary French that circulates at the end of the twentieth century, in a specific book economy, with a francophone audience in mind. In this particular context, the narrator’s inability to translate the sentence that communicates the circumstances of Félix Faure’s death from French into Russian does little more than foreground the uniqueness and universality of the French language to its audience of native speakers: French alone is able to tell this story not only because the story is French but, most importantly because French alone is able to tell any story— and by extension any history, as this rarefied, aesthetic rendition of a historical event in the vein of post-memorial narrativization affirms. The narrator’s difficulty to make sense of the scene is intricately linked to his Russianness; this interstellar message remains untranslatable because he is Russian, he lives in the Soviet Union and he experiences his human, cultural, political, and social environments in the Russian language. The French language is untranslatable not because Aliocha would rather not “domesticate” this very French sentence within a reductive, if not hostile, Russian linguistic and cultural environment but rather because he has elected to position the story of a Russian life in a culturally and linguistically French context. This has significant ramifications for the authorial stance. Le Testament français, the story of a Russian boy growing up with limited but marking exposure to the French language, was published in French, for an audience of native speakers by an established Parisian publishing house (Mercure de France). As Adrian Wanner has pointed out in Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora, “[t]he autobiographical elements in Makine’s novels seem calculated to lend a certain ‘ethnographic authenticity’ to his writings” (24). This is true of many authors writing in French today, and certainly evocative of criticisms leveled against all four of the writers studied in this book. The expectation that the native informant tell stories of her faraway land often leads to editorial decisions that promote exoticization: “If the success of the translingual writer depends on his ‘exotic’ appeal to a foreign audience, the communication between author and reader risks becoming a mere indulgence in glib stereotypes” (Wanner 45). For Aliocha, in particular, Adrian Wanner suggests the following: “The crisis of translation leads to a more general crisis of expression and communication. Not  only

Andreï Makine  41 interlingual transposition, but even the statement of his thoughts in his own language become increasingly problematic for Alyosha…” (31). I would argue that the crisis of which Wanner speaks is generated by the tensions that the narrator produces while positioning Russian narratives crafted in French within their radically Russian and/or Soviet contexts in an attempt at retaining the ethnographic authority of the text for its monolingual, francophone readership. In those instances, the narrator often resorts to typographical variation and annotation. When, Dimitrich, the father of his paternal aunt’s children, tells his kholodets story—a story of frozen bodies in a taiga lake at the time of the Gulag—at the dinner table one night, Aliocha translates: “Les kholodets, cette viande en gelée dont il y avait justement une assiette sur notre table, devint alors un mot terrible—glace, chair et mort figées dans une sonorité tranchante” (“So kholodets, that meat in aspic, of which there was a plateful on our table at that moment, became a terrible word—ice, flesh, and death congealed into one trenchant sound”; 207; Strachan 144). He also translates his French stories for his classmates, adapting them to the expectations of the three established groups: the proletarians, the “tekhnars,” and the intellectuals: “Je remarquai assez rapidement qu’il fallait assaisonner mes récits français selon le goût de mes interlocuteurs…Fier de mon talent de conférencier, je variais les genres, adaptais les niveaux de style, triais les mots” (“I noticed fairly quickly that it was necessary to season my French stories according to the tastes of my listeners…Proud of my talent as a raconteur, I varied genres, adapted my style, chose my words”; 224; Strachan 156). This quote is followed by a long annotation on the tastes and preferences of each group and the narrative adjustments that the narrator makes as he positions himself in relation to them. What he is in fact performing in this paragraph—and one could argue throughout Le Testament français—is a double linguistic and cultural shift: a translation of French narratives into Russian for himself, his non-francophone family and his friends and a translation of his bilingual experiences into French for his literary audience. As he notes toward the end of the narrative when discussing his initial difficulty to convince editors that his French-language novels were worth publishing: “…j’étais ‘un drôle de Russe qui se mettait à écrire en français’. Dans un geste de désespoir j’avais inventé un traducteur et envoyé le manuscrit en le présentant comme traduit du russe. Il avait était accepté, publié et salué pour la qualité de la traduction” (“I was ‘some funny little Russian who thought he could write in French.’ In a gesture of despair I had invented a translator and submitted the manuscript, presenting it as translated from the Russian. It had been accepted, published, and hailed for the quality of the translation”; 313; Strachan 220). He then reflects on the new significance that the book’s central graft metaphor acquires within this particular context: “…si, enfant, j’étais obligé de dissimuler la greffe

42  Andreï Makine française, à présent c’était ma russité qui devenait répréhensible” (“… whereas in childhood I had been obliged to conceal my French graft, now it was my Russianness that failed to find favor”; 313; Strachan 220). The initial shift from French to Russian that provided a cultural and social position from which to speak of things French to his monolingual, Russian classmates, friends, and family is now followed by a second shift that positions him as a Russian author who writes in Russian and requires translation into French to reach a monolingual, French audience. The two terms of the graft metaphor seem to have simply switched meanings: the host body which was Russian is now French and the graft which was once French is now Russian. This reassignment of meanings, however, is quite limiting. For one, the narrator’s reflection on his bilingualism and biculturalism is codified in normative French, a language that he perceives as distinct from both Charlotte’s French and his native Russian. A graft is either rejected by the host body or it enters into symbiotic coexistence with it and over time creates a new living entity. Aliocha tasks his literary French to tell a radically Russian story. If the graft (either French or Russian) causes pain, discomfort, or shame, it is not because the narrator struggles to negotiate his multiplicity. It is rather because a normative iteration of literary French is called upon to tell a story which will not be convincing unless the narrator can somehow maintain an authoritative Russian voice. When Aliocha and his sister call upon the magical power of “bartavels et ortolans” to help them overcome their grief as they are kicked out of a long, Soviet line snaking into a grocery store and close to some rare delicacy (66–69), the spell works not because there is something intrinsically powerful about the words’ phonetic realization but rather because the harshness of everyday Russian life only makes sense for the book’s francophone audience when in relation with or in juxtaposition to what is—or at least sounds— familiar. The Russianness of Le Testament français is never more successfully foregrounded than when it is francized. In fact, the moment when Aliocha declares having finally accepted himself as double follows an act of unconscious translation from French into Russian. During his last summer in Saranza, Charlotte tells him the story of a samovar, a term used to refer to amputated World War II veterans. Two years after the end of the war, as she is walking through a Moscow square, Charlotte witnesses a violent confrontation between this one man and several other amputees, a scene of pain and desperation that, as she tells Aliocha, has made her wonder over the years if she understands anything at all about a country where she has lived for decades (262). Although Charlotte speaks in French, toward the end of their conversation, she says something about the amputee that Aliocha does not relay directly—as he has done for the entirety of Charlotte’s story; instead, he informs his readership that this particular passage is translated from Russian, the

Andreï Makine  43 language into which his memory chose to code it: “Dans la traduction russe que garda ma mémoire, la voix de Charlotte ajoutait sur un ton de justification: ‘Et parfois je me dis que je comprends ce pays mieux que ne le comprennent les Russes eux-mêmes. Car je porte en moi le visage de ce soldat depuis tant d’années…’” (“In the Russian translation, which my memory retained, Charlotte’s voice added in a tone of justification, ‘Yet sometimes I tell myself that I understand this country better than the Russians themselves. For I have carried that soldier’s face with me over so many years…’”; 263; Strachan 183). This sentence directly contradicts Charlotte’s conclusion at the end of the samovar narrative on the significance that the encounter with the young amputee had for her: for Charlotte it is a shift toward uncertainty, a sense of always being foreign or at a certain remove while living in a land that has been home for much longer than the native country; it is a rejection of knowledge as an assimilative event; a nod to an estuarine inability to understand. To perform this radical misreading, the narrator uses translation not as negotiation of the silences that punctuate borderlines but rather as a means for mystification. Charlotte’s French becomes silent not because it has reached a space of uncertainty and verbal or cultural indeterminacy but rather because the narrator has chosen to translate it into Russian and then transpose it into the realm of his literary French. By so doing, he is garrisoning his Russianness—this is a Russian story that memory can only codify in the language of the original actors—and making his authorial stance indispensable as translator into French of an allophone narrative. This mirrors the master editorial mystification to which I have already alluded and which Aliocha discusses at the end of the narrative, a twist that also appears in the author’s autobiography: French originals presented to publishing houses as translations of Russian source texts that Makine had to eventually write to bolster the publication claim that he made for the pseudo-translations. In both cases, a French original is silenced by means of a Russian pseudo-source text only to be recast in a commercially viable French pseudo-translation: Charlotte’s story is too French if not filtered through the narrator’s Russianness just as Makine’s first books would have been too French to lay claim to Russian authenticity if they had not been originally written in Russian. As this passage precedes directly the moment when Aliocha finally feels at peace with both his Frenchness and Russianness,9 it behooves the literary critic to discern in both Charlotte’s silencing and the instrumentalization of translation as guarantor of the native informant’s reliability and indispensability the proverbial cutting of the narrative’s Gordian knot. The narrator has not resolved all contradictions generated by the French/Russian dichotomy but he has certainly made a conscious decision to subsume both poles within the affectively and culturally neutral, highly abstracted language of his literary expression. To return to the graft metaphor, neither rejected nor in symbiosis, the

44  Andreï Makine graft is aestheticized into a figure of speech that supports and maintains a fictitious tension between the two languages and cultures. Once Charlotte’s estuarine biculturalism and bilingualism are neutralized, her potential as an affectively and historically powerful disruptor becomes marginal and, as I will show, only resurfaces at the very end of the book. Charlotte is an intriguing character whose unwavering oscillation within well-defined yet consistently shifting and evolving historical and geographical spaces is not only an excellent example of how estuarine engagement with multiple and contradicting flows of linguistic, social, and political change works, but, also a reminder that postmemorial narrativization need not necessarily devolve into ideological manipulation and historical abstraction. Charlotte’s personal history encapsulates the traumatic events that defined the first half of the French and Russian twentieth century: World Wars I and II, the Russian Civil War, and the terror of Stalin’s and Beria’s Soviet Russia. Different narrative instances weave the fabric of which this extraordinary life is made: press clippings in the Siberian suitcase, Charlotte’s own memories, Aliocha’s parents, his extended family, and, of course, the narrator himself. The resulting portrait is multifaceted and elusive. Its fragmented chronology resists inscription within existing historical narratives, notwithstanding Charlotte’s active participation in events that shaped her two countries’ histories. By the same token, Charlotte’s sui generis positioning within history reads—at least for Aliocha and the prevailing narrative stance— as an open invitation for an affectively and ideologically charged postmemorial reconstruction. I would argue that Charlotte resists such an interpretation by inhabiting her multiplicity—historical, linguistic, and cultural—not as a graft or as an endless search for a lost Atlantis but rather as perpetual shifting and readjustment within spaces in constant need of border reconfiguration. Her relationship with Gavrilytch is paradigmatic of her ability to coexist, relate, and ultimately modify the environment—spatial, mental, or cultural—within which perceptions about difference, distance, and otherness form, mature, and propagate. Gavrilytch is Charlotte’s neighbor in Saranza. He lives in an old isba which shares a yard with Charlotte’s apartment building. He is drunk most of the time, scares everyone out of the yard when he enters, and yet entertains a very particular relationship with Charlotte. He calls her Charlota Norbertovna and always stops to have a quick chat with her when their paths cross. The narrator describes the two buildings’ proximity as a metaphor of sorts for the encounter of two worlds: prerevolutionary Russia’s modernization movement on the one hand (Charlotte’s building with its “oeils de bœuf” and its “bacchantes”) and the ancestral, timeless, Russian soul that persists through revolutions, regime changes, famines, and wars (the old isba). This dichotomy narratively mirrors the book’s central positioning of the conflict between Aliocha’s French and Russian selves. It situates Charlotte, herself a

Andreï Makine  45 bilingual, bicultural subject, within an environment that emphasizes spatial and temporal separateness and distance. Without suggesting some form of resolution by placing the two characters in a euphoric state of cultural hybridity, her interactions with Gavrilytch undermine dominant binaries while emphasizing difference. Gavrilytch’s Russification of Charlotte’s name is the first step toward highlighting both the distance that separates them and the cultural and linguistic common ground that they share. Charlotte’s Russified name is an acknowledgment of her Russianness as much as it is a reminder of her foreign origins. Unafraid of this imposing, inebriated man, Charlotte always responds to Gavrilytch’s salutes and engages in short conversations with him which range from everyday niceties to historical and affective contextualization of their relationship. Toward the end of the narrative, during Aliocha’s last summer with his grandmother, upon her return from the yard where she has just had one of her exchanges with Gavrilytch, she tells the narrator the following: “—Tu sais, me dit-elle en russe, comme si elle n’avait pas eu le temps de passer d’une langue à l’autre, Gavrilytch m’a parlé de la guerre, il défendait Stalingrad, sur le même front que ton père. Il m’en parle souvent” (“‘Do you know,’ she said to me in Russian, as if she had not had the time to switch from one language to the other, ‘Gavrilych has been talking to me about the war; he was defending Stalingrad on the same front as your father. He often speaks to me about it”; 276; Strachan 192). Aliocha’s comment on the language Charlotte used to report Gavrilytch’s story points to the narrator’s constant awareness of code switching. For Charlotte the choice was unconsciously dictated by the emotive force of the moment and her knowledge that Russian would not be an impediment to communication when speaking to her grandson. The very concept of change is of particular interest in this passage; the narrator defines linguistic change as passage from one national language to another. For Charlotte, speaking Russian to an interlocutor with whom she primarily communicates in French is not a change at all; it underlines rather the significance of her interaction with Gavrilytch which, translated into French, would have lost much of its affective force while also highlighting the social and cultural distance between the two. Charlotte and Gavrilytch share very little. What she effortlessly exhibits, however, is that difference does not necessarily equate distance or, inversely, assimilation. Their interaction requires that they both slightly shift their usual social and cultural positioning to relate to this new, estuarine space that they share. Speaking Russian to the narrator after discussing Stalingrad with Gavrilytch is evidence that although taking her leave from her Russian neighbor inevitably disturbs the estuary, the initial shift that allowed for the interaction to take place has provoked a longer-lasting modification in the relational modalities that Charlotte employs. And although we know that she will eventually switch back to French when talking with the narrator, the few Russian

46  Andreï Makine sentences that she enunciates inadvertently provoke a shift within Aliocha as well, multiplying the ripples produced by the original event. As he does throughout the narrative (sex-worker episode, graft, etc.), Aliocha chooses to interpret the moment as an anomaly within an otherwise perfectly binary linguistic and cultural pattern (French during his Saranza summers, Russian during the schoolyear), eventually sublimated within the “ideal” realm of literary French: “Je l’écoutais et la Russie, le pays de sa solitude, ne me paraissait plus hostile à sa ‘francité’” (“I listened to her, and Russia, the country of her isolation, no longer seemed to me hostile to her ‘Frenchness’”; 276; Strachan 192). What he calls ‘francité,’ his interpretation of Charlotte’s difference, morphs two pages later into the perfect, universal French of his linguistic expression. The morning following Charlotte’s encounter with Gavrilytch, the narrator and his grandmother take one of their long walks out of the village and into the steppe. As they pass by the atemporal, black isba with which Charlotte’s building shares a courtyard, Charlotte starts telling the narrator a story about Frossia, one of the inhabitants of the isba. He makes a point of noting that she is speaking in French, although French is their usual language of communication. Toward the end of Charlotte’s narrative, after commenting that although they were crossing the steppe in summertime he could feel the wintry cold as Frossia would have experienced it in the old isba during the time of his grandmother’s story, the narrator circles back to the question of language: “Le français avait pénetré dans cette isba qui m’avait toujours fait peur par sa vie ténébreuse et très russe…Oui, elle avait parlé en français. Elle aurait pu parler en russe…Donc il existait une sorte de langue intermédiaire. Une langue universelle!” (“French had gone inside that izba, which had always alarmed me with its somber, heavy, and very Russian life…Yes, she had spoken in French. She could have spoken in Russian…So a kind of intermediary language did exist. A universal language!”; 279; Strachan 194). In other words, the profound affective and cognitive effect Charlotte’s narrative has on the narrator is the direct result of her linguistic choice. It is particularly important to note that although Charlotte’s story is beautifully recounted, with an abundance of metaphors and imagery that resembles poetic expression, the narrator does not single out the literary qualities of her speech, but rather the French language as an absolute, universal instrument for effectively altering the immanent confines of reality through communication in prose. To what extent is Charlotte’s French an “intermediary” language? Why is this language universal? Would it be because it allowed him to penetrate into the old isba by virtue of casting a cultural spell that dissipated its opaque, terrifying Russianness? There is obviously no true “intermediary language” to speak of and neither can the reader identify a particular linguistic trope, an ‘open sesame of sorts,’ that Charlotte used to narrate Frossia’s story—in fact, the literary qualities of her speech do not depart significantly from

Andreï Makine  47 her penchant for the poetic. The narrator simply chooses to cast French as universal, to assign it the quality of “entre-deux-langues,” while, in fact, the pendulum has swung firmly on one side of the binary. And yet the narrator’s insistence upon the ability of this “intermediary” French to open up hitherto inaccessible Russian spaces to his imagination and sensibilities gives the reader pause. Is he simply conceding the superiority of French as a de facto universal language or is he, as I suggested earlier in this chapter, domesticating the French language within his Soviet landscape to argue his Russianness to a francophone audience? What form, then, does this act of domestication take? If a domesticating translation points to a foreign text’s seamless inscription within the literary and cultural codes of the receiving culture, then the domestication of French and its cultural expressions within Le Testament français, a text written in French, requires a more precise definition of the author’s linguistic medium. At the end of the passage in which he reflects upon the effect Charlotte’s narration of Frossia’s story has on his perception of the old isba, the narrator has an important intuition: “Et ce jour-là, pour la première fois, cette pensée exaltante me traversa l’esprit: ‘Et si l’on pouvait exprimer cette langue [intermédiaire] par écrit?’” (“That day, for the first time, the inspiring thought crossed my mind: Suppose one could express this [intermediary] language in writing?”; 279; Strachan 194). Knowing by the end of the narrative that Le Testament français is the narrator’s written account of Charlotte’s life, we can safely presume that Aliocha’s language of literary expression is, in fact, not French, but, rather the intermediary language that Charlotte used to tell Frossia’s story. It is within the linguistic environment of this new language that French becomes domesticated as a translative vehicle for the narrator’s Russian and Soviet experiences. In fact, as language of translation ­between Russian and the intermediary language of literary expression, French assumes the identity of a fully transparent, ahistorical, culturally neutral idiom which functions as a boundary between a silent language (Russian) and a written one (the intermediary language). French is then doubly bound by its enunciative power (it is the only language in the novel that materializes as oral speech) and its ultimate effacement as a domesticated translational tool. To a certain extent, French becomes a concrete manifestation of the multiple erasures that domesticating translations perform. The intermediary language in which the novel is written functions, in this context, as a culturally and historically empty linguistic environment within which the narrator’s Russian and Soviet experiences take shape as a long sequence of French enunciations. After having been translated into French and ultimately narrated in the intermediary language that is meant to bridge the gap between French and Russian, Aliocha’s Russianness morphs into a static, often exotic, certainly inaccessible entity that the novel ultimately packages as a radically domestic product (Le Testament français—emphasis mine).

48  Andreï Makine Charlotte has a very different understanding of the intercultural reading experience. As the Baudelaire translations passage reveals, she has very little faith in a single language’s ability to express the totality of human thought or sentiment. A few days after speaking to the narrator about Frossia, she discusses two Russian translations of Baudelaire’s “Parfum exotique” with her grandson, noting that, at times, the translation simplifies the original while, at other times, the translation breathes new life into Baudelaire’s poem, enhancing and surpassing it. She is unable to finish her analysis as heavy rain begins to fall. Charlotte’s and Aliocha’s path home is blocked by a parked train. As they cross a flat, merchandise car, to make it to the other side of the railway, the train begins to move. It is too late to jump so they decide to remain onboard, uncertain of the train’s destination. While on the open car, the narrator experiences a moment of absolute lucidity. As he reflects on the incongruity of the different chapters making up the narrative of his young life, he suddenly realizes that they collectively belong to a different lifetime: Liés ainsi, ces instants formaient un univers singulier, avec son propre rythme, son air et son soleil particuliers. Une autre planète presque…Cette planète était le même monde qui se déployait dans la course de notre wagon. Oui, cette même gare où le train s’immobilisa enfin…Ce même monde, mais vu autrement (Linked together thus, these moments formed a singular universe, with its own rhythm, its particular air and sun. Another planet almost…This planet was the same world that was unfolding as our wagon hurtled along. Yes, the same station where the train finally came to a halt…The same world, but seen differently; 289). (Strachan 201) If the moving train is a metaphor for his and Charlotte’s in-betweenness, then experiencing an ontological revelation while positioned in this intermediary space, highlights the urgency the narrator senses throughout the narrative to configure this liberating intermediary language while, inadvertently, marginalizing both French and Russian. Charlotte’s choice to discuss “Parfum exotique” and its Russian translations at this particular juncture, however, should not go unnoticed. Notwithstanding the misattribution of the Russian translations which Makine scholars have identified and widely discussed,10 Charlotte’s interest for textual multiplicity is revealing of both her ability to thrive in estuarine environments and Aliocha’s sedimented approach to multilingualism and cultural border-crossing. Charlotte discusses the three texts—the original and two Russian translations—moving seamlessly in and out of French and Russian, while Aliocha, as Adrian Wanner has pointed out in “Gained in Translation: Andreï Makine’s Novel Le testament français” uses French exclusively in his account of the episode (121). In his analysis, Wanner is more interested in translation’s ability to communicate meanings in

Andreï Makine  49 the original text that remain latent or are unutterable. He focuses on Charlotte’s interpretation of Belmont’s translation which she considers better than Baudelaire’s original French text because it reveals semantic content that the French text suggests but never articulates. What I find particularly compelling in this passage is the narrator’s attention to his grandmother’s bilingualism as she offers her appraisal of the two Russian translations, particularly in relation to Baudelaire’s text itself. In two instances, Aliocha notes that Charlotte is moving in and out of languages: “Tu vois—poursuivait ma grand-mère dans un mélange de russe et de français, car il fallait citer les textes des traductions—, chez Brussov le premier vers donne ça: En un soir d’automne, les yeux fermés…” (“‘You see,’ my grandmother continued, in a mixture of Russian and French, for she had to quote the texts of the translations, ‘In Bryusov the first line is rendered as: ‘On an autumn evening, with eyes closed…’”; 284; Strachan 197–98). As Charlotte’s analysis continues, the narrator realizes that he is no longer listening: “Mais je n’entendais plus que la mélodie, tantôt russe, tantôt française, de sa voix” (“But now all I was hearing was the melody of her voice, sometimes in Russian, sometimes in French”; 285; Strachan 198). As is the case with the poetic voice in Baudelaire’s poem (Baudelaire dulls his narrator’s vision to sharpen his sense of smell), the narrator alters his perception of sounds, moving ultimately beyond French and Russian into a melodically musical third space where transition from one tongue to the other signifies beyond linguistic signs. This third space, however, shares all the elements of the exoticized landscape that Baudelaire’s poetic voice enters through its olfactory sensations. Baudelaire’s “Parfum exotique” is replete with nineteenth-century exotic literary tropes, ranging from sea travel, to anthropomorphic languid landscapes to tropical islands and vegetation. The narrator’s reading of Charlotte’s literary analysis as a “parfum exotic” of sorts highlights his refusal to acknowledge the crossing of concrete, material, and linguistic borders that multilingualism entails. By taking refuge in the melody of Charlotte’s bilingualism, he sublimates the actual shifts that his grandmother must perform to cross from Bryusov or Belmont’s poetic landscape into Baudelaire’s and vice versa. From the awkwardness of switching phonetically from one language to the other mid-sentence to the inevitable silences that those transitions occasion to the mistakes and gaps that linguistic border-crossings entail, Charlotte certainly operates a series of adjustments which the narrator neutralizes by transforming them into either simple repositioning on either end of a binary (French/ Russian) or reassuring, repetitive, predictable melodic variations. Neither Charlotte’s intellectual labor, nor her negotiation of the fault lines between her two worlds (linguistic and cultural) make an impression on the narrator who opts for inhabiting a third space, only to find himself, a few pages later, on an open train-car thinking, as a Baudelairian echo of sorts, that there must be a different world, planet, universe (or maybe

50  Andreï Makine even this same world but viewed from a radically different perspective) in which his “langue d’étonnement” would be comprehensible by all (289). Once established in France, Aliocha’s odd yet pragmatic choice to present his novels, written in French, as translations form Russian to Parisian editors bespeaks in concrete terms his desire to be “understood by all.” Even though the price is re-writing his French-language texts in a presumed Russian original, inventing a translator and presenting himself as a Russophone author, the benefit of using his in-between language— literary French—to articulate his bilingual, bicultural story outweighs all difficulties that the editorial mystification presents. In fact, contrary to what the narrator believes, it is not his Russian origins that he must dissimulate; it is, quite on the contrary, his French graft that unsettles the editorial establishment. His Russianness is welcome—given the geopolitical seismic events of the late eighties, in the mid- to late nineties, stories from the East were in high demand in Western Europe. What the Parisian editorial houses refuse to accept is that an author who is born and raised in Russia may produce high-quality literary texts in French. It is Charlotte, Saranza, and his francophone childhood that he is hiding by pretending to write in Russian, not his Russianness. In fact, his Russianness is what will ultimately make his work viable in the French literary market. The narrator notes that “…ma malédiction franco-russe était toujours là” (“…my Franco-Russian curse was still upon me”; 313; Strachan 220). The qualifying term “franco-russe” foregrounds explicitly the master dichotomy that informs the narrator’s perception of his multiplicity: always double without ever escaping the binary—which explains the misrecognition of his Russianness as the determining factor behind the initial rejection of his francophone prose. If in Russia it was the French graft that marginalized him, it must then be that in France it is his Russianness that impedes his literary success. Instead of facilitating comprehensibility, his in-between language, literary French, becomes a liability in a monolingual editorial environment where categorizing and cataloguing heavily depend upon nationality and the ensuing assumption—barring well-known cases of officially multilingual nation-states—that one nation equals one sanctioned national language. It is the peculiarity of a Russian author writing in Proustian French, the absolute literary reterritorialization of the writing instance that mystifies editors—not Aliocha’s bilingualism, his Russianness or his graft. Opting for a third language which the narrator himself identifies as literary French—the poetically tinged French that Charlotte uses to recount Frossia’s story in the written form—squarely positions him beyond the border. By never acknowledging the frictions, silences, failures, and revelations that proliferate at the border itself, he inadvertently glosses over the complexities—and creative potential—of the estuarine environment that Charlotte inhabits. Although not necessarily reactionary, the narrator radically separates his literary practice from the receiving

Andreï Makine  51 culture’s avant-garde, by definition spatially and temporally identified as liminal, marginal, interstitial, and fissured. While preparing for Charlotte’s visit to Paris—a dream foreclosed upon by the grandmother’s passing—he notes that he would avoid taking her to his current neighborhood. The multicultural and multilingual Belleville could not, as he claims, shock Charlotte, an immigrant herself who spent most her life in a multicultural, multilingual context. As he notes: Si je ne voulais pas l’y amener, c’est parce qu’on pouvait traverser ces rues sans entendre un mot de français. Certains voyaient dans cet exotisme la promesse d’un nouveau monde, d’autres—un désastre. Mais nous, ce n’est pas l’exotisme, architectural ou humain, que nous recherchions. Le dépaysement de nos jours, pensais-je, serait bien plus profond (If I did not want to take her there it was because you could walk along whole streets without hearing a word of French spoken. Some saw the promise of a new world in this exoticism, others, a disaster. But we were not seeking exoticism, whether architectural or human. The change of scene we would experience in our days together I thought would be much more profound; 322). (Strachan 227) In the last few pages of Le Testament français, the narrator’s distaste for this new Paris—which will develop into a conscious rejection of France’s cultural diversity in his later work—is primarily expressed through a subtle critique of language. Taking a closer look at the passage quoted above, reveals quite readily his predilection for those who consider France’s métissage to be a disaster—the word “désastre” is privileged typographically (the dash visually separates it from the rest of the sentence) and syntactically (no verb links it to its subject allowing it to carry the force of both the verb and the object, modifying its essence from complemental to total, absolute). And if the narrator claims that the human and architectural exoticism (languages other than French and the bold Parisian architectural statements which began to alter the capital’s Haussmannian landscape in the second half of the twentieth century) does not interest him, one has to wonder what he means by a “dépaysement plus profond.” He never quite defines it. He does, however, suggest in the following paragraph that “[l]e Paris que je m’apprêtais à faire redécouvrir à Charlotte était un Paris incomplet et même, à certains égards, illusoire” (“[t]he Paris that I was preparing to let Charlotte rediscover was an incomplete Paris and even, in some respects, illusory”; 323; Strachan 227). Fragmentation, gaps, or even illusion are integral parts of Charlotte’s Saranza as they are of her life-narrative. What is radically different about the narrator’s illusory Paris as compared, for example, to the sense of illusionary existence that Charlotte has as a child when, alone, in the interminable Siberian winter, she walks daily to the pharmacy to get morphine for

52  Andreï Makine her addicted mother (74) is that his results from conscious cultural subtraction whereas Charlotte’s follows the need to negotiate cultural and familial fissuring. The narrator creates an illusion by making sure that Charlotte never sees or hears what is already there, whereas, the young French girl who still lives between two worlds, mostly Russian but also, occasionally and for relatively short periods of time, French must make sense of a universe in which the steppe sensorially clashes with her native chestnut trees, in which her father is dead and her mother vacillates between consciousness and a morphine-induced dreamworld, in which she is ultimately expected to be both adult and child. The last and likely most meaningful misrecognition of Charlotte’s interstitial cultural and linguistic identity is the narrator’s interpretation of his grandmother’s decision to switch from Russian to French at the exact moment when she reveals to him the true identity of his mother in the final letter that she sends him before she passes on. He notes the linguistic shift and attempts to account for it: La lettre était écrite en russe et c’est seulement à cette ligne que Charlotte passait au français, comme si elle n’était plus sûre de son russe. Ou comme si le français, ce français d’une autre époque, devait me permettre un certain détachement vis-à-vis de ce qu’elle allait me dire (The letter was written in Russian, and it was only at this line that Charlotte switched to French, as if she were no longer sure of her Russian. Or as if French, that French of another era, would allow me a certain detachment from what she was about to tell me; 339). (Strachan 238–39) The shift to French is indeed compelling. Charlotte shifts from Russian to her native language to inform the narrator of essentially two things: that they are not related by blood and that his biological mother, a Russian woman, was a prisoner who handed him over to his adoptive mother, Charlotte’s daughter, to spare him the harsh living conditions of the Gulag. Why then choose to reveal this very Russian twist of the narrator’s story in French? The assumption that she no longer trusted her Russian to tell her grandson an admittedly momentous secret is unconvincing as the semantic content of the message is culturally eminently Russian and she is fully bilingual. So is the narrator’s second interpretation, namely that the belle époque air of Charlotte’s French would create the distance required to better receive such life- changing news more convincing? This French is the only French Charlotte has ever spoken when in the narrator’s presence and, in that sense, its sudden appearance in the letter is more likely to charge the moment emotionally by drawing Aliocha’s affective attention to a relationship which was almost exclusively built and sustained in belle époque French than create distance between the reader and the text.

Andreï Makine  53 In fact, what the narrator fails to recognize is that Charlotte’s passage from one language to the other is not a meaningful event when analyzed in relation to the particular conditions of enunciation—whether it is while recounting her conversation with Gavrylitch, her memories of Frossia, or when revealing a long-held family secret. The fact that those moments range from the trivial to the extraordinary is further evidence that the context is only significant by means of its irrelevance. A true cultural estuary is a space requiring no linguistic or cultural tradition to fully dissipate notwithstanding the inevitability of contact zones within which new forms of cultural life and social belonging are constantly negotiated. Charlotte inhabits liminal spaces of cultural contact while being fully able to reinscribe herself within monolingual and monocultural zones. In her letter, French reclaims its place in an environment that is linguistically (letter written in Russian) and historically/culturally (the Gulag) single, at the very moment when the two worlds, Soviet and French, meet and a new contact zone is inadvertently created. Her linguistic shift does not carry representational or metaphorical significance; to remain within the logic of the estuarine metaphor, it is rather the result of the fundamental reduction in salinity (Russian language, Gulag) at the precise moment and in the contact-zone conditions that favor its mixing with fresh water (French language, French immigrants in Russia), symbolically actualized in the ritual act of handing the baby off to his adoptive mother over the frontier of the prison’s barbed wire.

Cultural Stratification and Hypoxic Environments In “Andreï Makine’s France: A Translingual Writer’s Portrayal of his ‘terre d’accueil’,” Ian McCall suggests that “[i]f Le Testament français portrayed Aliocha’s dreams of France, whereas Requiem pour l’Est omitted the dream and portrayed the reality of the present, ‘rêves’ and reality are starkly juxtaposed in La Terre et le ciel de Jacques Dorme, the last installment of Makine’s trilogy” (315). Borrowing McCall’s reading of the three novels as a trilogy, while shifting the analytical focus, I would like to suggest that Le Testament français, Requiem pour l’Est, and La Terre et le ciel de Jacques Dorme map a progressive rejection of the cultural estuary that Charlotte exemplified in the first novel of the trilogy, ultimately leading to the reactionary reading of multiculturalism that Makine proposes in his 2006 essay Cette France qu’on oublie d’aimer. In fact, I will argue that he forecloses on the estuarine potential of intercultural relationships by means of gradually restricting his characters’ ability to experience multiculturalism as an “open totality.” In “Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff,” M.M. Bakhtin suggests that “[a] meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign

54  Andreï Makine meaning” (7). In fact, we ask questions of foreign cultures that they would have never thought to raise themselves: Without one’s own questions one cannot creatively understand anything other or foreign (but of course the questions must be serious and sincere). Such a dialogic encounter of two cultures does not result in merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched. (7) Although my reading of estuarine contact zones allows for some merging and mixing, I find the concept of open totality particularly useful as it admits not only the inevitable contact between different cultural or linguistic entities as we reach toward the other but also the inevitable retreat within spaces of at least presumed unity and homogeneity. However, it is Bakhtin’s acknowledgment of our tendency to raise questions about the foreign which it would never ask of itself to find answers to questions about ourselves that we resist asking in the first place that I find particularly intriguing. This convoluted yet productive path toward piecing together one’s own narrative is naturally intensified by the questions bilingualism and biculturalism raise as to what is native and what is other or foreign. The indeterminacy of a multicultural agent’s enunciating stance as she interrogates her other while aiming at a revelation of the self, collapses the frontier that Bakhtin assumes between self and other without, however, invalidating the interrogating stance itself. In fact, it is a gradual distancing from a cognitive and affective place of indeterminate questioning that differentiates the main characters of Requiem pour l’Est and La Terre et le ciel de Jacques Dorme from not only Charlotte but also the narrator in Le Testament français, notwithstanding his predilection for dichotomizing the estuary. Published in 2000, Requiem pour l’Est tells the story of a Russian military doctor who doubles as a spy for the Soviet intelligence services. In both those capacities, he navigates the political and military turmoil of the Cold War years while retracing his family history which is steeped, as was the case with Le Testament français’s Charlotte and her family, in the events that defined the first part of the Russian twentieth century: the violent oppression of the 1920s, the Gulag, and the Second World War. Notwithstanding the novel’s limited if not marginal interest in the bilingual and bicultural conditions, there is still vivid engagement with French-as-a-foreign-language through the narrator’s longstanding relationship with an older French woman who is part maternal figure, part family historian. It is she who fills in the familial history blanks for the orphaned narrator. One of his earliest memories is the sound of a French lullaby as this foreigner whom everyone calls Sacha is running away from the site of his father’s execution holding the narrator in her arms,

Andreï Makine  55 attempting to assuage the young child’s fear with a melody. The narrator tries to decipher the words he hears: Il essaie d’en saisir les mots. Mais les paroles ont une étrange beauté libre de sens. Une langue qu’il n’a jamais entendue. Tout autre que celle de ses parents. Une langue qui n’exige pas la compréhension, juste la plongée dans son rythme ondoyant, dans la souplesse veloutée de ses sons (He tries to grasp the words. But the phrases have a strange beauty, devoid of meaning. A language he has never heard. Quite different from that of his parents. A language that does not require understanding, just immersion in its swaying rhythms, in the velvety suppleness of its sounds; 23). (Strachan 10) This early passage sets the tone for the narrator’s relationship with French as both foreign language and familial sociolect throughout the novel. The conscious explosion of the sign which he operates in this section of the book (beauty free of meaning) informs an understanding of otherness that is based on aestheticizing difference rather than deliberately engaging it. Interrogating the modalities of the bilingual condition— Aliocha’s constant preoccupation in Le Testament français—gives way to an acceptance of the incomprehensible as an unknowable—and thus closed—totality. Elsewhere, the narrator describes this foreign language as “magical” (55), a powerful spell that radically separates the violent universe of Soviet totalitarianism from a world in which he can hope to survive. What best contextualizes the narrator’s rejection of Bakhtin’s “open totality,” however, is his theorization of translation, a daily practice for a military doctor-turned-spy who is alternately stationed in Africa and in Western Europe. During a hostage-liberation negotiation, he finds himself translating from French into Russian and back into French while reflecting both on the urgency of his circumstances and the dilettante privilege that navigating this language, rarely spoken since childhood, represents: Je comprenais…que la réussite dépendait non pas de la logique des arguments, mais de quelque rituel dont seul le Yéménite possédait le secret et que le Français et le Russe essayaient de percer. Un sésame. La ronde des phrases plus ou moins identiques me laissait le loisir de toucher, comme on touche le grain des pages d’un vieux livre, la texture des mots que je traduisais (I…understood that success depended not on the logic of the arguments but on some ritual of which only the Yemeni knew the secret and that the Frenchman and the Russian were trying to grasp. An ‘open sesame.’ This round of more or less identical sentences left me the leisure to feel the texture of the words I was translating, as one fingers the grain of the pages of an old book; 55–56). (Strachan 34)

56  Andreï Makine The need for magical incantation to access the secrets of the hostagetaker’s negotiating modalities along with the narrator’s interest in the texture rather than the meaning of the words that he is translating, position him, from a theoretical standpoint, quite firmly within the tradition of foreignizing translation. He translates not to communicate meanings— he quite clearly has little regard for the arguments that the two sides advance—but rather to unsettle the certainties of the receiving culture. He accomplishes his goal as the French negotiator gradually moves away from the stilted language for which the circumstances usually call, adopting a rather personalized style of speech (56). In a different context, the estuarine potential of such a shift recalibrates the power differentials that dominate contact and border zones, opening up the involved totalities to the restructuring of cultural and linguistic systems. Disregarding signification while intentionally privileging the aesthetic, however, strips this moment of its interrogating possibilities, restricting its reach to an alchemic or metaphysical leap that forecloses on the contact zone’s possibilities as a place of multiple and multidirectional questioning. The glimpse of the Bakhtinian “open totality” that we get with the French diplomat’s shift from the official to the personal when he, not without a tinge of irony, suggests that the Russian Counselor and the narrator himself will ultimately need a “navicert” to escape the city following the negotiations fades slowly away as the narrator chooses to neutralize the statement’s disrupting power—the diplomat’s comment questions the larger geostrategic consequences of the negotiations at hand—and turn his attention to the literary echoes of the word “navicert,” once encountered in Pierre Loti’s orientalist prose. Opting, then, for a foreignizing translation that divorces itself from signification writ large, inadvertently privileges incomprehensibility. When reflecting upon his travels between Africa and Europe in terms of the work he needs to accomplish as an intelligence agent, the narrator notes: “Tout ce qui, au Nord, était mots, conciliabules feutrés, lentes approches d’une personne clef devenait, au Sud, cris de douleur, sifflement du feu, corps à corps haineux. Comme si une horrible traduction déréglée s’était installée entre ces deux continents” (“Everything that in the North was words, discreet consultations, slow approaches to a key person, turned in the South into cries of pain, the whistling of bullets and bitter hand-to-hand fighting, as if a horrible, unbridled process of translation had become established between these two continents”; 106; Strachan 69). The problematic civilizational dichotomy that this passage establishes between North and South, advanced and barbaric, subtle and savage, is conceptually parallel to an out-of-kilter translation. The binary structure of the metaphor is not in itself shocking as unsuccessful integration within a new cultural environment is often attributed to translational difficulties. What is less common, is regarding translation as an entity, a material body of consequence that posits itself

Andreï Makine  57 as a barrier between two foreign languages. Incomprehensibility in this instance does not result from lack of knowledge but rather from the positive knowledge that the frontier is impassable because the only agent with negotiating potential—translation—has itself morphed into an immovable obstacle. When in France, the narrator’s discussion of integration echoes this notion of absolute incomprehensibility: L’intégration ne signifie, au fond, rien d’autre que l’imitation…se faire pareil pour rester autre, vivre comme on vit ici pour protéger son lointain ailleurs, imiter jusqu’au dédoublement et, en laissant son double parler, gesticuler, rire à sa place, s’enfuir, en pensée, vers ceux qu’on n’aurait jamais dû quitter (Basically, integration means no more than imitation…to make oneself similar in order to stay different. To live as they live here as a way of protecting your remote and distant self. To imitate to the point of splitting yourself in two and, by letting your double speak, gesticulate, and laugh for you, to escape back in your thoughts to those you should never have abandoned; 123–24). (Strachan 82) The only way to be part of the foreign environment is to pretend being someone else, to cross, in other words, the translational obstacle and morph into the totality that is the other side of the translational boundary. This dichotomization of the self aims, according to the narrator, at protecting what was left behind, suggesting a reconceptualization of the before/behind as yet another totality which must remain unadulterated. The narrator’s analysis, then, presupposes the existence of an all-knowing viewing or orchestrating stance, a metaphysical, or at least meta- cognitive, positioning which attributes affective and cognitive meaning to two versions of absolute selfhood that never meet: the reified memory of what was and the sterile imitation of what currently is. Whether interpreted as the Bakhtinian questioning of self and other, or as estuarine potential for negotiation and constant shifting when encounters cause friction, or even as moments of failed or partial communication, the struggle to exist with foreignness becomes submerged in Requiem pour l’Est within the viewing stance’s artificial separation of spaces and experiences. Theorized as a multiplicity of sorts, this separation is, in fact, nothing more than a sterile doubling that ultimately undermines the self’s innate ability to interrogate its fundamental otherness. In La Terre et le ciel de Jacques Dorme, the radical separation of cultural spheres morphs into a nascent critique of contemporary France, its language and its youth posited as the absolute other of the heroic WWII generation and its language. The narrator, a Russian author currently living in Paris, is writing a novel about Jacques Dorme, a French pilot who served in the Soviet Union during World War II and had a brief affair with a French woman whom the narrator befriended as a

58  Andreï Makine teenager. As did the maternal French figure in Requiem pour l’Est, the character of Choura or, alternatively, Alexandra, teaches the orphaned narrator French and tells him the unlikely story of two French nationals meeting and falling in love in World War II Russia. La Terre et le ciel de Jacques Dorme ends with the narrator’s encounter with Jacques Dorme’s brother whom he interviews as he conducts research for his new novel. In the first two parts of the novel, Alexandra, the French language, and the array of French novels that the narrator reads in Alexandra’s isba are cast both as polar opposites of the Khrushchev-era orphanage in which the teenage boy lives and as an ideal representation of, initially, childhood (48–49) and, later, a life worth living. Comparing the lexical brutality of the orphanage to the lightness of the literary French of Alexandra’s teachings and books, he notes: “Inconsciemment peut-être je mettais en parallèle cette langue d’acier et la légèreté du verre d’eau devenant péché sur les lèvres de la duchesse de Longeville…Des mots qui tuaient et des mots qui, employés d’une certaine façon, libéraient” (“Unconsciously, perhaps, I drew a parallel between this steely language and the lightness of the glass of water that became a sin on the Duchesse de Longeville’s lips…Words that killed and words that, when used in a certain way, liberated”; 52; Strachan 45–46). The liberating potential of this new language and its literary tradition represents the totality of the narrator’s desire: Je cherchais dans mes lectures ce dont j’étais privé. L’attachement à un lieu (celui de ma naissance était trop indéfini), une mythologie personnelle, un passé familial. Mais surtout ce dont les autres venaient de me priver : cette divine liberté de réinventer la vie, de la peupler de héros (What I was searching for in my reading was what I lacked. Attachment to a place (that of my own birth was too ill defined), a personal mythology, a family past. But, above all, that thing of which the others had just robbed me: the divine freedom to reinvent life, and to people it with heroes; 61). (Strachan 55) The narrator here subtly references the erasure of the orphaned children’s parents who, as state dissidents, were relentlessly vilified by the authorities and ultimately practically eradicated from the personal histories and memories of their offspring. The narrator opts to populate the void with heroes from his readings and Alexandra’s personal narratives. The binary structure of his world is not only irreconcilable but radically hierarchical as well. There is no question as to which universe (Russophone or Francophone) is preferable as France steadily occupies the pole of liberty and freedom whereas Soviet Russia is associated only with repression, totalitarian practices, and stifling of creativity. When he starts seeing clearly Jacques Dorme emerge as a character in his book, the narrator reflects on the pilot as a direct representation of his country: “Tel

Andreï Makine  59 était Jacques Dorme qui avait surgi devant moi dans le feu du couchant. Un homme taillé dans la matière même de sa patrie, cette France que j’avais découverte grâce à mes lectures et mes conversations avec Alexandra” (“Such was the Jacques Dorme who had appeared to me in the blaze of the sunset. A man hewn from the very stuff of his native land, that France I had discovered thanks to my reading and my conversations with Alexandra”; 168; Strachan 172). After favorably comparing him to some of his literary heroes, he concludes: “Le grain de cette substance humaine était même encore plus subtil, je discernais non pas les personnages et leurs gestes mais plutôt le dense halo de leur vie. L’esprit de leurs engagements terrestres. Leur âme” (“The grain of this human substance was yet more subtle; what I perceived was not the characters and their actions but rather the dense aura of their lives. The spirit of their earthly undertakings. Their soul”; 168; Strachan 172). The metaphysical leanings of Requiem pour l’Est, the privileged viewing stance that orchestrated the separation between the narrator’s before and after in that novel, morphs here into an explicit abstraction of anything concrete, historical, social, or political, an unapologetic subscription to the ontological superiority of “being French.” “Being French,” however, is itself siloed within a restricted and reductive interpretation of Frenchness, one that exhibits disregard for context and historical circumstance, a definition that itself posits insurmountable temporal and ethical barriers between its different iterations. On his way to visit Jacques Dorme’s brother, “le Capitaine,” the narrator witnesses a scene of verbal and physical abuse perpetrated by a group of young people against an older couple in their car, who, we later learn are Jacques Dorme’s brother and his wife. After noting how vulgar young people’s French is, the narrator comments on the relationship that the old couple has with its current surroundings: “Nous ne partons pas. C’est le pays, leur pays, leur France qui s’éloigne, remplacé par un autre pays. Cette maison entourée d’arbres nus et de branches d’if, d’un vert presque noir, fait penser au dernier rocher d’un archipel englouti” (“We are not leaving, it is the country, their country, their France, that is moving away, being replaced by another country. This house, surrounded by bare trees and the foliage of yew bushes, dark green, almost black, is evocative of the last rock of a submerged archipelago”; 185; Strachan 190). In La Terre et le ciel de Jacques Dorme, the characters’ inability to cross over and establish contact with otherness, no longer concerns national languages and cultures and their erroneously assumed homogeneity on either side of the frontier. Makine’s Russian, francophone character draws in this novel a dividing line between sociolects and age-groups within what in previous works he had viewed or treated as a coherent cultural and linguistic environment, as a totality of sorts. The narrator realizes that, just like Alexandra living in the Russian steppe some 20 years earlier, like his novelistic heroes and “le Capitaine,” he is also speaking

60  Andreï Makine “une langue disparue” (“a dead language”; 193; Strachan 199). This realization squarely positions him on the side of the binary that, because no longer ontologically present, retreats into that rarefied, all-viewing, meta-cognitive sphere that he began constructing while becoming acquainted with the French language and its literature in Alexandra’s isba. The competing pole, however, is no longer Russian and the deprivations of the Soviet era but rather French language and culture that depart from the paradigms of the literary, the patriotic, or the heroic. Makine revisits the violent confrontation between French youth and “le Capitaine” in his 2006 essay, Cette France qu’on oublie d’aimer. Katherine Knorr sets up the essay’s affective and intellectual context convincingly: And so here is Makine, the twentieth-century version of those puzzled travelers, amid the contradictions of the opulent West: a prosperous society with an extraordinary cultural heritage and great personal liberty, where the natives are constantly zeroing in on ‘oppression’ and subsidizing barbarous noise-making in the name of freedom, equality and ‘creativity’…. (“Andreï Makine’s Poetics of Nostalgia” 33) In Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora, Adrian Wanner takes this observation to its logical conclusion while situating Makine within the tradition of the translingual Russian émigré author: As the foreigner who validates the superior status of French culture Makine even published a book-length essay on this topic, following the example of other canonical Russian authors who turned from fiction writing to propagandizing, in which he exhorts his fellow French citizens to return to the roots of their Frenchness. (41–42) The author refuses to discern valuable cultural content in what he calls “les vomissures du rap”—among many other forms of cultural production in twenty-first century France. In so doing, he opts for a standardized version of literary French, roughly corresponding to the first half of the twentieth-century while rejecting contemporary French sociolects as a perversion of sorts. A closer look at the author’s discussion of the attack against “le Capitaine” in La Terre et le ciel de Jacques Dorme, points to the particular form that conscious political positioning takes in Cette France qu’on oublie d’aimer. During an interview on France Culture as recounted in the essay, the journalist shares with the author his distaste for the attack scene—recounted in terms that place the responsibility squarely on the young men who perpetrated it without sociohistorical contextualization of any kind—adding that “…celui qui a une telle vision des choses

Andreï Makine  61 est nécessairement…un réactionnaire” (“…he who has such a view on things is necessarily…reactionary” 94). Makine pushes back, wondering if any criticism of violent “young people” living in the suburbs of major French cities (“le Capitaine” and his wife live in Roubaix, a suburb of Lille, in the north of France) should be stigmatized as being de facto reactionary. He then shares with his reader what he would have liked to tell the journalist but did not: J’ai envie de lui dire que, en arrivant en France, j’ai vécu dans ces banlieues, je connais la réalité dont je parle. La réalité…C’est ça le hic. Qu’importe la réalité pourvu que soient préservées la cohérence de l’idéologie, la pureté du discours, la rigueur des schémas (I would like to tell him that upon my arrival in France I lived in these suburbs, I know the realities of which I speak. Reality…Therein lies the issue. No one cares about reality provided that we don’t break with ideological coherence, discursive purity, pattern precision). (95) Throughout the essay, Makine accuses contemporary French intelligentsia of a sclerotic attachment to left-wing ideology which necessarily puts the blame for all violent excesses in the suburbs (this essay follows by one year the infamous 2005 riots) on the French Republic and its failure to integrate the youth in question, a demographic group made up primarily of working-class French citizens of immigrant descent. To fully comprehend what he means by ideological coherence and discursive purity we need to take a closer look at the definition he provides for his concept of “francité” early on in the essay: “La francité a toujours été [une] recherche passionnée des formes nouvelles” (“Frenchness has always been a passionate search for new forms” 46). An attempt at defining “forme” follows soon thereafter: La forme française n’est pas un habillage folklorique bon à épater les touristes mais un style d’existence profondément irrigué par le vécu national, une riche consonance où s’entrelacent des thèmes très divers…tout un monde en mouvement novateur. Sa force est de savoir réunir dans un ensemble vivace des éléments apparemment incompatibles (The French form is not some folkloric veneer meant to astound tourists but rather a mode of existence profoundly irrigated by the national experience, a rich consonance of different themes…an entire world in creative movement. Its force lies in its ability to assemble apparently incompatible elements into an enduring whole). (52) In what weakens the strength of Makine’s argument in this passage, namely the vagueness of the definition itself in addition to its potential applicability in discussions of any human civilization ever studied, lies the ideological power of his statement. A cultural tradition that is in no

62  Andreï Makine way distinguishable from any other can, given the right historical moment, geostrategic power differentials, and social receptiveness morph into a universally acceptable ideal. When, a few pages later, the author reminds us that Pouchkine, among many other non-native francophone speakers in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, chose to correspond in French, the “language of Europe” as Pouchkine himself calls it, we have little trouble accepting the universality of this language whose forward-looking forms, we have been told, seamlessly integrate old and new, same and other: “…la puissance avec laquelle le français s’empare du réel pour le penser, le clarifier, le transformer…s’illustre aussi dans les sciences naturelles, dans l’histoire, l’art oratoire, le droit…Telles sont les causes de la fameuse universalité du français” (“The power with which French takes hold of the real, ponders it, clarifies it, and transforms it… is equally evident in the natural sciences, history, oratory, the Law…This is what sustains the universality of the French language” 61). The profoundly Eurocentric, post-Enlightenment historical basis of this analysis echoes Makine’s earlier comments on Voltaire’s complexity and multiplicity. At times fearless to the point of becoming arrogant, at other times gallant with a flair for the overly ornate (22–23), Voltaire intellectually excels in Makine’s estimation, thanks to an uncanny range of cognitive function and expression. His multiplicity and complexity, in other words, construct and inhabit a totality which is then codified by Makine as the “French spirit.” If this “impalpable French quintessence,” as he calls it, is alone able to access the quasi-totality of human epistemologies and knowledge, then, it stands to reason that French is the universal language par excellence, the idiom which codified the Voltairean totality and now stands guard as its sole gatekeeper. This language and this cultural tradition, however, are, as Makine warns us later in the essay, particularly fragile: … ce français ravalé au statut d’une des langues vernaculaires dans une Europe sans identité, cette France ramenée aux proportions d’une province gérée par une démocratie sénile qui ne sait plus défendre ses idéaux, une telle langue et un tel pays n’auront plus rien de commun avec la francité créatrice, passionnée, généreuse… (…a French language reduced to the status of vernacular within an identity-deprived Europe, this France that has been diminished to the size of a province governed by a senile democracy that no longer knows how to defend its ideals; such a language and such a country will no longer have anything in common with the creative, passionate and generous Frenchness [of the past]). (65) Following the universalist argument that the author has been developing since the early pages of his essay, we have to assume that only within the framework of universality can French be as creative, passionate, and

Andreï Makine  63 generous as it was at the time of Voltaire. The author argues that political correctness presents the most significant threat to the spirit of the Enlightenment: “Oui, c’est ainsi qu’apparaît de nos jours le Français pensant: une intelligence affublée d’innombrables couches de protection et qui tâtonne, se faufile entre les interdits, rampe sur un champ de mines, tout effrayée d’une possible explosion” (“Indeed, this is what the thinking Frenchman looks like today: his intelligence saddled with countless protective layers, he fumbles about, weaves his way through all that is forbidden, crawls on minefields terrified of a possible explosion” 65–66). He then zeroes in on the particular restrictions that political correctness imposes upon free thinkers: “Et si on n’était pas obligé, en engageant une franche discussion, de soupeser les caractéristiques ethniques, sociales, sexuelles, etc., de son interlocuteur et de censurer en fonction de ces critères” (“What if, by starting an honest discussion, we didn’t have to take into account the ethnic, social, sexual, etc. characteristics of our interlocutor and accordingly censor our speech” 66)? The universalist reach of Voltairean revolutionary thinking then a priori subscribes to the values of republicanism, thus raising the question of liberty’s profound incompatibility with equality. In Makine’s text, this incompatibility is further highlighted when the author, speaking about his own fascination with France, notes that it would probably be best if one were to simply close one’s eyes to avoid seeing the country’s current “invading ugliness” (19). In fact, he is not suggesting that we combat the ills of political correctness by liberating speech from the constraints of identitarianism; he is vying for the erasure of those aspects of cultural and social French life that are incompatible with the myth of “francité” to which he subscribes and which he, as enunciative stance, performs, namely white, male, middle-class, cisgender, and straight. When he suggests that the superiority of the French language compared to soussou, malinké, and peul hinges upon the fact that native speakers have yet to write a Divine Comedy or their War and Peace or La Chanson de Roland in these languages, he is committing to a Eurocentric, graphocentric, interpretation of culture that positions first peoples and languages in the prehistory of their European counterparts. It is then not equality that he privileges when advocating for the marginalization of political correctness but erasure of difference and hardening of borders between forms of cultural expression and belonging that depart from the European model. In a chapter titled “La France nouvelle,” the author meets a biracial couple, Félix, a Guinean man living and working in France as a highschool history teacher, and Nadine, a guidance counselor. They are politically firmly on the left; they abhor Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front; they are for gay marriage; they are lucid about Vichy and aware of France’s long imperial history. As the author notes, this is the France of tomorrow. However, “[j]uste une chose me manquait dans cette France de demain: la parole libre, contradictoire, passionnée” (“there was just

64  Andreï Makine one thing missing in this France of the future: free, contradictory, passionate discourse” 77). Interestingly enough, there is no mention of an instance at which either Félix or Nadine refused to openly discuss any of their ideological or political beliefs with the author. In fact, when he discovers and reads through two boxes full of books which belonged to Nadine’s father, a World War II veteran with whom Nadine rarely spoke toward the end of his life, the narrator makes no effort to interrogate further, to find out why she had decided to erase from her memory his service to his country during WWII and focus on what she calls his “débile fidélité à Pétain” (“stupid loyalty to Pétain”). He finds enough evidence in those two boxes that her father’s politics were far more nuanced than she thought and yet he does not engage her in conversation. Same thing when a few years after the first encounter with the family, he meets up with their son, Kevin, in Paris and asks him if he knew of his maternal grandfather. When the young man says that his grandfather “was an old fascist,” Makine reminds the reader of Nadine’s comment that her father and she had nothing to say to each other toward the end of his life, then ends the chapter (second of two on the family) with no further reflection. The passionate debate that he misses in the midst of this otherwise wonderful family is, I would argue, simply the result of Makine’s by now firmly rooted conviction that the frontier separating his France, the France of his WWII heroes and Kevin’s France of “rebeus” and “renois” is insurmountable. The two entities are not simply incompatible, but, as he suggests later in the essay, they are openly hostile to one another. When the author addresses the violent confrontations between police and revolted youth in the suburbs, his rhetoric mirrors the absolute ideological separation that the text has been performing since the very beginning11: on one side the lawless space of the banlieue and “…à l’opposé de cette ignominie, l’abnégation digne des exploits guerriers: le chauffeur d’un bus incendié qui sauve une handicappée au risque de brûler avec elle” (“…on the opposite side of this disgrace, [one finds] self-sacrifice worthy of war-time bravery; like the story of this driver who saved a handicapped woman from his burning bus risking death alongside her” 98). The rather subtle rejection of difference by means of political correctness transforms here into warlike confrontation fostered by a sense of existential urgency: it’s either them or us. If we are the admirers of WWII heroes and the indestructible core of French greatness, then who are they? They are hateful, resentful others; they hate the French because they sense their weakness spurred on by their loss of identity and their propensity for self-flagellation; they hate the Republic and they jeer at the national anthem; they reject France’s hardwon “laïcité.” The passage ends with a rhetorical question: “…n’est-ce pas comique d’accueillir dans sa patrie, nourrir, loger, soigner ceux qui vous haïssent et vous méprisent” (“…isn’t it funny to welcome in one’s

Andreï Makine  65 country, feed, house and care for people who hate and despise you” 99). Notwithstanding the historical and social tone-deafness of this analysis or the thoughtless assumption that these others are foreigners—these youth that he refers to are in their majority French citizens of immigrant descent—the core argument of this rather incendiary paragraph is that the divide is absolute and the competing totalities entirely closed. The obvious difference between Cette France qu’on oublie d’aimer and the novels of the trilogy whose declining estuarine potential makes this pamphlet possible is not so much the virulence and passion with which one France is defended against another but the inherent violence of the author’s political project. When in an estuary, saline and fresh bodies of water do not mix even slightly at the boundary, more often than not hypoxic conditions condemn life in the bottom, saline half. It is quite clear which stratum of French society the author would rather deprive of oxygen. When he exhorts young “foreigners” to be worthy of France, he is in fact asking them to erase all traces of difference and adopt the Republican model as their single cultural marking. He is encouraging a radical shift in loyalties, one that the waves of immigrants which in his estimation were successfully integrated in the past did not have to make: mostly Christian, white, and almost exclusively European, peoples whose histories never intersected—or at least never intersected directly—with French modernity’s imperial and colonial projects, they were incorporated into the national body through a historical process of addition, not erasure. Makine’s colorblind, race-neutral vision of France at the dawn of the t wenty-first century is nothing more than the political expression of a deeply rooted belief in a humanism qua universalism that refuses to anchor globalization and multiculturalism in the defining historical processes (Atlantic crossings, rise of capitalism, slavery) of the past five centuries. This radical disinterest in comparative history is what permits the author to suggest, without the slightest tinge of irony, that: “…il ne peut y avoir qu’une seule communauté en France: la communauté nationale. Celle qui nous unit tous, sans distinction d’origine et de race” (“…there can only be one community in France: the national community. The community that unites us all without regard for race or origin” 105). In this cohesive, enclosed, and utterly hypoxic environment the health of the ecosystem matters less than the survival of specific species; the anecdote which validates the master narrative matters more than a contextualized examination of power dynamics and hierarchies that alone can produce complex, convincing, nuanced, intersecting, and mutually interrogating narratives: “Mon humble avis: la seule politique qui vaille serait celle qui prendrait en compte, avant tout, cette femme âgée qui pleure son mari tué dans une banlieue où l’on peut assassiner un homme en passant, en s’amusant presque. Où surtout l’assassin restera impuni” (“My humble opinion: the only worthy policy is the one that considers above all that old woman mourning her dead husband in a

66  Andreï Makine suburb where one can kill a man, just like that, almost taking pleasure in the act” 11). “Voltaire, réveille-toi!” (“Wake up, Voltaire!” 98), indeed!

Notes

Andreï Makine  67 également exploitables et valorisables par le centre: soit sur une reproduction à l’identique des formes normées, accompagnée d’une mise en contexte exotique, qui se plie au goût dominant et le conforte dans sa position (Bianciotti et Makine illustrent une telle option); soit sur l’élaboration dissonante d’une écriture métissée—par collision—, appréciée dans son altérité pourvu qu’elle demeure dans des limites acceptables. (… the linguistic and language-use choices of authors from the periphery are restricted and lead to two antithetical approaches equally exploitable by the center: either a faithful reproduction of normative forms which is accompanied by an exotic contextualization that conforms to the dominant taste while buttressing it (Biancotti and Makine are examples of such an approach); or a dissonant formulation of a violently cross-pollinated type of writing, appreciable in its difference as long as it remains within acceptable parameters). (28–29) 9 “Le lendemain matin, je me réveillai avec le sentiment d’être enfin moi-même. Un grand calme, à la fois amer et serein, se répandait en moi. Je n’avais plus à me débattre entre mes identités russe et française. Je m’acceptai” (“The next day I woke up with the feeling that I was myself at last. A great calm, at the same time both bitter and serene, spread through me. I no longer had to struggle between my Russian and my French identities. I accepted myself”; 263; Strachan 183). 10 See especially Adrian Wanner’s excellent analysis in “Gained in Translation: Andreï Makine’s Novel Le testament français.” 11 The essay begins with two quotes, both written by translingual authors like Makine himself (Romain Gary and Julian Green), the first one lamenting France’s insignificant place in the world, the second one not only confirming the country’s decadence but also suggesting that great cultures possess an indestructible core (9).

2

Nancy Huston’s Estuarine Ecosystems and the Minor

Among the writers that make up the corpus of this study, Nancy Huston is certainly the one who has reflected on her translingualism and self-translative practice in the most explicitly theoretical terms. In a 1993 essay titled “Pour un patriotisme de l’ambiguïté,” she explores the characteristics of her double identity noting that her two languages and cultures (English/French and anglophone Canadian/French): …ne veulent surtout pas se réunir; elles ne veulent même pas forcément se serrer la main, se parler entre elles; elles tiennent à se critiquer, à ironiser, à faire des blagues l’une aux dépens de l’autre  ; en somme, elles revendiquent toute l’ambiguïté de leur situation (…avoid meeting up at all costs; they don’t even want to shake hands, to speak to one another; they insist on critiquing each other, being ironic and making fun at each other’s expense; in other words, they fight to maintain the ambiguity of their situation). (38) This refusal of languages to commune along with their self-imposed distance that facilitates a process of deliberate, mutual undermining bespeak the subject’s unease with the very concept of duality. When a year later, the author notes in “Festins fragiles” that, notwithstanding the inevitable choice of a language, when she writes she admits to the need for a third language that while necessarily articulated in either English or French, retains the defining characteristics of the other language that Huston values: J’ai besoin…de me forger une langue à moi…Elle est située maintenant… quelque part entre l’anglais et le français, c’est-à-dire que…je cherche à préserver en français ce que j’ aime de l’anglais (son ouverture, son économie, son insolence) et en anglais ce que j’aime du français (sa précision, sa sensualité, son élégance) (I need…to create a language that is mine alone…right now it is to be found…somewhere between English and French, meaning that…I am looking to preserve in French what I like in English (its openness, its economical nature,

Nancy Huston  69 its insolence) and in English what I like in French (its precision, its sensuality, its elegance)) (12) In other words, her writing idiom is a paradoxical amalgam of voicing and silencing: silencing of either French or English when writing in the other tongue; selective voicing of certain aspects of the silenced tongue’s features; silencing of the chosen language’s intensities and particularities to make space for the palimpsestual rendering of the other code’s nuances; voicing of a border between these multiple linguistic realizations that remains silent while speaking the promise of a productive dialogue. In her 1999 essay titled Nord Perdu, Nancy Huston relates foreignness to infancy: “À l’étranger, on est enfant à nouveau, et dans le pire sens du terme: infantilisé. Réduit à l’infans, c’est-à-dire au silence; privé de parole” (“When abroad, one becomes a child all over again; and in the worse sense of the word. Reduced to infans, meaning reduced to silence; deprived of words” 78). This quote follows a rather long reflection on her own history of translingualism which concludes with an aphoretic definition of the foreign: Choisir à l’âge adulte, de son propre chef, de façon individuelle, pour ne pas dire capricieuse, de quitter son pays et de conduire le reste de son existence dans une culture et une langue jusque-là étrangères, c’est accepter de s’installer à tout jamais dans l’imitation, le faire-semblant, le théâtre (To choose as an adult, freely, individually, if not capriciously, to leave one’s country and to live the rest of one’s life in a foreign country and culture means that one accepts to position one’s self permanently in a state of imitation, pretense, playacting). (30) Huston clearly echoes Julia Kristeva’s assertion in Étrangers à nousmêmes that “…l’étranger ne sait pas ce qu’il dit. Son inconscient n’habite pas sa pensée, aussi se contente-t-il de faire une reproduction brilliante de tout ce qu’il y a à apprendre, rarement une innovation” (“…the foreigner does not know what he is saying. His unconscious does not dwell in his thought, consequently he is satisfied to brilliantly reproduce everything there is to learn, seldom innovating”; 49; Roudiez 32). Contrary to Kristeva’s, Huston’s exile was not prompted by political, social, or economic imperatives; she experienced no persecution or curtailment of her personal freedoms. The choice to live in France was that of the privileged cosmopolitan, a figure with whom she lucidly identifies. What is striking about the last quote, however, is the explicit link that she establishes between her exile and imitation, pretense and theater. Losing the ability to speak, voluntarily positioning one’s self in infancy (in a space of no speech) is equivalent then to a life of performance. And yet there is nothing in Huston’s text to suggest that the triptych

70  Nancy Huston imitation-pretense-theater, or the absence of voice, silence, or infans, are sterile forms of communication. Julia Kristeva has detected in the bilingual subject’s silence an inevitability: “…entre deux langues, votre élément est le silence. A force de se dire de diverses manières tout aussi banales, tout aussi approximatives, ça ne se dit pas” (“…between two languages, your realm is silence. By dint of saying things in various ways, one just as trite as the other, just as approximate, one ends up no longer saying them”; 27–28; Roudiez 15). She compares the bilingual’s silence to “dead water:” Le silence ne vous est pas seulement imposé, il est en vous…Ne rien dire, rien n’est à dire, rien n’est dicible. Au début ce fut une guerre froide avec ceux du nouvel idiome, désiré et rejetant; puis la nouvelle langue vous a recouvert comme une marée lente, de mortes eaux (Silence has not only been forced upon you, it is within you…Saying nothing, nothing needs to be said, nothing can be said. At first, it was a cold war with those of the new idiom, desired and rejecting; then the new language covered you as might a slow tide, a neap tide; 28–29). (Roudiez 16) The dead water phenomenon was first described in the late nineteenth century by Fridjof Nansen who had encountered it a number of times in his journey to the North Pole. In his own words: This is a peculiar phenomenon which occurs when a surface layer of freshwater rests upon the saltwater of the sea and this freshwater is carried along with the ship gliding on the heavier sea beneath it as if on a fixed foundation…When caught in dead water the ship appeared to be held back, as if by mysterious force and she did not always answer to the helm. (Miloh, Tulin, and Zilman 105) Julia Kristeva reads the bilingual condition as a failed estuary: the two languages are superposed but unable to relate to the bilingual subject stultifying it thus into inertia (or lack of responsiveness if we follow the ship metaphor). Notwithstanding the similarities between Kristeva’s and Huston’s theoretical reflection on bilingualism, including their emphasis on lack of originality, imitation, and inauthentic performativity, Huston accounts for estuarine conditions of bilingual relationality in terms that, although cognizant of the initial shock of contact and the ensuing stratification, never quite foreclose upon the promise of a productive, even prolific new cultural ecosystem. In fact, when she revisits the theme of silence in “Professeurs du désespoir,” in 2004, her discussion of Beckett’s relationship with silence provides valuable context for interpreting her earlier theoretical work: “Je vois Beckett comme un frère en dépression. Un grand-père en fait, mais

Nancy Huston  71 en littérature la consanguinité est immédiate, l’écart temporel n’existe pas. Je le lis, il est là avec moi, en moi” (“I see Beckett as a brother who is suffering from depression. A grandfather, actually, but, in literature, family ties are immediate, temporal distance does not exist. I read him, he’s here, with me, in me” 71). The paradoxical mutual and simultaneous silencing and voicing of languages that Huston explores in her earlier essays, takes shape here as not only a spatial force, displacing and replacing words, styles, utterances, and the socio-cultural or pragmatic parameters of linguistic expression, but also a radical temporal contraction. If Beckett is a brother outside the logic of genealogies and history, he is also a “funambule sur une corde raide et pointillée [qui] nous conduit au bord du gouffre vers lequel il tend depuis longtemps=le silence” (“tightrope walker on a straight, dotted rope leading us to the mouth of the abyss toward which it had always verged=silence” 91). The implicit association between voicelessness and verticality eloquently summarizes Huston’s reflection on bilingual writing over the 1994–2004 decade: the bilingual, self-translating author maintains a delicate balance between two languages and two cultures without quite inhabiting either while resolutely and against the forces of history (or gravity in Huston’s metaphor), aiming at silencing both. And yet, if the arrival point on the tightrope is silence, then the writer departed from speech—the linearity of the rope itself is not undermined in the metaphor. The temporal and spatial contraction that the author performs then is similar to Zeno’s paradox which stipulates that if the tortoise starts racing a given distance before Achilles, its competitor, the latter will never be able to overtake it because he has to always reach the point where the tortoise previously was before moving forward. As long as the tortoise has the slightest of leads at the beginning of the race, Achilles’s win is an impossibility. For the writer to reach silence, she needs to cover the distance between the starting point (the theoretical seat of speech) and silence, her destination, with the decreasing use of voice. Although the slow decrease in speech production should lead to silence, unless the rope were to disappear and annihilate the subject position entirely, it keeps the writer from reaching the end-point precisely because it is conceptualized in the metaphor as verbal production: each section of it overtaken is language reduced, tending to silence but never quite voiceless. Paradoxically, the subject’s single way out of this conundrum would be to fall, reinsert herself into history by means of failure and brutal force, interrupt a process of timeless idealization of language and insert the gaps, voids, and discontinuities that the contingencies of border zones, linguistic and cultural, produce as they strive for time and place. Huston effectively cuts the rope, stuns the tortoise into immobility, and allows Achilles to win the race in two very different works, as distant in time as they are in style. Trois fois septembre was published in French, in 1989 and was never translated into English. Limbes/

72  Nancy Huston Limbo: Un hommage à Samuel Beckett was published in 1998 in a bilingual edition with the following annotation: “Les deux versions, l’anglaise et la française, sont de l’auteur” (4). Although never translated into either French or English—an exception in the bibliography of a consistently self-translating author—both books thematize translation in distinct yet conceptually similar ways. Trois fois septembre tells the story of a mother and a daughter as they try to make sense of Selena’s, the daughter’s best friend’s, suicide. Renée and Solange Vauginas live in the USA where they moved from France after the death of Renée’s husband three years prior to the events that lead to Selena’s suicide. The story takes place between New Hampshire and Cambridge, Massachusetts, first at the Colline high school, where Renée teaches French as a foreign language and the two young women complete their high-school education, and then in the larger Boston area where Selena works as a secretary at a therapist’s office and Solange studies art history at Radcliffe College. The reader learns the circumstances of Selena’s life in the three-year period that precedes her suicide (1969–71) from the young woman’s journal. Access to the journal is provided by Solange who, in the span of a single weekend, reads the journal to her mother out loud in French, translating a text written originally in English into hers and her mother’s native language. Limbes/Limbo is an exploration of languages and linguistic genealogies. A homage to Beckett, as Huston explicitly states in the title, Limbes/Limbo is also a homage to translation: two languages and two texts, facing each other, relating to without transforming into each other. Using different narrative tools, both texts momentarily delay reader-access to content, silencing themselves while interrogating comprehensibility. Limbes/Limbo challenges the bilingual reader to make sense of the gaps and discontinuities between the two texts, whereas it edifies a literal and metaphorical wall for the monolingual reader: an obstacle to overcome either by turning what amounts to a blank page (a gap in the narrative) or by making the effort to decipher incomprehensible signs, an experiment that inevitably explodes the sign as phonetic realizations of signifiers not only distort accepted acoustic images but, most importantly, fail to correspond to any signifieds. Trois fois septembre is replete with instances of translational annotation, refusing the reader the illusion of fluency. Renée often interrupts Solange to ask questions about what a certain word means, to comment on the incomprehensibility of her daughter’s translation or even to correct her interpretation of a certain word or expression. The bilingual reader exits the narrative path to follow the women along a trail of linguistic discovery; the monolingual reader is looking at a digression with little meaning. Both bilingual and monolingual readers of either text are invited to make sense of fragmented narratives that thematize their own suturization.

Nancy Huston  73 The theoretical implications of the two texts’ resistance to narrativization are distinct yet interrelated: In Limbes/Limbo self-translation offers a novel lens through which to look at translingual literature as a minorizing force.1 Self-translation constructs a privileged space where double linguistic and cultural palimpsests2 create an intricate relational model operating along the lines of mutual silencing. In particular, silence as the operative model permits the voicing of the language not in use—foreign or native—the subtext of the original text or version, whose voice in translation similarly decreases in volume allowing the other tongue to nuance and texture it. The double palimpsest—horizontally from tongue to tongue and vertically from linguistic palimpsest to text—destabilizes meaning and deterritorializes both source and target tongue, both major languages undergoing a process of minorization. According to Deleuze and Guattari’s overall argument in Kafka: pour une littérature mineure, three conditions ensure minorization: deterritorialization of the major language, disappearance of the subject behind the collectivity, and politicization of personal labor (29–33). Huston’s inclusion of Beckett’s name as annotation within the title along with a large number of Beckettian references in the text itself makes of Limbes/Limbo a work of elective affinities. Rather than creating a nexus of intensely personal associations—justified in part by the common linguistic passage from English to French—or subscribing to the narrative of the Beckettian translingual genealogy, the book’s Beckett conversations gesture at a translingual community-to-be, a reconfigured space of historical continuities and linguistic disruption that graft upon the narrative a dissident text of emancipation through deterritorialization from the center, which is the tongues and stories of the father. Finally, Limbes/ Limbo politicizes the translating instance as personal labor by nuancing the intensities of the original text, English or French, in an effort to account for the practical difficulties of linguistic transposition—a practice at odds with the linguistic and cultural doxic expectations of the target language. 3 Written in French and English and published in a bilingual edition featuring the English text on the left and the presumed French translation on the right further silences the multiplicity of voices in Limbes/Limbo, since the steps of linguistic genesis are deliberately obscured. The minorization process is brilliantly showcased in all its ambiguity: two major languages deterritorialized and reterritorialized by mirroring each other. The negative space of the translingual writer’s in-betweenness materializes in Limbes/Limbo not only as the obvious paper fold separating and virtually superimposing one language onto the other, but most importantly, as the act of self-translation—a process of displacement by minorization both vertically (palimpsest to text) and horizontally (language to language).

74  Nancy Huston

Palimpsestual Echoes in Trois fois septembre In Trois fois septembre, the resistance to story-telling is a pre-translative event: Solange’s translation is accompanied by a literal emptying of the body. In his seminal study The Translator’s Turn, Douglas Robinson suggested that [t]o the extent that it makes sense to talk of translational equivalency at all, in fact, it is a matter not so much of minds—analytical correspondences—as it is of bodies, of feel. Equivalence between a SL and a TL word or phrase is always primarily somatic: the two phrasings feel the same. (18) He describes the translative act as follows: …the translator’s body is the ground on which the artificially dualized languages—SL and TL—meet, conflow, comingle. In the act of what we might call ‘pretranslation,’…SL and TL are indistinguishable. The act of translation, then, involves…a channeling of internal heteroglossia into a current from one (SL) to the other (TL). (107) Notwithstanding the neat categorization of linguistic production into units that may at will—even though somewhat artificially as Robinson himself later concedes—self-erase to allow room for one of the two codes in question to dominate first the somatic and, second, the translative field, Robinson’s work thematizes the translator’s traditionally studied cognitive, emotional, cultural, and economic functions into embodied physicality. The Translator’s Turn steers thus the debate away from technical considerations around the modalities of “crossing over” toward aspects of the translative phenomenon that are peripheral to translation proper. In addition to being somatically marked, Solange’s translational labor far exceeds the narrative frame of a huis clos manuscript reading: In Trois fois septembre, the vivid tapestry of white, European privilege, complete with private schools and New England countryscapes, is punctuated by memories of the Holocaust and the Vietnam war. The gradual melding of both French and English into a liminal space of incomprehensibility then forcefully questions power differentials across lines of gender, social class, and race. Positioned along the same periphery that Robinson’s work inhabits, although suggesting an entirely different theoretical reading of its meanings for translation, Edwin Gentzler wonders in Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post-Translation Studies: What if translation becomes viewed less as a temporal act carried out between languages and cultures and instead as a precondition

Nancy Huston  75 underlying the languages and cultures upon which communication is based? What if we considered the political, social, and economic structures as built upon translation? (5) Gentzler articulates these questions after a thorough presentation of the post-translation studies field which, as he explains, is not only concerned with “the cultural changes that take place after the translation” (3) but paradoxically also with a more detailed look at pre-translation culture that conditions not only the production of translated texts but original writing as well. The field of post-translation studies examines those socio-political and linguistic conditions that create an environment in which highly innovative, original writing can flourish. (3–4) Logically following from this deliberate insertion of translation within historical flows that transcend source and target culture, societies, and languages, Gentzler suggests “that we rethink translation by getting rid of the many dichotomies and reimagining the cultural foundation in terms of all people being rewriters” (8). Solange reads and translates Selena’s journal. Selena writes in her journal as she reads and attempts to interpret the letters Jonathan, her Jewish-American boyfriend, sends her from Vietnam. Jonathan writes about his wartime experiences while, at his end of this layered narrative, reading and commenting on an intricate historical tapestry which collapses the Holocaust and the Vietnam war into an uninterrupted continuum of human cruelty. Readers and interpreters, the three young people are, in Gentzler’s words, rewriters of the cultural foundations informing the social, economic, and political shape that the turn of the twentieth century took in the West. How do the proposed theoretical frameworks for both Limbes/Limbo and Trois fois septembre inform or intersect with this work’s larger theoretical concern with estuarine ecosystems and why does it matter? Huston’s narratives suggest language’s initial inability to account for an environment of newly mixed waters: existing vocabularies, linguistic, or cultural operate minimally while processing the shock of encounter. New and mostly uncomfortable relationships take shape while existing relational modalities become obsolete: in Limbes/Limbo, the literary genealogy that binds Beckett to Huston comes undone; in Trois fois septembre, Selena mentally collapses and ultimately takes her life when her hitherto physically and intellectually fusional relationship with Jonathan is reduced to undecipherable letter-writing. The eminently political project of major-language-minorization that Limbes/Limbo undertakes and the peri-, pre- and post-translational stance that Trois fois septembre adopts both point to what new forms of cultural, linguistic, social, and political life the brackish waters of the estuarine ecosystem that  delineates the

76  Nancy Huston horizon of expectation in both texts will eventually see emerging: major languages minorized from within, able to think and contest their own privilege as it stratifies stultified hierarchies; and a foundational redefinition of translation as a constitutive element of human communication and as the precondition for any relationship, beyond the singularly verbal and into the somatic, the historical, the silent. In “Déracinement du savoir: un parcours en six étapes,” Nancy Huston suggests that Trois fois septembre “incarne une position linguistique presque perverse” (“occupies an almost perverse linguistic position” 23). In Writing it Twice: Self-Translation and the Making of a World Literature, Sara Kippur echoes Huston’s assessment: “…the awkwardness of the novel’s construction is both what gives it a certain aesthetic interest and what makes it untranslatable. To translate the novel into English would be to remove the layers of artifice that produce its complexity” (36–37). Perverse, awkward, and layered with artifice, Trois fois septembre is a linguistically, typographically, and thematically resistant text: it resists both French and English using one to texture the other while radically separating them on the page by means of typographical variation. It then thematizes the translational labor, the “crossing over” from one language to the other by interrupting Solange’s translation to amply annotate it. The reader experiences awkwardness and artifice visually, verbally, and narratively. She also unwillingly participates in an act of perversion. According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, when used in relation to language or linguistics, the verb “to pervert” means “to interpret incorrectly; misconstrue or distort”. A healthy number of annotations upon the translative act are occasioned by incorrect interpretations: Renée misunderstands the meaning of a word that Solange translates into French, or misconstrues its pragmatic environment and uses. There is, however, one case of “linguistic perversion” upon which neither Solange nor Renée comment notwithstanding its conspicuousness and thematic, linguistic, and theoretical ramifications for the novel as a whole. Read out loud in French by Solange, the following excerpt is written by an already mentally unstable Selena after she reads a letter Jonathan sends her from Vietnam in which he references Passover, the parting of waters and the relevant biblical quote: J’ai compris ! Enfin j’ai compris: la mer Rouge que traversent les fils d’Israël, c’est aussi le fleuve Rouge du Viêt-Nam du Nord, le Song Kôi; depuis le début, Jonathan ne cesse en effet de me répéter qu’afin de m’atteindre il doit traverser sa mère. Il est parti là-bas à cause d’elle—les eaux rouges de son ventre qui l’empêchaient de respirer—, il avait besoin de consulter un oracle lointain, c’est bien cela, pour lui arracher son droit d’être en vie (I understood! I finally understood: The Red Sea that the sons of Israel crossed is also the

Nancy Huston  77 red river in North Vietnam, the Song Kôi. Since the very beginning Jonathan has been telling me that in order to reach me he must cross his mother [mère=mother; mer=sea]. He went over there because of her—the red waters of her belly that didn’t let him breathe—he needed to consult a faraway oracle, yes, that’s it, so that he may reclaim from her the right to be alive). (194) In one of the earlier entries in Selena’s diary, she talks about Jonathan’s family and the traumatic events around their departure from Poland in 1942. According to what Jonathan knew and was able to share with Selena, he had an older brother whom the parents had to leave behind, in Warsaw, with assurances that he was going to follow them shortly after their departure, a promise that never materialized. Jonathan knew nothing about the circumstances of the parents’ escape. When Renée interrupts Solange’s reading to object that in 1942 getting out of the Warsaw ghetto and safely to New York was no longer possible, Solange adds that when Jonathan once spoke to her about the events around his parents’ arrival in New York, he noted that he thought his mother “… avait dû… faire quelque chose” (“…must have…done something” 69). In that same journal entry, Selena quotes Jonathan as describing his own birth in the following terms: “‘Je suis né en 1949, après sept ans d’hostilité de ma mère…’ et il s’est repris ‘Ma langue me trahit. Je voulais dire, de stérilité’” (“‘I was born in 1948, following seven years of maternal hostility…’ and he corrected himself ‘My language is failing me. I meant, sterility’” 68). Placing Selena’s interpretation of Jonathan’s Passover reference in the context of this earlier passage allows the bilingual reader to shed light on a linguistic impossibility, a perversion of sounds and meanings that Solange’s translation produces. Selena’s moment of clarity results from an interpretation of Jonathan’s writing that revolves around the homonymy mer/mère (mer Rouge/la mère de Jonathan). In the original English-language text that Solange is translating, this couple probably reads sea/mother (mom) creating no acoustic resonances to justify Selena’s understanding of Jonathan’s Passover reference as directly echoing his relationship to his mother. There are two plausible interpretations for this discrepancy: either Solange is distorting the text as she reads; or, Selena, who knows some French, is letting the French words for sea and mother texture her reading of Jonathan’s English-language text, creating a bilingual palimpsest which dissipates as Solange interprets—we can’t ignore the extra-narrative possibility of auctorial mistake or oversight but exploring that avenue yields results that are textually extraneous and therefore analytically less engaging. In either case, the translative act perverts the original text: the translator’s choice to either change Selena’s journal entry entirely or eliminate layers of its complexity occasions the production of a passage that for the monolingual, French-language reader, paradoxically reveals both Selena’s declining mental health and

78  Nancy Huston her brilliance as she is able to penetrate in the innermost recesses of Jonathan’s psychological turmoil. For the bilingual reader, in a narrative that thematizes translation, that foregrounds the Vauginas women’s difficulties learning English as a foreign language, this passage casts doubt on textual stability and translative accuracy in relation to both this particular journal entry and the novel as a whole (based on the language of publication, I am casting the bilingual reader of the narrative as a francophone speaker with second-language skills in English). These two very distinct reading experiences tend to converge when considered as extensions of Jonathan’s slip, earlier in Selena’s journal. Jonathan speaks of the seven years that intervened between the loss of his brother, the escape from the Warsaw ghetto and his birth as years of “maternal hostility” and, then, correcting himself, as years of “maternal sterility.” If, as Selena claims when interpreting the mer/mère homonymy, Jonathan needs to cross his mother as the Jews crossed the Red Sea, in other words, annihilate the mother to free himself from “les eaux rouges de son ventre qui l’empêchaient de respirer” (194) as Moses annihilated the threat of water delivering the Jews to the motherland, what Jonathan must truly do is deliver himself from the hostility (the red waters of the mother’s belly) that the historical and familial circumstances of his birth occasioned following a period of sterility after the loss of the first born (according to Selena, Jonathan went to Vietnam to consult a faraway oracle on how to reclaim from the hostile/sterile mother the right to be alive). Reconceptualizing the mother as hostility/sterility and the sea as an obstacle Jonathan must eliminate to be free establishes an intriguing parallel between the otherwise vastly divergent reading experiences (monolingual and bilingual): if sea means threat to be eliminated and mother echoes hostility, then the homonymy mer/mère need not necessarily be one. The thematic echoes are enough for the sea/mother couple to be metaphorically just as efficient. Translation then does not pervert so much as it varies the interpretative possibilities. Whether Solange is changing the “original” or simplifying it semantically, it is the postmemorial experiences of Jonathan, the child of Holocaust survivors who directly experiences wartime dehumanization in Vietnam himself as they clash with Selena’s perception and practice of political life in the USA that nuance this passage. It is, in other words, the post-translational difficulty the two lovers have to establish communication as their historical circumstances change: if, as Gentzler suggests, translation is the precondition of all relationality, Solange’s interpretation, Selena’s use (and misuse) of the Red Sea biblical metaphor, and Jonathan’s naming and misnaming of the seven-year period that followed the disappearance of his older brother as hostility/sterility, all converge toward a contact zone, a borderline of sorts, a potential new estuarine ecosystem, which their reconfigured circumstances (loss of mental health for Selena, loss of her best friend for Solange, wartime

Nancy Huston  79 and postmemorial trauma for Jonathan) will have to mold, negotiate, and inhabit as a new relational reality. Solange’s translational labor, the relational mode that carves spatial and temporal places out of her era’s becoming for personal, social, and political histories to collide and produce new configurations of being for the narrative’s main characters is bound to the young woman’s body. Before beginning to read and translate her friend’s journal, while mother and daughter get settled in the mother’s home for a weekend of reading and mourning, Solange runs to the bathroom, vomits, returns to the living room, and the following brief exchange follows: “-Je me vide, Maman. -Oui, je sais. -Depuis la semaine dernière, je n’arrête pas de me vider. Il ne restera bientôt plus rien. C’est comme si tout mon corps voulait se retourner comme un gant” (“I’m emptying myself, mom. -Yes, I know. -I have not stopped emptying myself since last week. Soon, there will be nothing left. It’s as if my entire body wanted to turn itself inside out, like a glove” 23). A few pages into reading her friend’s journal, Solange runs to the bathroom again. When her mother asks her whether she would like to eat something, she says: “Non, pas encore. Tout à l’heure. Quand le moment viendra, je le sentirai…” (“No, not yet. Soon. When the moment comes, I will know…” 41). Indeed, a few hours later, Solange asks for food and “[q]uelques minutes plus tard elle poursuivait, la bouche pleine” (“a few minutes later, she continued with her mouth full of food” 85). Late into the night, although convinced at the beginning of the weekend that neither one of them should sleep at all during these two days, Solange starts feeling the effects of fatigue: “[Elle] constata que non seulement son visage mais tout son corps étaient maintenant de bois: comme si ses members étaient les planches d’une vieille porte déglinguée, et ses articulations autant de gonds grinçants de rouille” (“[she] realized that not only her face but her entire body was now stiff as a board: as if all parts of her body were wood planks in an old door that’s falling to pieces, her joints like hinges squeaking with rust”131). Solange’s body, the material conduit of Selena’s journal, is first emptied, then nourished and finally allowed to rest. Selena’s journal does not inhabit Solange in a purely cognitive, linguistic, emotional or psychological manner; it turns her inside out, it physically nurtures her (Solange’s mouth is full of food and words) and it renders her body immobile. The journal that Selena prefaced in a note to her friend by the following imperative: “…à partir de maintenant / tu dois interpréter” (“…starting now / you must interpret” 24) must physically crash against Solange’s material constitution, undo and redo her body, so that, as Robinson suggests the translating subjectivity is capable of “feeling” both source and target language: “Translation succeeds best not when the translator has obeyed every cognitive rule—performed a painstaking textual analysis and planned his or her restructuring out carefully in advance— but when he or she is most sensitive to the feel of both the SL and TL

80  Nancy Huston words” (The  Translator’s Turn 17–18). Intrigued by what translation “feels” like, Robinson further theorizes the abstract sensation of feeling “at home” as the incorporation within the text of …a proprioceptive phantom, some nexus of felt experience that charges the text, any text, with the feel of reality, of ‘one’s ownness,’ of proprioception. A text that is charged with that felt experience— by individual readers, by groups of readers, by whole cultures—will feel real whether it is an original or a translation, whether it is domesticated or foreignized. (What Is Translation? Centrifugal Theories, Critical Interventions 119) The physicality of Solange’s experience, then, is not enough; the reader must also share the feeling that she can “own,” physically or otherwise, the text Solange produces. Renée, her first audience member, frequently interrupts her daughter to request an annotation, share a linguistic difficulty that she, herself, has experienced as a bilingual, exilic subject, or identify and articulate similarities between elements of American culture in the late sixties as Selena experiences them in the North-East of the USA and France. These seemingly artificial interruptions acquire new meaning if we interpret them through Robinson’s theoretical lens: Renée is inscribing her reading experience within the text Solange translates for her by means of metalinguistic processing of the estuarine conditions of contact that she is encountering. When she notes her daughter’s mistranslation of “third floor” as “troisième étage”—the French language begins numerical counting of floors after the ground floor—she is not truly correcting her daughter’s French. Renée relates one language to the other in a cognitive space which, while remaining external to the chronology and semantic progression of the narrative, is intimately meaningful to her and to her relationship with Selena. All of Renée’s relationships in her new home in the USA are necessarily formed and nurtured in translation, including her relationship with her daughter’s friend. Focusing on a minor, irrelevant linguistic detail allows her to conceptualize Solange’s interpretative labor and Selena’s descent into madness as forms of otherness that may eventually transform into estuarine environments governed by interruptions, pauses, and silence. It is worth noting that when Solange is shocked that her mother does not know the meaning of the word “raunchy” after three years of residence in the USA, Renée nonchalantly notes that she must have heard it at some point but that she has the habit of eliminating from her vocabulary words and expressions that she does not understand so that they no longer bother her. This is not a character that strives for linguistic perfection, that labors over the accuracy of meanings, or that delights in the acoustic particularities of the new language. She is a reader in search of post-translational referents that will allow her to “feel at

Nancy Huston  81 home” with the narrative. Robinson believes—contrary to Venuti and Berman—that making a text “one’s own” does not mean appropriating it to domesticating political and social ends. Quite on the contrary, in the final chapter of The Translator’s Turn, he suggests that admitting to and examining one’s ideosomatic restrictions is at the core of translational ethics: “By the ‘ethics of translation’…I mean specifically ethical growth out of ideosomatically programmed restrictions, out of controlled obedience to cultural ideals, out into the world, into a liberating confrontation with and openness to diversity” (201). Toward the end of the narrative, after Renée has confronted the translational event with a series of linguistic interrogations, she enters into Robinson’s ethical translational space by moving away from her own triumphs and deficiencies as a bilingual subject and toward, in Gentzler’s terms, a form of “rewriting.” In the late stages of the narrative, Solange reads an excerpt from a letter that Jonathan wrote to Selena from Vietnam. In response to a postcard she sent him about coleopters he notes that the only winged insects he is interested in at the present moment are helicopters (he does not fail to make note of the acoustic similarities between the two). Renée then interrupts to remark that Solange’s father used to call them “batteurs de mayonnaise” (mixer beaters for mayonnaise) (168). Her voice is so low that her daughter neither hears what she says nor does she ask for clarifications. Solange has already spoken of her father who was a medic during the Indochina war in a passage that pitted the two women against each other: the daughter considered her father’s presence in Indochina as inseparable from France’s colonial history while the mother interpreted her husband’s involvement as set apart from the country’s imperialist project since he was in Vietnam to practice medicine, notwithstanding the colonial war context. At this later stage in the novel, Renée is ready to superpose Jonathan’s experience in Vietnam, his brutal honesty about not only the damage war causes but also the cognitive dissonance he experiences when trying to reconcile his Marxist ideals with the need to kill to survive in a conflict that no longer makes sense, upon her husband’s. The two Vietnams palimpsestually echo each other by means of metaphors: helicopters that successively morph into coleopters and “batteurs de mayonnaise,” generate a tide of brackish water that Renée can no longer sidestep or circumvent. Relating to this new, mentally fragile Selena she never really knew, to her daughter–translator, and to her own past (WWII and the Holocaust, Indochina and France’s colonial wars) requires navigating these new waters with an acute ethical sense, as Robinson would have her, of the infinite intersections between the personal and the historical. Thematizing those encounters as elements of the same life narrative demands of the narrativizing subjectivity to shift continually from zones of comfort (“Ton père n’a pas fait de sale boulot au Viêt-nam. Il était médecin.” “Your father didn’t do anything wrong in Viêt-nam. He was a doctor.”) to zones of encounter

82  Nancy Huston with the incomprehensible—two people, two nationalities, two generations, one function: save human lives while the coleopters/“batteurs de mayonnaise” are chopping (Joanthan reminds Selena that they are called “choppers”) bodies to pieces. Closer to the conclusion of the narrative, Renée morphs into a translator of sorts herself. Following Solange’s translation of a passage in Selena’s journal in which the young woman shows definitive signs of mental illness, Renée interrogates the necessity of translation as an act of monodirectional interpretation. Selena tells the story of her encounter with Herman, a musician with whom she has a brief relationship while Jonathan is in Vietnam. She believes him to be Jonathan’s messenger and considers the hair on his body to be concrete proof of her intuition: it is too reminiscent of Jonathan’s body hair to be pure coincidence. Solange interrupts her reading/translating to briefly note that Selena keeps switching the spelling of the young musician’s name: sometime it’s with one, sometimes with two ns. Renée makes no comment on Solange’s remark but as soon as her daughter reads and translates the passage on body hair, she exclaims: “—Des quoi? –Des poils. The hair. –Ah! Voilà pourquoi il s’appelle Herman! L’ homme velu!  –Mais non, Maman. Ce n’est pas Air-mann, c’est HHHHeur-mann. –Son homme à elle, alors? Her man? –N’importe quoi. –Oh! J’essaie de rigoler un peu!…” (“—The what? –The hair [Des poils]. The hair [in English]. –Aha! That’s why his name is Herman! The hairy man! –No, mom. It’s not Air-mann [the letter “h” has no phonetic realization in French], it’s HHHHeur-mann. –Her guy, then? Her man [in English]? –Nevermind. –Come on! I’m just joking around…” 201). While this brief exchange can certainly be read as the effort of a mother to provide comic relief for an emotionally, cognitively, and physically exhausted daughter, it also provides valuable insight into Renée’s ability to navigate unknown translational waters. It is unrealistic to think that after three years of residence in the USA as a parent to two kids, a toddler and a teenage daughter, and an active member of the country’s workforce, Renée would have trouble understanding the meaning of the word “hair.” The context may have troubled her because the word for body hair (poils) in French is different from the word that describes head hair (cheveux). The ludic association that she establishes between hair and Herman, however, points to a concern different from lexical equivalency. Her mispronunciation of the word “hair” produces the “hairy man” echo while the more acoustically faithful yet still phonetically incorrect “her” realization that she offers later creates the “her man” interpretation. While Herman’s presence in the narrative, and especially Selena’s comments about his body hair, are a clear indication of the young woman’s diminishing mental clarity, it is also the beginning of the last few hours that mother and daughter will spend together: from this passage in the narrative onward the typographically distinct

Nancy Huston  83 passages that relate dialogue/narration in the present time between Solange and Renée are longer while the journal passages are shorter more fragmentary and certainly less cohesive. The short, comic interlude that produced the “hairy man” and “her man” interpretations marks perhaps the narrative moment in which the waters of the estuary start mixing: no new environment, no new life has of yet developed, but the conditions for nutrients and oxygen to travel freely between previously radically separate bodies of matter are in place. Renée’s comments, irrational, facetious, and entirely unmotivated as they are, steer Solange toward a type of translation that does not require “bearing across” but rather relating anew. In “Autotraduction et figures du dédoublement dans la production de Nancy Huston,” Valeria Sperti notes that “…la narration parcourt et s’inscrit dans le sillage d’un autre texte, intime, dans ce cas un dernier témoignage écrit dans une langue autre que celle de l’amie lectrice française” (“… narration travels along and inscribes itself within the path of an intimate, other text; in this case, a final testimony written in a language other than the French friend’s and reader’s” 70). Trois fois septembre becomes an echo chamber within which, as Jan Hokenson suggests in “History and the self-translator,” Huston deploys language(s) stereoscopically: “…self-translators…labour to construct texts in which we can often discern, stereoscopically, two social systems and their canons set into a unique relationship, inter-echoing” (55). These two metaphors, Sperti’s trace and Hokenson’s stereoscope, spatially mold the estuarine contact zone that the novel promises by bringing Renée and Solange, an ontologically “other” Selena (mentally ill and now dead), Jonathan, and the superposed histories of coloniality and of the Holocaust as well as a critical appreciation of French imperialism all within the same realm of relational coexistence. Layers of histories, personal, cultural, and linguistic, not only echo each other—an echo after all is imitative and sterile—but creatively learn how to position themselves at the intersection of their multiple encounter points.

Limbes/Limbo: Undermining the Major Limbes/Limbo is a text difficult to categorize and certainly resistant to thematic unity. In a style reminiscent of stream-of-consciousness, it strives to concretize in mostly linguistic and existential terms the space its title designates. Heavily influenced by the theatrics of the absurd and conscious of the challenge posed by the inevitable use of language—or rather languages—as building blocks in the process of deconstructing speech, it is riddled with instances of non-sequential progression and against-the-grain reasoning—structuring techniques which in and of themselves suffice to deterritorialize meaning and question the legitimacy of language as Logos. At the outset of Limbes/Limbo, the narrative voice sets the stage for the continual destabilization of language

84  Nancy Huston that the book performs as a whole: language’s ability to assign meaning to the words it produces is questioned. Silence is then presented as a viable alternative. As the text unfolds, there is a disquieting sense that language is an external imposition that neutralizes the assumed difference between being-as-linguistic-agency and speaking, ultimately reducing both to silence. This leads the speaking voice to the necessity of its body’s dismemberment, followed by the undoing of Huston’s genealogy as foreigner, and finally the refusal of all genealogies and the wish to exist without language. After looking at language as an inadequate expression of both the collective and the intensely personal, the narrative voice interpellates Beckett, the translingual father, and positions him as interlocutor in a diatribe on the compulsion to utter nonsensical speech. Under the watchful (if not detached) Beckettian eye, the speaking voice successively doubts its own legitimacy, fights the unreasonable expectations of the father, and undercuts the medium of expression at hand: writing. Although nothing she writes will ever be enough, there is very little she can do to stop words from being spoken. The narrative voice leaves us with the promise of speaking a truth of momentous significance, only to silence itself promising to circle around to language once again (57). What self-translation achieves in addition to the structurally and thematically deterritorializing narrative modalities that Huston puts in place, is the destabilization of the original by its not-yet-reached translational horizon. The fifth section4 of Limbes/Limbo is a good example of the virtual translation’s intrusion into the original in view of a deterritorialization of its linguistic identity. Following Huston’s suggestion that both being and speaking should be reduced to silence, the single paragraph section, originally written in English,5 begins with the literal dismemberment of the narrative voice’s body: “Here: I pluck off my fingers one by one and drop them on the…what’s that thing called down there, the floor? The ceiling? The flour? With what will I pluck off my nose, now that my fingers are gone? Here, have a foot!” (22/24). The phonetic similarities between “floor” and “flour” suggest that the inability to linguistically distinguish between floor and ceiling is phonetic in nature as well—an unmotivated difficulty in English. Forced into foreign territory and unable to mean by phonetic interplay of signifiers, the “floor”/“ceiling” ambiguity shifts to the signified and speaks in primarily spatial terms, forcing the reader to conceptualize the speaking subject’s predicament as a problematic positioning within an ill-structured interior space with inversed or simply uncertain boundaries. Accounting then for the third question (“The flour?”) in a series of interrogations meant to configure space leads to the voluntary creation of a non-sequential and borderline nonsensical text meant to mirror the annihilating act of the body’s deconstruction by its own members: just as “flour” bears no resemblance to its neighboring and syntactically

Nancy Huston  85 analogous terms, effacing, in fact, their signifying potential by imposing upon them the only meaning that unites them in their difference from its own signification (notion of space), so does the dismemberment of the physical body either not obviously relate or appear fundamentally antithetical to the materiality of the constructed space around it. As a matter of fact, the body’s undoing is only possible if one allows for a radical contraction of space and matter—one that would permit the ideal of self-absorption and reduction to nothingness, to literally take place, to occupy space despite its negative spatial value. As language carves meanings out of sets of differences and oppositions, the disappearance of the body is etched into the signifying difference between a set of spatially definable terms and a third word, seemingly unrelated, yet of critical linguistic agency in the production of the contraction that will render “ceiling” and “floor” the coordinates of space as a negative, self-annihilating value. English, the host language, adjusts the edges and confines of its signifying oppositionalities to accommodate the now modal third term, and by so doing finds itself slightly off center,6 deterritorialized. The introduction of the destabilizing third term is a direct consequence of the narrator’s bilingualism, and inscribes itself into the potential horizon of self-translation. The presence of French both as bilingual subtext and target language nuances lexical and syntactical choices in English, and thus directly influences or alters significations. The translation of the passage in which the body comes undone reads as follows: “Voici: je m’arrache les doigts un à un et je les laisse tomber sur le…comment ça s’appelle, là-bas? plafond? plancher? Avec quoi pourrai-je m’arracher le nez, maintenant que mes doigts sont partis? Tiens, prends un pied!” (23/25). The phonetic similarities between “plafond” and “plancher,” the lack of a third term that would foreground the spatial signification of the two existing words as well as the presence of a phonetically constructed third term, the morpheme [pla], mirroring, on the one hand, the characteristic surface quality of both “plafond” and “plancher”— their flatness that clashes by definition with the three-dimensionality of space—and, on the other hand, the signifying insignificance of the succession of two words and the constructed third term, which in unison closely resemble the nonsensical bla bla bla, create a vantage point from which to read the English original. Although chronologically subsequent, the French text forms and thematically informs the original English and is, in its turn, fashioned by it. If we assign to the French palimpsest the agency for the awkward but productive sequence of the terms “floor,” “ceiling,” and “flour,” how are we to detect the English text (both as original and bilingual subtext) in the French translation? Is the creation of negative space as deterritorializing force still operative in the French, or has it lost its currency? The inclusion of “flour” in the English text is justified by the phonetic discrepancy in English between the Frenchinspired “ceiling” and “floor.” Its exclusion from the French translation

86  Nancy Huston is phonetically legitimate but thematically problematic, since it leaves a void that the quasi-homophonies and productive potential of the French text do not quite fill. The intensity of self-annihilation and the body’s tendency toward nothingness (or rather toward a negatively constructed space), however, is no less present in the French translation than it is in the English original. What is demonstrably different in the French text is the resistance of its lexicon to concretize the spatial coordinates of the body’s annihilation process—that is, if we consider as actively communicative only those linguistic elements physically present in the translation, either inscribed or voiced. If we were to assign meaning to the translated text’s absences, however, we could suggest a different spatial configuration. In more practical terms, the silencing of the word “flour,” resulting primarily from a lack of phonetic necessity, is significant in a twofold manner: it acknowledges the French language’s palimpsestual and, by the same token, deterritorializing force in the English original, and it creates a fold within which the flatness of “plancher”/“plafond” may position itself as a negation of verticality and/or three-dimensionality and as a reflection of the self-annihilating body—in other words, mirroring of an essentializing process: body reduced to voice, the three-dimensional interior space reduced to a mono-dimensional surface. In the English original, the disappearing body is nestling itself in the fault-line created by the incursion of the French palimpsest. In the French translation, the transference of meaning from English creates a fault of its own, literally: the absence of “flour” and the quasi-identity in phonetic terms of “plancher” (floor) and “plafond” (ceiling) shorten the textual distance between the plucking of the fingers and the urgency with which the inability to pluck the nose is contemplated—thus collapsing the space, literal and physical, separating the different stages of self-effacement, conferring signifying power to the negative spatial contraction of the target language, its silences, and its faults. The deterritorialization of the target language is then not so much a consequence of signifying destabilization through the palimpsestual presence of the mother tongue, but rather the end result of a condensation and contraction process that carries meaning over from the source to the target language, aiming all the while at the distillation and intensification of the original’s significations. Much critical attention has been given to the complementarity of French and English in Limbes/Limbo. In “L’étrangeté rassurante de la ‘bilangue’ chez Abdelkébir Khatibi et Nancy Huston,” Névine El Nossery has noted that the two texts’ interdependence points to the insufficiency of any one language to fully express the human experience of the bilingual subject: …une relation de complémentarité et de contiguïté s’établit entre les deux textes, ils s’éclairent mutuellement, voire se complètent

Nancy Huston  87 dans une dialectique d’interaction et d’empiétement réciproque… [E]ntre les deux langues il y aurait une affinité des langues qui se mêlent, reflétant par conséquent les insuffisances des langues, leurs manques et leurs faiblesses (…the two texts have a complimentary and contiguous relationship, they illuminate each other, they even complete each other in a dialectic of interaction and reciprocal encroachement. Between the two languages there would exist, then, a linguistic affinity of tongues that combine reflecting thus their insufficiencies, deficiencies and weaknesses). (395) In “The Space Between: Self-Translator Nancy Huston’s Limbes/Limbo,” Nicola Danby suggested that the two versions’ complementarity augments the potential of both texts: “the translations—or French and English counterparts—create a double reading or a combined meaning which is greater than each of the meanings contained in the texts, if examined individually” (84), an idea echoed in Genevieve Waite’s “Nancy Huston’s Polyglot Texts: Linguistic Limits and Transgressions” which argues that Huston’s text “does not present a perfect linguistic ‘double’ of itself. Rather, Huston provides what appear to be enriching and enlightening extensions of both versions of the text” (106). In “L’écriture en langue étrangère comme pratique et comme poétique: Le cas de deux écrivains ‘francographes,’ Nancy Huston et Andreï Makine,” Alice Duhan detects in the slight alterations that each version occasions in the semantic character of the other a tool for narrative development: “…le texte anglais et le texte français disposés côte à côte dans le livre rebondissent l’un sur l’autre, chacun détournant légèrement les mots de l’autre pour relancer le récit” (“… the English and French texts, placed next to each other as they are, build on each other, each slightly altering the words of the other to give new life to the narrative” 224). It is the propelling rather than the completing aspect of “complementarity” as Alice Duhan suggests, the element of inevitable linguistic and cultural perverting that bilingual texts perform and the subsequent mutual readjustment that their perversion prompts that not only move the shared narrative forward but also deterritorialize national, social, and political certainties. El Nossery’s and Damby’s focus on complementarity (echoing, once again, Benjamin and the broken vessel) suggests that translation takes fragmented, incomplete narratives and makes them somehow whole, assimilating one within the other, allowing the more privileged within each particular power dynamic to absorb and efface the other— an antithesis to the mechanics, physics, and biology of Huston’s estuary. In fact, critics have often thought of translation in Limbes/Limbo in terms of comprehension/apprehension. As Valeria Sperti notes in “Autotraduction et figures du dédoublement dans la production de Nancy Huston,” “[d]ans Limbes/Limbo, le flux de conscience et le démantèlement des mécanismes ordinaires du langage…amplifiés par la présence de

88  Nancy Huston deux idiomes, thématise et inscrit l’appropriation de l’autre dans le texte et par l’écriture” (“[i]n Limbes/Limbo, the flow of consciousness and the undoing of ordinary linguistic mechanisms…amplified as they are by the presence of two languages, thematize and inscribe the appropriation of the other in the text, by the act of writing” 73). In “The self-translator as rewriter,” Susan Bassnett also intimates that an apprehensive process is at work suggesting that when the self-translation is complete “the gaps are closed, the process has become a healing one and the self-translator is no longer caught between languages but able to exist fully in both” (16)—the assumption behind Bassnett’s argument being that there is a third term, a language or a text that is whole, pure, and unadulterated (possibly the writer’s artistic idiom, as Andreï Makine would have it), a passport of sorts that allows the writer peaceful entry into both English and French. As Pascale Sardin-Damestray explains in “Samuel Beckett / Nancy Huston ou le bilinguisme de malentendus en contrefaçons: Deux expériences similaires?” Huston …parodie dans Limbes le style ‘du vieux Sam’ pour certes lui témoigner son admiration, mais aussi, et surtout, pour le ‘traduire’ dans son idiome à elle, pour mieux l’apprivoiser, le privant par cette ‘authentique contrefaçon’ de sa voix à lui, tuant par le geste même qui l’honore ce père spirituel (…parodies ‘old Sam’s’ style to both express her admiration for him but also, and most importantly, to ‘translate’ him into her own language, to better tame him, denying him by means of this ‘authentic forgery’ his own voice and killing the spiritual father by a gesture that is also meant to honor him). (259) The use of the verb “apprivoiser” (tame) establishes a de facto hierarchical relationship pitting Beckett’s artistic idiom against Huston’s. Configuring the spiritual father/daughter relationship in these terms suggests that once the fight is won—or lost—there is no reason for Huston to revisit, renegotiate, or simply continue interrogating her affinities or disagreements with Beckett. The two of them are henceforth locked in a binary with a specific and unalterable power dynamic. Jane Elisabeth Wilhem and Carolyn Shread have fought this critical tendency to lock texts and subjectivities into position. In “Redefining Translation Through Self-Translation: the Case of Nancy Huston,” Carolyn Shread argues that [i]t is because both writing and translation enable the performance of alternate identities that they are compelling and necessary activities: our need to move beyond individual subjectivities into subjectivities-as-encounter is met…, despite the dominant accounts of writing that posit the heroic, self-coinciding individual as the source of creative expression. (61–62)

Nancy Huston  89 In “Autour de Limbes/Limbo: un hommage à Samuel Beckett de Nancy Huston,” Wilhem emphasizes the importance of distance that Huston establishes between both texts/languages/cultures: “L’auto-traduction, pour elle, est la meilleure façon de rester à ‘la marge,’ comme elle dit, de mesurer l’écart et de préserver la distance qui sont les conditions mêmes de la compréhension ou de l’intelligence des signes” (“For her, self-translation is the best way to remain in ‘the margins’, as she says, the best way to measure the gap and maintain the distance which together are the conditions for comprehending or understanding signs” 72)—to comprehend (understand; grasp mentally) one must not comprehend (encompass). The concluding sentences of Limbes/Limbo’s fifth section resist both understanding and incorporation. Following a rather stream-ofconsciousness middle section that contemplates in a mostly playful manner the absurdity of life, the speaking voice notes: “Come on, now, this is serious. It’s nothing to laugh about. If you keep on laughing we’ll rip out your spleen. Where exactly is the spleen, anyhow? I smell a rat” (24). The deconstruction of the body that was introduced in the opening lines of the section as a self-erasing act is revisited here as an act of aggression inflicted upon the unidentified interlocutor by a nebulous “we” that we have to assume includes the self-annihilating “I” of the beginning. The choice of organ is a felicitous one as the spleen’s melancholy and laughter-related connotations confer on it an inherent signifying contradiction that is strengthened by the narrator’s difficulty to locate it in the body, after enunciating the threat of its removal. Aggression disintegrates into the overall absurd movement of the fifth section and culminates with a direct reference to Beckett and “Play,” a sentence seemingly irrelevant to the spleen aggression, which, if taken in any signifying seriousness, only adds to the section’s orientation toward the nonsensical. Mirroring the interlocutor’s lack of concentration and jollity, the passage’s last sentence undermines its menacing content of as well as any possibility of inscription within a reasonably decodable whole. The Beckettian quote also serves as the introduction to the sixth section and its overt commentary on foreignness and absurdity, presented as similar if not mutually reinforcing conditions. The French self-translation suggests a somewhat different interpretative narrative: “Sérieux, maintenant. Fini de rire. Si vous riez, c’est la rate que l’on arrachera. Où elle est d’ailleurs la rate ? Il y a un os” (25). The sequence spleen-rat of the English original is not necessarily then a suggestion to break with textual cohesion in favor of the absurd, but rather an echo of the original’s French palimpsest. Two more observations seem worth noting: the phonetic and morphemic identity between “rate” (female rat) and “rate” (spleen) in French as well as the narrator’s choice to translate the Beckettian quote into French not as the author translated it himself in Comédie,7 but rather using an idiomatic French expression with equivalent signifying value. If the narrator’s choice to return to the body’s

90  Nancy Huston deconstruction by attacking the spleen in the original was the result of French linguistic resonances, why not keep the historically and literarily sanctioned Beckettian translation that would allow for the “rate”/“rat” quasi-homophony in a text that apparently revels in the absurd, and opt for a very reasonable and doxic translation? The deconstructive movement begun at the outset of section five and concluded with the Beckett quote has achieved a doubly deterritorializing effect: after its initial reconfiguration of space in both English and French by means of negation and contraction respectively, it has literally disorientated both languages by gesturing at each other’s translational horizon without, nonetheless, ever positioning itself within it. Although “I smell a rat” owes much of its textual genesis to the French “rate,” it remains ambiguous whether the contiguity is phonetic (“rate” meaning spleen) or signifying (“rate” meaning female rat). Similarly, the exclusion of Beckett’s translation destabilizes the very process of annihilation set in motion by the gradual undoing of the body at the beginning of the fifth section. While the original moves from the last threat against physical integrity to an enunciation meant to gesture at both Beckett and the absurd, the self-translation inverts the process of self-annihilation by introducing a bone (“Il y a un os”) with a doubly structural purpose: prop up the failing body and tell the complex story (il y a un os=there is a hitch) of self-translation by reconfiguring its genealogical center away from Beckett. The narrator’s relationship with Samuel Beckett, her presumed translingual center, is a complex one. In section six he serves as reconstruction material for the previously effaced, currently reassembled body: “Beckett, my brother, my foot. At last I feel (ugly word, feel) close to you. At last your language is limpid to my, what, brain, heart, foot” (24). Although the French translation does not differ significantly from the original, the use of the formal “you” in its pronominal and adjectival forms, “vous” and “votre” respectively (25), undercuts the closeness that rhythm, syntax, and vocabulary suggest in the English-language text. Furthermore, the statement that foreigners must have invented the absurd—an opinion based, according to the narrator, on Beckett’s use of languages and silences—is followed by explicit references to three of Ionesco’s plays (La cantatrice chauve, Les chaises, and Rhinocéros), to Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropismes (“And only a Russian expatriate would choose to spend her time spying on sub-conversation in French”), and to Gertrude Stein (“Stein the stone”), without any gesture at Beckett the author or any of his works. The French translation neither alters nor excludes passages of the original, with two notable exceptions: the reference to Nathalie Sarraute, and the literal translation into English of Stein’s name. The effacement process that began in the previous section with the attempt at self-erasure, although subsequently reversed, points not only to Deleuze and Guattari’s positioning of the individual within the

Nancy Huston  91 collectivity—in this case, a community of exile and foreignness constructed on the basis of intellectual kinship—but most importantly, to the unity-ensuring center’s destabilization. The gradual silencing of Beckett in both original and translation as well as Sarraute’s absence from the translation and Stein’s elliptical transference suggest a willful suppression of the most readily accessible, linguistically familial elements within the exilic community. If deterritorialization is to be achieved by means of decentering, distancing one’s self from the very languages that constitute one’s communicational instruments is what facilitates the reconfiguration and broadening of the community’s linguistic confines. Similarly, introducing a third language, German, genetically closer to the mother tongue and, in fact, acquired in childhood, thanks to the one who, historically, replaced the biological mother,8 suggests a process of familial and biographical anchoring that counters the decentering movement. Finally, Sarraute, a francophone author whom the narrator has most likely read in French, makes an anonymous appearance in the English version only to be excluded from its cultural and linguistic hometext. Sarraute’s complete effacement from and non-replacement in the French translation, corrects the linguistic economy of a self-translation too doxic for its own defamiliarizing good: after a number of fairly explicit references to Ionesco that closely follow the English-language text, the French self-translation runs the risk of speaking a language too familiar to its own literary history. The subsequent passage from a rhinoceros to Stein duly unsettles the cultural assumptions of the French self-translation deterritorializing the translingual French literary canon as effectively as does the brief but productive English quote (“My tailor is rich”), which, by echoing both the Assimil method for learning English as a foreign language (the “Collection sans peine” series) and Astérix chez les Bretons (“Mon tailleur est riche”), silences the original by rendering it incapable of signifying in its own linguistic medium. While inscribing herself within the long tradition of artistic exile in general and literary expatriates in particular, Huston uses self-translation to regulate the intensities of translingual voices and to create a community wherein her role as isolated epigone is one of undermining correspondences and tangentially repositioning both linguistic and cultural affinities. Huston’s deliberate undoing of traditional genealogies in view of a reconfiguration of the translingual community-to-be within which she positions herself, is further pursued in the following section of Limbes/ Limbo, which opens with a meditation on the absurdity of human civilization’s elevation of the act of procreation to the status of legend, myth, and metaphysics. These introductory reflections end with a rhetorically empty question, followed by a series of nonsensical statements: “A qui profite le crime? Voilà la question. A côté de celle-là, être ou ne pas être: fadaises. Ou farandoles, au choix. O, chois. Cha che chaurait,

92  Nancy Huston chi ch’était drôle…” (29). Originally written in French, the “ch” consonance highlights and undermines in both its articulatory deficiency (mispronunciation of the phoneme [s]) and its encouragement of silence (hypertextual repetition of “chut”) two of the passage’s major thematic axes: the centrality of childbearing as the herald of future growth, both demographic and spiritual, and the intellectual mutism resulting from the necessity of association with genealogical formations. The following paragraph exemplifies the text’s emancipatory promise: “Ah! ne plus être dans aucune langue. Ne plus languir. N’être. La bonne blague. Enfin, couci-couça” (29). The question of language is introduced in a rather abrupt manner. Read as further commentary on linguistic inadequacies, Huston’s wish to bypass language and position the speaking self within the confines of the silence to which the end of her previous paragraph has eloquently gestured can be interpreted as a challenge to historical continuities through the negation of genealogical permanencies (“Ne plus être…”). This reading, however, requires a semantic equation between language and being that the double negation “ne plus” and “aucune” renders fairly problematic, since it does not tolerate the alternative of being in language. The devoicing of both life and language is further complicated by the introduction of “ne plus languir,” a promise of invigoration in the aftermath of linguistic necessity. Finally, the doubly signifying “n’être” suggests a new form of genealogy, a birth (in the homonym “naître”) that signifies its own annihilation at the very moment of its enunciation. The concluding “La bonne blague. Enfin, couci-couça.” departs entirely from the being-in/withoutlanguage debate, expressing rather the writer’s self-doubt of her linguistic choices. The unresolved tension between language and birthing is then transferred to the English self-translation: “Oh! To be released from the obligation to live in any tongue! To relinquish language, once and for all! To vanquish lanquish. That’s a good one. Well, so-so” (28). The self-translation radically alters the meaning of the original French by omitting both the verb “to be” and any allusion to birth. Emancipation from language is not construed as a form of existential anguish but rather as a release—the end of a term of imprisonment imposed upon the speaker by the same agent to whom she ascribes the decision of her liberation. Languor is similarly replaced by a forceful separation from one’s tongue(s) “once and for all.” Not only is the promise of invigoration lost in the self-translation, but it is further suppressed by a sense of finality absent from the original. Finally, the ambiguity of “n’être/naître” is glossed over by a timid gesture at “languish”—appearing in the text in the phonetically corrupt form “lanquish”—in view of its ultimate containment as articulated by the militarily aggressive “vanquish” and “quish,” an obsolete noun signifying thigh armor, present in both “vanquish” and “lanquish.” The English self-translation then silences the philosophical complexities of the French original by transforming them

Nancy Huston  93 into an uncomplicated and resolute escape from language. By making an abstraction of genealogy, the English version bypasses the previous section’s community of forefathers constructing a space of historical and literary freedom from within which the narrator may operate, privileged with the luxury of its linguistic and cultural parthenogenesis. When, in the following paragraph, the original switches from French to English, the genealogical urgency switches linguistic media as well: “Everyone is someone but I, who know that all of us are no one. Sshh. Don’t tell. Mum’s the word. And our mummies and daddies before us and our sons and daughters behind us. Or below us” (28/30). The idiomatic expression “Mum’s the word” ushers into the text a litany of necessary familial communities of ancestors and progeny with the express intention of silencing them by emphasizing their deficit of being (“all of us are no one”) and, hence, the inability to signify as biological narratives constitutive of the speaker’s identity. What the French self-translation does is quite different: “Tout le monde est quelqu’un sauf moi, qui sait que tout le monde est personne. Chut ! Motus ! Bouche cousue ! Mais comment coudre lorsqu’il faut éternellement en découdre, en amont avec mamounette et papounet, en aval avec tous les fistons et fillettes en puissance” (29/31). The first significant discrepancy between original and self-translation is the absence of phonetic or lexical links between the imposition of silence and the interrogation of genealogy (“mum’s the word” and “mums” in the original). The word that effectuates the transition between the two and subsequently initiates discussion on familial ties in the self-translation is “cousue” (literally, “sewed”) later rearticulated in its infinitive form, “coudre” and the infinitive of its same-root antonym, “découdre.” The uninvited, rather stream-of-consciousness appearance of mothers and fathers in the original English is recast as a logical reflection on the necessities of genealogical warfare: How can one silence the narrative of family when the undoing of family histories entails the conferral of articulatory power to the “bouche cousue” that should not utter the secret and riddle of non-being (“tout le monde est personne”)? Another noticeable divergence of the self-translation from the original is the unreality, the un-being of the offspring, only acknowledged in its potentiality (“tous les fistons et fillettes en puissance”). The ambiguously positioned ancestors and progeny of the English—the parents are placed before the narrator, the children behind or below her—mirror and reinforce the inevitability of life’s cyclical motion, whereas the French self-translation’s family members succeed each other in a neatly chronological linearity that may or may not impose its own continuation upon biological necessity. In other words, silencing the secret of nonexistence, non-inscription within familial tales and genealogies prompted by “Bouche cousue!”—incidentally, an outmoded expression gesturing, as does “Mum’s the word!”, at language’s lexical genealogies—signals

94  Nancy Huston in the French self-translation a process of elective deconstruction of ancestry, an act of language and enunciation firmly controlled by a lucid speaking subject who ultimately displaces the disorientated voice of the English original and may speak the promise of a future community as the narrator moves from renouncing silence (“Mais comment coudre…”) to methodically unraveling the unique to the French selftranslation “tissu de mensonge, dégoulinant de sens” (“weave of lies, dripping meaning” 31). In addition to deterritorialization and the effacement of the individual behind the collectivity, Deleuze and Guattari suggest the politicization of personal labor as a constituent element of minorization processes. In Limbes/Limbo, self-translation is politicized by virtue of its positioning as self-conscious commentary or meta-translation in the stead of the doxic target language rendition of the original text. Instances of self-translating self-reflexivity are both deterritorializing, as they undo linguistic and cultural assumptions about translation reflective of target language orthodoxies,9 and often consonant to the processes of genealogical reconfiguration since, in many instances, they relate directly to Huston’s literary and linguistic affinities with Samuel Beckett. In particular, once the narrative voice turns to Beckett after asserting language’s failure as means of intercommunal as well as interpersonal communication, in section 11 of the text (originally written in English with few interspersed passages in French) it stages a dialogue of sorts with the translingual father meant to voice the hesitations, difficulties, and failures of the self-translating act by thematically reflecting on the condition of literary epigonism and structurally sabotaging translational expectations as it moves from source to target language: Beckett beckons. Come with me my pretty miss, and let us leap to the abyss. What is a miss? Mister Lister kissed his sister. Do you realize what you’re saying? How can you possibly—After all I’ve— And you just go and—Well I won’t stand for it. Then what do you stand for? (38) Framed by the repetition of the phonetic sequence “beck,” Beckett’s mot d’ordre, doubly commanding as it signifies submission and by the same token speaks the name of the father, suggests a movement toward the silence to which the end of the previous section has already gestured. In a Beckettian vein, the narrator questions the meaning of the word “miss” only to divert her attention from semantics and construct a nonsensical sentence on the principle of assonance. The repetition of “s” points to the speaker’s insubordination and her rejection of a designation which, by definition, assigns her to a position of gender-specific inferiority: by diverting the “s” sound from its original context to a playful yet potentially explosive linguistic environment of loose cultural reference

Nancy Huston  95 and incestuous undertones she disassociates herself from the assumed genealogy positing her relationship to Beckett in the margins of transgression, at several removes of any necessity—biological, ideological, linguistic or other. The father retorts with a sequence of unfinished invectives aimed at the interlocutor’s sense of indebtedness. The relationship is further challenged when the narrative voice questions the very significance of her interlocutor’s position, intimating the derivative or representational nature of his authority (“What do you stand for?”). The French self-translation comments on the meaning of the original rather than transferring it into the target language: Beckett me hèle. Laissez là raison et rime, sautons gaiement dans l’abîme. Je le suis, je me suis aussi. Tu te rends compte de ce que tu dis? Comment peux-tu—Après tout ce que j’ai—Et voilà que tu te permets de—Eh bien! ça ne se passera pas comme ça. Comme une lettre à la poste. Comme un oiseau sur la branche. (39) The absurdity of “Mister Lister kissed his sister” is replaced in the self-translation by a sentence which, rather than breaking with its inherent semantic and genealogical continuities, apparently subscribes to the sense of subservience vigorously resisted by the original. Figuring in the self-translation alone, “Je le suis, je me suis aussi” (“I follow him, I also follow myself”) breaks semantically free from the original and signifies as translative act. The narrator’s leap to the abyss following Beckett’s lead points then to the pregnant void inscribed by the other language’s obliteration, which positions the self-translator within the negative fold of signification. The silent space of the source language is filled with a reflection on the act of self-translation as locus of genealogical reconfigurations that restore the position of the father in the text, but only as he relates to the enunciative practices of his descendent. The ambiguity of “Je le suis,” which could be interpreted as “I am [the abyss],” fully inverting the father-daughter relationship, suggests a radical challenge to the very essence of epigonism, since it transcends temporal linearity and celebrates the negative fold as self-generating and self-sustaining, beyond genealogical and hierarchical considerations. Whether in or at the origin of the void, the self-translation’s challenge extends beyond the confines and characteristics of the translingual community-to-be, to the editorial and eminently political realm of dominant translational practices. Huston’s refusal to treat translation as transposition and transference weakens both source and target languages’ translational assumptions, since it advances the following propositions: first, the playful phonetic variation on [s] in English has no equivalent or rather equals non-enunciation in French and, second, the polysemic ambiguity of the French can find no satisfactory textualization in English. Suggesting the impossibility of a language’s phonetic and lexical apparatus to render a foreign tongue’s

96  Nancy Huston meaning not only undermines the target language’s hegemonic position vis-à-vis the source tongue, or vice-versa, but, most significantly, assigns to the traditionally invisible translator the materiality and intellectual significance she was never meant to share with the author. Although the last two sentences of the French self-translation (“Comme une lettre à la poste. Comme un oiseau sur la branche”) mirror the repetition of “stand” in the English original by duplicating the preceding statement’s penultimate word (“ça ne se passera pas comme ça”—italics mine)—same word, different semantic environment—, they signify differently. The narrator’s inquiry into Beckett’s beliefs, her search for his ideological foundation (“Then what do you stand for?”) presumably meant to challenge the inevitability of a seemingly patronizing and hierarchical genealogy, is translated by two idiomatic expressions in the foreign tongue, one suggesting effortlessness and the other signifying uncertainty. The lack of signifying correspondence between original and self-translation is at once an expression of dissent from a Beckettian genealogy rooted in the act of self-translation that Beckett and Huston share in addition to their languages of literary expression, and a commentary on the quality of the self-translation itself. Huston uses the foreign language as a mirror to the native tongue that will not refuse to signify but will rather reflect on the process of its other’s transference into a different linguistic code. The theoretical underpinnings of the self-translator’s art are then summarized in the binary structure of antithetical modalities: ease and uncertainty, facility of composition and difficulty of reiteration in the other language. After a series of questions in the French text lacking equivalents in the English original and signifying as annotations of the self-translating process (“Qu’est-ce que ça représente? A quoi ça rime?”), the effortlessness/uncertainty juxtaposition is illustrated by the concluding selftranslation  of a rather garrulous English original: “Ce que je voulais dire, c’est: Basta. Deux syllabes. Zut, encore raté” (39). The original reads as follows: “What I wanted to say was—Basta. Two syllables. Foiled again. You fiend! You villain! You basta! You turd” (38). The English original introduces a third language with the Italian word “basta” positing as alternative phonetic realization of “bastard.” The French self-translation, much less prolific than the original, limits itself to “basta’s” conventional signification with the addition of the narrative voice’s certainty that something is not quite working. The association between the two-syllable word, the agent of the narrator’s defeat, and “bastard” is entirely absent from the French, which seems to be acknowledging its inability to transfer meaning from the original: what is “raté” (“unsuccessful”) is the translation itself, powerless as it is to render the scatological context in the original paragraph—the selftranslation is more ludic than specifically scatological—as well as the condemnatory-verging-on-vulgar vocabulary that directly implicates the

Nancy Huston  97 two-syllable “basta”/Beckett. The self-translation is, thus, presented as an alternative to genealogical pressures: although translating one’s self in the second part of the twentieth century into either the native English or the foreign French carries Beckettian resonances, the subjection of the transference process to self-reflection and meta-language (“représente,” “rime,” “raté”) liberates both languages from the necessity of linguistic and, by the same token, historical or genealogical equivalence. Additionally, the self-reflexivity of the very personal translating labor minorizes both English and French as dominant languages, not only within the frame of editorial and economic politics, but most significantly in Huston’s case, as languages of the numerous Anglophone translingual communities in France and their genealogies. Huston’s text makes of Beckettian silences and immobilities a dynamic, self- conscious commentary on literary and intellectual lineages. Interestingly enough, the last section of  Limbes/Limbo is the only one to entirely eliminate from the self-translation Beckettian echoes of the original. Heavily focused on birthing, living, and their discontents, the concluding section of the book, originally written in English, points to Beckett both as intellectual forefather and tormented artist: “Now. Breathe deeply. Om is where the Art is. Don’t give me that Krapp. Stop crooning at me” (56). The French self-translation reads as follows: “Maintenant. Respirez profondément, faites preuve de savoir-vivre. Ne me faites pas rire” (57). The creative anxiety of the original brought about by a conflation of the artistic father, the divine provenance of the universe, and the tormented writer is absent from the self-translation. No reference is made to home as origin or art as identity-defining life force or even Krapp, the literary character, the protagonist of either Eleutheria or Krapp’s Last Tape, the visible link to Beckett and the justification for interpreting the artistic definition of the Sanskrit “Om” as the quintessence of the intellectual community whose confines Huston is in the process of reconfiguring. The French text substitutes the neutral “savoir-vivre” for the radically personal “home.” It also replaces the narrator’s objection to Beckett’s literary (Krapp) and erotic (crooning) seduction by a rather de-contextualized “Ne me faites pas rire” (“Don’t make me laugh”). No translational necessity indicates the erasure of Beckett from the French self-translation: the identification of the “Krapp” and “Om” references requires no less erudition in French than it does in English. The self-translation’s aim is to superficialize the intensely philosophical hostility of the original toward the stifling yet indispensable influence of the intellectual father, which it achieves in an ironically Beckettian manner: an ambiguously bathetic repositioning of the text (it goes from a meditation-reminiscent deep breath to savoir-vivre which, however, may literally mean “knowing how to live,” in which case the philosophical concerns of the original are subtly yet surely reintroduced) is echoed by a phonetic approximation

98  Nancy Huston devoid of meaning (from “FAITES Preuve de savoir-VIVRE” to “Ne me FAITES Pas RIRE”—emphasis mine). What the self-translation ultimately minorizes in this concluding section is not so much English and/or French as major languages and literary traditions, but rather the ability of the bilingual author’s text to signify outside the potentialities of its self-translation. Whether the original is palimpsestually undermined by the translation at the former’s very inception, long before it undergoes the translative process, or whether it allows for the collectivization of the bilingual experience by either repositioning the speaking subject within the community or by politicization through the self-reflexivity of its translating labor, the act of self-translation silences the assumed creative precedence of the original in favor of an unorthodox (one that rivals doxic assumptions) yet signifying limbo, a position of uncertainty that deterritorializes the reading experience. The reader is never explicitly told which is the source and which is the target language, leading her to presume the derivative yet potentially original positioning of each, and vice versa. The text is thus minorized both linguistically and performatively; it refuses to speak either tongue authoritatively and performs only as a destabilizing agent, a relational unknown in the estuarine environment that Huston’s deterritorializing self-translation has successfully created. In lieu of a conclusion, I will examine the book’s epigraph, which first appears in the published version of the text, providing us with no way of distinguishing between original and self-translation. The English text on the left, under the heading “Limbo,” reads as follows: “Get it in Ing-lish. Shoved. Wedged. Lodged in the language like a bullet in the brain. Undelodgeable. Untranslatable” (6). On the right, following the title “Limbes,” the French text: “¡Caramba! Encore raté” (7). Whichever way we assume the self-translation to have been effectuated, the epigraph’s double version sets the tone for the book’s self-translation processes as a whole. The lack of signifying equivalence between the two passages unsettles translative theories and hypotheses to the extent that it bypasses the original/translation binary and establishes a relationship of mutual linguistic dislocation. The English text’s emphasis on the positioning of an undefined yet untranslatable “it” within the somewhat distorted (“Ing-lish”) and certainly overpowering context of the entity “English language” is mirrored by the repositioning of the French language within the lexical and punctuational confines of a third language (¡Caramba!). The limits of the bilingual community are presented as both stifling (the “undelodgeable” immanence of English) and porous (the introduction of Spanish), both confining and liberating. The translator, more visible than ever, shoulders both restrictions and liberties by commenting on the act of self-translation itself: “Encore raté!” becomes a reflection upon the violence of the translative process as expressed by “¡Caramba!,” the cutting of the English text’s Gordian knot, and,

Nancy Huston  99 similarly, the English version mirrors the multilingualism of the French by means of undoing its own monolingualism both by exploding the name of the tongue (“Ing-lish”) and by immobilizing its fragments in a desolate and unproductive space (“bullet in the brain”). Like asymptote lines, the two texts neighbor each other, deterritorializing the promise of an intersection and speaking their inability to fully signify either as translatable or as unrelated linguistic units. Self-translation allows then for that estuarine space of prolific negativity and productive silence to materialize and question the intellectual, editorial, and political implications of unproblematic linguistic transference and obscurantic simplifications of the bilingual subject’s complexities and pluralities.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this study of Limbes/Limbo appeared in SubStance in 2009. 2 In Bilingualisme d’écriture et auto-traduction: Julien Green, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Michaël Oustinoff uses the palimpsestual nature of self-translation as theoretical underpinning for exploding the author/translator binary: Considérer que l’autotraduction relève d’une logique palimpsestueuse singulière permet de dépasser les interrogations sur le statut à accorder au texte auto-traduit qui aboutissent trop souvent à considérer la question sous le seul angle de la dichotomie primitive [auteur/traducteur], alors même que cette dichotomie s’abolit lorsque l’auteur et le traducteur ne font qu’un (Considering that self-translation falls within the parameters of a singular palimpsestual logic allows one to move beyond the questions petaining to the status of a self-translated text. Those tend to examine the issue only from the perspective of the basic dichotomy [author/translator], when that very dichotomy is abolished in instances where author and translator are the same person). (29) 3 Oustinoff suggests that self-translation’s doxic expectations are by definition minimal: “L’auteur ayant tous les droits, l’auto-traduction est par nature plurielle: elle est libre de se conformer à telle ou telle doxa, voire à plusieurs—en ce sens elle est fondamentalement transdoxale” (“Since the author retains all rights, self-translation is naturally plural: it is free to conform to any kind of doxa it chooses, even to multiple doxai at a time—in that sense it is fundamentally transdoxal” 23). 4 What I call “sections” in this study are parts of the narrative delineated by typographical breaks yet not so termed by the author herself. Their thematic unity is questionable at best and transition from one to the next is more whimsical than structurally or thematically relevant. 5 The original version of Limbes/Limbo, published as an appendix in Nicola Doone Danby’s MA thesis The Space between: Self-Translators Nancy Huston and Samuel Beckett, is alternately written in English and French and allows one to determine in which language the published version’s text was originally composed. 6 In Pour la Poétique II, Henri Meschonnic advanced the idea of translational  decentering  as structural phenomenon: “Le  décentrement  est un rapport textuel entre deux textes dans deux langues-cultures jusque dans la

100  Nancy Huston structure linguistique de la langue, cette structure linguistique étant valeur dans le système du texte” (“Decentering is a textual relationship between two texts in two languages-cultures permeating all the way to the linguistic structure of language, which is itself a value in the textual system” 308). 7 “Nous n’étions pas longtemps ensemble et déjà elle sentait le rat” (12). 8 In an essay titled “En français dans le texte,” Nancy Huston writes on the interchangeability between mother and language positions: “Mutti et Mommy désignaient deux personnes différentes. Mommy n’était plus là, mais je n’avais pas pour autant perdu ma mère puisque Mutti était là” (“Mutti and Mommy referred to two different people. Mommy was no longer there, but I hadn’t lost my mother because mutti was there” 233). 9 Lawrence Venuti’s analysis of the translator’s invisibility largely constitutes the definition of doxic expectations for the purposes of this analysis: “Under the regime of fluent translating, the translator works to make his or her work ‘invisible,’ producing the illusory effect of transparency that simultaneously masks its status as illusion: the translated text seems ‘natural,’ i.e., not translated” (5).

3

Vassilis Alexakis and the Limits of Self-Translation

Born and schooled in Greece, Vassilis Alexakis is the kind of bilingual author that Steven Kellman has termed “ambilingual” in The Translingual Imagination: A taxonomy of literary translingualism would begin by differentiating between authors who have written important works in more than one language, the ambilinguals, and those who have written in only a single language but one other than their native one, the monolingual translinguals. (12) Following a move to Lille to study journalism, Alexakis opted to stay in France, in part to avoid exercising his chosen profession in a country that had meanwhile been politically overtaken by a military dictatorship. By the end of the junta (1974), Alexakis had been living in Paris for a few years, working as a journalist. That same year, his first book, Le sandwich, was published by Julliard, an important Parisian publishing house. Having worked (first as a student, then as a journalist and author) exclusively in French for two decades, in 1983 Alexakis wrote Talgo, his first novel in Greek, marking the beginning of his ambilingual career. Talgo also inaugurated his self-translating practice which has been ongoing ever since. In Singularités francophones, ou choisir d’écrire en français, Robert Jouanny looks at the success that the French language enjoyed in Greece in the twentieth century as resulting from a long history of cultural and political exchanges between the two nations dating back to the nineteenth century and the Greek Revolution, the liberation war which ensured the country’s independence from the Ottoman empire.1 Although Jouanny does not revisit the history of French (and British and Russian) imperialism in Greece in the nineteenth century as the Ottoman empire was shrinking and European nations were attempting to establish spheres of influence in the Balkans, he does allude to what he terms Greek people’s “aptitude” for foreign languages. Decontextualized, this assertion essentializes speakers of Modern Greek as predisposed (biologically? because of some intrinsic phonetic, morphological, or otherwise

102  Vassilis Alexakis linguistic particularities of Modern Greek?) to multilingualism. In La République mondiale des Lettres Pascale Casanova offers a convincing justification for Greek authors’ admittedly common translingualism by shedding light on the hierarchical structure of European (and world) book markets: …pour Cioran ou Strindberg, écrivains de ‘petites’ langues européennes, …relativement peu reconnues littérairement mais pourvues de traditions et de ressources propres, l’écriture en français, ou l’autotraduction, sont des façons de ‘devenir’ littéraires et de sortir de l’invisibilité qui frappe structurellement les écrivains des périphéries de l’Europe… (For Cioran and Strindberg…having been born into small European languages…that were relatively unknown literarily but nonetheless endowed with their own traditions and resources, writing in French, in the one case, and self-translation, in the other, were ways of achieving literary existence, of escaping… the invisibility that systematically affected writers on the periphery of Europe; 353). (DeBevoise 259) Vassilis Alexakis’s choice to write in French is not a calculated move that was motivated by the importance of the French book market as compared with its Greek counterpart. His choice is dictated mostly by his autobiography (his studies in France, the Greek junta in the late sixties/early seventies, his marriage to a French woman, etc.). If we were to zoom out, however, and contextualize his ambilingualism and subsequent practice of self-translation within the larger framework that Casanova proposes, then a more complicated picture begins to emerge. It is that of an individual who due to a de facto presence of French as the language of culture and intellectual accomplishment in his native country was ready, at the age of 17, to leave familiar, familial, linguistic, and cultural structures behind and inscribe himself within an otherness that he yearned to resemble. In most such instances, however, the relationship remains unequal. A gifted, hard-working, ambitious individual will certainly end up resembling the host; the structural inequality that made the relationship possible will continue to inform all manners of exchange between the two. Whether this will lead to an identity/existential/professional/ political crisis or not depends, again, on individual circumstances, experiences, predispositions, etc.—so does, in fact, the outward expression of the conflict, if such an event is to occur. In Vassilis Alexakis’s case, the defining moment in this process of always resembling more but not quite reflecting is his realization that writing and living in French equals the progressive disappearance of the mother tongue. In an interview to Aleksandra Kroh, Vassilis Alexakis notes the following on, first, writing exclusively in French at the beginning of his career and,

Vassilis Alexakis  103 second, language-choice when he began writing in both native and foreign languages: “J’avais l’impression d’être dans cette langue plus libre, de pouvoir aller plus loin, dire des choses que je n’aurais pas dites dans ma langue d’origine, à cause de la culture ou de l’environnement” (“It felt as if I were more free in this language, as if I could go further, say things that I would have never said in my native language because of culture or the general context” L’aventure du bilinguisme 109); he then adds: “Il y a des sujets français et des sujets grecs…Pour moi, la langue est liée au pays. J’écris en français essentiellement en France et en grec, essentiellement en Grèce” (“There are French themes and there are Greek themes… for me, language is linked to country. For the most part, I write in French when in France and in Greek when in Greece” 174). Although liberating, French does not possess a universal storytelling power. The return to Greek for Alexakis, beyond the personal, psychological, and practical reasons, which are the author’s own to know, marks a decisive intellectual shift from absolute subscription to the Enlightenment ideal of freedom from parochial cultural and other restrictions in the cosmopolitan West through the adoption of French, the language most apt to tell the universal story of human liberation, to a need to contextualize experiences according to the geographical, historical, and cultural specificities that make them possible. This is what justifies, to a large extent, Alexakis’s interest in thematically structuring his novels around a process of self-reflection or study of lived experience. Whether we call those of his books that resemble closely his biography “romans autobiographiques,” following Philippe Lejeune’s definition in Le pacte autobiographique, or abstain entirely from using the word “autobiography” when studying Vassilis Alexakis’s novels—as the author would prefer that we do2 — there is little doubt that the stories he tells are heavily invested in exploring some of the same themes that a translingual author writing in both a major (foreign) language and a minor (native) language and consistently self-translating his work from one language to the other inevitably encounters and is expected to investigate: how does choice of language, although, as the author suggests, said choice is dictated by topic, affect, in turn, the particular treatment (ideological, linguistic etc.) of the topic in question? How does self-translation limit/enhance/alter the “original?” Is there an “original” in the case of self-translation? Does it matter if the first iteration of the text is in the major or minor language? In an interview he gave to François Pradal and Françoise Ploquin, Alexakis discussed his self-translating process as an act of textual completion: “On pourrait dire qu’il n’y a pas de version originale. La version définitive du texte apparaît dans la seconde langue. Il s’établit ainsi avant la publication un dialogue entre les deux langues” (“One could claim that there is no original version. The definitive version of the text appears in the second language. Before publication, the two languages are already in dialogue” 8). This interpretation of self-translation as a

104  Vassilis Alexakis palimpsestual dialogue between two languages and two texts is not uncommon among theorists of translation and literary critics of Alexakis’s work. Abdelkébir Khatibi has suggested that bilingual palimpsests can operate in two different yet equally disruptive ways: …soit que le texte opère une traduction continue de son énoncé (ceci est cela); soit qu’il se trame et se complote contre ses différences… effaçant tout renvoi explicite, et si renvoi il y a, il est tenu dans la production du texte, non point insaisissable, mais en disruption inhérente (…either the text operates a continuous translation of what it says (this is that)  or it takes place and conspires against its references…erasing all explicit reference, and if reference there is, it takes place in the production of the text, not elusive, but in inhering disruption). (Maghreb Pluriel 201; Yalim 139) Halloran-Bessy has noted that Alexakis’s self-translations are not identifiable as such since there is no mention of a translator, an editorial choice that she causally links to the bilingual genesis of his texts. 3 In The Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary Self-Translation, Jan Walsh Hokenson and Marcella Munson have gone so far as to suggest that studying the work of a self-translator in one of the two languages is to engage with it partially: When interpreting the work of…self-translators, the critic’s native language usually determines the horizon. Yet to stop short in this way is to ignore not only half the writer’s work but also the liminal spaces between, where they have done some of their most creative work in the translative process. (161) Discussing Brian Fitch’s analysis of the relationship between the two versions of a self-translated text, Hokenson and Munson gesture back to Walter Benjamin and the notion of pure language: Fitch proposes that once a writer produces a second linguistic version of a text, the first is incomplete without it…Like Benjamin’s notion of pure language, where text and translation are shards of an unstated whole, Fitch’s thesis on the bilingual text has had a long posterity. (194) It is indeed challenging to avoid Benjamin’s and, later, Fitch’s transcendental turn when reading a self-translator’s work, as Munson and Hokenson do, not only in terms of the two versions’ complementarity but most importantly in relation to what does not appear in the text, the liminal spaces within which the author positions herself as she traces one language over and alongside the other’s erasure, the ever-present “other”

Vassilis Alexakis  105 language that although absent makes itself palpable by texturizing its usurper. We are tempted to gesture toward a third space/language/text that we may never articulate but whose existence assuages the anxiety self-translation produces by refusing to situate itself within a stable referential system. In “Translation with No Original: Scandals of Textual Reproduction,” Emily Apter’s discussion of afterlife in Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” suggests an alternative: In shifting the ethics of translation away from questions of fiability and fidelity…, and toward debates over the conditions of textual reproducibility, Benjamin provides the groundwork for defining translation in its most scandalous form: that is, as a technology of literary replication that engineers textual afterlife without recourse to a genetic origin. (171) Apter places emphasis on the project of referential deconstruction that Benjamin’s text suggests and performs (there can be no discussion of fidelity if each language’s referential axis is not situated within its linguistic system but is rather expected to signify in relation to a third, unknown, and unknowable language). She then proposes situating a translation not in relation to its original but rather within some system of emancipated instances of textual afterlife. These then signify not by differing from or resembling an original text but mostly—although not exclusively (they are instances of afterlife, after all)—by their ability to proliferate. Although the idea of replication is an interesting one—most certainly for its accompanying democratizing potential—it responds only partially to the concerns of self-translation (Apter’s work focuses on translation proper) which must address the intangible superposition of both languages in both texts. In Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature, Gustavo Pérez Firmat brilliantly summarizes the self-translator’s predicament: Unlike the typical translator, the autologous translator works not only with the finished product; present at the creation, he remembers the gestation of the work—the false starts, the dead-ends, the changes of direction, all the decisions and accidents that shaped the finished product…biscriptive writers have a unique, untranslatable relation with each of their languages. (107) The false starts and dead ends that never make it into either text, the gaps and silences that ensue, the lexical connotations in one language that amplify the text written in the other4 are all instances of untranslatability insofar as they remain linguistically unrealized in both versions of the bilingual text. And yet, as this chapter will seek to show, they are certainly discernible and clearly meaningful in ways that effectively

106  Vassilis Alexakis reconfigure each linguistic system and cultural environment involved in interconnected estuarine ecosystems. Theoretical discourse on self-translation, whether focused specifically on the existence or absence of an original or interested in the psychological complexities involved in transposing one’s often fictionalized autobiographical text in another language, has regularly proceeded from the questionable principle of national languages’ systemic integrity and stability. In “L’autotraduction littéraire: enjeux et problématiques,” Valeria Sperti suggests the following: S’autotraduire pour un écrivain signifie avant tout choisir une langue et se dire dans une autre…Les formes de ce dire hétérolingue peuvent varier considérablement, au gré des motivations personnelles et des situations sociolinguistiques auxquelles l’écrivain se confronte (More than anything else, self-translating means that an author chooses a language and tells his story in another…The shapes that this heterolingual narrative may take can vary considerably based on personal motivations and the author’s sociolinguistic context). (2) Sperti conceptualizes the two languages as poles of a binary: lexical choices that oppose them (“une langue” vs. “une autre” or even the adjective “hétérolingue” which emphasizes otherness) reinforce the dichotomy while attributing variability to personal motivation and the author’s sociolinguistic context. This reading rests on the assumption that languages are internally stable in their relational otherness but substitutable by an agent external to their rules and logic. Along those same lines, when Najib Redouane speaks of geographical and linguistic displacement in Vassilis Alexakis’s work in “Crise identitaire et bilinguisme littéraire chez Vassilis Alexakis,” he relies on the assumption that the place from which the author departs is singular: L’auteur franchit les frontières et les fioritures de la langue grecque, ample et redondante, pour passer aux marques et aux manques de la langue française et écrire désormais dans une langue mitoyenne, mieux mutante, de l’entre deux langues, française en apparence, grecque sous-jacente qui se glisse dans la chair des phrases lui donnant une saveur venue d’ailleurs (The author crosses over the border and the embellishments of the ample and redundant Greek language in order to reach the marks and lacks of French and henceforth write in an in-between language midway between the two, better at mutating, French in appearance, Greek underneath that slips into the flesh of sentences, giving it a savor that comes from elsewhere). (160) The essentialist vision of the Greek language as a nourishing mother of sorts that cedes its privileges to the austere exigencies of French posits

Vassilis Alexakis  107 the two languages as stable codes associated with particular expressive abilities marked, on the one hand, by embellished plenitude (Greek) and, on the other hand, by labor and lack. Furthermore, by focusing exclusively on the author’s passage from Greek to French, in other words, the initial process of foreign language acquisition, the author erases the process of return to the native language, privileging thus French as the final destination in this voyage between languages and the sole linguistic space within which the “langue mitoyenne” may take shape. This theoretical framework, which privileges the crossing of clearly marked frontiers between stable linguistic spaces, borrows from the Benjaminian belief in a pure, transcendental, and therefore immutable code toward which it is the task of the translator to aspire. In self-translation studies, this approach is particularly problematic given the concomitant presence of the translator in both spaces, in both languages and in both texts at all times. Piecing together the fragments of Benjamin’s vessel is a process that occurs over time. Here, it is important to remember that Benjamin insisted not on the meaning but rather on the intention of the original, the pure language or promised vessel. Intention projects itself onto time. It is, by definition, to be interpreted by others, over time. The vessel is to be pieced together by multiple subjectivities, within linear time. Self-translation challenges both these conditions: it involves a single subjectivity—which may or may not occupy multiple subject positions—and although textual production of the different versions happens necessarily successively, textual genesis is marked by simultaneity. When Brian Fitch then suggests in his seminal study on selftranslation titled Beckett and Babel: An Investigation into the Status of the Bilingual Work that: [r]ather than seeing the target-text as a kind of ‘reflection’ of the source-text in another language, the two texts will be considered to be on an equal footing…the first version will no less have the character of a reflection than the second, and they will both reflect the same ‘thing’, (32) we need to take pause. Not only does Fitch assume the wholeness and integrity of what he terms source and target languages but he explicitly positions both under the authority of an aptly termed “thing,” possibly the unattainable perfection of a Benjaminian prelapsarian code, or, as Fitch himself notes later in his analysis, “the realm of the hypothetical:” Given the necessity and, at the same time, the impossibility of effecting a synthesis of any kind enjoying a textual status, such a synthesis can only be situated in the realm of the hypothetical: it remains unrealized—indeed unrealizable—and yet necessary for any adequate account to be given of the status of these two texts. (138)

108  Vassilis Alexakis Although reading both versions of a self-translation is indeed necessary, there is no compulsion to conceptualize this double reading as a synthesis. Unless, of course, one subscribes, as Fitch certainly does, to a referential relationship between both versions and a third, equalizing and certainly hierarchically superior term. Fitch undermines his own reading when he refers to the original and self-translation as a “textual system” that brings “two languages into a condition of reciprocal interference and interplay that has nothing to do with the mere contiguity of languages that obtains between translation and original” (134). The notions of interference and interplay complicate the hierarchical triangular structure that “thing,” original, and translation create earlier in his work, emphasizing a type of relationality that privileges contact over reference. Referential anchoring in theoretical approaches to self-translation is a central analytical tool even when the argument moves away from a third term (in-between language, pure language, etc.). In Bilinguisme d’écriture et auto-traduction: Julien Green, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Michaël Oustinoff discusses the nature of the total work: “L’œuvre totale est donc la somme des versions, ce qui revient à dire—en poussant le raisonnement à l’extrême—qu’aucune version n’est véritablement autonome ni par conséquent, paradoxe des paradoxes, la version initiale” (“The total work is then the sum of its versions which means— if we were to push the argument to its extreme—that no version is really autonomous, including, paradoxically, the initial version” 245). This passage echoes Fitch’s contention that, at the end of the first version’s composition, the self-translating author has merely “suspended his enterprise” and deferred the realization of his work to the moment of the second version’s composition which “will subsequently come to complete this first version” (131). Here, both authors argue for a different conceptualization of referentiality: instead of positioning, in Peircean terms, the referent outside of the translational binary, they make of the “complete/ total work” a referential term that governs the relationship between the two versions of the self-translation. This “complete work” is not external to the existing versions since it is to be located within the continuity that self-translation creates between texts. It refuses, however, to acknowledge each version’s autonomy which the sum total of both alone can guarantee. In other words, each text is referentially anchored within the other in a relationship that does not amplify and complicate it but rather reduces it to a state of dependency and lack. In Maghreb Pluriel, Khatibi examines the relationship between native and foreign language as one not of potential synthesis but rather of relational exteriority: La langue dite étrangère ne vient pas s’ajouter à l’autre, ni opérer avec elle une pure juxtaposition: chacune fait signe à l’autre, l’appelle à se maintenir comme dehors. Dehors contre dehors, cette

Vassilis Alexakis  109 étrangeté: ce que désire une langue (si j’ose parler ainsi) c’est d’être singulière, irréductible, rigoureusement autre. (…the so-called foreign language does not add itself to the other, nor does it enter a relation of pure juxtaposition with it—it signals to the other, summons the other to maintain itself as outside. Outside against outside, this strangeness—what a language desires (if I may say so) is to be singular, irreducible, and rigorously other; 186). (Yalim 122) It may be conceptually and ideologically challenging to accept that when languages approach each other they desire to remain unalloyed and whole. We tend to think in terms of comprehensibility when we broach the question of second-language acquisition: if we learn a language other than our native tongue it is because we desire to understand how other people communicate, build communities and cultures, fight, love, live. As I have argued elsewhere, 5 the inherent danger of comprehensibility as a theoretical approach to otherness is its potential to assimilate and reassure: assimilate the irreducible difference of the Other into a hierarchical relationship based on the assumption of knowledge (knowing the Other is a slippery slope toward producing her) while positioning the Self in a logic of sequential proficiency (acquiring concept A allows us to move to concept B and so on) resulting from a misrecognition of what is a dynamic and multiple linguistic and cultural system as a stable object that one can possess. Khatibi suggests that the foreign language need not fit the oppositional logic of knowing vs. ignoring. Languages acknowledge each other in productive ways that safeguard relationality while allowing for at least a certain sense of wholeness. For Khatibi, translation operates along the same lines: “Je pense…que la traduction opère selon cette distanciation sans cesse reculée et disruptive” (“I think…that translation operates according to this intractability, this endlessly receding and disruptive distancing”; 186; Yalim 122). Distance does not mean disengagement. So long as maintaining distance disrupts narratives of exclusion, cultural superiority and nativism, positioning one’s self in complete exteriority to the foreign is, in fact, a progressive, productive stance. It helps us move away from the “what” of empirical knowledge (what do I need to know to be able to communicate with the Other?) toward the “how” of Khatibi’s relational exteriority. This post-structuralist interpretation of meanings as secondary to the movement of symbolization within the translative act that Samuel Weber theorized in “A touch of Translation: On Walter Benjamin’s ‘Task of the Translator,’” has paved the way to readings of translation and self-translation as cultural events, inaugurating what has been termed “the cultural turn” in translation studies. Critics in this tradition have explored what Weber terms the “how” of translatability as the asymmetrical power relations that govern translational exchanges between languages and cultures. Expanding the reach of the cultural (and, by extension, political) argument, Valeria Sperti

110  Vassilis Alexakis questions the limitations that hierarchical power relations impose upon the practice of self-translation: L’étude du transfert autotraductif s’apparente à celle de tout bien culturel, car il est sujet à des relations de domination qui demandent une analyse du domaine transnational qui tienne compte des relations de pouvoir entre les états, des tensions linguistiques à l’intérieur d’un même pays et des littératures respectives, enfin, last but not least, de la connaissance des langues de l’autotraducteur qui est rarement tout à fait ambilingue (Studying self-translational transfer is like studying any cultural good. It is subject to relationships of domination which then beg an analysis of the transnational field which takes into consideration relationships of power among states, linguistic tensions within a single country and within their respective literatures. Finally, last but not least, it is subject to the selftranslator’s knowledge of the two languages which is never entirely equal). (“L’autotraduction littéraire: enjeux et problématiques” 3–4) The ethical question that this line of thought raises is, then, how to inscribe—or not—those differentials in translation. They certainly have a place in both first and second versions as they comment in powerful ways on what Sperti terms “the transnational field.” In “Global Translatio: The ‘Invention’ of Comparative Literature, Istanbul, 1933,” Emily Apter suggests that “global translatio” is “patterned after untranslatable affective gaps, the nub of intractable semantic difference, episodes of violent cultural transference, and unexpected love affairs” (108–9). I would like to suggest that privileging those untranslatable gaps, silences, and absences that Emily Apter discerns in Spitzer is what brings us closer to Khatibi’s gesturing across difference. And it is what allows us to both acknowledge cultural, linguistic, and political inequalities while textually inscribing them with the clear intention of interrogating the hierarchies which make them possible. Of capital structural importance in this process is valuing absence. In “Bilingualism, Writing and the Feeling of Not Quite Being There,” Sylvia Molloy notes: One always writes from an absence, the choice of a language automatically signifying the postponement of another… the absence of what is being postponed continues to work, obscurely, on the chosen language, suffusing it, even better, contaminating it, with an autrement dit that brings it unexpected eloquence. (37) Echoing Molloy, in “Quand Vassilis Alexakis tricote le moi translingue,” Alain Ausoni suggests that “[f]ace au dilemme du choix de la langue d’écriture, l’écrivain bilingue réalise que son texte s’écrit toujours en creux, sur fond d’absence de la langue oblitérée” (“[f]aced with the

Vassilis Alexakis  111 dilemma of language choice, the bilingual writer realizes that his text is always composed in counter relief, on the background of the obliterated language” 20). In these instances, when a self-translator silences one of her languages to write in the other, the absence of the unscripted tongue, inhabits a meaningful space. It does not entirely disappear; like Khatibi argues foreign tongues do, it gestures at its counterpart. It textures it and it brings forth the gaps punctuating the scripted text. It  demands that the reader acknowledge them and question the relationship that they may entertain with the signs of the tongue in which the text’s other version was composed. More importantly, it fights comprehensibility as its very absence undermines the reader’s certainty that she may ever fully understand the multilayered linguistic and cultural system within which the text in question operates. As in most estuaries, elements of one language/culture will, over time, dissolve into the other, bond with the foreign, radically transform and create new configurations of cultural and political life. The initial bodies of cultural knowledge and praxis in all their internal ambiguities and multiplicity, however, will retain their right to difference, to internal change and reformation that, as Sandra Bermann has suggested, “can never repeat the original but, at the most, touch it from the point of a tangent, allowing it to live into the future along a new and different line” (“Translating History” 263). Although separate, these processes need to relationally implicate one another. Estuarine relationality aspires to ongoing negotiation producing modifications and readjustments as new meanings are created and existing paradigms shift. The ethical horizon of exchanging within the estuary is limitless so long as languages and cultures exhibit the requisite flexibility that accepting otherness as untranslatability requires. This is the essence of the philosophical paradox that estuarine translation seeks to resolve: how to relate when no communication is possible? How to utter—and then textually codify— while safeguarding one’s strangeness and untranslatability and respecting the other’s difference and foreignness? Which elements of one’s language and culture should one let dissolve in the estuarine waters of the contact zone? How to then reposition one’s self vis-à-vis the newly generated cultural environment? Vassilis Alexakis’s self-translating practice offers some preliminary answers. When discussing the author’s revision of the French text at the time of a new edition’s release—Alexakis has reviewed his French-language text for Talgo, Contrôle d’Identité and La langue maternelle—Valeria Sperti notes in “L’autotraduction littéraire: enjeux et problématiques” that “la présence de l’autre langue ouvre le texte à la variation, à une instabilité génératrice et la pratique révisionnelle, vécue comme une sorte de traduction intérieure, se renouvelle là où l’espace littéraire—principalement français—le demande” (“the presence of the other language opens the text up to variation, to a productive instability. This revisionist practice that the author experiences as some type of

112  Vassilis Alexakis internal translation recurs when the literary space, mostly French in this case, requires it” 8). Although Sperti reads in these revisions Alexakis’s strong investment in his “langue de l’espace littéraire d’hospitalité” (“Vassilis Alexakis et Nancy Huston au miroir de l’autotraduction” 81), in other words his particular relationship with the French language— an interpretation that disregards the editorial needs and means of the French book market when compared with its counterpart in Greece— she nevertheless points to a significant aspect of self-translation, namely its ability to create productive instabilities. To illustrate how the author’s work performs within the cultural estuary, I will read closely two of Alexakis’s novels along with their self-translations: La langue maternelle, originally written in Greek and translated into French—I will focus exclusively on the original, 1995 French version—and Les mots étrangers, first written in French in 2002 and translated into Greek by the author shortly thereafter. The choice of these two self-translations is motivated both by their subject matter and by their more or less successful creation of estuarine textual conditions for cultural contact and exchange. Thematically, both texts question language acquisition, loss, language use, and politics. Reading both French and Greek versions of the two novels allows for an in-depth assessment of how effectively their theoretical engagement with the theme of foreign and native-language learning, forgetting and reacquiring aligns—or not—with the complex ways in which language politics perform as the narrator tells and retells his story.

La langue maternelle and the Politics of Self-Translation La langue maternelle/Η μητρική γλώσσα is a homecoming of sorts. Fifteen months after the passing of his mother, the narrator, Nikolaïdis, travels to Greece from Paris, where he lives and works, without any definite plans to return to France. We know that he has been visiting his home country for decades but never for any extensive period of time. We also know that he is a successful cartoonist in France but that he has no desire to work on his drawing while in Greece. To keep busy he starts writing the story of his stay in Greece as it unfolds putting before his readers’ eyes not only the final product of his newly conceived labor but also the steps of its genesis. Along with that birth we witness the re-birth of Nikolaïdis’s native language. At the center of these three journeys—the return and the narrative and linguistic gestations—is the search for the meaning of the Delphic Epsilon, an isolated letter at the entrance of the temple of Apollo in Delphi, placed among dicta of the Seven Sages, long lost and, according to all available sources, undecipherable to us as well as to the Ancients. When reading the two versions of the text, Greek and French, side to side, a few interesting patterns begin to emerge. Among the most compelling ones are: a degree of cultural and linguistic domestication for the benefit of

Vassilis Alexakis  113 the French public in the French version (the opposite is not true in the Greek text—a discrepancy that may be due to the Greek geographical and cultural territorialization of the story-as-content itself); a distinct affective sensibility in each language; and changing political platforms as the narrator shifts from one audience to another. Although these differences are to be expected and would have been present—at least to a certain extent—even if the translation had been the work of a different author, what the side-by-side consideration of the two versions readily reveals to the ambilingual reader is that the meaning of these variations and their impact on the relationship between two separate linguistic and cultural bodies of history and literary tradition is ever-shifting while resisting its own de- and re-territorialization. In La langue maternelle, cultural annotations and the ensuing domestication of the text in its French linguistic environment vary from necessary to seemingly arbitrary. At the very beginning of the novel, the narrator spends Easter in the house of a good friend a few miles outside of Athens. The two of them have a brief exchange about Stamata, the name of the village where the house is located: “–Περίεργο όνομα, είπα. –Πράγματι, είπε ο Θοδωρής” (8). The French text reads: “–Curieux nom, ai-je dit. Stamata signifie “Arrête-toi”. –En effet, a dit Théodoris” (“‘A strange name,’ I said. Stamata means ‘Stop.’ ‘Indeed,’ said Theodoris”; 10; Patton 26). In Greek, Stamata, the name of the village, is also the second person singular conjugation of the verb “to stop” in the imperative mode. The French version includes this annotation whereas the commentary on the word’s polysemy does not appear in the Greek text. What is particularly interesting in this brief passage, however, is the transcription of Thodoris’ name in French. In fact, instead of a transcription, we are dealing here with a domesticating translation. In Modern Greek, Thodoris is the diminutive form of the first name Theodoros. Although not absent from people’s oral lexicon, Theodoros is the version of the name that one would be more likely to encounter in official registries and paperwork. Incidentally, it is the only version of the name that has changed neither phonetically nor orthographically since Byzantine times. What Alexakis, the self-translator, opted for in the French text is a curious amalgam of spoken Modern Greek (Thodoris), the French version of the name (Théodore) and the timeless Greek Théodoros. I qualify this translation as domesticating for two equally important reasons: first, Théodoris echoes Théodore more immediately than the transcription of Θοδωρής would thus inviting the inscription not only of the character but also of the character’s cultural and historical circumstances within the French linguistic host in fairly unproblematic terms; second, the partial erasure of the Modern Greek version of the name followed by the superposition of a phonetic realization that suggests continuity between Byzantium and late-twentieth-century Greece (Empress Theodora would be the most obvious reference for a well-educated francophone

114  Vassilis Alexakis reader) domesticates the text within, this time, a European narrative frame that positions Greece as both the origin (classical Greece) and the Other (a crossroads between East and West as Byzantium and then territory within the Ottoman Empire). La langue maternelle, however, thematically complicates these readings of Modern Greece. As the narrator advances in his search for the meaning of the Delphic Epsilon, which mirrors his other two quests, the reacquisition of his native language and the mourning process following the passing of his mother—the only reliable Greek interlocutor during all the years of his French exile—he reflects on his Greek schooling and the institutional devaluation of the Modern Greek idiom that was official educational policy at the time: “Μεγαλώσαμε με τη βεβαιότητα ότι κανένα σοβαρό έργο δεν θα αναδυόταν ποτέ μέσα από τα θλιβερά ελληνικά που μιλούσαμε, ότι δεν θα είχαμε ποτέ τίποτα καλύτερο από το παρελθόν μας να επιδείξουμε” (102). And the French self-translation: “Nous avons été élevés dans la certitude qu’aucun texte de qualité ne pouvait s’écrire dans le grec que nous parlions, que nous n’aurions jamais rien de mieux à présenter que les œuvres du passé” (“We had been brought up with the certainty that no text of any quality could be written in the language that we spoke, that we’d never have anything better to show than the works of the past”; 116; Patton 53). Although the French version mirrors the content of the Greek text fairly accurately, it performs two substantial erasures: it reduces the affective import of the Greek version and it diminishes the amplitude of the defeat experienced by the narrator. Both texts describe the certainty of young people growing up in Greece in the 1950s that Modern Greek, the idiom spoken at home and in the streets, would never equal former versions of the language (the unspoken reference here is to Classical Greek) and consequently nothing one could write in the demotic, the language of the people and of the time, could possibly equal the literary, scientific, and intellectual production of eras past. Alexakis grew up in a diglossic environment, one in which official discourse (including the language of most public schooling) was articulated in katharevoussa (“the pure”), an amalgam of recent iterations of the Greek language and elements of Classical Greek, while people spoke demotic Greek, the contemporary version of Greek that one learned at home. In fact, as Kostas Kazazis notes in “Dismantling Greek Diglossia,” this was not an exceptional fact in Greece’s linguistic history: “Greek speakers had been living with diglossia during much of their historically documented existence, beginning in post-classical times. It was not always the same type of diglossia, but it was diglossia all the same” (8). In “Εισαγωγή: από το γλωσσικό ζήτημα σε ένα πρόβλημα ποιότητας της γλώσσας μας” (“Introduction: from the language question to a problem of linguistic quality”), Georgios Babiniotis makes the same argument, while suggesting that the diglossic event begins to take shape in the first century BCE. He adds that spoken Greek had, over time, incorporated

Vassilis Alexakis  115 many elements of the different learned iterations of the language which explains why, when, after decades of debate, in 1976 the Greek state decrees that the official language of the land is Κοινή Νέα Ελληνική (demotic Greek), the transition is surprisingly eventless. In this same essay, Babiniotis also clarifies that starting with the linguistic reform of 1917, demotic Greek was taught in elementary schools—although not consistently. He adds that the choice between demotic and katharevoussa in the primary years was related to the politics of the government in power: progressive governments tended to favor dimotiki whereas conservative governments often opted for katharevoussa. Whether schooled in dimotiki or katharevoussa during his primary years—a point that he does not elucidate—the narrator of La langue maternelle clearly rejects an educational system that he views as punishing of linguistic creativity and innovation, encouraging of sterile forms of reproduction and largely dismissive of intellectual production that exceeds the confines of its narrowly defined canon (Classical Greece, Byzantium, learned literary and cultural production of the post-Ottoman years). The self-translation into French attenuates the narrator’s critique by operating the following changes: while the Greek version states that the narrator’s generation grew up with the certainty that no “serious work” (σοβαρό έργο) could be produced in the language they spoke, the French version speaks of “text of any quality” (texte de qualité); this work in the Greek version could never “emerge” (αναδυόταν) from Modern Greek whereas the French text states that it could never “be written” (s’écrire); demotic Greek is qualified as “θλιβερά” in the Greek version, a word that translates as “sad, miserable, sorry, pathetic” in English, while in the French text no adjective is present at all; the Greek text states that this generation would never have anything interesting to show other than its “past” (παρελθόν) while the French version opts for the more precise “works of the past” (“œuvres du passé”). The affective strength of the word θλιβερά is amplified by the choice of “serious” when noting the perceived absence of “serious works”—the most commonly retrieved antonym for σοβαρός in Modern Greek is γελοίος, “ridiculous,” which when applied to cultural production augments the reader’s feeling of sadness caused by witnessing the diminution of something valuable as communicated by the adjective θλιβερός. Moreover, the Greek version’s preference for terms that encompass large swaths of cultural production (έργο, παρελθόν) and its use of αναδυόταν (verb “to emerge”) which assumes the active presence of multiple historical and cultural forces situate the passage’s affective effect within a narrative that is much larger than any single text, writer, genre, or even epoch. The French version, on the other hand, restrains both the emotional and cultural scope of the narrator’s commentary. It looks at what the Greek version considers an all-encompassing political and cultural phenomenon as a question that solely pertains to texts. Alexakis’s

116  Vassilis Alexakis francophone readership is familiar with at least some of these texts. In fact, when considering the syntagm “Greek cultural production,” it is very likely that an average francophone reader’s referent will be those texts by Sophocles or Plato that she read at school. The narrator’s lived experience if transposed into French in all its emotional amplitude would resonate but very marginally with a reader who has not lived in a diglossic environment. The matter-of-fact reference to texts, however, to those “works of the past” (“œuvres du passé”) encourages the francophone reader to reexamine her own attitude toward the Greek language, a language that she has probably only known through translation, or studied as a dead language—a form of second-language learning that also privileges translation—and always culturally contextualized within the textual production of the Classics. Estuarine conditions in this passage’s self-translation are created, then, by the refusal of the two texts to exit the parameters of their particular relationship to the diglossic history of Greek while simultaneously questioning the foundations of that relationship—the affective linguistic excesses of a timeless culture and the de facto historical continuity between the Classics and Western European civilization as institutionalized by governments and educational systems. Facing each other, without yielding their particular positioning, they must question the solidity of the arguments that have shaped the frame within which their relationship to the Greek language has evolved. For the Greek version, this could mean a reassessment of the diglossic event as a whole: having been part of the Greek linguistic landscape for so many centuries, couldn’t diglossia in general, and the dreaded katharevoussa in particular, be reconceptualized as value added? The narrator certainly seems to think so. While he writes words starting with the letter “epsilon” in his notebook, he amuses himself—and the hellenophone reader—by noting sentences made up entirely—or almost—of words in katharevoussa. The passage’s self-translation maintains the italics of the Greek version, while offering a transcription of the sentences in the Latin alphabet, followed by a translation of the sentences’ meaning. There is no mention in the French text of the fact that the transcribed Greek is not the demotic in which the book is written, but, rather this in-between, artificial language for which the narrator has no sympathy. Not only, then, does the Greek text reconsider the importance of katharevoussa by allowing it residence in its territory—albeit as a ludic, ironic interlude—but it also invites the self-translation to acknowledge katharevoussa’s presence without assigning the other language the power of naming and thus recognizing it. What the French text names and recognizes, reinforcing thus its excessive reliance upon the Classics, is a Plutarch quote that the narrator finds and underlines while studying the author who had served as a priest at the Delphic Oracle hoping to find information on the Delphic epsilon. In fact, the Greek version includes two separate quotes, both in

Vassilis Alexakis  117 the original without translation into Modern Greek, accompanied by the narrator’s suggestion that if he underlines these quotes it is because he understands them in the original (142). The French text only provides one of the two quotes directly in French translation, followed by the only footnote in the entire book which provides the bibliographical reference for the passage. The Plutarch passage reveals self-translation’s estuarine potential in La langue maternelle in both the Greek and French versions. In Greek, the emphasis on the narrator’s pleasure at deciphering the original—compared for example, to his inability to read Homer in the original—is a silent reframing of his relationship with katharevoussa: if he is able to read Plutarch in the original, it is thanks to his use of katharevoussa in daily school life—the same passage is largely undecipherable for generations who were schooled in Greece without daily, mandatory use of katharevoussa, even though both Alexakis’s and subsequent generations studied Classical Greek at school. In the French text, like those twentieth- and twenty-first-century Greeks who never had to study katharevoussa, the francophone reader is unable to read Plutarch’s Greek. Removed from the classical Greek that one studies in France by five centuries, Plutarch’s text is a stark reminder that the Greek language evolved and is still evolving past—but also carrying within as is the case with all languages—the Classical version of itself. The French version’s refusal to transcribe the Greek text into the Latin alphabet, coupled with the obvious materiality of the footnote, reads as commentary on its disconnect from the history of the Greek language past the point (Classical Greece) that political and historical conjecture and intent have collaboratively archived it, assigning it all the accompanying archontic7 privilege and force. Estuaries are unique environments: in addition to permitting distinct bodies of water to enter contact zones without fully altering their composition, they encourage a certain degree of incorporation. The textual estuary that Vassilis Alexakis produces in La langue maternelle is quite similar to natural estuaries in that respect: in addition to instances of maintained difference in contact, the novel’s two versions point to moments of dissolution of one language into the other which does not result in loss but rather in producing an entirely new linguistic and cultural formation. The narrative begins with a dream. The narrator arrives late to a class full of immigrants at the same time as an unpleasant French woman who sits behind him. He is consumed by the idea that he needs to tell her off which he eventually does. Then he notices that the woman has written five words in both singular and plural forms in her notebook. He doesn’t remember the teacher ever pronouncing these words and wonders when she had the time to write them down. The first one of those words is “rizi.” The Greek and French passages dealing with the mystery word read as follows: “Της πρώτης, της λέξης ρίζι (αλλά δεν σημαίνει ρύζι, το γνωστό μας ρύζι), ο πληθυντικός σχηματίζεται

118  Vassilis Alexakis με την προσθήκη του γράμματος ν, κάνει ρίζιν” (7). “Le premier, rizi (cela n’a rien à voir avec le riz), prend au pluriel un n, rizin” (“The first, rizi (it has nothing to do with rice), takes an n in the plural, rizin”; 9; Patton 1). The self-translation is fairly accurate. The two languages mirror each other quite faithfully—barring a couple of lexical repetitions in the Greek version which do not make it over to the French text, a syntactic necessity that carries very little semantic weight. The passages are remarkable in their ability to echo and challenge both their respective cultures and each other. It may be useful to note here that neither language forms the plural with the addition of the letter “n.” It may also be worth noting that, notwithstanding the false phonetic and orthographic proximity with the word rice in both languages, there exists no “rizi” in French and no “ρίζι” in Greek. With the addition of the letter “n” for the formation of the plural in the Greek version, however, the text introduces what will be, as we have already seen, a central narrative thematic concern, the diglossic relationship between demotic Greek and katharevoussa. If “ρίζι” were a Greek word, it would be a neutral noun—το ρίζι. The ending in “ι” would make it a neutral noun of demotic Greek. Instead of pointing to the plural, the addition of the letter “n,” at least for an hellenophone reader of Alexakis’s generation, and beyond, points to katharevoussa—with a twist: the word ρίζι in katharevoussa would have been a second declension neutral noun which would have ended in “on,” ρίζι-ον. In other words, it’s katharevoussa with an incorporated deletion. In the French text, “rizi” (“rizin” in the plural) is further removed from “riz” (rice) phonetically than “ρίζι” is from “ρύζι” (rice) in the Greek version. Its spelling references rice but its phonetic realization echoes most immediately the word “risible” (laughable). The deleted portion in this case is the phonemic combination [bl]. As with the Greek version, the French text invites the reader to phonetically articulate an imaginary word by restoring a deletion. By so doing, however, the reader is restoring the foundational deletion of the “other” language which made the self-translation possible in the first place. “Rizi” in the French language is an impossible word without the palimpsestual presence of Modern Greek (ρύζι), yet it is the phonetic association of that same “rizi” with “risible” (laughable) that fully textures the ludic nature of the truncated “ρίζιν” in Greek: the use of the letter “n” at the end of noun, adjective, and pronoun declensions is a debate issue in Greek linguistic circles to this day,8 a reminder that a language codified and made official just over 40 years ago certainly retains a level of tension with its most recent historical iterations. Creating an estuary as two versions of a self-translation face each other is, then, not just a question of semantic completion, as theorists discussed in the first part of this chapter have suggested; it is rather critiquing or undoing the self while simultaneously elucidating (or completing) the other. It is this kind of complex repositioning that creates over time cultural estuaries, zones in

Vassilis Alexakis  119 which new challenges and new forms (textual, intellectual, historical, political, etc.) emerge. The narrative’s first paragraph, the textual environment within which this estuarine passage appears, is marked by another common feature of Alexakis’s self-translations, namely, a significant change in register as we move from the Greek version (low) to the French text (standard). When the narrator encounters that unpleasant woman whom he wishes to confront, he notes the following: “Κάποια στιγμή θα της τα πω…‘Ξέρω τι έχεις πει για μένα παλιοκαριόλα’, της λέω, ‘όλα όσα έκανες σε βάρος μου’” (7). The French text reads as follows: “‘Il faudra bien que je m’explique avec elle’… ‘Je sais tout ce que tu as dit, tout ce que tu as fait contre moi’, lui dis-je” (“‘I’m going to have to have it out with her,’ I thought…‘I know all about what you said, everything you’ve done against me’”; 9; Patton 1). The Greek text uses a vulgar adjective to characterize the woman (παλιοκαργιόλα is the rough equivalent of “fucking bitch”) whereas the French version elides the epithet entirely. In fact, Alexakis opts to not replace it in the self-translation by a neutral, more polite—if still critical— sounding adjective. The syntactic position of the epithet in the Greek text is a significant one. Παλιοκαργιόλα is a feminine adjective, in the vocative declension, positioned at the end of the sentence to elicit the woman’s response and establish some form of communication between the two characters. In their study of self-translation in Après J.-C. titled “L’enjeu de la traduction chez Vassilis Alexakis,” Anthoula Rontogianni and Katerina Spiropoulou, situate the changes in register within the following theoretical frame: Faire passer d’une langue dans l’autre, c’est l’acte même de traduire, mais dans le cas d’Alexakis, la traduction le mène plus loin, à une sorte de jeu de langue, de la bi-langue dans le sens où il fait preuve de l’intraduisible…La pratique de l’autotraduction chez Alexakis l’aide à trouver l’équilibre entre les deux cultures et surtout à le sauver de la dissonance (To transfer from one language to the other is the essence of the translative act. In Alexakis’s case, however, translation pushes the author further, to a kind of language game, a game of the bi-langue, to the extent that it concretizes the untranslatable….In Alexakis’s work, self-translation not only helps the author establish a balance between the two cultures but, most importantly, it saves him from dissonance). (52) Although finding the lexical equivalent of παλιοκαργιόλα in French does not present any particular difficulty, introducing an expression such as sale pétasse in the French version would have ushered into the text a sense of familiarity that the language in this particular instance resists. This is not to say that French as a language anchored in the contemporary cultural context within which the bilingual and bicultural

120  Vassilis Alexakis narrator evolves allows for less profanity than Greek. In the particular relationship that this self-translation establishes between the two languages, however, familiarity is untranslatable. What Rontogianni and Spiropoulou call balance between the two linguistic codes, I read as the estuary’s irreducible multiplicity. Notwithstanding the mostly productive dissolution that follows contact and coexistence in liminal spaces, the particularities and internal variations of the cultures and languages that meet are never quite erased. Untranslatability does not protect from dissonance; quite on the contrary, it encourages it. It provides a space of encounter within which silence as communication is privileged. By virtue of interpellating the parties involved—dissonance attracts attention as it generates desire for resonance—dissonant encounters promise a relational rapport that accepts difference as a functional modality and interprets positioning not as a hierarchical binary but rather as an ever-shifting event that produces meaning horizontally and encourages the creation of potentially limitless contact points. In Alexakis’s case, the self-translation’s resistance to transpose familiarity with a taste for the vulgar from one cultural and linguistic environment into the other impacts the ambilingual reading experience in different ways: the bilingual reader may relate it to the thematic core of the text, namely the rediscovery/resurrection of the mother tongue, a process anchored in a desire for familial intimacy following the passing of the mother; we can also interpret this discrepancy as a semantically insignificant event that may or may not have its roots in elements of the translating agent’s autobiography. In an estuarine environment of palimpsestual gesturing and mutual texturing between the two languages such as the one that the contiguity of “ρίζι” and “rizi” creates, the change in register interpellates more forcefully by its delayed promise of relationality, in other words by bolstering the novelistic space’s estuarine character, than by any thematically or culturally referential meaning that it may carry. The promise of a relational future, a radical political and ethical gesture, is amplified when the self-translation tackles one of the most heated, complex, and divisive political debates of the 1990s in Greece, namely the Greek government’s refusal to accept one of the ex-Yugoslavic republics’ intent to use in the official name for its newly constituted national territory, the term “Macedonia.” According to official Greek policy at the time, “Macedonia” solely describes Greece’s northern region of the same name and references a past that is culturally and linguistically Greek. Accepting the neighboring country’s intent to use the term for purposes of national determination and international recognition of its statehood would equal an attack at Greece’s territorial sovereignty. The issue was recently resolved with the signing of the Prespa treaty (12th June 2018) wherein both parties agree that the official name of the country will henceforth be “Republic of North Macedonia.” They also agree that the word “Macedonia” has distinct historical and cultural

Vassilis Alexakis  121 associations for the two nations—including a note that the Macedonian language spoken in North Macedonia belongs to the group of Southern Slavic languages (“prespes agreement” article 7). In his study of Greek history after the military junta (1967–74), Giannis Voulgaris notes that Greece’s positioning against the inclusion of the term Macedonia in the name of its neighboring nation and its ensuing diplomatic isolation reinforced the country’s self-perception as a solitary nation, misunderstood because it is culturally and historically unique (ανάδελφον έθνος=a nation without a family tree) (Η μεταπολιτευτική Ελλάδα 404–05). The first mention of the Macedonian question in Alexakis’s narrative does not articulate the word “Macedonia” while clearly referring to the debate. While discussing the etymology of various names of towns he passes through as he travels from Athens to his friend’s house in Stamata, he notes that his brother, Costas, who lives in the north-west of Greece and has a particular interest in both etymology and folklore has told him that Greeks consistently hellenize Slavic or Albanian town names in the north of Greece—given the political and cultural tensions around the “Macedonian question” in the mid-nineties, the syntagm “North of Greece” might as well be a perfect synonym for the word “Macedonia:” “…φοβούμενοι προφανώς μην αμφισβητηθεί η κυριαρχία μας στα μέρη αυτά” (9). The French version significantly alters the meaning of the Greek text. First, there is the omission of the word “προφανώς” (obviously). There is nothing obvious about the national policy of deslavization in the North of Greece for the francophone reader: “…pour prévenir toute contestation de notre domination dans la région” (“… to prevent any challenge to our control in the region”; 11, Patton 2). The second alteration diminishes the text’s affective resonance: the Greek “fearing that our dominance would be questioned” becomes “to prevent any challenge…” in the French version. The third change is of temporal nature: the present participle in the Greek version registers fear in an atemporal, continuous present whereas the French text projects the intention expressed by changing town names into an imagined future of stable sovereignty. The affective and temporal urgency with which the Greek text frames the Macedonian debate question is complicated when the narrator relates a fight he had with his ex-girlfriend, Vaguélio, about this very issue. She is very upset that Greece’s northern neighbors want to call themselves Macedonians because, in her estimation, they have no legitimate claims to the history of Alexander the Great, which she believes they are seeking to appropriate. In fact: “Είναι μουσαφίρηδες!” (50) / “Ce sont des touristes!” (“They’re tourists!”; 58; Patton 25). The Greek text qualifies the inhabitants of North Macedonia as “guests” while the French version calls them tourists. Interestingly enough, the word “μουσαφίρης” entered the Greek lexicon through the Turkish language, ironic commentary in and of itself on the cultural purity and impenetrable national frontiers for which Vaguélio is arguing. The link

122  Vassilis Alexakis between the French word “touriste” and the Greek word “μουσαφίρης,” however, is not as arbitrary as it may appear. The word most readily associated with the tourism industry in Greece, one of the healthiest economic sectors in the 1990s and one that, after years of austerity, economic crisis, IMF, and ECB tutelage, still performs exceptionally well today is “φιλοξενία.” Philoxenia is the ancient tradition of hospitality, literally “loving the stranger,” one that both in Greek and most Western European languages carries connotations of “hospitableness and welcome” (Collins English Dictionary). A tourist is by definition a stranger, one that becomes, through the act of hospitality and welcome of which the Greek tourism industry prides itself, a “μουσαφίρης,” a guest. The linguistic estuary that “touriste” and “μουσαφίρης” create, then, powerfully comments on the identitarian Greek politics around the Macedonian question while placing emphasis on the fragility of the European edifice qua contemporary incarnation of Western civilization whose edification has required the elision of multiple pages in the history of the continent, two of the most significant ones being the contributions of Arabs and Turks to the rich tapestry that is Europe today. In Arabic, whence the Ottomans adopted the word that was to become the Greek “μουσαφίρης,” ‫ ﻣﺴﺎﻓﺮ‬means traveler. The current tradition of philoxenia extended to foreign travelers, or tourists, in Greece today, is marked by the history of contact, conflict, exchange, war, and resistance that has punctuated life in the Eastern Mediterranean for the past 3,000 years. As Effi Gazi has noted in “Μεταπλάσεις της Ελληνικής εθνικής ιδεολογίας και ταυτότητας στη Μεταπολίτευση” (“Transformations of Greek national ideology and identity in the era of metapolitefsi”), modern Greek history is, at least in part, the product of a debilitating tension between the importance of Ancient Greece as the cradle of Western civilization for the European unification project and contemporary Greece’s wanting position within the internal hierarchies of the EU (258). Alexakis’s self-translative process becomes, then, political commentary to the extent that it requires that both languages, both cultures, and both nations look critically at the centuries that intervened between Rome and the Renaissance, between Plato and humanism and interrogate the white, Christian, and logocentric narrative that serves as the foundation of contemporary Europe. Alexakis concludes his reflection on the politics of contemporary Greece with a brief account of an extraordinary experience he has at one of Athens’ theaters. After attending a comedy, critical of the current political situation in the country (in the tradition of “επιθεώρηση”/“epitheorissi”), he witnesses the following peculiar scene: following the last curtain call and as the spectators are ready to exit the theater, the protagonist and producer of the show, who has remained on stage after all other actors have left it, asks the audience to stay, breaks the (already absent) fourth wall, and addresses it directly (we later learn that he does the same thing after every single show). He tells them that Greece is

Vassilis Alexakis  123 under attack, that foreigners are trying to usurp its land, its sea, and its islands, that no one among the country’s European partners remembers what they owe to this country, that they are hypocrites who selectively attack Serbia for its violent nationalism but do not sanction Turkey for its treatment of its Kurdish population, that they are thieves, these European partners, who have filled their museums with Greek treasures. He equally attacks Greek politicians for their greed. The actor ends his speech by expressing his certainty that Greece will eventually rise again while simultaneously unfolding a piece of cloth that he has been holding onto since the beginning of this odd epilogue to the play; it’s a Greek flag. He wraps it around his shoulders, yells “Long live Greece” and collapses onto the stage, repeating “Ζήτω η Ελλάδα!” (195) / “Vive la Grèce” (223). The self-translation of the passage presents little variation from one version to the other with two notable exceptions: the actor begins his diatribe by reminding the audience that an actor’s job is to make them laugh; just like shadow puppets—only even shadow puppets, he adds, sometime feel like crying. The Greek text makes in this passage an explicit reference to Karaguiozis, the most famous Greek shadow puppet, the protagonist of Greek shadow puppet plays that take place during the country’s 400-years of Ottoman occupation and that thematically privilege the ingenious ways in which the poor Karaguiozis resists the powerful Turkish hierarchy—along with its Greek lackeys— exhibiting the kind of agency one rarely associates with the dispossessed. In contemporary slang, the word also means “ridiculous.” The French version replaces the referentially empty “Karaguiozis” by an explanatory annotation (“figurines d’ombres”=shadow puppets) that fails to single out any single of the puppet characters. The choice of “Karaguiozis” in the Greek is wonderfully ambiguous: the actor wishes his initiative to be perceived as similar to the clever schemes of the rebel Karaguiozis who argues for Greek independence in the face of foreign occupation, what he ends up doing, however, is mostly ridiculous (as evidenced by the lukewarm public reception). The French text is more lyrical (“les figurines pleurent”=“puppets cry”) and does not gesture at the possibility of a polysemy: “les figurines d’ombres” reads mostly as a metaphor for a contemporary Greece that has been reduced to a puppet (figurine) in the hands of powerful European and international political players and to a shadow (ombres) of its former self. The second discrepancy between the two versions concerns the treatment of the Kurdish people by the Turks. In the Greek version, the actor accuses Greece’s European partners of having forgotten Cyprus and the Kurds: “Ξεχνούν την Κύπρο, οι καλοί μας φίλοι! Kαι τους Κούρδους! Ουδέποτε τους απασχόλησε η σφαγή των Κούρδων!” (194). The French version reads as follows: “Ils ne se soucient guère de Chypre, nos bons amis ! Ni des Kurdes, d’ailleurs” (“They don’t care about Cyprus, our good friends. Or about the Kurds either”; 223; Patton 103). A number of politically significant changes mark

124  Vassilis Alexakis the space of self-translation: first, “forgetting” Cyprus in the Greek text becomes “not caring about Cyprus” in the French version; second, the word “Kurds” appears twice in the Greek while the French text only uses it once; finally, the Greek text speaks of a Kurdish “massacre” while the French version refers to the Kurdish people as a clearly suffering entity but without qualification of their historical suffering. The Cyprus question, unresolved to this day, is a particularly thorny chapter in Modern Greek history not owing solely to the linguistic, religious, cultural, and historical affinities between Greeks and Greek Cypriots which charges affectively most lay people’s interpretation and appreciation of the events surrounding the 1974 Turkish invasion of the island, but also, and most importantly, due to the decisive role that the Greek military junta played in creating mature conditions for Turkish military action in the island’s northern part.9 “Forgetting” those events is certainly more ethically complicated than “not feeling concerned.” Self-translation in this instance allows for different degrees of affective power and a distinct sense of ethical responsibility to emerge in the two texts: in the French text, the current political situation in Cyprus registers as one among many problems around the globe that the United Nations (UN) has failed to peacefully resolve due to the lack of a true geostrategic interest in the affair by the Security Council’s permanent members—in fact, it is more than likely that Alexakis’s francophone readers know about Cyprus through media reporting on either the numerous UN resolutions that have punctuated the crisis over the years or the presence of UN peacekeeping forces on the island, without, however, any knowledge of the precise historical context within which the Turkish invasion took place. The Greek text does not provide that historical context either. Both versions inscribe the space of historical memory with a silence. The narrator could have opted for heavy annotation in either the French text alone or, in both Greek and French versions. He chose the affectively meaningful “forgetting” for the Greek text and the neutral “not worrying” for the French text. Whether this choice of silencing the actual events will lead to estuarine relationality through the reception of the silence as an impetus for repositioning one’s self in relation to history (Why does the Greek reader feel that he should not have forgotten Cyprus? Does the francophone reader know enough about the history of Cyprus, an EU member after all, to even form an opinion on the island’s history?) is a matter solely dependent upon the reader’s agency as historical subject and as citizen. The self-translation creates a space in which significant potential for powerful shifting vis-à-vis history emerges. It remains to be seen whether the two cultural and linguistic bodies’ contact will produce a novel relationship to historical knowledge or will, conversely, buttress existing positions and historical epistemologies. Similarly, the clear difference in the depiction of recent Kurdish history in the two versions raises interesting political questions for the

Vassilis Alexakis  125 ambilingual reader. The repetition of the word “Kurds” in the Greek text as well as the clear reference that the Greek version makes to the massacre of the Kurdish people is both more emotionally (repetition) and factually (specific accusation) involved than the rather tepid mention of the Kurds in the French text. This particular discrepancy sheds ample light to the nationalistic character of the actor’s speech. In the Greek cultural and historical imaginary, the suffering of the Kurdish people is almost entirely due to their mistreatment by the Turks, Greece’s eternal foe.10 However, in the mid-nineties, if mention had been made of a Kurdish massacre to international audiences, the obvious point of reference for the receiving party would have been the Anfal campaign in Northern Iraq at the end of the Iran–Iraq war. If the narrator were to speak of a Greek massacre in the French text, the relationship between the Cyprus question and the Kurds, namely the causal link to Turkey’s aggression and cultural regression which the Greek text clearly suggests, would have remained invisible. In fact, the French version links Cyprus and the Kurds syntactically and thematically by positioning both as objects of the verb “se soucier de”—Europeans simply do not worry about Cyprus and they do not care about the Kurds either. If we accept that the Greek version’s estuarine potential emerges at the precise moment when the hellenophone reader is interpellated as consumer of a thoughtless and facile de facto association between political injustices and the Turkish state (let us not forget that the actor who delivers the speech selfidentifies as “Karaguiozis,” or ridiculous), then the francophone reader is equally interpellated by her neutrality (“ne pas se soucier”) vis-à-vis the questions raised. The estuarine environment that this particular selftranslation creates, then, is not one marked by palimpsestual resonance of one language and culture within the other, but, one of potential political repositioning in the presence of but not necessarily in relation to one another. Were this shift in mentality and attitudes to take place, then the timbre of the overall relationship between France and Greece as political actors in Europe generally and in the Eastern Mediterranean in particular could potentially shift as well, at least at the level of the individual citizen–agent and her potential network of associations. The narrator clearly undermines the actor’s exaggeratedly nationalistic speech. At the end of the speech, the actor falls flat on the scene, covered in the Greek flag, shouting “Long live Greece!” He does not only repeat stereotypical nationalistic discourses about the relationship between Greece and Turkey or the European Union; he does so while in emotional and physical disarray, the country’s flag, a powerful symbol of Greekness, barely covering a body that can no longer properly function. What for the hellenophone reader is an invitation for introspection and self-critique, for the francophone reader is an impetus for reconsidering the meaning of the European edifice, particularly in terms of its reliance on a phantasmatic interpretation of Greekness whose construction

126  Vassilis Alexakis depends on emptying the lived experience of the country’s contemporary inhabitants of all its cultural complexity so that their imagined essence may perform on the European stage the myth of foundational Western civilization. Additionally, the Greek version performs introspective critique at narrative junctures where politics and history are not the story’s primary thematic concern. While discussing his fascination for the letter “epsilon,” and, more specifically, following a question formulated in direct speech in both versions in which he wonders about the reasons that may justify his interest in the Delphic epsilon, the narrator notes: “Αλλά γιατί λέω ότι ενδιαφέρομαι; Απλά το κοιτάζω. Η σκέψη μου στέκεται στο κατώφλι αυτού του αινίγματος. Το έψιλον μου κρατάει συντροφιά” (44). The French version of the same passage is shorter: “Je me contente en fait de le regarder. Mon esprit s’arrête au seuil de son mystère. L’E me tient compagnie” (“For me, it’s enough just to look at it. My mind stops at the threshold of its mystery. The E keeps me company”; 50; 21 Patton). What is missing in the French text is the question that introduces the passage in Greek: “But why do I even say that I am interested [in the epsilon]?” In the Greek text, in addition to questioning the motivation behind his interest in the quest to find the meaning of the epsilon, the narrator also questions whether he is in fact interested in the enigmatic letter. The answer to this second question, which remains unarticulated, silent in the French text is, in both versions, that he is simply looking at the epsilon, that his mind hovers at the threshold of the letter’s mystery, that the letter keeps him company. The moment of explicit self-examination in the Greek version is not present in the French text. And although both versions register the answers to the narrator’s question, they do so differently. In the Greek text, the narrator’s mind “στέκεται,” pauses, at the threshold of the “αίνιγμα,” the riddle that the letter poses. In the French version, his mind, “s’arrête” stops, at the threshold of the letter’s “mystery.” The changes are subtle yet particularly meaningful when inscribed within the larger context of the narrative’s major themes. Pausing to consider a riddle implies intellectual engagement and an eventual resolution—or not. Although stopping in front of a mystery does not exclude entirely the possibility of engaging it in terms similar to one’s attempt at solving a riddle (inductive thinking, pattern recognition, and, most importantly, study of language: semantic contradictions, polysemy, amphisemy, etc.), the passage in French inadvertently introduces a transcendental dimension that examines the limits of the subject’s agency. In a narrative that engages Ancient Greece to the extent that La langue maternelle does, the word “αίνιγμα” echoes both the triumph of human reason and the tragedy of the human condition, themes that the enigma of enigmas in Classical Greek literature, the riddle posed by the Sphinx and solved by a young Oedipus, are masterfully deployed in Oedipus Rex. Even though the lexical

Vassilis Alexakis  127 choices in Greek seem to be privileging the narrator’s agency and promising the solution of the riddle, they can also mean the opposite: framed as they are by a self-questioning, self- doubting interrogation, they remind the reader that Oedipus’s fall was not so much driven by the omen he received (that he was to kill his father and marry his mother) as it was by the unquestioned belief in his own reason, his refusal to doubt himself and make of his own agency the object of his scrutiny. The French version introduces the dimension of self-doubt— textually invisible due to the absence of the self-doubting question—by speaking of a complete stop in front of a mystery. The word “mystère” in French, in addition to its figurative, everyday use which points to what is hidden, that which cannot be known, also means truth that is inaccessible to human reason, whose content may only be understood by means of divine revelation: “Vérité inaccessible à l’intelligence humaine, mais dont le contenu ne peut être saisi que par la révélation divine” (“Truth that remains inaccessible to human intelligence, whose content can only be understood by means of divine revelation” Dictionnaire Larousse online). Interestingly enough, in the Middle Ages, “mystère” was a type of religiously themed play. The Greek version’s suggestion that reasoned approaches to riddle-solving when not accompanied by introspective self-doubt can have negative outcomes (self-doubting question and association with Oedipus Rex) becomes full-fledged commentary on the limits of human reason to access truth (transcendental or otherwise) in the French text. The additional semantic echo of theatrical practice (“mystère” as play) enhances the estuarine conditions of cultural relationality created by the two passages, insofar as it projects a referential zone of contact between the two languages/cultures echoing as it does both the Greek text’s theatrical associations and the French version’s religious/transcendental ones. A few pages further, when the narrator thinks back to his relationship with Vaguélio, his ex-girlfriend, he says that they used to enjoy racing each other inside the apartment, on all fours (French version) or crawling (Greek version) to a designated endpoint: “Να τ’ομολογήσω; Κάναμε κι αγώνες δρόμου μπουσουλώντας” (49). The French version omits the question that introduces the French passage: “Nous courions à quatre pattes” (“We’d race on hands and knees”; 56; Patton 24). While the Greek version hesitates to lift the curtain on the couple’s intimacy (“Should I admit to it?”), the French text does not mark the decision to do so as following a moment of self-doubt. The self-translation also points to a linguistically unjustifiable discrepancy: in the Greek text, the lovers crawl whereas in the French version they run on all fours. These are clearly two different ways to race. If Alexakis had meant to describe the game as either crawling or running on all fours, he could have chosen “ramper” in French for crawling or “στα τέσσερα” in Greek for running on all fours. Is it that the couple raced, in fact, in both manners, or is racing by crawling an admission that the narrator is only willing to

128  Vassilis Alexakis make in the Greek version after having considered the alternative, having doubted the wisdom of his choice? Answering this question is likely beside the point. What the ambilingual reading of the self-translation reveals is that positioning one’s self in relation to the two languages requires shifting and interrogating. And that the potential impact of these continual readjustments is eminently political, not because it refers explicitly to politics—the last two examples have forcefully illustrated this point—but rather because they compel the ambilingual reader to imagine a zone of contact, an estuary of sorts, within which elements of the competing bodies of knowledge retain their irreducible particularity (Oedipus in the Greek text) while aspects of both in a relational encounter produce new articulations (palimpsestual images of the couple racing in nonconventional ways). The narrator suggests a different approach to the politics of the estuary when reflecting meta-linguistically on the challenges of translation. As he explores the various interpretations of the Delphic “epsilon,” he considers the possibility that the “E” was a symbolic reference to Hermes, the patron of travelers, or of Hestia, protectress of the Pythian sanctuary. In French—as in English—this reflection requires annotation. Referring to Hermes in particular, the narrator notes in the French version: “…son nom commence en effet par cette lettre en grec (Ἑρμῆς), le h ajouté en français n’étant qu’une réminiscence de l’accent rude” (“… his name does indeed start with that letter in Greek (Ἑρμῆς), the h in other languages being nothing more than a reminder of a rough breathing mark”; 125; Patton 58). Having explained the relationship between the letter “h” in the Latin alphabet and the rough breathing mark of Hellenistic Greek, when referring to Hestia, the narrator includes the Greek spelling of the goddess’s name in parentheses without further annotation. A few pages later, reflection on the annotative process itself becomes an explicit part of the narrative. While exploring the possible meaning of the Delphic epsilon in the company of François, a French librarian at the French School of Athens where the narrator studies daily the history of Delphes, Nikolaïdis wonders how to transcribe into French those Greek words that begin with an “epsilon” accompanied by the rough breathing: “Je ne sais pas trop comment transcrire en français ces mots qui s’écrivent avec un h, mais commencent en fait avec E en grec. Devrais-je mettre le h entre parenthèses, écrire par exemple ‘(H)éllène?’” (“I’m never sure how to transcribe those words that start with an H in other languages, but actually start with an E in Greek. Should I put the h in parentheses, ‘(H)ellène,’ for example?”; 170; Patton 79). This quote is absent from the Greek version; in the French text, it constitutes an entire paragraph. Reflecting on the difficulties of transcription from one alphabet into the other in a text that privileges language both thematically and typographically without translating the meta-translative passage is an intriguing choice. Although the passage targets specifically issues raised by

Vassilis Alexakis  129 transcribing certain words from Greek to French, it follows an exposé by François which the French text partially omits notwithstanding its relevance to the general question of the epsilon’s phonetic realizations in Ancient and Hellenistic Greek. François explains to the narrator that if the Delphic “epsilon” were indeed the initial of a word (as opposed to, for instance, the number 5), then one would have to explore all words starting with that letter, whether preceded by a rough or a smooth breathing. The two following sentences in the Greek passage are absent from the French version: “Ήταν περίπου σαν το ε που χρησιμοποιούμε όταν λέμε ‘Ε! Μη σπρώχνετε!’… Κάποιο διάστημα καταργήθηκε μάλιστα, όπως καταργήθηκαν σήμερα τα πνεύματα” (149). The decision to elide the first one is justified by the lack of phonetic equivalence in French (“[the phonetic realization of an ‘epsilon’ with a rough breathing] resembles the sound we make when saying ‘Eh! Stop pushing!’”). The second sentence, however, communicates cultural and historical information relevant to the demotic vs. katharevoussa debate with which the francophone reader of this narrative is by now quite familiar: “In fact, it was for a while abandoned, just as we have in our days abolished breathing marks.” This comment refers to an orthographic simplification that was codified into law in 1981, a few years after the erasure of katharevoussa from both officialdom and education. By noting that in the past—he does not specify at which exact moment in the history of the Delphic oracle— breathing marks had been unsystematically used to the point of being entirely abandoned for undetermined periods of time “as is the case today,” François performs a temporal contraction that points to continuity between the Greek language’s past and present that is, uncharacteristically, not marked by a sense of inadequacy and lack; in fact, lack, erasure, and haphazard use are the characteristics that allow for the two iterations of a culture to relate, not what sets them apart. Examined together, these discrepancies between the two versions of the self-translation articulate an overarching concern with silence. Ready to close the 40-page notebook in which he writes one word starting with “epsilon” per page thus documenting his journey in the company of this letter, the narrator decides to jot down the word “epsilon” itself to “…κάνω μια αναφορά στον περίεργο διάλογο που εδώ και τόσον καιρό έχω ανοίξει με τη σιωπή μου” (190—emphasis mine). Instead of “my” silence, the French version suggests that the narrator wants to “… faire mention de l’étrange dialogue que j’ai engagé depuis un moment avec son silence” (“to acknowledge the strange dialogue I’ve been having for some time with its silence”; 217; Patton 101—emphasis mine). The self-translation relates the narrator’s silence to that of the letter epsilon, a letter which, by now, both the francophone and hellenophone readers know is unlikely to reveal its meaning. If we consider the erasures that the quest for the meaning of “epsilon” has occasioned, most notably, the meta-translative annotation about the rough breathing mark from

130  Vassilis Alexakis the Greek text and the rough breathing mark’s occasional deletion from the orthography of older versions of the Greek language from the French text in relation to this double silence that the self-translation privileges (the narrator’s and the epsilon’s), we conclude that, if the epsilon is to yield any meaning at all, it is in its politics as refusal to speak: speak the officially coded history and politics of Greek diglossia, speak the insurmountable silences that a self-translation must ponder to materialize into inevitably lacunary expression, speak the cultural and linguistic erasures that define the bilingual and bicultural condition; it is, finally, in its politics of resistance to knowledge-as-power— knowledge of the difficulties of self-translation, knowledge of Greek diglossia’s complete history, knowledge of the affective power of loss that a bilingual subject experiences.

Eliding the Colonial: The Linguistic Ethics of Les mots étrangers This estuarine resistance to knowledge-as-power, although still present, is more complicated and nuanced in Alexakis’s Les mots étrangers. The narrator’s central quest in Les mots étrangers is the acquisition of a foreign language. In the opening pages of the book, the narrator, Nikolaïdès, a Greek francophone author, is not quite sure which language he will study although he has an expressed preference for African languages. The decision is made in Beauvais, while Nikolaïdès is visiting Paul-Marie and Mathilde Bourquin, retired linguists who have spent a number of years conducting research in Africa. The language Nikolaïdès chooses is Sango, the vehicular language of the Central African Republic, a former French colony and a neocolonial linguistic space since to this day the official language of the land, the language taught at school, is still French. A few pages prior to settling on Sango, when the narrator identifies Africa as his continent of linguistic choice, he mentions as probable cause of a seemingly arbitrary choice, a picture of his paternal grandfather taken in Bangui, a city in what was at the time French Equatorial Africa. At the time, Nikolaïdès’s grandfather was visiting his sister, Clotilde, who spent most of her life there, member of a then thriving Greek community. Knowing that the narrator’s father has just passed away, the choice of Sango acquires new meaning. The desire to learn a new language, initially understood as an expression of linguistic and cultural curiosity, is truly a very personal journey. Learning new words allows the narrator to negotiate loss through discovery, death through the processes of linguistic rebirth, and, finally, the unknown thereafter through problematic appropriation of knowledge, not only knowledge of a new language but also knowledge of a people and a continent. This very personal journey is steeped in the narrator’s past, both as a descendant of African minor colonizers—Clotilde was not the only

Vassilis Alexakis  131 family member to have lived extensively in Africa; Nikolaïdès’s paternal grandmother was born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt as was his grandfather—but, also as a speaker and writer of French, the language that almost half a century after independence still narrates the ­Central African Republic’s official stories. Furthermore, he chooses to learn and consequently bring to the attention of French-speaking audiences the land’s vehicular language, itself imposed by suppression and silencing of the roughly 60 languages spoken in the Central African Republic. In other words, his project, personal though it may be, has linguistic and political ramifications that go beyond the act of mourning. In fact, the narrator himself discusses at length the linguistic situation in the Central African Republic with native speakers of Sango when he visits the country. His analysis of the native peoples’ loss, however, is predicated on a problematic parallel: throughout the narrative, he establishes an analogy between katharevoussa and French, followed by a de facto equation between Sango and Modern Greek. In other words, he likens colonial linguistic history to Greece’s history of diglossia. Although linguistic violence is at the root of silencing both low varieties and colonized native tongues, obliterating the specificities of the postcolonial linguistic condition in favor of elaborating a universal paradigm of injustice done to minor languages forcefully questions the legitimacy of the anti-neocolonial linguistic discourse that the narrator enunciates in French—himself a francophone author whose linguistic exile is a matter of personal choice. Furthermore, the word “francophone” when used to describe writers, like Alexakis, non-French Europeans, writers from the Americas, or Asians from non-postcolonial cultural spaces who write in French, is free of the epithetical grammatical value it carries when referring to authors from previously colonized countries who write in French.11 Alexakis’s narrator, a character very closely resembling the author, inadvertently participates in a hegemonic discourse that excludes Sango from the Glissantian paradigm of the tout-monde. As Emily Apter suggests: Glissant’s paradigm of the tout-monde, building on the non-dialectical ontological immanence of Deleuze and Guattari, offers a model of aporetic community in which small worlds (modeled perhaps after a deterritorialized Caribbean), connect laterally through bonds of Creole and a politics of mutualism centered on resistance to debt. (301) Sango and its native speakers may only be heard through translation and an obligatory return to the metropolitan center. Instead of laterally relating to peripheral tongues, Sango forcefully enters into dialogue with two European languages: the colonial language, French, and the minorcolonial, phantasmally same, Modern Greek. The historically established axis of the colonizer/colonized becomes thus a triangle of sorts: the tension between the colonizer’s language and the colonized peoples’

132  Vassilis Alexakis native tongue is negotiated through a colonially virginal language, Modern Greek, which, at least in the narrator’s personal history, has a colonial past of its own. In the liminal space of self-translation, French and Greek transcribe and translate Sango, imposing upon it a number of Eurocentric, grammatical regulations. In an article titled “Francophonie,” Réda Bensmaïa discussed the “crossing out” of Francophone literature from American Universities, a “scotomization” of francophonie in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He represents the scotoma, the blind spot internalized by all involved in the study of French-speaking literatures, by an X that typographically crosses out the word “francophonie.” He explains: “By putting an X through the lexeme ‘Francophonie,’ I … wanted to indicate that Francophonie is not only limited to the ‘critical zone’ of French literature, but that it belongs to a broader topography that encompasses it without exhausting its potentialities” (20). If Les mots étrangers radicalizes the scotomization of “francophonie” by shedding light on a triangular topography with two summits in Europe, one in the colonial metropolis, the other in the mythical birthplace of Western civilization, and the third one in the heart of a phantasmal Africa with an equally imagined native tongue that obscures and silences all that remains external to it, then its self-translation could aptly resemble Bensmaïa’s X and the promise of a larger topography with inexhaustible, estuarine potential. In “Mondialisation et identité: le cas de Vassilis Alexakis,” Olympia Antoniadou notes the importance that Les mots étrangers assigns on the preservation of minor languages: Vassilis Alexakis, à l’époque de la globalisation, traite le thème de la disparition des dialectes et des langues dites ‘petites’ tout en nous envoyant le message, de sa propre façon, que les ‘petites’ langues (comme l’est aussi le grec par rapport à l’anglais) préservent des ‘petits mondes’ qui nous aident à mieux vivre (In the era of globalization, Vassilis Alexakis, deals with the issue of dialect and ‘minor’ language disappearance while telling us, in his own way, that ‘small’ languages (this would include a language like Modern Greek in relationship to English) preserve ‘small worlds’ that help us live better). (227) This reading is supported by the narrator’s tendency to establish historical and cultural parallels between Modern Greek with its politically charged diglossic past and Sango. Right after Paul-Marie Bourquin tells Nikolaïdès, whose aunt Clotilde used to live in Bangui, that Sango is the dominant language of the Central African Republic, the narrator decides that this is the African language that he will study. While Paul-Marie is looking for a Sango textbook and a French–Sango dictionary in his library, he tells Nikolaïdès that to this day, decades after independence,

Vassilis Alexakis  133 the country’s elites consider Sango a subaltern, vulgar language. This comment is directly followed by a reflection on the status of Modern Greek: “L’État grec avait érigé en langue officielle un idiome savant, la catharévoussa (de catharos, pur), qui était censé prouver l’indéfectible continuité de l’hellénisme à travers les siècles” (“The Greek government had set up a scholarly language—Katharevousa (from katharos, pure)— as the official language. It was supposed to prove the unfailing continuity of Hellenism through the centuries”; 39; Waters 22). The Greek text reads as follows: “Έπρεπε να γράφουμε στην καθαρεύουσα, αυτό το ψεύτικο ιδίωμα που είχε επινοήσει το ελληνικό κράτος για να στηρίξει τον ισχυρισμό ότι ήμασταν οι νόμιμοι κληρονόμοι του αρχαίου πνεύματος” (39). The differences between the two versions are striking. The expression “scholarly language” that the narrator uses in the French text to explain the nature and function of katharevoussa becomes “fake language” in the Greek text. The justification that successive Greek governments used for the imposition of katharevoussa to a people whose native language was a different idiom varies as well: the Greek version suggests that katharevoussa “supported the Greek state’s claim that [Greeks] are indeed lawful heirs to the spirit of the Ancients” whereas, according to the French text, the purpose was “to prove the unfailing continuity of Hellenism through the centuries.” Finally, the French version specifies that katharevoussa was the country’s official language while the Greek text only mentions the legal mandate (until 1976) to produce all written documents in katharevoussa. In the context of a narrative which centers thematically around the acquisition of a minor language (Sango), this passage performs, at least initially, an erasure: Bourquin’s analysis of the current linguistic status quo in Central Africa, of Sango’s continual subalternization by means of its exclusion from officialdom, is recast in colonial, Eurocentric terms when the attention of the narrator turns to Greek. As the passage suggests, the question of Greek diglossia is inescapably inscribed within the mythologization and political, cultural, and military instrumentalization of a presumed European supremacy, during the modern imperial era. The French version, in particular, emphasizes this association by opting for the word “hellénisme” where the Greek text speaks of a certain “spirit of the Ancients.” “Hellénisme,” defined in the online Larousse dictionary as the totality and particular character of Greek civilization (“ensemble de la civilisation grecque; caractère de cette civilisation”), points the francophone reader toward the Greco-Roman cultural and political traditions that since the Renaissance define the character of modernity in Western Europe, including Western liberalism’s constituent and foundational contradictions, namely imperialism, slavery, and colonialism. When read ambilingually, however, this passage appears to favor less openly the two European vertices of the triangle. It does so by heavily criticizing the imposition of katharevoussa and therefore undermining the parallel that

134  Vassilis Alexakis the narrator attempts to establish between Modern Greek and Sango, French, and katharevoussa. First, by calling katharevoussa a “fake” language, Nikolaïdès challenges the analogy to French: although French in the Central African Republic and katharevoussa in twentieth-century Greece are expressions of Foucauldian power discourses, in linguistic terms, French is a language in uninterrupted use for many centuries whereas katharevoussa is a politically motivated linguistic artifice—in a 2008 essay published in the Greek newspaper To Vima, the classicist D.N. Maronitis suggests the term of “alloyed dialect” as a linguistically accurate description of katharevoussa.12 The second nuance that the self-translation reveals is that, according to the Greek version, the use of katharevoussa is confined to writing. This is not entirely accurate. Although, as I have already mentioned, Greeks of Alexakis’s generation certainly spoke Modern Greek at home, at the store, in the streets and among friends, in certain official contexts they were expected to use katharevoussa in oral speech as well. The narrator’s emphasis on katharevoussa as a mandatory written language limits its reach and therefore further undermines its association with French—the official language of the Central African Republic in both oral and written expression. By inhabiting the liminal space of self-translation, these complexities destabilize the thematically problematic equation between Sango and Modern Greek. They suggest that although the narrator considers both languages to share characteristics of what we may term the minor linguistic condition, it is only within their specific cultural and linguistic context that their histories of marginalization in all their intricacy and peculiarity may begin to emerge. One could argue, however, that contextualization and nuanced commentary in this passage is the exclusive privilege of the Greek version. In a narrative that tells stories from a former French colony, it would have been politically effective and ethically urgent to share a more textured reflection on neo-coloniality with the francophone audience as well. An estuarine environment within which colonial critique and resistance develop along a certain persistence of neocolonial tropes, should be at least equally available to both cultures/ languages contributing to its ecosystem. In Les mots étrangers, neocolonial discursive elements and critique of coloniality inhabit both Greek and French versions alternatively without the palimpsestual resonance of self-translation that one encounters in La langue maternelle: as the above passage reveals in no uncertain terms, the potentially unsettling political commentary in one version disappears entirely from the other without the remaining reverberating trace that characterizes a cultural estuary. When the narrator accounts theoretically for certain orthographic adjustments that he makes to Sango words transcribed in the French language he notes: “La lettre g, ga, prend toujours naissance au fond de la gorge, comme dans ‘gangrène’. On doit écrire par conséquent Bangi

Vassilis Alexakis  135 et non pas Bangui, comme on le fait en français. En sango, Bangui se prononce Bangoui” (“The letter ‘g,’ ‘ga,’ is always hard, starting in the back of the throat, like in ‘gangrene.’ Bangui should thus be written Bangi and not Bangui, as it is in French. In Sango, Bangui is pronounced Bangwi”; 47; Waters 27). In the Greek version, the same passage is less prescriptive: “Οι Γάλλοι γράφουν Bangui διότι χωρίς την παρεμβολή του u το g μετατρέπεται σε ζ, ‘Μπανζί’. Ο κανόνας αυτός δεν ισχύει στο τοπικό ιδίωμα, σύμφωνα με το οποίο η γραφή Bangui διαβάζεται ‘Μπανγκουί’. Η σωστή ορθογραφία είναι βέβαια Bangi” (47–48). “On doit écrire” in the French text assigns responsibility to the French (“on”) for urgently (“doit”) adopting a different spelling for the word Bangui whereas the Greek version describes in rather neutral terms an orthographic difficulty which owes to differences in the phonological systems of the two languages. Although it names the French when accounting for the spelling discrepancy, when the Greek text suggests which spelling is more accurate, it does so by making “correct spelling” (σωστή ορθογραφία) the grammatical subject of the sentence, a poignantly different syntactic choice from the French-language text which invites the francophone reader—whether Central-African or French—to reconsider the de facto imposition of French phonological rules on the transcription of Sango into the Latin alphabet. This, in turn, raises a number of related questions that may range from the emancipatory politics of orality to the legitimacy of French as the country’s official language. What is certain is that the Greek text is not afforded the possibility of reflecting on the same issues notwithstanding the affinities between Sango and Modern Greek as minor languages whose importance (ethically and structurally) the narrator has established from the book’s opening pages. When Nikolaïdès mentions to Georges, his editor, that he spends some of his free time leaving through a Central-African language textbook, without, at this point, revealing his true interest in Sango, Georges, an erudite, not only guesses the language correctly but, through recalling that André Gide spoke some Sango, which he had picked up during his African travels, he speaks passionately about Gide’s Voyage au Congo, a book that he finds mediocre. At the end of this diatribe, the narrator tells Georges that his favorite Sango word is pupulenge which Georges finds particularly charming—the word means prostitute. He repeats it a few times and then writes it down in his notebook. The narrator is particularly touched: “Je fus ému, comme si j’avais forgé ce mot, ou comme si le sango était ma langue…Il ouvrit son agenda et nota, à la page du jour, le mot en question. Il écrivit poupoulingué à la française” (“I was moved as if I had invented this word, or as if Sango were my language…He opened his calendar and noted, on that day’s page, the word in question. He wrote poupoulingué, the French way”; 62; Waters 38). The Greek version reads as follows: “Ένιωσα κολακευμένος σαν να την είχα επινοήσει εγώ αυτή τη λέξη, ή σαν να τη θεωρούσα πλέον δική

136  Vassilis Alexakis μου τη γλώσσα της Κεντρικής Αφρικής… Άνοιξε το ημερολόγιό του και τη σημείωσε στη σελίδα που αντιστοιχούσε στη μέρα εκείνη” (64). Two significant differences dominate the self-translative environment: first, the choice to erase in the Greek version the comment that the narrator makes in French about how Georges spells the word pupulenge. As with the phonological exposé above, the Greek text lacks the political nuance of its French counterpart notwithstanding the Greek language’s and culture’s long history with contentious linguistic politics; second, with one exception, all verbs in the French version are conjugated in the passé simple, the literary simple past, which the narrator uses scarcely, demonstrating a clear preference for the passé composé.13 The editor’s thoughts on a colonial text, Gide’s Voyage au Congo, create a particularly meaningful context within which to situate the French narrator’s critique of neocolonial linguistic policy. Noting that Georges chose to write the Sango word pupulenge according to French phonological rules, following the editor’s reflection on the extractive role French companies played in the colonies (62), while conjugating his verbs in the passé simple is a powerful commentary on the complex, difficult, and often reductive relationship that French governments and the French people have had with their colonial past since the decolonization era. Although conscious on a historical and theoretical level of the destructive presence the French had in sub-Saharan Africa in colonial times, the dimension of coloniality-as­­ linguistic-imperialism escapes him entirely. Assuming that he holds the universal transcription key, Georges jots down the word pupulenge “in French” thus performing a double erasure of the indigenous language: first, although fascinated by the word’s acoustic image, he automatically privileges the written-form-as-archive; second, knowing that the Central African Republic is a francophone country, he uses the official, colonial language’s alphabet and phonology to transcribe Sango assuming that, even in linguistic spaces where French has been evolving away from the direct influence of France, there can exist no variation in either oral or written language use. In that sense, he performs an additional subalternazing move against Sango, already marginalized and vilified within its own linguistic community, as he refuses to inquire into the particularities of its phonetics (the very thing that attracted him to the word pupulenge) reterritorializing thus the exotic within the confines of the center’s linguistic knowledge-as-power. The narrator’s use of the passé simple in this instance, reads as an ironic reminder to the francophone reader—certainly aware at this point that the literary past’s use is a deliberate break in the narrative’s grammatical rhythm—that not only do linguistic rules and habits change over time and space (as the progressive replacement of the passé simple by the passé composé in both oral and written speech clearly indicates) but so do the politics we associate with particular linguistic attitudes and choices: today’s submission of a minor tongue to the rules and regulations of a major colonial language

Vassilis Alexakis  137 is as regressive as was the ability to discern beauty in an African language considered de facto inferior and institutionalized as such a progressive political statement at the time of Voyage au Congo. The self-translation of a narrative that negotiates not two but rather three languages, cultures, and histories, has the potential, at least theoretically, to produce significantly textured and nuanced conditions of exchange and relation within the contact zone where the three traditions converge. In Les mots étrangers, this tri-partite affiliation is often reduced to a Eurocentric binary through the erasure of Sango, the Central African Republic, and its people. In fact, this deletion occurs at instances when the text thematically centers on the indigenous people of either Bangui or the African continent. The self-translation then reinforces paradigms of essentialist otherness and racialized difference that marginalize and silence the non-European vertex in a narrative that, ironically, celebrates the language and culture of an African people. While in the process of studying the language, before embarking upon the discovery of the country where Sango is spoken, the narrator wonders whether his relentless efforts to pronounce Sango words correctly will have his neighbors assume that the apartment has been taken over by undocumented aliens (“sans-papiers”) (48). The Greek text replaces “undocumented aliens” by “blacks” (“μαύρους”) (48). The French text’s stereotypical hypothesis that African speakers in France are necessarily undocumented aliens morphs into essentialist racism in the Greek version. When Nikolaïdès notices that a patron at the café he frequents in Bangui is harassing the server, a young woman named Esther, he articulates his desire to see her react violently in the following ways: “J’espère qu’Esther va lui arracher une oreille d’un coup de dent” (“I hope that Esther is going to rip one of his ears off with her teeth”; 203; Waters 145) / “Μα δε θα του κοπανήσει τη μπύρα στο κεφάλι;” (“Will she not smash the beer bottle on his head already?” 227). His insistence upon a damaging historical and cultural trope in the French version, that of the uncivilized, savage, cannibalistic black inhabitant of the dark continent becomes irritation in the face of submission to patriarchal abuse in the Greek text. In both passages, discrepancies between the two versions of the narrative reterritorialize it within each of its linguistic and cultural contexts while othering Africa and its native peoples. In other words, not only are linguistic and cultural echoes or palimpsestual relationality absent from the two versions, therefore erasing the self-translation’s estuarine potential, but most importantly, the siloing effect that the refusal to relate produces is predicated upon the marked distance that both European centers maintain from the essential Other. “Undocumented alien” is a resonant synonym for sub-Saharan Africans in early 2000s France, a country which followed very closely the 1996 Saint Bernard movement, organized primarily by black undocumented aliens protesting their precarious status. The hellenophone reader of the same time

138  Vassilis Alexakis period living in Greece has encountered people from sub-Saharan Africa at city squares and cafes where she may have purchased what merchandise they sold—mainly illegally burned CDs following Napster shutting down and preceding the popularization of the iPod. In a country with very little racial diversity at the time, she has invariably called them “blacks,” participating in their economic exploitation without considering them capable of political agency. That dimension of political organization and associative resistance present in the French “sans-papiers” is also subtly introduced in the image of a young black woman tearing the white neo-colonialist man’s ear off for touching her inappropriately— the stereotype “biting” back. The Greek version, although clearly politically aware of patriarchy when suggesting that Esther should smash a beer bottle on Gilbert’s head for harassing her, reproduces, in conjunction with the French text, the same paradigm of violent, irrational, and therefore uncontrollable femininity that some superior, more logical force should guide while benevolently permitting it to exhibit (a carefully framed and calibrated) agency. This, in fact, brings the ambilingual reader back to the “blacks” of the first passage, embodiments of a cosmopolitan order that while encouraging passage for all, chooses carefully who among the travelers will represent for the foreign host a little more than the darkness of their skin and who, as in Nikolaïdès’s case, will be celebrated, for a literary production and a writing career that owe much to being an immigrant, a traveler. Although not often, elements of the estuary do emerge in the narrative when the narrator focuses explicitly on Sango as an object of ­linguistic study. When he learns that there is no subject–verb agreement in Sango, he imagines a Sango speaker studying French or Greek, legitimately wondering: “Quel besoin avez-vous de les accorder avec leur sujet? On dirait des instruments de musique qui se dérèglent après chaque note” (“Why do you need to make them agree with their subject? They seem like musical instruments that fall out of tune after each note”; 75; Waters 48). In the Greek version, the verb “accorder” is replaced by the less strictly grammatical term “συνταιριάζω”: “Γιατί τα συνταιριάζετε με το υποκείμενό τους; Μοιάζουν με μουσικά όργανα που ξεκουρδίζονται μετά από κάθε νότα” (79). The reference to out-of-tune instruments in the Greek version (verbs that need to be matched to different subject pronouns are like instruments that require tuning after each note played) is strange; there is no obvious association between the act of matching and that of tuning instruments that could account for the referential horizon of this particular simile. Only within the estuary that the self-translation creates, can this uncanny pairing acquire its full connotative force. The relationship that the simile establishes is not between textual elements of the Greek text as a monolingual reading of the self-translation suggests; it is rather between the French and Greek versions that the relational

Vassilis Alexakis  139 quality of the rhetorical device fully signifies. In other words, it does not relate “matching” to “out-of-tune instruments” but rather the French version’s palimpsest (verb “accorder” which belongs to both grammatical and musical lexica) to the Greek text’s dissident potential. A page or two later, while the narrator is still struggling with the grammatical and syntactical difficulties of Sango, it is the French text that surprises by its discontinuity in linguistic logic while the Greek version supplies the palimpsestual scaffolding for the dissonant passage to emerge: “Quand il est tout seul le verbe oscille entre le présent et le passé. On traduira lo kui plutôt par ‘il est mort’ que par ‘il meurt’” (“When it is by itself, the verb fluctuates between the present and the past. Lo kui is translated by ‘he is dead’ rather than by ‘he is dying’”; 76–77; Waters 49). The Greek text reads as follows: “Όταν είναι μόνο του, το ρήμα παραπέμπει συχνότερα στο παρελθόν παρά στον παρόν. Λο κουι σημαίνει μάλλον ‘πέθανε’ παρά ‘πεθαίνει’” (“When it is by itself, the verb refers more often to the past than to the present. Lo kui’s meaning is closer to ‘he died’ than to ‘he is dying’ 80). In the French version, the narrator articulates a grammatical rule—when outof-context a verb in Sango oscillates between the present and the past. He then undermines it by providing an example which instead of denoting oscillation between the present and the past clearly chooses the past instead of the present. In the Greek text the rule and the example suggest the same thing: when free of context—and therefore of the adverbial support that could temporally situate it in a linguistic system that does not use tenses—a verb in Sango is conceptually closer to the simple past than it is to the present. As the French palimpsest did in the previous example, the Greek palimpsest here anchors the linguistic transgression that the French text performs within an estuarine environment of unspoken exchange, a silent relationship of reciprocity that acquires meaning only when considered as an ambilingual, relational phenomenon. In a novel that employs interlingual translation between three languages, of which two are written European tongues and one is an African oral tongue, at different levels of its total production (including the self-translation), one would have hoped for more—and probably more explicit—instances of dissent by means of estuarine relationality. Instead, even within those passages where the narrator most privileges the formation of linguistic estuaries, namely the passages in which he documents his acquisition of Sango, interlingual translation verges upon appropriation. In the hermeneutic tradition, translation is an aggressive act. It comprehends, in both meanings of the word: it facilitates communication but at the same time engulfs the other tongue. As George Steiner points out in “The Hermeneutic Motion,” the balance may be restored only when “[t]he arrows of meaning, of cultural, psychological benefaction, move both ways. There is, ideally, exchange without loss” (After Babel

140  Vassilis Alexakis 190). Using interlingual translation to account for syntactic discrepancies between French and Sango, the narrator notes: “Si l’on veut exprimer l’idée qu’on n’a plus de parents, on affirmera d’abord qu’on les a, puis on ajoutera pepe…, c’est-à-dire ‘pas’… ‘J’ai mon père et ma mère pas” (“If you want to express the idea that you no longer have parents, first you will say that you have them, and then you will add pepe…that is ‘not,’…‘I have my father and my mother not’”; 74; Waters 47–48). The francophone reader (the Greek self-translation does not differ significantly from the French version) experiences a syntactical distortion as typical characteristic of the African language’s linguistic logic. By first affirming meaning and then negating it, “[l]e Sango…tergiverse, se risque à formuler le contraire de ce qu’il entend, cultive le suspense. La phrase sango se développe à l’ombre d’un doute” (“Sango…equivocates, takes the chance of expressing the opposite of what it means, cultivates suspense. The Sango sentence spins itself out beneath the shadow of a doubt”; 75; Waters 48). If Sango were an equal partner in this discussion, it could suggest that the seemingly uncomplicated notions of affirmation and negation take on different nuances in different cultural and linguistic environments; it could, in other words, undermine the very Eurocentric foundation of the surprise that the European student feels when she encounters its syntax and trouble her ontological certainties anchored as they are in the linear teleology that structures her worldview. But it would still need to do so in translation, from the “shadows of the doubt” that jeopardize the possibility of its articulation. Self-translation’s potential to first complicate the relationship between French and Greek, the languages of the narrative’s publication, and then, by creating spaces of dissent and non-belonging for both European languages allow Sango, de facto minimally present in the book, to articulate silences and “doubts” without marking itself as essentially the other remains largely untapped. Interlingual translation and the largely annotative commentary that accompanies it inadvertently group the two Indo-European languages who share a wealth of linguistic characteristics together producing a binary whose opposite pole is the African other. Ironically, Sango’s voice is reduced to a definitive, externally imposed silence by an act of non-translation. The book ends with a few sentences written in transliterated Sango unaccompanied by translation. We can only assume that an attentive reader is expected to decipher the meaning of these final sentences by virtue of having encountered their translation multiple times throughout the narrative. After multiple readings, I am not able to do so. My experience may indeed be marginal but I believe it results from my dependence upon interlingual translation in either French or Greek, which both versions amply provide. Having established the European languages’ indispensability, communication codes without which the subaltern tongue is literally reduced to nonsense, this linguistic guessing game is nothing more than a ludic experiment in memory retention.

Vassilis Alexakis  141 As the narrator reminds the reader at the outset of the narrative, Africa for him has always been a “fascinating playground,” “un espace libre où tout restait à inventer, où tout était encore possible” (“…a free space where everything remained to be invented, everything was still ­possible”; 15; Waters 4). The book ends with a paragraph written in Sango, an African language, transliterated into French and hence replete with the history of its colonial silencing, a virginal linguistic ground for the francophone and hellenophone reader to reproduce foundational colonial tropes by exploring (going back to the translations the narrator offers at different points in the narrative), inventing (assigning semantic content in a violent act of comprehension—in Steiner’s terms) or simply playing.

Notes 1 “Parmi les raisons qui expliquent le succès du français dans ce pays, on notera le rôle de quelques Grecs exilés en France à la fin de la Turcocratie (Coraÿ, Calvos), l’accueil réservé par les éditeurs français tels que Didot aux publications des Grecs, avant et pendant la guerre d’Indépendance, l’importance du mouvement philhellène associé au goût romantique pour le voyage en Grèce au XIXème siècle, la politique généralement pro-hellénique de la France à la fin du siècle et sans doute l’aptitude des Grecs à un indispensable bi- ou plurilinguisme” (“Among the reasons that explain the success of French in this country are: the role that Greeks exiled in France played at the end of Ottoman rule (Korais, Kalvos); the warm welcome that French editors such as Didot reserved for Greek publications before and during the war of Independence; the importance of the French philhellenic movement which was itself linked to the appetite of the Romantics for travel in Greece in the nineteenth century; the largely pro-Greek French policies at the end of the century; and possibly Greek people’s aptitude for a necessary bi- or plurilingualism” 27). 2 In an interview that he gave to Alexandru Matei, Alexakis noted: “D’ordinaire, mes romans sont écrits à la première personne… Ce ‘moi’ c’est toujours un effort de rentrer dans la peau de quelqu’un d’autre, dans la peau d’un narrateur qui n’est pas moi” (“Normally, my novels are written in the first person… This ‘I’ is always an attempt at slipping under someone else’s skin, under the skin of a narrator who is not me.” “‘Et l’un et l’autre’ ou le moi œcuménique de Vassilis Alexakis” 173). 3 “…le fait que la plupart des ouvrages de l’auteur ne comportent pas la mention ‘traduit du grec’ ou ‘traduit du français’ s’explique partiellement par le fait que la genèse des textes est bilingue, que chaque texte naît dans la coexistence complémentaire des deux langues” (“The fact that most of the author’s works do not include the mention ‘translated from Greek’ or ‘translated from French’ is at least in part explained by the fact that the origin of the texts is bilingual, that each text is born in the complementary coexistence of both languages.” “Vassilis Alexakis: bilinguisme, littérature et autotraduction. Parcours linguistique et itinéraire identitaire” 80). 4 In “Seeing in Depth: The Practice of Bilingual Writing,” Ralph Sarkonak and Richard Hodgson discuss instances of “invisible” bilingualism: … in the novels of Nabokov, one often finds bi- and often trilingual puns which are invisible to the reader who knows only one of the languages involved…in the case of bilingual writers such as Beckett, ‘invisible’

142  Vassilis Alexakis bilingualism would become visible, if the two versions of the text were ever published side by side in a bilingual edition. (23) 5 In “Human difference and the value of the untranslatable.” 6 Patton’s translation of La langue maternelle and Waters’ translation of Les mots étrangers into English are from the French version of each book. 7 I am borrowing here from Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever. 8 See Τομπαΐδης, Δημήτρης (1992). Διδασκαλία νεοελληνικής γλώσσας. Θεσσαλονίκη: Βάνιας; Κλαίρης Χρήστος και Γ. Μπαμπινιώτης (2005). Γραμματική της νέας ελληνικής γλώσσας. Αθήνα: Ελληνικά Γράμματα; Τσοπανάκης Αγ. (1987). Προβλήματα της δημοτικής: το τελικό -ν. Θεσσαλονίκη: Αφοί Κυριακίδη and Τσοπανάκης Αγ. (1994). Νεοελληνική Γραμματική. Θεσσαλονίκη-Αθήνα: Αφοί Κυριακίδη-Εστία among others. 9 For a comprehensive history of the events that led to the invasion, see The Cyprus Conspiracy: America, Espionage and the Turkish Invasion. 10 For a psychoanalytical reading of the complex representation of Turkey in the Modern Greek identitarian imaginary and vice versa see “Modern Greek and Turkish Identities and the Psychodynamics of Greek-Turkish relations.” 11 According to Jacques Coursil and Delphine Perret, “francophone” as an attribute has ontological value, whereas used as an epithet it names: …grammar proposes a rule (the rule of the attribute and of the epithet) that distinguishes two uses for the same word. In the first one, francophone subsumes all subjects who speak French; francophone is then an attribute of these subjects. In the second one, … the epithet francophone is a mode of nomination. In this case, it is used by the French (European) ‘center’ to distinguish itself from its peripheral ‘Others’. (201) 12 https://www.tovima.gr/2008/11/24/opinions/i-ritoriki-tis-kathareyoysas-1/ 13 In fact, toward the end of the narrative, the narrator references explicitly the decline of the passé simple while talking to a young inhabitant of Bangui that he meets during one of his walks in the city: “Non, nous ne l’utilisons pas, sauf quand nous avons la prétention de faire de la littérature. Mais les professeurs sont hostiles à l’évolution de la langue. Ils sont trop attachés au passé simple et à l’imparfait du subjonctif pour accepter leur déclin” (“No, we don’t use it, except when we claim to be making ‘literature.’ But professors are hostile to the language’s evolution. They are too attached to the simple past and the imperfect subjunctive to accept their decline”; 223; Waters 160).

4

A Native Informant in the Estuary Chahdortt Djavann and Iran

Born and raised in Iran, Chahdortt Djavann moved to France in her mid-twenties and has since published a number of essays as well as autobiographical and fictional novels exclusively in the French language and for the most part thematically concerned with Iran’s political, religious, and cultural circumstances since the Islamic Revolution. Her position is very clear: pro-Western and fundamentally anti-theocratic. Her support of Western political systems is predicated upon the natural supremacy of democracy. In À mon corps défendant, l’occident, Djavann posits the urgency of a choice: “ . . . tôt ou tard, il faut choisir son camp. Alors, à mon corps défendant, je choisis l’Occident. Car je pense que si quelconque espoir existe, il ne peut exister que dans le camp démocratique, malgré ses perversités et ses faiblesses” (“…sooner or later, one has to choose sides. So, reluctantly, I choose the West. Because I believe that, if there is any hope, it’s only in the democratic camp, notwithstanding its perversities and weaknesses” 411). In more recent years, she has written against the Iran nuclear deal, supported Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the USA from it, and has suggested that the West should attack Iran in alignment with Vladimir Putin’s Russia while an online election for a democratic Iranian government is taking place with the simultaneous participation of Iranians residing in Iran and the Iranian diaspora (Iran, j’accuse). Saba Mahmood has identified the “abhorrence of everything Muslim and sheer exaltation of all things Western” as a “structural feature” of anti-Muslim, native-informant autobiographical writing in Europe today (“Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War of Terror” 92). Although Djavann concedes a number of Western political and cultural imperfections, she nevertheless openly exalts the Enlightenment and humanistic models as the ideal philosophical underpinnings of all government. Djavann’s discussion of her native country’s political woes points to the undemocratic nature of its Islamic regime as the fundamental reason for worsening living conditions, restriction of political and personal freedoms, and institutionalized violence against women. Her equation of democracy with human rights and progressive politics and the ensuing conflation of Islam with dictatorial regimes and regressive

144  Chahdortt Djavann political dogma translates in her writings as the type of binary resistance vs. subjection structure against which Western feminism and progressive political thought have been fighting for the past four decades. Mahmood has cautioned against “scholarship that elides dimensions of human action whose ethical and political status does not map onto the logic of repression and resistance” (Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject 14). By putting forth the necessity for democratic agency against Islamic regimes, Djavann inscribes herself and her politics within the same frame of political and ontological self-erasure against which she so vehemently fights: an enthusiastic supporter of Western democracies—a study of Muslim, Middle-Eastern democracies is conspicuously absent from her work—she applies to her native country the same principles of exclusion and dogmatism that dictated her exile.1 A witness in front of the Stasi commission when the veil debate was taking place in France, Djavann used her status as a native informant to argue in favor of outlawing conspicuous religious signs in public schools. As in Bas les voiles!, her manifesto against imposing any form of the veil on minors, Djavann positions herself as the one who knows, the one whose body bears the marks of history, the eyewitness whose voice speaks the truth. Doing so in France, a country where the value of universalism often elides a number of freedoms and rights in the name of an egalitarian state whose fundamental principle, equality, disappears behind the proliferation of institutionalized inequalities, 2 such as the Stasi commission, 3 imposes a culturally and historically specific reading of events which transpired in a set of very particular social, religious, geopolitical, and geostrategic circumstances, the shaping of which has been directly affected by the West in general and by France in particular.4 What is presented as inside knowledge of an exemplary and therefore vague otherness unavailable to the native informant’s interlocutor is uncritically accepted because it is emotionally charged, historically compelling, and undoubtedly authentic. In The Politics of the Veil, Joan Wallach Scott focused her analysis of Djavann’s Stasi testimony on two salient blind spots: first, her conflation of all Islams, from the theocracy of the mullahs to the minority religion that Islam is in France (163); then, her failure to explore the complexity of veiled women’s lives in Iran (164). Does it truly not matter at all that women in Iran have the right to vote or serve in the parliament? Djavann would answer that those rights are beside the point. In an interview to Kristen Halling, she noted that wearing the veil marks women ontologically: Faire porter le voile c’est affirmer l’idéologie qui postule une distinction d’essence entre l’homme et la femme et leur reconnaît des droits différents…Pour que les Américains non-musulmans puissent comprendre cela, imaginez qu’on demande aux noirs de porter un voile parce qu’ils sont des noirs et inférieurs aux blancs (Imposing the

Chahdortt Djavann  145 veil is affirming the ideology that postulates an essentialist distinction between men and women and assigns them different rights… To help non-Muslim Americans understand this, imagine asking black Americans to wear a veil because they are black and inferior to whites). (141) The parallel that she establishes between sexism and racism is compelling and historically supported by the problematic relationship between rights and justice: as the decades following the civil rights movement in the USA have clearly demonstrated, having rights by no means guarantees equality, justice, or erasure of oppression. It is hard to argue with her reading when deployed for critiquing Islamic, theocratic regimes. It is rather unsettling to accept this line of reasoning, however, when reflecting upon Islam in Europe. As Katrin Sieg has argued in Black Virgins: Sexuality and the Democratic Body, Djavann’s works help forge the nationalist imagination that leftist, feminist, and migrant narratives actively try to invalidate (182). When wondering why Djavann’s narratives enthrall the French, Sharif Gemie echoes and enhances Sieg’s analysis: [Djavann] tells nationalist-minded neo-republicans exactly what they want to hear. She tells them that France is right, and that it is morally and politically better than other countries. By virtue of her status as an Iranian, her words provide the evidence that French policies on the veil cannot be racist. (62) In “Retooling Democracy and Feminism in the Service of the New Empire,” Saba Mahmood frames the debate politically and historically, reminding us that all discursive objects are mediated by the fields of power within which they evolve and that “[c]onsequently, contemporary concern for Muslim women in Euro-American public debate cannot be disassociated from the war declared by European and American governments on the Muslim world (which includes Muslim immigrant populations residing in Europe)” (130). Djavann herself sketches the broad lines of the political environment differently, privileging the IsraeliPalestinian conflict for what she calls “Muslimism, 5” European Muslim youth’s combative, communitarian identity; by so doing, she concedes that Islamic extremism in Europe is not directly comparable with, or, at least, not principally comparable with, the Iranian mullah regime— an ideological stance absent from most of her writing where the equation between wearing the veil in France and wearing a chador in Iran is rather absolute. The authenticity of Djavann’s testimony in front of the stasi committee or on the various media outlets that have hosted her over the past 25 years or so, therefore, is hard to debate. Notwithstanding the unconvincing conflation of Islam and theocracy that her critics have pointed

146  Chahdortt Djavann out, her voice’s authenticity is beyond dispute—at least to the extent that the authenticity relates intimately to intent and that her intent has always been the advancement of women’s rights as human rights. In fact, it is impossible and therefore distracting to debate to what extent Djavann represents Muslim women, Iranian Muslim women, Muslim women in the West, or any other category. What is far more relevant to mine for its analytical potential is the vehicle of her critique’s expression: translation. Speaking in a foreign language the truth of trauma experienced in one’s native tongue is an awesome task. Whether through the voice of a translator or the voice of one’s own, a series of events that unfolded over time must undergo a number of violent operations including temporal condensation and cultural and historical transplantation. Telling a story in French, in front of a state commission of Frenchmen, in a language, a time, and a place different from those of the original set of occurrences, inevitably tunes the receiver’s ear to the expectations, legal, cultural, and other of the host language and the host culture. The effacement of particularities and differences that a fluent narrative guarantees (not necessarily a fluent speaker, but a narrative that possesses a coherent and clearly articulated agenda in the foreign language) operates an artificial separation between a set of competing cultural, political, and linguistic environments—if I am here, testifying in front of this committee, in this language and at this moment it is precisely because I am not there, speaking that language, addressing a different set of sociocultural expectations at a historical moment that, although simultaneous, is radically other.6 Translation, however, is supposed to operate as a deconstructive yet relational praxis. In “After the Apocalypse: Paul de Man and the Fall to Silence,” Shoshana Felman has argued that translation is antithetical to confession “which attempts a synthesis by taking itself (taking the self) as center, thus denying in its very mode that the center, the original is dead” (161). Once the self as knowing and narrating stance is positioned off center, translation becomes “the undoing of an illusory historical perception or understanding by bearing witness to what the ‘perception’ or ‘understanding’ precisely fails to see or witness” (160). The original is not dead; it is deconstructed and made to relate differently: “What does it mean for a translation to occur? It means that the original, or history, has been given not a voice that redeems it from its muteness and says it properly, but the power to address us in its very silence” (163–64). Within this theoretical framework, translation bypasses language and engages the receiving culture, society, history, and body politic in terms that are yet to be configured. In his recent work on universals and translation, Etienne Balibar echoes Felman’s interest in translational indeterminacy. Before addressing the translational trope of linguistic relationality, he reflects on what he has always identified as the blind spot of universalism: “Enoncer l’universel, ou quelque proposition dans la modalité de l’universel, c’est l’approprier

Chahdortt Djavann  147 à un certain temps, à un certain lieu, à un sujet qui les occupe, c’est donc construire un intérêt, c’est en faire l’instrument ou le fondement d’un pouvoir…” (“to enunciate the universal, or some proposition in the modality of the universal, is to integrate it within a certain time, a certain place, a certain subject that occupies said time and place. It means, then, to construct an interest, it’s to make it into an instrument or foundation of power…” Des Universels 51). When exploring the role translation plays in the consolidation of the power universals wield he reflects on the untranslatable as the supplement that derails the universalizing process: …[l]’intraduisible interdit de formuler ‘positivement’ une base commune et consensuelle pour des discours d’émancipation qui ont affaire simultanément à des structures d’oppression hétérogènes, non contemporaines, dont les…résistances et révoltes qu’elles engendrent ne peuvent purement et simplement s’ajouter au titre de l’universalité abstraite de la défense des droits de l’homme (…[t]he untranslatable forbids the ‘positive’ formulation of a common and consensual base for emancipatory discourses that relate simultaneously to heterogeneous, non-contemporary structures of oppression… the resistance and revolts that they produce cannot purely and simply be added to the abstract universality of human rights’ defense). (84) In fact, in an ideal world of relational difference, it is humanity’s linguistic multiplicity that ensures otherness which never crystalizes into a fixed identitarian entity—provided the following two conditions are present: “…1) que la multiplicité n’est pas donnée et ne reste pas inchangée… mais se transforme par l’exercice de la traduction…; et 2) que dans la pratique de la traduction, ce…sont… les langues elles-mêmes qui ‘se parlent’ de façon plus ou moins malaisée, et parfois violente” (“…1) that multiplicity is not given and does not remain unchanged…but is rather transformed by the exercise of translation…; and 2) that in the practice of translation, it…is…languages themselves that ‘talk to one another’ in mostly awkward and sometimes violent ways” 173–74). Much like Felman’s silence (the gaps, even trauma-inflected mutism, that uncomfortable possibly violent encounters engender), Balibar’s multiversum is the only space for articulating a type of universal that negates itself at the very instance of enunciation: “Parce qu’elle ne saurait définir un ‘lieu’ d’énonciation que comme la relation de plusieurs lieux, ou comme le terme mobile d’un transfert d’une langue au sein d’une ou plusieurs autres, une telle universalité déjoue son propre paradoxe énonciatif en le démultipliant” (“Because it could not possibly define a ‘place’ of enunciation in terms other than that of a relationship between multiple places, or as the mobile term of the transfer of one language inside one or many others, such a universality thwarts its own enunciative paradox by intensifying it” 178). Languages are expected to relate not because stable,

148  Chahdortt Djavann authoritative meanings, products of the fields of power within which they were initially articulated, are transferred from one linguistic, social, and political environment to another (with its own economy of systems of oppression and resistance in place) but because the inevitable contact into which they are brought in an interconnected, globalized, cosmopolitan world defines them as the paradoxical systems that they are: entities of unquestionable internal stability on the one hand and self-erasing adaptability on the other. With no single place from which to enunciate in the Balibarian multiversum, language actualizes its universal reach by shaping into different communicational modalities (silence, violence, translational transposition, etc.) while always privileging the relational aspect of speech—paradox that echoes the central feature of the estuary: the shock of encounter between masses of otherness produces new difference without ever fully erasing the variations that allowed for brackish water to come into being in the first place. Most of Djavann’s work is structurally and ideologically dependent upon a stable and universal enunciative position that, at least at first glance, erases by virtue of its absolute authority the estuarine possibility that colliding differences produce. In many of her novels where Iran and theocracy are pitted against the West and democracy, the tension between the two is not simply resolved by preferring the democratic West over a theocratic Iran—although the characters very clearly gravitate toward the former. The narrative voice often creates a third enunciative position that is supposed to negotiate the distance between the two poles of the binary. In Comment peut-on être français? that third term is Roxane the arbiter, the authoritative voice that guides Roxane’s, the main character’s arduous process of learning French while also attempting to resolve the constant conflict between francophone Roxane and Farsi-speaking Roxane. The double identity of the main character, a young Iranian woman who arrives in Paris as political refugee not speaking a word of French, is further fragmented by means of introducing the third Roxane, creating unsustainable pressure which ultimately results in a suicide attempt. Je ne suis pas celle que je suis picks up Roxane’s story—the main character’s name is Donya but it is obvious to the reader that she shares everything but that first name with Comment peut-on être français’s Roxane—after she is released from her stay at a psychiatric hospital following a suicide attempt, focusing, in particular, on her decision to undertake psychoanalysis and on the progress that she makes while in session. The arbiter in this scenario is in no uncertain terms the psychoanalyst. The binary is structured around the traumatic Iranian past that dictated exile and the shortcomings of Donya’s present situation in Paris: loneliness, low-paid, survival jobs that intensify the sense of precarity and provide no professional satisfaction, reduced ability to become integrated because of a crippling linguistic barrier (at least this is how Donya perceives the difficulties that she encounters while

Chahdortt Djavann  149 learning French). In this book, however, the arbiter is mostly silent— in fact, Donya is quite frustrated by her psychoanalyst’s formulaic responses or complete lack of engagement. Although she knows that her analyst is simply following protocol, she makes a narrative motif out of her dissatisfaction with his methods. In La dernière séance, a sequel to Je ne suis pas celle que je suis, the psychoanalytic work is brought to a close and the arbiter erased because no longer needed. The three novels, then, Comment peut-on être français, Je ne suis pas celle que je suis, and La dernière séance, create a single thematic arc, namely the progressive erasure of the arbiter position and the resulting unmediated contact between the competing elements of the original dichotomy. This chapter will examine whether the initial clash of difference produces estuarine relational conditions, under which circumstances and to what extent. A close reading of La muette, a novel by Chahdortt Djavann, which maintains and reinforces a similar triangular relational structure to the one that Comment peut-on être français first introduced, will serve as foil: in La muette, speech and silence create an intriguing estuarine relationship between two women in today’s theocratic Iran, which is then translated and circulated in France. The foreign book economy welcomes and disseminates the narrative, which, in its published form, is structurally and ideologically framed by an Iranian male authoritative voice, that of the translator, and the enunciative stance of a Western, female journalist. The two frames that instances of power superpose on the found journal of the young Fatemeh dilute the estuarine potential of the initial conflict between silence and speech by reducing it to a commercial product aimed at satisfying the expectations of the host cultural and political economies by shedding light on the atrocities perpetrated by non-democratic regimes. Language and translation occupy central stage in Djavann’s novels. In the trilogy (Comment peut-on être français, Je ne suis pas celle que je suis, and La dernière séance), the main character struggles to learn a foreign language while living as a refugee in the country where the language is spoken; in La muette, translation is the only means by which this Iranian story can be articulated and related to the world, thus indicting a murderous regime. In L’oreillle de l’autre, Jacques Derrida questions translation’s ability to account for the internal multiplicity of language: …la traduction peut tout, sauf marquer cette différence linguistique inscrite dans la langue, cette différence de système de langues inscrit dans une seule langue;…elle peut tout faire passer…sauf le fait qu’il y a, dans un système linguistique, peut-être plusieurs langues, quelquefois, je dirais même toujours, plusieurs langues, il y a de l’impureté dans chaque langue (Translation can do everything except mark this linguistic difference inscribed in the language, this difference of language systems inscribed in a single tongue…it can get

150  Chahdortt Djavann everything across except this: the fact that there are, in one linguistic system, perhaps several languages or tongues. Sometimes—I would even say always—several tongues. There is impurity in every language; 134). (Kamuf 100) He then remarks that “…l’original est a priori endetté à l’égard de la traduction. Sa survie est une demande de traduction, un désir de traduction, un peu comme Babel demande: traduisez-moi!” (“…the original is indebted a priori to translation. Its survival is a demand and a desire for translation, somewhat like the Babelian demand: Translate me”; 201; Kamuf 152). If translation is incapable of marking the internal multiplicity of language and speech acts then opting for enunciation over silence is necessarily an act of difference—erasure. The theoretical basis of Saussurian linguistics is predicated upon locking meaning into one difference by excluding all others (as poststructuralist philosophy has successfully argued, the structural integrity of the sign depends on eliminating pressure from its borders—internal as well as external). Derrida pushes this paradox to its logical conclusion: if language is to survive it will have to self-mutilate, to obliterate difference internally and externally, to consciously reduce its potential to the quasi-totalitarian authority of a single actualization. Djavann weaves her work, to at least a certain extent, around this conundrum: while translation is certainly life, it must nevertheless amputate text and context to acquire enunciation privileges. The insertion of the arbiter stance is an unsuccessful attempt at damage control: the clear preference of the arbiter—particularly in Comment peut-on être français and La muette—for the West, the French language and democratic regimes over totalitarian ones aims at entirely effacing the nuance and multiplicity that textured the Iranian years, notwithstanding the traumatizing experiences that shaped Roxane’s, Donya’s, and Fatemeh’s childhood and early adulthood. It is, in fact, psychoanalysis in a foreign tongue, as Djavann stages it in Je ne suis pas celle que je suis and La dernière séance, that provides in her work the most reliable roadmap to an estuarine relationality within difference.

Cultural and Linguistic Multiplicities in Comment peut-on être français, Je ne suis pas celle que je suis, and La dernière séance Comment peut-on être français is the story of a young Iranian woman living in Paris after having fled her native country to escape the mullah regime. We witness her difficulties adjusting to a city that is equal parts beautiful and indifferent. Roxane, the book’s main character, struggles to learn the language, to find a job, to connect with the people around her and, most importantly, to erase any link to her past in Iran, including her native language. The reader is afforded glimpses at Roxane’s family,

Chahdortt Djavann  151 social, and student life in Iran throughout the narrative, although it is only near the end that the circumstances of her migration come into focus: while on a trip to Isfahan, Roxane and her two friends are arrested for indecency—the pasdaran find them with shoes off massaging their feet at the end of a day spent walking. Roxane is raped in jail, becomes pregnant, and decides to travel to Turkey to have an abortion. After a two-year residence in Turkey, Roxane leaves Istanbul for Paris, begins a correspondence with Montesquieu (her reinterpretation of his Persian Letters to which I will return) to mitigate her loneliness, develops a short-lived friendship with a Korean immigrant, and one day, after being arrested for a traffic violation, suffers the effects of an involuntary traumatic memory, and ultimately attempts suicide. Roxane’s difficulties with acquiring language fluency dominate the first part of the novel (I consider that to be the portion of the narrative that precedes her letters to Montesquieu). In fact, if she bothers to engage in her impossible correspondence with the eighteenth century philosopher at all, it is, at least in part, to improve her French language skills. While attempting different methods for enhancing vocabulary retention and advancing overall lexical competency, Roxane notices that not only is she double, a Farsi speaker, on the one hand, and a hesitant French speaker who makes too many mistakes on the other, but that a third voice, an authoritative arbiter of fluency, has arisen, further fragmenting an already divided self: Sans s’en rendre compte, elle commença à se tutoyer, à se dédoubler. La première personne, ‘je’, fut la Roxane persanophone, la deuxième personne, ‘tu’, fut la Roxane apprentie francophone et il y eut aussi la troisième Roxane, la Roxane arbitre, celle qui reprochait sans cesse à la Roxane persanophone son inaptitude à être la Roxane francophone (Without realizing it, she began to speak to herself in the second person, becoming double. The first person, ‘I’, was the Farsi-speaking Roxane, the second person, ‘you’, was the student-of-French Roxane and there was also a third Roxane, the Roxane-referee, the one that constantly accused the Farsi-speaking Roxane her failure at being the francophone Roxane). (57) The role of the referee in this relationship is intriguing: instead of ensuring that the two parties engage each other while respecting a set of preestablished rules, she actively advocates the erasure of the Farsi-speaking Roxane, clearly reproaching the “je” her inability to become the coveted “tu”. There is no attempt at negotiating or mitigating or even simply examining the affective and intellectual complexities inherent in the process of learning a second language post-migration. The only acceptable result is effacement of Farsi and absolute assimilation within the host linguistic and cultural environment. The Farsi-speaking “je” makes an effort at

152  Chahdortt Djavann implementing the referee’s suggestions: “Entre chaque chose et son nom, il y avait une distance à parcourir, un espace qu’il fallait réduire jusqu’à l’effacement, pour que le mot se pose sur la chose, pour que le mot dise la chose. Entre chaque chose et son nom s’interposait le nom d’origine, le mot persan”7 (“Between each object and its name, there was a distance to cover, a space that she had to reduce to nothingness so that the word coincide with the object, so that the word say the object. Between each object and its name was the original name, the Persian name” 58). The self is divided into three unequal parts and so is language: the external world (represented in this schematization by the Peircian referent), the foreign language and the native tongue. The distance between French signifiers and the referents that Roxane assigns to them remains insurmountable so long as the Farsi signifier retains its linguistic currency thus deferring the association between French acoustic actualization and linked object in the material world. Conspicuously absent from this process is the signified, the commonly and communally assigned mental realization (idea, image, etc.) of the signifier. Roxane has always had trouble accepting reality. When she found out as a young child that the woman whom she believed to be her mother was in fact her sister, she rejected the necessary adjustment to reality that the revelation required by first developing a stutter, then communicating with others exclusively by means of fabulation and finally by retreating into silence (79–80). Linked from an early age to speech, her ability to temporarily eliminate uncomfortable truths hinges upon the production of either excessive or wanting language. The referee’s command that the Persian language disappear deprives Roxane of the privilege she had hitherto enjoyed in her native tongue, namely to calibrate reality by altering the quantity and quality of her speech output. The missing signified does not represent the commonly held idea that a language community shares about the meaning of a given signifier for Roxane. Quite on the contrary, its absence suggests that she must exist in an unmodulated reality beyond accessible language. With Farsi reduced to silence and French not functionally communicative yet, Roxane must name the referent, the material manifestation of reality, using language that lies outside the self: the “je” has to become “tu” without any recourse to translation; in other words the “je” is entirely reinvented as material existence within a reality that allows neither proliferation nor reduction of speech—simply because there remains no enunciating subjectivity to perform the once powerful intensity modulations. In a different but related configuration, the signified is the obliterated Farsi-speaking Roxane: the physical articulation of a word assigned to a referent without access to the signified is akin to the effect conversation has on two interlocutors each speaking a language that the other does not comprehend communicating without the benefit of translation. Paralinguistic, pragmatic, and gestural enhancements will certainly facilitate some degree of relational exchange, but the two parties will mutually

Chahdortt Djavann  153 signify as fundamentally other. Asking a signifier to relate to a referent without the presence of a signified situates the speaker who performs the operation in a reality with an immediate othering effect. In the case of Roxane, a traumatized young woman whose relationship with reality is tenuous in the best of circumstances, the result is overwhelming. Roxane’s resistance against the limitations that exile has imposed upon her otherwise prodigious ability to enhance and curtail language production is twofold: she engages into a correspondence with Montesquieu while retreating into socially isolating silence. Writing to Montesquieu is for Roxane both means for language advancement and social critique. Like the French philosopher, she uses epistolary writing to reflect critically on Iran and France. After all, she shares a first name with one of the most intriguing female characters in Lettres Persanes and she is of Persian origin living in France, not unlike the main male voices in Montesquieu’s novel. Sharif Gemie has suggested that although Djavann emulates Montesquieu’s critical thinking, she misinterprets the French philosopher’s intentions. He notes that …the purpose of the Persian Letters was not primarily to criticize eastern despotism—which appears to be what Djavann thinks—but to exploit a stereotypical image of the Orient as a means by which to introduce implicit criticisms of the French polity which could get past the relatively strict censorship of the early eighteenth century. (53) Although not unsubstantiated, Gemie’s reading makes no room for Roxane’s criticism of Paris as the mecca of consumerism—her description of French supermarkets as the absolute differentiator between Third and First World economies is mordant critique of unbridled Western capitalism (25)—where people have lost their capacity for empathy. Although her criticism of the French is certainly less frequent and less caustic compared to her attacks against the mullah regime in Iran, it is one of the most significant content items in her letters to Montesquieu—in fact, as Isabelle Moreels has pointed out: “…lorsque la protagoniste s’attache dans ses lettres à Montesquieu à lui expliquer les aspects de la vie ­contemporaine parisienne qui ont changé par rapport à ce que décrivait le philosophe, elle adopte en plusieurs occasions le ton ingénu de Rica comme voile d’ironie” (“…when the protagonist tries to explain in her letters to Montesquieu those aspects of Parisian life that have changed compared to what the philosopher described in his work, she often takes on Rica’s naïve tone as veil of irony” 71). Notwithstanding the stylistic and thematic echoes between Roxane’s letters and Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes which are significant enough to allow for a comparative study while raising interesting intertextual questions (What do the two Roxanes have in common, where do their life stories diverge and why does it matter? How do the effects of the political climate on the book economy of the early eighteenth

154  Chahdortt Djavann century in France relate to Djavann’s early twenty-first century political and editorial moment? How does gender affect the narrators’ cultural critique in both works? How does writing in one’s native language differ from doing so in a language one acquired later in life?), in Djavann’s case there is no actual correspondence—Montesquieu never writes back. The letters Roxane sends out are returned to her, unopened and unread. This begs a number of questions: first, since Roxane engages in cultural and political critique of both the West and Iran in a text that will circulate primarily in a western book market, where is the Iranian enunciative stance? Is Roxane, the character, supposed to inhabit it? If yes, are her Western location and absolute rejection of the motherland’s contemporary political landscape not a concern? Montesquieu’s Persians were certainly not authentic, but they possessed narrative complexity. They wrote both from the West and East. They had dissimilar access to power. They held both active (writing, reading, and responding) and passive (only receiving) roles. Finally, they offered varied assessments of the societies that they inhabited—whether as natives or foreigners. Djavann’s authorial signature endorses Roxane’s authenticity, but a Roxane firmly situated in Paris and ideologically Western is likely to occupy the single narrative stance of the native informant. Furthermore, Roxane’s choice to address the present while writing to the past is problematic on two levels: it buttresses her authorial positioning even further because not only is she a witness to and therefore reliable narrator for the horrors of the mullah regime, but she also has the historical hindsight to maneuver her assessment of both Iran and the West into a fluent, fluid, and convincing narrative that carefully bypasses chapters of European and Middle Eastern history that could breed skepticism in the contemporary francophone reader (European colonial presence in the Middle East, Islamophobia in the West, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, a fair appreciation of the Shah regime, to name only a few). Finally, writing to a silent addressee who, as Roxane notes, could best understand her predicament because he had in fact invented her three centuries earlier as a character in Lettres Persanes (144), fundamentally undermines the relational character of correspondence: even if Roxane sees in Montesquieu a father of sorts (148), how can she narrativize herself into the enunciative position of the daughter if her interlocutor has never interpellated her as such? If, as I argued, these letters are one of the two mechanisms Roxane uses to calibrate the intensity of language when faced with violent clashing between reality and imagination that she cannot otherwise negotiate, then the fact that its deployment marks so many significant absences—absence of enunciative positions, absence of key historical players and moments, absence of the father—tips the scales away from relating within existing socio-cultural and political parameters and toward a rather fabricated set of plausible yet firmly siloed relationships: Roxane’s monodirectional relationship with Montesquieu;

Chahdortt Djavann  155 the pure beauty of Iran’s great poets battling its absolute opposite in the pure evil of the country’s current regime; the wondrous city of Paris as she had imagined it when reading French literature clashing violently with the indifferent, cold metropolis that she now calls home. Nothing is objectively unrealistic, wrong or even unconvincing about how she assesses her different life experiences. However, just as she collapses the potential complexity of her correspondence into a single voice, a single point of view and a single geographical and geopolitical anchor point, so does she limit her multiple experiences, often unpleasant, sometimes traumatic, to a single, often totalizing, certainly hierarchical set of relationships: Farsi must retreat so that the new language take its place; the past must be forgotten for a new life to flourish away from the mullah regime; literary Paris must dissolve behind the brutal city that has confined her to a chambre de bonne and survival jobs. Negotiating these radical substitutions, then, means that often Roxane inhabits an empty in-between. While waiting for the French language to fully replace Farsi, she retreats into a debilitating silence: “Le persan se taisait de plus en plus, battait en retraite. Les mots persans se faisaient rares, ils désertaient sans être remplacés par les mots français. De cet état résultait un vide, un mal de mots, un ‘no word’s land’” (“Persian became gradually more silent, retreated. Persian words became rare, they deserted without being replaced by French words. That state led to an emptiness, a lack of words, a ‘no word’s land’” 119). Her insistence upon silencing Farsi to either forget her traumatic past (114) or disable communication with her family (119), in other words, her desire to avoid relating to those elements of her personal history that affectively overwhelm her, create a hypoxic estuary. In Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction, Sara Horowitz suggested that “[s]urvivor muteness witnesses; it constitutes a form of testimony, uncovering a trace of what was endured…muteness comprises a speech act whose context, (non)speaker, and frame enable us to interpret it” (87–88). Muteness in Horowitz’s analysis is not deliberate erasure. It is meaningful absence of speech. As David Rubin has noted Language and especially narrative structure are necessary components of autobiographical memory…What is included and excluded depends in part on the language available and the narrative structures used. If no words exist to describe something or if the narrative structure omits something, it is less likely to be remembered. (“Beginnings of a Theory of Autobiographical Remembering” 53) Roxane’s attempt at her own life concludes a long period of deliberate self-isolation through partial self-erasure, during which silencing Farsi, Iran and the memories associated with them creates, as she concedes, an uninhabitable wasteland of a life.

156  Chahdortt Djavann Roxane’s happy moments in Comment peut-on être français? are rare. She enjoys biking and swimming and she has a good relationship with her employer, a French journalist who hires Roxane to care for her daughter while she’s at work. The only joyous relationship that Roxane develops while in Paris is with Kim, a Korean man who lives in the same building as she and one day invites her over for tea. Roxane is infatuated with Kim whom she finds extremely handsome and refined. An immigrant himself, Kim has been living in France longer than Roxane, is more fluent in French, and appears keen on helping her master the language—he gifts her the audio-cassette learning method that he used during his early days in Paris. Roxane’s relationship with Kim is not only the most intensely pleasurable experience that Roxane has—although to her chagrin, they never become lovers—it is also the only time in the narrative when Roxane creates and inhabits an estuary. Commenting on their inability to communicate fluently, Roxane notes that “[l]’absence de mots et l’étrangeté de la situation avaient créé une intimité mystérieuse, une sorte d’alchimie entre ces deux inconnus” (“[t]he lack of words and the strangeness of the situation had created a mysterious closeness, a sort of alchemy between these two strangers” 87). While reflecting on her feelings for Kim, she rejects the compulsion to label human relationships: Ce que Roxane ressentait pour Kim, sans le connaître, c’était un de ces sentiments rares qui se situaient au-delà du oui ou du non, au-delà de toute question et de toute réponse, au-delà du noir et du blanc, au-delà du mal ou du bien. Un sentiment qui existait au plus profond d’une jeune femme, c’est tout (What Roxane felt for Kim, without being aware of it, was one of those rare feelings that exist beyond a yes or a no, beyond questions and answers, beyond black and white, beyond good and evil. A feeling that existed in a young woman’s most profound self, that’s all). (94) Roxane’s need to identify a third term—an arbiter between her Farsiand French-speaking selves, a referent that triangulates the sign’s duality, etc.—acquires in these particular circumstances the creative force of the estuary. It is not the absence of a third term that fosters the necessary conditions for the birth of estuarine relationality—a third term may very well emerge as the relating masses (cultural, linguistic, social, historical, etc.) collide. What Roxane is doing with the third term, with what she conceptualizes as the material manifestation of her in-betweenness, for the better part of this narrative is manipulate it into erasing her Iranian past. It is only when she moves beyond dichotomies and dualities without concomitantly attempting to reduce them into singularities that she enters a space of non-hierarchical, estuarine relationality, a space that is productively silent (affectively, her

Chahdortt Djavann  157 silent exchanges with Kim are the richest moments she experiences 130) in the face of an unknown she does not seek to comprehend, interpret, or possess. Je ne suis pas celle que je suis and La dernière séance pick up Roxane’s story after her suicide attempt. Although the main character’s name in these two books is Donya, it is immediately clear to the informed reader that the three books, Comment peut-on être français?, Je ne suis pas celle que je suis, and La dernière séance form a trilogy. To get better following a suicide attempt, Donya, a young Iranian woman who has sought asylum in France and currently lives in Paris, decides to attempt psychoanalysis. La dernière séance concludes the young woman’s journey, structurally echoing the mirroring effect between chapters that focus on the psychoanalytical process and chapters that make space for the narrative intrusion of flashbacks that the reader first encounters in Je ne suis pas celle que je suis. Some episodes of Roxane’s/Donya’s life are revisited in these two books—notably the protagonist’s arrest and rape in Isfahan—while the later narratives shed light on entirely new memories from her Turkish and Iranian lives. The structural and thematic positioning of Roxane’s correspondence with Montesquieu in Comment peut-on être français, her attempt at narrativizing her lives, Iranian, Parisian, Farsi-speaking, French-speaking, etc. while a third-person narrator tells stories from the young woman’s past and present does not change in the two novels that follow. It is, however, reconceptualized as psychoanalysis and is therefore subject to a different set of conventions. The interlocutor remains as clearly neutral in the psychoanalytical context as Montesquieu was in Comment peut-on être français by virtue of his silence; the language of expression is the same, a foreign language, French, that Donya has difficulty maneuvering with the nuance and depth that she would like; the main character is divided into multiple personalities when visiting the psychoanalyst—the therapist never quite knows which Donya will be addressing him at any given time. On the other hand, Donya’s story is communicated in oral speech; it requires at least a minimum of meaningful linguistic exchange with another person; it costs her money that she has trouble finding; and, contrary to her correspondence with Montesquieu, it strips her of the advantage she enjoys in Comment peut-on être français as the hindsight-privileged storyteller who casts her controlled gaze over the past. The past in her psychoanalysis surfaces violently and unexpectedly. Also stripped of time as a double signifier of economic power—the paradox being that psychoanalysis both costs money and diminishes the availability of time, the only income-generating resource she has—and help from her dictionaries, Donya’s oral narrativization of past trauma, in a foreign language within the financially unaffordable and emotionally insufficient temporal framework of a short encounter with a mostly silent stranger is certainly a formidable task.

158  Chahdortt Djavann Interdisciplinary research on the bilingual brain is plentiful. As early as the last decade of the twentieth century, RoseMarie Pérez-Foster was arguing that …proficient coordinate bilinguals [bilinguals with equally proficient command of their two languages]…tend to develop separate linguistic organizations for the two languages they speak. This group of bilinguals verbalize different associations to a word according to the language in which the word is presented. The word…is linked to two separate streams of associations, idiosyncratic meanings, and specialized affective accompaniments. (65) More recent research (2019) has been able to map the operation of these separate linguistic organizations. In a review of current cognitive control literature, Santa Vinerte and Laura Sabourin have concluded that “[i]t is now widely accepted that lexical representations of both languages are active simultaneously, and evidence suggests that there is cross-activation during both comprehension…and production” (118). Despite this simultaneous activation coordinate bilinguals rarely produce speech in the unintended target language. In fact, bilingual brains make efficient use of a set of controls including but not limited to inhibition, attention, conflict monitoring and resolution, selection and task-switching—collectively termed “cognitive control”—which allow for the concomitant inhibition of one language and selection of the other (118). Furthermore, research in emotional regulation suggests that recalling certain memories in a foreign language presents clear advantages.8 In Je ne suis pas celle que je suis Donya, a native speaker of Farsi with good command of spoken French, is keenly aware of her predicament: she must narrate trauma experienced in her native tongue and land in a foreign language whose subtleties escape her. After her suicide attempt, she chooses to undergo psychoanalysis which, unlike talk therapy, puts the burden of language production entirely on the patient. Language is heavily thematized from the opening pages of the narrative, the conflict between native and foreign taking center stage both in the main character’s speech, and in the omniscient narrator’s commentary. Donya’s first visit to her psychoanalyst is awkward, marked by prolonged silences and intense stares. Her initial thoughts on her suicide attempt are followed by a series of reflections the narrative voice offers on Donya’s linguistic abilities in French: —Je pourrais dire que c’était un accident, mais la verité, c’est que je voulais vérifier si le sang coulait bien dans mes veines; alors je les ai ouvertes avec un cutter, ironisa-t-elle, en se moquant d’ellemême avec un mépris non retenu, un accent à couper au couteau et très probablement en faisant quelques fautes d’article: en féminisant

Chahdortt Djavann  159 l’accident et virilisant la vérité (—I could say that it was an accident but the truth is that I wanted to make sure blood was indeed running through my veins so I opened them with a box cutter, she said with some irony, making fun of herself with unbridled disdain, a very thick accent and very likely making article mistakes: assigning a feminine article to the masculine ‘accident’ and masculinizing the feminine ‘truth’). (16–17) During that same first session, the analyst himself questions the viability of this whole enterprise: “‘Comment quelqu’un qui ne connaît même pas le langage ordinaire français, sans parler des expressions, des jeux de mots, des mots d’esprit, des proverbes, de la poésie… peut-il entamer un travail analytique fondé essentiellement sur la langue?’ se demandait-il” (“How can someone who doesn’t even know everyday French, let alone expressions, puns, witticisms, proverbs, poetry…begin his psychoanalytic journey which is essentially based on language?—wondered the analyst” 18). His concern grows as he notices that the closer Donya comes to revealing something meaningful about her past, the more likely she is to assume one of the several personalities that inhabit her, that allow her to refer to herself in the third person, thus fully disconnecting her from the memory that was about to resurface. In fact, he tells his own therapist that he believes speaking to him in a foreign language is what probably facilitates Donya’s personality shifts, which he finds to be artificial and pretty theatrical in nature (104–05). A few visits later, Donya reads her unusual circumstances somewhat differently: Peut-être que c’est une vraie chance de faire une psychanalyse en français dont les mots ne colportent pas des souvenirs horribles… Enregistrer mon histoire dans une autre langue…Peut-être que raconter mon passé avec les mots étrangers pourrait l’exorciser, le laisser passer (Maybe I am really lucky to be in psychoanalysis in French, a language whose words do not peddle horrible memories… recording my history in another language…Maybe telling my past using foreign words could exorcize it, put it to rest). (115–16)9 The idea that her past need not entirely disappear for life to continue in exile, that narrativizing is not a death sentence, is radical for Roxane/ Donya. The theatricality of speaking a foreign language which the psychotherapist reads as an element of distraction, may in fact be a way for Donya to enter some form of relational estuary. In the last two books of the trilogy, French progressively transforms from a labyrinthine nightmare to a safe space in which she can articulate the past without affectively surrendering to it. Determining whether the foreign language kicks Donya’s cognitive controls into higher gear or it aids with processes of emotional regulation is beyond the scope of this work. What

160  Chahdortt Djavann can be said with certainty is that the dominating antithetical forces of the early triangulations (Farsi-speaking Roxane, Francophone Roxane, and Roxane the arbiter), the isolating silence and the tendency to reduce dichotomies into singularities have yielded to the promise of a relational existence. Donya articulates this new estuarine potential in La dernière séance when she explains her evolving relationship with the French language to her psychoanalyst: J’ai fait miens les mots français, et eux, ils ont fait leur mon enfance, mon enfance qui s’est passé sans eux…Ils ont créé une distance, un espace entre moi et le passé que j’ai vécu dans ma language maternelle, et c’est dans cet espace-là que je pourrais, peut-être, construire une vie…Dans cet entre-deux (French words are now mine and theirs is my childhood, my childhood that happened without them… They have created a distance, a space between myself and the past that I experienced in my native language and it is in this very space that I could, maybe, make a life…In this in-between). (198) There is nothing absolute, nothing singular, nothing messianic about this statement. It conveys rather a sense of gratitude toward the foreign language as negotiator, as translator of the unspeakable into the yet to be fully spoken. The in-between that Donya identifies is the act of translation itself. Once the linguistic mistakes, the silences and the disparities are no longer interpreted as wanting intelligence or competence but rather as alternate relational tools—a point that the psychoanalytical method’s reliance upon lapsi and speech voids drives convincingly home—then translation can function as relational intensity, as management of lack and excess, as the foundational event of apostrophizing the other (even when that other is an earlier materialization of the self), beyond the confines of source and target, fidelity and infidelity, the translated and the untranslatable.

Translational Stifling in La Muette10 Published in 2008 by Flammarion, Chahdortt Djavann’s novel La Muette puts translation’s potential to calibrate relational intensities within the estuary to the test. In fact, I will argue that, in this novel, translation as a framing device dilutes the estuarine potential of eyewitness testimony reducing a productively resistant muteness to silence deprived of agency. La muette tells the intertwined stories of the 15-year-old Fatemeh and her 30-year-old paternal aunt, la muette—we are never told the muette’s name but we do learn that as a child she lost the ability, or desire, to speak after witnessing her father, a violent drug addict, beating her mother to death. The novel is presented as a translation of Fatemeh’s diary, composed in prison, and delivered to a French journalist by

Chahdortt Djavann  161 Fatemeh’s prison guard. In her diary, Fatemeh recounts the events that led to her imprisonment, namely the murder of her husband, a mullah in her native Iran, and her four-month-old daughter, Zynabe. The young women’s destinies are set in motion when the muette falls in love with Fatemeh’s maternal uncle. Shocked and scandalized, Fatemeh’s mother convinces her reluctant husband to marry his sister off to a mullah of her acquaintance. Shortly before the wedding, the muette, who never really consents to the marriage, is found naked in the arms of Fatemeh’s uncle and subsequently sentenced to death by stoning for having sullied the mullah’s honor. In an effort to make the muette’s sentence less inhumane, Fatemeh’s father negotiates the punishment with the mullah who promises to reduce it to death by hanging provided that Fatemeh becomes his wife instead of the muette. A few months after her marriage to the mullah, Fatemeh gives birth to her first child and shortly thereafter kills both husband and daughter, making no attempt at escape, and is sentenced to death by hanging. Djavann structurally reinforces the impression that what we are reading, even though clearly published as a novel, could very well be eyewitness testimony. Fatemeh’s narrative is prefaced by the journalist who is said to have published the translated manuscript and followed by two short notes: a brief account of the circumstances in which the diary came into her possession by the French reporter to whom a prison guard initially entrusted the manuscript and a commentary on linguistic and cultural challenges encountered by the text’s translator. The majority of the diary’s sections are prefaced by a short segment in which Fatemeh transcribes or relates short exchanges with the prison guard that punctuate her incarceration before delving into the main narrative, the story of the muette’s and her own transgressions. The heavily layered framing of the diary (two journalistic voices in addition to the translator and the prison guard-turned-go-between) is neither surprising nor original and echoes literary practices and devices reaching as far back as the Arabian Nights and the Quixote. In addition to conferring authority and authenticity on the found manuscript, the motif allows for a series of mises en abyme to create structural and thematic doubles, which, in turn, texture and nuance characters, plot- and sub-plot-lines, arguments, and philosophical or intellectual lines of inquiry. The translation component introduces additional diffractive elements: the strangeness of the source language and culture, which, although domesticated through the act of translation, remain uncanny, further obscuring perceptions of an already challenging multilayered narrative structure; and the de facto assumption that the tale is worth telling beyond its linguistic and cultural home environment and the ensuing mandate of situating the foreign body logically and appropriately within the confines of the host culture. Finally, to gesture back to Venuti and the translator’s invisibility: the closer, in

162  Chahdortt Djavann terms of linguistic equivalence, a translation remains to the original, the better access it provides to its meanings. It is therefore legitimate to assume that a found manuscript, translated into the language of publication— usually after painful restoration to an assumed original and consequently pre- or un-corrupt state—gives the reader direct access to a fully transparent, readily retrievable set of significations pointing to some version of truth that is either unspeakable or undetectable in the native tongue. La Muette adapts to this set of conventions effectively: it tells a story impossible to communicate without translation to an audience that positions itself within the dominant context of the publishing and distributing culture in relation to which the narrative will have to shape itself and acquire meaning. The truth that Djavann reveals, the condition and fate of women without financial independence or social prominence in modern-day Iran, is both terrible and gratifying for the primary target readership, French speakers of the Hexagon, as it reinforces their widely shared faith in republican secularism and restores the compromised image of the motherland as a terre d’asile and a terre d’accueil. Due to its inability to signify in its native economy of publication where censorship and publishing practices refuse its articulation, the story of the muette must signify in translation. The emphasis that Djavann’s narrative places upon the text’s translation by insisting on the steps of the diary’s transition from a literal prison, out of the hands of an author sentenced to death, to what she perceives to be a democratic book market where no restrictions are placed upon publication speaks of its desire that readers position themselves as privileged outsiders whose interpretation of the book’s thematic core, women’s lives in Iran under the regime of the mullahs, never loses sight of their externality. The narrative thus allocates enough space in the host culture’s matrix for the latter to reassert its dominant practices vis-à-vis its own readership by accommodating meanings which, by the time they reach their intended audience, have lost all currency as “original” and most of their historical urgency as testimony. I would like to argue that foregrounding the diary’s fictive translation into French undermines the emancipatory potential of the embedded narrative’s resistance to dominant theological, social, and economic discourses through the use of silence. The framing devices in general and the act of translation in particular illustrate the need for Fatemeh’s story to be told in a foreign tongue or forever keep its silence. In other words, telling Fatemeh’s story in French takes the performative power away from the embedded narrative, by the same token, transforming Fatemeh from an agent of resistance to the exact opposite of what she and her aunt mean in the original story: they both become silent bystanders, victims whose life stories serve no other purpose than to exemplify all that is wrong with modern-day Iran. This is carried a step further by Fatemeh’s translation of her aunt’s silent life into a narrative, a betrayal of the muette’s deliberate rejection of traditional

Chahdortt Djavann  163 communication. Ultimately, translation—interlingual or silence-to-word translation—accentuates the story’s symbolic otherness, suggesting that the reader align herself with the French journalists and the Iranian translator who are voicing Fatemeh’s and la muette’s stories in a foreign tongue while depriving them of the linguistic and textural particularities that a domesticating transplantation into the foreign language necessarily effaces—not to mention the essential transformation that occurs when a life lived in silence must enter the realm of the written word. To a certain extent, the paradox of linguistically representing a de facto silent moment applies to all historical discourses: in the telling of history, the task of language is not to revive but rather to create. The event itself is firmly rooted in the past, inimitable and inaccessible. What language actually performs is a speech act with loose referential links to its semantic object and significant stakes in the shaping of opinions and reactions in the different environments of enunciation and circulation within which the historical narrative will eventually position itself. Jean Rancière has pointed to textual and textural poetics when engaging the question of modern history’s affair with science, suggesting that the double signification of the word “histoire” (story and history) which, at least in the French language, has informed much of the philosophical debate on history as a discipline, should be at the very core of the field’s scientific demystification (180). The story that history tells is the act of telling history itself. If there is any truth to access in historical narrative, it is “dans les modes d’interprétation mais aussi dans la découpe des phrases, le temps et les personnes du verbe, les jeux du propre et du figuré” (“in the modes of interpretation, but also in the style of the sentences, the tense and person of the verb, the plays of the literal and the figurative”; Les Noms de l’histoire: Essai de poétique du savoir 180; Melehy 89). The interpretative and textural elements that Rancière posits as the depositories of historical truth become all the more relevant—though, paradoxically, all the more elusive—when witnessed history is recounted in translation. All speech is conditioned by the circumstances of its enunciation: Who speaks? How legitimate is the speaker’s discourse? When and where is this narrative being produced? Who is present? What is the intended audience? When transplanting an eyewitness’s account from one sociocultural and linguistic environment into another, the speaker may easily acquire a symbolic identity as the other, the quintessential representative of her native country, while paradoxically losing her subjectivity as other. As a result, the obfuscated individual identity of the enunciator does not lend itself to the type of scrutiny that usually allows for an assessment of the speaker’s authority. Moreover, the audience tends to uncritically settle into a receptive position, categorically conceding the speaker’s legitimacy, often going as far as dismissing previous knowledge of the semantic content in question based on the speaker’s unchallengeable authenticity.

164  Chahdortt Djavann Although much of Djavann’s published work in French is fictional, the author’s identity as an Iranian woman activist, visibly pro-Western and categorically anti-theocratic, never quite recedes into the background of the reading experience. Djavann does not fight the role of the representative that is usually and unfairly assigned to most non-hexagonal writers; she accepts and honors her “typicality,” inhabiting an author-function which makes it very difficult to separate her political activism from her fiction. In fact, it invites both critics and readers to blur the boundaries of genre and allow an author-become-symbol to navigate the muddy waters separating reality and representation with remarkable unaccountability.11 What Nicholas Harrison has noted on the reception and critique of francophone literature is, I believe, particularly applicable to Djavann’s œuvre: The notion of the “francophone author” . . . designates a certain “author-function,” to use the term offered by Foucault in his famous essay “What is an Author?”: particular aspects of the author’s real or imagined biography . . . including notably “race” or national origins, are seen by the reader as pertinent to the text, and as providing a legitimate or even crucial means of making sense of it. To label a work of fiction “francophone,” then . . . is already to imply the appropriateness of certain critical and interpretative maneuvers. (104) La muette is a powerful example of this subtle yet interpretatively ­powerful blurring of boundaries between authorial—and authoritative— voice and literary character. By writing the muette’s story in French and presenting it as fictional eyewitness testimony translated from Farsi into French, Djavann lays bare a series of “specific socio-historical operations of language”12 with real political ramifications for an audience and an economy of publication that posit themselves not only as universal arbiters of literary taste but also as guarantors of freedom of expression and human rights. Referring to the role Paris has played over the years as the quintessential literary metropolis, Pascale Casanova writes in La République mondiale des Lettres: “La capitale dénationalisée de la littérature dénationalise à son tour les textes, les déshistoricise pour les conformer à ses propres conceptions de l’art littéraire” (“Paris, the denationalized capital of literature, denationalized texts so that they would conform to its own conceptions of literary art”; 216; DeBevoise 155). She adds that: “ . . . la reconnaissance centrale est à la fois une forme d’autonomie nécessaire et une forme d’annexion ethnocentrique qui nie l’existence historique des consacrés” (“Such recognition is at once a necessary form of autonomy and a form of ethnocentric annexation that denies the historical existence of those who are consecrated”; 217; DeBevoise 156). As part of a larger argument on the significance of publishing centers and, in particular, the importance of universal principles for literary consecration as devised and imposed by Paris, Casanova’s

Chahdortt Djavann  165 observation puts in perspective the effects that porousness of genre can have in Djavann’s work: the author performs historically significant testimony in French by the mere inscription of her name on the cover of the book while at the same time universalizing her text’s appeal and authority by circulating it in a publishing capital that produces literary history through the veiling or erasing of the national, linguistic, and historical specificity of the enunciating instance, in the muette’s case, the fictional character Fatemeh. This is in direct contrast to the meanings that Fatemeh’s life acquires in the main narrative as well as the significance of the aunt’s capital act of resistance, namely her conscious withdrawal from social interaction through speech. Their disobedience and transgressions bespeak a desire to affirm selfhood in a political and social environment that denies women in their circumstances the ability to do so. Djavann’s narrative veils this constitutively pivotal concern by shifting agency from Fatemeh to French journalists and francophone readers. If, as Spivak has argued in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” representation as doubling or repetition “dissimulates the choice of and need for ‘heroes,’ paternal proxies, agents of power” (33), Fatemeh’s and the muette’s scripting and re-scripting in translation bespeaks a violent appropriation of the subaltern’s story by agents of power similar enough to the subaltern—the Farsi-speaking translator and the native-informant female author—to be perceived not as speaking for (representation as Vertretung) but rather as innocently mirroring, providing the scene of the story’s writing (representation as Darstellung). As Ritu Birla has noted in “Postcolonial Studies: Now That’s History,” Spivak’s ethics of responsibility hinges upon “cultivating a capacity to respond to and be responsive to the other, without demanding resemblance as the basis of recognition” (93). The systematic obliteration of Fatemeh’s otherness reduces hers and her aunt’s subalternity to a plotline, a cautionary tale spoken by Westernized intellectuals who have access to and power over both signifiers and signifieds. In La muette, the text’s difficulty in enunciating its history is identified by an act of displacement. In the book’s preface to the diary, we become acquainted with two of the three most decisive agents (the third one being the translator) in the history of the text’s dissemination: the reporter who received the manuscript from the prison guard and the journalist to whom the reporter sent the manuscript and its translation into French requesting that she publish it. Before either of these documents reaches the journalist, however, she receives a letter from the reporter, fully quoted in the preface, announcing the impending arrival of both manuscript and translation and promising a more in-depth explanation of how she came into possession of the original in the form of an afterword to the text’s translation. The letter’s arrival is narrated as follows: Au mois de septembre, j’ai reçu, à mon domicile, une lettre qui provenait d’Iran. Je ne connaissais personne dans ce pays et j’ai cru à une

166  Chahdortt Djavann erreur, mais c’était bien mon nom qui figurait sur l’enveloppe. Au dos était écrite une adresse en caractères persans. La couleur de l’encre, bien que bleue, n’était pas identique des deux côtés de l’enveloppe. Chaque adresse était écrite par un individu et un stylo différent. (9) In September, I received at my home a letter from Iran. I thought it was a mistake since I didn’t know anyone in that country but the envelop clearly stated my name. On the back was an address in Persian characters. The ink color, although blue on both sides, was not the same. Each address had been written by a different person and a different pen. Identified as C. J. at the end of the letter, the reporter’s exact whereabouts are not revealed. We know that the letter was sent from Iran; however, the sender’s address, written in Farsi, by someone other than herself, remains a mystery, momentarily shifting the authenticity debate, inherent in all found-manuscript narratives, from the veracity of the story to the disseminating agent’s credibility. The difference in language, handwriting, and pen characteristics clearly distinguishes the reporter from both the publishing journalist and the third agent, the Farsi speaker who provides the sender’s address. The emphasis placed upon differences between French and Farsi, sender and receiver, and shades of blue ink on an envelope containing a letter written by and for agents of the French news economy (a reporter and a journalist both working for French media outlets) helps obscure the manuscript by diverting attention away from its ability to speak the truth of its narrative. All specific identifying markers, personal (“mon nom”), temporal (“au mois de septembre”), and spatial (“à mon domicile”) point away from the source text (still literally invisible because not yet received), the source language (present yet lacking signifying power) and, most importantly, the writer of the diary (very summarily mentioned in the body of the letter itself as a “jeune femme de quinze ans en prison”; “fifteen-year-old young woman, held in prison”). The reference to Iran and its language is unspecific enough to further dehistoricize the instance of enunciation, Fatemeh’s diary, and transform the meanings of the original into reflections of how its new environment appropriates it: as a modality that shifts the witness’s account from lived experience to linguistically and culturally displaced narrative. This sense of displacement, the impression that meaning resides somewhere beyond the original document, is further emphasized by the dislocation of the reading experience itself. When the package containing both manuscript and translation reaches the publishing journalist, she opens the diary and examines its contents: “Pas de marge, pas de ratures, pas de renvois ni de flèches. Ces pages noircies de mots étrangers qui m’échappaient complètement m’ont envahie d’une oppression peu commune. L’écriture était encore plus petite et plus serrée dans les

Chahdortt Djavann  167 dernières pages . . . ” (“No margins, nothing crossed out, no references, no arrows. These pages, black with foreign words that meant nothing to me, overwhelmed me with an unusual sense of oppression. The writing was even smaller and tighter in the last pages…” 10). The lack of space in the Farsi original bespeaks the writer’s sense of urgency. Composed in prison as Fatemeh awaits execution, the young woman’s story typographically reflects the time and space constraints placed upon the act of witnessing itself: the need to report the events that have shaped her aunt’s, the muette’s, life supersedes rhetorical concerns and compositional imperatives making secondary concerns of structural reflection, lexical ornamentation or paragraphing. By the same token, witnessing and, paradoxically, writing trauma moves away from language (differentiation and meaningful discontinuities) and toward silence (the diary’s undifferentiated continuum which the reader fails to identify as signifying marking because of its foreignness). As Sara Horowitz has suggested in Voicing the Void: “[m]uteness instantiates a consistent movement of displacement . . . that characterizes both the event and its subsequent reflections and depictions. Ultimately this movement centers on a displacement of language as such which aspires, finally, to silence” (38). The movement away from language, the displacement that ultimately leads to silence, is facilitated in Djavann’s narrative by the centrality of the manuscript’s translation. After reading the diary’s translation, the journalist goes back to the original: “Je l’ai feuilleté page par page, faute de savoir les lire. La gorge et le cœur serrés, j’avais l’impression de comprendre déjà un peu la version persane, du moins la détermination de son auteur et la souffrance qu’exprimait cette écriture si lointaine” (“For lack of reading expertise, I leaved through it page by page. With a tight throat and a tight heart, I was under the impression that I could already understand the Persian version a little, at least the determination of its author and the suffering that this far-away writing expressed” 11). This return to the source, the mock act of reading the original manuscript, completes the silencing of its intended performative meanings. It is only through the reading of the inserted annotation in the form of translation that the journalist perceives in the original the “determination” and “suffering” of the witness. The act of witnessing and narrating trauma is stripped of its constitutive element of embodiment and reduced to voyeurism. The visual characteristics of the author’s handwriting, disassociated from content and intention, are valued as evidence supporting the truths communicated by what becomes for all intents and purposes the French original. The “calligraphie alambiquée, petite et serrée” (“small, tight, and overly refined calligraphy”) performs a new illocutory act: it no longer bears witness to the brutal events of the muette’s and the niece’s lives; instead, it authenticates the meanings of the French translation. The journalist concludes: “Qu’une telle histoire fût vraie, je ne l’aurais jamais cru si je n’avais pas eu le cahier en main. Aucune hésitation: je le

168  Chahdortt Djavann publierai” (“I would have never believed that such a story could be true, if I had not had the notebook in my hands. No hesitation: I will publish it” 10). This statement is clearly logically challenging since she does not read Farsi. It remains, however, true to what the book as a whole performs: a fetishization of the Iranian Other and her linguistic difference both accessible through processes of non-estuarine, totalizing silencing and translation. In a narrative haunted by loss, the most significant death that the reader witnesses in this process of silencing is that of the narrator as a witnessing agent. The translation is presented as a condition of comprehensibility and readability not only in the journalist’s preface but most importantly in the translator’s note that concludes Djavann’s book. By virtue of its concern with philosophical approaches to translation and the technical difficulties encountered in the process of transforming one language into another, the translator’s note doubly silences the original text by placing upon it the definitiveness not only of its social and patriarchal authority (the male, Iranian intellectual who dissects and subsequently restructures a young, uneducated woman’s outpour of emotion) but also of its compositional inevitability (the final comment on the diary explicitly requires that the reader return to the framing devices of the book and thus move away from Fatemeh’s story). By silencing Fatemeh, the translator’s note equally obliterates her abused and incarcerated body. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry’s discussion of Oedipus, Lear, and the Beckettian Winnie reaches the following conclusion: [T]he voice becomes a final source of self extension; so long as one is speaking, the self extends out beyond the boundaries of the body, occupies a space much larger than the body. . . . Their ceaseless talk articulates their unspoken understanding that only in silence do the edges of the self become coterminous with the edges of the body it will die with. (33) Fatemeh’s writing occupies a space that not only projects itself outside the body but is materially separated from it and therefore unbound by the constraints placed upon her physical existence. The advantage of the written word resides in its transferability from one potential voicing to the next and thus, in the case of witnessing and narrating trauma especially, its theoretically endless dissemination. The reflection of the body’s markings that is the young woman’s handwriting is distorted by the professional translator: “L’auteur n’utilisait aucune ponctuation, n’allait jamais à la ligne et n’avait divisé son récit en chapitres. . . . J’ai néanmoins pris la liberté d’aérer le texte dans la traduction pour que la lecture en soit plus aisée” (“The author used no punctuation, never changed paragraphs, and had not organized her narrative in chapters…I have taken the liberty, however, to create some breathing room in the translation

Chahdortt Djavann  169 to facilitate reading” 115–16). The formal and structural elements upon which the translator chooses to improve are some of the most significant thematic concerns of the narrative: lack of control and decision-making ability over one’s life which results in unpredictability and the impossibility to punctuate, paragraph, or organize in the traditional sense of the words; confinement as experienced not only in prison but most significantly in an ill-defined outside, similar to the one occupied by the diary’s intended Farsi-speaking readership. It is only within this outside that the diary could function as historical and cultural modality by unsettling assumptions and shifting perceptions as testimonial performance. Instead, Fatemeh’s story, spoken in French, aérée, and accessible, conforms to the doxic expectations of its new readership: it reads well and, as the translator assures us, remains faithful to the original: “J’ai tenté avant tout, autant que faire se pouvait, de rester fidèle à l’écriture, à la voix, au souffle qui traverse cette histoire” (“Above all else, I have tried, as much as it was possible, to remain loyal to the writing, the voice, the breath that runs through this story” 115). Paradoxically, these are the characteristics of the narrative that were never transferred to the translation: the voice, the writing (structure, quality of handwriting, compositional eccentricities) and the movement, spirit, or breath of the historical moment’s urgency. The translator’s note ends on a rather elaborate set of “précisions d’ordre ethnolinguistique” (“ethno-linguistic clarifications”): the French— and English—language’s lack of a lexical equivalence for “Khaléh” and “Améh” (maternal and paternal aunt) and “Amou” and “Dâï” (paternal and maternal uncle) as well as the translational difficulties presented by the term “Havou” which designates the relationship between wives in a polygamous household. The framing devices’ normalizing effect is thereby maximized: Western languages are lumped together as ethnolinguistically distinct from Farsi on the basis of familial structures that the translator purports are foreign to them. Even if we accept that the quite gratuitous diatribe on sharia and polygamy is due to the translator’s unfamiliarity with his French readership’s knowledge of Islamic law, there is no obvious reason for insisting on untranslatability: his quite effective use of the French term “coépouse” undermines the necessity of the explanatory digression and points away from linguistic questions and toward a translator’s concern with his readers’ cultural expectations. Furthermore, the translator’s assertion is historically, culturally, and linguistically inaccurate. Numerous francophone and anglophone countries —the translator singles out two Western languages: English and French—have dealt with polygamy in legal, cultural, and religious terms and have developed adequate and fairly accurate lexical means to convey meanings related to this particular type of family formation. His emphasis on lexical variation to designate maternal and paternal aunts and uncles in Farsi is even less motivated since transference into French is rather unproblematic—the

170  Chahdortt Djavann less economical, descriptive “tante maternelle” is hardly a translational hurdle worth annotation. Following the obliteration of Fatemeh’s text, Djavann’s narrative suggests voicing the translation as a text signifying its cultural and linguistic difference from the original; the original therefore finds itself thematically and formally alienated from its historical truth as testimony, only producing meaning as a normalized, Westernized echo of an urgency transformed into unsettling otherness. The sense of impending death and the ensuing need for testifying to the urgency of historical truth is no less present in the main narrative than its nullification is dominant in the framing narrative devices. The apparent conflict is negotiated by Fatemeh’s prison guard, the only character allowed access to both the inside of the prison and the world outside, including agents of the foreign, translating culture. He is only present in short narrative or dialogical segments at the beginning of the text’s sections and rarely utters more than a few words. He keeps his identity secret until the very end of the book when he reveals his name and birthplace along with the date of Fatemeh’s hanging. He is the one who provides Fatemeh with writing material and small portions of opium to dull the excruciating pain that follows torture, making, therefore, the composing of the narrative possible. He is also the one responsible for the text’s dissemination in the West, the one who hands the notebook over to the French reporter in Iran. As indispensable as his agency appears to the very possibility of witnessing, the prison guard constitutes an additional layer between Fatemeh and the truth she wishes to communicate. As provider of both pen and paper and the necessary conditions for writing (numbing of pain), he facilitates the ultimate silencing of the witness. Elaine Scarry has argued that torture resembles death insofar as it overemphasizes bodily to the detriment of psychological or mental events expressible through voice. This presence/absence dichotomy is what largely characterizes death rituals and, to a certain extent, metaphysics (49). By refusing to communicate verbally with her, the prison guard allocates Fatemeh a silent space where altered perception of reality (opium) and mediated voicing of truth (transcription of voice into writing) come together to refute the impending reality of death-as-punishment. The diary allows Fatemeh to alter the meaning of her death from exemplary punishment of a transgressor to a document meant to articulate causal links between institutionalized denial of selfhood and murder. This new signification, however, performs in a radically different way when served up as a generalization of historical truth for something as unrelated to the two women’s experiences as a foreign book market and its taste for the truth of the native informant. The expressivity of the tortured-thennumbed body and its silenced voice are then channeled into a text which lacking immediacy and authorial control over all aspects of dissemination and circulation reads as life after death, the crossing beyond, or afterlife, of a truth impossible to articulate in its historical circumstance.

Chahdortt Djavann  171 The embedded narrative, Fatemeh’s diary, is in many ways a story about death and its silences, its circumstances, personal and historical, and its implications. In Djavann’s text, death, literal and metaphorical, is a female experience. The central thanatic event is the muette’s loss of voice. In the opening pages of her diary, Fatemeh foregrounds the necessity to speak the voice of the woman rendered mute: “Elle avait fait du silence son art de vivre. Quant à moi, arrivée à ce point, j’ai le devoir, le besoin de raconter son histoire” (“She had made of silence her way of life. Having reached this point, I now feel the obligation, the need to tell her story” 18). The life of the muette, a posteriori recounted by a first-hand witness, has already transcended its own historicity into a condition of afterlife, to gesture back to de Man, a reassembling of fragments that never constituted a whole to begin with. Fatemeh’s wording of silence is, at its core, a translative act, one that imposes the transplantation of a story experienced outside language into the concreteness of a text which only exists as language. As Fatemeh herself points out, “se taire signifiait peut-être ne pas trahir la vérité” (“perhaps remaining silent meant not betraying the truth” 18). As the reader finds out a few pages later, when her father stood trial for the murder of her mother, the aunt refused to testify against him and never spoke again (25). Although a first-hand witness of the events that lead to her mother’s murder, the muette, perfectly capable of speech at the time, withholds language, declining the role of confabulator in what would have certainly been an officially sanctioned distortion of truth. The historical and personal experience enveloped by silence should only signify a-linguistically. Fatemeh’s account is paradoxical. By definition verbal, it undermines its own legitimacy by refusing to articulate the meanings of the original in their own terms (silence) while also breathing life into an estuarine moment of resistance: the muette’s conscious decision to relate to her and to the world through silence and a culturally transgressive valorization of the body. The muette’s story is centered on two events, both intense bodily and erotic experiences, both leading directly or indirectly to her death-byhanging and Fatemeh’s incarceration, writing of the diary, and eventual execution. Early on in the narrative, Fatemeh finds her aunt in the middle of the night, lying on the snow in the family’s yard, awake and seemingly playful. As she draws close, Fatemeh notices the following: “Avec sa main, elle enfonçait des boules de neige entre ses cuisses, elle semblait ivre, ivre d’amour, de folie. Pendant quelques secondes j’ai regardé ses doigts frénétiques qui fourraient la neige dans son sexe, cette image m’a effrayée” (“With her hand, she would force snowballs between her legs; she seemed drunk, drunk with love and madness. For a few seconds, I watched her fingers frenetically shoving snow into her genitals; that image terrified me” 32). Following the events of that night, the muette’s disposition changes, she withdraws from life, and prompts her sister-inlaw’s decision to marry her off to the mullah. Right before the wedding,

172  Chahdortt Djavann Fatemeh and her mother discover the muette in her lover’s—Fatemeh’s maternal uncle’s—arms: “[Ma mère] est restée deux secondes paralysée devant la scène que nous découvrions: la muette et mon oncle étaient nus, endormis dans les bras l’un de l’autre. Moi aussi j’étais interdite et sans voix” (“My mother stood for a couple of seconds paralyzed in front of the scene that we had just discovered: the muette and my uncle were naked, asleep in each other’s arms. I was also dumbfounded and speechless” 75). The muette’s transgression sets the events of her death and Fatemeh’s eventual marriage to the mullah in motion. These two structurally pivotal scenes thematically mirror each other: they center on the muette’s erotic pleasure, solitary, and shared, and they violently disrupt her family’s ability to narrativize her life (Fatemeh is either frightened or speechless). The muette’s body takes precedence over verbal expression and expresses its pleasure in the same unmistakable terms that it will later speak its pain: without words. According to Barbara Johnson: “There seem . . . to be two things women are silent about: their pleasure and their violation. The work performed by the idealization of this silence is that it helps culture not to be able to tell the difference between the two” (137). If a woman forfeits speech altogether, not verbally communicating her pleasure and pain undoes the dichotomy suggested by Johnson and renders both experiences visible, clearly identifiable and, therefore, separable events in the culture’s imaginary. Fatemeh’s later account of her sexual encounters with the mullah—both violating and pleasurable—read as inadequate translations of experience already registered in the narrative economy as ineffable, not because of social impositions and interdictions but rather because of speech’s essential shortcomings and the privileging of silence. Fatemeh speaks of her relationship with her aunt, la muette, in terms less verbal than bodily: “ . . . je ne savais plus où mon corps s’arrêtait et où le sien commençait. Il y avait un amour fusionnel entre nous, à travers moi elle voyait la fillette qu’elle avait été autrefois” (“I no longer knew where my body ended and hers began. We were inseparable; through me, she could see the little girl she once was” 43). The de facto absence of words transforms their bond into a union beyond the rudiments of human understanding: “Sous ses mains, je me sentais protégée, nous étions en connivence, par une sorte d’alchimie, sans mots” (“In her hands, I felt protected; we were complicit as if by alchemy, without any words” 44). Their only shared contact with the spoken and written word consists in vicariously experiencing its power through the reading of Mille et Une Nuits (44). Positing a clearly eroticized body as an agent of transcendence undermines the intended audience’s unproblematic acceptance of the Word as a prerequisite for knowledge. The text seems to suggest that verbal communication (reading the Arabian Nights) is a mimetic act, a mirroring of desire’s essential physicality. Knowing is an expressive rather than an impressive process (the etymology of “connivence”

Chahdortt Djavann  173 pointing to the most expressive of human senses, the gaze) that defies interpretation and bypasses logic. At the muette’s hanging, Fatemeh tries to speak to her, let her know that she is in the crowd witnessing her final moments and ultimately her death but no words are uttered (90). Instead, for a few seconds, “nous étions les yeux dans les yeux” (“we were staring into each other’s eyes” 91). Verbally accounting for the absence of verbal communication accomplishes two things: it undercuts the power of the Word as Logos, reason (this is a story, after all, about the alchemic transference of experience from one woman to another) challenging, at the same time, its own authority and legitimacy as a witnessing act. Fatemeh knows that escaping death as defined by her captors is only possible through writing: “ . . . j’aimerais que l’histoire que je raconte dans ce cahier puisse me survivre. Écrire me fait vivre alors que la mort m’attend derrière la porte de cette cellule” (“…I would like for the story that I’m telling in this notebook to survive me. Writing allows me to live; it’s death that awaits me beyond the door of this cell” 37). The text is a eulogy which by default assigns the salvatory function to the act of writing as corporal extension and, therefore, as life. The only time when Fatemeh emphatically rejects silence and conceptualizes her text as its antidote, in other words as voice, is when silence becomes for her—as it did for Roxane—the correlate of isolation: “Tout est silence dans cette cellule et je n’entends que les battements de mon cœur, les démons du passé s’élancent sur moi, j’ai peur, j’étouffe, je ne veux pas mourir avec cette haine qui me transperce et me ravage . . . je dois enregistrer cette haine dans ce cahier” (“There is nothing but silence in this cell. I can only hear my heart beating. The demons of the past are throwing themselves at me, I’m scared, I can’t breathe, I don’t want to die with this hatred that runs through me and devastates me… I must record this hatred in this notebook” 43). It is, once again, the inscription, the fusion of the body with pen and paper as well as the rationalization of oppression and murder as causally linked that promise deliverance. The verbal encoding of her and the muette’s story will permit a disassociation of the women’s afterlife from that of the afterlife of their respective historical footprints. The text is not meant to guarantee the survival of the act of witnessing as history; it is rather meant to account for and, by so doing, move beyond, the hatred that has defined her: “Je ne veux pas emporter [cette haine] avec moi dans la tombe” (“I don’t want to bring [this hatred] along with me to the grave” 43). The last part of the diary focuses on the events that led to the murder of the mullah and Fatemeh’s daughter. Fatemeh’s narrative emphasizes literal and metaphorical instances of bodies expulsing waste matter, illness, and death: the mullah’s nauseating breath which smelled like rotten meat (97), Fatemeh’s request for gloves and a mask to keep her from becoming nauseated when changing the mullah’s bedridden first wife (102), her incessant vomiting after becoming pregnant followed by

174  Chahdortt Djavann the assertion that she wanted to expel the child that was growing inside her (104), the mullah’s second wife’s attempt at killing the child while in utero by deliberately tripping Fatemeh (105) and, finally, Fatemeh’s crime, the double murder of her husband and daughter (104–05). The foregrounding of death and matter that no longer serves any lifesustaining purposes bespeaks Fatemeh’s preoccupation with the decomposition of both body essences and the social and familial relational fabrics. Following the hanging and expiring of a body for all intents and purposes conterminous with hers, that of her aunt, la muette, Fatemeh’s existence morphs into an afterlife of sorts: deprived of the vital symbiotic relationship that had nourished her over the years, she detects in her sexual violation by the mullah and her physically violent rejection by his second wife an impossibility of experience with the notable exception of eroticism (104). As repulsed as she is by her husband and as ashamed and guilty as she feels, she admits to sexual pleasure described as solitary and clearly disassociated from the mullah whose face remains invisible to her as she covers her head with a blanket to avoid the putrefaction that is his breath. The life impulse that is customarily associated with sexuality is in Fatemeh’s case compromised by a reassigning of meaning to two narrative elements linked to the sexual act, both literary topoi with clear ontological connotations: the breath, symbol of life as metaphysics which in Fatemeh’s diary becomes an agent of decay, and the mullah’s throat, sounding box of voice and logos, which Fatemeh silences by penetrating it with a knife while his sex is in her vagina (108), inverting at once a number of philosophical, theological, and biological paradigms. The murder of her daughter by asphyxiation similarly draws attention to the mouth, breathing and the ability to produce sound, effectively mirroring Fatemeh’s own gagging by the mullah when she refuses to obey him (102) and the self-censoring of her orgasmic cries (104). The life-sustaining silence of the muette that permitted both women’s bodies to claim visibility is transformed into an imposition that accurately traces the confines of those same bodies’ afterlives: obscured in death by a process of effacement resulting from a failed attempt at witnessing their history. A text permeated by decomposition and death narratively points to the unfeasibility of a post-factum telling of the original experience. Piecing together fragments results in a radically unconstructed whole that, being conscious of its meaninglessness when compared with the original events and their significations, descends rapidly into isolating silence. Piecing together Fatemeh’s story, or speaking for Fatemeh, is for Djavann a political as much as it is a literary act. Contrary to what we can assume Fatemeh’s wishes and expectations to be, it is mostly through the reading prism of the translative and publishing acts that this story acquires meaning. The message it communicates differs significantly from that promised by the publisher in the book’s preface—the true and urgent story of a contemporary Iranian woman. Multiple annotations by three agents

Chahdortt Djavann  175 of adaptation and dissemination and the very fact of the book’s circulation in the French economy of publication challenge the claims of immediacy and veracity inherent in all witness’s accounts. In fact, they provide an inevitable lens through which the embedded narrative, the diary, reveals itself as a translation of histories to which the reader may lay claim without, however, benefiting from an economy of estuarine relationality. The unsaid has been uttered, the incomprehensible translated, the forbidden circulated. Fatemeh’s attempt at voicing her aunt’s silence, inadvertently kills the muette’s story and the book narrates the piecing together of its exploded fragments as difference known, examined and, ultimately, rejected.

Notes 1 In “French New Orientalist Narratives from the ‘Natives’: Reading More than Chahdortt Djavann in Paris,” Laetitia Nanquette suggests that Djavann’s work is replete with elements of new Orientalism and emulative Occidentalism (269). Nanquette’s analysis of Djavann’s Comment peut-on être français? highlights the author’s simplistic division of her world (France/ Iran) into spheres of pure good (France) and pure evil (Iran), the underlining assumption being that one should unconditionally side with (emulate) French Republicanism and categorically reject the Islamic Republic. 2 Etienne Balibar has pointed to the fundamental philosophical chasm between form and application of the egalitarian principle in Frontières de la démocratie: “Ce qui devient alors déterminant est la contradiction entre la forme égalitaire et les mécanismes inégalitaires des institutions, et avant tout de l’Etat… ” (“What, then, becomes decisive is the contradiction between formal equality and the inegalitarian mechanisms of the institutions and, most importantly, of the State…” 11). 3 One can legitimately count the Stasi commission among the latter, an official body constituted for the sole purpose of legitimizing governmental policy by means of banking on the cultural impact of one of the most persistent foundational myths of the modern French state, that of a “terre d’accueil.” 4 Djavann herself scrutinizes the role France has played over the years not only in direct relation to the ousting of the Shah, but also in the development of what has now become the Iranian nuclear problem (See À mon corps défendant, l’occident and, more recently, Iran, j’accuse). 5 See Bronwyn Winter’s Hijab and the Republic: Uncovering the French Headscarf Debate (213). 6 An interesting critique of domesticating translations, and translative acts in general, as inherently ethnocentric has come from Douglas Robinson in Translation and Empire. One of his most salient points is that for the conceptual dichotomy between assimilating and foreignizing to carry any theoretical value, we have to assume the existence of “a stable separation of source and target languages.” Although such a distinction is clearly problematic to make, when looking at the politics of translation it may be more interpretatively productive to be focusing not so much on linguistic codes but rather on instances of enunciation. Djavann’s testimony before the Stasi commission is an example of a clear separation between the cultural apparatus one would associate with Iran and the Persian language and the political and legal workings of the French language as a vehicle for the values proclaimed by the French Republic.

176  Chahdortt Djavann







Conclusion

The creation of cultural estuaries at a time when new articulations of the global condition nuance the ways in which we define human communities is predicated upon the reconfiguration of borders. Notwithstanding their capacity to divide, limit, ostracize, and impede, borders inadvertently engender new political, cultural, and social formations while allowing the distinctiveness, internal multiplicities, and strangeness of their constitutive elements to endure. Michel Agier has reflected on the border’s ordinary extraordinariness: “…it is in border situations that the relationship with the other is put to the test, with an unknown who is also the embodiment of what the world is for those who find themselves there, arriving at the border” (Borderlands 76). The border is neither a geographically delimited nor a materially stable space. What constitutes it is precisely the encounter with otherness and the ordinary and extraordinary processes that follow. Although the nature of these processes ranges from political (the immediate and pressing concern of status) to economic (exchange rates, cash availability, building creditworthiness, etc.) to cultural (navigating unknown social codes, linguistic barriers, and one’s own place in newly constructed cultural frameworks), translation as a broad strategy of negotiation is the fundamental modality of the encounter. As a conclusion to this reflection on the merits of the cultural estuary, I would like to suggest that applicability of the concept extends beyond the realm of translingual cultural production and into the larger field of postcolonial studies. This by no means implies that translingualism is a characteristic of non-postcolonial authors who opt to write in a language other than their native tongue. For classification purposes, however, since Steven Kellman’s The Translingual Imagination and Robert Jouanny’s Singularités francophones ou choisir d’écrire en français in particular, critics have tended to more readily disassociate the term translingualism from the postcolony and link it rather to cases of authors who migrate for reasons unrelated to the aftermath of colonization. This is clearly limiting from both an etymological and political perspective: (a) we would be hardpressed to identify postcolonial authors who have not effectuated some type of linguistic crossing before settling in their language(s) of literary

178 Conclusion expression; (b) it is rather peculiar to exclude writers who live and work in France from the political, social, and linguistic framework of the postcolony when France itself is a cosmopolitan postcolony.1 Their autobiography, the years spent as children and young adults in a country not under direct French colonial rule (as is the case with all authors studied in this book) matters but little when their editorial, linguistic, and cultural positioning requires that they be in conversation with the postcolonial and neocolonial realities of their immediate surroundings. In fact, their language of adoption, free as it may be of the explicit historical imprint of imperialism, colonial occupation, and postcolonialism, is no less politically ambiguous. Often appreciated as an agent of transformation and liberation for the speaking/writing translingual subject, it is equally rejected for its inhospitable insistence on name-, genealogy-, and origin-tracing—a translingual author’s concern shared by a number of postcolonial writers who are also expected to report at the center on their far-away lands and their othered identities. These obvious similarities between translingual writers and the postcolonial multi-lingual condition should not obscure two fundamental differences which in part justify a tenuous yet necessary classificatory distinction: the communal character of historical experience, whether elating or traumatizing, and the institutionally normative imposition of the foreign language upon the native tongue. In other words, translingual subjects are not faced with the forced acquisition of the foreign language at school and the institutional inferiorization of the native language(s) by the overwhelming presence of the politically sanctioned other tongue in official discourses meant to construct and maintain national and civilizational identities. They do not share the postcolonial sense of exilic community in the adoptive country and/or tongue either, since the politics of exile and the narrative of departure owe their character and unity to indigenous histories, largely unrelated to the imperialist, colonial, or neocolonial projects of the adoptive land and its language(s). In that sense, translingual writers’ faith in the emancipatory potential of the adoptive tongue is not necessarily related to a national narrative of political and cultural liberation. Their largely autobiographical work reflects individual territorial and linguistic shifts as they, themselves, become agents of border destabilization and recentering. In other words, their work maps out the processes of ideological and geographical repositioning that the translingual subject both undergoes and articulates as it strives to relate to the separately existing and progressing native and foreign communities. Negotiating new territories, either communally or individually, is not a naturally occurring process. As Paul Jay has noted in Global Matters: The Translingual Turn in Literary Studies: The locations we study do not exist apart from the human act of measuring, delimiting, identifying, categorizing and making boundaries

Conclusion  179 and distinctions. As we complicate the traditional attention we pay to nation-state locations by paying attention to transnational spaces and regions, it is important that we develop a clear sense of the constructedness of these regions. (74) As necessary as these acts of measuring and delimiting are—if we are to critically interpellate oppressive hierarchies, ethically ambiguous policies and procedures at the border and the vested economic and social interests that make them possible—it is equally important to note that enunciating a minority political position for one’s self does not absolve one from participating, actively or passively, in existing structures of unequal power distribution. In The Migrant Text: Making and Marketing a Global Literature, Subha Xavier has studied the ethically ambiguous positioning of migrant texts which, as she argues, “are written, published and first circulated within the nation-state and as such always carry with them the traces of exoticism and otherness that allow for their creation and dissemination in the national and later global literary marketplace.” (19). Much discussion about borderlands has centered around the announced demise of the nation-state. As I have argued in the Introduction, I see the nation-state as the only codified, functional space for articulation and negotiation of minority position rights. What the utopian erasure of the nation-state produces is the default empowerment of a vaguely defined globality which de facto privileges the local/global, cosmos/polis dichotomy imposing the false choice of the universal pole. Far more valuable—and much closer to an ideally rhizomatic existence—is the difference-producing and difference-sustaining estuarine tension that my study of translative practices in translingual authors’ works has attempted to illustrate. It is in fact the power of translative acts, communal and individual, to create estuarine environments within which one can negotiate both nationhood and globality that posits the theory of the cultural estuary as a valid lens through which to examine writing in the postcolonial studies field. In “Translation Matters: Linguistic and Cultural Representation,” Paul Bandia discusses the role that translation has played in the representation of the African worldview, culture, and artistry on the world stage in a neocolonial and globalized context. In particular he argues that [t]he language of the neo-colonial postcolony is… hybrid, fragmented and diglossic…As representation, the language expresses the plurivocality of the varied voices that need to be heard on the global stage. Representation of these multiple voices is tantamount to translating a hybrid, linguistically multilayered text from the periphery to the global centre. (16)

180 Conclusion The fact that monolingualism in the postcolony is under immense pressure is well-documented. Charles Forsdick has noted that …translingualism is…a reminder that the monolingual orientation of literary expression is under increasing pressure—exposed as the legacy of a set of assumptions that solidified in Western Europe in the eighteenth century, and led to the singularization and equation of language, nation, community, identity and place. (“French Literature as World Literature” 218) Along the same lines, Paul Bandia has effectively argued that the postcolony extends to contemporary cosmopolitan global centers where migration and cultural relocation have…shaped a polyphonic and polylingual society…These contexts by their very nature evoke translation and bilingualism as a fundamental condition of being. Translation therefore acts as a primordial instrument in the cultural representation of otherness. (Translation Matters: Linguistic and Cultural Representation 16) The multilingual postcolony relies upon translation not to transcend regional configurations, nations, cities, and polities but rather to resist “class and power inequalities” (Bandia 16) from within those structures. The bequest of the Enlightenment, colonial imperialism, and the nation, all historical forces which one could argue have clearly privileged universalist and therefore oppressive interpretations of political, social, and cultural formations and policies both at the center and along the periphery, are still with us today. Our choice to relate with them in estuarine or, conversely, antithetical terms is what will likely determine the degree to which we can effectively resist them. Edouard Glissant suggested in his Poétique de la Relation what relationality-within-globality could look like. Relying heavily on Deleuze and Guattari, Glissant maps his Poetics of Relation onto rhizomatic thought: “La notion du rhizome maintiendrait…le fait de l’enracinement, mais recuse l’idée d’une racine totalitaire. La pensée du rhizome serait au principe de ce que j’appelle une poétique de la Relation, selon laquelle toute identité s’étend dans un rapport à l’Autre” (“The notion of the rhizome maintains…the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root. Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other”; 23; Wing 11). My articulation of the estuary intersects with Glissant’s relational totality in three ways: first, the operational value of opacity; second, the central role that language and translation play in the articulation of a “virtual totality”; and, third, the protection, at all costs, of diversity as “the totality of every

Conclusion  181 possible difference.” Glissant quotes Segalen on this final point while suggesting that diversity “[doit être] préserv[ée] des assimilations, des modes passivement généralisées, des habitudes standardisées” (“must be safeguarded from assimilations, from fashions passively accepted as the norm, and from standardized customs”; 42; Wing 30). He later emphasizes the detrimental effect that the innocuous-seeming (if not desirable) concept of “understanding” may have on totalizing relationally: Si nous examinons le processus de la ‘compréhension’ des êtres et des idées dans la perspective de la pensée occidentale, nous retrouvons à son principe l’exigence d[’une] transparence. Pour pouvoir te ‘comprendre’ et donc t’accepter, il me faut ramener mon épaisseur à ce barème idéel qui me fournit motif à comparaisons et peut-être à jugement. Il me faut réduire (If we examine the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is [a] requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce; 204). (Wing 189–90) Opacity is in fact the “most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence” precisely because it is irreducible. The translational modalities of the cultural estuary also require that opacity be not only accepted but also valued as a meaning-producing force. Much like the constant shifting and concomitant internal equilibrium that estuarine zones of cultural contact require: “la Relation joue à la fois dans [un] rapport interne (de chaque culture à ses composantes) et dans un rapport externe (de cette culture à d’autres qui l’intéressent)” (“Relation functions both in [an] internal relationship (that of each culture to its components) and, at the same time, in an external relationship (that of this culture to others that affect it)”; 183; Wing 169). Glissant suggests that translative acts are what allows us to maintain linguistic identities (internal relationship) while relating in diversity (external relationship): …parler sa langue et s’ouvrir à celle de l’autre ne fondent plus une alternative. ‘Je te parle dans ta langue et c’est dans la mienne que je te comprends.’ Créer, dans n’importe quelle langue donnée, suppose ainsi qu’on soit habité du désir impossible de toutes les langues du monde (…speaking one’s language and opening up to the language of the other no longer form the basis for an alternative. ‘I speak to you in your language voice, and it is in my language use that I understand you.’ Creating in any given language thus assumes that one be inhabited by the impossible desire for all the languages in the world; 122). (Wing 107–08)

182 Conclusion The translational labor that individuals and communities undertake in Glissant’s world of relational totality creates what he calls an “explosion of incredible diversity”: Les rapports linguistiques sont marqués…par les créations surgies du frottement des langues, par un va-et-vient de soudainetés novatrices (par exemple, les langues initiatiques de la rue dans les pays du Sud), et par une masse d’idées reçues, de préjugés passivement subis (linguistic relations have become marked…by creations springing from the friction between languages, by the give-and-take of sudden innovation (for example, initiatory street languages in southern countries), and by masses of generally accepted notions as well as passive prejudices; 118). (Wing 104) Although this assertion presumes a political understanding of language production, use, and distribution, insofar as it accepts the entrenchment of prejudices that we would have to assume are generated and reinforced by centuries of social, racial, economic, and cultural disenfranchisement and oppression, we can’t fail to note the lack of an eminently political edge to “late Glissant.” In “Late Glissant: History, ‘World-Literature,’ and the Persistence of the Political,” Charles Forsdick documents the uneasy tension between the political and the cultural in Glissant’s later work concluding, however, that the ambivalence born from conjugating poetics and politics can indeed be productive. Chris Bongie and Peter Hallward have been more critical of Glissant’s apolitical stance in Poétique de la Relation which they juxtapose to the politically resistant Discours antillais. In “Edouard Glissant: Dealing in Globality,” Chris Bongie recognizes that the incessantly transforming world of Relation which dominates Poetics of Relation has been a constant of Glissant’s work since the 1950s. He notes, however, that the emphasis Glissant puts on relationality in his later work comes at the expense “of the robust political commitments that he had so often voiced in the Discours” (94). In yet harsher terms, Peter Hallward suggests in Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific that “[i]n Glissant’s later work, national mediation has become a positive liability in the articulation of a deterritorialized, ‘rhizomatic’ reality. In the process he moves from a critique of dispossession toward its effective affirmation” (69). In fact “[t]he equation of subject and world as a single process of Relation obliterates all ‘in-between’ space, the space of ‘development’ and conflict…There can be no national repossession, for dispossession is now the condition (and opportunity) of Creative reality itself” (124–25). This is precisely where my concerns with Glissant’s marginally political positioning reside as well. By positing a totality that obliterates the border, Glissant inadvertently marginalizes not only the political complexities of life at borderlands (whether national/regional or social, educational, financial, etc.)

Conclusion  183 but also restricts the applicability of totality as a theoretical concept to an aspirational rather than existing and historical globality. Conceptually, the estuary remedies this limitation because it is effectively predicated upon, on the one hand, the irrefutable existence of states as producers of hegemony and, on the other hand, the equally irrefutable existence of economic, cultural, and political forces that operate beyond the state’s control producing an excess of transnational and transcultural difference that traditional political formations fail to contain. In “Whose Cosmopolitanism? The Violence of Idealization and the Ambivalence of Self,” Jackie Stacey suggests that [t]he idea of an “openness to difference” posits a self that is transparent, accessible and fully intelligible to ourselves and others…similarity and difference are wrongly seen to be self-evident, mutually recognizable and somehow the property of individuals, instead of the result of a relational intersubjectivity full of ambivalence and occlusions. (35) Along the same lines, Sivamohan Valluvan notes that [t]o avoid reifying difference—uncritically operating off the selfevident register of demarcated, intelligible difference—we must give voice to the conspicuous hybridity apparent all around us. These voices can throw light on the arbitrariness or contingency of intelligibility. (“Cosmopolitanism and Intelligibility” 77) Both these readings of intelligibility echo Glissant’s relationality insofar as they undermine singular, individual iterations of identity; they do, however, suggest that at a time of globalized cosmopolis, differencein-relation is an unstable syntagma that exceeds comprehensibility. If the estuary is effectively political as much as it is culturally plural and multiple, it is precisely because it retains the tension between what is unintelligible because it is new and unchartered (the brackish water and its ecosystem) and what exceeds understanding because it is internally shifting and everchanging (the salt and fresh water bodies that come into contact at the estuarine zone and the alterations they undergo without, however, in essence transforming into something new). The cultural estuary cannot project itself onto a Glissantian totality because it lacks the stability that the universalizing force of the tout-monde confers. By that same token—and as I have showed through the study of individual authors and works—it never exits the interrogating mode and, in that sense, is eminently political. While discussing Peter Hallward’s critique of Glissant’s Relation, Chris Bongie notes: Glissant’s apparent embracing of a serene postmodernism whose intentions are purely poetic and whose real world implications are

184 Conclusion precisely nil…is, for Hallward, exemplary of “postcolonial theory” as a whole, which has privileged “the interminable ‘negotiations’ of culture and psychology” over the “collective principle” without which “the political pursuit of justice” is quite simply unthinkable (2001:xx). (95) Situated midway between Glissant and Hallward, the cultural estuary does not abandon culture as messy and stubbornly indeterminate as it may be while refusing to walk away from the collective principle. Politics without culture is pure ideology and culture without politically ideological grounding devolves into relativism. As my chapters on Alexakis, Huston, and Djavann have shown, it is through delving into the particularities of the individual translingual experience with all its cultural, linguistic, and social complexities that political awareness about the collective fortunes of our cosmopolitan neocolony arise. Conversely, my chapter on Andreï Makine highlighted the challenges of subscribing to existing (and more often than not oppressive) political and ideological forces, especially when the individual trajectory is one that begins at a denigrated periphery and ends at a hyper-valorized metropolitan center. My personal interests and expertise have limited my examination of the cultural estuary’s dissident potential to language and, in particular, translation. It is my hope that scholars of both translingual and postcolonial literature and culture with interests in different areas of the humanities or social sciences will find the concept’s flexibility as a metaphor and precision as an analytical tool useful as they examine the intersection of politics and culture in their own disciplinary spaces.

Note 1 See Laila Amine’s Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light for a recent overview of the social and cultural processes that have transformed not only the metropolis into a postcolony but also the postcolony into a concept that transcends colonially informed cartographies.

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes. absolute incomprehensibility 57 Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (Hallward) 182 After Babel (Steiner) 17, 30, 139–40 “After the Apocalypse: Paul de Man and the Fall to Silence” (Felman) 146 Agier, M. 177 Alexakis, V. 18, 20, 24, 66n7, 184; and limits of self-translation 101–42 alloyed dialect 134 ambilingualism 101, 102, 113, 120, 125, 128, 133, 138, 139 American Academy of Motion Pictures 2, 3 American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language 76 Amine, L. 184n1 À mon corps défendant, l’occident (Djavann) 143 Amour Bilingue (Khatibi) 31–2 Andreï Makine: L’ekphrasis dans son oeuvre (Clément) 38 “Andreï Makine’s France: A Translingual Writer’s Portrayal of his ‘terre d’accueil’” (McCall) 53 anoxia 15 Antoniadou, O. 132 Appiah, K. W. 4 Apter, E. 105, 110, 131 “Autotraduction et figures du dédoublement dans la production de Nancy Huston” (Sperti) 83 Babiniotis, G. 20, 114–15 Bakhtin, M. M. 53–4 Balibar, E. 10, 11, 146–7, 175n2 Bandia, P. 179, 180

Basics of Environmental Science (Allaby) 23n11 Bas les voiles! (Djavann) 144 Bassnett, S. 88 Beckett and Babel: An Investigation into the Status of the Bilingual Work (Fitch) 107 Bellemare-Page, S. 38 Benhabib, S. 9 Benjamin, W. 12–14, 27, 30, 31, 66n4, 87, 104, 105, 107, 109 Bensmaïa, R. 32, 132 Berman, A. 29, 81 Bermann, S. 111 biculturalism 19, 24, 28, 36, 42, 44, 45, 50, 54, 119, 130 bilangue 18, 31, 32, 86 bilingualism 16, 19, 20, 24, 26, 28, 33, 34–6, 41, 42, 44, 45, 49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 70–73, 77, 78, 80, 81, 85–87, 98, 99, 101, 105, 11, 119, 120, 130, 141n3, 141–142n4, 158 bilingual palimpsests 104 bilingual relationality 70 Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary Self-Translation, The (Hokenson and Munson) 104 Bilinguisme d’écriture et auto-traduction: Julien Green, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov (Oustinoff) 108 Birla, R. 165 Black Virgins: Sexuality and the Democratic Body (Sieg) 145 Blommaert, J. 16 Body in Pain, The (Scarry) 168 Bongie, C. 182–3 border(s) 10, 17, 18, 20, 22n8, 30, 50, 56, 63, 69, 71, 78, 150, 178, 179, 182; epistemology 7, 9; fractal 11;

198 Index reconfiguration 44, 177; thinking 7, 8 Bourdieu, P. 12 Brennan, T. 5 Calhoun, C. 5 Canagarajah, S. 5, 16 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak) 165 Casanova, P. 27, 102, 164–5 Cette France qu’on oublie d’aimer (Makine) 19, 25, 53, 60, 65 Chang, J. 2 Clément, M. L. 27–8, 38 cognitive control 158 “Collection sans peine” series 91 colonial/coloniality 5, 7, 8, 18–20, 30, 65, 83, 154, 178; eliding 130–41; imperialism 180; language 131, 136; neo-coloniality 27, 134; occupation 178; post-coloniality 27, 32; wars 81 “Colonial Cosmopolitanism” (van der Veer) 5 Comment peut-on être français (Djavann) 21, 148, 149; cultural and linguistic multiplicities in 150–60 Comment peut-on être français? (Djavann) 148 communicational modalities 148 “Comparative Cosmopolitanism” (Robbins) 21n1 Contrôle d’Identité (Alexakis) 111 cosmopolitan/cosmopolitanism 1, 2, 18, 20, 21n1, 21n3, 21–2n5, 66n4, 69, 103, 138, 148, 156, 178, 180, 184; critical 7, 22n9; ethical 6; minority 4; new 3–11; situational 5 Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Appiah) 4, 6 Cosmopolitics (Robbins) 4 cosmos/polis binary 3, 10 Coursil, J. 142n11 “Crise identitaire et bilinguisme littéraire chez Vassilis Alexakis” (Redouane) 106 cultural stratification 53–66 cultural turn 109 Danby, N. B. 87 Dargis, M. 2 dead water phenomenon 70 decentering 17, 23n14, 29, 91, 99–100n6

Deleuze, G. 73, 90–1, 94, 180 “Deleuze and Translation” (Godard) 17 de Man, P. 12, 13, 146, 171 “Déracinement du savoir: un parcours en six étapes” (Huston) 76 Derrida, J. 18, 30–2, 36, 142n7, 149–50 “Des Tours de Babel” 31 Des Universels (Balibar) 10 “Deterritorialising Translation Studies: Notes on Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux” (Hopkinson) 17 deterritorialization 73, 83–7, 90, 91, 94, 98, 99, 182 diasporic citizenship 22n6 diversity/diverse/diversality 7, 10, 16, 19, 51, 70, 81, 138, 180–1, 182 Divine Comedy 63 Djavann, C. 18, 21, 143–6, 148–50, 153, 154, 160–2, 164, 165, 167, 168, 170, 171, 174, 175n1, 175n4, 175n6, 184 domesticating (translation) 12, 14, 19, 24–67, 81, 112, 113, 114, 161, 163, 175n6 duality 3, 21n1, 68, 156 Duhan, A. 87 “Edouard Glissant: Dealing in Globality” (Bongie) 182 Eleutheria 97 Elliott, M. 23n12 El Nossery, N. 87 “En français dans le texte” (Huston) 100n8 Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity (Segalen) 13 Estuarine Ecosystem: Ecology, Threats and Management, The (McLusky and Elliott) 23n12 estuary/estuarine: delimiting 18–21; ecosystems 68–100; Le Testament français, as faltering estuary 24–53; and native informant 143–76; palimpsestual echoes, in Trois fois septembre 74–83; stratification 15; translation 2, 3, 8, 11–18, 23n11, 23n12, 54, 56, 57, 65, 104, 106, 111, 112, 116–20, 122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 130, 132, 134, 137–9, 177, 179–81, 183, 184 Étrangers à nous-mêmes (Kristeva) 69 European Union 8

Index  199 Even-Zohar, I. 30 exoticism 13, 40, 47, 49, 51, 67n8, 136, 179 Felman, S. 146 Firmat, G. P. 105 Fitch, B. 104, 107–8 foreignizing (translation) 14–15, 20, 29, 30, 56, 175n6 foreign language acquisition 107 Forsdick, C. 180 Foucault, M. 13 fractal border 11 francité 61 francophone 2, 13, 18, 28, 35, 40–2, 50, 58, 59, 62, 78, 91, 113, 116, 117, 121, 124, 125, 129, 131–6, 140, 142n11, 154, 164, 165 “Francophonie” (Bensmaïa) 132 “French Testament: Andreï Makine and Translation, The” (Liddelow) 33 Freud, S. 5 Gary, R. 67n11 Gemie, S. 145 Generation of Postmemory: Language and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, The (Hirsch) 26 Gentzler, E. 74–5 Gide, A. 135–6 Glissant, E. 180–3 globalization 1, 3, 8, 18, 20, 65, 148, 179, 183 Global Matters: The Translingual Turn in Literary Studies (Jay) 178–9 Global South 8 “Global Translatio: The ‘Invention’ of Comparative Literature, Istanbul 1933” (Apter) 110 Godard, B. 17 graft metaphor 34, 41, 42 Green, J. 67n11 Guattari, F. 73, 90–1, 94, 180 Halloran-Bessy, M. 104 Hall, S. 5 Hallward, P. 182–3 Hansen, J. 38 Harrison, N. 164 Hearth, S. 176n12 “Hermeneutic Motion, The” (Steiner) 139–40 Hirsch, M. 26, 38

Histoire de sexualité, I: la volonté de savoir (The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction) (Foucault) 13 Hodgson, R. 141–2n4 Hokenson, J. W. 83, 104 Hollinger, D. 4–5 Hopkinson, J. 17 Horowitz, S. 155, 167 Huston, N. 18–20, 68–100, 112, 184 hypoxia 15; definition of 23n10; hypoxic environments 53–66 imperialism 133, 136, 178; colonial 180; cultural 19; French 83, 101 incomprehensibility 13–14, 19, 36, 55–7, 72, 74, 82, 175 internal multiplicity of language 149–50 Irving, A. 22–3n9 Jay, P. 178–9 Je ne suis pas celle que je suis (Djavann) 21, 148–9; cultural and linguistic multiplicities in 150–60 Joo-ho, B. 2 Jouanny, R. 101, 177 Julliard 101 Kafka: pour une littérature mineure (Deleuze and Guattari) 73 Kant, I. 5 katharevoussa 114–18, 129, 131, 133, 134 Kazazis, K. 114 Kellman, S. 101, 177 Khatibi, A. 18, 23n15, 30–2, 36, 86, 104, 108–11 Kippur, S. 76 Knorr, K. 60 Koshy, S. 4 Krapp’s Last Tape 97 Kristeva, J. 4, 21n2, 69–70 Kroh, A. 102 La blessure du nom propre (Khatibi) 23n15 La Chanson de Roland 63 La dernière séance (Djavann) 21, 149; cultural and linguistic multiplicities in 150–60 La langue maternelle (Alexakis) 20, 24, 111, 134, 142n6; and politics of self-translation 112–30

200 Index “La littérature au temps de la post-mémoire: écriture et résilience chez Andreï Makine” (Bellemare-Page) 38 La muette (Djavann) 21, 149, 150; translational stifling in 160–75 La République mondiale des Lettres (Casanova) 27, 102, 164 “Late Glissant: History, ‘World-Literature,’ and the Persistence of the Political” (Forsdick) 182 La terre et le ciel de Jacques Dorme (Makine) 19, 25, 53, 54, 57–61 “L’autotraduction littéraire: enjeux et problématiques” (Sperti) 106 “L’écriture en langue étrangère comme pratique et comme poétique: Le cas de deux écrivains ‘francographes,’ Nancy Huston et Andreï Makine” (Duhan) 87 Lejeune, P. 103 Le monolinguisme de l’autre (Derrida) 30, 32 “L’enjeu de la traduction chez Vassilis Alexakis” (Rontogianni and Spiropoulou) 119 Le pacte autobiographique (Lejeune) 103 Le Pen, J.-M. 63 L’épreuve de l’étranger (Berman) 29 Le sandwich (Alexakis) 101 Les mots étrangers (Alexakis) 20, 112; linguistic ethics of 130–41 Le Testament français (Dreams of My Russian Summers) (Makine) 18, 19; as faltering estuary 24–53 Lettres Persanes (Montesquieu) 153, 154 Levinas, E. 14 “L’hospitalité des langues: variation autour d’un thème” (Lagarde) 66–7n8 Liddelow, E. 33 Limbes/Limbo: Un hommage à Samuel Beckett (Huston) 19, 71–3, 75, 83–99 liminality 1 linguistic identities 1, 52, 84, 181 Lionnet, F. 7–9 L’oreillle de l’autre (Derrida) 149–50 Loti, P. 56

Maghreb Pluriel (Khatibi) 108–9 Mahmood, S. 143, 145 Makine, A. 18–19, 24–67, 88, 184 Malcomson, S. 6 Maronitis, D. N. 134 Matei, A. 141n2 May, S. 4 McCall, I. 53 McLusky, D. S. 23n12 Meschonnic, H 23n14 meta-translation 94 Mignolo, W. 7, 9, 10 Migrant Text: Making and Marketing a Global Literature, The (Xavier) 179 minor (literature and transnationalism) 4, 7, 8, 10, 20, 68–100, 103, 130–6 minority cosmopolitanism 4 minority rights 4 minorization 73, 75, 94 Minor Transnationalism (Lionnet and Shih) 7 Molloy, S. 110–11 “Mondialisation et identité: le cas de Vassilis Alexakis” (Antoniadou) 132 monolangue 31, 32 monolingualism 5, 18, 31, 32, 41, 42, 50, 53, 72, 77, 78, 99, 138, 180 Montesquieu, C. de 4, 21n2, 151, 153, 154, 157 multiculturalism 51, 53, 54, 65 multilingualism 16, 19, 25, 30, 48, 49, 51, 99, 102 “Multilingualism and National ‘Character’: On Abdelkébir Khatibi’s ‘Bilanguage” (Bensmaïa) 32 multiversum 147 Munson, M. 104 “Nancy Huston’s Polyglot Texts: Linguistic Limits and Transgressions” (Waite) 87 Nanquette, L. 175n1 nation-state 3, 5, 6, 8–11, 22n5, 50, 179 Nations without Nationalism (Kristeva) 21n2 neo-coloniality 27, 134 new cosmopolitan 3–11 Niranjana, T. 22n7 NOAA 23n10 Nord Perdu (Huston) 69

Index  201 “On Self-Translation” (Stavans) 176n7 “On the Bilingual’s Two Sets of Memories” (Schrauf and Rubin) 176n9 opacity 180, 181 open totality 53–6 Ortega y Gasset, J. 23n13 Oustinoff, M. 99n2, 99n3, 108 Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora (Wanner) 40–1, 60 Parasite (Joo-ho) 2–3 Pérez-Foster, R. M. 158 Perret, D. 142n11 phonetic similarities 84–6 Plato 116, 122 Ploquin, F. 103 poetic language 28 Poétique de la Relation (Glissant) 180–1, 182 “Politics of Genre, The” (Hearth) 176n12 Politics of the Veil, The (Scott) 144 Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light (Amine) 184n1 postcolonial/postcoloniality 18, 27, 32, 131, 177–9, 184 “Postcolonial Studies: Now That’s History” (Birla) 165 postmemory 25, 26, 38, 39, 44, 66n2, 78, 79 post-translation studies 22n8 Pour la Poétique II. Epistémologie de l’écriture. Poétique de la traduction (Meschonnic) 23n14 “Pour un patriotisme de l’ambiguïté” (Huston) 68 Pradal, F. 103 Prendergast, C. 176n11 Prix Goncourt 24 Prix Goncourt des Lycéens 24 Prix Médicis 24 “Professeurs du désespoir” (Huston) 70–1 Radhakrishnan, R. 66n4 “Redefining Translation Through Self-Translation: the Case of Nancy Huston” (Shread) 88 Redouane, N. 106 referentiality 31, 108

relationality 15, 29, 70, 78, 108, 109, 120, 137, 139, 180, 183; bilingual 70; cultural 127; diachronic 14; estuarine 18, 20, 21, 111, 124, 139, 149, 150, 156, 175; linguistic 146, 182; palimpsestual 137; synchronic 13–14 Requiem pour l’Est (Makine) 19, 25, 38, 53, 54, 57–9 “Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff” (Bakhtin) 53–4 “Retooling Democracy and Feminism in the Service of the New Empire” (Mahmood) 145 rhizomatic translation 17, 179, 180, 182 Robbins, B. 4 Robinson, D. 15, 29, 66n6, 74, 79–81, 175n6 Rontogianni, A. 119, 120 Routledge Handbook of Migration and Language, The (Canagarajah) 16 Rubin, R. C. 155, 176n9 Sabourin, L. 158 Sages, S. 112 Sardin-Damestray, P. 88 Sarkonak, R. 141–2n4 Sarraute, N. 90, 91 Sassen, S. 8 Saussurian linguistics 150 Scarry, E. 168 Schiller, N. G. 22–3n9 Schrauf, R. W. 176n9 Scott, J. W. 144 second-language acquisition 109 “Second Language Use Facilitates Implicit Emotion Regular via Content Labelling” 176n8 sedimented translation 16, 20, 28, 29 Segalen, V. 13, 14, 181 self-translation 18, 20, 68, 71–3, 83–5, 88–99, 99n2, 99n3; limits of 101–42; politics of 112–30 separatism 7 Shih, S. 7–9 Shread, C. 88 Sieg, K. 145 Singularités francophones, ou choisir d’écrire en français (Jouanny) 101, 177

202 Index Siting Translation: History, PostStructuralism and the Colonial Context (Niranjana) 22n7 situational cosmopolitanism 5 Sophocles 116 “Space Between: Self-Translator Nancy Huston’s Limbes/Limbo, The” (Danby) 87 Space between: Self-Translators Nancy Huston and Samuel Beckett, The (Boone Danby) 99n5 Sperti, V. 87–8, 106, 109–12 Spiropoulou, K. 119, 120 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravotry 165 Stacey, J. 183 Stavans, I. 176n7 Steiner, G. 17, 30, 139–41 Stone, K. 66n2 Talgo (Alexakis) 101, 111 textual multiplicity 17, 48 Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature (Firmat) 105 Totality and Infinity (Levinas) 14 “Touch of Translation: On Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator, A’” (Weber) 12–13, 27, 66n4, 105, 109 To Vima 134 translatability 3, 12, 13, 109 translation: as afterlife 12, 105, 170, 171, 173, 174; domesticating 12, 14, 19, 24–67, 81, 112, 113, 114, 161, 163, 175n6; estuarine 2, 3, 8, 11–18, 23n11, 23n12, 54, 56, 57, 65, 104, 106, 111, 112, 116–20, 122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 130, 132, 134, 137–9, 177, 179–81, 183, 184; foreignizing 14–15, 20, 29, 30, 56, 175n6; meta-translation 94; rhizomatic 17, 179, 180, 182; sedimented 16, 20, 28, 29; selftranslation 20, 73, 84, 85, 88–99, 99n2, 99n3, 101–42 Translation and Empire (Robinson) 175n6 Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post-Translation Studies (Gentzler) 74–5 “Translation Matters: Linguistic and Cultural Representation” (Bandia) 179

“Translation with No Original: Scandals of Textual Reproduction” (Apter) 105 translator’s invisibility 29, 100n9 Translator’s Invisibility, The (Venuti) 29 Translator’s Turn, The (Robinson) 74, 81 Translingual Imagination, The (Kellman) 101, 177 translingual/translingualism 1, 2, 18, 24, 68, 69, 73, 91, 95, 97, 101, 102, 177, 178, 180, 184 transparency 23n14, 100, 181 Trois fois septembre (Huston) 19, 71, 72; palimpsestual echoes in 74–83 United Nations 8 universal/universalism 2–7, 11, 13, 17, 21, 22n9, 40, 46, 47, 62, 63, 65, 131, 136, 144, 146–8, 164, 165, 179, 183 untranslatability 13–17, 105, 120, 169 Valluvan, S. 183 van der Veer, P. 5 Venuti, L. 14–15, 29, 66n6, 81, 100n9, 161–2 Vinerte, S. 158 Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (Horowitz) 155 Voltaire 63 Voulgaris, G. 20, 121 Voyage au Congo (Gide) 135–7 Waite, G. 87 Waldron, J. 4 Wanner, A. 40–1, 48–9, 60 War and Peace 63 Weber, S. 12–13, 109 Whose Cosmopolitanism (Schiller and Irving) 22–3n9 “Whose Cosmopolitanism? The Violence of Idealization and the Ambivalence of Self” (Stacey) 183 Wilhem, J. E. 88 Writing it Twice: Self-Translation and the Making of a World Literature (Kippur) 76 Xavier, S. 179