Writing and Translating Francophone Discourse : Africa, the Caribbean, Diaspora 9789042038943, 9789401211765

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Writing and Translating Francophone Discourse: Africa, The Caribbean, Diaspora

TextxeT

Studies in Comparative Literature 78

Series Editors C.C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen

Writing and Translating Francophone Discourse: Africa, The Caribbean, Diaspora

Edited by

Paul F. Bandia

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014

Cover painting: “Africa”, by Maria Palffry. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence’. ISBN: 978-90-420-3894-3 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1176-5 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014 Printed in The Netherlands



CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Paul F. Bandia Introduction

vii 1

Lieven D’hulst From the French Antilles to the Caribbean: “Translation” within the Francophone Realm

19

Christine Raguet A “Flavor of Diversity”: Intercreation and the Making of a Mosaic-Whole

37

Sandra L. Bermann Édouard Glissant and the Imagination of World Literature: Relation, Creolization and Translation

63

Samia Kassab-Charfi Semiotics of the Hyphen in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Biblique des Derniers Gestes

87

Tom Conley Mapping “Tout-monde”

111

Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo and Elizabeth Wilson Translating the Other’s Voice: When Is Too Much Too Much?

127

Réda Bensmaïa The Language of the Stranger: A Dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Abdelkébir Khatibi on Language and Translation

153

Moradewun Adejunmobi Vernacular Monolingualism and Translation in West African Popular Film

167

Verena Andermatt Conley Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche: Translation as Artistic Practice

189

Alain Ricard In a Free State? Translation and the Basotho: From Eugene Casalis to Antje Krog

205

Notes on Contributors

225

Index

229



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University who provided me with access to vital research resources in the writing and compilation of this book. My gratitude goes out to the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) for their generous financial support through a standard research grant. Many thanks are also due to the contributors to this book and the translators who made it all possible. I am deeply grateful to the editors of the TEXTXET series at Rodopi for believing in the project. Special thanks to Cedric Barfoot for the exceptional guidance throughout the editing process. I hope the close collaboration between some of the contributors and their translators will serve as a hallmark for the kind of interdisciplinary research which is the basis of this book.



INTRODUCTION PAUL F. BANDIA

This book is an interdisciplinary contribution to the growing body of work that brings together research in Translation Studies and French and Francophone Studies. The book is in part inspired by the ideals of Édouard Glissant’s Poétique de la relation1 and his concept of Toutmonde.2 It is dedicated to his memory, as the Martinican philosopher died during the writing and compilation of the book. Although there are quite a few chapters dealing with Glissant’s theories, the book does not purport to be a collection of essays on Glissant’s work. Yet, the ideals derived from Glissant’s eminently hopeful and positive conceptualization of relations, using the islands of the Caribbean as a backdrop, are a source of inspiration for bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines and geographical areas. These scholars share an interest in the intersection between Translation Studies and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. There is a continuing rapprochement between the center and the periphery in the French literary world, which can only help to bolster French as a global literary language. The concept of translation is ever more present in the harmonization and sustained prominence of French in the global literary space. As I have argued elsewhere,3 postcolonial writing has parallels with the metaphorical and pragmatic conceptualization of translation. The conveyance of African or Caribbean language culture in French involves recourse to translation and other literary transfer strategies for the benefit of an international audience. These translational or transcultural practices are at the basis 1

Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la relation, Paris: Gallimard, 1990 (Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 2 Édouard Glissant, Tout-monde, Paris: Gallimard, 1993. 3 Paul F. Bandia, Translation as Reparation: Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa, Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2008.

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of the poetics of relation in the French-speaking world. Glissant himself had alluded to the significance of translation for a poetics of relation among peoples and cultures. As represented in this book, translation becomes a pathway to mediation or bridging the gap between the metropole and its peripheries, and between the various cultures that make up the francophonie. These varied cultures evoke multiple linguistic and artistic practices within the francophone realm, in various modes of artistic expression such as literature, film, music and dance. It should be pointed out that the term “francophonie” refers here to those regions that had come under French influence through colonization or slavery. Other non-hexagonal literatures such as Belgian, Swiss and Quebec literatures have enjoyed considerable attention in France as well as in their respective academies. The issues of marginalization, integration and recognition are not the same for these literatures as they are for Francophone literatures of the global south. Cultural encounters in the francophonie have also given rise to some influential theoretical frameworks that have shaped and defined knowledge in contemporary thought. Some of the essays in this book showcase these mainly francophone theories such as Édouard Glissant’s poetics of relation, Abdelkébir Khatibi’s concept of bilangue and bi-culture, Jacques Derrida’s monolingualism of the Other, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s littérature mineure (“minor literature”),4 and Hélène Cixous’ feminist reflections. The French and francophone encounter is therefore an important theme in this book which, through the conceptualization of translation as a medium or pathway, seeks to channel the optimism or felicity of the encounter and foster collaboration and interdisciplinarity. The book highlights the relation between translation as an academic discipline and French and francophone studies. From his native Martinique, Édouard Glissant envisions an archipelago of islands interconnected geographically and culturally in a network of relations that recall Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome.5 Without minimizing individual identities rhizomic relations downplay the hierarchy between the root and its various 4

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. 5 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Introduction

3

offshoots and extensions, which continue to grow and multiply and take a life of their own. Like rhizomes, the French language has grown, spread and morphed into many incarnations from its root in the metropole to distant geographies with unrelated cultural universe. Unlike the rhizome, however, the relations between French and its various incarnations across the globe have been marred by hierarchical practices either through colonization, slavery or a quest for new settlements. The power differential that derives from this hierarchical relationship has dictated, to a certain degree, the orientation of research in French and Francophone studies in the last few decades. Much like in Anglophone postcolonial studies, the discourse seems to have been cast in immovable and fast binarisms of “us” versus “them”, the colonized versus the colonizer, the metropole versus the postcolony, center versus periphery, and so on and so forth. Writers and artists from the postcolony have claimed the right to use French as a language of creation but shaped to suit their own historical and sociocultural circumstances. Meanwhile, attitudes in the metropole have come a long way in recognizing some of these distant incarnations of French as mediums of artistic expression. There have been numerous anecdotes based on these perceived binarisms such as those about the marginalization of writers from the postcolony in the French literary marketplace and the creation of a separate section in major bookstores for books written by non-indigenous Francophone writers. There is also the vexed question of whether writers from immigrant communities can be considered French and whether their works, often based on the imaginary of their ancestral homeland, at times conveyed by means of translation, can be classified as French literature. Without wanting to minimize the weight of history in these matters, this book seeks to transcend postcolonialist binary conceptualizations and seek common ground in a broader and more felicitous understanding of la francophonie, as will be discussed further on. The book extends Glissant’s metaphor of relation, as conceived in light of the Caribbean archipelago, to the network of nations and cultures that today constitute the social, political and cultural entity of the francophonie. In light of the poetics of Relation, the book seeks to enhance scholarship and intercultural exchange in the French-speaking world, without regard for colonialist hierarchies. Postcolonial translation research has basically followed a similar

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trajectory, theorizing strategies for bridging distant and non-related language cultures whose encounters are often cast in terms of unequal power relations between the colonized and the colonizer. It is the aim of this book to transcend such binarisms and pave the way to a multidimensional approach to translation phenomena reflective of the pluralism characteristic of contemporary francophone culture. The postcolonial turn Interest in postcolonial studies has been growing steadily in France over the last decade or so, in spite of an initial reticence towards what was largely seen as an Anglo-Saxon affair. There have been clichés such as that France could not relate to this postmodern phenomenon because the country was not yet post-colonial, and still sitting in its colonial laurels. Rather like the treatment reserved for early Anglophone literature in England, such as hosting Wole Soyinka, a leading African writer, in a department of anthropology rather than English, francophone literature in France had become the preserve of a small specialist group whose interests were mainly folkloric, anthropological or sociological. French-language literature from outside France was isolated from its counterpart produced within the Hexagon. In the early days, this form of segregation was adopted in French-language institutions outside France, as French literature departments in the United States, for instance, continued to isolate francophone literatures. French-language literature of the global south was often taught in English translation in programs having little to do with literature but much to do with anthropological and sociological curiosities. Francophone writing was denied its literarity as it did not always conform to the standards and expectations of the French literary establishment. The gatekeepers of French literary and cultural patrimony did not look kindly upon this “bastardized” imitation of Frenchness, and sought to prevent the contamination of what was considered “la fine fleur de la civilisation française” (“the finest of French civilization”). The Académie française has been singled out as the gatekeeper par excellence whose principles stymied creativity among Frenchlanguage writers outside France during the colonial and early postcolonial times.6 Coupled with a policy of assimilation and

6

European-Language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa, Vols I and II, ed. Albert S. Gérard, Budapest: Akadémiai Kiado, 1986; Robert Fraser, Lifting the Sentence: A

Introduction

5

centralization, an expansionist desire for an imperial France – which had school children in the colonies chanting “nos ancêtres les Gaulois” (“our ancestors the Gauls”) – the notion of a France d’outremer had serious implications for the manner in which the French language and culture were to be adopted and used in the colonies. The desire to turn peoples in distant lands and cultures into upright French citizens had serious ramifications for artistic and aesthetic productions in the colonies and for their ultimate acceptance and integration within the realm of French cultural heritage. It is often said that the British aloof treatment of its colonies through a system of Indirect Rule, though devious and non-altruistic in many ways, had the unintended yet fortunate consequence of allowing creativity in the stylistic and aesthetic use of the colonial language. Hence the early proliferation of local varieties of English and other hybrid formations, which were eventually afforded literary status. A fair amount of literature was written for local consumption, such as the Onitsha Market literature, in English or English-based hybrid languages. The effects of this linguistic laissez-faire attitude can be felt today in major works written entirely in English-based creoles such as West African Pidgin English or Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Rotten English used in a novel by the same name. In contrast, it is assumed, French-language writers were denied such freedom to experiment or innovate with the colonial language.7 Although hailed as a creative attempt at Africanizing French, Ahmadou Kourouma’s novel, Les soleils des indépendances, did not pave the way for a kind of creolization of the French language as has been seen in English-language literature. It is said that Kourouma’s novel was first published in Montreal rather than in Paris, in 1968, precisely because the French literary establishment would have nothing to do with that kind of linguistic experimentation. It is interesting to note that Kourouma’s novel was published in the same year as the Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay’s Les belles soeurs, an iconic Quebec play which was the first major attempt to write an entire literary piece in a popular or working-class variety of French known as Joual. Quebec seemed more open to such literary innovations. Kourouma’s novel met with Poetics of Postcolonial Fiction, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000; Jean-Marc Moura, Exotisme et lettres francophones, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003. 7 European-Language Writing; Fraser, Lifting the Sentence.

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great acclaim in French-speaking regions outside France, in Africa, the Caribbean and Quebec where the idea of a non-Hexagonal literary variety of French had already taken hold. Naturally, the novel’s popularity and commercial success led the Éditions du Seuil, a major publisher in France, to take on its publication. The Académie française has been known to reject French neologisms coming from non-Hexagonal territories in the former colonies including Quebec.8 The difference in colonial practices may account for the wide gap between the proliferation of postcolonial studies in English and a rather muted response in French. It is not that French artistic and literary preoccupations have always elided otherness. Au contraire, over the ages the French literary imaginaire (“imaginary”; “vision”) has sought inspiration from far-flung cultures in distant lands across the globe. We can think, among many, of Voltaire’s travelling hero Candide, Malraux’s fascination with Asia, Gauguin’s depictions of Tahiti, and Le Clézio’s immersion in Africa in more recent times. It is that the grandiose ambition of French imperial designs and an unfettered pride in a perceived cultural exceptionalism led France to take on a mission civilisatrice (“civilizing mission”) in its colonies, with ineluctable repercussions on the relations between the colonized and the colonizer. The colonial experience was therefore one of domination and marginalization or at best exoticization of non-French reality emanating from the colonies.9 The settlement colonies built on slavery and the exploitation colonies peopled by native-others were absent or marginalized in the collective French psyche. The colonial metropole was the root, the center, the fountain of civilization that would irrigate the culturally barren hinterlands of the empire. A direct consequence of this attitude was the creation of a small colonized elite group thoroughly schooled in the French tradition, referred to as the évolués, with an uncanny mastery of French language and letters that only helped to distance them further from their own people. It was hoped that there would be a trickle-down effect of French civilizing virtues from the évolués to the colonized masses. 8

Christopher L. Miller, “The Slave Trade, La Françafrique, and the Globalization of French”, in French Global: A New Approach to Literary History, eds Christie McDonald and Susan Suleiman, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, 248. 9 Moura, Exotisme et lettres francophones, 1.

Introduction

7

Whereas Anglophone writers were producing fiction readable by the local literate populations, their francophone counterparts such as Senghor, Césaire and Damas were engaged in a poetics of negritude written not so much for local consumption as for convincing the colonizer of the cultural essence of the colonized. A few of these elite leaders from the colonies were members of the French national assembly representing their respective regions within an extraterritorial France. It is said that Senghor had become a reference for French language and grammar, with a better command of the language than most native-born French citizens. Senghor is known to have extolled the virtues of the French language and civilization, which seemed to him more conducive to his literary and aesthetic pursuits than his indigenous language. He even got into some trouble with leading African philosophers with his unbridled and unrestrained comment “L’émotion est nègre, comme la raison est hellène”. (“Emotion is Black, Reason is Hellenic”).10 Yet, this mark of excellence did not translate readily into the recognition and acceptance of French-language artistic productions from the colonies into the mainstream of French culture and society. Like their Anglophone counterparts, these bilingual and bicultural colonized elites had felt the need to mould the French language, so to speak, to adequately capture and convey their specific cultural sensibilities. Like English in remote corners of the British Empire, French was subjected to a process of tropicalization, a kind of acclimatization to the realities of its new ecology or context of usage. The extension of the French language and culture beyond its hexagonal territory meant that the new French geopolitical reality, which could be felt in the four corners of the planet, had to account for the various cultural encounters with other traditions. French began to take on the local colours and flavours of the cultures and traditions encountered in its new and expansive ecology. Fast forward to the current era of globalization, and it can be safely surmised that the relationship between the territorial center and its extraterritorial peripheries, be they postcolonies as in Africa or settlement colonies as in the Caribbean and the Pacific, has developed into a mutual desire for geopolitical relevance in an increasingly globalized world. As stated in 2006 by the Congolese writer Alain 10

Léopold Sedar Senghor, “Ce que l’homme noir apporte”, in L’homme de couleur, ed. Claude Nordey, Paris: Coll. Présences, Plon, 1939, 295.

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Mabanckou (quoted in Lieven D’hulst’s essay in this book) French literature is only a national literature among many other Frenchlanguage literatures which make up the francophonie (“La littérature française est une littérature nationale. C’est à elle d’entrer dans ce grand ensemble francophone.”). The center and its peripheries need one another in order to assert their presence in an increasingly crowded and competitive global literary marketplace. The continued relevance and prestige of French as a global literary language will depend on collaboration, harmony and mutual respect and recognition between the metropole and its former colonial satellites, without which the French language may very well suffer the fate of once powerful languages like German, Dutch and Portuguese which have seen their global status diminish over the decades. The inside/outside divide, which had dogged French-language literature for so long, has been blurred in today’s context of globalization with the movement of peoples across borders and the consequent disruption of stable identities, as well as the formation of multicultural cosmopolitan identities. This is not to say that our globalized world has been conflated into a homogenized reality founded on a cosmopolitanism that is tantamount to being simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. To speak positively of multiple identities is not to laud the potential loss of French cultural specificity in order to make room for other French-language realities from elsewhere. Rather, it is a cosmopolitanism that admits differences and national specificities and yet avoids the effects of exclusion or marginalization that often accompany a fractured globalization. In the context of multicultural cosmopolitanism, there is a felicitous encounter or relation between center and periphery, between general and local and, in translation terms, between the foreign-source and target-host cultures. This is indeed evocative of Glissant’s poetics of Relation where there are harmonious intercultural encounters and, in the spirit of Deleuze’s concept of the rhizome, there is a multiplicity of non-hierarchical relationships. Contemporary multicultural cosmopolitanism in the context of globalization sets the stage for a global turn in translation research, which is more susceptible to accounting for the hybridity, heterogeneity and multidimensionality of current linguistic and cultural practices.

Introduction

9

Some of the more widely-read fiction in French today is written by non-native French writers (authors born outside France) such as the Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau, the Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun, and the Cameroonian Calixthe Beyala.11 These writers share a common French citizenship, and their works and those of others like them have given new life to French-language literature and enhanced the prestige of French as a global literary language. The same can be said for French studies departments outside France, which have noticed a resurgence largely thanks to a marked interest in francophone studies. Although it is true that issues related to hybridity, alterity, interculturality and transnationalism have always been part and parcel of French literary history,12 it is also important to highlight the significant role played by Francophone Studies in French departments in American and European academic institutions in bringing these issues to the forefront. Indeed, as pointed out earlier, French literature has always explored issues of intercultural encounters and alterity in relation to other European cultures as well as some non-western traditions. What makes the experience of postcolonial francophone literature somewhat exceptional is the fact that it is conceived as a discourse of resistance, of empowerment and representation of the multiple voices that had been silenced or marginalized for far too long by colonialist or imperialist practices and through hegemonic encroachment. Hybridity, alterity and other derivatives of intercultural encounters had occurred in previous French literary experience in circumstances that do not necessarily mirror those at the basis of colonialism. There is a fundamental difference between manifestations of openness to hybridity and otherness as a consequence of orientalism or the quest for exotica, and the mobilization of linguistic and cultural hybridity and alterity by postcolonial writers as strategies of resistance to imperialism and the assertion and representation of subaltern identities. Migration and the movement of peoples towards the more economically viable metropolitan centers have resulted in a cosmopolitan society made up of people from varied cultural

11

Alain Mabanckou, “La francophonie, oui, le ghetto, non!”, Le Monde, 19 March 2006; Miller, “The Slave Trade”. 12 French Global: A New Approach to Literary History, eds Christie McDonald and Susan Suleiman, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

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provenances for whom the process of integration also implies seeing themselves and their cultures being reflected in the general representation of the current cosmopolitan reality. Postcolonial migration has brought an influx of peoples from a variety of cultures and ethnicities into France changing the landscape for good and making it impossible to continue to overlook or marginalize the realities shaped by France’s colonial and postcolonial history. This may contribute to our understanding of the upturn of interest in francophone or French-language literatures. It must be pointed out that interest in francophone literature has also grown among nativeborn French speakers who see in this literature an aperture into the world of France’s extraterritorial otherness. There is a general willingness to engage with otherness and in boundary crossings in today’s context of globalization. This calls for the rethinking and reconciliation of the “French” and “francophone” labels in referring to literature written in the French language. The conflation of these separatist labels has the potential to enhance the purview of Frenchlanguage literature on the world stage. There have been many encouraging signs to that effect as some winners of France’s prestigious Goncourt prize have been non-native French writers. One cannot help but see a parallel here between such recent developments for the Goncourt prize and the longstanding practice of including non-native English writers in the competition for the Man Booker prize. It is common knowledge that prominent or popular francophone writers and artists like Patrick Chamoiseau, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Calixthe Beyala have been outspoken about the fact that while the English-speaking world hardly distinguishes between writers of Anglo-Saxon descent and writers for whom English is historically a borrowed tongue, so to speak, the “French” and “francophone” labels perhaps unwittingly isolate non-native from native French-language writers. Some have sought to portray French literature as literature dealing specifically with the historical and sociocultural reality of hexagonal France. This view seems to exclude French-language writers who are not French and those living in France but who draw their inspiration from the imaginary of their ancestral culture outside France. Globalization and the migration of peoples towards the center continue to blur this kind of distinction, as it becomes increasingly difficult to categorize many literary works

Introduction

11

dealing with migrant society within the metropole, as well as those works inspired by and steeped in contemporary cosmopolitanism. In the context of globalization and migration the “French”/ “Francophone” divide has come under serious attack. In 2007 a group of forty-four writers (including “French” and “francophone” writers) published a manifesto, “Pour une littérature-monde en français” (“For a world literature in French”) which essentially calls for the end of the designation “francophone literature” and eventually the movement known as la francophonie. Citing the fact that five of the top French literary prizes of the previous season had been won by writers from outside France, they see in this a displacement of the center towards the periphery and thus call for the return of a literature concerned with the world rather than focussed on la francophonie and its imperial center. Like their Anglophone counterparts, the writers envision a world literature in French characterized by the kind of pluralism that is representative of today’s globalized society. Such a literature would be anathema to la francophonie which, according to the writers, creates and maintains a ghetto in which the colonial hierarchy between France and its former colonies is sustained. For these writers the francophonie movement is nothing but the last vestiges of colonialism. A world literature in French would be transnational, open onto the world and liberating, freeing the French language from the control of the metropolitan center, or “denationalizing” the language.13 The idea of this manifesto is a clear indication that there is something amiss about the label “francophonie”. The francophonie has in recent times been regarded as a postcolonial response, a stalwart to the expanding influence of the Anglo-Saxon language and culture. However, while the British Commonwealth of Nations has evolved over the years into a union of fairly horizontal relations, the francophonie has often come across as a movement essentially sponsored and steered by France. In fact, there is a suspicion that unlike their government, the people of France are not really interested or inspired by la francophonie. By contrast, there seems to be a sense of purpose and unity in diversity among members of the British Commonwealth. Furthermore, the French-speaking world is basically made up of France and its former colonies, whereas English is extensively spoken today in many countries that were not under

13

Achilles Mbembe, “Francophonie et politique du monde”, Congopage.com, 24 March 2007.

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British colonization. In spite of its international appeal, French is only widely spoken in countries or regions outside France where the language was imposed through colonialism or slavery14 (that is, excluding other French-speaking European countries and Quebec). Hence the ambivalent relation to the language by speakers in former colonies. The manifesto for a world literature in French can be construed as an indication of France’s waning global influence, and the desire of non-native French writers to connect with those who share a similar historical experience in other global languages. In order for the French language to remain a world language with a global reach, France’s positionality as the privileged center in the French-speaking world must give way to something like Glissant’s poetics of Relation with its former colonies. Francophone literature and translation There is a symbiotic relationship between the concept of translation – understood both pragmatically as interlingual transfer and metaphorically as representation of otherness – and postcolonial modes of expression. Many francophone writers and artists have acknowledged the fact that they draw inspiration from the oral tradition of the societies about which they write. Their fiction and artistic production are informed by oral culture and aesthetics, both in content and in form. Fictionalizing orality in colonial language literature evokes parallels with translation both in its practical sense of writing across languages and its metaphorical conception of literary and cultural transfer. The concept of writer-translator has been applied to colonial as well as postcolonial writers insofar as writing for these authors involves some recourse to strategies or devices commonly associated with translation. Given this outlook, translation is increasingly being viewed as providing a paradigm for literary and cultural criticism, particularly with respect to literature and other art forms dealing with the former colonies. In light of this critical orientation, translation is conceived here as a paradigm for comprehending discourses of representation of otherness within the specific context of francophone discourses on Africa, the Caribbean and the Diaspora. Such discourses may be mediated through literature, cinema, art and other aesthetic and cultural modes of expression. 14

Miller, “The Slave Trade”.

Introduction

13

Translation therefore has a triple conceptualization here as interlingual, intercultural and intersemiotic. Although translation, by its very definition, evokes the notion of “carrying across” linguistic and cultural boundaries, postcolonial discourses are often steeped in hybrid aesthetic practices, which have rendered such boundaries obsolete, and call attention to hybridity as an active site of cultural production. This holds true for francophone literature, film and other forms of artistic expression. The contributors to this collection deal variously with these art forms within the context of francophone cultures. Representation of otherness is viewed here through the prism of translation both in its pragmatic and metaphorical manifestations. Given the significance of translation for francophone literature and other modes of artistic expression, in terms of the representation of the various cultures alien to the metropolitan idiom, including the teaching and dissemination of this literature outside French-speaking regions worldwide, there is a need for references that explore Francophone Studies from a mainly translation perspective beyond specific or isolated geographies. This book is an attempt to transcend boundaries and bring translation research to bear on francophone discourses from various national and transnational spaces. Translation theory has been receiving a great deal of attention as a research paradigm in interdisciplinary fields such as Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Communication, as well as in the Classics. French and Francophone Studies can also benefit from the transnational and intercultural perspectives afforded by translation theory. The contributions to this volume showcase a variety of francophone discourses and highlight the potential of translation as a paradigm for literary and cultural criticism. Besides dealing with francophone literature and art, the essays in this book are interrelated on several levels. There is a relatively broad representation of literary and cultural practices in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, the Caribbean, and the francophone Diaspora. Contributors hail from Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and North America. Some essays tackle the theme of translation and francophone literature from a mainly pragmatic standpoint, while others frame their discussion on the basis of translation as a metaphor for transculturality, transnationalism, intermediality and translocation. In fact, there is a fair amount of overlap in many of the essays between the pragmatic and metaphorical dimensions of translation.

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From a pragmatic or literal translation standpoint, fictionalizing has at times involved direct translations of oral narratives into the colonial language. Such direct translations as instances of concrete acts of linguistic and cultural representation are the focus of some contributors to this volume who call our attention to the actuality of translation and the complex relationship of otherness to the metropolitan idiom. Building on translation as a metaphor, a number of essays explore philosophical notions and theories that are rooted in French and Francophone Studies and have shaped contemporary intellectual discourse. These essays are variously grounded in Édouard Glissant’s theories of “Tout-monde” and “poetics of Relation”, Abdelkébir Khatibi’s concept of “bi-langue”, Jacques Derrida’s “monolinguisme de l’autre” (“monolingualism of the other”), among others. It is worth mentioning that Glissant’s, Khatibi’s and Derrida’s ideas have had considerable impact on postcolonial studies, Francophone studies and translation research. This volume provides a unique opportunity for exploring these philosophical notions in a context which brings together French/Francophone studies and Translation Studies. Lieven D’hulst’s essay looks at the shifting function of translation in the francophone realm where translation is conceived primarily as the interaction or movement between partner languages and cultures in the postcolonies, on the one hand, and the acknowledged matrix or pivotal French language, on the other. He describes a dual practice of intranslation and extranslation, the former referring to what is essentially intra-francophonie translating and the latter understood as translation involving a language culture outside the francophone realm. This essay also explores a more recent phase of translation which emphasizes the cultural task of translation, especially with respect to the recognition and enhancement of creole languages and cultures. Combining philosophical musings and translation practice, Christine Raguet’s piece is a fascinating study of Victor Segalen’s Essay on Exoticism which emphasizes the need for intercultural exchanges as an acknowledgement of diversity. Segalen’s views are then adopted to guide and inform the translation of Caribbean literature, showing their implications for a translation approach that recognizes and treats otherness with respect.

Introduction

15

Among the essays grounded in a metaphorical conceptualization of translation is Sandra Bermann’s piece which highlights the role and significance of translation in Glissant’s theories, particularly the poetics of Relation, where translation is viewed as the ultimate art of Relation. Glissant’s concepts of Relation and Creolization, reinforced by the underlying presence of translation, are conducive to the contemporary practice of World Literature. While Relation fosters a non-nationalist apprehension of space, time and cultural identities, translation by its very nature involves the encounter of languages and cultures to engender something new and beyond the specific language cultures. Bermann establishes a convincing link between Translation, Relation and Creolization, highlighting their significance for the growing field of World Literature. In light of Glissant’s poetics of Relation, Samia Kassab-Charfi sees a parallel between translation as a movement from one language to another and the use of the hyphen in Caribbean literature as a strategy for creating new concepts which she describes as a kind of internal translating. With this in mind, she embarks on a detailed reading of Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Biblique des derniers gestes, showing how specific the hyphenated-forms can appear, as they visually draw a kind of “in-between connection” or bridge in the lexical landscape throughout the novel. As a stylistic act, the hyphen’s function is not only morphological but also semiotic, as it offers new ways of reading or translating the Caribbean world. Based on an understanding of Glissant’s “Tout-monde” as a poetic of geography, Tom Conley examines what he refers to as the cartographic latency of the concept of Relation, by positing that the concept of “Tout-monde” evokes the Caribbean as poetry that becomes a complex mental and geographical world-map. Glissant’s poetic geography is a cartography of an open whole, of the island of archipelago which is at once open and closed, made up of a multiplicity of cultures and identities, creating a complex mental and geographical map. The essay examines how the cartographic latency of Glissant’s reflections translates or betrays what Glissant might have called a creative politics where invention is part and parcel of intervention. Regarding the translation of Caribbean literature, Marie-José Nzegou-Tayo and Elizabeth Wilson raise some ethical issues which they discuss based on their combined experiences, both practical and

16

Paul F. Bandia

scholarly, in the translation of the complex web of languages and cultures in the Caribbean. They examine translation practices in Caribbean literature against the backdrop of recent experiences in translating Haitian and Guadeloupean texts. The ethical questions raised evoke issues of fluency or transparency in translation. For instance, a major ethical dilemma is to determine to what extent a translator can render transparent or authentic the language of a text written in a specific manner to give voice to the Other. It is rather interesting to note that one of the texts discussed and analyzed is Christine Raguet’s (a contributor to this volume) published translation of Olive Senior’s Discerner of Hearts into French as Zig-Zag et autres nouvelles de la Jamaïque, where she resorts to Martinican Creole as the translating language, although she also takes poetic license by coining some expressions to create a Creole-like effect. Khatibi’s ideas on the complex relation of the francophone writer to the French language is related to translation, as Réda Bensmaïa draws a parallel between the francophone writer capable of inscribing multiple idioms in French and the simultaneous translator or interpreter. Bensmaïa’s essay explores Khatibi’s ideas on translation and their link to Khatibi’s concept of bi-langue. While Khatibi extolls the virtue of the francophone writer in the artful and creative use of “la langue adverse” (“the enemy’s language”), Derrida bemoans the existence of linguistic alienation, a kind of linguistic anxiety which is the consequence of linguistic insecurity. Derrida asserts that we never speak just one language, highlighting the fact that there is no such thing as a pure language, and therefore underlining the translative nature of language itself. Looking at the fast-growing industry of popular film production in West Africa, Moradewun Adejunmobi discusses the combination of what she refers to as vernacular monolingualism and various externalizing translation practices as a strategy for preserving and promoting indigenous languages. It is shown how a strategic use of French or English subtitling in films ensures a rather harmonious coexistence of indigenous and colonial languages. Adejunmobi’s concept of vernacular monolingualism describes the almost exclusive use of an indigenous language in film with subtitles in a European language. Unlike the kind of monolingualism associated with some hegemonic powers, vernacular monolingualism is viewed in a positive light as it is shaped by the source rather than the target language

Introduction

17

culture. It ensures the preponderance of the indigenous language over the adopted colonial language. While most of these essays deal with the interface between indigenous languages, Creoles and the French language, Verena Conley’s essay addresses the issue of migration, displacement or dislocation and its impact on the metropolitan idiom used in film produced by minority subjects residing in France. She showcases the work of the filmmaker Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche who sees translation as a form of negotiation in his films and a means to minimize conflict and enhance conversation and dialogue. Given the ethnic diversity of contemporary French society and the influence of French culture far beyond its borders, translation is now tied or related to a “littératuremonde” that transcends national borders and has become the locus of encounter between foreign or local languages and a narrowly defined grammar of global French. Alain Ricard adopts a historical perspective in presenting the works of some missionaries who devoted their lives to translating, documenting and preserving oral history in Southern Africa. Ricard’s unique approach explores translation between indigenous languages and French, and at times into English by French-speaking missionaries. The essay highlights the role of translation in the promotion and preservation of indigenous languages and cultures and showcases what Ricard describes as a francophone achievement devoid of any colonial pursuits. It is interesting to note that these individual efforts contributed to laying the groundwork for written literature coming out of Southern Africa. The essays in this volume all foreground the notion of translation in francophone literature and art by exploring the various forms or incarnations of translation either from a pragmatic perspective of linguistic appropriation or in terms of a broad metaphorical understanding of translation, allowing for conceptual frameworks that can account for the multiple and complex relations between the francophone writer or artist and the French language and culture.



FROM THE FRENCH ANTILLES TO THE CARIBBEAN: “TRANSLATION” WITHIN THE FRANCOPHONE REALM LIEVEN D’HULST

Introduction: historiographical issues In a 2003 article, Romuald Fonkoua identified three models within the literary historiography of the French Antilles.1 The first consists of an interpretation by Jack Corzani2 of literary evolution with respect to the political and social histories of the islands; it is based on combined geopolitical and linguistic parameters. In this history: “[Corzani] retient ce qui est commun à ces espaces géopolitiques (Antilles et Guyane): le français comme langue de production littéraire; la nature des rapports politiques de ces territoires – quel que soit leur statut particulier – à la France métropolitaine.” (“[Corzani] retains what is common to geopolitical spaces (the Antilles and Guyana): French as literary language; the nature of the political relationship between these territories – whatever their specific status – and metropolitan France.”)3 Consequently, the concept of French Antilles does not include other French speaking areas of the region, such as Haiti, Saint Lucia, or French Guyana. As for James Arnold’s approach, it aims to map out all of the literatures from within the Caribbean Basin as a single “literary region”: I would like to thank Krista Slagle and Catherine Thewissen for their assistance in translating this text into English. 1 Romuald Fonkoua, “Historiographie de la littérature antillaise: aspects et problèmes théoriques”, in Les études littéraires francophones: état des lieux, eds Lieven D’hulst and Jean-Marc Moura, Lille, UL3, Travaux et recherches, 2003, 245-57. 2 Jack Corzani, La littérature des Antilles-Guyane françaises, Fort-de-France: Désormeaux, 1978, 6 vols. 3 Fonkoua, “Historiographie de la littérature antillaise”, 245.

20

Lieven D’hulst … a comprehensive attempt to chart the Greater and Lesser Antilles and the Caribbean rimlands as one literary region. Heretofore all literary histories covering the Caribbean have focused on one linguistic and cultural region in relation to its former metropole.4

Fonkoua is referring to the idea of “really attempting a literary history of the Caribbean by insisting on the endogenous character of the evolution of facts” (“entreprendre véritablement une histoire littéraire des Caraïbes en insistant sur le caractère endogène de l’évolution des faits”).5 The semantic extension of the concept of literary region remains yet to be seen. Maximin, finally, demonstrates the expansion of Caribbean literature and culture. She deals with concepts such as the fantastic, the carnivalesque, the initiatory, the picaresque, each understood from a generic and interdisciplinary perspective, while bringing together, “in space and time”, “relevant work for a specific content” (“dans le temps et dans l’espace”, “les œuvres pertinentes pour tel ou tel propos”).6 In spite of the broad vision, hers would be rather selective in method. Of the three models examined by Fonkoua (Corzani’s, Arnold’s and Maximin’s) – others could undoubtedly be highlighted as well – only the first seems to focus more specifically on the parameter of language, which is the main reference point for the institutional discourse regarding the French-speaking world.7 Further, the connection between language and literature often changes from one model to another: either literature is associated with a given language, 4

A History of Literature in the Caribbean, eds Albert James Arnold et al., 3 vols, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1994-2001, I, xiii. 5 Fonkoua, “Historiographie de la littérature antillaise”, 246. 6 Colette Maximin, Littératures caribéennes comparées, Pointe-à-Pitre: Jasor, 1996, 19. 7 Cf. the preamble in the Charte de la Francophonie approved by the Conférence Ministérielle de la Francophonie on 23 November 2005: “La langue française constitue aujourd’hui un précieux héritage commun qui fonde le socle de la Francophonie, ensemble pluriel et divers. Elle est aussi un moyen d’accès à la modernité, un outil de communication, de réflexion et de création qui favorise l’échange d’expériences.” (“The French language today represents a precious common heritage that establishes a common basis for the French-speaking world, which is diverse and has multiple representations. French is also a means of access to modernity, a tool for communication, reflection and creation, all of which that foster an exchange of experiences.”): http://www.francophonie.org/IMG/pdf/charte_franco phonie.pdf (accessed 11 August 2010).

From the French Antilles to the Caribbean 21 or it is articulated with more languages within larger literary and cultural groupings. Otherwise the choice of a literary language ends up in fact not being a decisive historiographical factor. Without assigning any kind of paradigmatic order to these three models, they could be considered to be a token of the seemingly straightforward dispute over familiar parameters of French literary historiography, if not of literary historiography in general. However, institutions such as literary criticism or secondary and graduate level literary education continue no less to put an emphasis on language or on geopolitical structures, so that the question of historiographical models might warrant inclusion in a meta-historiographical framework. What are the presuppositions involved in the work of historians, critics, and researchers? What are their concepts and methods? Which metalanguage are they using? If it is possible to observe that contemporary discourse, either critical or scholarly, for example, has a tendency to substitute the expression “littératures antillaises” for “littératures caribéennes”, it is because there is a desire to launch a major shift in the way of looking at the relationship between literatures within the Caribbean Basin. But what is the overarching theme of these relationships? Where do they differ? What do they have in common within the cultural ensemble? A recent conference sought to shed light upon the presuppositions inherent in the concepts and methods used by comparatists specializing in the Caribbean.8 It must be noted that the debate is of interest to an increasing number of researchers and it is still ongoing. This being the case, we shall concentrate from this point forward on the issue of language, more precisely on its function as a vehicle of relations between the literatures and cultures of the Caribbean. It may come as a surprise that the field of translation, in particular, has been a neglected topic among literary comparatists and historians of Francophone and Caribbean literature. Traditionally, translation practice is paired with languages. At the same time, and more loosely defined, it refers to a wide range of intercultural and intersemiotic operations. For example, the passages from oral to written, from music to text, from ethnographic analysis to literature, have often been labelled as translation. This simply shows that the distinction between a limited and a broad conception of the Caribbean equally comes into 8

Caribbean Interfaces Caribéennes, eds Lieven D’hulst, Jean-Marc Moura, Liesbeth De Bleeker and Nadia Lie, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.

Lieven D’hulst play on the level of translation. How then can these two (interlingual and cultural) concepts of translation be reconciled? And which methods should be used in order to successfully conduct their study? This article focuses in turn on interlingual translation and cultural translation. 22

The role of translation and the influence of institutions Interlingual translation may be defined as a process that bridges at least two languages and two literatures and therefore cannot be simply confused with original texts in the target culture. As a product, it continues to express an interconnection between the languages and literatures involved. This principle subsequently invalidates the delusion of each being autonomous: for instance, there is no such literature which could be labelled as inherently “French”, “English”, “Spanish”, or “Creole” without taking into consideration the fact that all of them also take in translations that interrelate them with other languages and literatures.9 Admittedly, as detailed below, the norms of multilingual translation, which are so strongly advocated by proponents of postcolonial translation, have not halted the age-old tradition of domesticating translation, a tradition which resists the presence or interference of other languages. Nevertheless, it shall prove difficult hereafter to maintain any lines of division founded on a linguistics of literary borders. But what about “Francophone”, “Anglophone”, “Hispanophone”, or “Creolophone” literatures? These belong to larger language groups which are supposedly less constrained in other respects (more notably geopolitical and institutional). And yet, within the literary groupings which are bound together by language, one would at least expect literary institutions to be less concerned by translation. However, this is not the case for French speaking institutions. For instance, the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) encourages translations within and outside of the internal French-speaking space, that is the space in which the French language comes into contact with partner languages. Thus, the Kadima prize, awarded by the OIF for the “valorization of partner languages of the South” encourages “the translation from French into partner languages or vice versa” (“valorisation des langues partenaires du Sud”, “la traduction du 9

Incidentally it should be pointed out that the translators and their respective translations are rarely hailed as representative of any one nation’s culture.

From the French Antilles to the Caribbean 23 français vers les langues partenaires ou inversement”).10 Such a custodial response reminds us that the choice of which languages to translate must take the current cultural tenor of French speaking areas into consideration, a practice which suggests that the languages in question gain a certain visibility, by making the French language their cornerstone. Similarly, the Ibn Khaldoun-Senghor translation prize in humanities and social sciences, created jointly in 2008 by the OIF and the Arabic Organization for Education, Culture and Science (ALECSO), rewards translations of French works into Arabic, and Arabic works into French. The objective being to “promote cultural and linguistic diversity and to encourage cultural and literary exchanges between the Arab and francophone worlds” (“promouvoir la diversité culturelle et linguistique et d’encourager les échanges culturels et littéraires entre le monde arabe et l’espace francophone”).11 Translation serves as a vehicle for a type of diversity which seems confined to the Frenchspeaking world and its partners, reproducing at a limited scale the translation flows which move more from the center toward the periphery rather than the other way around.12 And as we will see further on, there is seemingly no policy directed toward the creation of partnerships within the Caribbean space. What happens then with the positions adopted outside of the authoritative discourse on Francophone space, within French or Francophone literary criticism, for example?13 They are obviously diverse, but it might be surprising to read an African author discussing intranslation into French, in a way which certainly reminds readers of the border which separates foreign literature from French or Francophone literature. In a passage from Le Monde, Alain Mabanckou explains: La littérature étrangère, soulignons-le, est celle qui nous parvient par le biais de la traduction. Wole Soyinka, écrivain nigérian, africain comme moi, relève bien de la littérature étrangère puisque je le lis en



10 Http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/actions-france_830/francophonie-langue-francaise_1040/francophonie_20244/francophonie-bilaterale_19109/prix-distinctionslitter aires_65144.html (accessed 15 November 2010). 11 Http://www. francophonie.org/IMG/pdf/Reglement_Prix_Ibn_Khaldoun_2010.pdf. 12 Johan Heilbron, “Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translations as a Cultural World System”, in European Journal of Social Theory, II/4 (November 1999), 429-44. 13 Opinions readily accepted in literary history, whether French-speaking or not.

24

Lieven D’hulst traduction. Par conséquent, malgré les apparences, Wole Soyinka est un étranger pour moi, du moins par la langue. Ce qui n’est pas le cas lorsque je lis Patrick Modiano, Dany Laferrière, Jean d’Ormesson, Richard Millet, Salim Bachi ou Jean Echenoz qui, tous, me parlent directement, dans cette langue que j’ai fait mienne, dans cette langue que j’utilise pour ma création.14

It is understandable that for a writer, the most important issue is the defence of his or her writings, that is, literature originally written in French, and which is distinct from foreign literatures. Hence the reflex to bind together a literary group by a language, to fuse French and Francophone literature and to include authors who may have been otherwise excluded by virtue of a geopolitical focus.15 Mabanckou adds: La littérature française, elle, nous l’oublions trop, est une littérature nationale. C’est à elle d’entrer dans ce grand ensemble francophone. Ce n’est qu’à ce prix que nous bâtirons une tour de contrôle afin de mieux préserver notre langue commune, lui redonner son prestige et sa place d’antan. Il nous faut au préalable effacer nos préjugés, revenir sur certaines définitions et reconnaître qu’il est suicidaire d’opposer d’une part la littérature française, de l’autre la littérature francophone.16



14

Alain Mabanckou, “La Francophonie, oui, le ghetto: non!”, in Le Monde, 19 March 2006: “Foreign literature is that which comes to us through translation. Wole Soyinka is an African-Nigerian writer, like me but belongs to Foreign literature because I read his work in its translated version. Despite appearances, Wole Soyinka is a stranger to me, linguistically at least. This is not the case when I read Patrick Modiano, Dany Laferrière, Jean d’Ormesson, Richard Millet, Salim Bachi or Jean Echenoz who, all, speak to me directly in that language that is my own and that I use for my own creation.” 15 “Ainsi Makine, Cioran, Semprun, Kundera, Beckett sont placés dans les rayons de la littérature franco-française tandis que Kourouma, Mongo Beti, Sony Labou Tansi relèvent encore de la littérature étrangère même s’ils écrivent en français.” (“Makine, Cioran, Semprun, Kundera, Beckett all belong to Franco-French literature while Kourouma, Mongo Beti, Sony Labou Tansi are laballed as foreign literature figures even though they write in French.”): ibid. On this issue, see Pierre Halen, “Le ‘système littéraire francophone’: quelques réflexions complémentaires”, in Les études littéraires francophones, 25-37. 16 “We have a tendency to forget that French literature is a national literature. It needs to make an effort to fit in with the francophone world. Then and only then will we be able to have some control over the preservation of our common language and give it back its prestige of the past. To make it possible, we need to leave aside our

From the French Antilles to the Caribbean 25 Yet, is it not surprising that critics no longer conceive of extranslation as a French or a Francophone product? This discourse still wields an implicit binary definition of translation which separates more than it brings closer the French (original) and the foreign (translation, albeit a translation into French). It is no different for the defenders of a littérature-monde – in French, again? – ready for dialogue “in this vast interconnected polyphonic whole, with no worries about quarrels for or against the prominence of a specific language or about some kind of cultural imperialism” (“dans un vaste ensemble polyphonique, sans souci d'on ne sait quel combat pour ou contre la prééminence de telle ou telle langue ou d'un quelconque ‘impérialisme culturel’”).17 This dialogue, if it must pass through translation, will maintain the participants’ autonomy guaranteed by the reference to their original language. Regardless, all this aligns with the usual classification of French editors who make such elementary but radical distinctions between French and foreign literature. To review, then, from the point of view of the institution, intranslation and extranslation are both concerned with the Francophone realm insofar as they are produced within the Frenchspeaking space. Yet, translation is also defined in relation to original works written in French, and should it be surprising that such works are clearly situated in a privileged space?18 It would be interesting to see if such honour withstands the most recent literary movements in the Caribbean, and specifically within the French-speaking islands, where other methods and concepts of translation and of writing have already made their appearance. An example: from French to Creole and back Let us look a little closer at one type of interlingual translation in the French Antilles,19 specifically, Creole-French translation, an example prejudices, reword certain definitions and recognize that it is suicidal to oppose French literature, on the one hand, and French-language literature on the other.” (Mabanckou, “La Francophonie, oui, le ghetto: non!”) 17 Muriel Barbery et al., “Pour une ‘littérature-monde’ en français”, Le Monde, 16 March 2007. 18 As evidenced by the Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie, which awards only those novels written in French. 19 See also Lieven D’hulst, “Les fonctions littéraires de la traduction intratextuelle: l’exemple des littératures francophones”, in Métissages littéraires. Actes du XXXIIe Congrès de la Société Française de Littérature Générale et Comparée, eds Yves

Lieven D’hulst of translation of partner languages within the Francophone space. Still, there is no question of real equivalence between these languages, since they belong to a diglossic space where languages possess neither the same status nor the same function. While the Creole language should convey a group of endogenous cultural values, it struggles to maintain a status as a written language, as it has a limited readership and is hindered by weak critical appeal. Except through being translated, Creole is not able to benefit from the advantages which the French literary institution provides. And yet, is translation really the best avenue through which to navigate a course for the recognition of Creole? From the point of view of Creolist institutions, intranslation into this language above all seeks to enrich its linguistic and literary position, as is shown by the efforts of translating certain important works of Western literature. Martinique author Raphaël Confiant says in light of La Fontaine’s Fables: 26

… le fabuliste créolophone est contraint de se faire à la fois écrivain et traducteur, ce qui l’amène à élargir les potentialités expressives d’une langue qui est restée trop longtemps, diglossie oblige, confinée à l’expression de réalités immédiates ou locales. Autant l’écrivain créolophone peut tout à fait restreindre son champ d’action à la Plantation ou au quartier populaire urbain et se satisfaire du créole tel qu’il est, autant le fabuliste, de part sa posture traductive, est contraint de confronter son outil linguistique à l’évocation de réalités étrangères c’est-à-dire non créoles. Traduire / transposer / adapter Lafontaine l’amène nécessairement à désigner des realia qui n’appartiennent pas à l’univers créole, à décrire des événements propres à une autre sphère culturelle, à faire sien une psychologie différente.20

Clavaron and Bernard Dieterle, Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de SaintÉtienne, 2005, 353-61. 20 Raphaël Confiant, “Fab Lafontèn” : “... the fabulist who speaks Creole needs to be both writer and translator, which brings him to expand the expressive opportunities of a language that, because of diglossia, has long been used for the expression of tangible and local realities. While the Creole-speaking writer can focus on the plantation and the urban working-class districts and be satisfied with Creole as it now stands, the fabulist with his translation background, has to adapt his linguistic tool to foreign realities, outside the creole world. Translating/transposing/adapting Lafontaine forces the translator to refer to realities that do not belong to the Creole world, to describe events from another cultural sphere and to endorse a psychology that is not his.” (Http://www.palli.ch/~kapeskreyol/guides/fab_lafonten.htm; accessed 11 August 2010.)

From the French Antilles to the Caribbean 27 When it comes to extranslation, the Creole universe is obviously made more accessible to the general reading public; consequently, French versions of several works by, among others, Confiant and Frankétienne have been written. However, these two translational directions are also the object of scepticism. This is not only due to the fact that translation also competes with original writings in Creole (in this case), but also because of the stylistic and semantic problems involved in translating into a language devoid of a translational tradition.21 On the other hand, extranslation does not manage to invalidate the exotic image of Creole writings. Confiant recently criticized ethnocentric translation practices: Il faut faire preuve d’une sacrée dose d’ethnocentrisme pour trouver normal que dans le roman chinois ou russe que je suis en train de lire, les paysans russes ou chinois parlent et se comportent exactement comme des paysans français. Et puis d’ailleurs est-ce que le côté fluide et coulant que je trouve dans la traduction correspond bien au style fluide et coulant dans le texte original? Les tenants de cette forme de traduction effacent, gomment complètement l’étrangeté du texte à traduire et le naturalisent en quelque sorte, l’empaillent, le colonisent, l’assimilent pour donner l’illusion qu’il a été directement écrit en français.22

In light of this two-fold standstill, the responsibility falls back on the writer to find new writing strategies which are able to give a voice to Creole (see further). Martinique Creolists, in particular, have sought to develop a model of writing which accommodates a certain “translational tension”, according to the definition by Confiant:

21

Cf. Christine Hazaël-Massieux, “À propos de la traduction de la Bible en créole: Analyse de quelques problèmes linguistiques et sociolinguistiques”, in Études Créoles, XVIII/1 (1995), 39-73. 22 Raphaël Confiant, “La traduction en milieu diglossique”: “Only an ethnocentrically-minded person would find it normal that Chinese or Russian farmers in the Chinese or Russian novel that I am currently reading actually talk and behave just like French farmers. Additionally does the fluid and accessible writing style found in the translation correspond to the fluid and accessible style found in the original text? That type of translation completely deletes and erases the foreign character of the text to be translated and naturalizes it so to speak, by flavouring it, colonizing it and assimilating it to give the illusion that it was originally written in French.” (Http://www.mq.ird.fr/pdf/AREC-F-Confiant.pdf [2003]; accessed 11 August 2010.)

Lieven D’hulst “Notes de bas de page, glossaire, calques et transpositions relèvent bien d’une pratique tantôt sauvage tantôt savante de la traduction, mais cette tension traductive qui traverse l’écriture antillaise va encore plus loin car elle conduit l’auteur à se faire traducteur au sens habituel, technique, du terme ….” (“Footnotes, glossaries, calques and transpositions are both a primitive and scholarly translation practice, but this dual tension that goes through Antillean writing goes even further because it drives the author to become a translator in the usual, technical sense of the term...”).23 Translation, which is infused within the writing process, is accompanied by procedures such as codeswitching and code-mixing, and is becoming therefore a prominent if not preferred vehicle for the complex situation of the Creole language. But beyond its reach, linguistically speaking, translation has equally become a vehicle for créolité, which is defined by the authors of Éloge de la créolité as “le monde diffracté mais recomposé, un maelström de signifiés dans un seul significant: une Totalité” (“[Creoleness is] the world diffracted but recomposed, a maelstrom of signifieds in a single signifier: a Totality”).24 Likewise, Glissant qualifies translation as a “relation majeure” of Creolization: “… la traduction est une véritable opération de créolisation, désormais une pratique nouvelle et imparable du précieux métissage culturel” (“... translation is a real Creolization operation, a new and inevitable practice within this precious cultural cross-fertilization”).25 The idea of translation represents a different direction toward literary and cultural recognition of Creole. The path is wider as it also seeks to integrate the current concept of interlingual translation into larger frameworks. 28

Translating culture? This expansion draws from many sources, whose complex intertwining has yet to be outlined more carefully.26 The following sketch at least refers to some of the major sources:

23 Raphaël Confiant, “Traduire la littérature en situation de diglossie”, Palimpsestes, 12 (2000), 53. 24 Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la créolité, Paris: Gallimard, 1989, 27. 25 Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers, Paris: Gallimard, 1996, 45. 26 See also Lieven D’hulst, “Cultural translation: A problematic concept?”, in Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies: Investigations in Homage to Gideon Toury, eds

From the French Antilles to the Caribbean

29

So cultural studies in its new internationalist phase turned to sociology, to ethnography and to history. And likewise, translation studies turned to ethnography and history and sociology to deepen the methods of analyzing what happens to texts in the process of what might be called ‘intercultural transfer’, or translation.27

Generally speaking, “cultural” translation applies to artefacts (written texts are included, here) which vary in size and form. It may limit itself to a set of cultural features to be highlighted in interlingual translation (nature, space, time, manners and the like) but may also apply to sorts of intersemiotic transpositions that bear no language referent (Rushdie declaring “I am a translated man”, for instance). The range of procedures designated by the concept of translation is thus both vast and imprecise. Moreover, it is frequently the subject of considerable debate, which is often rather hostile to the very idea of a shared consensus.28 At any rate, if cultural translation exceeds interlingual translation, it also tries to bring closer translating and writing in such a way that both would be able to escape the borders between the foreign and the local, as installed by institutional gatekeepers. It is widely known that the aforementioned combination of writing and translation is popular in postcolonial African and Caribbean literature.29 As the opinions of both Confiant and Glissant demonstrate in the quotations above, this combination has also been thoroughly researched by authors and Francophone Caribbean critics. More notably for Chamoiseau, translation covers an ensemble of interlingual operations including the act of interpreting language within a particularly ethnographic context. Also, the notion of “translation” may simultaneously reveal many different plans, such as the example of the oral passing through to the written context which we read in the following excerpt from Solibo Magnifique (1988): Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger and Daniel Simeoni, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2008, 221-32. 27 Susan Bassnett, “The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies”, in Translation Translation, ed. Susan Petrilli, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003, 442. 28 Boris Buden, Stefan Nowotny et al., “Cultural Translation: An Introduction to the Problem, and Responses”, in Translation Studies, II/2 (2009), 196-219. 29 Joanne Akai, “Creole … English: West Indian Writing as Translation”, in TTR, X/2 (1997), 165-96.

30

Lieven D’hulst Pipi, maître-djobeur, par un désir aigu de sauver les mots du Magnifique, approcha la performance, sur plus de trois heures, à l’allure des chevaux de bois de nos manèges créoles. Il fut enregistré, et je passai la saison des quénettes à traduire l’ensemble sur tout un lot de pages, tourbillonnantes et illisibles. Si bien, amis, que je me résolus à en extraire une version réduite, organisée, écrite, sorte d’ersatz de ce qu’avait été le Maître cette nuit-là ….30

This meta-translational observation sharpens the ethics of the act of translation, an ethics that stands against the traditional notion of “invisibility”. Chamoiseau adds: Au bout d’une longueur de silence, Congo revint au corps de Solibo et, dans un affolement de ses rides, posa le diagnostic utilisé comme ouverture de cette parole: Méhié é hann, Ohibo tÿoutÿoute anba an hojèt pahol-la! …. Ce qui, traduit, peut vouloir dire: Messieurs et dames, Solibo Magnifique est mort d’une égorgette de la parole ….31

The background setting for Creole-French translation, therefore, allows for the reversal of the reality of Creole extranslation. In order to be recognized, the latter had to go through a language of prestige, like French. From this point forward, extranslation incorporates the writing process itself. The integration of translation into the narration process itself is strengthened by other procedures than mere quotation, such as the appearances of translating or interpreting characters, the development of the translation motif, narrators or readers who recount translations, etc. Accordingly, prospective strategies and polemics of translation/writing or cultural translation do not prevent the researcher from patiently reconstructing its discursive proprieties, but also the 30

Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo Magnifique, Paris: Gallimard, coll. Folio, 1998, 226: “Pipi, wishing to save the words of the Magnificent, took upon doing so for more than three hours at the speed of the wooden gorses from our Creole merry-go-rounds. The Magnificent was recorded and I spent the honey berry season translating the whole recording on many whirling and illegible pages. So much so, friends, that I decided to edit it into a reduced, organised, written version, a sort of ersatz of what the Master had been that night ....” 31 Ibid., 42: “After a long silence, Congo came back to Solibo’s body and with all the wrinkles of his face moving worded his diagnosis as follows : Méhié é hann, Ohibo tÿoutÿoute anba an hojèt pahol-la !… which, translated, means or can mean: ladies and gentleman, Solibo Magnificient is dead of language overuse.”

From the French Antilles to the Caribbean 31 indecisions and mandatory returns imposed upon by conventions of interlingual translation, thus the call for new author-translators or for another language of translation: Faut-il dès lors voir dans la revendication d’une traduction des œuvres caribéennes par des traducteurs caribéens, un simple réflexe “protectionniste” lié à une angoisse quasi paranoïaque de la trahison? Ou, au contraire, une insolence d’intellectuels et d’hommes de lettres, déçus par une pratique traductrice aux relents centripètes, niant l’altérité du texte et cherchant donc à cloisonner là où c’est précisément la volonté de décloisonnement qui domine, qui s’affirme?32

Yet, it must be added that in the Caribbean space, cultural translation remains largely subjected to strong institutional constraints, so much so that there is no question of abolishing the borders between foreign and endogenous literatures on such a basis. Moreover, as the following remark by Confiant shows, editorial strategies in particular do not favour regional interaction: Nous Antillais, nous sommes complètement isolés par rapport à la littérature des pays qui nous entourent. Nous sommes complètement tournés vers l’Europe, et je connais mieux Sciascia, Tabucchi, Gadda ou Eco – pour citer des auteurs italiens – que les auteurs mexicains ou colombiens .… Nous n’avons même pas de contacts directs avec nos amis les écrivains de la Caraïbe. Pensez que nous ne sommes pas traduits en espagnol ou en portugais …. Cela dépend selon moi des maisons d’édition, qui s’occupent de la promotion du livre au niveau de la traduction.33



32 Corinne Mencé-Caster, “De la proposition de traduire en langue caraïbe les œuvres caribéennes comme mode d’affirmation de la perception d’une identité commune”, in Écritures caraïbes, eds Georges Voisset and Marc Gontard, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002, 34: “Should we see in the claim for translation of Caribbean works by Caribbean authors a protectionist reflex linked to a near-state of paranoia and a deep-seated fear of treason? Or, by contrast, should we see in it an arrogance on the part of intellectuals and people of letters disappointed by translation practices with centralizing overtones that ignore the otherness of the text and therefore seeks to compartmentalize when the aim should be to decompartmentalize.” 33 Francesca Torchi, “Un aperçu du roman créole. Entretiens avec Raphaël Confiant et Manuel Norvat”, in Francofonia, 47 (Autumn 2004), 123-24: “We, Caribbean, are completely isolated from the literature of the countries that surround us. We are completely turned towards Europe, and I know Sciascia, Tabucchi, Gadda and Eco–

Lieven D’hulst This shows that attempts toward an “intra-Caribbean” translation policy hardly seem to alter institutional strategies in light of interlingual translation, even if the latter wishes to conserve the demands of cultural translation. 32

From French to English: Chamoiseau What happens when Francophone translation/writing becomes the object of extranslation into an international language such as English, that is seemingly excluded from Francophone partner languages? At what point do its insets remain visible? At what point does it remain a “cultural” translation? The US version of Texaco is an interesting example of the manner in which translators seek to address these questions. For instance, frequent paratextual interventions (translator’s notes, afterword, glossary, acknowledgements, etc.) attest their efforts to legitimize their work, to the point that if there is a query as to whether to respect the original or remain true to the ethics of the translator, the latter would not entirely bow out, on the contrary, “wherever the author’s translation diverges substantially from the meaning of the Creole, we have included our own footnoted version. We distinguish our footnotes from the author’s by the use of brackets.”34 The result is a type of cooperative articulation which subtly defines the respective parts of the author and of the translator: the closeness which the translators call for in the Afterword is no less limited, than by the few most widely recognized norms in interlingual translation: Some would say … that if you can read Patrick Chamoiseau’s “Texaco”, maybe we overtranslated it .… Have we then as translators betrayed the original book by actually making it readable when it can strike so many as opaque? .… any translated text is already a processed text, that is, text necessarily digested by an intermediary reader who in turn becomes a writer, but also because despite the Babelian ambitions of Texaco, Chamoiseau meant for his book to be

to mention a few Italian authors – better than the Mexican or Colombian authors .… We don’t even have direct contact with our author friends from the Caribbean. Our work is not even translated into Spanish or Portuguese .… I believe this depends on the publisher that is in charge of the promotion of the translated version of the book.” 34 Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco, trans. from the French and Creole by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov, London: Granta Books, 2007, ix.

From the French Antilles to the Caribbean

33

readable .... Chamoiseau is serious about being read by a broad group of people.35

In a way, one could say that the collation with the concept of cultural translation paradoxically brings back to mind more standardized views on languages. Instead of a direct substitution of the hybridization of Creole and French, we are left with multiple layers of languages. Turning to Walcott: The torment of the process of translating Texaco is for me quadrupled. First the original, the French, then the Creole (one is talking about vocabulary, not tone, which is unified in the novel, hence its miraculousness), then the translation into English and then into an English version of Creole whose base is French Creole; one must glide, with the translation’s push, over some discomforts and perils. Since no two Creoles are identical in the Caribbean – Haitian Creole is different from St. Lucian – the sense of opacity increases.36

The actual translation process requires the deconstruction of French Creole followed by the reconstruction of a different product intended for a new audience, therefore we see the implementation of an English version of Creole. And yet, translators are not alone in deciding upon the recontextualization of texts. As Richard Watts rightly points out, the American editorial and educational institutions have managed to frame the translations within the postcolonial niche which in reality takes them away from their unique position within the Franco-Antilles relations: There are three principal types of desired reception expressed by the paratexts to Chamoiseau’s translated works: first, to confine the works to the eternal present of the colonial Caribbean; second, to disconnect them from their specific “francophone” context; and third, related to the previous one, to privilege the affinities with writers from the nebulous category of World Literature.37

35

Ibid., 393. Derek Walcott, “A letter to Chamoiseau”, in What the Twilight Says, London: Faber and Faber, 1998, 225. 37 Richard Watts, Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005, 162. 36

Lieven D’hulst To compare this work of recontextualization in English with Confiant’s translations of Creole into French, one must admit that in spite of procedural differences, in both cases, we are faced with complex alliances between institutional strategies, concepts and practices of interlingual and cultural translation. 34

Conclusion Translation is a binding tool, which goes beyond the limits ascribed to its interlingual definition when it calls for the implementation of a new language of translation, with the intention of eventually turning into writing. At the same time, translation is an accurate gauge, more than critical opinion, of the regulations imposed by literary and cultural institutions on intercultural traffic, including the transformation and migration of literary works. These regulations depend on geopolitical structures that create frames or realms that do not necessarily interact smoothly in spite of the binding function of translation. As the example of the institutional Francophonie shows, the interaction between translational practices and institutional regulation takes the form of a three-faceted structure and it would be fitting to examine the point at which it can be observed also outside of Francophone Caribbean literature. Interlingual translation makes the borderlines between languages and literatures more conspicuous as they are crossed. It also emphasizes the issues and concerns of national literatures and specifically those that are willing to set up close partnerships with French and Francophone literatures within the Francophone realm. At the same time, the adoption of postcolonial and Caribbean discourse on créolité within the Francophone Caribbean Basin shifts the focus from an interlingual to a more cultural approach toward translation, one that strives to invalidate borders between languages, cultural practices, but also between translators and writers. The new resources of the writer-translator in this setting are a number of plurilingual processes associated with interlingual translation. Finally, translation, and specifically intranslation into Creole, helps to create niches within Caribbean literature, thus contributing to the further establishment of Creole literature. These three translational practices coexist in time and space. Yet there is nothing that anticipates a significant connection between them

From the French Antilles to the Caribbean 35 and thus a homogenous politics of translation is yet to be defined within the French-speaking realm of the Caribbean.



A “FLAVOR OF DIVERSITY”: INTERCREATION AND THE MAKING OF A MOSAIC-WHOLE CHRISTINE RAGUET

“The perception of diversity” is a notion coined by Victor Segalen in a book never completed, not even conceived in an organized form and which was laid out in the form of notes between 1904 and 1918. These fragments were collected and published in 1978 as Essai sur l’exotisme, later translated in English as Essay on Exoticism.1 These notes were prompted by Segalen’s wish to twist the meaning of the word “exoticism” in order to strip it of its garish garb and its alluring appeal, which set the tone during the colonial period: To this day, the word Exoticism has hardly been more than a synonym for “impressions of faraway lands”; of climates, of foreign races; and too often misused by being substituted for that word, which is yet more compromised, “colonial.” Under the dreadful rubric of “exotic literature,” “exotic impressions,” … one gathered, and one gathers still, all the flashy paraphernalia of a return from the abode of a Negro king; the crass, flashy rags of those who return from we know not where …. It is this exoticism, specifically, which is most obvious and which imposed its name …. But the kind of insistence with which this kind of exoticism imposes itself upon those who travel, its too large visibility, makes it also a good point of departure and necessitates that I finish with it by dealing with it one last time.2

Segalen’s reflection as it is outlined in these notes aims at restoring the word “exoticism” to its initial value – the meaning derived from its etymology, as contained in “exo” (“outside”), and “exôtikos” (“all 1

Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism, trans. and ed. Yaël Rachel Schlick, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2002. 2 Ibid., 68.

Christine Raguet that is foreign”). He is interested in any form of otherness in Nature and otherness in the nature of those Others offered to inquisitive observers.3 When Segalen attempted to work on this notion, he meant to deprive it of all the intrusive tropical visions, which had long burdened it, so that exoticism could leave this somehow normative space in which it was enclosed to turn toward the Other, acknowledge the distance between the Other and those who perceive him/her/it and open their perspective to the Other. As a matter of fact, not only does he imagine a non-hierarchical type of relation, deprived of all form of power struggle, but he cleared it of any possibility of voyeurism. It then becomes a relation based on fair and respectful exchanges, not trying to take or impose anything, but ready to give and receive: thus Segalen considered the Other’s perception of oneself as part of the process of exoticism. To come back to the notion of “inquisitive observers”, I mean by this both those who are ready to go towards what is outside (“exo”), in a free movement towards otherness, and those who come from outside (“exo”), who are perceived as others and are ready to initiate intercourse – those receiving and perceiving Otherness from different perspectives and notably through all cultural productions conveying the Diverse. I will only discuss the application of these notions to literature since my purpose mainly aims at showing how translation can manage not to absorb or reduce the otherness of what comes from outside, what is “exo”, but how it can bring it inside so as to supplement and complement what is already there. The already-existing element will be enriched with these contributions from the outside and make a new coherent whole – the translated text. With the book he planned to write, Victor Segalen wanted to enable minds to blossom through an attempt at re-evaluating the concept of exoticism at a time when it was burdened with quite a good amount of ethnocentrism, an attitude which can also be observed in translation as Antoine Berman noted some seventy years later: 38

Translation is the “trial of the foreign.” But in a double sense. In the first place, it establishes a relationship between the Self-Same (Propre) and the Foreign by aiming to open up the foreign work to us in its utter foreignness …. In the second place, translation is a trial for the Foreign as well, since the foreign work is uprooted from its own

3

Otherness may either be due to time-gaps or space-gaps. The important matter is to be found in a particular attention to elements of the Diverse.

A “Flavor of Diversity”

39

language-ground (sol-de-langue). And this trial, often an exile, can also exhibit the most singular power of the translating act: to reveal the foreign work’s most original kernel, its most deeply buried, most self-same, but equally the most “distant” from itself …. Thanks to such translation, the language of the original shakes with all its 4 liberated might the translating language.

Inside/outside About ten years after Berman’s first publication in French (1984) of The Trials of the Foreign, Jean-Louis Cordonnier went a step further in his reflections on the connections between translation and culture. He saw ethnocentrism as a form of protective reaction of the Self in face of the Other, and he coined two words, “ouvertude” (“openity”) which he opposed to “fermetude” (“closity”). The latter is regarded as the expected attitude in translation following a movement which “aims at being permanently active and which devotes its energy to spreading out between cultures”. Such a stance is supposed to be attentive to all sorts of readers, who equally deserve to be taken into consideration, which is quite the opposite of ethnocentric determinism “submitting translation to the idea it has of its own limits in face of foreign cultures and of the hermeneutic capacity of its readers”.5 Consequently, “fermetude” (“closity”) when “exotic” texts are translated necessarily leads to a re-production based on the alreadyexisting and derived from well-known and accepted models, so that the reader of this “second” text can perceive and receive it as a “first” and familiar text. In some cases this second text may have received all the gaudy paraphernalia of ostentatious exoticism in order to create a second utterly contradictory movement and generate eye-catching strangeness in a piece of writing initially meant to be recognizable. In the end, such positioning may not be completely conflicting since in such cases the methods resorted to and the objects foregrounded belong to the colonial collective unconscious. To develop the problematics of the relation exoticism/translation/ interculturalism, it may be interesting to go back to another positioning almost contemporary with Segalen’s, to Oswald De 4

Antoine Berman, “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign”, in The Translation Studies Reader (1984), ed. Lawrence Venuti, London: Routledge, 2000, 284-85 (Berman’s emphases). 5 Jean-Louis Cordonnier, Traduction et culture, Paris: Didier, 1995, 153 and 169 (my translations).

Christine Raguet Andrade’s “Manifesto Anthropófago” published in 1928, in which the notion of social, economic and philosophic anthropophagy6 is exposed in note forms and later expanded by Haroldo de Campos.7 In his work, he considers the anthropophagic dimension of cultural relations: its application to the world of translation is presented by Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira in “Readings of Antropofagia and Haroldo de Campos’ poetics of transcreation”.8 According to de Campos, anthropophagy is a sign of Brazil’s polyphonic identity, not only a tribute to the strength of the Other whom the Self wants to absorb in order to acquire more vitality, but also a mode of “revitalization”.9 What is to be noted here is the implicit link between death and life, disappearance (of the original text) and revivification (through the revitalization of the translated text). At this stage in the discussion, one may fear a loss or a destruction of alterity whereas the purpose of the above perspective is to debunk the neo-colonial discourse with the anthropophagic metaphor, which aims at deconstructing Western logocentrism. Moreover one can observe in anthropophagic translation “a distinctive sign of alterity in the gaps of a universal code”.10 The very notion of “gaps” undoubtedly evokes the absence of familiarity, which can be felt when facing the culture of the Other, thus the problem of filling these gaps is brought to light. According to the method discussed by Pires Vieira, anthropophaging a text corresponds to introducing foreign elements belonging to the receiving culture11 with a new and creative intention or objective. For some, it may correspond to the introduction of 40



6

Oswald De Andrade, “Anthropophagous (Anthropophagic) Manifesto”, Revista de Antropofagia, May 1928, trans. Maria do Carmo Zanini, 2006: http://www.sibila.com.br/index.php/sibila-english/395-anthropophagic-manifesto (accessed 3 April 2010). He introduces his work with these words: “Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.” 7 Haroldo De Campos, “The Rule of Anthropophagy: Europe under the Sign of Devoration” (first published in Portuguese in Metalinguagem, Petróposlis: Vozes, 1967), trans. M.T. Wolff, Latin American Literary Review, XIV/27 (January-June 1986), 42-60. 8 Else R. Pires Vieira, “Readings of Antropofagia and Haroldo de Campos’ poetics of transcreation”, in Post-Colonial Translation, eds Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, London: Routledge, 1999, 95-113. 9 Ibid., 96. 10 Ibid., 104. 11 I refrain from using “target” and “source”, as their semantism is so charged with opposite connotations that a huge discrepancy is thus presupposed.

A “Flavor of Diversity” 41 extracts belonging to the receiving culture in order to integrate the foreign within the receiving world.12 Here, the interrelation between the inside and the outside, or “self” to “other” (passage from language A to language B + addition of B cultural elements to the A culture in the B text) is quite obvious and it could lead to a type of transcreation aiming at revitalizing a foreign text whose beauty lies in the new harmony thus created. This new harmony can also be worked out the other way round, that is by adding external elements in order to nurture the receiving culture with as many new foreign constituents as possible and thus gain in “openity”. In this organization, transfers will be operated in the other direction, that is from the outside to the inside, or “other” to “self” (passage from language A to language B + addition of A cultural elements to the B text-culture), in a movement which aims at receiving the Other with all its specificities and differences. At this point, notions like “recreation” or “transcreation”, as presented by Pires Vieira, can be introduced because they lead to a distancing from monologic truth to bring about a transformation of past traditions, a perspective which enables the escape from the frightening dualistic target-and-source straightjacket and the opening of a third way, a space in which each element is there to give and take – working out not only a transcultural passage, but an intercultural exchange. To avoid dualism in exchanges between the outside and the inside (or Other and Self) and prevent a negative situation when the Other is brought inside because it may easily be acclimatized – which in translation would correspond to naturalization or domestication – one would expect to rely on a positive procedure. Then, textual revitalization could be worked out with the help of a certain principle of fragmentation, followed by refabrication, which I will call “tesseration” (or the picking up of tesserae to create a new whole). This method consists in having each individual constituent preserve its original value and in cohesively setting it in accordance with the next constituent so that they can make a perfectly coherent mosaic-whole – a new whole made of tesserae, each keeping its individual uniqueness. To apply Haroldo de Campos’ and Oswald de Andrade’s ideas to the

12

Else R. Pires Vieira then gives the example of pre-romantic author Manuel Odorico Mendes and his translation of The Odyssey into which he interpolated fragments from Camões, 104.

Christine Raguet French language-culture13 and to translations into French is not only perfectly viable, but can also be observed in the analysis of some translations of post-colonial texts. They correspond to a rather vivid translating process presently at work even though publishing houses may still be quite resistant to it. 42

Exoticism revisited To get back to the initial preoccupation, one has to understand that Segalen posits exoticism at the centre of his vision of the world14 – that is a place of reception, emission and exchange; a fertile and prolific place, in the botanic sense of the word, its creative dimension. In botany, prolific may imply the creation of extra growths. There perceptions will bloom in contact with diversity so as to produce new conceptual data. Such a train of thoughts and such an evolution have led to Segalen’s conception of exoticism as an aesthetics of the Diverse: “I agree to call ‘Diverse’ everything that until now was called foreign, strange, unexpected, surprising, mysterious, amorous, superhuman, heroic, and even divine, everything that is Other.”15 By proposing a list of adjectives giving rise to strong emotions, which could foster reactions possibly endangering the contact with the Other, Victor Segalen has taken a very bold stand: he has got rid of what, up to then, had commonly singularized the Other in order to conceive a new mode of perception of this otherness. To make it viable he has somehow proposed to discern multiplicity through its singularities, that is to establish contact between the subject of observation’s own individuality and some incomprehensible outside, which would prompt this sensation of the Diverse in the maintaining of the existing distance between the object observed and the perceiving subject,

13 The language-culture to which I refer here relates to Henri Meschonnic’s presentation about decentring in Pour la poétique II, Paris: Gallimard, 1973, 308: “Decentring corresponds to a textual link established between two texts in two language-cultures even as far as between their linguistic structures, this linguistic structure being a reference in the system of the text. Annexation corresponds to erasing this link, creating an illusion of the natural, the as-if, as if a text in the original tongue was written in the receiving tongue, without taking into consideration the differences between cultures, times, linguistic structures” (my translation; Meschonnic’s emphases ). 14 Segalen, Essay on Exoticism, 61. 15 Ibid., 67 (Segalen’s emphasis).

A “Flavor of Diversity” 43 bearing in mind that for Segalen, the Diverse covers a wide natural scope. What is important to remember in such an attitude is the narrow link existing between the distance in question and what Segalen has presupposed to be the centre of his vision of the world. Consequently, exoticism would lie in a neutral space, opposite the naturalizing space – a place which always either absorbs it, thus polishing it, or encloses it in current commonplace clichés, feeding on and entertaining readymade folklore, thus singling it out. He has certainly favoured the bringing in of new forms of knowledge that would transcend the inquisitive observation – so that this fresh observation would not be a voyeur’s, or prompted by unhealthy curiosity. This would be worked out through the interaction of all the concerned parties and would thus involve the couple universality/peculiarity in order to dwell on peculiarities (in its plural form) as individual specificities. This is why cultural anthropophagy may be useful in this demonstration especially if it is associated with creativity. What is innovative in Segalen’s approach leads us to understand the Other’s peculiarities as constitutive features of his/her/its personality, and to accept them as positive elements in our perception of the Other. At the same time, what can be felt as a peculiarity will have to be rejected because it may evoke oddness and give rise to rejection and exclusion, like any peculiar form of Otherness perceived as threatening or frightening. Under certain circumstances, such a stance may even lead to the erasing of the Other. During the translating process, these phenomena will similarly manifest themselves since they will inevitably cause naturalizing through levelling or deleting. If in my demonstration, I insist on selecting the word “peculiarities” in its plural form, it is to counterbalance the word “universality” and to dwell on the fact that in transcultural and intercultural translation the multiplicity of individual values is at work in discourses. As a matter of fact, voices in translation, whether the characters’ or the narrators’ or even more or less abstract forms of impersonal echoes, convey, each in their own way, their individual characteristics. All these subtle nuances that endow an original with vitality and strength simply become dulled under the weight of naturalizing or stereotyping practices.16

16

The phrase “stereotyping practices” corresponds to the definition of the overused word, “exoticism”, a meaning Segalen has refused to make his.

Christine Raguet I would like to illustrate these practices with two extracts from two rather recent novels by Anglo-Jamaican writers, Leone Ross’ All the Blood Is Red17 and Andrea Levy’s Small Island,18 and their French translations. 44

(Nicola) “Me see seh the two of you gang up on me while me gone, eh ? What else you been doin’?” (Ross, All the Blood Is Red, 25)

“But weh dem say ? What it say ?” Alexandra listened intently. Nicola always broke into patois when she was excited. (Ross, All the Blood Is Red, 63)

Je vois que vous vous êtes mis ensemble pour dire du mal de moi pendant que j’étais partie, pas vrai ? Et qu’est ce que vous avez fait d’autre ? (Ross, Le sang, 48) « Mais qu’est ce qu’ils racontent? Ils disent quoi ? » Alexandra écoutait avec grande attention. Nicola tombait toujours dans du dialecte jamaïcain quand elle était excitée. (Ross, Le sang, 111)

We can easily notice that Nicola’s creolized English – she is one of the four women-protagonists in the novel – is located on a rather low level on the continuum scale and that the narrator calls it “patois”, thus acknowledging it as the basilectal form of Jamaican creole, one of Nicola’s peculiarities. Between Standard Jamaican English, the acrolectal form of English spoken in Jamaica and Jamaican Creole, the basilectal form, there is a large linguistic spectrum, the continuum. In the above example, the variety used might be called mesolectal since standard English structures are there to make a web of linguistic landmarks to be easily spotted by the readers and help them follow the conversation. Moreover, it can be regarded as representative of a voice specifically worked out by the author in order to characterize Nicola, so that she can be identified, but also understood by the readers.

17

Leone Ross, All the Blood Is Red, London: Angela Royal Publishing, 1996 (Le sang est toujours rouge, trans. Pierre Furlan with the collaboration of Lyonel Trouillot, Arles: Actes-Sud, 2003). 18 Andrea Levy, Small Island, London: Headline Book Publishing, 2004 (Hortense et Queenie, trans. F. Faure, Paris: La Table Ronde, collection Quai Voltaire, 2006).

A “Flavor of Diversity” 45 In the French version, syntactic structures and grammar respect normative rules, no sentence dislocation, which would have reflected the original form, is observed. Lexically speaking, French norms are respected. So, one can see how Nicola’s voice has been naturalized: its creole dimension has completely disappeared, though it is still presented as being Jamaican dialect (“du dialecte jamaïcain”), but nobody can hear it. Moreover, when the translator chose the word “dialecte” to translate “patois”, which refers to “creole”, and added the adjective “jamaïcain”, he located the speaker on the regional level, not the national. On top of that the verb “tombait” (“fell”) to translate “broke into” introduces the notion of fall in the passage from an acroletal system (the narrator’s) to a dialect, thus placing the “patois” on a lower level. Such insidious details invite the reader to get into the disquieting margin mentioned above, weighed down with stereotypes, to imagine this character and her speech (since it is reproduced in acrolectal English). This is all the more surprising as Lyonel Trouillot participated in the translation process for the passages, which Mavis, the mother, narrates in creole, but he obviously did not have his say elsewhere. Another example, taken in the second novel and translated by another translator, will show other distortions. ‘Me caan believe what me ear is hearing. You a man.’ (Levy, Small Island, 24) The man gon’ throw me out, Gilbert. That fool-fool ras clot say I must go. And by morning or him will call on the police. Police, I say—why him need the law on me? I am abiding as I must. He call me darkie and coon, so I tell him him must show respect. Him say him want respect. His house him shout on me until me ear burn with it. (Levy, Small Island, 441)

Peux pas croire ce que mes oreilles entendent. Toi un homme. (Levy, Hortense et Queenie, 38) Le mec voulait me foutre dehors, Gilbert. Il a dit qu’il allait appeler la police, le bâtard. Il m’a traité de négro. Je lui ai dit qu’il fallait qu’il me respecte. (Levy, Hortense et Queenie, 462)

Here two types of clichés can be observed. In the first passage, pidgin French, is spoken by a Jamaican adult addressing another Jamaican

Christine Raguet adult, which is quite unexpected since the translator chose to render their linguistic peculiarities in an incorrect form of French, which somehow sounds childish. In the first sentence, this is worked out by suppressing the subject “je”, though it is followed by a correct ending. The creole “me hear” is not translated, probably because there is no corresponding grammatical form in French. The only acceptable option in French might have been to introduce creole or creolized words. The second is in pidgin French: the personal pronoun is used as subject, which is not only incorrect, but also corresponds to no existing creole form; this incorrect construction is even enhanced by the dropping of the copula. In the second passage, the original has not only been transformed, but heavily shortened, so that the French simply summarizes the situation resorting to a kind of suburban slang, a cliché preventing the reader to make out the character’s geographic and cultural origin, but enclosing Kenneth in a kind of social ghetto. Having read these two examples, it is important to raise the question of individualities in translation with regard to fragmentation. First of all, one should try to imagine what the principles of atomization used in fluid mechanics would produce when applied to discourse. It would lead to a fragmentation of discourse, comparable to that of fluids in order to obtain a better dispersion so as to extend their spectrum. According to such a perspective, it would become rather easy to understand how, in translation, a mode of atomization of the constitutive elements of the enunciation could create not only linguistic but also cultural richness. This could easily rest on the importation into another language of the varieties initially contained in the original. But what in Segalen’s text could lead us to think it possible? Probably in his passage on Individualism. 46

Only those who have a strong individuality can sense Difference. In accordance with the law which says that every thinking subject presupposes an object, we must assert that the notion of Difference immediately implies a personal point of departure. Only those with a strong individuality can fully appreciate the wonderful sensation of feeling both what they are and what they are not. Exoticism is therefore not that kaleidoscopic vision of the tourist or of the mediocre spectator, but the forceful and curious reaction to a shock felt by someone of strong individuality in response to some

A “Flavor of Diversity”

47

object whose distance from oneself he alone can perceive and savor. (The sensations of Exoticism and Individualism are complementary). Exoticism is therefore not an adaptation to something; it is not the perfect comprehension of something outside one’s self that one has managed to embrace fully, but the keen and immediate perception of an eternal incomprehensibility.19

Not only is the external world, the outside, as well as the external text, different from the world of the receiver who will perceive it with his/her own set of references, but in this extract, there are a few details which require much attention, and they are certainly even more interesting as they constitute a web. The terms in question may play a considerable part when considered in the space of translation: “kaleidoscopic vision”, “strong individuality”, “distance”, “complementary elements”, “adaptation”, “perfect comprehension”, “eternal incomprehensibility”. They should be analyzed separately as regards their role in the translating process to be better appreciated. “Kaleidoscopic vision” To believe that “kaleidoscopic vision” would be a necessary condition to the good perception of the diverse in a fair translation, would amount to switching perceiving and perceived while wrongly thinking that the multiple forms and colours thus discerned simply and rightly reflect reality. Now, one must keep in mind that the notion of image pertains to the realm of the illusory or fabrication. So to read a text with a kaleidoscopic vision, would correspond to seeing it in infinite reflections, each of a different nature and in infinite combinations, comparable to the productions of a kaleidoscope, even if conceived as a metaphor. Effectively, the kaleidoscope is a human production which is meant to play with visual perception and in this action the perceiving eye/I manipulates the device as s/he wishes. Through this action s/he transforms the perceived, acting on the sensations, until an evolution from the senses to emotions is provoked. To illustrate this, a reading of Verlaine’s “Kaleidoscope”20 can help materialize such perspectives. In this poem written in 1873, the poet plays with perceptions and sensations: he locates them on the margins, in a pre

19

Segalen, Essay on Exoticism, 20-21 (Segelan’s emphasis). Paul Verlaine, Selected Poems, trans. C.F. MacIntyre, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1948. 20

Christine Raguet conscious zone, which may well anticipate William James’ studies.21 For Verlaine, who was then in prison, the captive of his thoughts and musings, the kaleidoscope creates a game of incoherent images.22 Therefore a similar type of situation such as self-retreat or selfdialogue may generate confusion between perceptions, sensations and emotions. Consequently, such a positioning would create a territory in which preconceptions can lead to dogmatic and exclusive attitudes in the translating procedure. The kaleidoscope works with the light spectrum in order to compose all sorts of visible combinations, but it may also contain fragments of coloured glass and make the same repetitive multicoloured shapes with these fragments thus evoking predetermined subjective observation when facing Others. As a result, these would be deprived of their original personality because they are artificially drawn from their original context and used with a preconceived purpose, such a process recalls Claude Lévi-Strauss’ words about the kaleidoscope: 48

The fragments are products of a process of breaking up and destroying, in itself a contingent matter, but they have to be homologous in various respects, such as size, brightness of colouring, transparency. They can no longer be considered entities in their own right.23

The fragments’ absence of entity “in their own right” is rich in consequences for translation, since this system establishes its own signifiers, deforming the signified according to their own functioning: this may lead a good number of translators not to take into consideration possible homologies and to re-create a new unity in order to unify the meaning according to their preconceptions.24 Accordingly, biased solutions are offered in order to satisfy the

21 William James’ Principles of Psychology was published in 1890; Verlaine’s collection Jadis et naguère in 1884. 22 See the appendix to this article. 23 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1962), Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1966, 36. 24 Here, I do not mean to re-appropriate Georges Mounin’s notion of coloured glass translation, the mark of a literal translation whose effect would be the reader’s disorientation.

A “Flavor of Diversity” 49 kaleidoscopic vision of the mediocre observer and please it with tawdry stereotypes made from these appealing coloured fragments. “Strong individuality” To speak of “strong individuality” amounts to considering the perceiving eye/I as unique and to attribute it/him/her an active role. The observer is not an indifferent being on whom are poured prearranged images conceived by the predominating ideology: his/her discriminating faculties are resilient enough to resist the various trends of dominating thought. A new way of rethinking individual identity will help to “establish new modalities of non identical identity”.25 When Ricœur declared “I shall henceforth take sameness as synonymous with idem-identity and shall oppose to it selfhood (ipseity), understood as ipse-identity”,26 we can consider that his research developed Segalen’s former concepts of sameness and selfhood, which he never fully analyzed but only introduced in order to reveal their differences. For him, sameness corresponds to a form of resistance to all evolution, to all that is Other and may convey changes; it is inscribed in its connection to the social environment and the fixity it entails and which, in the field of translation, may lead to the superimposing of ready-made notions or images on the Other, a procedure which will necessarily warp the cultural proposals included in the translation.27 Selfhood “indicates an element of plurality and diversity in the very heart of individual identity, which cannot be reduced only to just social identity”.28 Thus, for Segalen, to accede to exoticism is almost a question of personal determination, since the

25 Gérôme Truc, “Une désillusion narrative ? De Bourdieu à Ricœur en sociologie”, Tracés: Revue de Sciences Humaines, VIII (Spring 2005), 49 (my translation). Gérôme Truc introduces his article with a reference to a quotation by Luc Boltanski about the “linguistic turn” initiated in social sciences, especially alluding to philosophers like Ricœur, and going even as far as mentioning a “sociology of translation”. 26 Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, (1990) 1992, 3. 27 If replaced in terms of “sociology of translation” and in reference to Bourdieu’s habitus, it will be easy to understand that such translators will be largely influenced by the dominating doxa. For more on the subject, see the following: Jean-Marc Gouanvic, Pratique sociale de la traduction, Arras: Artois Presses Université, collection traductologie, 2007; Constructing a Sociology of Translation, eds Michaela Wolf and Alexandra Fukari, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. 28 Truc, “Une désillusion”, 48 (my translation).

Christine Raguet agent then escapes social determinism so as to be able to elaborate an individual mode of perception of the world, and so be open to the translation of the Other. Ricœur may offer the most adequate phrase when he justifies the gain that will ensue from the loss of any attempt at reaching a linguistic absolute in translation in his first article “Translation as challenge and source of happiness” and speaks of “linguistic hospitality”.29 In this perspective, the pleasure of dwelling in the Other’s language is compensated for by the pleasure of welcoming what is foreign – welcoming in one’s culture the word of the Other.30 50

“Distance” Welcoming in one’s culture what is foreign may be in contradiction with the notion of appreciative “distance” that Segalen wishes to be present and active in exotic observation. To understand its deeper meaning, we have to get back to voyeurism, a mode of observation which maintains the observing subject at quite a distance from what s/he observes so as to be hidden from the observed. Nevertheless this distance is wiped out by the keen desire to participate in the scene observed; in the process, the observer projects his/her own desire onto the scene or person observed, thus negating all sensation of the Diverse. This is exactly what Segalen deplores, but he comments on this form of concupiscence and appropriation to be found in the voyeur’s look. All that s/he perceives is fallacious since the object or person’s difference is exposed both to misunderstanding and annexation – in a form of subservience to the dominating thought. When applied to writing, such behaviour may correspond to the quest 29

Paul Ricœur, On Translation (2004), trans. Eileen Brennan, London and New York: Routledge, 2006, 10. 30 It is difficult to refrain from quoting a passage from Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other, in which the same idea is developed: “What is identity, this concept of which the transparent identity to itself is always dogmatically presupposed by so many debates on monoculturalism or multiculturalism, nationality, citizenship, and in general, belonging? And before the identity of the subject, what is ipseity? The latter is not reducible to an abstract capacity to say ‘I,’ which it will always have preceded. Perhaps it signifies, in the first place, the power of an ‘I can,’ which is more originary than the ‘I’ in a chain where the ‘pse’ of ipse no longer allows itself to be dissociated from power, from the mastery and sovereignty of the hospes (here, I am referring to the semantic chain that works on the body of hospitality as well as hostility” (Jacques Derrida, Monologualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin [1996], trans. Patrick Mensah, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, 14).

A “Flavor of Diversity” 51 for refined style or any other kind of prevalent trend prompted by the need to resist the Other’s foreignness, thus ending up in stylistic levelling. Such a stance may have comparable repercussions in translation, when, as noted earlier, the characteristics of the diverse in a language are either erased or transformed in two main directions described by Antoine Berman – homogenization and ennoblement.31 Conversely Victor Segalen reminds us that “It may be that freedom is one of the characteristics of the Exot, that is, being free with regards to the object that is felt or described, at least at that final phase when the Exot has moved away from the object.”32 His positioning tends to show that appreciative distance creates a margin, a space between, in which only the Exot, as Segalen means it, can have access and in which intercultural exchanges will bloom. In literary or translating creation, an ethical process maintaining the appreciative distance, will open up new perspectives and abundance, a regeneration through heterogenization, comparable to those which have developed in creolization: “I name creole language, a language whose constitutive elements are heterogeneous to each other.”33 His definition evokes a type of tesseration, as developed above. Moreover, Segalen’s “distance” could be understood as a kind of epistemic distance entailing some work on and with the intellect, which after having respected the right distance necessary to noninterference and precise analysis, will be activated in a procedure in which the reasonable mind will be able to resist tawdry stimuli (what the voyeur seeks). In this context, epistemic distance not only implies intellectual distance, but also ethical distance; in particular to take into account the heterogeneity of the receiver’s knowledge concerning the Other’s culture, and the weight of the norms in his/her own – each culture constituting a homogeneous whole. Thus, when translation reduces the distance between the Self and the Other, it runs the risk of 31

Homogenization and ennoblement are two of Berman’s thirteen deforming tendencies as classified in his 1984 book. The first arbitrarily destroys the text’s shapeless polylogy to pass from the diverse to the uniform; with the second, elegance prevails, it becomes the one and supreme norm. Berman opposes it to popularization, or the “blind recourse to pseudo slang”. In both cases, these tendencies match the dominating doxa. 32 Segalen, Essay on Exoticism, 34 (Segalen’s emphases). 33 Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers (1995), Paris: Gallimard, 1996, 20 (my translation).

Christine Raguet smothering all trace of alterity, or perhaps even all trace of this original language pre-existing before our first language instead of acting in interrelation, as evoked by Derrida: 52

… the prior-to-the-first language can always run the risk of becoming or wanting to be another language of the master, sometime that of new masters. It is at each instant of writing or reading, at each moment of poetic experience that the decision must arise against a background of the undecidable. It is often a political decision – and often a decision regarding the political side of things.34

In the making of creoles, original languages have resurfaced by tesseration to give birth to a new language. Thus in the making of a text through translation, why not take for granted the existence of the original language to give birth to a new text and then avoid the sterile subservience to the yoke of dominating norms? “Complementary elements” “Complementary elements” will associate in the margins and provide a full range of new translation techniques, corresponding to stylistic techniques to be found in the productions of Caribbean writers like phonographologic transformations,35 hybrid neologisms, hyperboles, repetitions, intensifiers. In this in-between zone and once the limits are smoothed out, “distinctions between English and Creole dissipate; and the differences between translation and original writing blurs”;36 then in this process of intercultural exchange, the poetics of transcreation as Haroldo de Campos described it can be developed a step further and lead to what I would call intercreation. In Segalen’s notes, the sensations of Exoticism and Individualism are shown as complementary and may be interchangeable. Yet they are not permeable, neither can they be superposed, and one cannot erase the other. When it is assumed that there is no pre-existing conflict for cultural and/or linguistic hegemony, these sensations, within the scope of the perception of the Diverse, are supposed to guarantee what 34

Derrida, Monologualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin, 62. Christine Raguet, “L’unicité du je-traduisant face à la nature protéiforme du texte de l’autre”, in The Self and Others, ed. Jaleh Kahnamouipour, Tehran: publication of the University of Tehran, 2007, 282-83. 36 Edwin Gentzler, Translation and Identity in the Americas, London and New York: Routledge, 2008, 175. 35

A “Flavor of Diversity” 53 Todorov37 noted in Segalen as “essential Exoticism”.38 “Essential Exoticism” is thus equated with otherness just as it establishes a “Parallelism between stepping back in time (Historicism) and moving out of space (Exoticism)”.39 In translation, one must keep in mind that there is no quest for a truth held by constraining monolingualism, which would restrain the original tongue (or mute tongue)40 from resurfacing. The mute tongue is the tongue of affects: it concerns the family and familiar world and has developed through centuries in the form of assembled fragments from various family branches and origins in order to give birth to a unique idiom. Some may refuse to recognize it as a language, but nevertheless it is vigorous and productive. It is a familiar tongue passed on in homes, but could also be this unknown pre-conscious language Derrida has mentioned; now to use this tongue may have implied transgression and may evoke a taboo, since it bears the “experience of an overstepping of limits”.41 Yet, as Glissant reminds us “today, we no longer write in a monolingual manner, but we are in the presence of all the languages of the world”,42 and we notice “cracks in the generalizing universal”, in consequence, it gives way to “the trace as thought. The trace supposes and conveys not only human thought, but the wandering of what exists.”43 In translation, such a trace will be observed in all forms of wandering, by gleaning elements of the original to bring out its cultural essence, evaluated in the light of all the cultures it contains. This is why the translating process can feed on Glissant’s ideas, which develop like a rhizome not as a unique root trying to reach the depths of the normative past sterilizing what surrounds it, but as a multitude of surface roots reaching the margins in order to meet “complementary elements” and thus create interrelations:

37 Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism and Exoticism in French Thought (1989), trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, 327. 38 Segalen, Essay on Exoticism, 24. 39 Ibid., 48. 40 Jacques Coursil, “L’Éloge de la muette”, La commotion des langues, Césure, Revue de la convention psychanalytique, 11 (1996), 149-66. 41 Derrida, Monologualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin, 32. 42 Édouard Glissant, “Traduire : relire, relier”, Onzièmes Assises de la Traduction Littéraire, Arles : ATLAS, Actes Sud, 1995, 25 (my translation). 43 Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers, 68 and 69 (my translation).

54

Christine Raguet Like any form of creolization, translation creates a parallel and a symbiosis between two distinct realities, most generally heterogeneous: the language of the original text and the language of the final text …. This initiates a linguistic relation and, as in any form of creolization, an unpredictable outcome, which enriches both languages.44

Moreover, I would like to add that in literature such complementary ramblings develop within literary works and in the relations that authorial speech may bring to light. If such speeches (either authorial or translational) feed on what Meschonnic termed “language-culture”, they open up on a further concept, the concept of “language/culture”, which pertains entirely to the author/translator’s habitus and thus attaches much importance to the author/translator’s creativity since each linguistic or cultural constitutive element is meant to keep its individual strength and value. When set together all these individualities become complementary to make the mosaicwhole introduced above. To reach the final stage, the translator acts just like the author did beforehand. S/he does not go back and forth between two poles, but rather interrelates “complementary elements” – this is the third way I alluded to earlier. These “complementary elements” meet to reconstitute a whole, which does not attempt to erase differences, but rather foregrounds them. “Adaptation” To pursue the exploration of the list of words selected from Segalen’s notes, which will help establish an “aesthetic of the Diverse” and help analyze its further developments in intercultural translation, I would like to dwell on a rather common notion in translation studies: “adaptation” and I am referring to the passage “Exoticism is therefore not an adaptation”.45 Here Segalen alludes to adaptation in situations when sameness (“mêmeté”), and the fixity it entails, prevents open reception of the Other but rather works out the projection of its own preconceptions on the Other, in a unidirectional movement. It is a manner for the same of squeezing Otherness into the Procustian Bed of ready-made exotic language and culture and to add this perverted form of exoticism to his/her traveller’s trunk. Thus the notion of 44 45

Glissant, “Traduire : relire, relier”, 27 (my translation). Segalen, Essay on Exoticism, 21.

A “Flavor of Diversity” 55 exoticism is shrunk as well as encumbered with “innumerable scoriae, flaws, stains, fermenting organisms, and molds that such continued use by so many mouths, so many prostituting tourist hands have left it with”.46 Segalen can discern the ravenous appetite one may have for new and extreme experiments, but through the projection of one’s cherished Self-Same on these Other perspectives. He can see it in the way amateurs of tropicalism have of revelling in the Other, not through the anthropophagic process evoked earlier, which is prompted by a desire to enrich one’s own culture with the Other’s culture, but only to consume new fabricated cultures in order to satisfy this predatory appetite. A form of greed in which the “I” becomes central to a non-exchange and which manifests itself through its own conception of otherness. In translation, “adaptation” is a polymorphous and polyvalent notion, based on two essential criteria: transmissibility and horizon of expectation, each taking as referent a mysterious and undefined addressee, made up by the adapting-I according to criteria preconceived in the cultural space of reception. Moreover in this perspective, one of transmissibility’s pre-requisites would certainly be efficiency. Consequently “adaptation” shrinks and limits the original since it favours a message construed within the frame of the linguistic system of rules of translation, and does not take into consideration its cultural characteristics. Now, … linguistic identity must not be mistaken for discursive identity. It means that language does not display cultural specificities, only discourse does. To put it differently, neither the morphology of words, nor the syntactic rules convey the cultural.47

Consequently, all elements deviating from the norm are problematic in translation and adaptors tend to domesticate them to make sure they will be understood. Besides, as Derrida maintained, “one of the limits of theories of translation: all too often they treat the passing from one language to another and do not sufficiently consider the possibility for languages to be implicated more than two in a text”48 – this is the case of literatures deeply set locally or issued from 46

Ibid., 19. Patrick Charaudeau, “Langue, discours et identité culturelle”, Ela, Revue de didactologie des langues-cultures, 123-24 (2001), 343 (my translation). 48 Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other (1987), eds Peggy Kampf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007, 196. 47

Christine Raguet diglossic or polylingual environments. Under the influence of linguistic studies, in translatology studies, the problem of the supremacy of language as a homogeneous and autonomous system has often been raised. Lawrence Venuti has evoked it in The Scandals of Translation. Linguistic coherence was regarded as a key factor, and translatologists tend to denounce this stance as being partial because of its scientific rigidity; thus Venuti accuses such approaches of trying to purify discourse, thus refusing the theory of the “remainder”.49 The concept of “remainder” is quite fit in the present discussion since it designates all discursive and linguistic forms that are marginalized because it is considered as having an inferior status compared to the normative standard. This amounts to creating a cultural and linguistic hierarchy, which is utterly irrelevant in literature (and much debatable elsewhere as well). Therefore, Venuti does not exclude the fact that the “remainder” may nevertheless influence standard language and slightly transform it.50 The adaptor is also the person who pretends to be defending the reality referred to – but what can that mean? Is not the translator under the influence of his/her senses? His/her own perception of the Other? Do not his/her senses affect his/her emotions? Then, prolific texts will raise the question of polyphony, multiplicity, influx of information for the senses, somehow interfering with emotions. Facing the danger of proliferation, the adaptor, prompted by the wish to render meaning clear, will privilege the general spirit of the text, without being burdened with cultural scoria, which may damage the flow of enunciation. In so doing the adaptor, clarifies, rationalizes, homogenizes, in short s/he smoothes apparently rough elements in order to keep what s/he thinks is the reality referred to in discourse, so that the reader can perfectly understand the utterance. 56

“Perfect comprehension” and “eternal incomprehensibility” Whereas the adaptor is mostly concerned with understanding, if we quote Segalen’s passage about “perfect comprehension” and apply it to translation – “Exoticism is therefore not … the perfect comprehension of something outside one’s self that one has managed

49

Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, London: Routledge, 1998, 25. This concept, like the polysystem theory, considers translation as the result and manifestation of intersystemic relations at a given time and in a given place. 50

A “Flavor of Diversity” 57 to embrace fully”51 – the question of comprehension cannot be evaded, since translation is, among other things, an act of communication. However, different conceptions about understanding lie rather at the level of “comprehensibility”, a word also used by Segalen, for a good number of translators will feel vested with a role of transmitter of knowledge. Effectively, to be able to speak and write a language unknown to one’s fellow-citizens is to be placed in a superior position, a place of power, since it gives access to data totally out of their reach. From this dominant position, the translator can feel vested with the task of transmitting as many pieces of information as possible, certainly quite a commendable attitude, but rather open to criticism when the literariness of a work is at stake and only the receiver is considered during the translating process. To show more clearly the opposite forces at work, in an article I published in French in 2007, I contrasted the “translator-I” and the “translating-I”, as two entities behaving differently when grappling with a text to be translated. I attempted to demonstrate that, prompted by the wish to promote perfect understanding, the “translator-I” “privileges what it names meaning, in all the uniqueness s/he attributes to the word, and thus tries to become the one who has knowledge, so that s/he makes selections, proceeds to eliminations especially when significance is so dense that the multiplicity of the signified leads the translator to become a little hermeneute”.52 Then s/he is superimposed on the “authorial-I” and thus imposes normative rules that will insure the linguistic balance of the language of translation. This is all the more detrimental when a text is deliberately composed in a polyphonic mode. Conversely, the “translating-I” would be prone to reject any form of normative tyranny so as to privilege the question of the literariness of the original and to evaluate the degree of literalness to be kept in translation. Literalness has nothing of a word-for-word translation, as Antoine Berman reminds us: Literal translation does not reproduce the artificiality of the original, but the logic presiding over the organization of this artificiality …. it shows that with this “shock of the foreign tongue”, the mother tongue, far from being alienated, reaches unsuspected strata of its being, strata

51 52

Segalen, Essay on Exoticism, 21. Raguet, “L’unicité du je-traduisant”, 278 (my translation).

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Christine Raguet which, in all probability, it could not attain within the limits of its own literature.53

Thanks to the union of the linguistic system and the text system literalness can be conceived and can lead to literariness. Then one can easily understand the fears at work in the minds of the “translator-I”, those little hermeneutes who dread alienating not only their person, but also their tongue and their culture to the Other’s, – and this, with the “I” in mind and regardless of the “You”, brings them to look for the perfect understanding, which is reached after having passed through the filter of their own mind. Such a relation between subject and object is effectively at the centre of Segalen’s preoccupations when he advocates “eternal incomprehensibility”, for we must rejoice at never being able to assimilate Others. There is no embrace here, but a mere improvement of our “ability to perceive Diversity”, which with the help of this constructive step will “infinitely enrich us with the whole Universe”.54 If applied to translation this enrichment can manifest itself in the constitution of a mosaic-whole. I would like to propose an illustration of such an attempt at tesseration. This is taken from my recent translation of Olive Senior’s Discerner of Hearts, published in French under the title Zigzag.55 I come brighter than all the other pickney around. And tree never grow in my face neither. Beg you a little food money there nuh before the light turn green. A who you calling dutty? A why you a wind up yu window and mek up yu face? You know say is Isabella Francina Myrtella Jones this you a talk to? And since when dutty bwoy like you think you can eggs-up so talk to Miss Catherine daughter that studying to turn teacher? Why you a turn yu head a gwan she you no see

J’étais plus intelligente que tous les autres ti-manmailles dans le voisinage. Et on n’a pas besoin de mettre ma tête dans un sac quand on est avec moi non plus. Je te demande un ti peu d’argent là han avant que le feu devient vert. Et c’est qui que tu appelles sale ? Et pourquoi est-ce que tu remontes ta vitre et que tu fais cette tête-là ? Est-ce que tu sais que c’est à Isabella Francina Myrtella Jones que tu es en train de parler ? Et depuis quand un garçon sale comme toi pense qui peut ’river à parler

53

Antoine Berman, La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain, Paris: Seuil, 1999, 141 (my translation). 54 Segalen, Essay on Exoticism, 21. 55 Olive Senior, Discerner of Hearts, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1995; Olive Senior, Zigzag, trans. Christine Raguet, Geneva: Zoé Éditions, 2010.

A “Flavor of Diversity” me? I know you see me all right for, though I don’t behave as if I notice, I know all you young men sitting on the bridge every day there eyeing me as I pass. (Senior, Discerner of Hearts, 76)

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comme ça à la fille de Miss Catherine qui apprend pour devenir maîtresse l’école ? Pourquoi tu tournes kabèche et tu vas dire que tu ne m’as pas vue ? Je sais que tu me vois très bien parce que quand même que je fais kondiré que je n’observe rien, je sais que vous tous les jeunes hommes assis sur le pont tous les jours-là vous me z’yeutez quand je passe. (Senior, Zigzag, 106)

In the original, one may immediately note that the speaker’s voice (Isabella is a beggar) is much creolized, but the author maintains a certain degree of grammaticality or spelling for the sake of comprehensibility. Consequently, her level of language is more mesolectal than basilectal. She keeps forms of standard English (acrolectal) thus enabling the reader to have a few selective landmarks to guide his/her reading. If a good number of phonographological markers (“mek”, “dutty”, “bwoy”) are there to render Isabella’s voicing and through them to place her both socially and geographically, they are not meant to be degrading. A few lexical and grammatical markers are introduced: they may reflect a poor mastering of standard English grammar though she pretends she was “studying to turn teacher”, but mostly function as representatives of Jamaican creole, such as “a gwan” which corresponds to a present continuous or “say” which is a simple conjunction between two clauses. In other words, Isabella’s tongue respects neither the rules of one language or the other, it is fabricated from individual complementary elements, which all together make a coherent whole. Such a process necessarily calls for fabrication in translation. In this attempt, very few grammatical warpings may be observed in translation (for instance “ne” in “ne … pas” is preserved as in the French spoken in the West Indies), these would have led in French to the production of a degraded level of language, something close to pidgin French. On the other hand, the main markers are lexical (“manmailles”, “kabèche”, “kondiré”, “z’yeutez”) which allows the introduction of other sounds, thus displacing perception towards Otherness. The existence of creole in the French Caribbean and the help of local linguistic usages (as the use of emphatic forms like

Christine Raguet “comme ça”, “han” or the dropping of the article in “tournes kabèche”) facilitate tesseration and the overall understanding of the translated text. The general idea of such practice would be to manage to create a lilt, a musical sway, which will take the reader to Otherness in an environment comparable to the original’s, but not guarantee perfect comprehension. In the above example, some words or phrases may seem problematic if taken individually, as independent tesserae, but once they are included into what becomes a mosaic-whole they participate in the making of the general meaning and their individuality is all the more enhanced. Nevertheless if some words remain rather obscure though they are perfectly inserted in the text and may make sense, they correspond to these indicators of the “eternal incomprehensibility” of the Other, which Segalen claimed. Such a translating process is based on an attempt at generating intercultural creation. 60

Conclusion In conclusion, how as regards Segalen’s essay on exoticism, does the effacement or the preservation of intercultural distance operate in translation? It manifests itself in two directions and in three different ways. The first direction corresponds to a movement of absorption of alterity, which is expressed in two almost opposite ways: the first seeking to negate otherness, the other seeking possession, corresponding to Cordonnier’s “closity”. The second direction seeks to elaborate an exchange through an opening on the Other, corresponding to Cordonnier’s “openity”. In the first case, absorption is practised according to domesticating principles, aiming at filling the distance, which is in fact necessary for the good perception of the Diverse, in order to gain a near-total visibility. With this negating action, the text will adapt to dominant precepts in order to domesticate what comes from elsewhere so as to smooth it and make it look and sound like a local production. In some cases we could almost speak of smothering otherness. In the second case, the existing distance is meant to be abolished according to voyeuristic principles, which means that alterity will only be rendered with the help of clichés only appealing because they sound strange, with the objective of creating a form of colonial exoticism. With this possessing action, the Other – in his/her human, natural, social or cultural form – will be dressed up so as to entertain the culture and language of reception and to introduce a

A “Flavor of Diversity” 61 touch of eccentricity coming from another sphere. There, the exo in eccentricity is endowed with yet another value in its relation to the receiving centre. Finally, the last attitude, following the steps of Victor Segalen, is prompted by a wish to perceive difference and the Diverse ethically. It takes the Other’s cultural values into account as they reveal themselves in a work whose richness would transcend local idiosyncrasies and singular identities, so that they can assume their function as constituents of discourse and narrative. These simple elements of characterization and contextual arrangement are assembled like precious tesserae taken from the original mosaic to reconstitute a mosaic-whole in which each initial fragment of the original can find its alter ego in the translated text – an alter ego, which has neither been sterilized nor cliché-ized. Subsequently, to reach intercultural dialogue in translation, or intercreation, the notion of creativity and the principle of invisibility must certainly be revised, and one may wonder how Segalen’s words about exoticism and sex can apply to the pleasure of the text: “Those who transformed the act of the flesh into a hygienic act lost everything in doing so; all they gained was that peaceful homogeneity in which the flavor of Diversity dies out.”56 In translation, if we remember that one of Berman’s thirteen deforming tendencies is homogenization,57 one may recognize that the successive producers of a text accept to foreground their intimate relation with the fictional as it carries representations, which may not only have a social function, but also a creative dimension, which will reveal itself in its “flavor of Diversity”. APPENDIX In a street, in the heart of a city of dreams, it will be as if one had lived there in past years: an instant at once very vague, very clear …

56

Segalen, Essay on Exoticism, 36. Homogenization is not included in Venuti’s translation as such. He only lists the twelve deforming tendencies presented in Berman’s article, “La Traduction et la lettre, ou l’auberge du lointain”, in Les Tours de Babel: Essais sur la traduction, Mauvezin: Trans-Europ-Repress, 1988. In his 1999 book, La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain, in his chapter “L’analytique de la traduction et la systématique de la déformation” (49-68), Berman lists thirteen tendencies, thus including “homogenization” (60). 57

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Christine Raguet Oh, this sun shining through a fog rising in steam! Oh, this voice in the woods, this cry on the sea! It will be as if one had forgotten the causes: he slowly wakes up from these metempsychoses, and things will be then as they all used to be in this street, in the heart of the magical town when the organ grinds jigs for the ends of the days, where the inns will have cats sleeping on the buffets, and bands of musicians stroll up and stroll down. It will be so inevitable, one almost feels he’ll die of it, while down his cheeks roll the tears, and the laughter sobbed out in the fracas of the wheels, invocations to death that will come with the years, with out-of-date- words like bouquets of dried flowers! From public dance-halls will come the shrill sounds, and widows whose foreheads the sun had burned brown, peasants, will push through the crowd of young whores who saunter there, chatting with frightful blackguards and old men without eyebrows, with dandruff for powder, while not two steps away, in the urinals’ odor, for some public fête they’ll be firing petards. It will be just like dreams when one wakes up to see what’s doing, then falls asleep, dreaming once more of the same old enchantment, the same old décor, summer, grass, the moiré of the buzz of a bee.58

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Paul Verlaine, “Kaleidoscope” (1873), in Verlaine, Selected Poems, 175-77.



ÉDOUARD GLISSANT AND THE IMAGINATION OF WORLD LITERATURE: RELATION, CREOLIZATION AND TRANSLATION SANDRA L. BERMANN

Prologue In an era of intensified interaction, immigration and, all too often, conflict across the globe, the study of World Literature can hold out hope for a broader and suppler form of education in the humanities. Perhaps for this reason alone, it is one of the major projects in comparative literature today. Indeed, a number of distinguished contemporary scholars, including Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch and Franco Moretti have offered particularly fruitful models for its development.1 Yet the project of World Literature continues to present challenges as well as promise. Historically associated with Goethe’s Weltliteratur and an era of emerging nation-states, it has traditionally focused on the canonized classics of European literature.2 Though a much broader range of texts has now entered the field, a frequent focus on only a This essay, “In Memory of Édouard Glissant: 1928-2011”, extends and re-examines several issues developed in an earlier article, “‘Mapping the World’ and Translation”, in Mapping the World, Culture, and Border-Crossing, eds Steven Totosy de Zepetnek and I-Chun Wang, Kaohsiung: National Sun Yat-sen University, 2010, 4-16. I gratefully acknowledge permission to re-use portions of that article here. I have also presented versions of this paper at workshops and conferences in Taiwan, Korea, Wisconsin and New Jersey, where I received the helpful comments and critiques of colleagues. 1 See Pascale Casanova, La Republique mondiale des lettres, Paris: Seuil, 1999; David Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003; Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, London: Verso, 1998; also Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, London: Verso, 2005. 2 See J.W. Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann (1822-32), trans. John Oxenford, San Francisco, CA: North Point, 1984.

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few national literatures still reduces its reach; center-periphery models of influence constrain it; and insufficient attention to language and text all too frequently restricts it to thematic studies. For literatures not already part of the European canon or written in dominant languages, these difficulties loom largest. In recent years, a series of critiques and responses to World Literature has extended its scope, and deepened its textual and linguistic analyses. The work, for instance, of Gayatri Spivak, Ngūgī wa Thiong’o, Karen Thornber, and Emily Apter has contributed importantly to these efforts.3 To this list we might well add the writing of Édouard Glissant. Though he seldom addressed the topic of World Literature in the disciplinary sense described above, he has offered, I believe, a number of important ways to re-think it.4 Not only did much of his writing, especially in his later years, take the planet as its ambit while decentring it from its European-American focus. But his concepts of Relation and Creolization have also challenged limiting ideas of national, cultural and linguistic identities, along with center-periphery models of influence. For scholars hoping to underscore the role of language, text and translation in World Literature, his work holds out some particularly intriguing prospects. Yet to date, his work has not been debated within the context of World Literature to the degree it might,5 though it has received considerable attention in postcolonial

3 Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003; Ngūgī wa Thiong’o, Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms, Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1993; and Ngūgī wa Thiong’o, “The Language of Languages”, in To Be Translated or Not to Be, ed. Esther Allen, Barcelona: Institut Ramon Llull, 2007, 131; Karen Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, 2009; Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. 4 See the manifesto signed by Glissant, among others: “Toward a ‘World Literature’ in French” which declared the death of “francophone literature” and the birth of “world literature in French”, a very different concept of World Literature than that described here. (On this issue, see Françoise Lionnet, “World Literature, Francophonie and Creole Cosmopolitics”, in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, eds Theo D’haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir, 2010, 323-36.) 5 Unfortunately, only a small selection of Glissant’s work has been translated into English. Though his work has not been much discussed in the context of World Literature, an important exception to this is the inclusion of his “Cross-Cultural

Glissant and the Imagination of World Literature 65 and Caribbean studies. The following pages attempt to redress this imbalance in some small part and to prompt further research and discussion. In order to pursue Glissant’s insights closely with a view to their pertinence for World Literature, my essay follows three intertwined terms of his poetics: 1) Relation itself, which presents Glissant’s planetary, at times Utopian, vision of languages, cultures and identities; 2) Creolization, which plays out the processes of Relation while signaling the decisive role of language, culture and multilingualism; and 3) Translation, which reveals, reconfigures and extends the ongoing processes of Creolization and Relation in the more material dimensions of language. 1. Relation Glissant’s best-known theoretical book in the United States, Poetics of Relation, begins with the image of a boat and a stark journey into the past.6 The boat described is a slave ship, drawing its captives into a triple abyss of the unknown: the belly or womb of the boat that stifles all cries, the ocean depths where so many lost their lives, and the pure unknown lying before its bow. But as Glissant portrays it, the experience of the abyss and the terror of its unknowns yields suffering but also a new knowledge. It is the knowledge of Relation. From our memory of the abyss, human connections may emerge. Indeed, Relation over time can, for Glissant, transform fundamentally. The muffled cry from the slave ship/abyss metamorphoses into the cry of poetry. Open boats sail, bringing knowledge to all: “We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.”7 (“Nous crions le cri de poésie. Nos barques sont ouvertes, pour tous nous les naviguons.”8) Beginning with this evocation of the Middle Passage, one that recalls both traumatic suffering and transformation, Poetics of Relation offers themes of history, language, poetry, and knowledge that are intrinsic to Glissant’s work. Many have a clearly aspirational Poetics: National Literatures”, in The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, ed. David Damrosch, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. 6 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, 2. 7 Ibid., 9. 8 Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation, Paris: Gallimard, 1990.

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quality. As his translator, Betsy Wing puts it, “Glissant sees imagination as the force that can change mentalities, relation as the process of this change; and poetics as a transformative mode of history”.9 Though sometimes admittedly idealistic, Glissant’s discussions of Relation nonetheless suggest intriguing new frameworks for rethinking a number of issues, including World Literature. They also gain a surprising degree of worldly specificity through the allied themes of Creolization and, especially, Translation. But what, in fact, does Glissant mean by the term “Relation”? And how might it frame – or open up – new ways to think about World Literature, language, and translation? Of the many ways in which Glissant explores the term “Relation” (beyond the most basic sense of connection or tie), the three I will emphasize here are, first, a new mapping that counters our usual reliance upon the identity of nationstates with a focus on encounters between interconnected linguistic and cultural regions. A second use of “Relation” refers more specifically to identity formations. Here Glissant relativizes notions of cultural identity to account for encounters with Otherness. A third use of the term “Relation” occurs in Glissant’s rewriting of official, linear history as a broken history, a narrative Relation constructed from linguistic fragments, images, and memory traces. Mapping: or challenging the identity of the nation-state As Glissant suggests in “The Open Boat”, the Caribbean islands face the flux of the sea, in constant touch with its terrifying history – as well as the unknown encounters of the future. But for Glissant, the islands and sea reach well beyond their local context. In his theoretical statements, he analogizes, through an adept and de-centering catechresis, different landscapes to different modes of thinking. There is, for instance, what he calls “continental” thinking – systematic, linear and dependent on filiation and genesis, organized around ideas of the One. He associates this thinking with nations of the Mediterranean. Opposed to this, Glissant proposes an “archipelagan” viewpoint – one that is non-systematic, changeful, open to multiple unexpected influences. Contrasting the unitary and totalizing with the preferred contingency and disjunction of encounter, innovation, 9

Glissant, Poetics of Relation, xii.

Glissant and the Imagination of World Literature 67 unpredictable change,10 he associates this term with images of the islands. Glissant’s “archipelagan” perspective gains theoretical power by evoking Deleuze’s and Guattari’s discussion of the rhizome. As he puts it in Poetics of Relation: “The root is unique, a stock taking all upon itself and killing all around it.” The rhizome is “an enmeshed root system, a network spreading … with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently”. Evoking this distinction, Glissant claims it as the philosophical basis of his own Poetics: “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.”11 The image of the rhizome appears in the mapping of the Caribbean islands, where no single island acts as root or identity of all. Rather there is a network and an unpredictable tangling of particular cultures and economies. On this rhizomatic conception, Glissant leverages the spatial, globalizing reach of his central term, “Relation”. Importantly, he extends it not only to the geography of the Caribbean, its most frequent, and purposely de-centring image, but also to nations and continents. Extending this concept of the archipelago well beyond the Caribbean, he writes: Ce que je vois aujourd’hui, c’est que les continents “s’archipélisent”, du moins du point de vue d’un regard extérieur. Les Amériques s’archipélisent, elles se constituent en régions par-dessous les frontières nationales. Et je crois que c’est un terme qu’il faut rétablir dans sa dignité, le terme de région. L’Europe s’archipélise. Les régions linguistiques, les régions culturelles, par-delà les barrières des

10

Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 33-34; Édouard Glissant, “Creolization in the Making of the Americas”, in Race, Discourse and the Origin of the Americas, eds Vera Lawrence and Rex Nettleford, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institute, 26869. 11 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 11; Glissant, Poétique de la Relation, 23: “La racine est unique, c’est une souche qui prend tout sur elle et tue alentour …. [Le] rhizome … est une racine démultipliée, étendue en réseaux … sans qu’aucune souche y intervienne en prédateur irrémédiable”; “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.”

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Unlike the thought of nation-states (which conjures rootedness), the thought of islands of language and culture presents an openness to encounter and interaction with that which is Other. When considering the study of World Literature, such an archipelagan approach suggests a counter-weight for, or at least a new complexity within, traditions associated with the nation-state. That is, if one of the main critiques of World Literature has been its tendency to emphasize national traditions (as if these were single and unitary), Glissant’s insights reinforce an awareness of a broad constellation of interacting languages and cultures that undermines nationalist narratives, as it also subverts essentialist multicultural ones. Theo D’haen, for instance, argues that by placing American literature in the broader context of linguistic and cultural relations within and beyond the United States, and within a “horizon of contending possibilities, with ‘America’ both battle and meeting ground”, Glissant’s theories provide a means to transcend narrow nationalist bounds as they also indicate their dependence on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome.13 A similar Glissantian approach might well be brought to other national contexts or, indeed, to conceptualizing World Literature itself, producing it as a mobile, polylingual and polycultural field, rather than one attached to a hegemonic center. I will return to the usefulness of this perspective when I focus on translation at the end of this article. 12

Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers, Paris: Gallimard, 1998, 44: “What I see is that today the continents are being ‘archipelagized’, at least as perceived from the outside. The Americas are archipelagizing themselves, are constituting themselves into regions beyond national borders. And I believe that this term of ‘region’ needs to be given some dignity. Europe is archipelagizing. Linguistic regions, cultural regions, beyond the barriers of nationhood, are islands – but open islands, this being their main condition for survival” (Glissant, “Introduction to a Poetics of the Diverse”, trans. Pierre Joris, Boundary 2, XXVI/1 (Spring 1999), 11921). 13 Theo D’haen, “Deleuze, Guattari, Glissant and Post-‘American’ Narratives”, in Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, ed Herbert Grabes, Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1997, 387-99.

Glissant and the Imagination of World Literature 69 Identities of cultures and languages: encountering Others Glissant’s discussion of archipelagan thought, with its re-mapping according to interacting cultural and linguistic regions rather than national borders or, indeed, models of center and periphery, is transformative in its own right. It also offers new ways to define identities – not through lines of filiation and rootedness, which typify most Western notions of identity, but through ongoing encounters with Others. Relation as Glissant describes it does not mean harmony or virtue.14 This is important to underscore. Rather, it suggests an awareness of contending interactions, interconnections and mobility. Associating his Poetics of Relation with Chaos theory as well as the rhizome, Glissant imagines particulars interacting within constellations, resisting the possibility of generalization or prediction. Rejecting in this way an assimilation of particulars into universals, or into fixed hierarchies, Glissant also rejects an identitarian politics that would make each individual cultural or linguistic particular into an impenetrable monad.15 Such an emphasis would – again – only devolve into a world of Root identities, common to nation-states and colonizing cultures. Such identities, typically sustained through narratives of nation and nationalism, bring myths of creation, strong lines of filiation, belief in an entitlement to territory, and the desire to conquer. A rise in power has historically emerged with these identities, as has expansion, colonization – and an encouragement, indeed often a legal requirement, of monolingualism. Opposed to this, Glissant encourages the reader to consider something different: a rhizomatic or Relational identity, where the

14

Celia Britton underscores this point, quoting Glissant’s words, “Relation is not virtuous or moral … a poetics of Relation does not presuppose an immediate or harmonious end to domination” (Édouard Glissant, Black Salt, trans. Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999, 106). See Celia Britton, “Globalization and Political Action in the Work of Édouard Glissant”, Small Axe, XXX/13:3 (November 2009), 2. 15 For debates about the place of the particular in Glissant’s thought, see Peter Hallward, “Édouard Glissant between the Singular and the Specific”, The Yale Journal of Criticism, XI/2 (Fall 1998), 441-64; Lorna Burns, “Becoming-postcolonial, Becoming-Caribbean: Édouard Glissant and the Poetics of Creolization”, Textual Practice, XXIII/1 (February 2009), 99-117; Eric Prieto, “Édouard Glissant, Littérature-monde, and Tout-monde”, Small Axe XXXIII/14:3 (November 2010), 11120; and Celia Britton, “Globalization and Political Action in the Work of Édouard Glissant”, and Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.

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experience of multiple contacts among cultures works against singular creation myths. Dependent not upon a genealogical root but upon a network of cultural and linguistic interactions, such Relational identities open themselves to ambient interactions. Circulation and the give and take of dialogic exchange replace the quest for territory and conquest. Through such oppositions between Root and Relation identities, Glissant clearly speaks not so much to current realities, but rather appeals to his reader’s imagination and ethical commitment to the future. As he puts it: … can we not imagine a new dimension of identity, open to the truth, or simply the presence of the Other? An identity that would not be the projection of a unique and sectarian root, but of what we call a rhizome, a root with a multiplicity of extensions, in all directions? Not killing what is around it, as a unique root would, but establishing communication and relation? It seems to me that man’s mind, and especially his imagination, must assume this challenge, not only on behalf of the Americas, but of the entire world. And if one says that that is a utopian idea, it should be remembered that no change in human history has occurred without utopian ideals.16

In such an imagined dimension, not only does the archipelagan region rather than the nation prevail: Relational identities born out of multiple encounters with Others also work against the violence of root identities devoted to conquest. Networks, cultural contacts, circulation and interaction are the modes of this emergent sense of identity, created by the mobility of persons as well as the translation and transmission of literary and cultural texts. Importantly, such interactions do not entail assimilation or subjection. Glissant’s discussions of Relational interactions and dialogical involvement in fact refer to what he calls the “opacity” of each particular culture, language or person. By the term “opacity”, he suggests depth and distinctiveness, though not isolation or hegemony. It is an irreducible Otherness – or untranslatability – that must always be recognized.17 Such opacities must, he believes, be respected. Only in this way, as equals in respect and independence, do cultures and persons achieve free dialogue and transformative exchange.

16 17

Glissant, “Creolization in the Making of the Americas”, 271. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 189-94.

Glissant and the Imagination of World Literature 71 Glissant thus constructs a planetary vision in which interacting constellations of particulars (texts, languages, cultures, peoples) replace not only nations but hegemonic centers and peripheries as they construct open, self-questioning identities. In large part, this notion of Relation remains visionary, though he rightly notes that recent historical changes could help to realize it. In the twenty-first century, it has, for instance, become more interesting – and certainly more feasible – to understand other cultures than to conquer or discover them. And thanks to the media, contacts among cultures happen frequently. Moreover, such events and information affect individuals, not only communities. Given all of this, identities might eventually grow more interactive and knowledge more easily shared. The very thought of the Other compels us to see the world in greater complexity, rather than simply as a product of our own viewpoint. But such awareness can also lodge within us more deeply, becoming an “Other of thought” that challenges and transforms our thinking into ethical action, and integrates a sense of alterity – or indeed, alterities – within our individual sense of self.18 Though Glissant seldom details the ways in which cultural interactions occur or new identities form, he regularly underscores their power. Indeed, such encounters produce the very future of thought. And if these transformative encounters regularly occur through the movement of peoples – in migration, trade, and travel – they also occur through the circulation of texts. Here, the translation and transmission of texts, intrinsic to World Literature, have essential roles to play.19 Histories Though Glissant’s texts frequently highlight spatial metaphors, it is essential to note that history makes equally strong claims. Linked directly to his imagery of space, it too depends upon concepts of Relation and is, in fact, often related in new linguistic and generic forms.20 Not at all a traditional history with a capital “H”, Glissant’s 18

Ibid., 154-55. See Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 4. 20 See especially his poetic collection: Édouard Glissant, Poèmes Complets, Paris: Gallimard, 1994, recently translated as The Collected Poems of Édouard Glissant, trans. Jeff Humphries and Melissa Manolas, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005; also Glissant, Black Salt. 19

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history is adamantly non-linear, and one in which memory plays a powerful role. In some ways like Foucault, but closer yet to Said’s (Deleuzian)21 plea for a “contrapuntal and nomadic” historiography, Glissant describes complex, multi-layered histories without single origins – and without lines of causation moving from a beginning point to the present. Glissant’s planetary vision, like the image of the open boat that launches Poetics of Relation, takes on board the particular, non-linear, diffracted histories and languages of the Caribbean. Thus, rather than privileging the official French history of discovery, his work relates the interwoven histories of the islands’ settling, the eradication of the indigenous population, the development of the slave trade, and the multiple immigrations that ensued. Such a historical Relation does not follow lines of filiation to a single source. It builds through an accretion of remembered fragments. According to Glissant – and here he is anything but utopian – these tragically diffracted histories must be related, faced and accepted, as the basis for the present and as hope for the future. In his poetic texts, as well as in narratives and theoretical essays, he pieces together the traumatic broken histories of the islands. For these spliced memories, like knowledge itself, can be shared. And when shared, the past of Others can influence our individual sense of identity and connectedness: “We each need the memory of the other”, as Glissant writes. Indeed, he urges us, “Let’s remember together, from all the coasts of these seas! Memory is an archipelago.”22 That memory resides in myriad cultural and linguistic texts and that their circulation might share diverse memories hardly needs emphasis. But the role that texts as “lieux de memoir” might play in the conceptualization of World Literature is seldom acknowledged, and the particular, memorializing effects of translation have only begun to be explored. 23 21

See D’haen’s essay, “Deleuze, Guattari, Glissant and Post-‘American’ Narratives”, which effectively connects Said’s “nomadic” history to the same matrix in Deleuze and Guattari. 22 Quoted by Bonnie Thomas, “Édouard Glissant and the Art of Memory”, Small Axe, XXX/13:3 (November 2009), 33 and 36. 23 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: ‘Les Lieux de memoire’”, trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations, XXVI (Spring 1989), 7. For some earlier contributions to the role of history in translation, see, for instance, Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books, 1968; Jacques Derrida, “Living On: Border Lines”, in

Glissant and the Imagination of World Literature 73 In sum, through its use of conceptual mapping, new modes of identity formation as well as historical memory, Glissant’s conception of Relation offers theoretical tools for thinking World Literature in more temporal as well as less hegemonic terms. These directions gain greater specificity through his discussions of language and Creolization. 2. Creolization As Glissant explores the past, one of the most frequently mentioned elements is language. Indeed, it is not only cultures and identities that are juxtaposed and endlessly tangled in the Relational world he offers. Languages are as well. Throughout history, multilingualism has, he says, been the work of Relation.24 And by multilingualism I mean here to elaborate upon two aspects of Glissant’s thought: first, the multiple languages that live within what we call a “single” language and second, the thousands of languages in our world as a whole, including those many on the verge of extinction. In their openness to Otherness in both of these dimensions, linguistic identities act as Relation identities – both in their complex histories and in their current and future planetary encounters. Within Glissant’s poetics, “Creolization” is the term that suggests an ongoing creative process joining languages from several sources.25 It plays an active, hybridizing role. For the student of World Literature, it can yield insight into questions of texts, cultures, identities and histories, beginning from the reference point of language. In this sense, it can suggest how we might approach individual texts from dramatically diverse and often hybrid languages and cultures as well as from more apparently unified ones. At the same time, it underscores a desired multilingualism. Given the Deconstruction and Criticism, eds Harold Bloom et al., New York: Continuum, 1979; The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985; “Des Tours de Babel”, in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. More recently, see Bella Brodzki, Can these Bones Live?, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. 24 He writes in Poetics of Relation, 214: “The Poetics of Relation requires all the languages of the world. Not to know or to ponder them, but to know (feel) that it is essential for them to exist. That this existence determines the accents of any writing.” 25 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 89-127; Glissant, “Creolization in the Making of the Americas”, 268-75; Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. Michael Dash, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.

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hegemony of Anglo-American English in the contemporary world, Glissant’s emphasis on the need to remain alert to the world’s endangered languages – but also to think and write with an awareness of the world’s multilingualism, even as it invests our single languages – is increasingly crucial. Language histories As Glissant describes them, what he calls Creole languages themselves have particular, broken histories.26 In the Caribbean, they arise with the Middle Passage, when languages from sub-Saharan West Africa combined with those of francophone Norman and British sailors to create a dynamic amalgam. A second American stage corresponds to the discourse of plantation culture. Here linguistic indirection, multiple detours and the very orality of the language developed through the vastly unequal power relations between dominant and slave cultures. And although the plantation has vanished, the complex combinations typical of Creolization are, according to Glissant, still at work in our megalopolises. They continue across the Americas: From Mexico City to Miami, from Los Angeles to Caracas, from Sao Paulo to Kingston, from New Orleans to San Juan, where the inferno of cement slums is merely an extension of the inferno of the sugarcane or cotton fields. All the Americas contain micro-cultures … where languages are emerging or dying, where the old and rigid sense of identity is confronting the new and open way of Creolization.27

As this quotation suggests, Glissant in fact extends the term “Creolization” metaphorically beyond its specific, traumatic history to convey the planetary: the encounters, métissage and innovation ongoing in the world’s many languages and cultures today. He also presents the history of the Americas in an open, polylingual guise. Both rhizomatic and Relational, Creolization thus takes on a general meaning: “If we speak of creolized cultures (like that of the Caribbean for example), it is not to define a self-contained category which by its

26

For Glissant, Creole languages are not synonymous with Creolization, though they often serve as examples of its processes. They also allow him to explain his views in the context of opposing, more essentialist or rooted constructions of Creole and Creolité. 27 Glissant, “Creolization in the Making of the Americas”, 274.

Glissant and the Imagination of World Literature 75 very nature would be opposed to other categories (pure cultures) but to assert that today the infinite vistas of interrelating are open to the human mind.”28 While born of local histories, Creolization works globally, subverting attempts to glorify any single, essentialist or unique origin that a language, nation or group seeks to claim. It presupposes instead a mixture of fragments, encounters and the transformations that add something new. At many points in his work, Glissant clarifies not only Creolization’s historical, fragmentary beginnings or its manifestations within the very real secondary or tertiary infernos of plantation culture, but also its creativity. For instance: As long as a creole language continues to combine the forms of two (or more) linguistic traditions, the product of this synthesis is a new kind of expression, a supplement to the two (or more) original roots, or series of roots, from which this creole language was born …. Therefore, creolization, which overlaps with linguistic production, does not produce direct synthesis, but résultantes, results: something else, another way.29

The mixing, the combining associated with Creolization make possible the creation of new linguistic – and cultural – expressions. In this way, Creolization overlaps in many ways with the concept of hybridity as developed by Homi Bhabha. Though each points to the ongoing métissage arising from encounters with alterity, and the new that comes from this, Creolization differs in its ongoing reference to the historical particular.30 Multilingualism within a language While frequently focusing on the dynamic linguistic métissage typical of Caribbean and post-colonial situations, Creolization also underscores the complexity and transformative potential of every

28

Quoted in Michael Dash, Édouard Glissant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 148. 29 Glissant, “Creolization in the Making of the Americas”, 169-70. 30 See Anjali Prabhu, “Interrogating Hybridity: Subaltern Agency and Totality in Postcolonial Theory”, Diacritics, XXXV/2 (Summer 2009), 76-92. His analysis includes reference to Glissant’s emphasis on historical particulars, but also to a Utopian Totality, and to the individual ethical act that transforms.

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language and culture. In this way, it can point to internal as well as external linguistic encounters. Glissant’s descriptions of Creolization remind us, that is, of the need to think of a language as itself multilingual, and without a closed identity. In fact, all languages are woven with more than one linguistic strand from more than one historical moment. They embrace differing registers of class, gender, and occupation, remnants of past linguistic exchanges, as well as frequent translations of oral into written forms. In this sense, Creolization evokes the cultural diversity, linguistic complexity and historical inequalities that inhabit all languages, even those not strongly marked by colonialism or pretending to linguistic purity. In all languages the languages of Others invariably speak and have a role in questioning apparently closed identities. Many have noted such internal plurilingualism within what we ordinarily call a “single” language – from Dante Alighieri, who was well aware of the “polylinguismo” in his emergent vernacular, to the philosopher Denis Thouard, who reminds us today that all languages are palimpsests, “differ[ing] more within themselves than between one another”, to Alain Rey, the linguist-editor of the dictionary Le Petit Robert, who describes French as “multiple, diverse, métisée, its lexicon is a millefueille”.31 Any language, closely considered, is fissured, divided, multilingual. Moreover, even in a language we call “our own”, there is always something Other that requires distancing and reflection and that prompts new words to translate it, to “say it in another way”, to describe it better, to say more. As Jacques Derrida relates in Monolingualism of the Other – which was a text first read at a colloquium organized by Glissant and that quotes him in its epigraph – there is an important aspect of all language that remains opaque, unattainable.32 In language, Otherness in this particular sense will always play a role. Welcomed and reflected upon, it may become an “Other of thought” as Glissant would say, capable of questioning our assumptions, thereby acting to distance us from illusions of linguistic purity while opening us to further linguistic and cultural connections.

31

See François Ost, Traduire: Défense et illustration du multilinguisme, Paris: Fayard, 2009, 138. 32 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or the Prosthesis of Origin, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Glissant and the Imagination of World Literature 77 The multilingual planet Regardless of how fundamentally this awareness informs – and transforms – individual identities, the Otherness inscribed in language opens it to new words and syntax that explore the multiplicity of our world and that strangeness abiding in language itself. Writers such as Proust, Borges and Joyce, as well as Glissant himself, have brought this linguistic strangeness – and creative supplementarity – to our attention. True, the language of art typically builds upon and beyond its complex past as well as its everyday communicative and representational function. But this tantalizing Otherness, existing to some degree within all language, opens it to external as well as internal linguistic encounters. In the modern world, the potential for such interaction has been materially heightened by media and publishing, making us aware of many languages. Yet, in a world in which English dominates, and where languages are dying at an ever-increasing rate, Glissant’s insistence on plurilingualism is also a call to action. Indeed, according to Glissant, all authors today not only have the potential – they also have the obligation – to write with an awareness of the world’s multiple languages. Moreover, the many cultures and languages of the world that now exist must be preserved. They must, in his view, be treated with respect for their individual dignity and opacity. Like peoples and cultures, languages must resist universalization. Each language expresses something distinct, irreplaceable. Glissant thus firmly rejects both the universalizing zeal associated with the traditional Tower of Babel story and the usual, post-Babel notion of linguistic plurality as tragedy. Rather, he envisions polylingualism as the very chance for the future, seeing in it: … vast and dizzying possibilities … opening up, transcending fierce struggles against economic domination. This is not the pre-apocalyptic dizziness which precedes the fall of the Tower of Babel, but rather the tremor of creativity confronted with these boundless possibilities. The Tower can be built in all languages.33

In such a world, languages expand and interact with one another, as the multiple languages inscribed in each single language foreshadow the potential for linguistic interaction and encounter in the planet as a

33

Glissant, “Beyond Babel”, World Literature Today, LXIII/4 (Fall 1989), 563.

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whole. In the increasingly interconnected world of today, Creolization thus captures for Glissant the desired “becoming” of each language. But it also conjures a planetary multilingualism, a creative mixing that reaches back in time at least to the birth of the European vernaculars.34 Above all, Creolization reveals the ongoing human potential to encounter something Other and, from that, to create more open, interwoven identities. It resists linguistic (and national) purities. From the perspective of World Literature, it issues a call to increase that potential interaction by resisting reliance on only the usual (often European and American) hegemonic texts, languages and cultures and extending our reading – and translations – to as many of the world’s languages and cultures as possible. As such, Creolization presents us with a perspective that can help us read the world’s literatures and cultures more effectively: with an awareness of their innate multiplicities, and their complex histories. It also urgently claims commitment to a planetary multilingualism at a time when many of the world’s languages are quickly becoming extinct under the pressures of globalization and the concomitant rise of English as a global language. Though we cannot individually support, read and discuss all the World’s texts and languages, we certainly can maintain the desire to do so. As Glissant reminds us, “not knowing the totality is not a weakness” but “not wanting to know it certainly is”.35 For the scholar and teacher, attention to the diversity of texts and languages can produce more intimate close readings. And if we linger with these readings and the particular histories they disclose, new knowledge and memories will be shared. Might such sharing transcend, as Glissant imagined, the fierce worldly struggles for economic domination? Maybe not. But attention to the planet’s polylingualism can produce a perspective that refuses to see its own cultural standpoint as universal and that instead finds its bearings within as many as possible of the world’s languages and cultures, and its most profound questions through the sharing of their diffracted, often tragic memories.

34 35

Glissant, “Creolization in the Making of the Americas”, 273. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 154.

Glissant and the Imagination of World Literature 79 3. Translation As I have tried to suggest, however briefly, Glissant’s poetics can open some new vistas (though I do not suggest they offer ready solutions) for World Literature’s ongoing challenges. In the light of Relation, open linguistic and cultural regions rather than bordered nation-states might, that is, become new spaces to study for transnational interactions. Similarly, thinking in terms of interacting constellations of cultures and languages might replace an attachment to hegemonic centers and peripheries as it challenges assumptions of univocal identities. A focus on the past might embrace diffracted histories imbued with cultural memory. At the same time, explorations of language and Creolization might invite a greater textual specificity and sense of linguistic Otherness. In the process, literary and linguistic study, especially conceived in terms of World Literature, might gain the potential to engage a broader range of texts, to present them at close range, and in more egalitarian fashion. To this point, I have not discussed the role of translation. Yet translation has been essential to almost all descriptions of World Literature – from Goethe to the present. It animates Casanova’s and Moretti’s most interesting case studies, contributes centrally to Damrosch’s definition of the field as “all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language”,36 and lies at the heart of many recent critiques and reflections, including those of Spivak, Apter, Ngugi and Thornber. It is central to Glissant’s writing as well, and not only because it has the salient potential to bring more of the world’s many multilingual texts to more readers than could otherwise occur. But translation also casts new light on Relation and Creolization, while prompting new insights into our readings of source texts, translations, and their roles in our planet’s interwoven literary histories. Defining translation In fact, Glissant does not lavish many words on translation. But he could not be clearer about its importance. He understands translation as Creolization and Relation par excellence. As he notes, it is actively involved in today’s world, with its migrating peoples and mobile texts. It works through the same openness to dialogue and 36

Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 4.

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transformation that Glissant associates with Relation and Creolization. And it operates with a creativity often ascribed in the West to the creative writer alone. As he puts it in Introduction à une poétique du divers (Introduction to a Poetics of the Diverse): Le langage du traducteur opère comme la créolisation et comme la Relation dans le monde, c’est-a-dire que ce langage produit de l’imprévisible …. [L]a traduction est une véritable opération de créolisation, désormais une pratique nouvelle et imparable du précieux métissage culturel .... [L]a traduction s’inscrit ainsi et de plus en plus dans la multiplicité de notre monde. La traduction est par conséquent une des espèces parmi les plus importantes de cette nouvelle pensée archipélique. Art de la fugue d’une langue à l’autre, sans que la première s’efface et sans que la seconde renonce à se présenter. Mais aussi art de la fugue parce que chaque traduction aujourd’hui accompagne le réseau de toutes les traductions possibles de toute 37 langue en toute langue.

By connecting translation to Creolization, Glissant emphasizes its fundamental role in all those interactive moments when cultural and linguistic métissage energizes – and re-creates – the world. By connecting translation with Relation, he also underscores its own rhizomatic quality, and its potential for limitless extension in space and time. Above all, in Glissant’s perspective, translation is in no way a secondary activity. There is no ontological concern with its fallen nature, as the Tower of Babel story traditionally suggests, nor a worry that it might bring something from the outside into a purer, national tradition. Anything but. In Glissant’s theoretical poetics, translation is an essential and positive element. It puts languages and cultures into circulation in new interlocutory contexts, joining them and their historical traditions in new and dynamic ways.

37

Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers, Paris: Gallimard, 1998, 45-46: “The language of the translator operates like Creolization and like Relation in the world. That is, its language produces the unforeseeable. Translation is a veritable operation of Creolization … from now on a new practice of that unstoppable cultural métissage. Translation increasingly takes its place within the multiplicity of our world. Translation is consequently one of the most important types of this new archipelagan thinking. Art of flight [fugue] from one language to another, without the first being effaced and without the second refusing to appear. But also art of the fugue because each translation today accompanies the network of all possible translations of all languages into all” (my translation).

Glissant and the Imagination of World Literature 81 Translation as Creolization and Relation Like Creolization, translation forges new idioms out of a dialogue with two or more languages. These will entail the intra-lingual translations within what we normally call a single language, as conversations occur between past and present linguistic systems, between different linguistic registers, dialects, between oral and written literatures. Such intra-lingual translations exist within all texts, the source as well as translation. Translation works all the more evidently on the inter-lingual level. Here, a translator will weigh words and phrases, engage in a negotiation between linguistic possibilities, and find comparable terms in the language of translation.38 S/he will, indeed, forge a language new to both the idiom translated and the language of translation. In this way, translation, like Creolization, contributes actively and creatively to the “becoming” of languages and cultures. Turning first to the past and its source text, translation journeys into a linguistic and cultural present where it creates a new text, whose particular combination of lexicon, syntax and references did not before exist. This new text that translation produces brings added linguistic, historical and cultural complexity to the receiving culture, arguing strongly against linguistic purity since translation immediately signals a linguistic and cultural debt to the text it translates. At the same time, it reshapes its source by memorializing it in a new interlocutory space with a new audience of readers. In this way, as translation moves a text from its cultural home into a new and broader cultural context, it creates new linguistic possibilities in both source and receiving cultures. It also quite literally makes World Literature possible – allowing for the encounters of cultures, texts and languages, those Relational, rhizomatic interactions that Glissant imagined and that today’s World Literature demands. But then, translation can itself be considered rhizomatic. Though a few authors have recently made this claim, it is an important one to emphasize here, since it underscores translation’s endemic sway and singular importance to a globalizing world.39

38

Ost, Traduire, 244-57. Indeed, as Brodzki notes in Can these Bones Live?, 2: “Translation is no longer seen to involve only narrowly circumscribed technical procedures of specialized or local interest, but rather to underwrite all cultural transactions, from the most benign to the most venal.” 39

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As translation employs processes of analogy, dialogue, and abduction, as it produces similarities that do not suppress inevitable linguistic differences, and as it accepts its own creative function, it can clearly be described as rhizomatic.40 That is, rather than returning to the same (translation cannot in fact provide exact equivalence though it can offer effective analogies), it inevitably entails a movement outward, like the reaching tubers and roots of a rhizome, extending to new linguistic, cultural and historical sites where it develops a new readership and cultural context. Inherently rhizomatic, translation establishes ongoing connections with source texts and cultures while also creating something new: that unforeseen, often surprising product we call translation. Moreover, working through individual texts, it powerfully evokes histories rather than a single national or literary History. It transfigures and transposes these into another interlocutory space. As Bella Brodzki notes (evoking Benjamin and Derrida) translation “hearkens back to the original or source text and elicits what might otherwise remain recessed or unarticulated, enabling the source text to live beyond itself, to exceed its own limitations”.41 In this way, translation contributes to an accumulation of historical memories, an ongoing exchange with Otherness that allows texts to live again, in unforeseen ways. On a pragmatic level, World Literature can often explore these translational processes in its close readings. Bringing source and translation together in its scholarship and teaching, it can invite the reader to consider translational gains as well as losses. It can inquire into the polylingualism of each single linguistic and cultural text, raising questions about linguistic identities, histories, and power relations that give rise to them. Such keen awareness of the creolized and historically produced nature of each language and text begins to level the traditional hierarchy between source and translation as it highlights the necessarily creative or constructive role of the translator.42

40

See Ost, Traduire, 244-57; Sandra Bermann, “Working in the ‘And’ Zone”, Comparative Literature, LXI/4 (Fall 2009), 432-46. 41 Brodzki, Can these Bones Live?, 2. 42 Octavio Paz speaks of the “twin processes” of writer and translator in “Translation: Literature and Letters”, trans. Irene del Corral, in Theories of Translation, eds Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 152-62.

Glissant and the Imagination of World Literature 83 As I have already suggested, the promise of thinking translation – or reading translations – along these lines is not really new. One might mention the important contributions not only of Spivak, Apter, Brodzki, but also of Cronin, Tymoczko and Venuti, among others. But they find in Glissant’s theoretical work a powerful companion text for some of the most important transformations Translation studies currently presents: an implicit questioning of the hierarchy between source and translation; an ethical need to consider the plurilingualism of each text; an awareness that equivalence cannot serve as a scientific measure for the practice of translation; and a heightened sense of translation histories and the translator’s and reader’s agency in this process. Translation and its trade routes: transmission and literary history Through translation’s very etymology (trans-ferre) as well as through its many linguistic and cultural encounters, it evokes one of Glissant’s preferred metaphors – the image of the journey. And like Glissant’s Open Boat, with its crossing of languages, cultures, and geographies, translation always carries a freight of worldly history – with its tragedies, inequities, and contingencies – as well as future aspirations. If World Literature might in fact be considered as “all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin”, how, in fact, does a text circulate within the world? This very question evokes a Relational poetics in which translation plays a central role. As I mentioned before, the encounters typical of Relation are not always harmonious or positive, but often violent and contentious. Thinking about translation, it is clear that each cultural encounter is inevitably haunted by questions of power – political, informational, religious, financial, technological. All affect the act, sometimes even the possibility, of translation, as well as the text’s dissemination and reception. Taking up Glissant’s challenge to think about translation’s role, we might ask specifically: how have various texts been translated, by whom, and for what purposes? Why is it that some texts of major importance within the source cultures have never been translated at all? How would their translation affect our sense of World Literature? How does translation affect original language authors and the languages in which they write? What about the transmission of oral texts? Might oral literatures be better suited for

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transmission through new technologies, as Glissant speculates?43 And if texts are translated, how do they fare in new cultural surroundings? Considering such questions brings cultural and linguistic inequalities to the fore, and can prompt thick descriptions of specific linguistic and cultural encounters both now and in the past.44 These would be of immense interest, I think, to the scholarship of World Literature. And they must be borne in mind whenever translation and its trade routes, its routes of cultural and material exchange, are considered. Translation and transmission can also help us think through Relation in other ways of interest to World Literature. They can, for instance, open up whole new itineraries in literary and cultural memory. Translation histories (that is, the history of all the translations of a given text or series of texts) can begin to reconceptualize literary history – in Relational terms. Tracing the trade routes of texts across languages and cultures, translation histories reveal networks of interconnections that typify – and concretize, in the “rocks and words” of language45 – the rhizomatic, Relational qualities of cultural interactions. In the process, they can reveal the freight of danger, of economic and cultural inequalities. We might, for instance, follow the translation history of a foundational epic such as the Mahabharata, the Iliad, Gilgamesh or the Aeneid over time and place, from its creation (itself an amalgamation, a mixing of many textual and oral fragments) to its broad, even planetary, modern distribution in many translations and re-translations.46 One could do the same with poetic genres such as the sonnet, the ghazal or the haiku, or with specific themes and characters, such as the adventures of Sinbad or the love of Majnun Layla. Such histories (and there are an endless number) reveal the errantry of the 43

Glissant, “Beyond Babel”, 563. I suggest something along the lines of ethnographer Clifford Geertz’s helpful use of “thick description” in his Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture, New York: Basic Books, 1973, 3-30 to describe and interpret cultures; also of Anthony Appiah’s “Thick Translation”, Calaloo, XVI/4 (Fall 1993), 808-19. In the case discussed here, the crossing of cultures, times, and languages would be explored with an eye not only to cultural differences in language but to broader extra-textual motivations, effects, or obstacles surrounding the act of translation. 45 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, xx. 46 Though Glissant does not suggest the particular translational strategy mentioned here, he points out the ambiguous errantry within many plots of our foundational epics in his Poetics of Relation, 15-16. 44

Glissant and the Imagination of World Literature 85 process by which authors have in fact read, translated and transculturated texts from one place and time to another.47 These translational trade routes (rather than the mythic lines of filiation associated with national literary histories) can reveal, on a worldly, historically traceable level, the linguistic and cultural interrelatedness that is thematic of Glissant’s term Relation and that World Literature could, to its advantage, explore. Translations of the world’s literatures over time function, that is, precisely like rhizomatic, archipelagan networks, often writing across (if never erasing), the official geo-political maps of national traditions and identities. These non-linear, intensely transnational translation histories render each text and its readers part of a complex network of World Literature, and have done so from the beginnings of our literary histories. In this sense, to read texts in the context of their translation histories is to provide an essential counter-weight, an “Other of thought” to traditional notions of national literary identities. It is to question them. It is even to suggest that the sort of root identity national traditions often present in their epics and myths is anything but pure and single. Interwoven, crossed with centuries of Otherness, it must, in some sense, be described as Relational. Translation can thus provide new ways to teach and research World Literature, not as the product of interacting nation states, dominant languages, or hegemonic centers, but instead as something like Glissant’s vision of interacting, negotiating, and often violently transforming languages and cultures. It can, in these ways, play a role in questioning fixed identities by envisioning them in different, more supple and inventive ways, opening them to the thought of Other languages and cultures that are – in fact – their heritage. It could engage them with necessarily broken, non-linear poetic and translation/publication histories. As such, thinking translation and its trade routes through Glissant’s often visionary poetics of Relation and Creolization could provide World Literature with some particularly promising, and hardly utopian new vistas. Returning via translation to issues posed at the start, we might begin to envision through Glissant’s Deleuzian perspective some new possibilities for a more linguistically and culturally open and attentive World Literature. Would this solve the many challenges of this

47

See also Michael Cronin, Translation and Identity, New York: Routledge, 2006, 14-17.

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growing field? Certainly not. But thanks to the broad considerations they raise and the room they leave for the work of translation, a World Literature that incorporates them might contribute to an educational practice with wider and more egalitarian planetary reach.



SEMIOTICS OF THE HYPHEN IN PATRICK CHAMOISEAU’S BIBLIQUE DES DERNIERS GESTES SAMIA KASSAB-CHARFI Vos traits d’union, Perse, épellent l’indicible. Ils forgent le langage aux remous du créole et du français. Le trait d’union est l’acte de prise en main d’une langue, ou de langues qui accèdent sans orgueil aux étendues nouvelles. Ils articulent le dit et l’indicible, le très réel et l’émerveille, le très savant et l’intuition, le prononcé dedans l’imprononçable. Ils lient et relient d’irréductibles divergences. Ils s’accommodent des incertains. Le connuinconnu y réinvente l’image et déclenche la vision toute nouvelle. Le trait d’union est d’écriture créole.1 J’écrivais sans fermer quoi que ce soit.2

From the break line to the ligation stroke “Les Eaux immenses de l’Océan ont tiré l’horrible trait d’union” (“The Ocean’s immense waters marked the horrible hyphen”), writes I would like to express my special and very warm thanks to those who contributed to the translating and reading of this text: Alison Stiner (Stanford University), Christy N. Wampole (Princeton University), Robert Harvey (SUNY Stony Brook), Neil Jones (University of La Manouba-Tunis) and Jacqueline Couti (University of Kentucky). 1 Patrick Chamoiseau, “Méditations à Saint-John Perse”, in La Nouvelle Anabase, 1, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006, 30: “Your hyphens, Perse, spell the unutterable. They forge language in the turmoil between Creole and French. The hyphen is tantamount to the act of grasping a language or languages that reach without undue pride toward new expanses. They articulate speech and the unspeakable, the altogether real and the wondrous, the altogether scientific and the intuitive, the pronounced from within the unpronounceable. They unite and disunite irreducible divergences. The knownunknown reinvents the image within them and touches off an altogether new vision. The hyphen is Creole writing” (all translations are mine). 2 Patrick Chamoiseau, Biblique des derniers gestes, Paris: Gallimard, 2002, 762: “I wrote without closing anything.”

Samia Kassab-Charfi Édouard Glissant in the Traité du Tout-Monde,3 imposing a morbid image of the hyphen, which comes to incarnate the symbolic trace of this crack in historical continuity, a dramatic rift between Africa and the Americas.4 But about nine years later, in Une nouvelle région du monde, the same Glissant converts the semiotic image of the dash into a beneficial link, in the expression “Tout-monde”: 88

Le lieu-commun nous donne l’intuition du Tout-monde, le lieu commun, sans trait d’union, nous est aussi nécessaire, pour récapituler les histoires du monde, et nous en avons largement usé ici, car c’est bien la répétition des évidences qui aide à entrer dans l’inextricable. Puissance de ce trait d’union cependant, qui réforme le vulgaire et le banal et le racorni de ce commun-ci, et le transmue, et le constitue en dépositaire et en rassembleur génial de ce commun-là.5

How should one understand this dichotomy? In his essay entitled Du Baroque, Eugenio d’Ors asserts that “Partout où nous trouvons réunies dans un seul geste plusieurs intentions contradictoires, le résultat stylistique appartient à la catégorie du Baroque” (“Anywhere we find several contradictory intentions merged in a single gesture, the stylistic result belongs to the category of the Baroque”).6 Does this mean that the prevalence of the hyphen in the Caribbean esthetic would project it into the rippling circle of the Baroque Americas, latinities where the Creole component has instilled instability and contradiction, promoted as values in the American poetic as Glissant understood it? If the dialectical conception joining/breaking is proof of a paradox at the heart of this poetic, it is fitting to explore the double side of things and to enter into the literary details, a vast and significant field. The exploration requires going back in fact to the preexisting diglossic context in the West Indies and asking what the

3

Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde, Paris: Gallimard, 1997, 190. Édouard Glissant, Poétique IV, Paris: Gallimard, 1997, 190. 5 Édouard Glissant, Une Nouvelle Région du monde, Paris: Nrf-Gallimard, 2006, 111: “We also need the commonplace that hints at the Tout-monde, the place in common, without hyphen, for it reiterates histories of the world. We have used them abundantly here, for the repetition of obvious things helps us to enter the inextricable. The hyphen is nevertheless powerful in that it reforms the vulgar, banal, earmarked dimension of this commonality, transfiguring it, constituting it as depository and ingenious gatherer of that commonality.” 6 Quoted in Lise Gauvin, La Fabrique de la langue: De François Rabelais à Réjean Ducharme, Paris: Seuil, coll. Points Essais, 2004, 330. 4

Semiotics of the Hyphen 89 relationship is between the presence of a bilingual breeding ground and the stakes of the sign “dash”, which are both pragmatic (the dash as an act or the trace of an act) and symbolic (conceptual link, innovative forgery). Part of the response, or at least the refining of a section of the question, is once again provided by Glissant: Dans le système diglossique qui prédominait dans les Antilles entre la langue française et la langue créole, j’ai compris avec une certaine part de chance et une grande part de naïveté – de naïveté poétique – que dans le rapport entre la langue française et la langue anglaise, la meilleure manière de combattre la diglossie n’était pas le militantisme créole, mais “l’inter-rhétorique”, non pas l’intrusion, “l’interintrusion” lexicale, mais “l’inter-rhétorique” et “l’inter-poétique” entre ces deux langues.7

These are therefore the stakes of hyphen use and, more generally, of the use of polylexicality,8 its semantic impact on the fabric of the text and on the narrative flow, and possibly the emergence of an ontology of such a literature. In what stylistic terms then could we consider the hyphen as a kind of translator marker, an iconic belt connecting two or several words in order to invent a new landscape, which neither seems to be a utopia nor a third language, but a gobetween leading to a new conceptual space? These questions will form the basis of my analysis, drawing from a noteworthy example of an Antillean novel, Biblique des derniers gestes by Patrick Chamoiseau. The hyphen is neither reducible to a simple linguistic fact, nor to a purely literary one: rather it is interactional. In its own right, this appreciation would have the advantage of allowing an 7

Édouard Glissant, “La Relation et le rhizome : du parler au déparler”, in Autour d'Édouard Glissant: lectures, épreuves, extensions d'une poétique de la Relation, 2nd Roundtable, eds S. Kassab-Charfi, S. Zlitni-Fitouri and L. Céry, Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, Series “Sémaphores”, 2008 (Proceedings of the International Colloquium organized in Carthage on April 26-28, 2005, in honour of Édouard Glissant, Édouard Glissant. Pour une Poétique de la Relation: limites, épreuves, dépassement), 348: “In the diglossic system that predominated in the Antilles between French and English, I understood, with some luck and a lot of naiveté – poetic naiveté – that between these two languages, the best way to combat diglossia was not through Creole militancy, but … ‘inter-rhetoric’ and ‘inter-poetics’ between the two languages.” 8 “Polylexicality” refers to the use of complex structures including those terms linked by a hyphen.

Samia Kassab-Charfi evaluation of the degree of lexical richness brought by this kind of word composition. According to which economy does the lexical linking express itself? What consequences does it have on the increase of the French lexicon? Should these junctures be read as indicators of a failing language,9 a language suffering from the insufficient scope of the lexicon of reference, or, in poetic terms, as instruments of a language of construction that is growing, becoming? The narrator of Biblique des derniers gestes says, “Il me manquait des langues primales et ... des fournées de grognements à modeler comme de l’argile brûlante, des atmosphères d’orage à transformer en signes” (“I lacked primal languages and … handfuls of grunts to mold like burning clay, tempestuous atmospheres to transform into signs”).10 What are the consequences of this linguistic frustration with the poetics of the novel? Furthermore, what semantic impact do the hyphenated constructions bring to Chamoiseau’s style? In virtue of what philosophy of language does this capture of the world operate, which crystallizes in the invention of new signs? 90

Writing, iconicity, semiotics Hyphen and polylexicality Among the numerous feats of language that make up the landscape of Biblique des derniers gestes, the author holds our attention, first for the simple reason that while referencing a natural component of the French language – polylexicality – he takes it to another level and infuses it with a freedom whose modalities are worth specifying, as well as the possible hermeneutic repercussions of this phenomenon. If, in language, compound lexical items constitute a relatively common general fact, when it emanates from the stylistic choice of an individual author, it seems in some way overpowered, struck by a different meaning. The diversified and often generalized definitions of compositionality come together to form a global definition that is more descriptive than functional. Thus, the proposed typologies often deal with the formal components of the lexical agglomeration, that is, grammatical and conjunctional components (types of verbs or verbal locutions, of substantives, adjectives, adverbs, semantic content of the 9

This topic has been widely analyzed by Celia Britton in Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. 10 Chamoiseau, Biblique des derniers gestes, 131.

Semiotics of the Hyphen 91 categories put into contact with each other, ways of linking, etc). Furthermore, it is also necessary to point out that compositionality can also encompass items as disparate as fixed expressions, compound words, or even sequences that contain a proverbial character, which deepens the perspective of the problem and often makes it necessary to change focal points. It is perhaps at this level that a crucial question intervenes, that of the plasticity of language. Indeed, the writer seems to consider language exactly like one would treat a plastic material. It is therefore fitting to situate ourselves from the point of view of an attentional (vs. intentional) stylistics,11 that is, stylistics that do not refer so much to the intention of the writer, but rather perceive and evaluate from the other end – lower down. Together with the receptivity of the reader, the lingua-material is the medium of the writer, just as oil or acrylic is the poetic medium for the painter and bronze or wood for the sculptor. It is notably this plasticity of writing that allows Chamoiseau to make esthetic transpositions from painting to literature. In Écrire en pays dominé12 Chamoiseau evokes a kind of writing using “à-plat et perspective”, closely related to the “Écriture horizontale” (“horizontal writing”) belonging to the musicians described by Daniel Aranjo.13 It is also this same plastic gesture turning a word into a physical concept through the writer-painter, that we can already guess in the extraordinary “terremère” (sic),14 an unedited agglutination invented by Glissant to designate Africa, where the hyphen is radically suppressed. The hyphen therefore appears as a specific over-determiner,15 a graphic phenotype, almost a notion. Its semiotization tends to bring it closer, in some cases, to a calligramme, forming the basis for a spatialization of the sign that projects a model of iconicity. Horizontal 11

These notions are exposed in Oswald Ducrot and Jean-Michel Schaeffer, Nouveau dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage, Paris: Seuil, 1995, Entry “Stylistique”. 12 Patrick Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé, Paris: Gallimard, 1997. 13 Daniel Aranjo, “L’opacité chez Édouard Glissant ou la poétique de la souche”, in Horizons d’Édouard Glissant, eds Yves-Alain Favre and Antonio Ferreira de Brito, Biarritz: J. & D. Éditions, 1992, 99. 14 Édouard Glissant, Tout-Monde, Paris: Gallimard, 1993, 506. It seems that the hyphen here is erased in order to morphologically express the very close relationship with Africa, the “mother-land”, which is nevertheless not the native one. 15 Michaël Riffaterre, quoted by Gauvin, La Fabrique de la Langue, 223.

Samia Kassab-Charfi transfer, to be sure, because it is linked to the constraints of the French graphic system. But what memory is preserved in this semiotics of mending, through a poetics of detail where sculpture and writing temporarily collide? It is also necessary to consider the possibility of envisioning this pattern as potentially extendable to the whole of the novelistic body in so far as it concerns the mode of articulation, an overlapping or interlocking of different intra-novelistic stories. In that case, the model of lexical complexity with a hyphen would function like a reduced model, fragmented parts of the overall story that the narrator joins together, going from one enunciative instance to another. The article by Jean Bernabé dealing with “The Homeric syndrome at work in West Indian speech” is particularly illuminating. In it, the Martinican linguist departs from the idea according to which “Les poèmes épiques ... résultent de la couture (‘rhapsodie’) de plusieurs textes” (“The epic poems … are the result of the seaming together [or ‘rhapsody’] of several texts”).16 Therefore, these patched or mended expressions somehow function as discontinuous traces of an aleatory locution, authorizing us to question within them the fragment of a locution that was a hiccup, or was silenced. Here we see the importance of this concept of “rhapsody” (etymologically “sewn songs”), perceived in terms of successive ligatures. The work therefore becomes a place of emergence for these phonemes in just as much a plastic sense – stitching, mosaic, “sewn” words – as a semantic one: “le vivre-content” (“happy-go-lucky”), “l’arrachécoupé” (“the torn-and-cut”), “les nègres-soiffeurs” (the “drunkenblacks”), “l’éther-diable” (the “ether-devil”) or “les brusquantes-àbottines” (the “rushing-women-in-ankle-boots”), are just a few examples.17 92

The hyphen as an exemplification case of Relation: the graphic barzakh of a “Linked-World” If to write in a bilingual milieu comes from a very complex relationship which, in societies called postcolonial, combine two languages usually in conflict or rivalry with each other, aggregation of terms through the use of the hyphen allows us to take on the

16

Jean Bernabé, “Au visiteur lumineux. Fènwè et wè klè, Le syndrome homérique à l’œuvre dans la parole antillaise”: http://www.potomitan.info/travaux/auvisiteur/fen we.htm. 17 Chamoiseau, Biblique des derniers gestes, 84, 189, 84, 152 and 100.

Semiotics of the Hyphen 93 problematic of the hierarchical organization of languages (dominantdominated). The liveliness of this problem reveals itself through eloquent anecdotes, such as those by Creole authors preceding the burning of their own works by themselves through a refusal of one of the languages – such as Frankétienne, a Haitian author, or Raphaël Confiant from Martinique, whose attachment to writing in Creole was always put forward, and who burned their manuscripts in French. This attitude attests the need to highlight the inclination for the dominated language, Creole, which is called the mute (“la muette”),18 and proves the impossibility of putting the dominant and the dominated language in relation to one another, enthroning each of them in an immanent and cloistered absolute. This attitude is then accompanied by an acrolectal19 inversion: the socially less desirable language becomes the one clung to the most in literature, perhaps by a reflex of preservation which seeks to reverse the socio-linguistic hierarchies. Against this model, the hyphen which links together appears as a contrapuntal response, morphologically neutralizing the theory of places in interactive discourse, which occurs in conversation, and which always has a dominant and dominated.20 It is this kind of overthrowing of perspective that subverts the vertical stratification of languages along a linking up horizon that points out the scriptural intention of Chamoiseau and the ethics behind it: “Maintenant, il nous anime vraiment ce Monde-Relié que nous imaginions!” (“Now this Linked-World we imagined drives us!”).21 The assemblage to which the polylexical expression makes reference finds its source in the necessity of articulating words and things22 – and at the same time brings an ethos which links heterogeneous worlds into the game. The making of literature comes at the price of this linguistic assemblage, which is already unfixing, in so far as it tricks the expectations of the reader by confronting him with unedited associations and pushes him into a maze of fractal writing, and where dialectic puts into play integration and disintegration. This double 18 The “mute” is the periphrastic denomination of the Creole language in Martinican intellectual circles. 19 Paul Wijnands, Le français adultère ou Les langues mixtes de l’altérité francophone, Paris: Publibook Université, 2005, 13. 20 See the notions of Up and Down in François Flahaut, La parole intermédiaire, Paris: Seuil, 1978. 21 Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé, 1997, 316 (my emphasis). 22 Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses, Paris : Gallimard, 1966.

Samia Kassab-Charfi articulation thus has the advantage of showing writing in the process of making itself, in the middle of its assembly, in its artisanship in the noblest sense: it is a work-in-progress grounded in the articulatory function of the hyphen. A small excursion into Biblique des derniers gestes gives the reader a clear picture: “femmes-à-graines” (“women-with-balls”), “chien-la-guerre errant”) (“vagrant-war-dog”), the sensation of being “tracassé-rassuré” (“worried-reassured”), “faire l’ababa-mustapha” (“do the ababa-mustapha”), “mourir droit-debout” (“to die standingupright”).23 Certain complex lexical items are even composed of multiple hyphens: “le-temps-qui-passe” (“time-which-flies”), where the newly composed agglutination stabilizes and conceptualizes the image.24 The ligature also generates a narrow contact, and therefore a mutual contamination, of the two lexemes, bringing about “le pouvoir réfringent des mots” (“refractive power of words”) of which Mallarmé speaks, the key to which is the birth of a new notion: “ … et de nouvelles significations surgirent à la chaîne dans l’étonnement de sa conscience” (“… and new meanings came out one after another in the astonishment of his awareness”).25 When asked, Chamoiseau reports that this world of creation was the one which Christopher Columbus records in his Journal, conveying the necessity of inventing new words to correspond to new things in the New World. In this logic of plasticity brought to attention earlier, this way of stitching terms together should be associated with the act of stapling, such as the visual artist Ernest Breleur does with his radiographic visual aids, where pixels virtually connect with heterogeneous elements. The act of cauterization from which Chamoiseau’s morpho-lexical fabrication arises and Breleur’s end result bring together here the primordial poetic initiative of the Haitian author Frankétienne, which is to be a “lexical pyromaniac”, or, in his words, setting the lexicon on fire, shaking up the status quo in order to dive into pure invention. Historically and ontologically confronted with a gap between a world that is seemingly irreconcilable, the Caribbean artist appears to have an additional initiative beside 94

23

Chamoiseau, Biblique des derniers gestes, 100, 204, 145, 156, 161. Ibid., 254. 25 Ibid., 160. 24

Semiotics of the Hyphen 95 inventing, through this isthmus, this barzakh26 of a graphic and typographic order, a way of bringing together the “matrices disjointes” (“disconnected wombs”)27 of origins, which allows us to put forth an analogical triangulation: tectonic stitching of continents / stitching of multiple identities / stitching of words. The tectonic friction of words: a particular coupling In Écrire en pays dominé, Chamoiseau states, “La mémoire reptilienne d’une langue s’atténue ou se combat, dans la récapitulation de ses mémoires, dans les frottements, les collées, les dérayages langagiers d’où naît l’impressionnabilité multilingue” (“The reptilian memory of a language gets attenuated or contested in the recapitulation of these memories, in their rubbing and sticking together, in linguistic unscratchings out of which multilingual impressionability is born”).28 Beyond a simple articulatory tool, the hyphen here appears as a conveyor of a particular hybridization, but one that is not really a métissage. As Laurent Jenny writes, it is necessary to distinguish … trois attitudes, trois stratégies de relation à l’altérité linguistique .… La première, d’exclusion de l’hétérogène, est celle du puriste. La seconde, d’intégration réaliste de la différence, est celle de l’apologiste du métissage linguistique. La troisième, réflexive et esthétique, d’appropriation de l’écart, est celle du forgeur de style.29

As a conveyor belt for transmitting the energy of a language, the hyphen gives rise to a particular stylistic situation where the word unit is born from these two vessels whose association generates new semantic tides. The French poet Guillevic would link this compositional creativity to a way of practicing “opus incertum”, an

26 In religious symbolism, the Barzakh is the boundary between two areas, for example between fresh and saline water. 27 Chamoiseau, Biblique des derniers gestes, 128. 28 Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé, 284-85. 29 Laurent Jenny, “La langue, le même et l’autre”, Fabula LHT (Littérature, histoire, théorie), 0, “Théorie et histoire littéraire”, June 2005: (http://www.fabula.org/ lht/0/ Jenny.html): “… three attitudes, three relational strategies vis-à-vis linguistic alterity .… The first one – exclusion of the heterogeneous – is that of the purist. The second – that of realist integration of difference – is that of the apologist for linguistic métissage. The third – reflexive and esthetic, that which appropriates the gap – is that of the stylistic inventor.”

Samia Kassab-Charfi image that sends us back to a technique of stacking up cinder blocks during construction in technical vocabulary – Deleuze reminds us of Samuel Beckett’s statement: “écrire, c’est forer des trous” (“writing means drilling holes”).30 The plasticity joins together a veritable techne, which reminds us that language is not innate but rather an artifact perpetually confronted with amnesia, or a kind of hit-and-run offense. This makes it vitally necessary to face up to the language, following the example of one of the characters from Le Quatrième siècle (The Fourth Century), a novel by Glissant which describes the beginning of the slave trade and the installation of slaves in the Caribbean world: “Il mêlait à sa parole des expressions tout à fait inconnues, chaque fois que son souvenir de la langue natale faiblissait, ou peut-être quand cette langue ne lui permettait aucune tournure qui pût s’adapter à la situation nouvelle” (“Completely unknown expressions turned up in his speech every time the memory of his native language weakened or, perhaps, when this language afforded him no turn of phrase capable of adapting to the new situation”).31 This assemblage can be found with other authors as well. In the Caribbean sphere, there is the example of “Un-homme-de-Harlemqui-ne-vote-pas” (“A-man-from-Harlem-who-hasn’t-got-the-vote”) that Aimé Césaire evokes and which strikes the reader of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Return to my Native Land).32 Here, the lexical yoke produces an identity that sides with undividable reality, sadly just as compact and definitive as a hundred-year-old cliché. François Cheng, a sino-francophone writer, who draws from the literary and ideographical Chinese tradition, is a witness to the association of the two signs: 96

Sur ce point, j’ai été certainement marqué par le système idéographique, dans lequel chaque signe forme une unité vivante et autonome, conservant par là toute sa capacité souveraine d’aller à la rencontre d’autres signes. La tradition poétique chinoise ne se privait pas de poser des binômes et des trinômes pour engendrer des espaces imaginaires mus par d’éventuelles déflagrations. Et moi-même je

30

Gilles Deleuze, Critique et Clinique, Paris: Minuit, 1993, 9. Édouard Glissant, Le Quatrième siècle, Paris: Seuil, 1964, 71. 32 Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939), Paris: Présence africaine, 2006, 20; Return to My Native Land, trans. John Berger and Anna Bostock, Baltimore: Penguin, 1969, 48. 31

Semiotics of the Hyphen

97

prends plaisir à les introduire dans ma poésie en français : “ciel-terrehomme”, “Yin-Yang-Vide-médian”, “mont-fleuve”, “pinceau-encre”, “nuage-pluie”, “dragon-phénix”, “serpent-tortue”, etc. Je n’hésite pas non plus à disséquer les mots composés afin de les rendre à leur implication originelle : “in-su”, “in-ouïe”, “in-visible”, “in-saisi”, “entente”, “ex-tase”, “dés-orienté”, “re-connaissable” ....33

In the amalgam of separated terms that split compound words, there is only a single step that the writer takes, in the capacity of a sorcerer of language. This mode of appropriation is all the more vital, as it often makes it possible to seal the fault line between the two languages of the writer, thus creating a related space for this “bilanguage” conceived by the Moroccan author Abdelkébir Khatibi, for whom “l’intime infiltration des langues” (“the intimate infiltration of languages”) (according to the expression of Ernest Renan) is a masterpiece of his poetics. Additionally, this agglutination is incarnated in the use of the hyphen in the texts of Bernard Zadi Zaourou34 from the Ivory Coast, in whose texts Martin N'Guettia Kouadio finds the following examples: “Guédé-l’orage-du-souterrainpays-des-réfugiés” (“Guédé-the-storm-of-the-underground-land-ofrefugees”), and “Soukoukalba-terreur-de-l’Iroko” (“Soukoukalbaterror-of-the-Iroko”)35 or even “Mon-arc-poème-de-miel-et-rudesélégies-de-ferventes-veillées” (“My-arch-poem-of-honey-and-roughelegies-of-fervent-vigils”).36 Within these long constructions,

33

François Cheng, Le Dialogue, Une passion pour la langue française, Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2002, 59: “On this point, I was certainly influenced by the ideographic system in which each sign forms a living and autonomous unity, preserving its supreme capacity to engage with other signs. The Chinese poetic tradition did not dispense with creating binomials or trinomials to generate imaginary spaces driven to possible detonations. I take pleasure in introducing them to my own poetry in French: ‘sky-earth-man’, ‘Yin-Yang-Emptiness-median’, ‘mountain-river’, ‘paintbrush-ink’, ‘cloud-rain’, ‘dragon-phoenix’, ‘snake-turtle’, etc. Nor do I hesitate to dissect composite words in order to return them to their original implication: ‘un-known’, ‘un-heard of’, ‘in-visible’, ‘un-grasped’, ‘under-standing’, ‘ec-stasy’, ‘dis-oriented’, ‘re-cognizable’....” 34 Bernard Zadi Zaourou, Fer de lance, Abidjan: NEI/NETER, 2002. 35 Martin N’Guettia Kouadio, “Des mutations du français aux formes langagières singulières dans des œuvres poétiques écrites et chantées de Côte-d’Ivoire ”, in Altérité et mutations dans la langue. Pour une stylistique des littératures francophones, ed. Samia Kassab-Charfi, Louvain-la-Neuve: Éditions AcademiaBruylant, 2010, 188. 36 Ibid., 188.

Samia Kassab-Charfi language becomes an icon in order to produce a semantic tightening of the image, proportionally inverse to its semiotic deployment in a polyptych, like a “déni de la finitude du mot” (“denial of the finitude of the word”) that the contemporary French poet Yves Bonnefoy evokes in La Vérité de parole.37 This process of “re-opacification”38 of language, should not be confused with the prior existence in the Creole language of compound expressions like “tout-partout” (“alleverywhere”) that contain duplications and redundancies. When using the hyphen, the writer joins together two terms that remain unedited, and the reader is called to guess the meaning of that opacity flowing between the two words. 98

The compositional palettes In Chamoiseau’s writing, the morphological model of constructing complex lexical items is often composed of two verbs: “prendredisparaître”, “aller-venir”, “comprendre-toucher”, etc. (“takedisappear”, “go-come”, “understand-touch”, etc.). In order to read them, a kind of inversion is necessary – “toucher pour comprendre” (“a touching in order to understand”) – and we see the need to mobilize the interpretative competence of the reader. In the case of “aller-venir”, the dash relies on a dynamic process in double time to that of “va-et-vient” (“coming and going”), a process which also takes other forms, such as “aller-virer” (“go-turn”).39 But outside of these compounds inspired by oral tradition, we note the high frequency of sequences with nominal components where the esthetics of ligatures opens the way for an emergence of new polylexical units whose effect is often one of conceptual unification or of a morpho-semantic condensation. Another effect is that of accelerating the image representation: it is like a morphological ellipsis that acts like a shortcut. For example, the hyphen often replaces or takes over the use of a preposition: “l’oignon-pays” (“country-onion”), “piedcalebassier” (“gourd-foot”), or “pied-caoutchouc” (“rubber-foot”).40 Attention should also be paid to the creation of lexical items forged on a pre-existing model, one that precedes the item in its context: as 37

Yves Bonnefoy, La Vérité de parole et autres essais, Paris: Mercure de France, 1992, 333. 38 Écrire en pays dominé, 287. 39 Chamoiseau, Biblique des derniers gestes, 704. 40 Ibid., 49, 140, 161.

Semiotics of the Hyphen 99 “l’arrière-goût” (“after-taste”) or “l’arrière-sens” (“back-sense”), and also those which place a thing and its opposite side by side, such as “vu-pas-vu” (“seen-and-unseen”).41 At the same time, the novel also presents a curious case of dislocation of terms that were once mono-lexical, where the lexical complex item shatters into two membra disjecta, such as “un mal-aise boueux” (“a muddy dis-ease”)42 taking its cue from the Creole division of the adjective “fondamental” (“fundamental”) into “fondalnatal”.43 The instances of lexical items containing numbers that do not exist in real denominations, for hyperbolic purposes, is also striking. Take, for example, “trente-douze vouloirs” (“thirty-twelve wants”).44 The strongest coefficient, however, no doubt manifests itself in expressions that are ordinarily simple but that Chamoiseau links together one after the other in a continuous chain and which increase the conceptual dimension of the text. This is particularly the case in the theoretical essay Écrire en pays dominé, where we find the following passage: Quand le mode-d’être, le mode-de-penser, le mode-de-se-penser, le mode-de-penser-sa-pensée, le mode-de-consommer, le mode-de-sedistraire, le mode-de-se-soigner, le mode-de-s’émouvoir.45

More examples present themselves as well: “mes désirs militants prenaient-l’envol” (“my militant desires took-flight”), “des-chosesqu’on-ne-lui-demandait-pas-et-qui-ne-servaient-à-rien” (“things-thatwere-not-asked-of-him-and-that-were-useless”); newly harnessed expressions that all seem to function as a fictitious collocation whose semantic impact has yet to be evaluated: “t’ouvrir-la-porte, donnerdes-ailes” (“opening-the-door-for-you, giving-the-impression-thateverything-is-possible”).46

41

Ibid., 229, 740. Ibid., 230. 43 We encounter such a case, but with an inversion, in “Jourd’hui-jour” (Today-day) (Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé, 70). 44 Chamoiseau, Biblique des derniers gestes, 163. 45 Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé, 122: “When the way-of-being, the way-ofthinking, the way-of-thinking-the-self, the way-of-thinking-one’s-thought, the wayof-consuming, the way-of-enjoying-oneself, the way-of-taking-care-of-oneself, the way-of-being-moved.” 46 Chamoiseau, Biblique des derniers gestes, 71, 70, 741. 42

Samia Kassab-Charfi What functions can we attribute to this new kind of polylexicality? Sometimes it replaces a verbal circumlocution (“se mettre à …”); sometimes it is the equivalent of a gerund, such as the following context explains: 100

Cette manière de prendre marcher-courir, de courir en marchant. Un mélange sans partage de course et de marcher, de rythmes respiratoires qui s’alternaient en fonction du terrain.47

The lexical items here infuse a stylistic mark into the heart of the writing that breaks the tranquility of the novelistic flow while investigating up-close the meaning of words. In Biblique des derniers gestes, where an immense analepsis plays out, during which the protagonist, while on his death bed, sees all the vicissitudes of his life as an anti-colonialist militant pass before his eyes, the hyphen bursts in and acts as a lexical disfixing that pushes the act of writing out of “le lourd français cérémoniel” (“heavy ceremonial French”).48 Certain excerpts from the novel even bring us into the artist’s workshop, who turns inward and considers his own practice as a blacksmith of the style, attentive to his thirst for language that is used to watch over the effervescence of the raw material of words: “C’était un frissonnement aussi amer qu’inexplicable, qui bousculait des blocs de l’alphabet créole et du lexique d’un français déformé …” (“It was a shiver that was as bitter as it was inexplicable that shook the blocks of the Creole alphabet and the vocabulary of a distorted French …”).49 In this context, we should think of the function of the hyphen as a demultiplication of the energy of language. Frankétienne treats words like “des particules d’énergie sensuelle” (“particles of sensual energy”);50 Guillevic51 refers to quantas, energetic condensations 47

Ibid., 223: “This way of walk-running, to run while walking. An unblended mixture of running and walking, of respiratory rhythms that alternated according to the terrain.” 48 Ibid., 137. 49 Ibid., 131. 50 Marie-Edith Lenoble, “Spiraliser la langue : l’écriture schizophone de Frankétienne”, in Altérité et mutations dans la langue. Pour une stylistique des littératures francophones, ed. Samia Kassab-Charfi, Louvain-la-Neuve: Éditions Academia-Bruylant, 2010, 117. 51 Eugène Guillevic, Lexiquer, Saint-Martin de Castillan: Éditions La Tuilerie Tropicale, 1986. In this collection of poems which is out of print, the French poet Guillevic speaks about a “wire-language”, a “string-language”. What matters for him

Semiotics of the Hyphen 101 whose analogy to words is quickly established. No doubt these are poets who compose scores that are very similar to the “emmêlements énergétiques” (“tangles of energy”)52 of the Chamoisian novel. Writing in this way disjoins or di-fracts at the same time as it creates a new unity. In the heart of the Caribbean community, it is even born of a rupture, a separation, following the movement of the “Pans de souvenirs agrégés-désagrégés selon des lois d’errance” (“patches of memories that were integrated-disintegrated according to the laws of wandering”).53 The Caesarean hatching transforms into a suturing feature under the pen of the author, and it ironizes the relational link in order to seal it off, both esthetically and ontologically: “Il devait se construire dans deux matrices disjointes” (“He had to construct himself in two split wombs”).54 Indeed, this kind of ligatured writing establishes an alternative movement to the “aller-virer” (“go-turn”) from one language to another. Chamoiseau does not write completely in French, or at least not in the expected French,55 supposing that there is only one. In Écrire en pays dominé, the essayist did not hesitate to show his reticence about a boring and frozen French, against a ruling language that does not correspond to the free and audacious images of his style: Alors, la langue intervenait en régente avec sa cour, ses pompes et ses convois. J’avais le sentiment que la prose ne savait pas monter les escaliers en sautant des marches, qu’elle ignorait les raccourcis, les chemins-chiens et les pistes de corsaire. Elle obligeait à traverser des rocailles où l’on s’ennuie et à dresser sans vertiges de cartographiques réalités. Je pouvais me surprendre besognant sans émerveille dans ces nœuds de mon existence que la langue herculéenne ambitionnait de nettoyer.56

is to take back the alphabet letters in order to compose from each letter splinters, in the spirit of that sculptural plasticity of the material language. 52 Chamoiseau, Biblique des derniers gestes, 175. 53 Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé, 193. 54 Chamoiseau, Biblique des derniers gestes, 128. 55 See Milan Kundera, “Beau comme une rencontre multiple”, L’Infini, 34 (1991), 58. 56 Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé, 87 (my emphasis) : “So language intervened in regulation with its court, its pomp and its convoys. I had the feeling that prose didn’t know how to climb stairs by skipping steps, that it was unaware of the shortcuts, the backways and the secret paths. It was obliged to cross the troublesome rocky terrain and to erect cartographic realities without dizziness. I could surprise

Samia Kassab-Charfi But nor can Chamoiseau write in Creole, which he confines to an almost suicidal literary invisibility. He states, “Si j’avais écrit en créole, je serais demeuré plus invisible que les crabes-mantous lors des grands secs de février” (“If I had written in Creole, I would have remained more invisible than the mangrove crab in February’s dry season”).57 Additionally, these lexical alliances, resulting from the hyphenated combination of two or more terms, appear in a sense as an alternative to the delicate choice between writing in French or in Creole. The writer therefore intervenes with a kind of third language, made in the image of Khatibi’s third ear, which hears the two languages – in Khatibi’s case French and Arabic – without a hierarchical consideration. In the mind of the “bi-lingual”58 the diglossias are inverted into a positive multilingualism.59 102

Recomposing the world? An “impenetrable tight solidarity” The bond appears in these conditions as a valorization of an interactional mosaic model, where the possibilities of extension carry it over into the depths of identity; it is also a model found in other art forms, such as painting, installations and sculptures, as a reflection of diverse social practices. This “vrac” (“bulk”)60 shakes up the layout of language at the moment it settles an economy of solidarity, intriguingly inspired from the tropical botanical model, where each tree is supported by another. The following excerpt from Écrire en pays dominé illustrates it well, where the author comments on the impressive vegetation of northern Martinique: Là, nul arbre n’est égoïste. Chacun porte et transporte, sert d’échelle et de terreau à une autre forêt, une solidarité protéiforme nouée impenetrable.61

myself drudging away listlessly in these knots of my existence that the Herculean language aspired to clean.” 57 Ibid., 74. 58 Abdelkébir Khatibi, Amour bilingue (1983, Paris: Fata Morgana), Paris : Éditions de la Différence, 2008, 208. 59 In his poetics of language, Édouard Glissant establishes the significant gap between diglossia and multilingualism: “diglossia” according to him “is the situation in which a language dominates another”. 60 Chamoiseau, Biblique des derniers gestes, 86. 61 Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé, 320: “There no tree is self-centered. Each one carries and transports, uses a ladder and compost to another forest, an impenetrable knotted protean solidarity.”

Semiotics of the Hyphen 103 Surrounding these interdependent “particules élémentaires” (“elementary particles”),62 bi- or polynuclear ones, there is a convergence or a constellation of related or adjuncted facts, as Greimas says: the amplifying image, which makes the meaning more explicit, the comparative extension, the circumlocution, and even sometimes the palinode.63 If we situate ourselves in the perspective of a dualist conception of what is within and outside of the norm, this phenomenon, at once both interlectal (because it associates creolisms and idiolectal invention) and intralectal (the author operates through his own words), authorizes us to think that the polylexical figure represents a kind of internal difference, located inside a stylistically limited territory. Laurent Jenny subtly brings this dialectical feature between deviation and appropriateness: “Plus je cherche un substitut propre en remplacement de l’ ‘écart’, plus m’apparaît la propriété de l’écart lui-même” (“The more I seek a substitute for the ‘gap’, the more appropriate the gap itself seems to me”).64 But ultimately what these images give rise to is an inherent questioning of their composite essence and of the philosophy of language that undercuts it. In the novel, there is a rather defining formula of this phenomenon of lexical creativity, which touches upon the profound nature of the act of “ameuter les tirets” (“mobilizing the dashes”):65 “L’invariant de ces multiples versions, c’était ce fantastique insidieux, protéiforme et incertain …” (“The constant variable in these multiple versions was this insidious, protean, and uncertain fantasy …”).66 This fantastique protéiforme may be taken in a polylexical way, which in turn produces a lexical and semantic strangeness on the level of expression, where the dialectic of fixation and alteration also plays out. In a sense, the complexity of the lexical items is one of the areas of application of this inter-language alterity: La connivence pouvait initier aux altérités brusques .… Les glossaires



62 Frankétienne, in “Le Dire du spiralisme”, Entretien avec Frankétienne et JeanClaude Fignolé, réalisé par Edelyn Dorismond et Fritz Calixte (http://www. potomitan.info/colloques/fignole.php). 63 Algirdas Julien Greimas, Sémantique structurale : recherche et méthode, Paris : Larousse, 1966. 64 Jenny, “La langue, le même et l’autre”, 3. 65 Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé, 317. 66 Chamoiseau, Biblique des derniers gestes, 252.

104

Samia Kassab-Charfi pouvaient s’abandonner ou se voir détournés des poses de transparence .… Longer des abîmes où le Récit explose. Tenir tête aux vertiges où les genres se mélangent. Ameuter les tirets. Faire exploser le Temps …. Installer l’Unité dans le désordre de la structure.67

This internal alterity makes us leave the single word, its radicality, in order to conceive of an alternative space. For “Toute phrase, nous dit Borges, s’appuie pour dire son sens sur un emploi des choses et des personnes qui en abolit l’être propre” (“Each sentence, Borges tells us, relies on the use of things and people which abolish its own being in order to communicate meaning”).68 This abolition, a renunciation of the meaning of a word by itself, obliges us to perceive what is sketched underneath the new scaffolding, a battle that silently throws itself into language rivalries, so clearly conveyed in the moving remark in Écrire en pays dominé: “La langue française … s’encaye sur des altérités indescriptibles et sur des hoquets de créole réprimé” (“The French language gets caught … in indescribable othernesses and hiccups of repressed Creole”).69 The lexical graft: another writing economy? Semantics of the “broke apart wombs”70 “Refaire un mot, lui regreffer ses labyrinthes” (“Remaking a word, regrafting its labyrinths”), writes the poet Guillevic.71 This question of labyrinths, in so far that it overturns the unity of a word, is fundamental. We must understand it first in relationship to Borges,72 but also in regards to Frankétienne’s image of the spiral and Chamoiseau’s baroque whirlwind of narratives. Drawing from an economy of compositional heterogeneity – morpho-lexical, semantic, nominal, intra- and inter-textual – the alliance at work in the polylexical system enthrones the order of the composite in the 67

Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé, 317: “Complicity could introduce abrupt othernesses .... The glosses could let themselves go or see themselves turned away from poses of transparency .... To follow the abysses where the narrative explodes. To stand up to the dizziness where genres mix. To mobilize the dashes. To explode Time .... To set up Unity in the disorder of structure.” 68 Quoted in Bonnefoy, La Vérité de parole, 336. 69 Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé, 86. 70 Chamoiseau, Biblique des derniers gestes, 128. 71 Guillevic, Eugène, Motifs : poèmes 1981-1984, Paris: Gallimard, 1987. 72 Chamoiseau, Biblique des derniers gestes, 332.

Semiotics of the Hyphen 105 scriptural domain. This order reigns at the heart of the novel, from the lexical scale to the arrangement (taxis) of texts and intertexts and their interaction (and even in the diversity of enunciative sources, for the “I” sometimes refers to the narrator and other times to an intradiegetic authority). In the novel, the interpenetration of quotes and borrowing, woven into the framework of the text, add to its polylexical tangles. It is as if the meaning in Biblique des derniers gestes comes only by way of refringence or through the interaction of words in relationship to each other: “Leur sens était global. Les symboliques gisaient dans les interactions de toutes les versions” (“Their meaning was global. The symbols were lying in the interactions of all versions”).73 But the relationship cannot be controlled, and it remains subject to unpredictability. The result is that aggregation escapes and requires a well-supported activation of interpretative competence. The lexical landscape of language in Biblique des derniers gestes enhances a pragmatics of lexical interactions that doubles as textual interactions (polyphony and dialogism). Therefore we might ask where the boundary is between the common or sociolectal territory and creative individuality? We clearly see the importance of activating the interpretative competence of the reader, which ties into Umberto Eco’s idea: … sa conception … accorde une place de plus en plus grande aux processus interprétatifs … et à l’idée d’un arrière-fond cognitif en transformation permanente : d’où son refus de considérer les processus sémantiques sur le modèle statique et purement linguistique du “dictionnaire”; l’interprétation des signes fait fond sur une “encyclopédie” multidimensionnelle et dynamique, qui s’enrichit lors de chaque nouvel acte interprétatif.74

73

Ibid., 234. Quoted in Ducrot and Schaeffer, Nouveau dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage, 222: “… to grant an ever larger space for interpretive processes and for the idea of a cognitive background in constant transformation: hence [his] refusal to consider the semantic processes on the static and purely linguistic model of the ‘dictionary’; the interpretation of signs dissolves into a multidimensional and dynamic “encyclopedia” that is enriched with each new interpretive act.” 74

Samia Kassab-Charfi Building by deconstruction: a kind of “oraliture”? Without going so far as to impute a possible integration of polylexical constructions into the category of “stylizations” by Umberto Eco,75 it is nevertheless interesting to look more deeply into these doublings of language, where language auto-generates itself, in cases such as “histoire-histoires” (“history-stories”),76 and through the amplification of narrative by Creole writers. In Écrire en pays dominé, Chamoiseau writes: 106

J’aime ça, oui : les accumulations enfilées du Conteur. Il ne dira jamais : “Il fait chaud” mais : “… il y avait tu m’entends un débat de soleil un scandale de soleil dans du soleil sans vent du soleil du soleil par en haut du soleil par en bas du soleil tout-partout roye manman soleil derrière soleil …”77

In Biblique des derniers gestes, the hyphenated pairings affect not only commonplace nouns, but proper names as well, such as in Balthazar Bodules-Jules, the name of the main character, and in AnneClémire L’Oubliée, Gasdo caca-dlo, Déborah Nicol, Sarah-AnaisAlicia.78 In Caribbean literature, beings are sometimes struck by what one might call a gender trouble, where they are upset by their sexual identity, which remains unclear. For an author like Chamoiseau, this turbulence can take the forms of compound names, masculine feelings in a woman, or feminine feelings in a man. The trouble also takes form in the cultivation of ambiguity through the creation of androgynous characters. It is this uneasiness of sexual manifestations and categories that we find in the hyphenated expressions, an uncommon form that offers a different vision of things, as if the complexity of reality needed to be mirrored in the complexity of expression. To be sure, the assemblage builds a bridge between the word and the thing. But paradoxically, the bridge is simultaneously 75

Ibid., 222. Chamoiseau, Biblique des derniers gestes, 762. 77 Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé, 191: “Yes, I like that: the strung together accumulations of the Storyteller. He shall never say: ‘It is hot,’ but rather ‘ … you understand there was a solar debate, a solar scandal in the sun without wind in the sun of the sun from the top of the sun from the bottom of the sun all-everywhere oh mommy sun behind the sun ...’.” 78 We find such a composition in some of Glissant’s novels (“Dlan-Métellus-Silacier” in Malemort or “Artémise-Marie-Annie” in Tout-monde, for example). 76

Semiotics of the Hyphen 107 deconstructed by the moment and act of writing, with its precariousness of approach. In Biblique des derniers gestes, the narrator’s hope is “griffonner sans saisir, griffonner sans raidir” (“scrawling without seizing, scrawling without tightening”),79 which reflects the author’s own technique. This seems to be the compromise between the stiff Written Word and the rippling Spoken Word – Oraliture? This points to a poetical way of becoming in written words, yet without settling for established meaning of words which seem at times irreparably fixed in their anchorage. Herein lies what Chamoiseau calls “le beau risque de l’Écrire” (“the beautiful risk of writing”),80 in the preservation within the literary field of an economy of orality. In all of his theoretical texts, the author affirms his unfailing affiliation with oral culture, with its subterranean palpitation: “Nous sommes Paroles sous l’écriture” (“we are Words behind writing”), as we read in Éloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness)81 a confession that points to “Un idéal inatteignable audessus de l’encre” (“an unattainable ideal above writing”).82 The in-out word The “zébrure de comète” (“comet streak”)83 of the hyphen signals a centrifugal surge from the boundaries of the single word, pushing it to the limits. In virtue of this seismics of language, the dynamics of amplification of the word proceeds from a deterritorialization,84 a situation which the two philosophers link to francophone literatures (or what they call minor literatures), which designate a reality that Lise Gauvin also underlines in La Fabrique de la langue: “Une littérature qui est affectée d’un fort coefficient de déterritorialité” (“a 79

Chamoiseau, Biblique des derniers gestes, 208. Ibid., 208. 81 Jean Bernabé et al., Éloge de la créolité, 1989, Paris: Gallimard; Éloge de la créolité / In Praise of Creoleness, Paris: Gallimard, 2004, 37. In Praise of Creoleness was translated by M.B. Taleb-Khyar in 1990, for the first time in Callaloo – A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters, XIII (1990), University of Virginia Charlottesville, and by the John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. The edition we refer to here is a bilingual one – Éloge de la créolité / In Praise of Creoleness, 38/99. 82 Chamoiseau, Biblique des derniers gestes, 123. 83 Ecrire en pays dominé, 191. 84 Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux (Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2)(1980), Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2004. 80

Samia Kassab-Charfi literature that bears a high coefficient of deterritoriality”).85 The use of the hyphen is therefore an indicative sign, a metonymy of a decentring away from the right word, resisting a centrality that is too tightly linked to the concept of the universality of French language. The notion of the right word, with which poets like Saint-John Perse demonstrate a particular obsession86 should perhaps be taken as a counterpoint to the insecurity of the hyphenated expression, which comes from a different kind of search for the right word: in the latter, we find something even more right than the right word, stronger because it is closer to the image in its figurative propagation, more eloquent and enhanced in its semantic essence because it is more complex and hybrid in its morphological configuration. Increasing and moving off center are therefore the terms of a lexical beyond,87 an image that is the exact opposite of the Saint-John Perse ideal, which celebrates language that is “franc[he] de tout métissage” (“free from any metissage”)88 and the writer that is neither “heimatlos” nor “hybride”.89 108

Conclusion Laurent Jenny warns that there is always a danger for the philologist to “Abstrai[re] les ‘inscriptions’ de leur contexte d’énonciation vivant” (“isolate ‘inscriptions’ from their lively enunciative context”).90 What is at stake here affects much more than just the « parti du langage » (“party of language”).91 The writing of history in the novel passes through a lexical rearrangement, which, on the 85

Gauvin, La Fabrique de la langue, 257. The author suggests, among other things, to replace the designation of “minor literatures” with “that, more appropriate …, of literatures of restlessness, taking from Fernando Pessoa this multi-resonant word” (“ … nous proposons de substituer à l’expression “littératures mineures” celle, plus adéquate nous semble-t-il, de littératures de l’intranquillité, empruntant à Fernando Pessoa ce mot aux résonances multiples”): ibid., 259. 86 Saint-John Perse, Œuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard, 1972, 1022. 87 Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé, 316: “Le vieux guerrier me laisse entendre :… dans cette espèce de monde on n’est plus ici ou là-bas, dedans ou dehors .… Une réalité qui doit aujourd’hui tramer les rêves des plasticiens ...” (The old warrior tells me : in this kind of world we are no longer here or there, inside or outside …. A reality which in current times must weave the dreams of plasticians …). 88 Saint-John Perse, Œuvres complètes, 511. 89 Ibid., 538. 90 Jenny, “La langue, le même et l’autre”, 4. 91 Bonnefoy, La Vérité de parole, 341.

Semiotics of the Hyphen 109 logical-semantic level, engenders a redistribution of parts of speech and of their traditional acceptance: pragmatic, plastic objects which say something other than the strict meaning of isolated notions or objects. In Biblique des derniers gestes, the compositional model replete with hyphenated expressions seems to function as a reduced model of the intricateness of narratives: “Soustraire une feuille à un feuillage animé de grand vent, … déchiffonner cette feuille et … la présenter comme l’ensemble même de l’arbre” (“to take a leaf from foliage blown by a great wind, … to uncrumple this leaf and … present it as the whole of the tree itself”).92 It works also as a synecdoche of constitutive heterogeneity – androgyny, internal dualities – within certain characters (and their doubled names), of the analeptic mise en abyme that revokes all kinds of temporal linearity in favour of flashbacks and continual digressions. If a kind of “impureté linguistique” (“linguistic impurity”) is instituted by Creole writers as a “fondation identitaire” (“foundation of identity”),93 this impurity, when it affects the definition of the self as a composite ontological identity, has no extension outside itself, meaning outside its own interests. In other words, composite identity engages only itself: it does not have repercussions on a distinct Other or Elsewhere, even if these two are troubled or worried by the differentiation. It is a gift because it intensifies lexical memory and also because it nourishes the ramifications and considerably extends the semantic horizons. Then the bridge built by the hyphen introduces us to a very new topography of translating, which cannot be found in any bilingual dictionary. It sets a transversal displacement mobility which is particularly concerned about not losing any of the words knit together in the new collocation. And maybe it reflects the fact that the search of an adequacy between the precarious, small-scale linking gesture and the creating of a new concept is a very highly poetical principle operating within Caribbean literature. Beyond that, the heuristic aptitude of the reader, a new and stimulating power from the strength of the work, must unfold and apply itself. Instead of the lacking unnamed thing, the writer brings into existence something that the reader only slowly realizes did not

92 93

Chamoiseau, Biblique des derniers gestes, 138. Jenny, “La langue, le même et l’autre”, 7.

Samia Kassab-Charfi exist before the nomination (in the Saint-John Persian sense).94 In other words, the act of naming brings the object-thing into being: 110

L’acte créateur, ce n’est pas écrire. C’est donner son nom à la chose, 95 et y écouter retentir, indéfiniment, le mystère de l’être.

It is through these deltas of renewed meaning that the rapids of Biblique des derniers gestes flow. Its style is chaotically reasoned, generous: “Langue en état de boom, proche du krach” (“language in a boom, bordering on crash”).96 Utopia is there, in the increasing overlap and decentring trace of the furrows of Chamoiseau’s writing.



94 Saint-John Perse, Éloges, Pour fêter une enfance, II, in Œuvres complètes, 24: “Appelant toute chose je récitai qu’elle était grande, appelant toute bête, qu’elle était belle et bonne” (“Referring to anything I would recite its grandeur, referring to any beast I would state its beauty and kindness”). 95 Bonnefoy, La Vérité de parole, 340: “the creative act is not writing. It is giving a name to a thing and listening to the mystery of being resonate indefinitely.” 96 Jean-Michel Adam, Le Style dans la langue: Une reconception de la stylistique, Lausanne: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1997, 45.



MAPPING “TOUT-MONDE” TOM CONLEY

The child, “l’enfant, amoureux de cartes et d’estampes” (“the child, enamored with maps and prints”) inaugurating “Le voyage”, Baudelaire’s final poem of Les Fleurs du Mal,1 may be the ideal reader of the deeply regretted Édouard Glissant, author, among a variety of novels, poems and critical studies of the Francophone Caribbean, of Tout-monde and its sequel, Traité du Tout-monde.2 The child would bring a rich gamut of unprocessed sensation to a title that invites all kinds of reverie. On cursory view “Tout-monde” would be a visual signature, a trademark, a logo, an icon of what Glissant calls a “poetics of Relation”. The first evidence of a relation between the world and its imaginary entirety is found between the adjective and substantive, in the dash of a hyphen. A whole, what is Tout, is tied to the world, our monde, the écoumène or habitable space in which we live. Tout-monde: the inclusive or global character of the adjective paradoxically beckons the other sum, the entirety of the globe to which it is apposed, that follows, and then closes when it falls silent or elides from view. Glissant’s title avers to be both a logo and a poem. The former, that would otherwise belong to trade and to a market economy for reason of universal recognition in its implied form as a brand-name (schematically put: Glissant = Tout-monde) paradoxically happens to be the latter. It almost goes without saying that when written poetry translates voice into written signs and, simultaneously, inscriptions into sound, its aural and spoken dimension refuses to cause its graphic component to disappear. As Baudelaire no doubt knew well, poets use 1

Charles Baudelaire, “Le voyage”, in Les Fleurs du Mal, Paris: Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, 1857, 1. 2 Édouard Glissant, Tout-Monde, Paris: Gallimard, 1993; Traité du Tout-monde, Paris: Gallimard, 1997.

Tom Conley the characters, typographic supplements (punctuation and ambient marks), and spacings of their words visually, to signify matter that may or may not translate into voice. They enrich the medium of writing by having the play of sound, writing and image cause words and phrases to flicker and meaning to drift into the shape and form of the verbal matter. Along this line, Montaigne, one of the great French poets of prose, speculated about how the “flesh and blood” of Plutarch’s Latin could be translated into French. The task of the translator, Montaigne implied was to turn the Latin in such a way that the very substance of Plutarch’s form would be seen, at once sublimely and subliminally, in Montaigne’s vernacular, a mix of Gascon and French. He makes a nod both to the classical author and to the shape of his idiom when noting that his words “signify more than they say”.3 For Glissant, an admirer of Montaigne, the poetic relation is built on the same process of translation. Where the visual inflections of his writing at once synthesize, divagate or differ from the voice it appears to be transcribing, an uncommon sense of space comes forward. The effects of voice and writing translate Glissant’s poetic signature into a signature geography.4 The writing acquires cardinal traits that are the stuff and substance of spatial reasoning, of locative imaging, indeed of maps and mapping. Given that geography, what in 1570 Abraham Ortelius had called “the eye of history”, Glissant’s “tout-monde” would appear intimately tied to the “writing of the world” (geographein) and related to the “eye” of his Antillean meditations. Floating logo that it is, Tout-monde embodies a geography in its divided relation to itself and to what it stands for. Upon cursory glance and protracted viewing it can be appreciated as a title-poem that translates into its form the ambient space of the Caribbean world to which it appeals. 112



3

Michel de Montaigne, Essais, in Oeuvres complètes, eds Maurice Rat and Albert Thibaudet, Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1962, 851. Here and elsewhere all translations from the French are mine. 4 Geography includes in its province both writing and invention of space. When seen in the world it represents, a geographical map causes its reader to behold a world at once in and apart from that which it represents in its own idiolect. Investing or, better, translating geography and mapping in the register of his writing, Glissant qualifies as a “writer of space”, a category that is the topic of Marie-Claire Ropars-Wulleumier, Écrire l’espace, Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-8, 2001, especially 76-77.

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In the tradition of poets who bring cartography into their verse – writers who conceive poems with pencil, divider and compass, who attend to words as if each were the sight and site of an island in an endless archipelago – Tout-monde becomes an iterated formula that serves the poet’s spatial invention. In this brief essay I would like to read passages from the Traité du tout-monde from the standpoint of the relation they hold with the spatial design of a variety of poetic maps and mappings. The aim is to discern how the cartographic latency of Glissant’s reflections translates (or betrays in the best of ways) what he might have called a creative politics where invention is part and parcel of intervention. The foundation for the argument is embedded in fairly longstanding debates in which administration of power, associated with maps and mapmakers in the service of strategic design, are opposed to spatial practices, that is, modes of living and inventing real and illusory milieus where individual users deploy for contingent and local purposes variously creative tactics of discourse, movement, performance and imaginative affiliations with uncommon and often obvious – hence overlooked – things. It will be suggested that “toutmonde” belongs to the latter and that the title and what it conveys are aimed against the former. Theory that associates maps with power finds its proponents in cartographical historians who apply Michel Foucault’s hypotheses about gridding or quadrillage and systems of classification to the legacy of maps and mapping. It is a bygone observation that in the early years of print-culture maps were not only useful tools for navigation but also, and tellingly, for administration and social control. Already in the first and many later editions of Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum orbis terrarum (from 1570 well into the early seventeenth century, in which the conceit of geography as the “eye of history” can be found) topographical maps of countries in both the new and old worlds were accompanied by lists of goods that could be extracted from them. Along a related mode of reasoning Maurice Bouguereau presented his Théâtre françoys (1594), the first official French atlas, derived from and drawn by Gabriel Tavernier, an artist familiar with Ortelius, to Henry IV of Navarre with the novel idea that it could serve as a sort of grid for taxation, territorial management and, it was inferred at the time of its production, military strategy. The map would serve the ends of the state and the centralization of its

Tom Conley power.5 It would offer to its users a sense of its modes of communication (rivers, roads and bridges), of arable and productive land (fields and forests), and of the virtues of its urban centers (cityviews that depict defensive structures, their placement in respect to rivers and their commerce, their market-sites and the like). When disseminated and made available to a broad public the map quickly acquired an ideological function of locating, pigeonholing and even pinpointing its users, effectively telling them where they are, what they do and how they live. Much like today’s computer programs that analyze the character and the buying habits of anyone and everyone who shops “on the web”, early modern maps and their avatars can be qualified as having the locative virtue of putting users in their place. It is here that J. Brian Harley, originally a historian of topographical maps in medieval England, changed the direction of research in cartography when he applied Foucaldian principles of power to the history of the production and uses of maps. Maps became symptoms of manifest and unconscious ideology in the ways they were shown being deployed or seducing viewers into reading them less as hypothetical or imaginary constructions than as graphic truth. Riddled with secrets and with unspoken agendas, for Harley and his followers the map has forever gone hand-in-hand with the articulation and management of power.6 However, the almost romantic force of attraction that Michel de Certeau exerts in his occasional writings on spatial practice builds upon and runs against the grain of historians who link cartography to power. The reader of L’Invention du quotidien: Arts de faire (published in English as The Practice of Everyday Life) witnesses how 114



5

Taken up in my Self-Map Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (1996), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, 207. 6 Brian J. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxon and with an introduction by J.H. Andrews, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. The practical implications of Harley’s work are the subject of Mark Monmonier’s many writings on the ways that in popular media maps are used to foment fear and doubt, hence to locate and control their users. See No Dig, No Fly, No Go: How Maps Restrict and Control, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010; From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim and Inflame, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006; Spying with Maps: Surveillance Technologies and the Future of Privacy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002; Bushmanders and Bullwinkles: How Politicians Manipulate Electronic Maps and Census Data to Win Elections, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001; How To Lie with Maps, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

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a historian of religion harnesses the legacy of mystical practice in medieval Europe to the art of living in constrained and restrictive conditions of current life.7 In a chapter titled “Récits d’espace” (“Spatial Stories”) he observes that anyone and everyone can make maps that evade or fail to fall under the purview of strategic control. They are found in the ways that pedestrians draw itineraries with their feet when they choose to move about an urban space in relation with (the emphasis here suggesting, as will be noted below, common ground with Glissant’s notion of a poetics of relation) memories, readings, with speech-acts, sly performatives or even creative linkages that the ambulant body makes with street- and place-names. Of a very surreal facture, the spatial story relates to their users and not to the administrators and cartographers of control. Although the ostensive narrator (or pedestrian) of the spatial story ambulates within the gridding of a controlled or striated space, he or she thinks and acts otherwise in relation to the designs of its confines. A creative process, that is, a construction of uncommon and unforeseen spatial and performative relations can be realized within milieus under surveillance. Although the spatial story cannot immediately change the world in which it is realized, its concept and usage become modes of survival and even means of obtaining agency.8 Along the same line

7

Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien: Arts de faire, 1, ed. Luce Giard, Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 1990, especially 176-79. The way that Certeau uses tactical means to work against the strategic agency of maps is made manifest in Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography Across History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Jacob spells out Harley’s way of reading maps in the chapters on their legacy of power (Chapters 1 and 2) before he turns to the creative uses that can be made of maps when they are treated as modes of writing (Chapter 3) or in the domain of fiction (Chapter 4). 8 Nigel Thrift has remarked that an almost antiquated existential humanism pervades Certeau’s theory of the spatial story: it works best in urban places where pedestrians can walk (thus disqualifying Los Angeles and other centers where the automobile reigns supreme) and, in the age of the cellphone and GPS, it requires revamping (see Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, London: Routledge, 2008, 24 and passim). Yet, and closer to Glissant, Certeau’s theory is mantled on his studies, developed in South America, of modes of non-violent practices, vital for survival, that “subalterns” in repressive societies use as best they can. The factual history is set forward in François Dosse, Michel de Certeau: Le Marcheur blesse, Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 2002, while its vital mystical heritage is developed in the pages of La Fable mystique, Paris: Gallimard, 1982, on the ways viewers “get lost” in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (Chapter 1) and

Tom Conley some of the same manifestations of alternative mapping and spatial creation are found in Gilles Deleuze’s studies of the ways that children plot itineraries that move through or alongside the family and oedipal order that Freud imposed on his subjects: he examines how they (or anyone else) can look at his or her situation so as to “deterritorialize” certain aspects and to “reterritorialize” various others.9 Deleuze’s practitioners of space, much like Certeau’s, are forever engaging or happening upon unforeseen relations that at once tie and separate affect to and from space, place and language. In Tout-monde and, especially for what follows, the Traité de tout monde Glissant moves to and about strategic and tactical character of mapping and locative imaging. The world of Tout-monde is Antillean. As such it is endowed with the rich cartographic history and theory of the “island” and the isolario or book-of-islands that in the sixteenth century became a catalogue of geographical knowledge in which things unknown or fantastical were awarded a place, indeed a droit de cité in an expanding world under the yoke of colonization:10 116

La pensée archipélique convient à l’allure de nos mondes. Elle en emprunte l’ambigu, le fragile, le dérivé. Elle consent à la pratique du détour. Elle reconnaît la portée des imaginaires de la Trace, qu’elle ratifie. Est-ce là renoncer? Non, c’est s’accorder à ce qui du monde s’est diffusé en archipel précisément, ces sortes de diversités dans l’étendue, qui pourtant rallient des dérives et marient des horizons. Nous nous apercevons de ce qu’il y avait de continental, d’épais et qui pesait sur nous, dans les somptueuses pensées de système qui jusqu’à ce jour ont régi l’Histoire des humanités, et qui ne sont plus adéquates à nos éclatements, à nos histoires ni à nos non moins somptueuses

the circulation of the story of the tale-told-in-the-coach in the pages on Jean-Joseph Surin (Chapter 4). 9 In Gilles Deleuze, Critique et Clinique, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1993; the concept of deterritorialization is developed at length in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille plateau, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980. 10 Simone Pinet’s Archipelagoes: Insular Fictions from Chivalric Romance to the Novel, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, a telling treatment of the island in the early modern literary imagination, studies how the spatial organization of fantasies of the unknown develops from the time of Cristoforo Buondelmonti’s Liber insularum archipelagi (describing the Aegean archipelago) of the fifteenth century to the writing of Don Quixote. It is essential for study of the poetic resonance of the “island”.

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errances. La pensée de l’archipel, des archipels, nous ouvre ces mers.11

The world is seen as an almost infinite scatter of islands that can be known only by the experience of errance, of travel that can move in all cardinal directions, from one piece of land to another, in marked contrast to what is called a “continental” system of imposed modes of thinking. Glissant’s sentences are in direct derivation of geographical categories that had been in place at the time of the first oceanic voyages, when the Aegean archipelago was often set adjacent to the peninsular and continental masses to the north and east.12 It was not long before the Aegean became a model for the Antilles: when confronted with knowledge of the Columbian discoveries the designers of the isolario contrasted the Mediterranean archipelagoes to those of the Antilles in a way that would make the news of the encounters with the New World fathomable (or even digestible, in the sense of breaking large bodies of thought into smaller pieces) for a public living on the European continent.13 Glissant aligns the continent with History, that is, with a strategic and controlling force (in upper-case H) while the island-groups are sites where a tactics of creative travel is possible, and where plural forms can be found at once in isolation from and in communication with each other: which no doubt causes Glissant to move from what is singular, la pensée de l’archipel (bearing a presence such that “singularity” might be a

11

Glissant, Traité du Tout-monde, 31: “Archipelic thinking is fitting with the allure of our world. It borrows from it what is ambiguous, fragile, ever-adrift. It consents to the practice of detour. It recognizes the imaginary bearing of the Trace that it ratifies. Does that mean renunciation? No, it means being in accord with what precisely has been diffused precisely from the world in archipelagoes, these kinds of diversity in extension that nonetheless rally drift and espouse horizons. We become aware of what had been continental, thick, of what weighed upon us in the sumptuous thinking of the System that until now ruled the History of the humanities, and that no longer are adequate to our flickerings, to our histories, to our no less sumptuous wanderings. Thinking of the archipelago, of archipelagoes, opens us onto these seas.” 12 For example, Pieter Apian, Cosmographie, Paris: Vivant Gaultherot, 1551, Ch. 18 fol. 28r. The relation of continent to island on this and other pedagogical maps is taken up in my Errant Eye: Topography and Poetry in Early Modern France, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, 70-71. 13 See Frank Lestringant, Le Livre des îles: Atlas et récits insulaires de la Genèse à Jules Verne, Geneva: Droz, 2002, which traces the evolution of the isolario from Buondelmonti to Benedetto Bordone, Tomasso Porcacchi, André Thevet and Vincenzo Coronelli.

Tom Conley graphic synonym of “insularity”) to its plural counterpart, la pensée … des archipels. In this reflection Glissant adds that continental ways of amassing knowledge of the past “are no longer adequate for our splinterings (éclatements)”. The luminous character of the word causes the island to be associated with the splinter and sparkle of light.14 Can it be by chance that on the world map of his Cosmographie universelle of 1555 that the Dieppe-School cartographer (and later, pirate) Guillaume le Testu brought a lexicon of geometry and of optics to his description of the archipelago to the south of Florida? On his map Cuba is spelled La Qube, as if melding a cube with the Taino cubao (where a fertile land is abundant) or coabana (a great place), and where the Antilles are associated with the Lentille: 118

For Testu the islands are lentils, an array of beans and of lenses or derived bodies having lenticular shape and thus gathering and refracting light in all directions.15 They are not entirely related to the fabled island of Antillia, the common term that offers a faithful (or

14

Randle Cotgrave in his 1611 Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues: “Esclater: To shine, sprkle, glisten, glitter; to flash out; also; to have a fresh or faire glosse. S’esclater: To split, burst, crash, breake, shiver into peeces.” 15 See Sarah Toulouse, “L’Hydrographie normande”, in Couleurs de la terre, ed. Monique Pelletier, Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1998, 52-53.

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continentally correct) historical gloss of the name that on medieval charts had been found between the Fortunate Islands and India.16 Glissant implies that “la pensée des archipels” (“the thought of archipelagoes”) is something of a thousand illuminations or flickerings that open thinking onto variegated spaces and cultures. If, too, in the poetic register that confuses sight and sound, the pensée archipélique recalls – and turns about, in an orphic act, in order to behold – what in Commune présence René Char had dubbed la parole en archipel, speech cast into and about a scatter of islands. Like Glissant’s, his are also words of originary urgency, translating into graphic form echoes of the unknown at the basis of the origins of the world in its primal scatter.17 “Les pays que j’habite s’étoilent en archipels” (“The country that I inhabit constellates in archipelagoes”):18 thus begins “Le Traité du tout-monde de Mathieu Béluse” (“Matheiu Béluse’s Treatise of the whole-world”),19 harking back to Glissant’s Le Quatrième siècle (“The Fourth Century”),20 the novel relating the mythic figure’s search for a homeland. In the middle of the “second book” (at the outset of the third section in the carefully numbered ordering) in this abbreviated and lacunary epic a voice remarks, L’errance, c’est cela même qui nous permet de fixer. De quitter ces leçons de choses que nous sommes si enclins à semoncer, d’abdiquer ce ton de sentence où nous compassons nos doutes – moi le tout premier – ou nos déclamations, et de dériver enfin.

The words immediately prompt interrogation: “Dériver à quoi?” (“Drift to what?”). And a reply:



16 The imagination of Antilia, the island of seven cities that appears on the Pizzigano Chart of 1424, is studied in Toby Lester, The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map that Gave America its Name, New York: Free Press, 2009, 210. 17 René Char, Commune présence, Paris: Gallimard, 1971. 18 Glissant, Traité du Tout-monde, 43. 19 Ibid., 41-70. 20 Glissant, Le Quatrième siècle, Paris: Seuil, 1964.

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Tom Conley A la fixité du mouvement du Tout-monde. A ces marelles, tragiques, endiablées, sages ou bienheureuses, à quoi nous jouons et dont les horizons ne forment pas les lignes.21

Reminiscent of Maurice Blanchot’s expressions of doubt in dialogues in which voices bear no indication of the locations from which they speak, the observation concerning errance calls attention to the way that dériver is taken in a geographical sense, as what – perhaps a rudderless vessel – strays from the sight of shore. And derivation, shown to be a function of fixation, is fraught with fantasy of being at once at home and lost at sea. To err is to be done with what we are si enclins à semoncer, that is, to summon or warn (in past usage, from the deck of a ship when another vessel’s warning shot is fired over the bow) to do, and then to abandon the circumspection in which we compass or use a pair of dividers to draw a circle around our doubts. Errancy, a creative passage, makes possible a derivation from fixed meanings and “the fixity of the movement of the Whole-world”. If the “Tout-monde” is shown to be stable or in a condition of stable equilibrium, it appears to be at once of Ptolemaic design (because it is set in place) and of Copernican character (because it moves on an axis). Implied is that the “Tout-monde” is gridded, much like that of a chessboard or sets of boxes children chalk on pavement for hopscotch, yet none is drawn with clear or discernible lines. It could very well be a globe whose striations of latitude and longitude are at once present and absent, or else that dilate as much as they constrict or contain. The phrasing implies that the “Tout-monde” is at once open and closed, immobile and moving, and a site where both strategic and tactical operations can take place. Its traits (and in its traits are written the history of slavery, la traite) are made manifest in the language of the isolario:



21 Glissant, Traité du Tout-monde, 63: “Wandering is exactly what allows us to locate. To be done with these lessons of things we are so inclined to heed, to abdicate this sententious tone where we measure our doubts – myself, first of all – or our declamations, and finally to be adrift”; “To the fixity of the movement of the Wholeworld. To these tragic, bedeviled wise or blessed hopscotch squares on which we alight and whose horizons do not form lines.”

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Mais cette mer qui explose, la Caraïbe, et toutes les îles du monde, sont créoles, imprévisibles. Et tous les continents, dont les côtes sont incalculable.22

Créole would be the attribute par excellence of the island for the reason that, like the inflection of “tous les continents”, it designates a history of subjection, exploitation and enslavement as well as something other, the site of a fabulous synesthesia in which light gathers and explodes into color and is, no less, richly olfactive.23 The continent, what would have dominion over the island, suddenly is an afterthought, a function of the errant and erratic force of the island. If a term can be borrowed from Baudelaire’s idiolect, it can be said that “Tout-monde” carries a double postulation. Its continents contain the histories that have made the creole world what it is, and the islands are signs of what it might become. One of its qualities is the fixity of its being, its étant, and another is its endless errance. It seems as if, in his copious reflections on the title, Glissant’s “Tout-monde” is a toponym given to a place, at once local and total, of projective identification. The poetry moves toward and away from it for the reason that it is a compass point or wind rose on a map of relations that Glissant had been drawing throughout his life. It is conceived so as to contain the double postulation that in fact marks the fairly recent turns in the history and theory of cartography. If it is allied with the tradition of the isolario, it is a term whose hyphen, its “trait d’union” (literally, line of union) or visual mark translates into graphic form a state of things in potential scatter, in which the world is tenuously connected to the totality that would describe it, a world whose

22

Ibid., 64: “But this sea that scatters, the Caribbean, and all the islands of the world, are creole, unpredictable. And all the continent whose coastlines are incalculable.” 23 A reading of créole in the context of synesthesia cannot fail to recall Baudelaire’s poetics of sensation in his Correspondances that fold olfactive sensation in the register of otherwise declarative turns of phrase. The “confuses paroles” (l. 2) that rhyme with “forêts de symboles”, mirrored by “Qui l’observent …” anticipate the olfactive register of the two tercets. Baudelaire’s créolité, that Glissant’s turns of phrase bring forward in the way he engages poetic drive (or the creative play of association, indeed a form of errance), has become a rich and viable topic in studies of Les Fleurs du Mal. Notably, Françoise Lionnet, “Reframing Baudelaire: Literary History, Biography, Postcolonial Theory, and Vernacular Languages”, Diacritics, XXVIII/3 (Fall 1998), 63-85.

Tom Conley stability is its condition of possible metamorphosis.24 It is not only of “creole” inflection by being associated with pidgin, unattached to any grammatical moorings, stuttering, echoing what Montaigne had called “la balbucie” of the new world before it was taught to read and write, but also of a rich philosophical density in its relation to “islandtheory” of the kind found in the beginnings – or recommencements – of Gilles Deleuze’s work on the creation and recreation of the world, in his prescient “Causes et raisons de l’île déserte” (in English translation as “The Desert Island”) in which islands had been shown forever rehearsing the origins of the world.25 He wrote that the “continental” island is derived, “accidental, born of disarticulation and fracture”, while oceanic islands are “originary, essential”, often “formed from coral reefs” to “display a genuine organism”.26 Continental islands make us realize that the sea is on top of the earth while oceanic islands remind us that the earth is under the waters of the sea and always “gathering its strength to punch through the surface”. The antipathy that each kind of island has for the other can be said to give philosophical “reason” to our rumblings about the origins of things. Surely the floating and unmoored aspect of “Tout-monde” makes the formula – especially when it stands over and above the writing that would subscribe to it – resemble an island. But further, it resembles an iconic map of medieval facture, the “T/O map” in which the entire world, enclosed in a circle, is divided into three parts. Apportioned according to a diagonal and a radial line descending from the axis at a right angle, the vast continent of Asia stands in the upper half while Europe and Africa are below. The diagonal represents the paths of the Nile and Tanais (or Danube) Rivers that separate the Orient from the Occident, while the shorter line stands for the Mediterranean. Around them is the mare oceanum, the ocean sea that turns the three continents into as many islands. 122



24

Glissant, Traité du Tout-monde, 64: “L’étant ni l’errance n’ont de terme, le changement est leur permanence, ho! – Ils continuent” (“Neither being nor wandering have ending, change being their permanence, ho!”). 25 Gilles Deleuze, “Causes et raisons de l’île déserte”, in L’Ile déserte et autres textes (1953-74), ed. David Lapoujade, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2004, Chapter One. 26 I am following Mike Taormina’s elegant translation in Desert Islands and Other Texts, New York: Semiotexte, 2003, 9.

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In its stenography the T/O map is shorthand for “tout”, for the entire world as the sons of Noah had inherited it, yet a world in miniature, whose parts are at once together and isolated.27

Glissant’s formula at once recalls and translates the icon into a poetic emblem at the same time it has the graphic virtue of making clear the double postulation found in the textual descriptions of “tout-monde”. It can be seen through the rich history of the ideogram. In a study of the word-images that inform Paul Claudel’s verse Henri Meschonnic notes how the Catholic poet translated innocuous combinations of letters and spacings into hieroglyphs. One of them, toit, the French substantive in its graphic meaning “roof” and in oral inflection “you” in the familiar, was for Claudel a scene of domestic bliss: the two walls of the home were figured by the “t”’s at either end of the substantive, while the “o” figured a table where the family broke bread, and the “i” the chimney out of which the dot became puff of 27

See Paul Zumthor’s gloss of the letters and form of the T/O map in La Mesure du monde, Paris: Seuil, 1993, and David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi”, in History of Cartography 1: The European Middle Ages, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 296-97, 301-302.

Tom Conley smoke from the fire at the hearth.28 Now, in the same vein, it could be that for Glissant “tout” might be of the same graphic-pidgin order, with the difference that the containing edges of each “t” contain the question of place and space that runs through Tout-monde and the subsequent Traité: ou or où. Where is the whole? Or is all in itself, in what the poet invests in the word in order to crack open its closed form – in order to bring promise of change or a sense of becoming in the shape of a tout ouvert, an all-or-where?29 Some answers to the question concerning the graphic force of the formula may be found in the inventive play of its iteration in Glissant’s writing. Early in the Traité du Tout-monde he writes of a Chaos-monde that he distinguishes from the Tout-monde: 124

J’appelle Chaos-monde le choc actuel de tant de cultures qui s’embrasent, se repoussent, disparaissent, subsistent pourtant, s’endorment ou se transforment, lentement ou à vitesse foudroyante: ces éclats, ces éclatements dont nous n’avons pas commencé de saisir le principe ni l’économie et dont nous ne pouvons pas prévoir l’emportement. Le Tout-Monde, qui est totalisant, n’est pas (pour nous) total. Et j’appelle Poétique de la Relation ce possible de l’imaginaire qui nous porte à concevoir la globalité insaisissable d’un tel ChaosMonde, en même temps qu’il nous permet d’en relever quelque détail, et en particulier de chanter notre lieu, insondable et irréversible. L’imaginaire n’est pas le songe, ni l’évidé de l’illusion.30



28

Henri Meschonnic, “Claudel et l’hiéroglyph ou la ahité des choses”, in La Pensée de l’image, ed. Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, Paris: Presses de l’Université de ParisVIII/Vincennes-à-Saint-Denis, 1994, 99-119, especially 100. 29 “Tout-monde”, as it were, must be submitted to the fracturing process that writerpoet Raymond Roussel employed in his novels, a point not lost on Gilles Deleuze in his Foucault, Paris: Edition de Minuit, 1986, 56: “Words thus must be split, cracked open, in order to extract their utterances.” 30 Glissant, Traité du Tout-monde, 22-23: “I call chaos-World the current shock of so many cultures that are set afire: these explosions, these shatterings, thrusting each other away, that disappear, yet subsist, become dormant or are transformed, slowly or at a blazing speed, whose principle and economy we are yet to understand and whose rage we cannot yet foresee, The whole-World, what is totalizing, is not (for us) total. And I call Poetics of Relation this possibility of the imaginary that leads us to conceive the ungraspable globality of such a Chaos-World, at the same time that it allows us draw some detail from it, and in particular to sing of our bottomless and irreversible place. The imaginary is neither the dream nor the scraps of illusion.”

Mapping “Tout-monde”

125

The island flashes and splinters of the chaos world inhere in and explode from an ever-expanding sum of undecidable forces that cut through the whole world. The words that comprise the very formula engage a relation in history, language, visual form, and even a politics of sensation available to any and every reader. The cartographic latency of the term allows the work to be read along multifariously creative itineraries, in perpetual translation between language and space, not only in the vagaries of its use and recurrence (it begins ever and over again) but also in its relation with worlds we see shattering in our midst.



TRANSLATING THE OTHER’S VOICE: WHEN IS TOO MUCH TOO MUCH? MARIE-JOSÉ NZENGOU-TAYO AND ELIZABETH WILSON

Caribbean Scholars have long advocated that consideration be given to the Caribbean context and language when Caribbean texts are translated into other languages spoken in the Caribbean. In recent times, translation theorists and particularly feminist translation theorists influenced by Gayatry Spivak’s seminal article “Can the Subaltern Speak?”1 seem to have gone overboard in introducing into their translations local languages which were not in the source text. For instance, discussing her experience in translating Marie VieuxChauvet’s Les rapaces, Carolyn Shread indicates that she “decided to switch language, or rather to replace key moments in the English text with Kreyòl”. She recognizes that she was “drawing out the Kreyòl from Vieux-Chauvet’s subtext and context rather than her text” and justifies her decision by her desire to reach the Haitian-American audience as an “invitation to make this text their own”.2 In the same vein, Françoise Massardier-Kenney theorizes about the translation of French abolitionist literature into English. Discussing the representation of African characters in the first chapter of Translating Slavery, she hypothesizes that: Perhaps then the translator can present a version of the missing voice and emphasize that all the French author has given the reader is a translation of a translation. The translator can recover Ourika’s speech

1

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988, 271-313. 2 Carolyn Shread, “Translating Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Les Rapaces for a Transnational Haiti”, The Journal of Haitian Studies, XIV/2 (Fall 2008), 100 (our emphasis).

128

Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo and Elizabeth Wilson in Wolof and make clear that the interpreter’s version in French is a sign of the narrator’s and the reader’s linguistic weakness. By translating from French into Wolof, rather than from French into English, in strategic parts of the text, the translator can momentarily “withhold translation” to make the translation apparent, to restore multilinguism.3

This article wishes to discuss this approach to translation against the background of recent experience in translating Haitian and Guadeloupean texts. The authors would like to question how far a translator can/should go in making transparent or authentic the language of a text originally written in a multilingual context, but which, in giving voice to the Other, does not always use his or her native tongue. The issues at stake revolve around faithfulness, historicity, and respect for the author’s choices and translation ethics. Translating Caribbean texts: the ideological context Because of its colonial history and geography, the Caribbean is a linguistically fragmented space. Since the Eighties, the region has been trying to become more integrated through organizations like the Association of Caribbean States (ACS), the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) with its opening to non-English speaking states (Suriname and Haiti) and more recently the creation of a Single Market Economy. These political and economic integrative efforts have been accompanied by more successful cultural and intellectual integrative initiatives (CARIFESTA and CARIFTA).4 Yet, language barriers remain despite efforts made in the region to bridge this gap. Translation is part of such efforts. In recent years, Caribbean literary texts have been made more readily available in the other languages of the Caribbean, with the exception of Dutch and Papiamentu. However, we are faced with the paradox that this availability is made possible by publishing houses located outside the Caribbean in the former colonial “centers”. It is clear that translation of Caribbean texts does not aim first at

3

Doris Kadish and Françoise Massardier-Kenney, Translating Slavery, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009, I, 15: Massardier-Kenney refers to Spivak in a note on the use of “withholding translation”. 4 CARIFESTA is a cultural event taking place every two years and hosted by an islandcountry since 1972; CARIFTA is an annual sporting event held in a different island during which young Caribbean athletes compete against each other.

Translating the Other’s Voice 129 readers from the region. Little is known of the decision-making process surrounding the selection of texts worthy of translation or not, particularly for the French publishing houses. We have been able to identify the influence of Caribbean scholars in the US and the UK and Casa de las Américas for the translation of texts into English and Spanish respectively.5 However, theoretical positions on Caribbean translation are yet to be structured because of the exogenous location of publishers and readership and also because Caribbean translators are not always hired for Caribbean translation projects. From that viewpoint, Guillermo Irizarry’s case study of three Spanish translations of Caribbean texts written in English by writers of Spanish Caribbean origin is very revealing.6 Indeed, Irizarry identifies three translating locations for these texts and therefore three ideological/theoretical underpinnings for these translations. The publication history of these books and their translations are as follows: Julia Álvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accent published originally in 1991 by Algonquin of Chapel Hill and its Spanish version, De como las chicas García perdieron su acento, published in 1994 in Barcelona, Spain by Ediciones B, When I Was Puerto Rican, by Esmeralda Santiago, published in New York by Addison-Wesley and reissued in 1994 by Vintage Books, and its translation, Cuando era puertorriqueña, published the same year by Vintage Books in its series Vintage Español, and Rosario Ferré’s The House on the Lagoon from 1995, published in New York by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and its translation, La casa de la laguna, published originally by Emecé in Barcelona, Spain, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1996 and 1997 respectively, and reissued by Vintage Books in 1997 in its Vintage Español series.7

Three translation practices are identified in Irizarry’s discussion: a translation by a translator from Spain for a Catalan publishing house (Alvarez); a translation by the author (Santiago) published by an USbased company, and a translation geared toward Spain, South America 5

See Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo, “La traduction des textes littéraires antillais: quels enjeux?”, in Sur le fil: traducteurs et éthique, éthiques du traducteur, ed. Christine Pagnoulle, Liège: L3/ Université de Liège, 2011, 99-109. 6 Guillermo Irizarry, “Travelling Textualities and Phantasmagoric Originals: A Reading of Translation in Three Recent Spanish-Caribbean Narratives”, available at http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v04/Irizarry.html (accessed 4 May 2012). 7 Ibid., 1.

Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo and Elizabeth Wilson and the US (Ferré), translator not identified. A comment made by Irizarry concerning the translation of Julia Alvarez’s novel, How the Garcia Sisters Lost their Accent, sets out the problems of translating Caribbean texts: 130

García Girls was translated by Jordi Gubern and the language of the Spanish version adopts the modality of Spanish spoken in Spain. Thus, the second translation8 responds to two hegemonic centers: the old colonial power, which certainly still maintains its fantasies of transnational domination, and the new dominant metropolis, whose dreams of domination are couched in the neo-liberal program. Within these new coordinates the Dominican Republic appears as this highly structured Other, insufficiently modern and excessively hierarchical, whose institutional realities exist as antidemocratic and hardened.9

Irizarry pinpoints the ideological contradiction of the Spanish translation and the invisible ideological subtext of any translation from the viewpoint of North-South relationships. Similarly, he praises Santiago’s self-translation of When I was Puertorican precisely because of its “linguistic interferences that force the readers to abandon the comfort of their expectations of normative discourse and therefore become empathetic with the narrator”.10 Indeed, the translation of Caribbean texts often leads to ideological discussions about translating texts from minority or dominated cultures. This debate takes place mostly within the Anglo-American academia, fueled by Spivak’s subaltern theory as well as post-colonial and feminist criticism. As Caribbean scholars and translators based in the Caribbean, we are nevertheless perplexed by the ideological radicalism of some translation theorists. Though we admit that translation is a delicate balancing act, and acknowledge that translation can reinforce cultural stereotypes (after reading Said’s 8

Because the authors are Spanish-Caribbean writing in English, Irizarry considers the English original as the translation of a phantasmagoric Spanish manuscript, hence his use of “second translation” to refer to the Spanish translation of these books. It must be noted however that he mistakenly criticizes the Spanish “translation” of Rosario Ferré’s book as the Spanish version. Indeed, even if the Spanish version of her books are published after the English version, they are usually written by her (based on Rosario Ferré’s comment at the 2000 conference of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico). 9 Irizarry, “Travelling Textualities and Phantasmagoric Originals”, 3-4. 10 Ibid., 5.

Translating the Other’s Voice 131 Orientalism and J. Michael Dash’s Haiti and the United States: Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination who could deny that?),11 we still have doubts about the appropriateness of some translation choices concerning certain languages in particular. Translating Caribbean texts: the linguistic context Translating a Caribbean text from French to English or vice-versa can be a very challenging task because of the linguistic complexity of the region. Indeed, in addition to the regional specificity of the European languages inherited from colonization (English, French, Spanish and Dutch), three main African-European Creoles have developed, one with an English-based lexicon as is the case in Jamaica for example, another with a French-based lexicon (Haitian, Martinican, Guadeloupean, St Lucian, Dominican, Grenadian and Trinidadian Creoles) and a third one with a mix of Spanish/Dutch-based lexicon (Papiamentu in Curaçao). This peculiarity stems from the fact that in addition to the usual sociolects developed for the European languages in the region, there is a hierarchical distinction between the regionalized European languages and their African-Caribbean counterparts. This situation identified as diglossia12 complicates matters in translating the Caribbean. An additional challenge comes from usage of the two languages in respective territories. For instance, in Jamaica people shift, often seamlessly, from standard Jamaican English to Jamaican Creole along a continuum. In St Lucia a native speaker could have access to Standard (St Lucian/Caribbean) English, French-based Creole, and English-based vernacular. Ed Ford and Leonie St Juste-Jean describe a continuum between French Creole (Patwa) and Standard English and make the point that in St Lucia

11

Edward Said, Orientalism (1978), New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1994; Michael J. Dash, Haiti and the United States: Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination (1989), New York: St Martin Press, 1994. 12 The prominent Haitian linguist, Yves Déjean has always argued that there is no diglossia in Haiti since 95% of the population is monolingual. We beg to differ based on research carried out in Haiti in 1997 by an MPhil student of the University of West Indies, Mona. In her interviews, she found that monolingual Creole-speakers looked up to French as a prestige language. Unfortunately, the student never completed her thesis. At the time, we called it among ourselves “psychological / mental” diglossia in the sense that French remained the language of reference for the monolingual Creolespeakers.

Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo and Elizabeth Wilson “Speakers command a span of this continuum rather than a point within it”.13 In several other Anglophone Caribbean islands native speakers could be fluent in Standard English – that is the version considered standard in their territory – as well as an English-based or Frenchbased Creole. In Haiti, code-switching occurs mostly in urban settings, in Port-au-Prince and within the North-American Diaspora. In addition to expected sociolectal variations, there are also regional differences between Kreyòl spoken in the North, South and West. As a result a translator’s choices in the case of Caribbean texts as we have already said are made extremely complicated and problematic because of these complex linguistic contexts. Whereas it is tempting to translate Francophone Caribbean texts using Caribbean English and English-based lexicon Creole, in practice, it is not that easy or straightforward. When Bridget Jones translated Pierre Clitandre’s novel Cathédrale du mois d’août (Cathedral of the August Heat)14 using Jamaican Creole and English, she was harshly criticized within the Caribbean for privileging Jamaican Creole at the expense of the other English-based lexicon Creoles. 132

Two case studies: Gouverneurs de la rosée and Cathédrale du mois d’août Langston Hughes’ and Mercer Cook’s 1947 translation of Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the Dew)15 provides a starting point for our discussion. Indeed, Jacques Roumain’s novel was the first to use in a systematic way a creolized French to convey the voice of the Haitian peasants. In addition, it is also a multilingual text since it is interspersed with Haitian Creole, English and Spanish

13 Ed Ford and Leonie St Juste-Jean, “St Lucian French Creole”, paper presented at Southern University of Illinois at Carbondale and displayed on the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages website maintained by Thomas Leverett: http:// www.siuc.edu/jpclfiles/stlucien.html (accessed 15 September 2009). 14 Pierre Clitandre, Cathédrale du mois d’août, Paris: Syros, 1982; Cathedral of the August Heat, trans. Bridget Jones, London and New York: Readers International Inc., 1987 (references to these books, as Cathédrale and Cathedral, given in parentheses in the text). 15 Jacques Roumain, Gouverneurs de la rosée (1946), Paris: Les Éditeurs français réunis, 1973 ; Masters of the Dew (1947), trans. Langston Hughes and Mercer Cook, Introduction by J. Michael Dash (1978), London and Kingston, Jam.: Heinemann – Caribbean Writers Series, 12, 1986 (references to these books, as Gouverneurs and Masters, given in parentheses in the text).

Translating the Other’s Voice 133 expressions. The translators used various techniques. Isolated words or expressions were kept as in the source text including the author’s gloss to facilitate understanding, as for example with “zafra”: “Il devait rentrer après la Zafra ainsi que ces Espagnols appellent la récolte” (Gouverneurs, 27) as opposed to “He was to return after the zafra, as the Spaniards call the harvest” (Masters, 33). In the case of “coumbite” – “à l’époque on vivait en bonne harmonie, unis comme les doigts de la main et le coumbite (1, Travail agricole collectif) réunissait le voisinage pour la récolte ou le défrichage ” (Gouverneurs, 16, our emphasis) – the author’s footnote (“travail agricole collectif”) is instead inserted in the text: “In those days when they all lived in harmony united as the fingers of the hand, they had assembled all the neighborhood in collective coumbites for the harvest or the clearing” (Masters, 25, our emphasis in bold type). The context (agricultural work) being self-explanatory (“assembled all the neighborhood”, “harvest”, “clearing”), the translators inserted “collective” to reinforce the meaning of the word.16 But there is no consistency: other Spanish expressions – “parece” (“Parece une véritable malediction …”; Gouverneurs, 32); “aguantar” (“Mais il y a quelque chose qui te fait aguantar, qui te permet de supporter”; Gouverneurs, 33); “huelga” (“Lorsque nous avons fait la huelga (1, Esp. La grève) chaque homme s’est aligné …”; Gouverneurs, 34) – which signal that Manuel, the main protagonist, lived abroad (in Cuba) for a long period, are not translated (Masters, 37, 38). This is particularly surprising in a context in which reference to the use of Spanish is mentioned in the narration for its impact on Annaïse during her first encounter with Manuel. Indeed, the omniscient narrator indicates Annaïse’s difficulty in understanding Manuel whose “somber voice … hit each sentence hard and sometimes threw in the magnificence of a foreign word”. (Masters, 38, our emphasis). Elsewhere, the translators indicate that the sentence was said in Spanish (Masters, 39, 56).



16

It should be pointed out that the translators changed the order of the text in that particular section, bringing Bienaimé’s stream of consciousness closer to the final utterance “Ah what coumbites! Bienaimé mused” (Masters, 25). In the French original, a descriptive paragraph separates the two (Gouverneurs, 16).

Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo and Elizabeth Wilson If we were to use Lawrence Venuti’s terminology,17 we would say that the translators oscillate between “domesticating” and “foreignizing” Roumain’s novel. We noted that some sentences and paragraphs of the novel were not translated into English. These omitted parts are the narrator’s comments (Gouverneurs, 22)18 or a character’s stream of consciousness (Gouverneurs, 15).19 Some strident political comments are either omitted or toned down in the translation (see the quotes in notes 18 and 19). Roumain’s play on language is lost at times. For instance, when the story-teller, Antoine the Simidor, tells about his courting and indicates that he used his “français-français” (Gouverneurs, 48), Roumain uses the convoluted creolized French of the country side, with some grammatical errors and mispronunciation. However this is lost in the translation, though the spirit of the original is kept (Gouverneurs, 49). It is never easy to translate the polyphonic nature of a Caribbean text. Though the existence of English-based lexicon Creole should be a boon for the translator, the editorial policies of publishing houses mindful of their target audiences can hinder the translator. In recent years, there has been a trend to accept the opacity of the source text and to convey that opacity in the translation. This has allowed for the transfer of the multilingual practices of the original texts into their translations. Bridget Jones’ 1987 translation of Pierre Clitandre’s Cathédrale du mois d’août (Cathedral of the August Heat) mentioned earlier, marks a turning point in Caribbean literary translation. Indeed, she uses Jamaican Creole in order to make the English-speaking reader hear the Haitian Creole under the French used by Clitandre. For instance, the dialogue of the passengers in John’s bus is rendered in Jamaican Creole (Cathedral, 10) though in the original it is written in a mix of colloquial French, Haitian French and Creole. The use of Jamaican Creole brings out the similarities of the Haitian experience 134



17

Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (1995), London and New York: Routledge, 2008, 1-34. 18 “… tant pis et la merde pour eux, parce que, question de courage au travail, nous sommes sans reproche ; et soyez comptés, nos grands pieds de travailleurs de la terre, on vous les foutra un jour dans le cul, salauds” (sections in bold are omitted in the translation). 19 “Travaillé durement en nègres conséquents, en travailleurs de la terre qui savent qu’ils ne pourront porter un morceau à la bouche s’ils ne l’ont extrait du sol par un labeur viril. Et la terre avait répondu : c’est comme une femme qui d’abord se débat, mais la force de l’homme c’est la justice, alors elle dit : prend ton plaisir …” (15-16).

Translating the Other’s Voice 135 with that of the English-speaking Caribbean and help to create a bridge between the French-speaking republic and the CARICOM countries. It is interesting to note that the translation was published at a time when Haiti was a center of interest for the rest of the Caribbean.20 For songs and proverbs, Jones uses basilectal Jamaican Creole. For instance, the popular “Caroline Acaau” song becomes “Carolina Acao”, and the main line “Dansé Congo jistan kò’m fèm mal, oh” (Cathédrale, 15) is translated “Me dance the congo till me body da ache” (Cathedral, 5). However, in the last line of the song, the translator chose the French etymological spelling to keep the Haitian word with the Jamaican Creole: “Nèg nouè ti-zorey anrajé” (Cathédrale, 15) becomes “Small ear black man enragé” (Cathedral, 5). The use of Jamaican Creole for songs and proverbs contributed to showing how close the worldviews of the two countries were despite the difference of language, for instance “giromon pa donnin Calbas” (Cathédrale, 34) is translated “Pumkin nebba bear calabash…” (Cathedral, 20). In addition to Creole, the French original contained utterances in Spanish, which led Jones to make some adjustments in her translation: she kept isolated words or short expressions in their original Spanish, but for longer utterances, she kept half of the sentence in Spanish, translating only the second half – “Virgén Altagracia Santa Madre de Dios! Il avait toujours voulu foutre en rogne les hommes de main du patron (51) becomes in the English translation: Virgén Altagracia, Holy Mother of God! All the time he wanted to fight it out with the boss’ strong-arm men . . . (35)

It should be noted that she uses “King Cane” with capital letters instead of the Spanish “Zafra” used by the author (Cathedral, 33-34). In the original, “La Zafra” is repeated like a refrain between paragraphs (Cathédrale, 49-51). While the Haitian readership would readily connect with the experience of cane cutting in the Dominican Republic, the English-speaking reader will miss that connection but will understand the powerful constraint of cane cutting on the lives of

20 Coincidentally, the translation came out in 1987, a few months after Jean-Claude Duvalier was overthrown. Jamaica was then trying to play a part in the democratic process following his departure.

Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo and Elizabeth Wilson the Haitian poor. Jones personifies the sugar cane which becomes like a monstrous Moloch waiting to swallow the flesh of the urban dwellers as well as the peasants. We find another example of Jones modulation of the original in her translation of “entreprises” (Cathédrale, 69). The author singled out the free-zone factories installed near the slum as “Entreprises” making a pun by hyphenating “Entre” and “prises” with “prises” implying the predatory nature of the factories and hinting at the American origin of the factories through the pronunciation “Anteupraillezizes” (Cathédrale, 70) used by the factory owners. Instead of using a calque, Jones substitutes “Incorporated” (Cathedral, 49), which allows for a pun on “corporate” and “corpse” (49) and the pronunciation “Incorrperaiytid” (Cathedral, 50, 69). Jones’ translation uses the Jamaican continuum (Creole-Standard English) and keeps some French and Spanish words from the original. She reserves the basilectal Creole for songs and proverbs and uses the continuum for the dialogues. Though there is no absolute consistency in the use of the two, the few exceptions do not affect the quality of the translation, on the contrary, they enhance the meaning of the original. 136

An example from the Anglophone Caribbean: Discerner of Hearts So far we have looked at translations of French Caribbean texts into English, trying to identify the translators’ solutions in order to render the Creole. We would like to examine a recent attempt at translating Olive Senior’s Discerner of Hearts into French as Zig-Zag et autres nouvelles de la Jamaïque by Christine Raguet.21 The interest of this translation is to examine how Raguet used Martinican Creole but also coined some expressions creating a Creole-like effect. For instance in the first short story, which gives its title to the English collection, Senior’s “Blackartman” (Discerner, 1) is translated by “Maginoir” (Zig-Zag, 11), making a choice between “art” and “’art” (heart) since the word play is impossible in French. Christine Raguet is very sensitive to the challenges of translating Senior. She notes in her Preface: 21

Olive Senior, Discerner of Hearts, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1995; ZigZag et autres nouvelles de la Jamaïque, trans. Christine Raguet, Carouge-Genève: Editions ZOE – Écrits d’Ailleurs, 2010 (references to these books, as Discerner and Zig-Zag, given in parentheses in the text).

Translating the Other’s Voice

137

Les variations sont aussi d’ordre grammatical: la syntaxe et la grammaire françaises ont du mal à en restituer les fantaisies. Si le créole jamaïcain a adopté des formes africaines qui se répercutent sur la structure de la phrase, sur la conjugaison, sur les accords entre autres, le français offre moins de latitude que l’anglais, car les variétés d’anglais existant à travers le monde ont donné à la langue une flexibilité que n’a pas eue le français, régie par l’Académie.22

Looking at Raguet’s strategies, we are able to identify cases where she uses French Creole from the Antilles: “Bondyé” (Zig-Zag, 18) for “Lawd” (Creole for “Lord”, Discerner, 6); “continyé à rigoler” (ZigZag, 18) for “gwan run joke” (Discerner, 7). In the absence of equivalent for “run joke” she resorts to the colloquial “rigoler” as she had done for “peep” (Discerner, 3) by using “zyeuter” (Zig-Zag, 13). To render the special meaning of “tie” italicized in Senior’s text (Discerner, 9) however, she does not use the Kreyòl “mare” from “amarrer” but she chooses to break the syllables “at-ta-ché” (Zig-Zag, 22) to transfer the emphasis.23 On other occasions, she moves the Kreyòl to another part of the text. For example, in a section of the text Senior uses the Creole “pickney” for “children”: What good is a woman if she can’t have pickney? Everybody else have baby but me poor soul. The girls my age, some of them have all two three pickney. And me can’t have even one little one. My own little sisters and all having pickney. Everybody except poor-me-gal. (Discerner, 11)

Raguet does not use French-based Creole for the first two occurrences of “pickney”, keeping the usual “enfants”. However for the last occurrence, she uses “pitits” (Zig-Zag, 25). The other Creole syntactic and lexical markers of the text – “have pickney”, “have baby”, “gal” – are not transferred in the translation of the paragraph. As stated in her Preface the translator has to negotiate between the demands of French

22 Zig-Zag, 8: “Variations are also grammatical in nature: French grammar and syntax have difficulty reproducing the idiosyncrasies of Creole. If Jamaican Creole adopted African forms which affect sentence structure, conjugation, and agreement among other things, French gives less freedom than English, because the varieties of English that exist around the world have given to the language a flexibility that French, strictly monitored by the Academy, has not had” (our translation). 23 Similarly, the italicized “spiritual bath” (10) is translated “un bain pu-ri-fi-ca-teur” (Zig-Zag, 22).

Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo and Elizabeth Wilson syntax and the flexibility of Creole. Except for cases where she translates an entire sentence into Creole, Raguet usually uses lexical markers rather than syntactic ones: she would rather use colloquial French to render the Creole syntax and put Creole lexicon in the mix – for example, “pretty up yuself, girl” (Discerner, 12) becomes “te faire jolie, ma fi” (Zig-Zag, 25). From Raguet’s translations, the most daring and challenging one must have been Senior’s story entitled “You think I mad, Miss?” (Discerner, 75-82). The story shows how a mad woman at a traffic light addresses motorists in order to obtain money from them. Each monologue conveys the protagonist’s obsessions as well as offers a picturesque insight into her begging strategies: thanking generous drivers, cursing the tight-fisted ones all the while using the CreoleEnglish continuum. In the translation, Raguet had to displace the Creole utterances in the text, shifting a marker from one place to another. For instance, the phrase “… never go out a street without my stockings straight and shoes shine good for is so my mother did grow me” (Discerner, 75) is adapted by using “jamais” without the negative marker and by doubling the adverb “good” into “bien-bien”. Except for “bien-bien” the Kreyòl is lost in the French and replaced by colloquial speech: “. . . jamais je sors dans la rue sans mes bas biens tirés et mes chaussures qui brillent bien-bien parce que c’est comme ça que ma manman m’a élevée (Zig-Zag, 105). Similarly, “why your face mek up so?” (Discerner, 75) is translated using familiar French “Pourquoi tu fais cette tête là?” (ZigZag, 105). However, the Creole is re-instated in the translation of “whisper” (Discerner, 75) by “chuichuiter” (Zig-Zag, 105). Phonetic markers of Creole, like “nutten” (Discerner, 75) for “nothing”, “Sar” (Discerner, 76) for “sir” and “dutty bwoy” (Discerner, 76) for “dirty boy”, are lost in the translation process. Raguet, however, re-creates a Creole-like effect at other points of the text: by aphaeresis of “arriver” in “’river” (Zig-Zag, 106) as well as of “envoyer” in “’voyé”, which both exist in Haitian Creole; by using “tu tournes kabèche et tu vas dire …” (Zig-Zag, 106, our emphasis) for “tu tournes la tête”, she moves the syntactic and phonetic markers “yu a turn yu head a gwan she” (Discerner, 76, our emphases) to a lexicon marker “kabèche”. There are several occurrences of this strategy in the text: “diplômation” (Zig-Zag, 108, 110, 111), “éducationnée” (Zig-Zag, 109, 110), “tourmentationner” (Zig-Zag, 107). Raguet uses Gallicized 138

Translating the Other’s Voice 139 spelling for the French-Creole expressions in the text except for “kabèche” (Spanish “cabeza”) and ‘kondiré’ (French “comme qui dirait”). “Unmannersable” (Discerner, 82) is rendered by phonetic modification “malélyvée” (Zig-Zag, 114). Space does not allow for a systematic listing of all the techniques used by Raguet in rendering Senior’s Creole. However, we think that our sample captures most of the techniques used by Raguet in order to convey the Creole voice in the French translation. Does she exoticize Senior for her French audience? In our view, her practice could be said to call into question issues of authenticity,24 yet several techniques are similar to those of the French Creolist writers of Martinique and Guadeloupe, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and Gisèle Pineau, to name a few. As a result, thanks to Raguet’s translation choices, Olive Senior is brought closer to her French Caribbean counterparts. What orthography? Which “Caribbean” English? At the Caribbean Studies Association Conference, Kingston, June 2009, Marlon James, author of The Book of Night Women, was asked why he did not use Jamaican Creole, the language the questioner apparently considered more appropriate for the context of the novel, set in Jamaica, especially as James was presumably fluent in Jamaican Creole. James stated that he used the language he did because he “wanted to”.25 The narrative voice in James’ novel is considered by many reviewers to be one of the striking and most successful features of the text.26 Certainly in the case of so many “canonical” writers whose works are set in a variety of geographical, historical and linguistic contexts quite apart from the writers’ own, the question of authenticity does not arise. Césaire’s or Shakespeare’s characters’ language is presumably what he wanted it to be. Should a translator

24

We use “authentic” in the original sense of “known to be true” as in the dictionary definition: “conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features.” MerriamWebster Dictionary online, http://www.merriam-webster.com/ (accessed 15 September 2009). 25 Marlon James, Jamaican artist, novelist, photographer, is the author of John Crow’s Devil, New York: Akashic Books, 2005, and The Book of Night Women, London: Penguin Riverhead Books, 2009. James’ novel is set on a Jamaican plantation during the period of slavery, so in any event the language of eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century enslaved women would not be contemporary Jamaican Creole. 26 See the online and other reviews of James, The Book of Night Women.

Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo and Elizabeth Wilson consciously decide to “improve” on an author’s text by using “more authentic” language? The question of authenticity is itself problematic, especially in the context of a work of fiction. The “Note on the Translation” which follows the English version of Jacques Stephen Alexis’ novel, In the Flicker of an Eyelid (L’Espace d’un cillement), translated by Carrol Coates and Edwidge Danticat says: “The co-translators disagreed on only one major point: Edwidge argued for fidelity to Alexis’ personal spelling of Kreyòl, but Carrol was insistent on using standard Kreyòl orthography in order to underscore the distinction between the Kreyòl and the French languages.” 27 This latter choice (Carrol’s) addresses an important issue involved in literatures marked by linguistic and cultural plurality or plurilingualism (a situation in which an individual switches between two languages, often in response to the social context). This is relevant in literatures originating from multilingual or plurilingual cultures such as the Caribbean. However this position raises a number of other issues where translations/translators/“translator function”28 are concerned – issues such as those mentioned in our introduction: faithfulness, historicity, respect of the author’s choices (as in Danticat’s preference just mentioned) and translation ethics. Ultimately however, as the great translator Gregory Rabassa, to whom we acknowledge our indebtedness, points out: 140

The translator must put to good use that bugbear of timid technicians: the value judgment. In translation as in writing, which it is as we have said, the proper word is better than a less proper but standard one .… Translation is based on choice and a rather personal one at that.29



27 Jacques Stephen Alexis, L’Espace d’un cillement, (1959). Paris: Gallimard – L’Imaginaire No. 114, 1983; In the Flicker of an Eyelid, trans. Carrol F. Coates and Edwidge Danticat, Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2002, 272. 28 Aletha Stahl quotes Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz, Adrienne Rich’s Spanish translator, who she says in borrowing from Foucault proposes the “translator function” as “a network that creates signification and is more important than the translator as an individual, man or woman”. See Aletha Stahl, “Does Hortense have a Hoo-Hoo?”, TTR (Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction, Études sur le texte et ses transformations): Les Antilles en traduction, The Caribbean in Translation, ed. Anne Malena, XIII/2 (2nd semester 2000), 133. 29 Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Discontents. A Memoir, New York: New Directions Books, 2005, 9.

Translating the Other’s Voice 141 But who decides what is “the proper word”? (Carrol Coates’ conviction seems to rest on this consideration.) What criteria influence that choice? Deciding what is “the proper word” depends on a value judgment and ultimately it is the translator’s opinion (or occasionally the editor’s) which prevails. Just as an author is free to do as he/she sees fit, as Marlon James bluntly reminded us, the translator’s choices in the final analysis are based on personal conviction as to what is important and what works best. These choices will of necessity please some and disappoint others. In fact, Rabassa sees the translator as being even more free than the author “because all he has to do is write”, though he reminds us that this writing must be based on a close reading of the text.30 Two other case studies: Pineau, Lahens Gisèle Pineau is of Guadeloupean origin: she lives and writes in France. About her language Marie-Agnès Sourieau says: For Pineau, whose mother tongue is “classic” French and whose second language is Creole, the problem of bilingual literary practice seems to be naturally resolved in her writing. Mastering all the nuances of French and colloquial Antillean French, she resorts very effectively to the Creole language and a transformed syntax that translate the reality of Creole speech and the cultural environment of her island. In deconstructing the linguistic norms, Pineau “liberates” the French language from its lexical and semantic rigor, thus eliminating its alienating hegemony.

And again: If on the one level Exile is meant for a white readership, on another it specifically addresses the Antillean people, those who have immigrated into France and those who have stayed home …. Métissage is inexorably transforming Frenchness.31

30

Ibid., 8. Marie-Agnès Sourieau, “Afterword”, in Gisèle Pineau, Exile According to Julia, trans. Betty Wilson, Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2002, 181, 185; Gisèle Pineau, L’Exil selon Julia (1996), Paris: Librairie Générale Française – Le Livre de Poche No. 14799, 2000.

31

Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo and Elizabeth Wilson Yanick Lahens lives and writes in Haiti. In the Afterword to Aunt Résia and the Spirits, Sourieau points out that Lahens embeds in her narratives everyday realities through “hybrid stylistic techniques”.32 Lahens’ language may also be considered hybrid/métissé in that she weaves into her fiction, written mainly in standard French, elements from orality, and uses Haitian Creole words and calques as well as French orthography for Creole words, all of which presents a challenge for the translator. In the preparation of the translation of Lahens’ Aunt Résia and the Spirits most of the discussion and the editorial changes suggested involved Creole words or Caribbean usage. Whereas the copy editor had questions or suggested changes regarding English words, the Series Editor would have preferred to substitute standard Kreyòl orthography for Lahens’ personal orthography (even in cases where she had used the Gallicized spelling) or for the translator’s Gallicized spelling of the Creole word. Some of the terms discussed include the following: “douces” with the author’s Gallicized orthography which in the translation is rendered “dous” using Kreyòl orthography – “Elle avait prévu pour les collations de l’après-midi toute une variété de “douces”: douce à la noix de coco, douce au lait” (Tante Résia, 88) and glossed as “sweets” in the translation (Aunt Resia, 58); “les lwas” – “Le monde était dans un certain ordre, celui voulu par Dieu, les lwas et les saints” (Tante Résia, 12); “point” – “Quelques-uns affirmèrent qu’elle avait un “point” spécial …” (Tante Résia, 87); “tassot de cabrit” – “Brice commanda le plat du jour: tassot de cabrit, bananes pesées et salade” (Tante Résia, 126); “morne” – “… du haut du morne ils virent une longue silhouette …” (La Petite Corruption, 22);33 and “tap-taps” – “Il avait emprunté une heure auparavant l’un des nombreux tap-taps qui relient le Portail Saint-Joseph au centre-ville” (Tante Résia, 115). In the translation these are transposed in Kreyòl as “lwa”, “pwen”, “taso kabrit”, “mòn”, and “taptap” with no “s” (Aunt Résia, 6, 57, 83, 142

32

Marie-Agnès Sourieau, “Afterword”, in Yanick Lahens, Aunt Résia and the Spirits and Other Short Stories, trans. Betty Wilson, Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010, 189 (translation of selected stories from Tante Résia et les dieux; Nouvelles d’Haïti; La Petite Corruption; and La Folie était venue avec la pluie); Yanick Lahens, Tante Résia et les dieux: Nouvelles d’Haïti, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994. 33 Yanick Lahens, La Petite Corruption (1999), Montréal: Éditions Mémoire d’encrier, 2003. (References to these books, as Tante Résia, Aunt Résia and La Petite Corruption, given in parentheses in the text)

Translating the Other’s Voice 143 110, 75 respectively). In the case of “clairin”, “mèt-tèt” and “trempés” (Tante Résia, 12, 77 and 84), the translation uses the Kreyòl forms: “kleren”, “mèt-tèt”, “tranpe” with a note (Aunt Résia, 5, 49 and 55 respectively). There is a constant compromise between translator’s and editors’ choices. According to Rabassa: Names are one of the bugbears of translation and usually illustrate its impossibility …. Names and especially nicknames, almost always carry some cultural nuance: … By not translating names we can at least maintain a certain aura of the original tongue and its culture. In my own translations I prefer keeping names in the original while sometimes translating nicknames if they carry some descriptive value and can be translated without doing too much mischief to the tone of the story.34

Many translators, like Rabassa, prefer keeping names in the original, (although where a fictional character is concerned if a familiar translation for the name exists in English, the English name is usually used, as in Br’er Rabbit and Tom Thumb (Exile according to Julia, 130)). Hence we find in translations names like La Nina Estrellita (In the Flicker of an Eyelid); Maréchal, Manman, Man Ya, Man Bouboule, Ti Pocame, (Exile according to Julia) or Man Cléa (Aunt Résia) even though “Man” might require a note.35 In The Drifting of Spirits36 this title refers to several women, hence the translator, Michael Dash, consistently uses “Ma” (Ma Ninette, Ma Boniface, Ma Octavia, Ma Rénel), the frequency and context eliminating the need for a note. In the case of pet-names like “Ti Do” and “Pòt-Lanmò” (“Gateway to death”), already in Krèyol, the translation has retained the Kreyòl spelling and supplied the English in a note (“Three Natural Deaths”, Aunt Résia, 156). These pet-names as Rabassa points out “carry descriptive value” and as is the case of Jean-Jean-Mort-aux-rats 34

Rabassa, If This Be Treason, 14. But then translating “Man” (simply a term of respect for elderly women) to “Mother Cléa” or “Mada Ya” – as we might say in an Anglophone Caribbean setting, could also require a note, especially when the woman in question is not a relative. 36 Gisèle Pineau, La grande drive des esprits, Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 1993 (The Drifting of Spirits, trans. J. Michael Dash: London: Quartet Books, 1999). 35

Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo and Elizabeth Wilson (“Jean-Jean-Rat-Poison”, Aunt Résia, 183) have been translated or explicated for that reason. A more contentious issue however is whether to creolize names and other terms and to write “manjègradoub” for Lahens’ “mangeur de tripes”(“Trois Morts Naturelles”, 24)37 the name given to gangmembers in “Three Natural Deaths”, explained in a translator’s note as “one who devours guts” (Aunt Résia, 156), “ti Pyè” for the author’s “Ti Pierre” or “gran pisans” for “La grande puissance”, (“Aunt Résia’s bus”), “Petwo” for the god “Pétro”, “Demini” for the party of the “Démunis” and so on; in other words, whether to use Kreyòl orthography in the translation (some would say to make the language more “authentic”) where in the original these names were written in standard French. This would certainly have the advantage of giving readers unfamiliar with a Kreyòl voice a closer approximation of the sound of the names or words in their original context.38 But would this do violence to the author’s text? Should a translator be more concerned about his/her audience or about a questionable authenticity than about fidelity to the author’s original version? This is a dilemma which calls for further theoretical examination. In the case of place names in Lahens’ texts a frequent choice is to keep them in the original, this helps to “maintain a certain aura of the original tongue and its culture” as Rabassa says in the passage earlier quoted. Hence in the short story celebrating Port-au-Prince, “Quai Colomb” is retained and glossed as “Columbus Quay” but not as “Ke Kolon”; similarly “rue des Miracles” and “rue des Fronts-Forts” are retained (“The City”, Aunt Résia, 90). “Carrefour” remains “Carrefour” although the temptation to write “Kalfou” as in Kreyòl is very strong. Especially when one knows that in Jamaica for example “Matthews Lane” is always pronounced “Matches Lane” the case is compelling for saying that “Kalfou” would be truer to “the original tongue and its culture” than Carrefour, whereas “Ke Kolon” however, phonologically so close to the French, would seem an unnecessary 144

37 Yanick Lahens, La folie était venue avec la pluie, Port-au-Prince: Presses Nationales, 2006. 38 This is a consideration in Anglophone Caribbean writing as well: a phrase in what appears as “Standard English” might be read by a Caribbean native speaker in a way that reveals its “Creoleness” (intonation, pronunciation, etc.). Although many Anglophone Caribbean writers do not use Creole orthography, read (“heard”), that is imagined aurally, by a Caribbean “native speaker” their text would sound quite different to a Caribbean ear than to an uninitiated Standard English speaker.

Translating the Other’s Voice 145 fiddling with the author’s text. “Place Geffrard” becomes “Geffrard Square” (to mark the distinction between “square” and the English word “place”) and the Iron Market (in French “Marché en fer”) has been translated to evoke the aspect of the site. These choices might seem haphazard or arbitrary as in the examples given earlier, but in each case the translator has decided that linguistically, and for musicality, it is the proper word. Once again, an important consideration remains: where the author’s text uses Standard French spelling would insistence on the Kreyòl orthography (that is changing the author’s version) facilitate or further hinder comprehension and appreciation on the part of uninitiated readers? A translator’s choices: un langage métissé Since at times no English equivalent exists, the translator has to ponder the relative merits of each recommendation and make a decision. While resisting attempts to domesticate the text is important, one needs also to consider whether using Kreyòl orthography for example, might serve to further foreignize or exoticize a text already foreign to a North American audience. So how far does one go in respecting the author’s choices vis-à-vis the readers’ interest or their expectations of faithfulness to a known context? This is particularly relevant because many literary translators are also scholars familiar with the linguistic, social, cultural, and historical contexts in play and therefore capable of improving the authenticity of an author’s text. The translation generally chooses to respect the author’s choices in deciding to keep Gallicized orthography for Kreyòl words but there are times when this is not the case and the Kreyòl spelling is employed instead as a compromise (as in kleren for clairin). In addition to her use of Gallicized Creole orthography Lahens’ use of calques creates creolized French: for example in “La mort en juillet”, she speaks of “la maison à chambre haute” (Tante Résia, 9) which is a translation from Haitian Kreyòl “kay chanmòt” and could have been translated in Jamaican creolized English as “upstairshouse” but the translator chose to keep it in standard American English as “one-story house” (Aunt Résia, 3, 11).39 Where a parallel word also exists in Caribbean English the translator might choose to use that word, both for evocative value and cultural specificity, for 39

In fact it should be translated as “two-story house”.

Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo and Elizabeth Wilson example “diablesse”, “soucouyant” or “soukouyan”, “morne” or “gallery” (all terms listed in the Allsopps’ Dictionary of Caribbean English).40 In Lahens’ story “Aunt Résia and the Spirits” for example, “gallery” is preferred (Aunt Résia, 53), rather than “balcony” or “porch” for the French, (Fr. “galerie”), because “gallery” is a term widely used and specific to the Caribbean rather than to North America (except perhaps for Louisiana and Quebec) and also because a “gallery” is not always identical to a balcony or a porch.41 In Caribbean usage the term does not carry the same meaning as the word in Standard English. The Allsopps’ Dictionary of Caribbean English defines “morne” as “a small round hill” and makes the point that it is a Creole word which does not exist as a noun in French. They say the origin of the word is the seventeenth-century Spanish word “morro” meaning “hillock” and that the word is “widely current in French Caribbean place names and as a loan”.42 Using the Caribbean English “morne” rather than the Haitian Creole “mòn” which was not in Lahens original text would be economical as well as evocative: it would serve to let Anglophone readers know that the word exists in Caribbean English as a variant of “small hill”, but this would call for a note. A creolized orthography for the word, a correction or improvement on the text, would not be meaningful to non-Kreyòl speakers and, would require a note, just as “morne” might (Aunt Résia, 110). Hence it is up to the translator to decide. Conversations with individual Anglophone Caribbean writers have led us to believe that they are very unhappy at attempts (editorial decisions for example) to alter their personal orthography when it comes to representing Creole. Translators, we feel, should try to respect the linguistic integrity of the author’s text. Lahens rarely chooses to use Haitian Kreyòl orthography; where she uses a Kreyòl term she often either italicizes the word as in: “Mirna était grande avec une peau couleur de rapadou, une taille finement marquée sur des jambes interminables.”43 Or she adds a note: “Rapadou: Pain de 146

40 Richard Allsopp and Jeanette Allsopp, Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. An Anglophone Caribbean translator from an Eastern Caribbean territory where there is a French-lexicon influence would have access to even more parallel words or expressions. 41 See ibid., 249-50. 42 Ibid., 387. 43 “Le désastre banal”, in La Petite Corruption, Montréal: Editions Mémoire d’Encrier, 2003, 11 (the author’s emphasis).

Translating the Other’s Voice 147 sucre à base de sirop de canne caramelisé” (Tante Résia, 90). She might use the French spelling: “Il sait que l’argent viendra à la fin du mois en gourde ou en dollar [sic] des États Unis” (La petite corruption, 40; our italics); “clairin” for “kleren” (Tante Résia, 12) or include a note as in “empereur”, “Les lwas”, (sic, note that in Creole the plural has no “s”) or “bagi” (“La Mort en juillet”, Tante Résia, 11, 12, 13.) In the translation these terms are italicized “empereur”; “lwa”, “bagi” and the author’s note is given (Aunt Résia, 4, 6). Lahens often does not use the Kreyòl orthography even for such integral notions or elements of Haitian cultural reality as food and drink, and the names of Vodou deities, practitioners and adherents. She sometimes uses “loa” and not “lwa”; “mambo” not “manbo”; “les hounsis” (Tante Résia, 92-93) not “ounsi”; “tassot de cabrit” not “taso kabrit” (Aunt Resia, 83). Moreover, she is sometimes inconsistent. In a single story she can shift from using the habitual Gallicized spelling to Kreyòl orthography, as in “dènye priyè” and “pè savann” both between quotation marks (Tante Résia, 91, 92). Or perhaps one should say rather that she manipulates the continuum and uses the different alternatives, sometimes interchangeably: thus she refers in the text of “La Ville” to “Erzulie Fréda” and “Saint Jacquesle-Majeur” whereas in the author’s footnotes she explains “Erzulie” by using the Kreyòl “Ezili” in one note (Tante Résia, 131), but retains the Gallicized spelling “Erzulie” in a previous note (Tante Résia, 128). In the same note (131), she also keeps the Gallicized “Saint Jacques-le-Majeur” instead of using the Kreyòl orthography “Senjak Majè” even though she is referring to “la mémoire populaire” (Tante Résia, 131). The author’s seeming inconsistencies arguably may point in fact to the phenomenon that for many bi-lingual speakers of Kreyòl and Standard French or English the distinctions are blurred. Or the writer may be consciously affirming a dual sensibility. The translator must sort through all this. On this page alone (131) there are several possible choices to contemplate. The English version keeps the Kreyòl spellings for both names in the note (Ezili; Senjak Majè), but translates the French name “Saint Jacques-le-Majeur” and indicates the reference is to “Saint James the Great” the English “equivalent” as well (Aunt Résia, 86, 88). Regarding the lyrics of a Kreyòl song, or a ritual incantation, Lahens departs from her usual practice and records them in Kreyòl orthography for the most part (Tante Résia, 92, 104,

Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo and Elizabeth Wilson 125); here the translation follows suit and repeats the Kreyòl lyrics followed by the English translation (Aunt Résia, 61, 68, 83). 148

Other considerations: gender, ideology and “minoritizing translations” In an interesting article, Aletha Stahl examines the consequences of personal choice and subject position and discusses the matter of “genders and remainders” and their effects on a translation.44 She describes the process of translating Gisèle Pineau’s L’espérancemacadam45 with a group of women students in a US college. Pineau’s texts are set mainly in the Caribbean. Stahl makes the point that as a translator “of Anglophone Caribbean origin”, Michael Dash, translator of Pineau’s first adult novel La grande drive des esprits “possesses the linguistic ability to render Pineau’s language in a more regional English”, which could affect both representation and audience. She sets out her reasons with which we concur: Dash’s ability is important because it allows for certain claims, for example the idea that Caribbean language of any kind breaks with the scope of received standard pronunciations and grammars and with the prescriptive elements of US, Canadian or British dictionary publishers; that a Caribbean readership may be constructed … thus shifting the audience for a translation; and above all, that a pan-Caribbean vision can stand behind this linguistic representation.46

Her group, she says, does not possess this “linguistic dexterity” as it includes no “native or near-native speaker” of “West Indian 44

Stahl, “Does Hortense have a Hoo-Hoo?”, 135. Gisèle Pineau, L’espérance-macadam, Paris: Stock, 1995. 46 Stahl, “Does Hortense have a Hoo-Hoo?”, 134. In a previous article we similarly pointed to the added asset of having a good Caribbean translator like Dash: “While having a Caribbean translator for a Caribbean text does not guarantee a good or better translation, having a good Caribbean translator is certainly a plus, as evidenced for example by Michael Dash’s translations of Glissant’s La lézarde and more recently Gisèle Pineau’s La grande drive des esprits”, especially as we noted that “Most translators of Caribbean fiction stumble over cultural elements (including local language usages) and natural environment” (Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo and Elizabeth Wilson, “Translators on a Tight Rope: The Challenges of Translating Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco”, TTR (Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction, Études sur le texte et ses transformations): Les Antilles en traduction, The Caribbean in Translation, ed. Anne Malena, XIII/2 (2nd semester 2000), 99-100. 45

Translating the Other’s Voice 149 English”.47 However, Stahl introduces another set of “ideological circles” – considerations arising from gender, which in the case of L’espérance-macadam because of the nature of the novel’s themes, is particularly pertinent. Stahl examines the question of “Gender and Remainders” in the light of Lawrence Venuti’s definition of remainder48 and his “stance in favor of minoritizing translations” borrowed from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s idea of a minor literature, that is “one that submits the major language to constant variation, thus alienating it”.49 Stahl’s discussion of the notion of “remainder” and the function of “minoritizing translations” is particularly relevant and useful in a Caribbean context. The debate regarding “domestication” versus “foreignization” of texts has been a long-standing one in translation circles. Because of the complexity of the language situations in both the Francophone/Creolophone and the Anglophone/Creolophone territories, as discussed earlier, translators have used a number of strategies in their attempts to translate the Caribbean for the reader from one set of languages to another: at times Creole words in the text are maintained intact; often with a note. Sometimes the Creole expressions within the text are followed by the English: “And I heard you telling me: “Pa pléré ti moun! Don’t cry little one” (Exile, 108); “Look at how nowadays the pale à vyé nèg, the old people’s language interests these children who were born in France” (Exile, 159). Sometimes as in the case of Pineau’s Exile according to Julia and Alexis’ In the Flicker of an Eyelid, and similarly in many other translations of Caribbean texts, there is a glossary, respecting both the text and the reader’s need. For TsiTsi Dangarembga although she cites English as her “first language”, “corn” would have no significance, as in her Zimbabwean reality there are “mealies”.50 In the same way “golden apple”, “June plum”, “pommecythere” or “pommesitay”, all call to mind a similar reality in their different Caribbean contexts. A

47

As mentioned before, note that there is not one “West Indian English” as there are so many regional differences from one territory to another especially in lexicon. Trinidadian (English) is different from Barbadian (English) and Jamaican (English) in this respect. 48 “The minor variables of language that are subject to a major form”, as quoted by Stahl, “Does Hortense have a Hoo-Hoo?”, 135. 49 Quoted in ibid., 135: and see also Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 160-63. 50 TsiTsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions, London: Women’s Press, 1988, 23 and ss.

Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo and Elizabeth Wilson reader who has never lived in Zimbabwe or the Caribbean, entering into the world of the text, can only imagine this reality. Although every reading of a text is unique, a glossary can help to reassure that one’s imaginaire is on the right track. At the same time reinstating an “authentic” phonetic Kreyòl spelling where an author has chosen to use Standard French may simply serve to further inhibit the reader’s ability to enter into the world of that text. 150

From our review of the translated Caribbean texts of our corpus and based on our own experience, we must acknowledge how difficult it is to respect consistency in translating multilingual and diglossic Caribbean texts. The translator has to negotiate with the source text and adjust his/her translation choices based on the “musicality”51 of the text. However it seems to us that the authors’ literary choices should be respected. As multilingual speakers, they made choices in their writing. As a result, when the translator re-instates what s/he considers “authentic” language, s/he betrays in fact the authors’ intention. One could argue that this betrayal can benefit the reader, yet caution must be exercised. Jones’ pioneering work and Raguet’s discerning translation choices might furnish models which could usefully serve other translators. In these translations, based on careful critical analysis, there seems to be a balance between consideration given to readers’ needs and respect for the authors’ text. A cross-Caribbean discussion on translation is needed that would lead to theoretical reflection about issues and processes. It is already recognized that Glissant’s thinking on a Caribbean cross-cultural poetics52 and Benitez Rojo’s discussion of the Caribbean as repeating islands,53 as well as the development of Caribbean Comparative studies are setting the stage for Caribbean-led discussion on translation. Glissant’s concept of “opacité”, as developed in Poétique de la relation, fits well into the discussion about foreignizing the translation process while Benitez Rojo’s analysis of Caribbean culture shows the commonalities in the Region, beyond the language barriers. 51

Richard Philcox, “Traduire Traversée de la mangrove ”, in L’œuvre de Maryse Condé: À propos d’une écrivaine politiquement incorrecte, Paris and Montréal: L’Harmattan, 1996, 226. 52 Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la relation, Paris: Gallimard, 1990; Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 53 Antonio Benitez Rojo, The Repeating Island, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987.

Translating the Other’s Voice 151 Time has come for Caribbean translators to conceptualize their views on translating the Caribbean by making use of the thought of these Caribbean writers as well as the work of Kamau Brathwaite, Maryse Condé, Derek Walcott, Lezama Lima, and others.54

54

A Symposium on literary translation was organized in Cuba in November 2011. Maybe this edited volume will contribute to taking the conversation further.



THE LANGUAGE OF THE STRANGER: A DIALOGUE BETWEEN JACQUES DERRIDA AND ABDELKÉBIR KHATIBI ON LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION RÉDA BENSMAÏA L’essence du langage est amitié et hospitalité.1 “L’Etre est relation”: mais la relation est sauve de l’idée de l’être …. Ce qui préexisterait (à la relation) est vacuité de l’être-comme-être …. La Relation n’affirme pas l’être sinon pour distraire.2 Comment écrire alors que ton imaginaire s’abreuve, du matin à des images, des pensées, des valeurs qui ne sont pas les tiennes ? Comment écrire quand ce que tu es végètes en dehors des élans qui déterminent ta vie? Comment écrire, dominé?3

This essay was translated from the French by Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Where possible, citations are given for published English translations; otherwise French quotations were translated by Jennifer Gage. 1 Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961, 282; Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969, 305: “The essence of language is friendship and hospitality.” 2 Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la relation, Paris: Gallimard, 1990, 199-200; Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, 185-86: “‘Being is relation’: but relation is safe from the idea of Being … That which would preexist (Relation) is vacuity of Being-as-Being …. Relation does not assert Being, except to distract.” 3 Patrick Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé, Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1997, 17: “How can one write when, from dawn until dreamtime, one’s imaginary is saturated with images, thoughts, values that are not one’s own? How can one write when what one is stagnates, cut off from the forces that drive one’s life? How can one write when subjugated?”

Réda Bensmaïa What is striking about a large number of Maghrebian and African texts written in French is their pointed reflection upon the question of language. The great majority of Francophone texts, it seems, deal with the razor’s edge of language, with the ways in which language involves the question of identity and therefore questions of belonging (ethnic, cultural, religious), of origins, of the nation and the internation. Indeed, in considering the corpus of Maghrebian texts in French, we are struck by the detour they force us to take via the (ideological? political?) question of the status of language. In the postcolonial context that concerns us here, this question quickly becomes inextricably tied to the possibility (or impossibility) of a national and cultural identity and, more specifically, to the status of the literature termed “Francophone” and its relationship – an uncanny one – to French literature. No one has expressed this feeling of strangeness with respect to language more powerfully than Abdelkébir Khatibi. In a text presented in December 1989 at the meeting of États Généraux de la Francophonie, Khatibi observed: 154

Depuis un certain temps, on ne parle plus de la littérature française, mais des littératures francophones. Cette opinion suppose qu’il y a effectivement une pluralité et une diversité d’idiomes littéraires. Une pluralité qui serait active, car sans œuvres constituées au sein de chacun de ces idiomes, il n’y aurait pas de véritable expérience internationale et interculturelle. Khatibi went on to elaborate: On est en droit de se poser une première question: cette dénomination (“les littératures francophones”) est-elle un simple constat, ou bien désigne-t-elle une situation tout à fait nouvelle et essentielle? Une “situation” qui mettrait en jeu non seulement la littérature française, mais d’une façon radicale (racines et diversité des racines), le français en son principe d’identité.4

4

Abdelkébir Khatibi, Francophonie et idiomes littéraires, Rabat: Editions-Diffusion “Al Kalam”, [n.d.], 1: “For some time now, we no longer speak of ‘French literature’ in the singular, but instead use the plural, ‘Francophone literatures’. This position presumes that there is actually a plurality, a diversity of literary idioms – and an active plurality, for without works established within each of these idioms, there would be no truly international and intercultural experience.” “We are entitled to ask the question: is this designation (‘Francophone literatures’) a simple statement of fact, or rather does it

The Language of the Stranger 155 For Khatibi and a large number of Francophone writers, such a perspective on “Francophone literatures” implied that through the plurality of idioms, there is always an understood reference to a “standard model” that is none other than “French literature in its principle of identity” – a model to which other literatures have been grafted as mere idioms. In this free-for-all, Walloon, Swiss French, Canadian, Maghrebian, and a host of creole forms, not to mention Belgian, Breton, Corsican, Catalan, and various African idioms, are reduced to cuttings that, grafted onto the French tree or taking root in French soil, have evolved to a greater or lesser degree. This uncanny quality of the French language has inhabited most of the writings that comprise postcolonial Francophone literary production since the 1950s, in the Maghreb as well as in the countries of West Africa and the Caribbean. As Khatibi noted: “comme la métaphore de l’arbre, ces différents idiomes fleuriraient, en quelque sorte transplantés, autour de ce modèle de référence, de ce principe d’identité que le poète Yves Bonnefoy5 définissait en tant que ‘règle, qui tend à identifier réalité et raison, et permet de ne pas douter que le langage lui-même, dans sa structure, reflète avec précision cet Intelligible’.”6 And in fact, very few Francophone writers have managed to escape this predication (one is tempted to say “predicament”): the “French language” erected as an absolute; “French” literature held up as a reference or model, and this dance of deference that Francophone writers have been obliged to perform around the “Intelligible” that French “language” and “literature” embody for them. This situation – thoroughly steeped in colonial history – has obviously given rise to a great diversity of reactions and tactics. designate a wholly new and essential situation? Such a ‘situation’ would implicate not only French literature but also, in a radical way (involving roots and the diversity of roots), French in its principle of identity?” (my emphases) 5 Yves Bonnefoy, “French Poetry and the Principle of Identity”, trans. Richard Stamelman, in The Act and the Place of Poetry: Selected Essays, ed. John T. Naughton, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, 128. 6 Khatibi, Francophonie, 1: “as in the metaphor of the tree, these various idioms, as if transplanted, were to flourish in the shadow of this standard model, this principle of identity defined by the poet Yves Bonnefoy as a ‘rule that tends to equate reality and reason and suggests beyond a doubt that in its structure language itself accurately reflects the Intelligible’,” (my emphases).

Réda Bensmaïa Indeed, if we consider for example the situation of Maghrebian writers, we may observe that all of them – whether writing in French or in Arabic – were confronted by a language that was itself deterritorialized, without a deep historical, cultural, or social foothold. At least this is the situation of Francophone writers who, writing in the language of the former colonial power, found themselves in an impossible position. Immediately after independence, it was virtually impossible not to write, because from the point of view of a writer, only literature could do justice to an inchoate and long-oppressed national conscience;7 but the impossibility of writing other than in French was (and remains) for them the mark of an irreducible border, an impassible distance separating them from what they could only fantasize as a Maghrebian or African form of primitive territoriality – a territoriality, moreover, that they felt they were constantly betraying; finally, the impossibility of writing in French is also the impossibility experienced by the Maghrebian of translating the idiosyncratic traits of a society in which one lives into a language that belongs to another culture. The problem can then be posed in very strict terms: how, ultimately, can one live in the asymmetry of multiple languages and yet write in only one language? How can one come to terms with oneself as an indigenous writer when one writes in what the Algerian writer Assia Djebar has called “the enemy’s language”?8 How can one be oneself in the language of the other? This is the sort of question that led Khatibi to say that the postcolonial Francophone writer was put in the position of someone 156

7

See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986: in particular Chapter 3, “What Is a Minor Literature?”: “The literary machine thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come, not at all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in this milieu: literature is the people’s concern”, 17-18 (Kafka: pour une littérature mineure, Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1975, 30: “La machine littéraire prend ainsi le relais d’une machine révolutionnaire à venir, non pas du tout pour des raisons idéologiques, mais parce qu’elle seule est déterminée à remplir les conditions d’une énonciation collective qui manquent partout ailleurs dans ce milieu: la littérature est l’affaire du peuple” [my emphasis]). 8 Assia Djebar, Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade, trans. Dorothy S. Blair, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993, 42; Assia Djebar, L’Amour, la fantasia: roman, Paris: Albin Michel, 1995, 53.

The Language of the Stranger 157 who “observes his identity and that of his people in a sort of cultural ethnology”,9 that is, as a stranger. This being said, the response of Maghrebian writers, viewed overall, can be seen to vary according to temperament, preoccupation, and political or ideological commitment: certain writers have quite simply practically given up writing; some have tried to adapt to their situation of acculturation by continuing to write in French while deliberately misusing the language, forcing it to say what it was not previously capable of saying; others have attempted to write in literary Arabic and to some extent in spoken Arabic; still others in Berber. In this regard, it seems important to point out that none of these have really succeeded in solving once and for all the problem that faced them: how to create an audience of readers who were up to the task, and how to anchor their works in a concrete cultural terrain. It is also important to note that, contrary to the position taken by Albert Memmi, the return to Arabic – even dialectal Arabic – was in no way sufficient to resolve the contradictions that loomed in the wake of independence, or to fill the gaping void between creators and their audience: whatever the medium they used, all the writers in a sense ended up in the same impasse. Various explanations have been offered for this phenomenon – the after-effects of colonialism, deculturation, the lack of material and human resources, regional idiosyncrasies, ethnic diversity, multiple conquests, the prevalence of generalized diglossia, and so forth – but all of these seem to me to take second place to one essential element: that the dichotomy between “high” languages and “low” languages (the latter consisting of popular languages such as the idioms of which Khatibi speaks), or more precisely the false tension between Arabic and bilingualism, absolutely fails to explain what is really happening in the Maghreb in the realm of culture, in the absence of any consistent sociolinguistic theory that could account concretely for what is really occurring locally and allow us to understand the nature of the problems. And this is precisely what a Franco-Maghrebian latecomer to Francophony seems to have understood better than anyone else. Indeed, it seems to me that Jacques Derrida’s first-hand grasp of the philosophical ins and outs of these questions informs the sly little 9

Khatibi, Francophonie, 2.

Réda Bensmaïa book he devotes to the problem of language and translation, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse d’origine.10 Certainly the theses put forth in this book have provoked a series of reactions that, while sincere and most often amicable, have not always been a match for the challenge laid down by Derrida vis-à-vis the proponents of bilingualism, multilingualism, and/or ethnocultural idiomatisms, or for his criticism of the tendency to self-justification that Francophone writers have evinced towards “the” language, “their” language – whether the latter meant the language of their colonizers or that of their mother and father. The challenge, first of all: whereas one might have expected the father of deconstruction to multiply languages and idioms with no holds barred, to propose a sort of Défense et Illustration of multilingualism, Derrida stops short and proclaims: “I only have one language; it is not mine” (“Je n’ai qu’une langue, ce n’est pas la mienne”).11 He reiterates this thesis, asserting that: “1. We only ever speak one language. 2. We never speak only one language.” (“1. On ne parle jamais qu’une seule langue. 2. On ne parle jamais une seule langue.”)12 And for anyone who might still doubt the seriousness of his commitment, he persists and reaffirms without demur: “1. We only ever speak one language – or rather one idiom only. 2. We never speak only one language – or rather there is no pure idiom.” (“1. On ne parle jamais qu’une seule langue – ou plutôt un seul idiome. 2. On ne parle jamais une seule langue – ou plutôt il n’y a pas d’idiome pur.”)13 To further complicate matters, Derrida does not hesitate, further on, to present himself as a singular case, even a unique and exemplary one. Indeed, running through a taxonomy of different types of Francophones – “French speakers from France”; “neither French nor Maghrebian” Francophones (Swiss, Belgians, Canadians, Africans, etc.); “Maghrebians” (Tunisians, Moroccans, Algerians, pieds-noirs) – Derrida writes (addressing Khatibi in a strange dialogue): 158



10

Jacques Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse d’origine, Paris: Editions Galilée, 1996; Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. 11 Derrida, Monolingualism, 1; Derrida, Monolinguisme, 13. 12 Derrida, Monolingualism, 7; Derrida, Monolinguisme, 21. 13 Derrida, Monolingualism, 8; Derrida, Monolinguisme, 23.

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Or, vois-tu, je n’appartiens à aucun de ces ensembles clairement définis. Mon ‘identité’ ne relève d’aucune de ces trois catégories. Où me classerais-je donc? Et quelle taxinomie inventer? “Mon hypothèse, c’est donc que je suis ici, peut-être, seul, le seul à pouvoir me dire à la fois maghrébin (ce qui n’est pas une citoyenneté) et citoyen français. À la fois, l’un et l’autre. Et mieux à la fois l’un et l’autre de naissance.”14

Other provocations of the same ilk are disseminated throughout the text, all tending to reverse or upend the dominant theses of the “postcolonial” critique of what Derrida himself terms “linguistic alienation”: the critique for example of transparency vis-à-vis the mother tongue: Ma culture fut d’emblée une culture politique. ‘Ma langue maternelle,’ c’est ce qu’ils disent, ce qu’ils parlent, moi je les cite et je les interroge. Je leur demande, dans leur langue, certes, pour qu’ils m’entendent, car c’est grave, s’ils savent ce qu’ils disent et de quoi ils parlent. Surtout quand ils célèbrent si légèrement la ‘fraternité,’ c’est au fond le même problème, les frères, la langue maternelle, etc. ….15

The critique of a belief in the possibility of a metalinguistic distance from language and from its pseudo-transparence to itself: Dès lors que les sujets compétents dans plusieurs langues tendent à parler une seule langue, là même où celle-ci se démembre, et parce qu’elle ne peut que promettre et se promettre en menaçant de se démembrer, une langue ne peut que parler elle-même d’elle-même.

14

Derrida, Monolinguisme, 30; Derrida, Monolingualism, 13: “Now, as you can see, I do not belong to any of these clearly defined groups. My ‘identity’ does not fall under any of these three categories. Where would I categorize myself then? What taxonomy should I invent? ‘My hypothesis is, therefore, that I am perhaps the only one here who can call himself at once a Maghrebian (which is not a citizenship) and a French citizen. One and the other at the same time. And better yet, at once one and the other by birth.’” 15 Derrida, Monolinguisme, 61 (my emphases); Derrida, Monolingualism, 34 (my emphases): “My culture was right away a political culture. ‘My mother tongue’ is what they say, what they speak; as for me, I cite and question them. I ask them in their own language, certainly in order to make them understand me, for it is serious, if they indeed know what they are saying and what they are talking about. Especially when, so lightly, they celebrate ‘fraternity.’ At bottom, brothers, the mother tongue, and so forth pose the same problem ….”

160

Réda Bensmaïa On ne peut parler d’une langue que dans cette langue. Fût-ce à la mettre hors d’elle-même.16

The critique as well of ideals of identity, of belonging, of citizenship and of nationality when these notions are used without any real critical distance and when they are taken as a given in sociological or anthropological terms: Notre question, c’est toujours l’identité. Qu’est-ce que l’identité, ce concept dont la transparente identité à elle-même est toujours dogmatiquement présupposée par tant de débats sur le monoculturalisme ou sur le multiculturalisme, sur la nationalité, la citoyenneté, l’appartenance en général? Et avant l’identité du sujet, qu’est-ce que l’ispéité?17

Soon, step by step, all the concepts that are currently invoked in cultural and postcolonial studies will be put through the mill of deconstruction that informs this book. Thus we move from the je to the pse of ipseity, from hospitality to hostility, from hostis-pet to posis, from despotes to potere, potis, sum possum, pote est, potest, pot sedere, possidere, compos, etc.,18 tying them to what Derrida sees above all as a transcendental structure of alienation that no subject can overcome effortlessly. According to Derrida, all of these figures – and many others that are related – are stamped with the seal of metaphysics which imposes itself through the language of the other: Tous ces mots: vérité, aliénation, appropriation, habitation, ‘chezsoi’, ipséité, place du sujet, loi, etc., demeurent à mes yeux problématiques. Sans exception. Ils portent le sceau de cette

16

Derrida, Monolinguisme, 43 (my emphases); Derrida, Monolingualism, 22 (my emphases): “Since subjects competent in several languages tend to speak only one language, even where the latter is dismembering itself, and because it can only promise and promise itself by threatening to dismember itself, a language can only speak itself of itself. One cannot speak of a language except in that language. Even if to place it outside itself.” 17 Derrida, Monolinguisme, 31-32; Derrida, Monolingualism, 14: “Our question is still identity. What is identity, this concept of which the transparent identity to itself is always dogmatically presupposed by so many debates on monoculturalism or multiculturalism, nationality, citizenship, and, in general, belonging? And before the identity of the subject, what is ipseity?” 18 Derrida, Monolingualism, 14; Monolinguisme, 32.

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métaphysique qui s’est imposée à travers, justement, cette langue de l’autre, ce monolinguisme de l’autre.19

Hence we can perhaps better understand why Derrida’s book met with such misunderstanding. When Gayatri Spivak, for example, reproaches him for using a smokescreen and drowning differences in the transcendental, or when Khatibi describes his own practice of the bilangue or the specificity of the situation of Jews in Morocco, they clearly demonstrate that they have not really understood Derrida’s objectives and the performance that this book represents. My own interpretation is that, failing to see the type of performance he engages in, they react as if he were simply proclaiming himself the martyr of Francophonie in order to crown himself with laurels. What they do not see, whether by refusal or inability to do so, for reasons Derrida himself attempts to elucidate in his book, is precisely that the transcendental character of the structure (of alienation) of what he calls the monolingualism of the other – what the colonizer imposes upon both himself and the colonized – is what determines both the universality and the singularity, even the exemplarity of each case, and that, in this respect, even Derrida is not exceptional: even he, Jacques Derrida, does not escape the game that is hazarded each time the French language enters into play in the postcolonial context. Thus, if he is indeed indulging in a performance in his quarrelsome book, it is not one in the sense of acting out, but rather as an actual politico-philosophical demonstration. As Derrida amply demonstrated in “Signature Event Context”,20 whenever it is a question of the relationship (without a relationship) to the language, the force of performativity that enters into play is never the manifestation of an originary will that is transparent to itself, but always the manifestation of a derivative force or instance: “Un énoncé performatif pourrait-il réussir si sa formulation ne répétait pas un énoncé ‘codé’ ou itérable, autrement dit si la formule que je prononce pour ouvrir une séance, lancer un bateau ou un mariage n’était pas identifiable comme 19

Derrida, Monolinguisme, 115; Derrida, Monolingualism, 59: “All these words: truth, alienation, appropriation, habitation, one’s-home [chez-soi], ipseity, place of the subject, law, and so on remain, in my eyes, problematic. Without exception. They bear the stamp of the metaphysics that imposed itself through, precisely, this language of the other, this monolingualism of the other.” 20 My interpretation follows that of Judith Butler in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, New York: Routledge, 1999, 241ff.

Réda Bensmaïa conforme à un modèle itérable, si donc elle n’était pas identifiable en quelque sorte comme ‘citation’.”21 Later he adds: “Dans cette typologie, la catégorie d’intention ne disparaîtra pas, elle aura sa place, mais, depuis cette place, elle ne pourra plus commander toute la scène et tout le système de l’énonciation … l’intention qui anime l’énonciation ne sera jamais de part en part présente à elle-même et à son contenu.”22 This is exactly what is occurring in the scene, or mise en scène, that is represented in Le Monolinguisme de l’autre. Thus the performance or street scene that Derrida stages for us to see and in a sense to experience in this book is presented not as a singular act (of liberty), but rather as the rehearsal (a dress rehearsal, even) for a norm or a network of norms that have always pre-existed the subject that actualizes them: 162

Les voies et les stratégies que j’ai dû suivre dans ce travail ou cette passion obéissent aussi à des structures et donc à des assignations intérieures à la culture gréco-latino-christiano-gallique dans laquelle mon monolinguisme m’enferme à jamais; il fallait compter avec cette ‘culture’ pour y traduire, attirer, séduire cela même, vers lequel j’étais moi-même d’avance ex-porté, à savoir l’‘ailleurs’ de ce tout autre avec lequel j’ai dû garder, pour me garder mais aussi pour m’en garder, comme d’une redoutable promesse, une sorte de rapport sans rapport, l’un se gardant de l’autre, dans l’attente sans horizon d’une langue qui sait seulement se faire attendre.23

21

Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, Paris: Minuit, 1972, 388-89; Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, 326: “Could a performative statement succeed if its formulation did not repeat a ‘coded’ or iterable statement, in other words if the expressions I use to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming to an iterable model, and therefore if they were not identifiable in a way as ‘citation’?” 22 Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, 389 (my emphases); Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 326 (my emphases): “In this typology, the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from this place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and the entire system of utterances … the intention which animates utterance will never be completely present in itself and its content.” 23 Derrida, Monolinguisme, 132-33; Derrida, Monolingualism, 71: “The paths and strategies that I have had to follow in this work or passion also follow the dictates of some structures and therefore of some assignations that are internal to the GraecoLatino-Christiano-Gallic culture to which my monolingualism forever confines me; it was necessary to reckon with this culture in order to translate, attract, and seduce into it the very thing, the ‘elsewhere’, toward which I was myself ex-ported in advance,

The Language of the Stranger 163 What Derrida illustrates so well, through the case of a FrancoMaghrebian Jew, is that every language is the language of the other, in keeping with the fundamental structure of alienation that he analyzes; no language can escape from the determinations that this structure imposes on the subjects who speak it, write it, and claim to master it. Not even Derrida, whose necessarily singular case in this event has a nonetheless universal dimension. In essence the first guinea pig that Derrida reveals to us as taken hostage by or in the language of the other is himself. It is himself as speaking subject that he exposes and that he sacrifices to prove that the law of the other’s language is indeed the one that possesses me when it is not my own. It thus becomes possible to interpret the most outrageous passages of this book so rich in irony and (Jewish?) humor. I am thinking of the audacious stunt that Derrida pulls when he analyzes his own relation to accents, in particular to the accent known as “pied-noir” or “southern”: “l’accent, quelque accent français que ce soit, et avant tout le fort accent méridional, me paraît incompatible avec la dignité intellectuelle d’une parole publique” (“an accent – any French accent, but above all a strong southern accent – seems incompatible to me with the intellectual dignity of public speech”).24 But there is another manifestation of alienation, an even more flagrant and devastating street-scene that relates to the language itself, its purity and the compulsive strictures it imposes on the subject in its grip. This scene paints a portrait of Jacques Derrida in a sort of becoming-elitist: “A travers l’histoire que je raconte et malgré tout ce que je semble parfois avoir professé d’autre part, j’ai contracté, je l’avoue, une inavouable mais intraitable intolérance: je ne supporte pas ou n’admire, en français du moins et seulement quant à la langue, que le français pur.”25 Or further on, even more strikingly (and deceptively): namely the ‘elsewhere’ of this altogether other with which I have had to keep, in order to keep myself but also in order to keep myself from it, as from a fearsome promise, a sort of relationship without a relationship, with one guarding itself from the other, in the waiting without horizon for a language that only knows how to keep people waiting.” 24 Derrida, Monolingualisme, 78; Derrida, Monolingualism, 46 (my emphases). 25 Derrida, Monolingualisme, 78 (my emphases); Derrida, Monolingualism, 46 (my emphases): “Throughout the story I am relating, despite everything I sometimes appear to profess, I concede that I have contracted a shameful but intractable

164

Réda Bensmaïa … cette exigence demeure si inflexible qu’elle excède parfois le point de vue grammatical, elle néglige même le ‘style’ pour se plier à une règle plus secrète …: la dernière volonté de la langue, en somme, une loi de la langue qui ne se confierait qu’à moi. Comme si j’étais son dernier héritier, le dernier défenseur et illustrateur de la langue française. (J’entends d’ici les protestations, de divers côtés: mais oui, mais oui, riez donc!).26

This portrait of the philosopher as a somewhat uptight Jewish piednoir traumatized by the language of the other will be reinforced and refined in light of the relationship to the voice, for example, involving another theater and requiring another type of demonstration – “j’ai été le premier à avoir peur de ma voix, comme si elle n’était pas la mienne, et à la contester, voire à la detester” (“I was the first to be afraid of my own voice, as if it were not mine, and to contest it, even to detest it”)27 writes Derrida – as well as the relationship to the body: my body, the body of others; to names, proper names; to one’s view of oneself and others; but also to speech and to the epic of life in general. And soon, deconstruction itself is diagnosed as the result of overcoming a conversion hysteria. This in any case is my reading of the passage where Derrida speaks of “tone” and what gives “tone to tone”, or rhythm: Cela commence donc avant de commencer. Voilà l’origine incalculable d’un rythme. Le tout pour le tout mais aussi à qui perd gagne. Car bien sûr, je ne l’ignore pas et c’est ce qu’il fallait démontrer, j’ai aussi contracté à l’école, ce goût hyperbolique pour la pureté de la langue. Et partant pour l’hyperbole en général. Une hyperbolite incurable. Une hyperbolite généralisée!”28

intolerance: at least in French, insofar as the language is concerned, I cannot bear or admire anything other than pure French.” 26 Derrida, Monolingualisme, 79 (my emphasis); Derrida, Monolingualism, 47 (my emphasis): “this demand remains so inflexible that it sometimes goes beyond the grammatical point of view, it even neglects “style” in order to bow to a more hidden rule…: a last will of the language, in sum, a law of the language that would entrust itself only to me. As if I were its last heir, the last defender and illustrator of the French language (from here, I can hear the protests, from various sides: yes, yes, laugh away!).” 27 Derrida, Monolingualisme, 80-81; Derrida, Monolingualism, 48. 28 Derrida, Monolinguisme, 81 (my emphases); Derrida, Monolingualism, 48 (my emphases): “It therefore begins before beginning. That is the incalculable origin of a

The Language of the Stranger 165 To translate: deconstruction’s site of origin is elsewhere: it originates from another scene, a scene inscribed – encoded, as it were – in another place, according to another regime (of thought and of subjectification). It is a scene that appears to have begun with a spontaneous taste for the purity of the language and therefore for hyperbole. But there was something else – here is another drama perhaps – woven into this primal inscription, this primitive text. In this scene, there was a child who spoke a language that turned out not to belong to him; a language that he had to learn at school, but of which he was in fact deprived. The rest followed “naturally”: Parce qu’il est donc privé de toute langue, et qu’il n’a plus d’autres recours – ni l’arabe, ni le berbère, ni l’hébreu, ni aucune des langues qu’auraient parlé des ancêtres – parce que ce monolingue est en quelques sorte aphasique… il est jeté dans la traduction absolue, une traduction sans pôle de référence, sans langue originaire, sans langue de départ.29

This sheds light on the reasons Derrida gives for suggesting that, for the aphasic that our monolingual was to become, there are only target languages, or as he writes “only events without arrival” (“des événements, sans arrivée”).30 We also understand better what brings Derrida to charge deconstruction with the need “to invent a first language” (“d’inventer une première langue”);31 and why only a language that has been able to escape the snares of the language of the other has any chance of escaping from the “hysteresis” that every language cultivates within itself. What is in any case certain is that for the Francophone monolingual as eternal stranger (to his language), rhythm. Everything is at stake, but may the loser win. For, naturally, this hyperbolic taste for the purity of language is something I also contracted at school. I am not unaware of that, and it is what needed to be demonstrated. The same goes for hyperbole in general. An incorrigible hyperbolite. A generalized hyperbolite.” 29 Derrida, Monolinguisme, 117 (my emphases); Derrida, Monolingualism, 60-61 (my emphases): “Because he is therefore deprived of all language, and no longer has any other recourse – neither Arabic, nor Berber, nor Hebrew, nor any languages his ancestors would have spoken – because this monolingual is in a way aphasic… he is thrown into absolute translation, a translation without a pole of reference, without an originary language, and without a source language [langue de départ].” 30 Derrida, Monolingualism, 61; Derrida, Monolingualisme, 118. 31 Derrida, Monolingualism, 61; Derrida, Monolingualisme, 118.

Réda Bensmaïa this language can only be a language still to be invented or, as Derrida puts it: 166

… une langue d’arrivée ou plutôt d’avenir, une phrase promise, une langue de l’autre, encore, mais tout autre que la langue de l’autre comme langue de maître ou du colon, encore que les deux puissent parfois annoncer entre elles, les entretenant en secret ou les gardant en réserve, tant de ressemblances troublantes.32

When Abdelkébir Khatibi speaks in his book Amour bilingue of his relations to language as a labor of “simultaneous interpretation”,33 it is above all this “language to be invented” that he has in mind: for Khatibi, as for Derrida, “the monolangue, the unity of the language of the other, is a word, a theological concept, an enchantment, and a fantasy, all of these at once” (“la monolangue, l’unité de la langue de l’autre, est un mot, un concept théologique, une féerie, et un phantasme; tout cela à la fois”).34



32

Derrida, Monolinguisme, 118-119 (my emphasis); Derrida, Monolingualism, 62 (my emphasis): “… a target or, rather, a future language, a promised sentence, a language of the other, once again, but entirely other than the language of the other as the language of the master or colonist, even though, between them, the two may sometimes show so many unsettling resemblances maintained in secret or held in reserve.” 33 Abdelkébir Khatibi, Love in Two Languages, trans. Richard Howard, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990, 48; Abdelkébir Khatibi, Amour bilingue, Casablanca: Editions EDDIF, 1992, 57. 34 Abdelkébir Khatibi, La Langue de l’autre, New York and Tunis: Les Mains Secrètes, Centre d’Études sur les Littératures Francophones d’Afrique du Nord, 1999, 55.



VERNACULAR MONOLINGUALISM AND TRANSLATION IN WEST AFRICAN POPULAR FILM MORADEWUN ADEJUNMOBI

As many scholars have noted, the power to avoid translation and thus foreign languages is one of the privileges extended to individuals who are monolinguals in powerful languages. Vicente Rafael observes, for example, that Americans who are monolingual in English view the act of translating as labor reserved for polyglot immigrants who have not yet fully assimilated into the American melting pot.1 Along somewhat similar lines, Alastair Pennycook recounts how avoidance of translation became a standard feature of an English Language Teaching theory and practice focused on native-speaker monolinguals who were consistently ranked higher than non-native speaker bilinguals as teachers of English around the world.2 The role of translation is not much different in multilingual contexts where, according to Lawrence Venuti, “unequal translation patterns reinforce existing hierarchies among linguistic and cultural constituencies”.3 My intention here is twofold: to explore conditions under which these unequal translation patterns might begin to give way, and to examine the connection between an alternative pattern of translation and the status and uses of monolingualism within multilingual populations. To speak of monolingualism in relation to multilingual communities would seem to be a contradiction in terms. But as Edwards has pointed out, even within a multilingual polity, it is

1

Vicente Rafael, “Translation, American English, and the Insecurities of Empire”, Social Text, XXVII/4 (Winter 2009), 12. 2 Alastair Pennycook, “English as a Language Always in Translation”, European Journal of English Studies, XII/1 (2008), 35. 3 Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference, London: Routledge, 1998, 162.

Moradewun Adejunmobi possible to remain monolingual.4 Furthermore, and in states where most citizens are themselves polyglots and thus multilingual, the idea and vision of monolingualism may continue to exercise considerable appeal for a variety of reasons. Translation remains important in such instances as the natural extension of a decision to practice a certain type of monolingualism. Paul Bandia observes that the postcolony tends to be multilingual, with the languages of former colonizers frequently occupying a dominant position.5 Proposals for reversing the relationship between the languages of former colonizers and indigenous languages in African postcolonies often seem to hint at the kind of monolingualism described by Edwards as either a prior or future condition for the postcolonial subject. In other words, the postcolony would itself remain multilingual with monolingual communities speaking different languages, living side by side, and presumably using translation into each other’s languages to facilitate communication. Scholars who are skeptical about proposing this type of multilingualism for resolving linguistic injustices warn darkly about the dangers of a “retreat to ethnocentric smugness”,6 and of communities barricading themselves behind “linguistic fortresses”.7 This is not the kind of monolingualism that I wish to consider in this article. My interest is not so much in a multilingual society made up of monolinguals, as in a multilingual society made up of polyglots. Would translation still be needed in such a society? My answer is: yes. Even if we were to imagine a multilingual society comprising mainly polyglots, translation would still be necessary if these polyglot individuals did not share identical language repertoires. One individual in the same country might speak Baule, Dyula and French, while another might speak Bete, Hausa, and Mossi. Communication between such polyglots would not be possible without translation into one or more of these languages. 168



4

John Edwards, Multilingualism, London: Routledge, 1994, 2: “Even in countries where more than one language has legal status, one cannot assume that multilingual encounters are common … you might live in India – which recognizes fifteen languages – and never leave your monolingual enclave.” 5 Paul Bandia, “Postcolonialism, Literary Heteroglossia, and Translation”, in Caribbean Interfaces, eds Lieven D’hulst, Jean-Marc Moura, Liesbeth De Bleeker, Nadia Lie, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007, 203. 6 Michael Cronin, Translation and Globalization, London: Routledge, 2003, 6. 7 Pennycook, “English as a Language Always in Translation”, 37-38.

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However, translation is not generally sustainable as an ongoing practice in the absence of what Cronin describes as “linguistic hinterlands” providing patronage for translation to and from particular languages.8 In effect, there would have to be fairly stable and substantial constituencies willing to read, view, or listen to texts in the languages targeted for translation in order for translation to be viable over the long term. The obverse is also true: the multilingualism of a community comprising polyglots will tend to diminish over time in the absence of linguistic hinterlands using translation to enable communication. Except where communities and constituencies exist that do not speak the same languages, there is no reason to ever engage in translation. Translation is superfluous, both in an imaginary monolingual community where everyone speaks the same language and in a multilingual context where everyone shares the same language repertoires. It is because speakers of different languages constitute linguistic hinterlands which may or may not overlap that translation remains necessary. But how else could these linguistic hinterlands thrive without returning full circle to the troubling notion of linguistic fortresses? And even if translation became widespread in such contexts, would these multilingual citizens not tend to translate from less powerful to more powerful languages, thus strengthening prevailing linguistic hierarchies as Venuti anticipates, and enabling a gradual language shift towards monolingualism in the more powerful language(s) over several generations? Is translation in the postcolony condemned to serve the interests of an encroaching and imperializing monolingualism,9 or an ethnocentric monolingualism? Are both forms of monolingualism two sides of the same coin, and are there any alternatives to this particular outcome? In what follows, I examine translation practices in West African popular film for possible answers to these questions. Translation in Nigerian film Mirroring the trend in translation studies writ large,10 translation scholarship on African societies rarely addresses the question of film translation and concentrates instead on translation in texts that 8

Cronin, Translation and Globalization, 145. Rafael, “Translation, American English, and the Insecurities of Empire”, 3. 10 Abé Mark Nornes, Cinema Babel, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, 3. 9

Moradewun Adejunmobi circulate in print form. Given the fact that Africa has now become a site for widely distributed and locally-initiated commercial film production, African film translation would seem to be a subject ripe for attention. Translation trends in African popular film are all the more worthy of attention when one further considers that fictional texts in an audiovisual format have the potential to reach a larger audience than fictional texts in print, especially in a part of the world where low literacy levels and illiteracy remain commonplace. For my discussion of film translation trends in West Africa, I will be focusing on the most successful instance of locally-initiated commercial film production in Africa, namely Nigerian video film, with an estimated output of 2000 films per year.11 The films are made in English, as well as in several indigenous Nigerian languages, most prominently, in Yoruba and Hausa, two of Nigeria’s “majority” languages.12 Describing the state of the Nigerian video film industry in an article initially published in 2002, I remarked that early Yorubalanguage films were not as consistently subtitled as Igbo-language films. Almost a decade later, the situation has now changed with almost all Yoruba films being subtitled. Films in other indigenous Nigerian languages are likewise frequently subtitled. Translation from an indigenous language to English is the most widespread form of translation in the Nigerian film industry. English-language films which account for a substantial percentage of the total output of the Nigerian film industry are almost never translated into an indigenous Nigerian language. We are however beginning to see translation of Nigerian English-language films into French.13 An interesting divide has emerged in West Africa when it comes to translation practices between locally produced audiovisual material 170

11 See Ramon Lobato, “Creative Industries and Informal Economies: Lessons from Nollywood”, International Journal of Cultural Studies, XIII/4 (July 2010), 341. Pierre Barrot, Le phénomène vidéo au Nigeria, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005, 12 places the estimate at between 1000 and 1500. Though exact figures are difficult to come by for the Nigerian film industry, most film scholars now agree that the Nigerian output exceeds that of Hollywood (over 500 films annually), and Bollywood (less than 1500 films annually). Lobato, in “Creative Industries and Informal Economies”, offers a fuller discussion of the Nigerian film industry compared to others around the world. 12 The terms “majority language” and “minority language” are clearly relative in Nigeria. Several of Nigeria’s “minority languages” like Edo and Efik for example number well over a million speakers. 13 For example, I was able to buy Nigerian English-language films dubbed into French in Bamako, Mali.

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and imported audiovisual material for television. Feature shows imported from outside Africa and in a language other than the official language of the particular African country tend to be dubbed into the official language of the country. This is particularly commonplace with Latin American telenovelas for example.14 Locally produced films which are more often watched on home television than in movie theaters tend to be subtitled in the official language of the particular country if the film narrative is not in that language. In this respect, West Africa is both a “subbing” and a “dubbing” region of the world. Shows that might otherwise be perceived as foreign since they are in a language that is not in use locally are dubbed, while shows in languages that might be recognized by viewers because they are used locally or regionally are almost always subtitled. Ironically then, television shows originating from countries at the greatest remove linguistically and culturally from West Africa are the very shows which are likely to be conveyed in a single language, namely the dominant or official language, while films from within the particular country or region communicate in two languages in different formats, one written and the other heard. Though television stations in many countries offer multi-language versions (MLVs) of national news, I have come across only one instance thus far of a multi-language version for a Nigerian feature film.15 Tunde Kelani’s Àbèní Tunde Kelani, whose work I wish to discuss here, is one of Nigeria’s most respected and successful film directors. While his films are popular, Kelani does not fully subscribe to the commercial 14

In the majority of cases, these television shows appear to have been imported already dubbed since the accent used was unmistakably foreign. I came across one instance, watching a Mexican telenovela (or “Soap opera”) in Ghana, where the accent and voices were Ghanaian. My conclusion is that the dubbing for that particular show was done locally in Ghana. The Ghanaians I was sitting with, watching the telenovela in question, found this combination of foreign faces with Ghanaian English, weird and unsettling. 15 The film, Ogun Atilewa, dir. Mike Bamiloye, Ibadan: Mount Zion Faith Ministries International, 1997 in Yoruba subsequently produced in English as Attacks from Home is the only case I have found yet of multi-language film. It was produced by a Christian film company, the Mount Zion Faith Ministries International. For further information on the language choices of this film company, see Moradewun Adejunmobi, “Technorality, literature, and vernacular literacy in twenty-first century Africa”, Comparative Literature, LX/2 (Spring 2008), 164-85.

Moradewun Adejunmobi imperatives that appear to drive most film production in Nigeria at this point. In particular, Kelani is especially invested in the mission of protecting Yoruba heritage and Yoruba language literature through film. Though he has occasionally produced English-language films, he is best known for the many Yoruba-language narratives he has directed. All his Yoruba-language films are subtitled. His 2006 film, Àbèní, presents an unusual approach to the practice of translation in the Nigerian video film industry.16 In effect, there are two versions of the film, one subtitled in English, and the other subtitled in French, apparently for distribution in different markets. The film tells the story of Àkanní, a young and successful professional from Bénin, who falls in love with and attempts to marry Àbèní, a young Nigerian professional from a wealthy family. But Àbèní’s father will have none of it: he wants his daughter to marry Ogagu, who has just returned to Nigeria from the US, and is the irresponsible son of a wealthy friend. When Àkanní visits Àbèní in Nigeria, her father has him thrown in jail on false charges. While working behind the scenes to try and free Àkanní, Àbèní pretends to accept her father’s plan for a wedding with Ogagu. But on the day of the wedding with Ogagu, and just as the ceremony is about to begin, she flees from her family. Viewers are given the impression that she is planning to meet up with Àkanní so the two of them can pursue their relationship far from her father’s reach. However, the story ends in tragedy. On the day of the wedding, Àkanní does not regain his freedom, but collapses in prison, the apparent victim of an intentional or accidental poisoning. In the closing shots of the film, Àbèní is left standing alone in a public place, dressed for a wedding, but without a groom. Like most of Kelani’s films, Àbèní is a Yoruba-language film, but one which is particularly replete with various linguistic and border crossings. The film is jointly produced by Kelani’s film company, Mainframe Film and TV productions, and a Béninois company, Laha Film Productions. The lead female character is played by a Nigerian actress (Sola Asedeko), while the lead male role is played by a 172

16

Details for the version subtitled in English are: Tunde Kelani and Amzat Abdel Hakim, dirs, Àbèní, Lagos: Mainframe Film and TV Productions, 2006. Details for the version produced in French are: Amzat Abdel Hakim and Tunde Kelani, dirs, Cotonou: Laha Film Productions, 2006.

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Béninois (Amzat Abdel Hakim), who also happens to be the multitalented owner of Laha Film Productions. The film was shot in both Nigeria and Benin with a mixed cast of Nigerian and Béninois actors. The setting for the story is initially in Nigeria, then shifts to Bénin, before returning to Nigeria again. It is useful to note here that both Nigeria and Bénin which are contiguous countries contain substantial Yoruba-speaking populations. Yoruba is a majority language in Nigeria, while in Bénin it is the language of a significant minority. Dialogue in Àbèní, is almost entirely in Yoruba, spoken by both the Nigerian and Béninois actors. However, copies of the film sold in Nigeria carry English subtitles, while the copies of the film sold in Bénin are subtitled in French. I first became aware of the dual versions of this film when I came across copies of Àbèní in a large market in Bénin, several months after I had purchased a copy of the film in Nigeria. For the sake of clarity, and since multiple languages are involved in both versions of the film, I will refer here to the Nigerian and Béninois versions of the film, Àbèní, rather than to a French, English, or Yoruba version of the film. In many different ways, this film demonstrates Kelani’s wellknown commitment to promoting the Yoruba language and culture. For example, it shows characters in an upscale, modern environment who speak in Yoruba most of the time, and in both domestic and professional situations. What we have here is an instance of monolingualism, not in a hegemonic language, but in one of the indigenous languages of a postcolony. To differentiate this kind of monolingualism from monolingualism in a dominant language, I have chosen to describe it as “vernacular monolingualism”. Furthermore, in the Nigerian version of the film, any written text that does not represent dialogue by the film’s characters is rendered in Yoruba. Thus for example, a written copyright warning in Yoruba, Ikilo Pataki (Important Warning), appears as the film begins, and all the credits at the end of the film are written in Yoruba. The individuals who participated in the production of the film are identified by such titles in Yoruba as: Olootu ati oludari (Producer and director), Olootu agba (Executive Producer), Oluranlowo Olootu (Deputy Producer), Ayaworan ti digitali (Digital camera man), Alabojuto Alasopo sinima (Continuity director), Onifoto (Photographer), Alabojuto Aso at’ Ounje (Costumes and entertainment coordinator). No English equivalents are provided for these terms. The continuous use of

Moradewun Adejunmobi Yoruba by the well-to-do characters of the narrative, as well as for written language communicating information of a technical nature indicates a desire to highlight the adequacy of Yoruba as a language of writing, as a language of casual communication, and as a language for dealing with new media technologies. Vernacular monolingualism is the general practice in indigenous language Nigerian films, even among film directors who do not share Kelani’s penchant for cultural nationalism and are simply seeking to make the most profitable film they can. Characters in most indigenous language Nigerian films inhabit a world where a single language suffices for virtually all verbal communication. In opting for vernacular monolingualism, the producers and directors of these films do not presume that their intended audience is overwhelmingly monolingual. To the contrary, the monolingualism of these films is a deliberately chosen artifice which enables commercial filmmakers to isolate a fairly large group of potential viewers within a community comprising individuals with differential experiences of multilingualism and differential degrees of linguistic proficiency in the diverse languages they speak. The filmmakers wager that there will always be many more individuals with an adequate level of proficiency in the particular language that they have selected than there will be individuals with an adequate level of proficiency in several languages at once. That wager takes on even greater significance in the case of Yoruba speakers divided by the colonial border with one group of Yoruba speakers (the larger group) living in Nigeria and accustomed to code-switching between Yoruba and English, as well as with other Nigerian languages such as Pidgin, while a second group of Yoruba speakers lives in Bénin and is accustomed to code-switching between Yoruba and French, as well as other Béninois languages such as Fon. In short, and unless a particular combination of languages becomes fossilized to some degree in the process of transforming into a Pidgin or Creole, the tendency will be for texts to be monolingual even where the audience for the text is known to be multilingual and polyglot.17 174

17

This might be the reason why cable television channels purporting to cater for the bilingual Latino/a audience in the United States ended up adopting “vernacular monolingualism” and effectively broadcasting all of their shows dubbed into Spanish – as pointed out by Katynka Z. Martinez, “Monolingualism, Biculturalism, and Cable TV: HBO Latino and the Promise of the Multiplex”, in Cable Visions, Television

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Similar challenges apply to Hausa spoken in Nigeria where the official language is English, and Hausa spoken in Niger where the official language is French. There are substantial Hausa and Yoruba speaking diasporas in several countries in West Africa, with the official languages of those countries being English in some cases and French in others. It is noteworthy that the Hausa and Yoruba languages with substantial numbers of speakers in other West African countries, both account for the largest proportion of filmmaking in indigenous languages in Nigeria. Unlike dominant forms of monolingualism, then, vernacular monolingualism applies mainly to texts. It also coexists comfortably with, and is indeed motivated by an acceptance of differential degrees of multilingualism within a community. Kelani’s films like many other Yoruba-language films are viewed mostly in countries and regions with substantial Yoruba-language communities. These films are widely available in south-west Nigeria where the Yoruba predominate. The films are somewhat less prominent in other parts of Nigeria, especially in those parts of Nigeria where the Yoruba live dispersed among native speakers of other languages.18 The films are available in Bénin (and more so in the city of Porto Novo), which has a significant Yoruba-speaking minority, as well as in the UK, in London, a city with a large Yoruba diaspora, but are less readily so in Accra, Ghana, where Yoruba migrants do not form a localized ethnic community. Àbèní in translation However, all dialogue in the Nigerian version of Àbèní is also subtitled in English, suggesting an equally important desire to connect with potential viewers who are not proficient in Yoruba, at least in Nigeria and maybe even outside the country. Indeed, the kind of commercial (or nationalistic) logic that renders an artificially crafted monolingualism appealing to film producers and directors is the very kind of logic that would make subtitling equally attractive: these film producers and directors appear to recognize that the rationale for deploying the artifice of monolingualism in texts, namely the desire to beyond Broadcasting, eds Cynthia Chris, Anthony Freitas, Sarah Banet-Weiser, New York: New York University Press, 2007, 194-214. 18 Naturally, and wherever the Yoruba live in concentrated communities even outside the linguistic hinterland for Yoruba speakers, these films will be widely available.

Moradewun Adejunmobi convene the largest possible audience in a multilingual setting comprising polyglots, is also a rationale for translation. If film producers and directors can make the calculation that by conducting all dialogue in a single language they might reach many more viewers from a vast polyglot community, they will probably be sufficiently motivated to take additional steps, including subtitling where possible, to further expand the audience for their films. What we have here, therefore, is a deliberate plan for drawing in as many viewers as possible from a multilingual population. For the majority of Nigerian film producers, any strategy that facilitates attention to linguistic diversity by expanding the circle of potential viewers at minimum cost in a multilingual population is to be considered. And for cultural nationalists like Kelani, it is as important for those who do not speak Yoruba to hear Yoruba being spoken as it is for native speakers of Yoruba to hear their language being spoken. In the Nigerian version of Àbèní therefore, even songs performed in Yoruba during the film narrative are translated and subtitled. Furthermore, the cover jacket of the film provides information about the film written in English only. The Nigerian version of the film is doing two things at once: highlighting the value and relevance of the Yoruba language and culture for speakers of the language, but also making the products of that language and culture available to viewers who might not speak Yoruba, but do read English. Moreover, the fact that an additional version of the film exists with subtitles in French indicates a conscious attempt on the part of the producers to further extend spectatorship of this film beyond the secondary circle of Nigerian viewers who might be proficient in English (but not Yoruba). It is clearly no accident that on the cover jacket of the version sold in Bénin, the Béninois film company, Laha Films is foregrounded as producer while the Nigerian film company, Mainframe is listed as collaborator on a separate line. On the cover jacket of the Nigerian version, it is exactly the other way round. The Nigerian version lists various Nigerian companies as distributors for the film with addresses and phone numbers in Nigeria, while the Béninois version lists a Béninois company as distributor with address and phone numbers in Bénin. All the information on the cover jacket of the Béninois version is in French, and all the credits at the end of the film are in French. The Béninois version confirms and expands the 176

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orientation of the film text towards a public that extends beyond the vernacular language community, and is larger than the community of a single polity. In this respect, Kelani himself has confirmed that translation of this film into French was not an afterthought, but a deliberate part of the plans made for the film from the moment production began.19 It is important to note, however, that subtitling in Àbèní, as in any indigenous language Nigerian film is not about feeding either the cosmopolitanism of a potential audience or their desire for an authentic experience of foreignness.20 Nor does this form of translation cater to what Stuart Hall describes as “vernacular cosmopolitanism” that involves one’s awareness “of the limitations of any one culture” with an unwillingness to “rescind … claim[s] to the traces of difference”.21 Instead, and unlike the kinds of literary translation activities discussed by Venuti,22 which emanate from institutions within a target language community and serve domestic agendas in the target language community, what we have here is translation initiated by speakers of a source language, or an externalizing translation practice. The Nigerian film industry is not alone in undertaking an externalizing form of translation work: Hollywood and Bollywood, among others, both offer useful precedents and parallels. What is at stake in an externalizing translation practice is not manipulation of the foreign to serve domestic agendas in the target language community, but a will to expand the circle of spectators beyond the political, linguistic, or cultural site of the text’s origination. In the majority of instances in the Nigerian film industry (though this is not the case with Kelani), the profit motive drives investment in externalizing translation practices.23 19

Kelani confirmed this during an interview with me in Macomb, Illinois, in 2008. See B. Ruby Rich, “To Read or Not to Read: Subtitles, Trailers, and Monolingualism”, in Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, eds Adom Egoyan and Ian Balfour, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and Alphabet City Media, 2004, 154. Also see Tessa Dwyer and Ioana Uricaru, “Slashings and Subtitles: Romanian Media Piracy, Censorship, and Translation”, The Velvet Light Trap, LXIII (Spring 2009), 46. 21 Stuart Hall, “Political Belonging in a World of Multiple Identities”, in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, Practice, eds Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 30. 22 Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, 11. 23 Bible translation, for example, is a well-known instance of externalizing translation practice. 20

Moradewun Adejunmobi More often than not, externalizing translation practices serve domestic agendas of culture brokers in the source language community rather than within the target language community. Texts subjected to externalizing translation are not products for export to the kinds of audiences that consume what Hamid Naficy characterizes as “accented cinema”.24 The audience for accented cinema and by extension “accented literature” within the target language community seeks to interface as directly as possible with the foreign, while the initiators of externalizing translation often seek to downplay the foreignness of the foreign-language text. Many African cinema texts are in indigenous languages and subtitled for export to audiences around the world.25 These audiences are usually located outside Africa and are seeking that direct interface with the foreign. By contrast, Nigerian indigenous language films are exports intended for communities contiguous and in contact with those viewers who belong to the linguistic hinterland of the language spoken in the film. The films are rarely perceived as foreign in the way in which African films outside Africa may be perceived as foreign. In this respect, translations in Yoruba films are rarely guided by what might be described as “best practices”. The translators are almost always non-native speakers of the language they are translating into. The translators seldom translate Yoruba dialogue into some kind of global English standard. Rather, the subtitles are in an unmistakably Nigerian variety of English, replete with what Venuti calls “unintended calquing”.26 Though there are fewer instances of such calquing in the French-language subtitles accompanying the Béninois version, even here, unusual expressions crop up that would probably be deemed ungrammatical or incorrect in standard French.27 Far from 178

24 Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. 25 I am thinking here of the kind of films produced by well-known directors like Sembene Ousmane and by Djibril Diop Mambéty. Elsewhere, I have described these films as corresponding to a “global ethnic” configuration, unlike Nigerian video films which represent a “regional popular” kind of configuration. See Moradewun Adejunmobi, “Nigerian Video Film as a Minor Transnational Practice”, Postcolonial Text, III/2 (2007): http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/548/405. 26 Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, 175. 27 When, for example, Àbèní runs into Àkanní at a restaurant in Cotonou and mentions to her friends that his face appears familiar, it is rendered in the subtitles as “Il a l’air familier” instead of something along the following lines: “On dirait que je le connais de quelque part.” When Àkanní’s mother tells him not to break up with his

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doing the work of domestication of a foreign language text which often happens when a text from a less powerful language is translated into a more powerful language,28 the subtitling of most Yorubalanguage films unintentionally foreignizes the English and French languages for native speakers of either language. The invisible translators of this and other indigenous-language Nigerian films aim for functional equivalence rather than domestic legitimacy within a community of both native and non-native speakers of the target language. It would seem then, that when the impetus for translation consistently emanates from a community of non-native speakers who deliberately disregard or are unaware of the standards observed by native speakers, the likely intended audience for the translated text is envisioned as one comprising fellow non-native speakers of the target language. The goal and result of this kind of translation practice is not domestication of a source language text according to the norms of native speakers of the target language. Rather, the end result is domestication of the source language text according to the norms familiar to non-native speakers of the target language. And yet, most externalizing translation practice also appears to aim for fluency. Clearly, in this case we are dealing with a fluency that would be recognizable to non-native speakers of English and French rather than native speakers of either language. The goal in externalizing translation is to project verbal communication and language itself as fully limpid and transparent. Thus, every effort is made to avoid wording in the translated text that would remind viewers of the source language. Initiators of this kind of translation fiancée Awa to pursue a relationship with Àbèní, her statement is rendered in the subtitles as “Je veux que tu t’accorches à Awa” instead of “Je veux que tu t’accroches à Awa”. The subtitles also make inconsistent use of the formal and informal second person pronoun in statements addressed to the same person. Thus, for example, Àbèní’s father sometimes uses “tu” with her, and at other times, uses “vous” in speaking to her. There are also several spelling mistakes in the French subtitles, such as “cela” being spelled as “cella” or “renverai” spelled as “referrai”. In yet other instances, there appears to be interference between the French and English subtitles. When for example, Àkanní’s friend says in Yoruba “Alejo ni won” (they are visitors/foreigners), in French it is correctly rendered as “Ce sont des étrangers” while the English subtitles (apparently contaminated by the French translation) read “They are strangers”. Misspellings, incorrect translations, and grammatical errors are somewhat commonplace in the subtitles, and more so in the Béninois version of the film. 28 See Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, 5.

Moradewun Adejunmobi subscribe to what Cronin describes as a philosophy of “neoBabelianism” or “the desire for mutual, instantaneous intelligibility between human beings speaking, writing and reading different languages”.29 One might assume that this goal would be difficult to realize where the translators’ proficiency in the target language appears to deviate from an international norm. But the tendency to translate the Yoruba language dialogue into a Nigerian-style English, and a Béninois-style French provides the best evidence yet that the intended audience for this film and others like it is national and regional rather than a global one.30 In cases like these, the monolingualism of the source text reinforces the impression of implied transparency of language communicated in externalizing translation. Both strategies hint at an absence of mediation that depresses (without completely eliminating) the audience’s perception of the foreignness of a film accessed in translation. Similar considerations are at work in the recourse to standard language in many popular narrative texts whether or not they become subjects of externalizing translation. In effect, the popular standard is a form of language laying claim to transparency because it cannot be completely identified with speakers of the language from any one locality. The popular standard does not have to be fully intelligible in every location, it merely has to be difficult to localize wherever it is used.31 These fluent translations of transparent language share some qualities in common with the type that Nornes characterizes as “corrupt translations”, especially in the tendency to smooth over 180

29

Cronin, Translation and Globalization, 59. In the Nigerian version for example, we read in the subtitles “You refused to pick my calls” instead of “You refused to take my calls”. We have “My senior” instead of “My older brother”. We read “How is Ogagu enjoying his vac?” instead of “How is Ogagu enjoying his holidays/vacation?”. In the Béninois version, we read in the subtitles “laisse-moi de l’appeler” instead of “laisse-moi le rappeler”. We have “Envoyez-nous des boissons” instead of “Servez-nous des boissons”. We also come across “Tu as dit que papa programme mon mariage” instead of “Tu as dit que papa fait des préparatifs pour mon mariage”. 31 The popular standard does not have to be and may not correspond to what Bourdieu describes as legitimate language – it is just a form of speech that is used over a dispersed area and thus not localized. The popular standard is more likely a popular version or sociolect of the legitimate language. See Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. 30

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textual violence.32 It comes as no surprise that when texts strive for the appearance of transparency of language, prospects for communication between speakers of different languages will either be ignored or presented as a problem to be exploited for comedic or tragic effect. At the level of diegesis therefore, this film, Àbèní, does not acknowledge that a group of Africans living in a given African urban setting might ever have to speak to other Africans and especially fellow compatriots who do not share in common the same language repertoires. For most of the film, we observe native Yoruba speakers who never have to communicate with non-Yoruba speakers. Even the idealistic project of building a regional community across colonial borders is realized here through the medium of a shared mother tongue. Despite different nationalities, the lead characters, Àbèní and Àkanní are both Yoruba speakers, as are Kelani and Hakim, the directors of the film. Translating communication gaps and multilingualism There are however a few occasions where there is a breach in the almost consistent monolingualism of the film, and the challenge of communication between Africans speaking different languages is represented, but handled in very different ways. In one instance, Ogagu, on a weekend trip from Lagos in Nigeria to Cotonou in Bénin, finds it difficult to order a meal in a restaurant: communication breaks down because Ogagu speaks English rather than Yoruba while the waiter speaks French, rather than Yoruba. In this comic scene, they finally have to resort to sign language. Neither thinks of using Yoruba to bridge the linguistic barrier though Yoruba is fairly commonplace in Cotonou, as the film itself already demonstrates since a significant part of the narrative plot unfolds in Cotonou. The film narrative thus connects the fact that Africans do not always speak the same languages with crossing a political border. Interestingly, the humorous dimension of this encounter derives from the fact that both characters speak different European languages, not from the fact that they

32

Nornes, Cinema Babel, 190 describes translators who engage in “corrupt translations” in the following terms: “They accept a vision of translation that violently appropriates the source text, and in the process of converting speech into writing within the time and space limits of the subtitle, they conform the original to the rules, regulations, idioms and frame of reference of the target culture. It is a practice of translation that smoothes over its textual violence and domesticates all otherness while it pretends to bring the audience to an experience of the foreign.”

Moradewun Adejunmobi probably also speak different African languages. The fact of speaking different African languages is simply elided.33 In the second instance involving a breach of the narrative’s monolingualism, Akanni who sings in Béninois nightclubs as a recreational activity, is introduced to the crowd at a nightclub before he steps on stage to sing. The MC who introduces Àkanní speaks in French, and is apparently understood by most people in the crowd who begin to cheer. Strangely enough communication does not break down in the Yoruba-speaking universe of the film, presumably because all the guests gathered at the nightclub are Béninois and accustomed to hearing French being spoken. The narrative does not direct any attention at Àbèní, who is present at the nightclub as Àkanní’s guest, and does not speak French. And on this occasion where the multilingualism of the nightclub audience is implied if not stated, that fact is not foregrounded in the narrative in keeping with the principle of linguistic transparency which favors the appearance of instantaneous intelligibility. As in the few instances of code switching between Yoruba and French shown earlier in the film, it is implied here too that the Béninois all speak the same languages, and always understand each other’s speech. Interpreters are conveniently missing from the plot, and none of the characters seems to need translation. A breakdown in communication is possible only when national borders are crossed since we do not hear any African language other than Yoruba ever being spoken to characters in either country, nor do we see them facing communication challenges when speaking to anyone else in their respective countries. On either side of the border, either monolingualism or multilingual transparency, are the norm. On the rare occasions when characters are shown to be multilingual, the characters exhibit complete proficiency in both languages, as long as the languages involved are a single African and a single European language and no borders have been traversed. A reluctance to portray compatriots with diverse language repertoires within individual 182



33

The difficulty of communication seems to stem from the possibility that the waiter does not speak Yoruba, and instead speaks a different African language, perhaps Fon. In the city of Cotonou, several African languages are widely spoken including Fon and Yoruba among others.

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nations would seem to be the flip side of opting for linguistic transparency and thus for monolingualism in texts.34 At the same time, each version of the film demonstrates that commitment to a given vernacular language audience can coexist with a real life practice of intercultural communication, hence the use of subtitling. To ensure that these goals do not become mutually exclusive, the film directors have consistently attached different languages to different modes of communication, namely spoken dialogue and writing. In the rare instances where both source and target language coexist in the dialogue of the film, the preference in Nigerian video films is for the target language alone to be acknowledged through written subtitles. In other words, Yoruba dialogue is consistently represented through English or Frenchlanguage subtitles. In the few cases where French or English is spoken in the films, this is never represented through Yoruba-language subtitles. This confirms that all the Yoruba-language viewers of the film are presumed to be polyglot, and that subtitles in the film are intended for those who do not understand Yoruba or have minimal proficiency in Yoruba. With one or two exceptions, English appears in this film only in written subtitles.35 Furthermore, this written text in English is almost always a translation of something initially said in Yoruba. In the Nigerian version, written English never represents spoken English, and only represents spoken Yoruba. Written language, then, becomes the primary site for intercultural communication. However, and by also presenting technical information in written Yoruba outside of diegesis in the Nigerian version, Kelani demonstrates that vernacular languages can be



34

To better understand the interesting challenges that this would pose for filmmakers, imagine a film in Yoruba with a few characters who speak Igbo from time to time. Both languages would be subtitled in English (or French), and thus it would not be obvious to a viewer dependent on the subtitles that different languages were being used, except if the story made a point of emphasizing that the Yoruba speaking characters do not understand the Igbo speaking characters. This is exactly what Kelani has done with the encounter between Ogagu and the Béninois waiter in Cotonou. 35 One of the exceptions occurs in a scene where Àbèní arrives at a guesthouse in Cotonou with some Nigerian friends. The guesthouse manager who welcomes Àbèní and her friends speaks a few sentences in English to welcome them to the guesthouse. These words do not appear in the subtitle at the bottom of the screen.

Moradewun Adejunmobi languages of writing and factual information without reference to translation and non-native languages.36 Interestingly though, the Béninois version of the film presents printed information about the film’s crew not in Yoruba, but entirely in French. There is also considerably more code switching between French and Yoruba in the scenes by Béninois actors that are set in Bénin than in the scenes by Nigerian actors which rarely involve code-switching. Clearly, these scenes would most probably be understood by bilingual Yoruba-French speakers, rather than by monolingual French language speakers. The Béninois actors are also more likely to utter brief sentences entirely in French.37 In some instances, these statements in French also appear in the subtitle strip, while on other occasions the statements do not appear in the subtitle strip. For example, the introduction of Àkanní by the MC in the nightclub does not appear in the subtitle strip. The discrepancy between the scenes set in Bénin and the scenes set in Nigeria with respect to levels of code-switching would suggest that the Béninois actors evidently had greater difficulty entering into the monolingual character required for the film. The fact that translation in this film involves subtitling rather than dubbing is also significant. Whether or not the viewer is proficient in Yoruba, he or she cannot avoid hearing Yoruba being spoken throughout the film. Both the Béninois and Nigerian versions of Àbèní are in the end still Yoruba-language films. The vernacular language is not elided here. The choice of subtitling by most directors of Yoruba language films may be as much a function of ideological preference as of economic necessity. Dubbing presents some advantages, but also from my perspective, notable disadvantages whether or not the languages involved are two African vernaculars, or one African vernacular and a European language. Compared to subtitling, and as noted by Nornes,38 among many others, dubbing is expensive and 184



36

Yoruba speakers in Bénin might not necessarily be able to read these Yoruba words and phrases, especially since the Yoruba alphabet appears closer to the English alphabet than to the French alphabet in the way phonetic values are assigned to letters. In my limited experience, Béninois Yoruba face considerable difficulty when attempting to read written Yoruba-language texts. 37 For example, Àkanní comes to sit at the table for dinner with his Yoruba-speaking mother, and asks before dishing out some food: “Ils ont préparé quoi?” (“What’s for dinner tonight?”) 38 Nornes, Cinema Babel, 190.

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presents all kinds of technical challenges. In all likelihood, native and non-native speakers of a given target language will find it easier to follow the dialogue in a film when the dialogue is dubbed. But dubbing also absolves native and non-native speakers of the target language of the obligation of encountering the source language as a living entity that they have to hear. It relieves them of the obligation of acknowledging the unfamiliarity of an unknown language and culture, even where fluency and the principle of language transparency are at work. Inasmuch as the production of a film in any African vernacular expands the circle of possible uses of that language, dubbing contracts the same circle, especially when the dubbed version of the film surpasses the source language version in circulation and influence. As Venuti has correctly argued, translation often works to the advantage of more powerful languages. That is to say, texts from less powerful languages are more frequently translated into more powerful languages, and as a result, speakers of more powerful languages do not have to interact with or learn less powerful languages. Dubbing in particular exacerbates this trend by completely erasing the less powerful language. However, communication with speakers of other languages is difficult in the absence of translation or the use of a language of wider communication. For communities in the developing world with high levels of multilingualism, this is an unavoidable challenge. While subtitling is not a perfect solution, it is the only one that makes it possible for a narrative to be filmed in a less commonly spoken language, and still be commercially viable. One must acknowledge though, that subtitling excludes those Africans who are not literate in any language and especially in commonly used nonnative languages of writing like English or French. This is the point at which the objective of creating narratives in particular African vernaculars enters into conflict with the objective of making these narratives accessible to Africans speaking other vernaculars. In the area of film for commercial purposes, narratives in less commonly spoken languages become commercially feasible to the extent that the narratives can be made available in more widely spoken languages: they need to be translated, and preferably subtitled. What I have examined in this essay is the reason why a practice of monolingualism might remain attractive for textual production in postcolonial multilingual communities. I have also discussed the

Moradewun Adejunmobi relationship between translation and a proclivity for monolingualism in popular texts in postcolonial multilingual societies. In communities comprising a majority of polyglots with different language repertoires and degrees of proficiency, the monolingualism of extended texts represents a coming to terms with differential experiences of multilingualism by circumscribing speakers of individual languages into discrete groups of readers, spectators, and consumers. Vernacular monolingualism of this sort is to be distinguished from efforts aimed at eradicating multilingualism, and the belief that a community cannot hold together unless everyone speaks a single language shared in common. The principle of linguistic transparency is the norm for popular narratives around the world. Where an adherence to the notion of linguistic transparency coincides with a commitment to vernacular monolingualism, there will be an openness to translation, and specifically externalizing translation. Both for commercial and ideological reasons, Nigerian film producers and directors embrace a vision of neo-babelianism and a commitment to externalizing translation, even when their products are financially viable without translation. This corresponds to an alternative translation pattern because it privileges subtitling which allows a language that is not the dominant language to be heard and it emanates from the users of the minor language. With subtitling in particular, speakers of a more powerful language cannot avoid frequent encounters with less powerful languages. This is a translation pattern that does not inevitably foreground dominant languages at the expense of less powerful languages and thus works to the advantage of indigenous languages. Nonetheless, and to the extent that few texts in more powerful languages are ever translated into indigenous languages in Africa, the translation patterns clearly remain unequal. Externalizing translation does not by itself subvert these unequal translation patterns, but it does strengthen the position of indigenous languages in a postcolony. I would like to acknowledge, though, that the experience of Yoruba filmmakers in Nigeria (and Bénin) could be viewed as an exception that invalidates the larger argument. Given an estimated thirty million or more speakers of Yoruba, Yoruba films have been in the past, and are likely to remain commercially viable even without 186

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translation.39 Though Yoruba-language films are now consistently subtitled in English (or French when produced in Bénin), the texts circulate and function as text mainly within the Yoruba-speaking hinterland. At the same time, it remains true that the production of audiovisual texts in indigenous languages with fewer speakers becomes more locally sustainable when such texts are subtitled into a language with many more speakers. The language with fewer speakers then continues to be used in locally produced texts that are also accessible to speakers of other languages whose patronage might make continued production of such texts viable. The downside, though, is that under such conditions, audiences comprising individuals proficient in languages with comparatively more speakers will probably begin to exercise an undue influence on the content and format of texts composed in languages with relatively few speakers. Over time, it is more than likely that these kinds of films will become examples of “accented cinema” more frequently viewed abroad than at home, and no longer functioning as popular texts in their place of origination. In conclusion I believe though that any procedure that enables the production and circulation of individual texts in multiple languages is to be commended and encouraged. Translation that contributes to strengthening language diversity is to be commended. When vernacular monolingualism in audiovisual texts is combined with externalizing translation practice, this very goal is accomplished.



39

Felix Fabunmi and Akeem Salawu, in “Is Yorùbá an Endangered Language?”, Nordic Journal of African Studies, XXIV/3 (2005), 392, estimate the total number of speakers of Yoruba to be about thirty million.



RABAH AMEUR-ZAÏMECHE: TRANSLATION AS ARTISTIC PRACTICE VERENA ANDERMATT CONLEY

Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche: translation as artistic practice In French theory and artistic practices, over much of the last decade translation has become a transformative critical concept. Formerly related to psychoanalytic theory in which drives were said to cross various somatic and psychic strata, translation now has a geopolitical focus in a broadly defined littérature-monde that goes beyond national borders. New problems are raised wherever foreign or local languages are translated into the French grammar. Writers hailing from local cultures, many of which are in ex-colonies, engage issues that exceed those of betrayal or fidelity that were often said to face translators in both political and literary dimensions. Against former predictions, many African writers continue to write in French in order to criticize problems in their own cultures as well as those that France and other governments or international agencies impose upon them. What happens, however, to those writers who belong to different cultures but who reside in France? Classified until recently as “francophone”, and mainly of North African and Sub-Saharan descent, they now also belong to a littérature-monde. They do not fit into a separate category and, strictly speaking, cannot even be said to be part of what the philosopher Etienne Balibar by way of Jacques Rancière1 calls France’s “alterity”. They are part of a country that is far from homogenous (if it ever were except in official fictions) and whose cultural ties extend beyond its borders. The nation state, based as it had been on principles of demographic inclusion and exclusion, is being reassessed. In the French Republic, under the impact of

1

Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, New York: Verso, 2009.

Verena Andermatt Conley migrations, ethnic communities have reappeared. As a result, linguistic as well as cultural translations and what they negotiate are ongoing. Critics such as Etienne Balibar and Bruno Latour argue that critical practices are now steeped in translation.2 What is valid for intellectual pursuits holds for the arts. Dealing with words, sounds or images, artists build their works on the basis of translation. Although a global world may seem borderless and writers such as Hélène Cixous or Jacques Derrida dream of a cosmopolis to come, many human beings still define themselves in relation to the nation state even if the latter is rapidly changing. In today’s de-centered world, in a country like France, artists from different communities continue to combat a dominant culture. Many do so by translating emotions and singular as well as collective cultural sensibilities between different communities so as to reconfigure and open spaces. Dilemmas resulting from global migrations create new vectors of tension within the country’s borders that inflect the production of culture today. In such an atmosphere, it is perhaps not by chance that recent texts but especially films are often more collectively produced. Writers and filmmakers put themselves on stage. Their artistic projects consist of braiding voices whose uncommon harmonies and discords lead to hybridization and even mutations of genres. In literature, this endeavor results in what elsewhere I have called “docu-fictions”, mixtures of literary writing and documentary styles that are also prevalent in contemporary film.3 These books or films, are made from what Hélène Cixous has called “stigmata”, that is, fertile wounds where artists and their subjects have been touched at intersections of singular and collective sensations and emotions. Actively engaged in making sense rather than in ratifying eternal truths, these artists translate emotions into words, sounds and images that will open passages. Literary and filmic docu-fictions give voice and face to humans making up the many heterogenous communities that compose France today. Writers and even more so filmmakers often call on inhabitants 190

2

Etienne Balibar, “Europe: Vanishing Mediator”, in We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004, 203-235; Bruno Latour, War of the Worlds: What about Peace?, trans. Charlotte Bigg. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2002. 3 Verena Conley, “Literature, Space, and the French Nation-State After the 1950s”, in French Global, eds Christie McDonald and Susan Suleiman, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, 145-59.

Ameur-Zaïmeche: Translation as Artistic Practice 191 from different communities and urge them to translate their feelings and emotions into words and images. In collaborative milieus, critics, writers and filmmakers become one of many voices. In terms borrowed from the media, they “pull in, they do not push back”,4 in what they do. Commenting on photographs exhibited at Documenta X (1997), Etienne Balibar notes that there are more stories today in a photograph than in a novel.5 The same holds true for many films from the past two decades that, between fiction and documentary, consciously translate singular and collective emotions into forms that have no simple generic or semiotic identity. To illustrate our point, we can juxtapose Jean-Luc Godard’s retrospectively rather magisterial and hyper-intellectual Two or Three Things I Know about Her (1966), in which the director controls his actors and imposes his point of view when making them speak about their alienated existence in the newly constructed grands-ensemble or housing estates in La Courneuve, near Paris, with Jean-Patrick Lebel’s lesser known remake of the film, Notes for Débussy: Open Letter to Jean-Luc Godard (1988). In this docu-fiction, the inhabitants of the same projects speak out themselves. They give voice to their affect. Lebel’s film begins with the implosion of the very building, the Débussy, shown by Godard. Yet, contrary to Godard, Lebel goes to the projects and lets former inhabitants speak about their many personal experiences while they were living there and how they constructed their everyday lives. These stories are much more nuanced than the whispers in Godard’s film would have led us to believe. We can also mention the many fictionalized semi-documentary films by Abdellatif Kechiche such as Games of Love and Chance (1997)6 or even more so Laurent Cantet’s The Class (2008),7 an extraordinary docu-fiction, which deals with affects and emotions that circulate among teachers and students, French nationals and immigrants, old and young. Exploring tact in connection with linguistic and cultural translations, The Class, filmed in the eighteenth arrondissement or district, puts into question and even into crisis the

4 Patricia Zimmerman, “Eco-Publics”, in From Earth Art to Eco Art, Cornell University, October 17-18, 2008. 5 Étienne Balibar, Droit de Cité, Paris: l’Aube, 1998, 159. 6 Abdellatif Kechiche, The Game of Love and Chance, DVD, Paris: Noé Productions, 2004. 7 Laurent Cantet, The Class, DVD, London: Artificial Eye, 2009.

Verena Andermatt Conley notion of a homogenous national culture built upon the myth of eternal values. It shows that there is not just one voice or single source of emission of truth – such as that of the teacher. All bodies are part of mobile networks consisting of ongoing relays of sense or meaning and the circulation of various singular and collective affects within the French state today. Many of these “docu-fictions” are part of what has somewhat hastily been labeled a new “genre” of banlieue fiction and films that began in the 1980s with Tea in the Harem of Archimed (1983) by Mehdi Charef, a factory worker turned filmmaker and writer. Charef’s film shocked a French audience to whom it revealed the difficult existence of adolescents living in distant parts of their own city. Others followed, from Jean-François Richet’s Etat des lieux (1994) to Malik Chibane’s Hexagone (1994). They all seized on an opening that made it possible to narrate the stories of people who in France are still called issus de l’immigration, that is, “descendants of immigrants”. The relative success of these films and the sudden attention given to the problems of life in the cités led to more commercial productions by French directors, of which the most famous and successful to date are Hate (1995), by Mathieu Kassovitz, and Banlieue 13 (2004), a banlieue action film directed by Pierre Morel, written and produced by Luc Besson. Both are rather aestheticizing and stereotyped renderings of young people’s lives in the banlieue. To these somewhat reductive works, recent films by Kechiche, Cantet or, for our purposes, by Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, introduce problematic issues that complicate a simple division between good and bad, or immigrants and French nationals. Ameur-Zaïmeche, an Algerian filmmaker who grew up in France, introduces a new gaze, that is, a way of looking from the inside, rather than intellectualizing from the outside, by putting himself on stage and by translating into the filmic medium the somatic and psychic sides where he has been touched or affected. Working collectively, both through the choice of non-professional actors many of whom are part of his family in Wesh Wesh qu’est-ce qui se passe (2001)8 or are linked by work ties as in Dernier maquis (2008), Ameur-Zaïmeche focuses on translating emotions in order to make injustices visible and alter time-bound perceptions. As a North African he asks for the right 192

8

Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, Wesh Wesh Qu’est-ce qui se passe?, DVD, Montreuil: Sarrazink Productions (Arte Editions), 2003.

Ameur-Zaïmeche: Translation as Artistic Practice 193 to make films that are not simply sociological treatises in the documentary mold. Ameur-Zaïmeche fights for the rights of his community but also for his own as a filmmaker who can treat film as a poetic medium. He shows how people are affected in ways that depend both on their singular and collective make up. In the Arte edition, in an interview with the audience of Wesh Wesh in a suburb of Strasbourg, one of the young people declared that she liked the film because it “touched her” (Arte Editions 2003). Ameur-Zaïmeche produces films that put into images the emotions of the characters so as to affect both a French and non-French audience and change perceptions of those living on the inside and the outside of the cité. Making films from his inner gaze or from what in an interview he calls his heart, Ameur-Zaïmeche makes his characters speak – and at times he even lets them do so freely – from where they have been affected. The dialogue that is carried on in several languages (mainly French and Arabic) and with different accents, points to the necessity of ongoing linguistic translation. At the same time, the complex registers of people’s feelings and reactions depend on their cultural appurtenance and their own psychic makeup. Better than the media, so it seems, cinema uses an art of transfer to portray the pains and joys of characters living in and coping with the Parisian banlieue. In Wesh Wesh qu’est-ce qui se passe? and in Dernier maquis,9 an intellectual gaze from the outside is transformed into another quasimystical gaze from the inside that is linked to an artistic practice of translation. In both films the filmmaker plays one of the main characters. The audience never knows whether he or she is in or out of the film. Wesh Wesh reveals the pain caused by a relatively little known French law directed against immigrants and their descendents that is called la double peine (“double punishment”) and by police brutality. Dernier maquis deals with forms of exclusion, that is, mainly with immigrants being denied access to a voice and a vote in the workplace. In Wesh Wesh, the main protagonist, Kamel, played by the director himself, was incarcerated – the audience never learns why – for five years. The incarceration was followed by his expulsion from France for two more years and the loss of citizenship. The film begins with Kamel’s return to his family that welcomes him back into the cité. It tells of the protagonist’s difficulties in reinserting himself 9

Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, Dernier maquis, DVD, Montreuil: Sarrazink Productions (Arte Editions), 2009.

Verena Andermatt Conley without legal papers in French society. The situation ultimately leads to his death. The film visually captures the entrapment of the characters in low aerial shots that sweep over the roofs of unending rows of housing complexes of the Cité des Bosquets in Montfermeil northeast of Paris; striated by labyrinthine alleyways, sharp angles and rows of misbegotten cars. The latter are rusty symbols of a false mobility that hardly enables the young people to leave the cite – or save Kamel’s life in his attempt to evade the police. In one scene, while going to make a drug deal, a group of young Arabs that includes Kamel’s brother Mousse, is seen driving down streets lined with apartment complexes that all resemble one another, which prompts one of them to ask: “On est où là?” (“Where are we?”), making obvious the loss of direction and enclosure experienced by these youths. Mousse answers: “On est aux Abesses” (“We are at the Abesses”). In addition to revealing the disorientation of the character, the place-name “Abesses”, referring to a medieval monastery, translates a vain attempt and a common practice by insensitive architects who fail to bestow any spatial variety or poetry on dreary housing complexes. Their squalor is shown in repeated shots in which the camera slowly pans upward on a dilapidated building in a way at once reminiscent of and very different from Godard’s shot of Sarcelles in Two or Three Things. In Godard, the long take and panoramic shots revealed the alienation of members of the consumer society who reside in the brand new and entirely inhospitable housing complexes. In Wesh Wesh, the close-ups of the decrepit walls that enclose the characters translate a sense of physical and psychological imprisonment, similar to that of the overwhelming towers of pallets in Dernier maquis. Against the background of a storyline protesting the double peine, Ameur Zaïmeche translates the life in the cité and the difficulties of a family through words and sounds. To nuance the characters in the same family, he alternates and even intertwines various cultural and linguistic translations. The characters react in different yet complex ways to collective dilemmas. In an early scene, Kamel’s mother, as the keeper of traditions, is teaching her emancipated daughter, Yasmina, how to make traditional North African food. The mother speaks mainly in Arabic which in the Arte Edition is translated into French subtitles. The result is a visual hieroglyph or palimpsest. Ameur-Zaïmeche further nuances cultural differences when he shows 194

Ameur-Zaïmeche: Translation as Artistic Practice 195 how the mother upholds ethnic traditions by serving a North African breakfast to her grown son Mousse, a drug trafficker, whom she earlier called a voyou, a “rogue”. While reprimanding him for not looking for a real job, she asks him why he is always picking on his sister, a lawyer, who prepares to move out to live with her French boyfriend. Mousse, critical of his sister’s values as an emancipated woman living with a Frenchman to whom she is not even married, asks his mother if his nephew will have a French name like Julien or Bertrand. The audience hears Mousse’s pain at this possibility. Ironically, Mousse speaks these words in perfect though slightly accented French. In these dialogues, Ameur-Zaïmeche is translating complex symbolic cultural idioms. Michel de Certeau10 and, after him, Etienne Balibar, remarked that cultural codes such as food, fashion or music translate easily, while symbolic codes pertaining to gender, sexuality, marriage, life and death encounter more resistance. The latter are translatable but always with inassimilable remainders that, in turn, lead to more communication. In Wesh Wesh, Ameur- Zaïmeche engages in such a translation in the context of family relations. Paradoxically, the mother, though she is the keeper of traditions, is more understanding of her daughter’s ways and proud of her achievements as a lawyer. Her support may well betray a secret desire to emancipate herself and to leave the cité. In the scene in which the two women prepare the food, the mother voices her admiration that her daughter is moving to a “pavillon”, a small single-family house that is the emblem of French bourgeois living. The daughter answers affirmatively in voice off while the camera slowly pans up the outer wall of the dilapidated building in which they live. And she adds that she is sick of seeing her mother suffer first in the bidonville, a transient “shantytown” in which immigrants were often put after their arrival, and now in the cité. All she wants to do, we hear her say, is leave. The building is shot through clumps of tree branches. A cut enables us to see that it is Kamel who is looking at the building while we hear his sister speak. More tolerant of her daughter, the mother, according to tradition, wants her sons closer to herself. The confined situation in which she keeps her sons indirectly leads to their demise. 10

Michel de Certeau, The Capture of Speech, trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Verena Andermatt Conley As Ameur-Zaïmeche states repeatedly, he refrains from passing judgment. As a result he can address problems by putting various and often conflicting affects into circulation. We hear the mother speaking in broken French to a young woman attendant in the “hammam” (the Turkish bath) where she relaxes in a robe following her bath. The young woman of North African descent wants to go out with Mousse. In broken French and under the pretext that Mousse is a voyou, a “rogue”, the mother vainly urges the young woman to see Kamel. She is more invested in linking up her older son, possibly so he can get legal papers that will enable him to stay in France. Yet in a later scene, when Irene, a young French teacher from the cité, who, the film suggests, is in love with Kamel, comes to the apartment to inquire of the latter’s whereabouts, the mother pretends not to understand any French and speaks only in Arabic. In one of the few comical scenes of the film, Yasmina, sitting between the mother and the young woman, acts as a linguistic and cultural translator. The emancipated daughter is the one who literally lives in translation, by going from one culture to the other, even combining them both into something new. The mother urges the young woman, possibly because she is French, in rather unflattering terms to go away and leave her son alone. She mutters that she has already found a suitable wife for him. She asks her daughter to translate by openly saying in Arabic rendered in the French subtitles as, “dis-le lui”. The daughter purposely mistranslates the mother’s harsh words into kinder terms for the young woman. The audience does not know if the mother fails to understand either the French or the translations since earlier in the baths she had managed to do so, or if her refusal to speak French is a way of affirming her difference, of refusing a French woman and of keeping her son. This scene follows another where, through his brother Yazmid, Kamel succeeds in arranging a date with the same woman. The scene of the date is not shown. Instead, the camera pans over the housing project at night to hear the music of Curtis Mayfield’s “Ghetto Child” about drugs and poverty, from his funk and soul album, Superfly (1972). The camera then cuts to Irene’s bedroom where Kamel is getting dressed. Sitting on the young woman’s bed, the two characters face the camera and not each other. Kamel is angry about a comment she has made that the audience never hears. It is implied that they made love and that he asked her to marry him so he could get his 196

Ameur-Zaïmeche: Translation as Artistic Practice 197 citizenship papers. It is also intimated that she was reluctant to enter a sham marriage (mariage blanc). We only hear Kamel parodying her voice and making a face: a sham marriage. He then blurts out angrily: “You do not know what it means. You have never known expulsion.” A cultural abyss opens between the two though the woman clearly is drawn to Kamel.11 The film begins to bridge the abyss by translating the pain of the experience of “double punishment” into words, sounds and images, but as the film shows, this translation is not easily done. The young teacher who lives in the cité clearly has her heart in the right place, as the audience learned in the previous scene, during which she intervened when the police brutally and unjustly roughed up Kamel’s younger brother, Yazid, and his friend. Yet, there still is an abyss less between the sexes than the treatment of people by the law because of their different cultures. The characters’ emotions that result from their experience of exclusion, expulsion and loss of citizenship, are translated in the film through images, words, colors or sounds that help change the spectators’ perceptions. The rapid succession of closing doors during Kamel’s futile job search conveys his impossibility of finding employment. Yet if doors close and walls surround the characters, mini-openings also become apparent. Open doors and brightly colored entrances with numerous tags capture the rebellious spirit of the young Arabs caught in an inhospitable place. Even more so, two scenes set in nature offer temporary relief. In one, the gang of young Arabs plays golf on the grass near the cité. The spontaneity of the sequence shows a sudden and unmitigated joy of adolescents who, for a moment, are able to break out of the prison in which they live, literally into an open space. Their behavior is suddenly cheerful and carefree. Another opening is offered when Kamel first goes fishing with two boys from the cité. Though they have to trespass by jumping over an iron picket fence to gain access to their destination along a body of water in the Forest of Bondy, they find some unguarded moments in the green and ochre colors of nature. While they are

11 Bled Number One is a film Ameur-Zaïmeche made in 2005, after Wesh Wesh, in which he tells of his exile in Algeria, in other words, of events that may have happened before the first film. There, the gap is between Kamel and the inhabitants of the bled (“village”). At the end of the film, in one of the director’s nature scenes, Kamel makes it clear that he cannot bear to stay in the Algerian village. Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, Bled Number One, DVD, Montreuil: Sarrazink Productions, 2006.

Verena Andermatt Conley fishing, the cacophonous soundtrack gives way to a calmer tune, John Coletrane’s well-known Naima (1960). The camera pulls back to reframe the scene in deep focus. The characters are no longer enclosed by walls, and though they are never set free, a feeling of entrapment is temporarily suspended. In Quartiers sensibles Azouz Begag had argued for the necessity of “irrigating thought” by introducing water into the proximity of the housing projects.12 Kamel, who is now in France illegally, finds an ephemeral reprieve from his flight from – and persecution by – the law in the space of an “irrigated” nature. It is in the same place where Irene – whose very name implies peace – joins him again later in the film and where, presumably, they mend their relationship, though the scene itself is not shown. The sudden palette of green surroundings introduces the possibility of an opening and a moment of peace in the often fast paced film set in the reality of a harsh urban environment. Yet, peace and paradise being elsewhere, all the characters of the film live under the sign of ambivalence. Ironically, it is in the same place that one of the young men turned informer rats on the group of drug traffickers to a corrupt policeman with whom he is at the same time drinking beer and doing drugs. The denunciation leads to the arrest of Mousse and, as a result of police brutality, the hospitalization of the mother. It will also be the same place where Kamel is ultimately killed while attempting to escape from another racist policeman after he had been spotted driving Irene’s car. Even more than Wesh Wesh, Dernier maquis can be appreciated as a generalized practice of visual, cultural and linguistic translation. Situated in an industrial zone, a kind of no man’s land not far from Roissy airport, Dernier maquis deals with the problem of those who are lacking a voice and a vote.13 As its title indicates, it focuses on the resistance of those who are often at the same time clandestine. The film gives dignity to immigrants and illegal workers who are usually dismissed according to their stereotype. While a motley crew of workers of North African and sub-Saharan origin toil on the ground and lead a life of hardship, large planes roar overhead, ceaselessly taking off and landing. The spectator gets the impression of different 198



12

Azouz Begag, Quartiers sensibles, Paris: Seuil, Le point, 1994. Etienne Balibar, addresses this problem critically in We, the People of Europe? Transnational Citizenship. He shows how Hannah Arendt noted that not to have citizenship deprived one of an existential territory.

13

Ameur-Zaïmeche: Translation as Artistic Practice 199 networks that coexist without intersecting. The capitalist matrix suggested by the planes that move people and goods all over the world never connects with that of those on the ground who are enclosed by towering stacks of palettes. The mobility of those in the air is countered by the immobility of humans on the ground. Instead of housing projects, the characters are facing pallets that, painted bright red for the film, give the spectators a sensation that translates immediately into a politicized affect.14 Working on giving voice to those who have none, the film produces what one critic, amplifying Gilles Deleuze, calls both a people and a country.15 Dernier maquis works on many registers at once. The workers toil for Mao, a Muslim and North African boss, who runs two businesses simultaneously: pallet repair on the one hand, and large truck repair on the other. Again, Mao is played by the filmmaker whose gaze is both in and out of the film: when he tells one of the African workers, who at first has trouble understanding him, that he does not look happy, his words can be attributed at once to the boss and to the filmmaker. Mao/Ameur-Zaïmeche keeps the same enigmatic smile throughout the film, making the spectators wonder who is looking and what is being translated. While international capitalism operates in the air, the Muslim boss oversees his enterprise on the ground. He runs a tight ship. He checks his workers’ time sheets and refuses to budge on matters of compensation. The film conveys the relation between the workers and the boss through a process of montage that is even more carefully worked out than in Wesh Wesh. Mao is often shown alone in the frame while the workers are cut off or their answers to the boss’ query are not heard. Emphasized by a divided screen, Mao, who occupies most of the shot, is seen speaking through his office window with his employees who remain totally or partially unseen. The workers are framed so as to appear separated from their boss by vertical posts. The shot focuses on the hands of the workers who punch in their time cards under Mao’s scrutinizing gaze before they deposit them in a bin mounted on the wall. Only the numbers on the cards are visible, the effect suggesting that the individual workers can be reduced to sets of

14

The film is reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), a film on Marxism and a Marxist film, that also makes use of the color red and the gesture of painting. 15 Cyril Neyrat, “Rabah, le patron”, Cahiers du cinema, 638 (October 2008), 20-22.

Verena Andermatt Conley ciphers. In another sequence Mao is watching in front of a large partially visible sign that reads barré, in French, both a division or something crossed out (barré) while a couple of employees circle around on their forklifts loaded with pallets. The movement of the circulating vehicles produces shifting borders that include, exclude and reposition both the boss and his workers, rendering them visible and then invisible behind the ubiquitous towers of the wooden frames that take on an existence of their own. The scene is set against the background of a sound that can be heard as African drums or workers tools. Against the main story line of how to give voice to those who have none, Le Dernier maquis opens questions about yet another symbolic issue, religion, and especially Islam. Ameur-Zaïmeche translates Islam for an ethnic, but also a French audience by staging a collective body of workers who ask questions of each other about the role of the Imam, about the necessity of speaking Arabic, about circumcision and different marital practices. He brings the audience to an understanding of a religion that is too often simply associated with terrorism. The filmmaker touches on a political problem: Mao (whose name is a contradiction in terms) is a capitalist Muslim boss who is clearly a descendent of immigrants. Does he exploit his workers? The latter repeatedly argue that he owes them money. The film debates the issue without giving a clear answer. To make his workers more productive, Mao transforms part of his garage into a mosque. During the first gathering, the North African workers challenge the Imam appointed by Mao and wonder why, according to the Muslim practice, they were not consulted on his choice. They ask for what Balibar in 1997 called “a minimal existential territory” from which they will have the right to speak and to vote. Sitting apart, the blacks in the congregation – perhaps because it is thus suggested they are illegal – are less militant and content with Mao’s choice. Those with papers, in this case the North Africans, are more outspoken. Just as they want to have a vote in choosing their Imam, so do they later think of organizing a union. When they laugh at their own idea, the filmmaker translates both the feeling of an impossibility while, at the same time, opening the very possibility of thinking it. At the end of the film, Mao fires the North African mechanics because he is allegedly losing money in his truck repair business. The mechanics refuse to leave and stage a rebellion, a kind of failed 200

Ameur-Zaïmeche: Translation as Artistic Practice 201 blockade against their boss whom they beat up severely. Their voices and actions challenge the other characters in the film and the spectators, thus translating their frustration for others in the same predicament and, at the same time, inviting those who are on the outside to reflect on a persistent problem they tend to ignore. To paraphrase Jacques Rancière, they request a portion for those who are portionless. Once more, the Sub-Saharan workers in the film refuse to join them. In an interview,16 Mamadou Koïta, one of the workers in the film who is referred to as the chef du village des manoeuvres (“the village chief of the laborers”) explains that those who have no papers but raise families are obliged to accept anything. Using very accented French he also expresses his earlier difficulties when working in construction with Portuguese workers. His feelings give a human face to a problem so often taken up in abstract and reductionist terms by voters and politicians alike. Voicing the frustrations of workers who are often invisible and who have no voice, the film also shows their desire to speak and their difficulty in obtaining the same rights as their French counterparts. By attempting to transform themselves into citizens, they translate their emotions into action even if, as always in Ameur-Zaïmeche, the end is ambiguous. The film encourages those who have no voice to capture speech while revealing to others on the outside the plight and the frustration of those who have no existential territory or space from which to speak. Dernier maquis argues that, to have agency, it is necessary to obtain the right to speak and to vote. It gives dignity to words such as Muslim, immigrant workers, illegal immigrants – categories that are generally dismissed on the basis of reductive and stereotypical thinking. The film also includes a scene in nature that translates another even more precarious moment of peace. It is there that Mao first meets the “Village Chief” and refuses his request for a raise. Shortly afterwards, he and one of his workers go to a canal that is overgrown with vegetation, though the bright green leaves bear traces of red paint, to release a muskrat that had found its way into their garage. The trapped animal has been seen as a symbol of Mao himself.17 As in Wesh Wesh, the scene can be read as an opening. The fast flowing and even 16

Timothée Alazraki, Mamadou Koïta, Chef du village des manoeuvres, Interview, DVD, Montreuil: Sarrazink Productions (Arte Editions), 2009. 17 Eric Loret and Richard Poirot, Une analyse filmique de Dernier maquis, Libé-Labo, Dernier maquis, DVD (Arte Editions), 2008.

Verena Andermatt Conley turbulent waters replace the stagnant atmosphere of the work place dotted with oily puddles. A shot with natural sounds that follows a heron flying from a tree in a deep blue sky replaces those with roaring planes mechanically taking off and landing. If a reprieve exists for Mao and the worker who accompanies him on the boat, it is at best temporary. The scene of escape into nature is followed by a shot in which another plane takes off and roars overhead. In all of his films to date, while engaging in ongoing cultural, linguistic as well as visual translation, Ameur-Zaïmeche plays close attention to montage. If each frame makes visible the characters’ emotions as openly political, so also is the use of vivid colors. After the multicolored doors of the dilapidated housing complexes in Wesh Wesh, the screaming red of the freshly painted pallets and the many black streaks translate the anger of the workers. The intense red immediately translates into a feeling of rebellion. By contrast, the often bleak sky in which planes ceaselessly land and take off shows the presence of a dynamic yet oppressive system. The nature sequence is infused with green that lends the film a moment of respite where the boss and the worker find some temporary calm together. Perhaps even more than color, music especially appeals to the circulation of affects. The two films make extended use of rap and hip-hop with highly politicized lyrics.18 Given the capitalist nature of the music industry, one can take issue with Ameur-Zaïmeche who declares that the introduction of popular music puts his films under the sign of counter-culture because of the irreverent and rebellious lyrics. The music nonetheless touches the nerves of the audience more directly than more disciplined classical tunes with their often hierarchical ordering.19 The use of improvisational jazz at crucial 202

18

The same happens earlier in Wesh Wesh. In Bled Number One, Kamel sits on a slope in nature while a rock guitar is playing on the soundtrack. The latter’s music is in sharp contrast with the indigenous tunes prevalent in the film. 19 In all of his films, Ameur-Zaïmeche makes a conscious and extensive use of music. In addition to rap tunes, there are those already mentioned by John Coltrane and Curtis Mayfield, introduced at crucial junctions in Wesh Wesh. We can also add music by Rodolphe Burger in Bled Number One that is intertwined with and interrupts the narrative. As Cyril Neyrat remarked in his review of Dernier maquis, music extends to movement of objects, such as the last shot when the pallets seem to be moving as if they were part of a ballet. To the pallets we could add the forklifts that are moving about in similar fashion.

Ameur-Zaïmeche: Translation as Artistic Practice 203 moments suggests the brief openings that punctuate the otherwise hermetic social closure. In both films, working on different registers at once, AmeurZaïmeche shows how young people adopt an international dress code and make use of music that easily appeals to all spectators. Yet his films also examine places where cultural and symbolic codes collide. They work on the delicate symbolic issues of gender and sexuality around the family in Wesh Wesh or the many complex religious issues in Le Dernier maquis that necessitate ongoing translation and negotiation. The filmmaker joins others who have seized upon recent openings that make it possible to tell the stories of the descendants of immigrants. The presence of these films will hopefully lead to a change in intelligence and in cultural sensibilities. While taking a strong political stance, Ameur-Zaïmeche more than others, opts for a poetic cinema that translates singular and collective emotions. He is, according to Rancière, both a conteur and a traducteur, a teller of tales and a translator.20 Avoiding the pitfall of an overly intellectualized or reductionist gaze from the outside and refusing to pass easy judgment, Ameur-Zaïmeche uses the filmic medium to raise questions and open spaces from where it will be possible to think and act in a novel way. By claiming the right to focus on his work as an artistic practice, he invents an alternative cinema that is truly one of translation.



20

Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 22.



IN A FREE STATE? TRANSLATION AND THE BASOTHO: FROM EUGENE CASALIS TO ANTJE KROG ALAIN RICARD

Textual and graphic practices are an engagement with Africa; the practice of translation is an act of imposition, reconfiguration, eventually a “desperate act” to understand “the New” in (South) Africa. From Bible translations in African languages, to Antje Krog translating Mandela into Afrikaans, translation is not only a linguistic practice, but also a political gesture.1 In 1975, two thick biographies of Moshoeshoe, an African king, dead for more than a century, were published.2 In both texts, two young French missionaries, Casalis and Arbousset, play an important role. The recent book by Antje Krog surprised me, since almost half the book is dedicated to the work of these two French missionaries and their relationship with Moshoeshoe. Antje Krog does a close reading of Missionary Excursion published in English in Morija and Nairobi.3 I published and annotated the French edition by Arbousset and helped prepare the English edition. Antje Krog never quotes from the French. This is not a central point, but it means that my 1

Antje Krog, Begging to Be Black, Johannesburg: Random House, 2009. Leonard Thompson, Survival in Two Worlds: Moshoeshoe of Lesotho (1786-1870), Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975; Peter Sanders, Moshoeshoe, Chief of the Sotho, London: Heinemann, 1975. 3 Thomas Arbousset, Missionary Excursion into the Blue Mountains, trans. Albert Brutsch and David Ambrose, Morija and Nairobi: Morija Achives/CREDU, 1991; Thomas Arbousset, Excursion missionnaire dans les Montagnes bleues suivie de la Notice sur les Zoulas, original manuscript edited and introduced by Alain Ricard, 2000. See also David Ambrose, “A Tentative History of Lesotho Palaeontology”, Journal of Research, Occasional Publication, 1 (1991), Roma: National University of Lesotho; David Ambrose, Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (1830-1929), Lesotho Annotated Bibliography, section 41, House 9 Publications, Roma: National University of Lesotho, 2009. 2

Alain Ricard hermeneutic angle will be a little different from hers, even though I share her conclusions. We reached the same points taking different routes. The relation between Moshoeshoe, Casalis, and Arbousset was built on a conversational interaction which was a constant translation; it was the beginning of a long story of translation which eventually disappeared under the veil of apartheid and became difficult to understand. I hope to show the continuity between this excentric and pioneering work of the Romantic era and the present efforts towards a new understanding of the place of translation, a new and romantic understanding. To establish this continuity I will focus on the work of a line of missionary translators who were maverick dissidents. I have been able to access part of their archives. The work of Tim Couzens4 on the Morija Mission has also given a new light to the contradictions and impasses of the Mission work while apartheid was being implemented. David-Frederic Ellenberger, his son Victor, and Edouard Jacottet, proud successors of Casalis and Arbousset, all focused their work on translation: Antje Krog has found these early pioneers and discusses their relevance. I want to supply more arguments to her account of her own struggle in the Free State, in the former Orange Free State, to acknowledge the Sotho heritage and presence, in a place where Boer history frantically tried to obliterate it.5 David-Frederic Ellenberger reorganized the Printing works of the Mission. Victor, the last born of his ten surviving children, was a writer and a translator. A colleague and contemporary of DavidFrederic, Edouard Jacottet was also a key missionary figure, especially in the collection and publishing of oral lore. Finally Paul, born in 1919 near Paris, collected all the material gathered and printed by his grandfather David-Frederic, which had been translated by his father Victor, in order to have it published and commented. Paul not only compiled: he organized the archives and thanks to him, we can now discuss this entire body of work. 206



4

Tim Couzens, Murder at Morija, Johannesburg: Random House, 2003. See also Tim Couzens, The New African African: A Study of the Life and Works of H.I.E. Dhlomo, Johannesburg: Raven Press, 1985. 5 Caroline Abela, “Les mises en scène du passé et leurs réécritures: les représentations luséales et monumentales des Basotho das l’Etat libre (Afrique du Sud et au Lesotho)”, doctoral dissertation, Université de Bordeaux 2, 2004.

In a Free State? Translation and the Basotho 207 I should also add that part of Antje Krog’s book, Begging to Be Black, was written while she was in residence in Berlin. She includes a Berlin diary in it: she was often in relation with Humboldt University and the Humboldtian ideal of translation informs her project. Eugène Casalis (1812-1891); Thomas Arbousset (1810-1877) Antje Krog’s reading of Casalis and Arbousset, full of empathy and uncommonly perceptive, would be even more convincing had she realized that Arbousset and Casalis were great translators: part of their “democratic ethos” was precisely this commitment to translation. She probably missed this point, because Casalis and Arbousset translated from Sesotho into French and the translation into English of the latter was bad as David Rycroft has shown. Moreover, and strangely enough, Casalis translated himself into English (1861), but did not say so; he thus made the English text appear to be an original text, whereas a French version had been published in Paris earlier (1859).6 This disguise might have been an essential part of his well meaning plot to convince the British Empire to accept Lesotho as a protectorate, and it worked. Nothing could signify more clearly the acute consciousness he had that his translation was a political gesture. But what do we mean by translation? Moffat for instance translated the Bible into Setswana. What, then, is so different in Arbousset and Casalis? The answer is simple: our missionaries practised a dialogic translation. They translated into Sesotho, but also translated from Sesotho. And this was extremely rare in the nineteenth century and even later. A central point in my argument is that a working and aesthetic interest in the textual productions of other non-western people is a first and gigantic step towards cultural relativism and towards a recognition of other people’s political rights. In this sense the interest shown towards the poetry of the Basotho and the Zulu is an extraordinarily new way of looking at other peoples.

6

Eugène Casalis, Les Bassoutos, ou vingt-trois années d'études et d’observations au Sud de l’Afrique, Paris: Société des Missions Evangéliques, 1859 (English edition 1861). See also David Rycroft, “An 1842 Version of Dingana’s Eulogies”, African Studies, XLIII/2 (1984), 249-274; David Rycroft and A.B. Ngcobo, The Praises of Dingana: Izibongo ZikaDingana, Durban: Killy Campbell/ University of Natal Press, 1988.

Alain Ricard During the nineteenth century very few texts from Southern Africa were published with laudatory comments. A.C. Jordan quotes Rev. Dorne about the Zulu having no poetry; we can also quote derogatory comments by Depelchin and Croonenberg about Ndebele songs.7 Verbal production and textual productivity was not acknowledged in the cultural patrimony of southern Bantu peoples. John Colenso translated the Bible into Zulu and made remarkable comments about the need to decentre interpretations. Nowhere did I find references to the textual production of the Zulu themselves. The same is true for the Xhosa: we have to wait for Mqayi and the beginning of the twentieth century to have annotated editions as well as translations of verbal texts from the Cape Nguni (the Xhosa). Casalis is the author of a grammar and an essay of the poetry of the Basotho, published in Paris in 1841.8 Arbousset wrote, with a colleague, an account of his travel from the Cape (Relation d'un voyage d’exploration) published in French in 1842 and translated into English in 1846 (Narrative of an Exploratory Tour).9 It includes a chapter on the Zulas and gives a long – more than 400 verses – French translation of Dingan praises including 27 lines of the original Zulu text. The English translation of the praise poem of Dingan was often reprinted, and the original edition in French soon forgotten, without Arbousset being given the credit for his field work, probably undertaken in 1838 in northern Lesotho. David Rycroft felt the need in 1984 to study the differences between the French and English edition and concluded that Arbousset’s work was misrepresented. Whereas the poem is presented in French as a “pièce en prose cadencée” it becomes an “ode in metrical verses”, which is quite the opposite. While the French original can be read as slam poetry, the English rendition has the stale flavor of a church hymn. One of the main interests of Arbousset’s book is the place given to poetry and to translations: it is a treasure of comments on literature and poetry among the San, the Basotho and the Zulu, the mark of an erudite and open mind. The perspective on the “other” is certainly 208

7

Alain Ricard, Introduction to Arbousset, Excursion missionnaire dans les Montagnes bleues suivie de la Notice sur les Zoulas, 2000. 8 Eugène Casalis, Etudes sur la langue séchuana, Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1841. 9 Thomas Arbousset and François Daumas, Relation d’un voyage d’exploration au Nord-Est de la Colonie du Cap de bonne espérance, Paris: Comité de la Société des Missions évangéliques de Paris chez les peuples non chrétiens, 1842 (English edition by Arthus Bertrand, Capetown, 1846).

In a Free State? Translation and the Basotho 209 totally in line with what at the same time Wilhelm von Humboldt was theorizing: the mind of the Basotho lay in their texts and in their poetry; this original linguistic and aesthetic construction was also worthy of translation, precisely because it was original. The “African”, the “Bantu” mind was not locked in its specificity. We can appreciate the beauties of this poetry in the same way that the Basotho can enjoy the psalms. What is even more surprising is that these translations are made for the sake of poetry, and Arbousset’s comments refer to aesthetic criteria. His published translations of the praises of Dingan should, by itself, secure Arbousset a place in the histories of literature. Arbousset’s Excursion missionnaire, written in 1840, remained in manuscript form until it was published in English (Missionary Excursion) in 1991, before being published in the original French ten years later. Krog quotes the speeches made by Moshoeshoe and notices how Arbousset was impressed by the rhetorical skills of the king. Casalis, also a member of the first group of missionaries who arrived in 1833, apart from his grammar of the Sotho language, Etudes sur la langue sechuana (1841),10 is the author of a comprehensive book on the Basotho, entitled The Basutos, published in French in 1859, translated into English in 1861 and reprinted in 1992.11 This book is probably one of the first comprehensive monographs on an African people based on fieldwork. The Etudes (1841) is an original book with more than half of its contents dedicated to the literature of the Basotho, and to the study of seven praise poems, including praises of Moshoeshoe. Rycroft shows the pertinence of a work a century and half old. The quality of the translation, the apostrophies, the paratactical construction, the choice of the present tense, the refusal to rhyme, in short, to normalize as a function of presuppositions of what poetry should be, demonstrates a sensitivity to the oral performance. This kind of fieldwork is rare, even unique in southern Africa of the nineteenth century. The translations read well, precisely because the texts were collected in the field and translated by the scholars themselves. At that time the concept of ethnographic fieldwork did not

10

Eugène Casalis, Etudes sur la langue séchuana, Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1841. Eugène Casalis, Les Bassoutos, ou vingt-trois années d’études et d’observations au Sud de l’Afrique, Paris: Société des Missions Evangéliques, 1859 (English edition, 1861). 11

Alain Ricard exist, but was invented by the two young missionaries. David Coplan in his book, In the Time of Cannibals quotes Casalis’ remarkable piece on the Sotho praise poet, still a relevant description of a field performance: 210

Le héros de la pièce en est presque toujours l'auteur. De retour des combats il se purifie à la rivière voisine, puis il va déposer religieusement au fond de sa hutte sa lance et son bouclier. Ses amis l'entourent et lui demandent le récit de ses exploits. Il les raconte avec emphase; la chaleur du sentiment l'entraîne, son expression devient poétique. De jeunes mémoires s'emparent des morceaux les plus frappants; on les répète à l'auteur enchanté, qui les retravaille et les lie ensemble dans ses longues heures de loisir; au bout de deux ou trois lunes ses enfants savent parfaitement le toko, qui sera désormais déclamé aux fêtes solemnelles de la tribu ....12 The hero of the piece is nearly always the author. Upon returning from combat he purifies himself in a nearby river, then he goes to put down, religiously, in the depth of his dwelling, his lance and his shield. His friends surround him and demand of him the recitation of his exploits. He recounts them with emphasis; the heat of sentiment leading him on, his expression becomes poetic. The memory of the young takes hold of the most striking parts; they are repeated to the delighted author, who ponders over them, and connects them in his mind during leisure hours; at the end of two or three months his children know the praises perfectly, which are thereafter declaimed at the solemn celebrations of the tribe.13

If this is not the founding text – it was published in 1841 – of performance anthropology in Africa, what else is? What Casalis has grasped is the essential feature of poetry: the performance of the poem is the poem (“l’exécution du poème est le poème”, Paul Valéry14). From the beginning, a relation of dialogic interaction, based on translation, but also on admiration and interest for an aesthetic of the performance was established. This was a very sound base on which to continue a relationship of cultural exchange. The flourishing of Sotho

12

Casalis, Etudes, 53. David Coplan, In the Time of Cannibals, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, 48. 14 Paul Valery, Première leçon du cours de poétique, Variétés V, Paris: Gallimard, 1944, 306. 13

In a Free State? Translation and the Basotho 211 literature later was to draw on the intellectual and poetic resources brought to light by the work of the first missionaries. In a sense what other translators did was to continue this dialogical relationship. It could continue because it was not a one-way affair, but a two-way exchange. Later on, the Basotho would write books and the Morija missionaries would translate. The process of translation could not continue under the pressures of apartheid. Translations could continue, but in Europe, in manuscripts. Stories of cannibals could be printed and nobody knew what they meant until suddenly in the Nineties (c. 1994), new figures of power appeared on the scene. No longer a representative of the politics of the belly, the protective “Morena”, the chief, becomes one who makes deals and looks for peace. Moshoeshoe became the model for Mandela – this obscure story became clear: it was a saga of salvation. David-Frederic Ellenberger (1835-1920); Edouard Jacottet (18581920) David-Frederic Ellenberger arrived in Lesotho in 1861, a few years after Casalis and Arbousset had left. Those pioneers had to go to Cape Town to print their translations and their pamphlets; the new missionary had been trained in Lausanne as a printer and created the Morija printing works, a publishing house which still exists and is probably one of the oldest still in operation in southern Africa. DavidFrederic Ellenberger was a different kind of translator: he used oral tradition, which he collected from the Basotho to create a historical narrative, in French, which could challenge the dominant narratives of White expansion being constructed by the Apartheid Volkekunde in the making. His work flew in the face of the “commonly held scholarly view” which maintained that the Bantu speaking people had only begun crossing the Zambezi River during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: No other writer at that time made such carefully supported and for that day, such radical statements .... Archaeology has since proven the correctness of Ellenberger claims concerning the antiquity of Sotho settlements in Southern Africa.15

15

Stephen Gill, Introductory essay, History of the Basuto, Morija: Morija Museum and Archives, 1992, 29.

Alain Ricard All his archives, collected in French, were edited and translated into English by his son-in-law and became the History of the Basuto. Stephen Gill, a historian and present head of the Morija Archives, stresses the originality of the work, and his opposition to the dominant African historiography of the time. That oral tradition could be used to establish genealogies, and to confirm claims of long standing presence in Southern Africa, was a revolutionary statement. The lines of descent went back to the fourteenth century, long before the Boers had come. Stephen Gill has written a most complete introduction to the new edition of the History of the Basuto. He explains the methods of David-Frederic Ellenberger, interrogating all the Basotho with whom he came into contact: 212

When someone would arrive to become a Christian, he would say: no! – So what should I do ? Well, I shall tell you all I know about the origins of God under one condition: That you tell me first all you know about your father, your grandfathers, your forefathers as far back as you can go ....16

Only one volume of the History of the Basuto was published: from the origins to 1834. David-Frederic Ellenberger did not write the book himself, but left the task to his son-in-law, J.C. Macgregor. The language to promote missionary work should be English. The intended reader of the scientific work of the Mission was now in South Africa or in Britain, no longer in France or in Switzerland. Being part of the British Administration, Macgregor could also give a welcome stamp of legitimacy to this History of the Basuto. Like Casalis half a century earlier, the documents were presented as original documents in English: the history had been compiled by David-Frederic Ellenberger and written, not translated, by J.C. Macgregor. The book was then translated by David-Frederic Ellenberger into Sesotho. Volume One of the Histori ea Basotho, released during 1917, covered the first period of the English edition. The second volume covering the second period of the English edition was never published. The unpublished Volume Two covers the period of the Lifakane and contains substantial additional information as well as corrections to the material which appeared in English. The book, as it 16

Ibid., 19.

In a Free State? Translation and the Basotho 213 is now, is a well-balanced account from the “origins of the Basuto” to Moshesh (Moshoeshoe) longing for peace and the arrival of the first missionaries. It is a history because of its method, as non-conventional as it may have been. Poems were used as historical sources. The Sotho texts were published in the newspaper Leselinyana between 1919 and 1921, and studied in two volumes of the authoritative collection of the Oxford Library of African Literature. These collections are the most extensive historical corpus on a Bantu-speaking people of the beginning of the twentieth century, earlier than the Zulu work of James Stuart. I am not qualified to discuss the book’s historical contribution, which Stephen Gill has already done very well. I just want to stress an aspect of the book which has interested me from the start, and which is what I call the cannibal chapter.17 Reading the History of the Basuto, I was struck by the mythical quality of these stories and by their contribution to the narrative attraction of the book. It is quite obvious that cannibal stories add an element of drama to a book intended to be read outside of Africa. These young men are facing terrible trials. At the same time this element is mitigated by humor. The story of the old cannibal wishing to eat white people first – because they eat sugar and other goodies – is a very funny piece, that David-Frederic Ellenberger narrates, “tongue in cheek”. This contributes to the narrative interest. But there is more and I am not sure that this other dimension has been explored. It is the story of Peete, a wonderful example of Moshoeshoe cleverness. The incorporation of loose groups into the body of the Sotho polity is also a very theological story: cannibals take part in a national communion since they become the grave of the grandfather they have eaten. This ritual of pardon has a mystical dimension. Cannibal stories create the myth of the good king – the life giver – and provide the monsters necessary to make a good story. The story of Peete is the story of Cannibal redemption within the body of the Sotho nation. Antje Krog quotes this story as a wonderful example of Moshoeshoe’s logic: “Emphasizing the cannibal’s digestive interconnectedness to Peete and through the grandfather, to himself as king, he opened up the possibility of change.”18 I am not sure that Antje Krog’s naturalistic reading of the episode is the only one appropriate and I believe that 17 18

Ibid., 217-26. Krog, Begging to Be Black, 26.

Alain Ricard our missionaries had certainly a theological, that is, anthropological interpretation of that “digestive interconnectedness”. David-Frederic Ellenberger wanted to be remembered as a genealogist, not as a writer. His young contemporary in mission work, Edouard Jacottet, had the same outlook: he was trained as a linguist, knew the work of Carl Meinhof, and focused his work on translations of folklore. His French edition of Sotho tales, published in 1895, is a model of methodological care and intellectual probity. It is in the milieu of the Morija Mission, described by Tim Couzens in Murder at Morija, in an intellectual atmosphere marked by Ellenberger and Jacottet that Thomas Mofolo grew to become the first African language novelist. His book Moeti oa Bochabela,19 published first as a serial and then as a book, is the first African language novel. Jacottet, author of a book on Sotho folktales, collected in the field and not rewritten by well-meaning editors, reflected on the methodology of folklore research and this was very rare at the time. The folktale alone is not enough: one must ask why it attracts, how it is “fabricated”, and this was what Jacottet did at the end of the nineteenth century and which has been done only too infrequently since: 214

Voici en quelques mots la méthode que j’ai suivie: je me faisais raconter par des Bassoutos, de vieilles gens surtout leurs contes populaires (nommés par eux ditsomo); je les écrivais mot à mot sous la dictée, les corrigeant ensuite soit avec eux, soit avec d’autres indigènes. Le maître d’école de ma station Salomon Tau, m'a été tout particulièrement utile pour cela. De cette façon je suis arrivé à posséder un texte sûr et correct. J’aurais désiré pouvoir donner à la fois le texte sessouto des contes et la traduction en regard, comme l'évêque anglican Callaway l’a fait dans son beau volume Nursery Tales of the Zulus. Comme le prix du livre en eût été de beaucoup augmenté, et que l’entreprise eût présenté de grandes difficultés, j’ai dû y renoncer quoique à contre coeur. J’ai tenu cependant, pour des raisons que tous les folkloristes comprendront, à donner du texte sessouto une traduction aussi littérale que possible. Le style sans doute en a souffert, mais la fidélité de ma transcription n’en est que plus grande. C’est ainsi seulement que le

19

Thomas Mofolo, Moeti Oa Bochabela, Morija Sesuto Book Depot, 1907, trans. Victor and Paul Ellenberger, L’homme qui marchait vers le soleil levant, Bordeaux: Confluences, 2003; English translation, Traveller to the East, Johannesburg: Penguin, 2007.

In a Free State? Translation and the Basotho

215

lecteur français peut avoir quelque idée de la manière de raconter des indigènes.20

Jacottet gave us an excellent analysis of the procedures of textualization and condensed in his text all the philological acquisitions of a textuality aware of its procedures, by dividing the stages of collection, transcription, verification, and publishing. He himself was also the transcriptor (transcriber), the translator and the editor. These principles are still pertinent and were explained by a scholar who possessed a critical sense sharpened by collecting in a situation of conflictual dialogue, as was the case in South Africa. What he was doing about stories was more difficult to do with poems. The question of translation, if we deal with oral texts, is naturally linked to the question of transcription and with the materialities of communication. Praise poems disconcert: most of those who heard these chants found them devoid of poetry. Their collection is not easy in a world without tape recorders. The imbongi declaims at breakneck speed: asking him to repeat makes him lose momentum. Transcription is a complex procedure, rarely undertaken with method for the Bantu peoples of the south (Zulu and Basotho in particular). The work of Casalis and of Arbousset, poorly understood and neglected, stands unrivaled. Perhaps an exception is the collection of James Stuart, which required enormous editing but is certainly even today the principal corpus of Zulu poetry. James Stuart, born in 1868 in Pietermaritzburg, was a judge in Natal during the greater part of his life. He encouraged Zulu imbongi to visit, spent many evenings on his

20 Edouard Jacottet, Contes populaires des Basotho, Paris: Leroux, 1895, VI-VI: “In short, here is the method I followed: I asked the old Bassouto people to recite their popular tales (called ditsomo); I wrote down what they said word for word, correcting the text afterwards either with the storyteller or with other natives. The schoolmaster of my station Salomon Tau, was especially helpful. In this way I was able to obtain a faithful and correct text. I would have liked to give both the Sessouto text and the translation as the Anglican bishop Callaway did in his lovely volume Nursery Tales of the Zulus. Because the price of the book would have been too high and because of technical difficulties, I had to give up the idea. For reasons that all folklorists will understand, I tried to give the most literal translation possible of the Sotho text. The style probably suffered, but the faithfulness of my transcription is all the greater. It is only in this way that the French reader can obtain some idea of how the natives tell tales” (my translation).

Alain Ricard veranda and collected numerous izibongo. He collected 278 poems, translated by Daniel Malcolm many years later. In 1922, Stuart left for Great Britain, where he recorded himself with a gramophone, reciting the texts he had collected. He wanted to give future hearers the sense of the imbongi’s delivery and produced a sound impression of these performances, far from the canons of our poetic diction but paradoxically so close to what we call today “rap”. Trevor Cope produced a volume of transcriptions, with translations and annotations based on a small part of Stuart’s collection translated by Malcolm. The praises of Chaka, collected more than eighty years after their first declamations, are the longest Zulu poem in this unique volume of Zulu poetry.21 They constitute a catalog – the term of poetry catalog is sometimes used to designate this kind of ode – of war exploits of their hero, declaimed in concise and concrete language, of great evocative strength. Their survival was not evident: Dingan as well as Mpande, accomplices in the murder of Chaka, could censor laudatory recitation of the famous predecessor. Yet the founder of the Zulu kingdom left a profound mark on the verbal art of his people. In his master’s thesis, An Analytical Survey of Zulu Poetry (1962) Mazizi Kunene defines three moments of Zulu poetry and he makes Chaka’s period the central moment. He shows the amplitude of the verse which becomes the stanza of Chaka, longer in its developments, more violent in images and in lexical choice. Birds devour, combat is everywhere. Other than the fieldwork of our two missionaries, Stuart’s gramophone recordings of Zulu eulogies (praise poems) is the only one to guarantee a kind of authenticity. Although praise poems to Chaka were no longer recited after his death, they remained alive as a basis for the eulogies of his successors. Two or three generations after Chaka’s death, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was possible to meet former soldiers or chiefs capable of remembering Chaka praise songs. It is thus that Stuart’s work recalls historical Zulu memory. The epistemological consciousness of Jacottet was expressed at a time of harsh political pressures. The story of the Mission, where both Jacottet and Ellenberger had been working, is in the forefront in the book of Tim Couzens (Murder at Morija). A historian of South 216



21 Izibongo, Zulu Praise-Poems, collected by James Stuart, trans. Daniel Malcolm, edited with introductions and annotations by Trevor Cope, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968, 88-117.

In a Free State? Translation and the Basotho 217 African literature, Tim Couzens has published texts of black writers like Plaatje and Dhlomo and thus contributed to rewriting the history of literature in South Africa. In his last book, he tells of the death of Edouard Jacottet, director of the school of theology, but also one of the great linguists of his day, poisoned – most probably by his daughter – in 1920. The story of this drama helps to understand the relations between the beginnings of apartheid, the activities of publishing and translation supervised by Jacottet and some of the impasses encountered by the Mission, in a universe that was surrounded by the fences of apartheid. This science of the texts, this careful ethnography, was by its very anteriority excluded from the debates of the end of that century on the constitution of anthropology as scientific discourse. In addition, it suffered from the discredit of scientific work produced in a missionary context. Thus the missionaries’ work did not benefit from the general effect of scientific decontextualization and the passage to universality validated by scientific institutions which occurred at the moment of the invention of social sciences. In a way, missionary marginality was a protection against unscrupulous use of their scientific knowledge of Africa to validate racism as well as the colonial project. Casalis and Jacottet were ideal candidates for the establishment of ethnological and linguistic studies in Africa, but they remained associated with an institution (the Christian mission) that the Third Republic – colonial and secular – had reasons to ignore. Lesotho was not part of the French colonial empire and the Christian mission was not the civilizing mission of the French Third Republic. Studies on Africa were carried out in South Africa, and the recognition of the outside world could have led to new legitimacy. But a sort of intellectual boycott relegated them to indifference. Bantu studies suffered from Bantu education being implemented by the apartheid regime. In addition, the crisis of the Morija mission was not just an epiphenomenon but a tragedy of historic dimension. To translate is to offer hospitality.22 A few original pioneers fought against an enclosed world that was to forbid translation up to the present: a single hand is enough to count the translations of non-oral South African texts (into languages other than English or Afrikaans). 22

Paul Ricoeur, Sur la traduction, Paris, Bayard, 2004.

Alain Ricard To translate was to fight against apartheid, even if this was not explicitly expressed. 218

Victor Ellenberger (1879-1972); Paul Ellenberger (1919- ) Victor Ellenberger was born in the cave house, in Masitisi, in 1879. He died in 1972 in France, where he had retired after being in charge of a Parish near Paris, from 1935 until 1947. He served for 32 years in Africa (1903-1917 in Barotseland; 1917-1934 in Basutoland-Lesotho). He had been sent to France for his secondary school and won several prizes for academic excellence as a student. He seems not to have had much contact with Switzerland although his father, David, was from Switzerland. Victor became French in 1929. In 1939 he convinced Gallimard, the most prestigious French publisher to issue his translation of Chaka. This book was the third novel by Mofolo and it had been published in Lesotho in 1925. The book was eventually published in May 1940. Not only was it a bad time, but right after the publication and the invasion of France by the Nazis, Gallimard issued a publicity leaflet which could be considered a deliberate provocation of the Nazis – Hitler was likened to Chaka: Un aventurier famélique, avide, sans scrupules, arrive, par son habileté et avec le concours de puissances occultes, à conquérir le pouvoir suprême. Identifiant son ambition avec la destinée de sa nation, il la réorganise sous une discipline de fer, institue le service militaire obligatoire, tourne toutes les activités du pays en vue de la guerre, puis, grâce à une tactique audacieuse, subjugue les peuples voisins, arrive de proche en proche à jeter des millions d’hommes dans un carnage indescriptible, cependant qu’ivre de sang il massacre même ses amis et ses bienfaiteurs, pour finir lui-même assassiné par ses proches, laissant sa nation épuisée et bientôt asservie par l’étranger. Pour éviter toute confusion, précisions que ces événements se passaient il y a un peu plus d’un siècle chez les païens sauvages de l’Afrique Australe, et que ce tyran sanguinaire se nommait Chaka, roi des Zoulous.23

23

“A hungry adventurer, greedy, unscrupulous, succeeds through his cleverness and with the help of dark powers in conquering supreme power. Identifying his ambition with his nation’s destiny, he reorganizes the state with iron discipline, institutes obligatory military service, turns all activities towards war, then, thanks to audacious tactics, subjugates neighboring peoples, succeeds step by step, pushing millions into unspeakable carnage, while, drunk with blood, massacres even his friends and benefactors. He himself is assassinated by his closest collaborators, leaving his nation

In a Free State? Translation and the Basotho 219 As could be expected, the book was taken off the shelves and the translation disappeared after that. It had however a career in French, was read by Léopold S. Senghor, and reissued several times with an original preface by J.M.G. Le Clézio. One important point, seldom mentioned, is that Victor Ellenberger was an excellent writer in French: his prose is very appealing by its precision and elegance. He also knew very well the Sotho environment and language, and thus in French the book has a very original quality. Few missionaries achieved his quality of writing, few writers knew a non-western culture with that degree of intimate familiarity. It is probably not by accident that the editorial manager of Gallimard at that time, Jean Paulhan was a strong defender of Victor Ellenberger’s work. Himself from a protestant family, he had lived in Madagascar and published translations of Malagasy poetry, which are still in print. Back in France, in charge of a parish, Victor Ellenberger continued his labors of translation, as the list below shows. But he was not that lucky with Gallimard who refused to publish his second translation. The French translation of Chaka includes a praise poem, written by Mofolo, in Zulu, while the book is in Sesotho. The new English translation by Daniel Kunene (1980) explains this bizarre intertextuality. All the books Victor Ellenberger translated had been published by the Mission press. What Arbousset and Casalis had started by reducing the Sotho language to writing, what his father, DavidFrederic Ellenberger and Mabille had done by creating a press and a paper, Victor Ellenberger was bringing to Europe. Apart from a major writer such as Mofolo, he also translated three books by James Machobane a relatively recent writer who had a distinguished career as an educator and agricultural innovator in Lesotho. He also chose two books by Segoete, who, according to Tim Couzens, was the “first major influence on Mofolo. His influence on Mofolo was considerable: he opened his eyes to a wider world, he instilled in him religious doctrine and he almost certainly introduced him to the idea of literary form in writing.”24 This is unique for an African language translated into French, and probably into any European language for that matter: how many exhausted and soon to be enslaved by foreigners. To avoid all confusion, let us specify that these events occurred more than a century ago in Southern Africa and that this bloodthirsty tyrant is named Chaka, king of the Zulu” (my translation). 24 Tim Couzens, Murder at Morija, Johannesburg: Random House, 2003, 290.

Alain Ricard fiction books – novels – from Zulu or even Kiswahili have been directly translated into English? It is rarely understood that a written literary tradition exists in these languages. For instance, Chaka has often been considered an oral text, and included several times in anthologies of oral literatures. It was even included in an Anthology of Anglophone literature in French. The work of Victor Ellenberger was completely obliterated. Why have these misunderstandings occurred so frequently? Not because of a malignant desire to counter missionary influence on Sotho culture. It was simply because such a profound contact with an African language, such original works had no place in the mental and political representation of Africa that prevailed in France. Victor Ellenberger, by his translations, was also a kind of a dissenter: he was showing that there could exist a literature in an African language, a written, modern literature and that the novel could give a form to some of the political and ethical dilemmas of Sotho society. His father had proven that history could be reconstructed from oral stories; he sort to prove that African languages could produce literary masterpieces: it takes time to adjust to these facts. Victor Ellenberger spent his retirement working and translating. He contributed a book on Lesotho for the hundredth anniversary of the mission, Un siècle de mission au Lesotho (Paris, 1933). His life had been devoted to the knowledge of Lesotho and especially to the collection of cave paintings which he copied systematically in the Twenties with the help of his son Paul. He organized an exhibition of his drawings at the Musée de l’Homme in 1950-51, along with commentaries by Professor Breuil from the College de France, one of the foremost prehistorians of his time. He also published a book on the Bushmen, La fin tragique des Bushmen (1953), which should be reissued. What is striking in Victor Ellenberger’s career is the continuation of the work of his father: what the father transcribed, the son translated. His father was responsible for the creation of a press, writers were born and Victor Ellenberger wanted the world to know. His brother was teaching Bantu languages and he was translating a Bantu language into French, thus proving practically the productive capacities of the language. He did not move to England and did not stay in South Africa. He was a French writer and a French translator, but the French did not listen to this man born in Africa as a Swiss citizen. What he was saying was so strange and unusual that he was 220

In a Free State? Translation and the Basotho 221 cast aside: there is never any bitterness in his writings, he had less mundane pursuits: he was not an “homme de lettres”. Transcribe, translate, edit and publish: each generation had its own task but they were all collapsed into a grand narrative of the productive encounter between the Paris mission and Moshoeshoe. The missionaries’ work remained peripheral to both Switzerland and France. David-Frederic Ellenberger was Swiss, Victor Ellenberger became French, Paul Ellenberger was French, but found himself in Switzerland during the war. They exemplify a new category of missionaries, multilingual, European, cosmopolitan, having a loyalty to Christianity and not to a regional or national Church. Jean François Zorn writes excellently that the missionary “represents a new type of envoy, placed beyond national and Church borders, and thus prefiguring, a century and a half earlier, the United Europe of nations and churches”.25 What they were doing was a challenge to the political order of the time. They were dissenters, quiet dissenters. Circumstances placed these missionaries, and especially the Ellenberger family, ahead of their times: they were not identified with one colonial nation, nor with the British Empire. They remained interstitial men: this was a good context to produce historical and anthropological work of value. It is perhaps not an accident if Victor Ellenberger’s brother, Henri, produced a highly acclaimed book on the Discovery of the Unconscious, after an international career, which he ended in Montréal. He could look into the psyche, without being obfuscated by national prejudices. I should also add that anthropology, as a discipline, was created in France by one of their colleagues from the Paris Mission, Maurice Leenhardt. He was a missionary, and this was not a handicap for a true relationship with other people. His interest in them was clear and that was a good basis for a true dialogue. Peripheral and interstitial people have a future, but they need patience. Antje Krog in her essay on translation has this comment on Mandela’s autobiography: “The convert writes back.”26 Mofolo is a good example of such a convert and he should be party to a debate where his works should be read and discussed, especially in the Free State. But they are in Sesotho. They have been translated: in 25

Jean François Zorn, Le grand siècle d’une mission protestante, Paris: Karthala/Les Bergers et les Mages, 1993, 515. 26 Antje Krog, A Change of Tongues, Johannesburg: Random House, 2003, 272.

Alain Ricard Afrikaans, twice in English, and very well in French thanks to Victor and Paul Ellenberger. Moeti oa Bochabela was unfortunately reissued in a very poor translation by Penguin recently. The debate on translation and on the democratic ethos of discussion will take on other dimensions if we invite Mofolo and Plaatje, all these converts who were writers, and who campaigned in their own way and with their own agenda against what was to become apartheid. It would be a great mistake to forget their own voices in the debate: they knew the example of Mosheshoe and they did not have to wait for the recognition of his foresight in the nineteenth century. They understood what was obscure to many and what Antje Krog calls “interconnectedness”. As Jürgen Habermas expressed in a very cogent and powerful argument, in relation to Western Europe: the message of Christianity has a right to be heard in a democratic society, such as today’s South Africa.27 Recognition of this would help South African intellectuals come to terms with the legacy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and that of Christianity, also understood as a conversation between colonial subjects and missionaries. The practice of reciprocal translation was a basic recognition of textuality that is still valid today even though it poses a problem. The colonial way of separating linguistic corpuses (English, Afrikaans and African languages), made worse by the South African attitude which enclosed each textual production in a linguistic void, prevented the recognition of the innovative even revolutionary character of Mofolo’s texts. Those who were the first to read these texts were not fooled but their impact was diluted, forgotten through lack of translations. To invent, as he did, a new African christology28 is not, in the context of the time, only a theological project: it is also a political project. Religious radicalness is a political radicalness. Confronting the beginnings of apartheid with conceptual and narrative communication, relativistic comparisons between groups and languages are the only effective weapons. This was the bitter 222

27

Jürgen Habermas, Entre naturalisme et religion, les défis de la démocratie, Paris, Gallimard, 2008 (translated from Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11 of Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion, Philosophische Aufsätze, Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp, 2005). 28 Isabel Hofmeier, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2004.

In a Free State? Translation and the Basotho 223 experience of Sol Plaatje, not completely that of Mofolo, integrated in a different way in colonial society. Such is indeed the stake of these re-readings of the first South African intellectuals. Published translations from Sesotho (in chronological order) Thomas Mofolo, Moeti Oa Bochabela, 1908, trans. Victor and Paul Ellenberger, L’homme qui marchait vers le soleil levant, Bordeaux: Confluences, 2003. Motsamai, E., Mehla ea Madimo, 1912, trans. Victor and Paul Ellenberger, Au temps des cannibales, Bordeaux: Confluences, 1999. Thomas Mofolo, Chaka, Morija, 1925, trans. Victor Ellenberger, Chaka, Paris: Gallimard, 1940. James Machobane, Mahaheng a Matso, 1946, trans. Victor and Paul Ellenberger, 1946, Dans les cavernes sombres, Bordeaux: Confluences, 1999. Manuscripts David-Frederic Ellenberger, Histori ea Basotho, Morija, 1917. ––, Catalogue of the Masitise Archives, ed. B. Lasserre, Roma/Morija: Institute of Southern African studies/ Morija Archives, 1987. History of the Basuto, Ancient and Modern, compiled by DavidFrederic Ellenberger, and written in English by J.C. Macgregor, London, Caxton, 1912. Henry Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry, New York: Basic Books, 1970. Paul Ellenberger, “Note préliminaire sur les pistes et les restes osseux de vertébrés du Basutoland (Afrique du sud)”, Compte rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences, 262 (1955), 444-47. Victor Ellenberger, Sur les hauts plateaux du Lessouto, notes et souvenirs de voyage, Paris: Société des Missions, 1930. ––, Un siècle de mission au Lessouto, Paris: Société des Missions, 1933. ––, La fin tragique des Bushmen, Paris: Amiot-Dumont, 1953. ––, Afrique avec cette peur venue du fond des âges, Paris: Le livre contemporain, 1956.

Alain Ricard Everett Lechesa Segoete, Raphepheng, Bophelo ba Basotho ba khale, Morija, 1913, 57 pp., trans. Victor Ellenberger, corrected by Paul Ellenberger, 79 pp., 1968. Thomas Mofolo, Pitseng, Morija, 1910, 169 pp., trans. R. Leenhardt, corrected by Victor and Paul Ellenberger, prepared for publishing by Limakatso Chaka, 235 pp., 1935-1972. Everett Lechesa Segoete, Monono, ke Moholi ke Mouane (La richesse n’est qu’une brume, une simple vapeur), Morija, 1910, 107 pp., trans. Victor Ellenberger, corrected by Paul Ellenberger, 135 pp., 2000. Z.D. Mangoela, Har’a libatane le linyamatsane (Vie et aventures avec les animaux sauvages), Morija, 1912, 96 pp., trans. Victor Ellenberger, corrected by Paul Ellenberger, 201 pp., 1980. 224



NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Moradewun Adejunmobi is a professor in the African American and African Studies department at the University of California, Davis. She has published articles on intercultural communication, translation, and language issues in African literature and popular culture. She is the author of JJ Rabearivelo, Literature and Lingua Franca in Colonial Madagascar (1996), and Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-Native Languages in West Africa (2004). Her current research focuses on new media, popular culture, and performance in Africa. Paul F. Bandia is Professor of Translation Studies in the Department of French at Concordia University, Montreal. He is an Associate Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is currently a member of the Executive Board of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS) and a member of the Editorial Board of numerous international journals. Professor Bandia has published widely in the fields of translation studies and postcolonial literatures and cultures. He is the author of Translation as Reparation: Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2008), co-editor of Charting the Future of Translation History (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006), Agents of Translation (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009), and Rencontres Est-Ouest/East-West Encounters, TTR (Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction: Études sur le texte et ses transformations), Vol. I (2010). Réda Bensmaïa is Professor Emeritus, Formerly University Professor of French and Francophone literature in the French Studies Department and in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. He has published extensively on French and Francophone literature of the twentieth century as well as on film

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theory and contemporary philosophy. He is the author of The Barthes Effect, Introduction to the Reflective Text (Minnesota, THL, 1987); The Years of Passages (Minnesota, Theory out of Bounds, 1995); Alger ou la Maladie de la Mémoire (L’Harmattan, 1997) and Experimental Nations or The Invention of the Maghreb (Princeton University Press, Spring 2003), an analysis of the way different North African francophone writers dealt with national identity, language and cultural constructions after the independence of their countries. He is also the Editor of Gilles Deleuze (Lendemains, Berlin, 1989) and Recommending Deleuze (Discourse, 1998). He is the main editor of several issues of refereed journals: the most recent in Sites on Literature and Philosophy. Sandra L. Bermann is Cotsen Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton. In addition to numerous scholarly articles, she is author of The Sonnet Over Time: Studies in the Sonnets of Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire; translator of Alessandro Manzoni’s On the Historical Novel; co-editor of Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation (with Michael Wood); and of A Companion to Translation Studies (with Catherine Porter). Her current projects focus on lyric poetry, translation, intersections between twentieth-century historiography and literary theory, and new directions in the field of comparative literature. She recently completed a term as President of the American Comparative Literature Association. Tom Conley who is author of À fleur de page: Voir et lire le texte de la Renaissance (Éditions Classiques Garnier, forthcoming 2014), An Errant Eye (2011) and other studies, teaches in the Departments of Visual and Environmental Studies and Romance Languages and Literature at Harvard University. Verena Andermatt Conley teaches in Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literature at Harvard University. She writes on issues of technology and ecology as well as on transnational dilemmas. Her most recent book is Spatial Ecologies: Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory (University of Liverpool Press, 2012).

Notes on Contributors 227 Lieven D’hulst is a professor of Francophone literature and of Translation Studies at KU Leuven (Belgium). He is a member of the editorial board of Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, co-director of a series “Traductologie” at “Artois Presses Université” (France) and member of the research council of KU Leuven. His actual research topics cover the relations between translation and transfer, theory and practice of translation historiography, migration and plurilingualism. Among his recent publications: Histoire des traductions en langue française: XIXe siècle (co-edited with Y. Chevrel and C. Lombez), Paris: Verdier, 2012; Essais d’histoire de la traduction: Avatars de Janus, Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014. Samia Kassab-Charfi teaches French and Francophone literatures at the University of Tunis. She is the author of La Métaphore dans la poésie de Baudelaire (Tunis, Alif, 1997); Rhétorique de Saint-John Perse (Tunis, 2008); “Et l’une et l’autre face des choses”, La Déconstruction poétique de l’Histoire dans Les Indes et Le Sel noir d’Édouard Glissant (Paris, Honoré Champion, 2011); Patrick Chamoiseau (Paris, Gallimard/Institut français, 2012; translated into English and Japanese); and Mémoires et Imaginaires du Maghreb et de la Caraïbe (edited with M. Bahi; Paris, Honoré Champion, 2013). She is an associate member for the Maghreb of the Académie des Sciences d’Outre-mer, a member of the Conseil Scientifique de l’Association Européenne d’Études Francophones and of the Observatoire Européen du Plurilinguisme and director of the SEFAR collection at Academia L’Harmattan (Belgique/France). Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo is an Associate Professor of French at the University of the West Indies, Mona, and the former Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures (2005-2011). She is specialized in the Teaching of French as a Foreign Language and a researcher in the literature and culture of the French-speaking Caribbean. In 2004 she received the French order of the Palmes académiques (Chevalier). She is a past President of the Haitian Studies Association (2005-2006), and the recipient of the 2013 Principal’s Award for Research for her article “The Haitian ShortStory: An Overview” (Journal of Caribbean Literatures, VI/3).

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Christine Raguet is Professor of Translation Studies at the Department of English, University Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. She is Director of the Centre for Research in Translation and Transcultural Communication (TRACT) and of the journal Palimpsestes. Her research is centred on transcultural problems in translation – stylistic difficulties and questions of reception. She has also translated many works of English literature, including novels and stories by the Caribbean authors Olive Senior, David Chariandy and Lorna Goodison, and was recently awarded the Baudelaire Prize for Translation for her translations of Olive Senior’s Summer Lightning and David Chariandy’s Soucouyant. Alain Ricard is presently directeur de recherche émérite with the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the University of Bordeaux (Les Afriques dans le monde). He has taught at the University in Lomé and from I989 to 1992 he was director of The French institute for research in Africa in Nairobi. His book Littératures d’Afrique noire: des langues aux livres (Paris, 1995) is a general book on African literatures. His other books include L’invention du théâtre (Paris/Lausanne, 1986); Naissance du roman africain, Félix Couchoro (Paris 1987); Wole Soyinka, l’invention démocratique (Paris/Lomé, 1988); West African Popular Theater (with K. Barber and J. Collins, 1997); and Ebrahim Hussein: théâtre swahili et nationalisme tanzanien (Paris, 1998; English edition, 2000). He published the Excursion missionnaire by Thomas Arbousset (Paris 2000). His last book appeared in May 2011: Le Sable de Babel, traduction et apartheid (CNRS editions, 2011). He has also been a literary consultant for the first documentary on Wole Soyinka, poète citoyen (ARTE) and a literary advisor to the Fondation Dapper. Elizabeth (Betty) Wilson, a former head of the Department of French, retired from the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston, Jamaica. She has translated poetry and prose, including the novels Juletane, by Myriam Warner-Vieyra (Heinemann, 1987), Gisèle Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia/Exile according to Julia (CARAF, University of Virginia Press, 2003) and the first collection in English by Yanick Lahens, (Haiti), Aunt Résia and the Spirits and Other Stories (CARAF, 2010).



INDEX

Abela, Caroline, 206 Àbèní, 171-73, 175-79, 183 Académie française, 4, 6 Aeneid, 84 Africa, 6-7, 12-14, 16, 74, 88, 90-91, 122, 170-71, 178, 186, 206, 209-10, 213, 21718, 220-21; North, 190, 192, 194-96, 198-200, 226; South, 212, 215, 217-18, 221-23; Southern, 17, 208209, 211-12, 219; SubSaharan, 13, 74, 189, 198, 201; West, 16, 74, 155, 169-71, 175 African film, 170, 178; languages, 182, 207, 214, 219-20, 222; vernacular, 184-85 Alexis, Jacques Stephen 140, 149; In the Flicker of an Eyelid, 140, 143, 149 Alvarez, Julia, How the Garcia Sisters Lost Their Accent, 129-30 Ameur-Zaïmeche, Rabah, 17, 190, 192-96, 199-203; Le Dernier maquis, 192-94, 198-203; Wesh Wesh, 19295, 197-98, 201-202 Antilles, 19-20, 25, 33, 89, 117-18, 137 Apter, Emily, 64, 74, 83

Arbousset, Thomas, 208-209, 211, 215, 219 Aranjo, Daniel, 91 archipelago, 2-3, 15, 66-70, 72, 80, 85, 113, 116-19 Arnold, James, 19-20 Babel, 77, 80 Bachi, Salim, 24 Balibar, Étienne, 189-91, 195, 200 Basotho, 205-209, 211-12, 215 Baudelaire, Charles, 111, 121; Les Fleurs du Mal, 111, 121 Begag, Azouz, 198 Ben Jelloun, Tahar, 9-10 Berman, Antoine, 38-39, 51, 58, 61; The Trials of the Foreign, 39 Bernabé, Jean, 28, 92, 107 Besson, Luc, 192 Beyala, Calixthe, 9-10 Bible, 27, 177, 205, 207-208 bi-langue, 2, 14, 16 Bollywood, 170, 177 Bonnefoy, Yves, 98, 104, 108, 110, 155 Borges, Jorge Luis, 77, 104 Bouguereau, Maurice, 113 Bourdieu, Pierre, 49, 180 Brathwaite, Kamau,151 Breleur, Ernest, 94

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Breuil, Henri, 220 Britton, Celia, 69, 90 Brodzki, Bella, 73, 81-83 calligramme, 91 Cantet, Laurent, 191-92 Caribbean, 1, 3, 6-7, 12-16, 19-21, 23, 25, 29, 31-32, 69, 73, 121, 128, 130, 132, 140, 143-44, 146, 148, 168; culture, 150; language, 1, 148; literature, 14-16, 20-21, 29, 34,106, 109 carnivalesque, 20 cartography, 15, 113-14, 121 Casalis, Eugène, 205-12, 215, 217, 219 Casanova, Pascale, 63, 79 Certeau, Michel de, 114-16, 195 Césaire, Aimé, 7, 96, 139; Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 96 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 9, 10, 15, 28-30, 32-33, 87, 90-95, 9899, 101-104, 106-108, 109, 148, 154; Biblique des derniers gestes, 87, 89-90, 92, 94-95, 98-110; Écrire en pays dominé, 91, 93, 95, 9899, 101-104, 108, 153; Solibo Magnifique, 30; Texaco, 32-33, 148 Char, René, 119 Charaudeau, Patrick, 55 Charef, Mehdi, 192 Cheng, François, 96-97 Chibane, Malik, 192 Cixous, Hélène, 2, 190

Claudel, Paul, 123-24 Clitandre, Pierre, Cathédrale du mois d’août, 132, 134 Coates, Carrol, 140-41 colonization, 2-3, 12, 69, 116, 131; colonizer, 3-4, 6-7, 158, 161, 168 Commonwealth, 11 Condé, Maryse, 150-51 Confiant, Raphaël, 26-29, 31, 34, 93, 139 Cook, Mercer, 132 Coplan, David, 210 Cordonnier, Jean-Louis, 39, 60 Corzani, Jack, 19-20 cosmopolitanism, 8, 11, 177 Coursil, Jacques, 53 Couzens, Tim, 206, 214, 21617, 219 Creole, 5, 14, 16-17, 22, 2530, 32-34, 44-46, 51-52, 64, 74-75, 87-89, 93, 98-100, 102, 104, 106-107, 109, 12122, 131-32, 134-39, 141-42, 144-47, 149, 155, 174; créolité, 28, 34, 74, 107, 121; creolization, 5, 15, 28, 51, 54, 63-67, 69-70, 73-76, 7881, 85; Haitian Creole, 33, 132, 134, 138, 142, 146; Jamaican Creole, 44, 59, 131-32, 134-35, 137, 139 Cronin, Michael, 83, 85, 87, 168-69, 180 D’haen, Theo, 64, 68, 72 Damas, Léon-Gontran, 7 Damrosch, David, 63-65, 71, 79

Index Dangarembga, TsiTsi, 149 Dante Alighieri, 76 Danticat, Edwige, 140, 148 Dash, Michael, 73, 75, 131-32, 143, 148 De Andrade, Oswald, 39, 40, 41 de Campos, Haroldo, 40, 41, 52 Deleuze, Gilles, 2, 8, 67-68, 72, 96, 107, 116, 122, 124, 149, 156, 199; and Félix Guattari, 2, 67-68, 72, 107, 116, 149, 156 Depelchin, H., and Croonenberg, C.H., 208 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 14, 16, 50, 52-53, 55, 72, 76, 82, 153, 157-66, 190; Le Monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse d’origine, 14, 158, 161-62 dislocation, 17, 45, 99 displacement, 11, 17, 109 Djebar, Assia, 156 Ducrot, Oswald and JeanMichel Schaeffer, 91, 105 Dutch, 8, 128, 131 Echenoz, Jean, 24 Eco, Umberto, 31, 105-106 Edwards, John, 167-68 Ellenberger, David-Frederic, 206, 211-14, 216; Victor, 206, 218-22; Paul, 218, 22122 Éloge de la créolité, 28, 107 essential exoticism, 53

231 exoticism, 37-39, 42-43, 4647, 49, 51-56, 60-61 extranslation, 14, 25, 27, 30, 32 fermetude, 39 film translation, 169-70 Fonkoua, Romuald, 19-20 Ford, Ed and Leonie St JusteJean, 131-32 Foucault, Michel, 72, 93, 113, 124, 140 France, 2, 4-12, 17, 19, 23, 31, 98, 114, 117-18, 141, 149, 158, 189-90, 192-93, 196, 198, 212, 218-21; francophonie, 2-3, 8-9, 11, 14, 20, 22-25, 34, 64, 154-55, 157, 161 Frankétienne, 27, 93-94, 100, 103-104 Gauvin, Lise, 88, 91, 107-108 Gentzler, Edwin, 52 Gilgamesh, 84 Gill, Stephen, 212-13 Glissant, Édouard, 1-3, 8, 12, 14-15, 28-29, 53-54, 63-81, 83-85, 88-91, 96, 102, 106, 111-13, 115-24, 148, 150, 153; Poétique de la relation, 1, 65, 67, 89, 124, 150, 153; Poetics of Relation, 1-3, 8, 12, 14-15, 65-67, 69-70, 7273, 78, 84-85, 111, 115, 124, 150, 153; Tout-monde, 1, 14-15, 69, 88, 106, 11113, 116-17, 119-24; Traité

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du Tout-monde, 88, 111, 117, 119-20, 122-24 globalization, 6-8, 10-11, 69, 78, 168-69, 180 Godard, Jean-Luc, 191, 194, 199 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von, 63, 79 Goncourt, 10 Greimas, Algirdas Julien, 103 Guadeloupe, 16, 128, 131, 139, 141 Guillevic, Eugène, 95, 100, 104 Guyana, 19 Habermas, Jürgen, 222 Hall, Stuart, 177 Harley, Brian, 114-15 Hazaël-Massieux, Christine, 27 heterogeneity, 8, 51, 104, 109 homogenization, 51, 61 Hughes, Langston,132 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 207, 209 hybridity, 8-9, 13, 75 hybridization, 33, 95, 190 hyphen, 15, 87-95, 97-98, 100, 102, 106-109, 111, 121, 136 Iliad, 84 imbongi, 215-16 interculturality, 9; -disciplinarity, 2; -mediality, 13; -semiotic, 13, 21, 29 intranslation, 14, 23, 25, 26, 34 Irizarry, Guillermo, 129-30 island, 1-2, 15, 19, 25, 44-45,

66-68, 72, 113, 116-19, 12122, 125, 128, 132, 141, 150 isolario, 116-17, 120-21 Jacottet, Édouard, 206, 211, 214-17 James, Marlon, 139, 141 James, William, 48 Jenny, Laurent, 95, 103, 108109 Jones, Bridget, 132, 134-36, 150 Joyce, James 77 Kadima prize, 22 kaleidoscopic vision, 46-47, 49 Kassovitz, Mathieu, 192 Kechiche, Abdellatif, 191-92 Kelani, Tunde, 171-77, 181, 183 Khatibi, Abdelkébir, 2, 14, 16, 97, 102, 153-58, 161, 166; Amour bilingue, 102, 166 Kourouma, Ahmadou, 5, 24 Krog, Antje, 205-207, 209, 213, 221-22 Kundera, Milan, 24, 101 Kunene, Mazizi, 216, 219 La Fontaine, Jean de, 26 Laferrière, Dany, 24 Lahens, Yanick, 141-42, 14447, 228 Latour, Bruno, 190 Lebel, Jean-Patrick, 191 Lenoble, Marie-Édith, 100 Lestringant, Frank, 117 le Testu, Guillaume, 118 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 48

Index Levy, Andrea, Small Island, 44-45 Lima, Lezama, 151 littérature mineure, 2, 156; - monde, 11, 17, 25, 69, 189 Lobato, Ramón, 170 Loret, Éric and Richard Poirot, 201

233 Neyrat, Cyril, 199, 202 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 64 Nigeria, 170-81, 183-84, 186 Nollywood, 170 Nora, Pierre, 72 Nornes, Abé Mark, 169, 18081, 184 OIF,

Mabanckou, Alain, 8-9, 23-25 Macgregor, J.C., 212, 223 Maghreb, 13, 154-55, 157; Maghrebian, 154-59, 163 Mahabharata, 84 marginalization, 2, 3, 6, 8 Martinique, 2, 26-27, 93, 102, 139 Massardier-Kenney, Françoise, 127-28 Maximin, Colette, 20 Meschonnic, Henri, 42, 54, 123-24 métissage, 25, 28, 74-75, 80, 95, 108, 141 metropole, 2, 3, 6, 8, 11, 20 migration, 9-11, 17, 34, 63, 7172, 190, 192 Millet, Richard, 24 Moffat, James, 207 Le Monde, 9, 24-25 Montaigne, Michel de, 112, 122 Moretti, Franco, 63, 79 Moshoeshoe, 205-206, 209, 211, 213, 221 N’Guettia Kouadio, Martin, 97 Naficy, Hamid, 178 negritude, 7

22-23 oral history, 17 orientalism, 9 Ormesson, Jean, d’, 24 Ors, Eugenio d’, Du Baroque, 88 Ortelius, Abraham,112-13 Ost, François, 76, 81-82 Other and Self, 41 otherness, 6, 9-10, 12-14, 31, 38, 42-43, 53-55, 59-60, 66, 70, 73, 76-77, 79, 82, 85, 104, 181 ouvertude, 39 Papiamentu, 128, 131 patois, 44-45 Paz, Octavio, 82 Pennycook, Alastair, 167-68 periphery, 1, 3, 8, 11, 23, 64, 69 picaresque, 20 Pineau, Gisèle, 139, 141, 143, 148-49 Pinet, Simone, 116 Pires Vieira, Else Ribeiro, 4041 postcolonial writing, 1 postcolony, 3, 168-69, 173, 186 Prabhu, Anjali, 75

234

Writing and Translating Francophone Discourse

Proust, Marcel, 77 Quebec, 2, 5-6 12, 146 Rabassa, Gregory, 140-41, 143-44 Rancière, Jacques, 189, 201, 203 recontextualization, 33-34 Renan, Ernest, 97 Rey, Alain, 76 rhizome, 2-3, 8, 53, 67-70, 82, 89 Rich, Ruby, 177 Richet, Jean-François, 192 Ricœur, Paul, 49-50, 217 Rojo, Antonio Benitez, 150 Ross, Leone, All the Blood Is Red, 44 Roumain, Jacques, Gouverneurs de la rosée, 132, 134 Rushdie, Salman, 29 Rycroft, David, 207-209 Saint-John Perse, 87, 108, 110 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 5 Segalen, Victor, 14, 37-39, 4243, 46-47, 49-58, 60-61; Essai sur l’exotisme, 37; Essay on Exoticism, 14, 37, 42, 47, 51, 53-54, 57-58, 6061 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 7, 23, 219 Senior, Olive, 16, 58-59, 13639, 180, 28; Discerner of Hearts, 16, 58-59, 136; ZigZag et autres nouvelles de la Jamaïque, 16, 136-39

Sesotho, 207, 212, 219, 221, 223 Shakespeare, William, 139 Shread, Carolyn, 127 slavery, 2-3, 6, 12, 120, 139 Sourieau, Marie-Agnès, 14142 Soyinka, Wole, 4, 23-24 Spivak, Gayatri, 64, 79, 83, 127-28, 130, 161 Stahl, Aletha, 140, 148-49 subtitling, 16, 175-77, 179, 183-86 terremère, 91 tesseration, 41, 51-52, 58, 60 Thomas, Bonnie, 72 Thompson, Leonard, 205 Thornber, Karen, 64, 79 Thouard, Denis, 76 Todorov, Tzevan, 53 transculturality, 13 translation as a metaphor, 1314; Translation Studies, 1, 14, 29, 54, 83, 169 transnationalism, 9, 13 Tremblay, Michel, 5 tropicalization, 7 Trouillot, Lyonel, 44, 45 Truc, Gérôme, 49 Tymoczko, Maria, 83 Valery, Paul, 210 Venuti, Lawrence, 39, 56, 61, 83, 134, 149, 167, 169, 17779, 185; The Scandals of Translation, 56, 167, 177-79 Verlaine, Paul, 47-48, 62

Index vernacular, 16, 76, 112, 131, 167, 171, 173-75, 177, 18385, 186-87 vernacular monolingualism, 174-75, 186-87 Vieux-Chauvet, Marie, 127 Walcott, Derek, 33, 151 Watts, Richard, 33 Weltliteratur, 63 Wijnands, Paul, 93 Wing, Betsy, 1, 65, 66, 69, 150,

153

235 world-map, 15 Yoruba, 171, 175, 179, 18284, 187 Zaourou, Zadi, 97 Zorn, Jean-François, 221 Zumthor, Paul, 123

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