Refraction and recognition

John Benjamins Publishing Company

This is a contribution from Target 18:1 © 2006. John Benjamins Publishing Company This electronic file may not be altered in any way. The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only. Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible to members (students and staff) only of the author’s/s’ institute. For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com). Please contact [email protected] or consult our website: www.benjamins.com Tables of Contents, abstracts and guidelines are available at www.benjamins.com

Refraction and recognition Literary multilingualism in translation* Rainier Grutman University of Ottawa

Texts foregrounding different languages pose unusual challenges for translators and translation scholars alike. This article seeks to provide some insights into what happens to multilingual literature in translation. First, Antoine Berman’s writings on translation are used to reframe questions of semantic loss in terms of the ideological underpinnings of translation as a cultural practice. This leads to a wider consideration of contextual aspects involved in the “refraction” of foreign languages, such as the translating literature’s relative position in the “World Republic of Letters” (Casanova). Drawing on a Canadian case-study (Marie-Claire Blais in English translation), it is suggested that asymmetrical relations between dominating and dominated literatures need not be negative per se, but can lead to the recognition of minority writers. Keywords: multilingualism and literature, translation, minorities in literature, French-Canadian Literature (1900–1999), Marie-Claire Blais, Ralph Manheim, Ray Ellenwood, Antoine Berman, Pierre Bourdieu, Pascale Casanova

0. Introduction The widely held view that translation ‘normally’ involves no less and no more than two languages (often called ‘source’ and ‘target’ languages) admittedly does justice to a majority of translational transfers between literatures. Yet a theory of translation cannot limit itself to the most common or plausible scenarios (that is, if it pretends to ‘observe’, according to the original meaning of the Greek verb theôrein). It should also include exceptional, marginally significant, even ‘abnormal’ ways in which literature has in fact been translated. After all, exceptions have been known to lead to the revision of previously universally

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accepted rules, and the most scientific of laws only last as long as they remain unchallenged by new facts. These pages address one such exception. It is bound to bend, if ever so slightly, the rules of translational engagement as they have usually been formulated. I am referring to those instances where the text to be translated is not neatly couched in one language, but is itself a composite of different language strands. Texts of this kind pose unusual challenges for individual translators and Translation Studies alike, especially if unequal relations and power imbalances between languages come into play. In what follows, a two-step approach will be adopted. First I raise some of the textual problems commonly involved in the transfer of multilingual works of literature. Antoine Berman’s work on translation will then help me reframe questions of semantic loss in terms of the ethical and ideological workings that underpin translation as a cultural practice. This, in turn, will lead to the consideration of certain contextual aspects which often dictate translational options. In the course of the argument, it will become clear, I hope, that the treatment given to foreign languages in translation is context-bound, and can as such be related to the translating literature’s relative position on the global map of ‘world literature’. The latter is conceived of, along the lines of research carried out by Bourdieu-disciple Pascale Casanova, as a much more conflictual space than what Goethe had in mind when he coined the term Weltliteratur [world literature], back in 1827. Drawing on the example of French Canada, and more specifically on American and English-Canadian translations of fiction by Marie-Claire Blais, we shall see that these built-in asymmetrical (i.e. unequal) relations between dominating and dominated literatures need not be negative per se, but can indirectly lead to the recognition of minority writers.

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What happens to multilingualism in translation?

. Heterolingualism unbound Before asking ourselves what exactly happens to foreign languages (and language varieties) in translation, it might be useful to briefly reflect upon their literary use, a phenomenon I have labelled heterolingualism in order to avoid unnecessary confusion with real-life situations stemming from language contact, such as societal bilingualism or diglossia. This point cannot be stressed enough, for I do not share the emphasis sometimes placed upon mimetic qualities of multilingualism. Those qualities do not, in my opinion, exhaust the wide

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Refraction and recognition

array of possibilities offered by juxtaposing or mixing languages in literature. Even in texts whose fictional universes claim to portray society, ‘realism’ largely remains a matter of skilfully crafted ‘illusionism,’ as Guy de Maupassant suggested in the oft-reprinted preface to his novel Pierre et Jean (1882). Because of its varying manifestations, heterolingualism is too multifarious a phenomenon to be easily subsumed under the heading of ‘realism’ (see Grutman 1996; 2002). Mimetic readings do not explain how languages interact with each other within the boundaries of texts whose use of foreign tongues quite often goes beyond mirroring society or supposedly ‘translating’ reality. My second reason for choosing heterolingualism is its mixed Greek and Latin heritage. Granted, those very roots unfortunately render the word opaque in English.1 True as well, my term sounds a lot like Mikhaïl Bakhtin’s ‘heteroglossia’, and it may even describe similar phenomena, but it does so from an altogether different perspective (Grutman 1993; 1997: 41–44). Whereas I am mostly interested in the foregrounding of foreign languages, for whatever reasons, by whatever means and with whatever effects, Bakhtin focuses on the dialogical interaction of socially differentiated speech styles within a given language. Those “social voices”, as Bakhtin (1981: 263) calls them, need not, however, and most often do not correspond to actual languages (in spite of what some translations of his essays would have us believe).2 The difference between both approaches can perhaps be best described with the help of a concept that used to have some currency in stylistics, namely the “principle of polyvalency” (Ullmann 1964: 9). Simply put, this concept means that “the same device may produce several effects”, i.e. have more than one function in a text and, conversely, “the same effect may be obtained from several devices” (Ullmann 1964: 20). In principle, texts can either give equal prominence to two (or more) languages or add a liberal sprinkling of other languages to a dominant language clearly identified as their central axis. The latter solution is much more commonly encountered, and the actual quantity of foregrounded linguistic material varies wildly. For a Romantic poet like Gérard de Nerval, a short Spanish title (El desdichado) was enough to conjure up exotic landscapes and valiant knights. The writer of fiction, on the other hand, may have to either incorporate larger foreign language samples — taking up entire paragraphs or even pages, as in Tolstoy’s War and peace and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy — or make repeated use of them in order to obtain the desired effect. The following are three of the more striking examples of 20th-century heterolingualism, where foreign languages are highlighted at a novel’s beginning, middle, and end, respectively.


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What many consider to be Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s masterpiece, Three trapped tigers (Tres tristes tigres, 1965), opens with a hilarious prologue in a mix of Cuban Spanish and American English wryly evocative of life in 1950s UScontrolled Havana. Before him, Thomas Mann let his character Hans Castorp convey his feelings in awkward French to the Russian émigrée Clawdia Chauchat in a language-infused chapter, ominously entitled “Walpurgisnacht” and conspicuously placed at the centre of The magic mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924). An even more spectacular case is Juan Goytisolo’s Juan the landless (Juan sin tierra, 1975). At the end of this daunting novel, Castilian (Spain’s dominant language as well as the narrator’s) gradually turns into Arabic, the main language spoken on the opposite shore of the Mediterranean. This transformation, a cultural shift as much as a purely linguistic transfer, is completed in three or four stages during the course of which ‘normative’ European Spanish becomes ‘slangy’ American Spanish (with a Cuban accent), then turns into a North-African Arabic dialect before taking on the guise of quotes from the Koran’s 109th sura (transliterated in Roman letters). The metamorphosis is complete when on the last page, Arab verses appear in Goytisolo’s own calligraphy. But with Arabic being read from right to left, we have not reached the end but rather the beginning of the story. The novel’s final words thus paradoxically become its first words, and the reader can start anew (see Kunz 1993). .2 Textual matters: Erasing (exotic) differences What tends to happen to texts such as these in translation? The jury is out on this question, or so a perusal of critical literature would suggest. In a course book designed for the teaching of translation in US comparative literature departments, André Lefevere devotes a short section to “Foreign words”. According to him, “An expedient solution, used fairly often, is to leave the foreign word or phrase untranslated and then to append a translation between brackets or even to insert a translation into the body of the texts a little later” (1992: 29). The case for incompletely translating heterolingualism is also made by Cees Koster, in a review of the novel Trainspotting in Ton Heuvelmans’ Dutch translation. Based in Edinburgh’s drug scene, Irvine Welsh’s novel liberally samples the heavily accented Scottish English spoken by the derelict youngsters that make up its cast. In the past, Dutch translators might have opted for some comparable urban slang from the Netherlands (the ‘Rotterdams’ spoken by erstwhile popular TVcharacters Jacobse and Van Es, for instance), but contemporary translational practice instead advocates the view that “Dialect should not be translated with dialect”. In Koster’s words: “culturally specific elements, especially coming from © 2006. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


cultures with which the target culture entertains narrow contacts, must be exoticized (the foreign is maintained as such in the text)”.3 Koster’s use of the word ‘exoticizing’ reveals his acquaintance with the writings of the late Antoine Berman. One of France’s sharpest translation critics and an accomplished translator himself (from Spanish and German), Berman harshly condemned the use of “Parisian slang [argot] to translate the lunfardo of Buenos Aires, the Normandy dialect to translate the language of the Andes or Abruzzese”, contending that “a vernacular clings tightly to its soil and completely resists any direct translating into another vernacular”. Such a transfer is even less likely to succeed in French culture, where the use of dialect invariably conjures up images of yokels: “An exoticization that turns the foreign from abroad into the foreign at home winds up merely ridiculing the original” (Berman 2004: 286). As early as the mid–1980s, Antoine Berman formulated his views on translation in essays that still go largely unrecognized in English-speaking North America, where his ideas have been disseminated most notably by Lawrence Venuti.4 I will consider two essays in particular: “La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain” (originally accompanying his 1985 translation of Schleiermacher, and reprinted posthumously as Berman 1999) and “La traduction comme épreuve de l’étranger” (a talk given at the University of Toronto in 1984, available in English as Berman 2004). Here, Berman laid the groundwork for an “analytic of translation”, both an analysis and a critique of “the system of textual deformation that operates in every translation” (2004: 278). It is not uncommon for translators, he contended, to try to put order in a text’s perceived chaos by correcting the original in the (false) hope of improving upon it. An infamous example of this is the treatment of Franz Kafka’s prose in most French translations (see also Kundera 1993: 131–144; Meschonnic 1999: 319–342). Kafka’s insistence on using the same words without looking for synonyms, his sparse use of punctuation marks and his run-on paragraphs all ran counter to traditional French conceptions of what constituted style and ‘good taste’ in writing. In the name of “rationalization” (Berman 2004: 280), his translators used synonyms wherever they felt they were needed, rearranged Kafka’s sentences and divided his paragraphs into units that were more pleasing to the eye of the reader. In others words, they presented the French public with a retailored Kafka, utterly destroying his idiolect (and therefore his idiosyncrasy) in the process. Berman (2004: 278) did not mince his words when he labelled “annexationist” or even “ethnocentric”5 the assumptions underlying such practices. Said to be typical of France’s uneasy rapport with translation proper (one need © 2006. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

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only think of the 17th- and 18th-century rewritings known as ‘belles infidèles’), their origins can be traced back as far as Ancient Rome. Was it not Jerome who claimed, in an oft-quoted letter to Roman senator Pammachius, that the translator “did not attend to the drowsy letter nor contort himself by translating the boorish style of rustics, but by right of victory carried the sense captive into his own language, sed quasi captivos sensus in suam linguam victoris iure transposuit” (quoted in Latin by Berman 1999: 32; the entire letter appears in translation in Venuti 2004: 21–30, the passage here quoted: p. 25). A victor, in other words, need not respect the culture of subjugated peoples: Vae victis!… This mode of translation was the exact opposite of what Berman had in mind. Rather than culturally annexing foreign texts, as has too often been the case, Berman’s ideal translator would respect and welcome them in all their foreignness. She would show her acceptance of them by translating their letter instead of their spirit. Unlike Kafka’s French translators, she would not rearrange the work to be translated in order to better fit the mould of her own deeply rooted cultural preconceptions. Reducing the possible tensions between languages and language varieties is an extension of a more general homogenizing strategy. According to Berman, whose own expertise lay in the field of translating Latin American writing into French, “the superimposition of languages is threatened by translation”. The relation of tension and integration that exists in the original between the vernacular language and the koine,6 between the underlying language and the surface language, etc. tends to be effaced. How to preserve the Guarani-Spanish tension in [Augusto] Roa Bastos? Or the relation between Spanish from Spain and the Latin American Spanishes in [Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s] Tirano Banderas? The French translator of this work has not confronted the problem; the French text is completely homogeneous. (Berman 2004: 287)

Berman is highly critical of homogenizing translations, precisely because they erase significant differences and destroy underlying semantic and syntactic patterns. They might seem more “homogeneous” but they are in fact more “incoherent” than the original (2004: 284–285). This becomes all the more evident when the target language of a translation is none other than the embedded foreign language of the source text.7 In those instances, the linguistic elements that signalled Otherness in the original run the risk of having their indexical meaning reversed and being read as ‘familiar’ signs of Sameness (and vice versa). Witness the French and German translations of T.S. Eliot’s notoriously heterolingual poem The waste land (analysed by Frank and Bödeker 1991, drawing on material provided by Ilse Suffis, see 1991:



55 n. 17). As it turns out, translators from neither country attempted to translate the poem’s foreign-language quotes but chose to keep them intact, thereby radically changing their overall impact: untranslated lines by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Nerval, and Wagner, which had contributed to the hermetic character of the original, became readily intelligible to readers of French or German versions. What was originally foreign and international has become eminently readable and national. The opposite is equally true: quotes from English literature familiar to Eliot’s British readers lose their immediacy in translation. Worse: left untranslated, those same English lines stand out as a sore thumb, and turn what was meant to be more or less ‘familiar’ into something utterly ‘foreign’ (such is the case of quotes by Shakespeare in most French translations of The waste land as well as in Ernst Robert Curtius’ German version). .3 Contextual matters: Asymmetrical transfers, unequal exchanges Truth be told, translators of multilingual texts often find themselves in a catch– 22 situation. When catering to a presumably monolingual audience, they can be tempted to gloss over linguistic differences highlighted in the original. For reasons of convenience, many translators have thus largely annulled the effects a writer may have sought to obtain from the intertwining of languages. Translators of linguistic ‘hybrids’ who do want to convey a sense of the original text’s balancing act between languages, on the other hand, go against the grain of institutionalized monolingualism. They are often facing an uphill battle. Let us assume for a moment they succeed in convincing both their editors and publishers of the appropriateness of their choice: they still have to await the verdict of the anonymous reading public, which neither wants to be reminded it is reading a translation nor particularly cares for writing that dallies with too many languages. In a country like the United States, where a subtitled movie is sure to bomb at the box office, it makes little sense to try to market translations of foreign novels with passages left in other languages. It would be an entirely counterproductive move, going as it does against the doxa of “fluent domestication” identified by Lawrence Venuti: “enforced by editors, publishers, and reviewers, fluency results in translations that are eminently readable and therefore consumable on the book market” (1995: 15).8 Fiction is far from being impermeable to such attitudes. The feasibility and the eventual success of a translation seeking to mimic the original’s multilingual layering will be in no small measure dictated by the prevailing attitudes, taste and habits of the potential audience. In many cases, the choice of one option over the other exceeds matters of text and style, but can be related to the target © 2006. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

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community’s views regarding foreign languages and cultures in general (and translation in particular). The problems arising from heterolingualism cannot therefore be limited to textual matters alone, no matter how fascinatingly complex these matters may be. Tolerance or intolerance of foreign words can be taken as more than an index of ‘familiarity’ and ‘foreignness’, of ‘Sameness’ and ‘Otherness’. Reaching far beyond those distinctions, they lay bare the power imbalance between literatures in different languages and/or from different countries. None of this will sound entirely new to anyone familiar with recent (and not so recent) developments in Translation Studies, where some scholars have been working for quite a while with a larger, culture-oriented, concept of translation. “There is no equality in literary contacts”, Itamar Even-Zohar (1978: 49) wrote thirty years ago, after pointing out the need to distinguish “contacts between relatively established systems which are consequently relatively independent”, from “contacts between non-established or fluid systems which are partly or wholly dependent on some other system(s)” (1978: 46). Because of their very dependence, literatures pertaining to the second category have less built-in resistance to outside interference than those in the first category. Some animals are indeed more equal than others. In her stimulating but provocative book on The world republic of letters, Pascale Casanova raises some of the same issues, albeit from a different epistemological point of view. Her brand of comparative literature incorporates many lessons from Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the ‘field’ of French literature, which she applies and fine tunes in order to gain better insights into the functioning of world literature, not as a museum of fetishized masterworks, but as a “world literary space”, a global system of power relations where writers from different nationalities compete for a place under the sun. Translation, Casanova argues, is one of the channels through which writers can accumulate ‘symbolic capital’ (Bourdieu), gain notoriety, and become internationally famous. As such, it never is an innocent intervention. Far from being “a purely horizontal transfer”, translation should be recognized for what it is, i.e. “the major prize and weapon in international literary competition, an instrument whose use and purpose differ depending on the position of the translator with respect to the text translated” (2004: 133; cf. 1999: 188–189; 2002: 7–8). The emphasis is different, to be sure: in line with Bourdieu’s (1998) theory of social action, Casanova focuses on the agents and power brokers of literary exchange, that is to say on the people involved, whereas Even-Zohar paid more attention to the items (texts, genres, writing models and conventions) circulating between and being imported into literatures when he was trying to conceptualize his “universals of literary contact/interference” (1978/1990b). These discrepancies © 2006. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


notwithstanding, their conclusions are strikingly similar: as a form of contact between literatures whose prestige and status will differ, in synchrony as well as in a diachronic perspective, translation cannot be but asymmetrical in nature. As a matter of fact, in a later incarnation of his 1975 paper, Even-Zohar rewrote the above-quoted sentence, which now reads: “There is no symmetry in literary interference” (1990b: 62). There are other similarities.9 Even-Zohar (1990a: 47; 1990b: 55–56) considered two major forms of contact: 1) between established literatures of comparable prestige, and 2) between literatures of varying stature and strength, with one being (temporarily or not) weaker, either a) on account of it having been established more recently than the other, or b) because it is written in a language of lesser diffusion, or c) because it is undergoing a partial reshuffling of its internal hierarchy, i.e. it is “in crisis”. As for Casanova, she links the relative position of a given national literature more closely to the socio-political and literary prestige of the language it is written in. These are two different things, for the “literary credit” given to a language can be obtained “independently of its strictly linguistic capital” (2004: 135; cf. 1999: 191; 2002: 8). “Literary credit” refers here to the strictly literary ‘prestige’ attached to a language in function of a myriad of criteria that, for being subjective, are no less effective in creating differences. At first glance, Casanova’s (2002: 9–10) typology seems to be more encompassing than Even-Zohar’s. In her model, literary exchange through translation can take one of the following forms: 1) translation from a dominant language into a dominated one (and vice versa); 2) translation from one dominant language into another dominant language; 3) translation from one dominated language into another dominated language. She chooses to concentrate on the first cluster of mirror situations, which, upon closer examination, overlap Even-Zohar’s second category of literary contact, i.e. the one taking place between a dependent and an independent literary system. The most fundamental difference to keep in mind, then, when studying literary translation as a socio-cultural rather than a purely linguistic phenomenon, would be the line separating transfers between, on the one hand, literatures that are potentially equal or at the very least comparable, and, on the other hand, clearly unequal partners. In the latter case, everything depends of course on the direction of the transfer: whether it is dominant literatures that sort of ‘upgrade’ texts by unsung foreign heroes or rather dominated literatures that select and ‘download’ classics, as it were, from the catalogue of world literature. Casanova is right in calling “incommensurable” (2002: 10) the respective stakes of both configurations, and in warning against any analysis that would lump them together. © 2006. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

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Returning to the topic at hand, one sees how this applies to the treatment of foreign languages in translation. The choice to either delete or maintain the original’s multilingualism will depend not only on the translator’s personal ethics (as advocated by Berman), but also on the (in)dependent status and prestige of the source literature in respect to those of the target literature, as well as on collective attitudes towards the languages one is translating from, each having their perceived socio-cultural importance and relative weight on the world market of linguistic goods. Those attitudes, as pointed out earlier on, are reflected in editorial policies of publishing houses and, perhaps less ostensibly, in audience expectations. In order to render the discussion less abstract, I would like to illustrate (and, hopefully, clarify) some of the more theoretical arguments made so far by using Canada as a case study, or, to be more precise: the English translation of multilingualism as it appears in French-Canadian prose. Canada’s dual literatures might not constitute an example of translation from one dominated language into another dominated language (that rarest of configurations according to Casanova [2002: 10]), but we are in the presence of two “dependent literary systems” (Even-Zohar), albeit far less (if at all) dependent on each other than on literatures from abroad (that of the United States and Great Britain for English Canada, and of France in the case of Quebec and the rest of French Canada).

2. Marie-Claire Blais in English 2. Literary translation, a Canadian institution Let me start by pointing out the a-typical situation of a country where literary translators spend the bulk of their time translating fellow Canadians. This state of affairs contrasts, not just with unilingual countries, where translators work per definition on works from abroad, but also with the situation prevailing in other officially bilingual countries: monolingual Belgians wishing to read their compatriots from the other linguistic community, for instance, normally have to wait for a foreign publisher to bring these out in translation. As for Canadians, during the general identity overhaul that took place in the wake of the Centennial celebration of Confederation (1867), they developed a new sense of being and belonging no longer solely predicated on Canada’s past as a British Dominion. In this project of nation-building, significant emphasis was placed on ‘Bilingualism and Biculturalism’: a Royal Commission by that name,



co-chaired by André Laurendeau, the influential editor of the Montreal daily Le Devoir, and Arnold Davidson Dunton, former chairman of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, published its final report in 1969. It is no surprise, then, that Philip Stratford has the history of literary translation start in 1972, when Liberal Secretary of State Gérard Pelletier “inaugurated a Canada Council Translation Grants Programme in the hope that making the best writing in English and French available in the other language would foster mutual understanding and cultural exchange” (Stratford 1991: 97). Before long, the federal initiative would generate several hundreds of titles. In 1974 alone, 66 translations were published, more than the total number that had appeared in the two centuries spanning between 1760 and 1960! Ray Ellenwood (1983: 61, 64–65) has calculated that the programme sponsored no less than 452 translations during the first decade of its existence, with work into English initially far outweighing that into French. The same decade saw the creation of special Translation Prizes to parallel the prestigious Governor General’s Literary Awards, the foundation of the Literary Translators Association/Association des traducteurs littéraires, and the addition of a “Translations” section to the University of Toronto quarterly’s annual survey of “Letters in Canada” (Stratford 1991: 100–101). This institutionalization of literary exchanges has its consequences, of course. A first one would be the status of Canada’s twin ‘literary fields’. They can hardly be considered ‘autonomous’ in the sense Pierre Bourdieu had in mind, for they have not been capable of dissociating themselves sufficiently from economic laws regulating the circulation of cultural goods in the marketplace (see Biron 2000: 28–32 for a similar reading of Quebec literature). In France, Bourdieu (1993; 1996) argues, purely economic laws not only do not apply, they have even been reversed since the days of Flaubert and Baudelaire, with short-term economic gain becoming less important than long-term symbolic recognition. This peculiar logic turned French literature into an autonomous sphere, a state within the State. Not so in Canada, where corrections to the free market routinely take the form of government funding — in many respects a modern guise (albeit a very gentle one) of that age-old structural dependency called patronage. Signs of this dependency can be seen at almost every step of the creative process: from individual bursaries for writing and/or travel, to global grants for publishing houses, translators’ stipends, literary awards and special funds for the promotion of both works and authors.10 At the same time, translation succeeded in fostering a more than passing interest in cultural difference: English Canadian readers fell in love with «la belle province» (as Quebec used to be called) and rediscovered a hitherto © 2006. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

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largely ignored part of their identity. In Sheila Fischman’s translation, Roch Carrier’s The hockey sweater became a synecdoche of French Canada, and its author a cultural icon. Much to his own surprise perhaps, Carrier “sells more in the rest of Canada than in [his native] Québec” (Stratford 1991: 104; see also Hébert 1989). Since 1999, he has served as Canada’s National Librarian, after heading the Canada Council from 1994 to 1997. Together with Gabrielle Roy, Marie-Claire Blais, and Michel Tremblay, he has been most consistently translated, which goes a long way towards explaining why these writers might well be the ‘fab four’ of Quebecois literature as refracted in English Canada. Third, government initiatives and their numerous spin-offs brought about a renewed understanding of translation as such. After years of discussing translations as if they were original texts — thereby effectively dismissing them as translations — Canadian critics went through a phase of judging equivalence in terms of fidelity/betrayal, before focusing on the translated texts themselves as discursive constructs (Mezei 1995: 136–137; 2003). Quebec French in particular, once a stumbling block for translators only familiar with European French, has since become the locus of much original reflection, as will become apparent from a closer examination of English translations of Marie-Claire Blais, one of French Canada’s most important living writers. The first female Quebec writer to be inducted into a European Academy,11 Marie-Claire Blais (Quebec City, 1939) is the author of more than twenty novels, all of which have been translated into English. Very early on in her career, Blais was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1963) as well as the coveted Médicis prize (for her gloomy 1965 novel Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel), thereby becoming only the second Canadian to receive one of France’s major literary awards (Gabrielle Roy had been given the Fémina prize in 1945 for Bonheur d’occasion, known in English as The tin flute). MarieClaire Blais has been translated by many different people over the course of her career: Sheila Fischman of course (she is indeed Canada’s most prolific and most versatile literary translator, the two-time winner of a Governor General’s Award for Translation and the recent recipient of an honorary doctorate from the University of Ottawa), but also David Lobdell and Derek Coltman, who each translated at least four of her texts. A non exhaustive list of translators who worked on one of Blais’ novels would include Ralph Manheim and Ray Ellenwood (both of whom I will return to shortly), Merloyd Lawrence, Carol Dunlop, Charles Fullman, and Michael Harris (this list was culled from Oore and MacLennan 1998).



2.2 The debate over joual Like many other Quebec writers active in the mid 1960s and early 1970s, Marie-Claire Blais dabbled in ‘joual literature’, a style of writing which consisted of foregrounding the street French of Montreal’s working class neighbourhoods. A social marker even more than a geographical one, joual purportedly got its name from a deformation of the standard French pronunciation of cheval, ‘horse’. Characterized by a far from normative phonetic structure, it contains large helpings of English words and expressions that are no longer perceived as borrowed items by the speakers themselves. Not unsurprisingly, the use of such slang in serious fiction met with considerable resistance from Quebec’s educated classes. Yet others came to see this linguistic variety as a token of French-Canadian suffering under British colonial rule and exposure to American consumer culture, thought to be epitomized by the language of Montreal’s proletarians. As Jacques Godbout pointedly put it in an April 1964 article with the alarmist title, “Notre créole: le joual”: The French-Canadian people speak … an advanced form of the very “franglais” that worried Étiemble, an integrated form, for 190 million Anglophones weigh heavily on the grammar and syntax of five million Francophones: the latter little by little invented a creole, i.e. a language typical of a colonized people, in order to defend themselves, but without it ever being the work of lucid consciousness.12

This particular connection explains why the use of joual was both a literary and a political stance. In a typical reversal of language-related values, the original stigma was turned into a positive token of identity: nobody else in the world speaks French like French-Canadians do. On a stylistic level however, problems were bound to arise, since there is no real tradition of writing dialect in the French-speaking world. Prose conventions in French do not allow for ‘noble’ uses of local or socially marked ways of speaking: simply put, dialect is the language of country bumpkins, and should only be sampled for comic relief or for reasons of exoticism, to provide some ‘local colour’. In a move typical of 19th-century paternalistic attitudes, writers like George Sand and later, Guy de Maupassant, let their peasant characters express themselves in the patois of Berry or Normandy, but such infringements upon the linguistic norm were tolerated only in directly reported speech (i.e. dialogue clearly set apart from the narrator’s voice). Émile Zola caused quite a stir when, in L’Assommoir (1877), he allowed the Parisian argot of Gervaise Macquais to progressively blend in with the language of his narrator — and this even if in the French mindset, argot is a step up from regular dialect! © 2006. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

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For the longest time, things were not very different in French Canada. Adjutor Rivard (1914) and other members of Quebec’s ‘Société du parler français’ encouraged the use of rural and archaic French expressions in order to distinguish Canadian literature from the one written in France, but they never contemplated the possibility of writing entire texts in dialect, a practice deemed taboo. As late as the 1950s, Monsignor Félix-Antoine Savard (1953) reminded his fellow writers of the moral role they played: “The writer is given a certain authority in linguistic matters; he should show himself to be worthy of this trust”. A writer, he went on to say, has to pay attention to the richness of the language that surrounds him, yet it is his duty to make a selection and to only present the reading public with “the best, the clearest, the purest, the most expressive, the most conform to the genius of his language”.13 Like Rivard, he advocated the use (albeit sparingly) of those typical French-Canadian words that had long since been forgotten in France. Quite tolerant of patois insofar as it expressed the ancestral purity of Quebec’s farmers and peasants, the bishop had little or no patience for “another language”, heard especially in “our industrialized cities”, and which is nothing else than joual avant la lettre: There, American loanwords, and all kind of words carried along any old how by importation, fashion, and tourism, are rife. If you add to that some laxness in behaviour, some looseness in pronunciation, even among our bourgeoisie, the whole should worry us.14

Will future writers be capable of “purifying all this linguistic matter”, he asked his audience incredulously. One decade later, several novelists would nevertheless start incorporating joual into their writing. Resorting to the intricacies of free indirect discourse, they blurred boundaries between the speech of characters and the narrator’s voice. This was the case in Claude Jasmin’s Pleure pas, Germaine, André Major’s Cabochon and, most notably, Jacques Renaud’s Le cassé, whose paradigmatic title combined two key-ingredients: linguistic contamination (‘être cassé’ is a literal translation of ‘to be broke’) and economic oppression by English North-America. Marie-Claire Blais’ participation in the debate took the form of a novel: Un joualonais, sa joualonie (1973, published simultaneously in France under the title À Cœur joual), where she presents her reader with a stream-of-consciousness narrative in colloquial French larded with thick joual. Her overall design is clearly satirical; so much so, in fact, that it has been argued that this novel hastened the decline of joual as a literary device. Un Joualonais tells the story of Abraham Lemieux a.k.a. Ti-Pit, who makes a meagre living working for the local Rubber Company and sleeps in a board-



ing house frequented by the usual urban fauna. His speech comes replete with the loanwords and “loan blends” (Haugen 1950) one is accustomed to hearing in spoken Canadian French: “business” (for affaires), “bum” (for clochard), “bicycle” (for bicyclette), “char” (for voiture), and so on. Another character, Éloi Papillon, is a small-time writer, an “écrivailleux”, who envies Ti-Pit’s superb command of authentic blue-collar “joualon” (one surmises here that Blais is making fun of her fellow-writers who had been too overtly flirting with joual). “Papillon” (literally: butterfly) occasionally veers into English in the midst of conversation, which is not uncharacteristic of some Montreal Francophones either: Et tu [Ti-Pit] veux peut-être savoir combien je gagne par année, hein, mon Christ? – C’est pas de mes maudites affaires. – Dix mille piastres, c’est ridicule, un salaire de famine dans la vaste NordAméricaine, la femme en croque la moitié, le gouvernement vous laisse les os! Avec ça, on peut même pas s’offrir un club-sandwich par jour! A very shitty business, my friend! (Blais 1973: 15)

Papillon’s French is pretty much standard fare in Quebec literature. “Mon Christ” and “maudit” are typical swearwords in Quebec, where they have lost their original, religious meaning yet continue to fulfill an important cohesive function as identity markers, for they make French Canadians stand out among speakers of other varieties of French (Grutman 1997: 168). The “piastre” (short for “piastre espagnole”) was a type of coin used in colonial times. Nowadays, it is most often pronounced “piasse” and used as a nickname for the Canadian dollar. As for the code-switching between the last two sentences, it might well have been triggered by the use of “club-sandwich”, a typically North-American snack (made with three slices of toast instead of two) for which indeed no French equivalent is available. 2.3 Manheim’s domesticating translation In its American translation, the novel’s opaque title becomes St. Lawrence blues, a more transparent cultural allusion to St. Louis blues and as such, an indication of the translator’s (or publisher’s) attempt to reorient the text in function of a US-audience (Godard 1999: 516). English-language readers are given no cue as to whether or when Papillon’s switch from French to English takes place. Theirs is a linguistically unified text, the result of “homogenizing strategies” (Berman):


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“I suppose you want to know how much I make a year?” “It’s none of my damned business”. “Ten thousand smackers, it’s ridiculous, starvation wages in this great North American continent, my wife eats up half, the government leaves me the bare bones. It’s not even enough for a daily club sandwich! A very shitty business, my friend”. (Blais 1974: 7–8)

Several scenes in Un joualonais involve actual Anglophones. Nobody even slightly familiar with Quebec’s past will be surprised to learn that Jerry Faber, Ti-Pit’s boss at the Rubber Company, and his wife are English-speaking. They live in a neighbourhood with the telling name “Upper-Nose Town” (Blais 1973: 32). At one point during a winter blizzard, Ti-Pit and his co-worker Baptiste, the latter having just been laid off by Faber because of recently discovered spots on his lungs, are asked to shovel snow in front of their boss’ doorsteps. They can make some extra money in the process. What follows is Ti-Pit’s account, first in the original French, then in Ralph Manheim’s version for the American market: … plus on avançait moins on allait loin, on avait la face morveuse et la poudrerie nous enfonçait son dard par les oreilles. … – J’ai déjà la crachote rouge à cause du spotting, dit Baptiste, mais y faut qu’on accroche not’ deux piastres, maudit, chus pas venu à Up-Nose pour cueillir des noisettes! – Et v’là qui cavernait l’ père Baptiste et que j’ pouvais pas lui arracher sa pelle des poings; au bout de trois heures de cette chiennerie-là on a fait l’escalier, les marches et Lady Faber a pu ouvrir sa chambranle: “How lovely! How lovely!… ”, qu’elle a dit, “I see the mountains…”. “Ouais”, que je lui ai dit, “mais y faut nous payer la traite asteur, mon vieux père Baptiste est pas fort, y branle même”. – Rentrez donc, my friends, dear fellows, qu’elle a dit, venez vous réchauffer chez nous. La bonne va vous préparer du café”. – On a donc sirupé not’ café à l’anglaise, y avait la bonne, un chien qui s’appelait Puss-Puss et que la dame appelait avec des cajoleries son pussy darling, et l’chauffeur et nous autres les p’tits pères. (Blais 1973 : 33–34, sic) The more we dug the less we were getting anywhere, our faces were covered with snot and the white stuff was squizzling into our ears… “I’m spitting red already”, says Baptiste, “it’s those spots on my lungs, but dammit, we’ve got to snag those two bucks. I ain’t come up to Upper-Nose to pick daisies”. So Pere Baptiste went on excavating and I couldn’t get the shovel away from him. By the time we’d broken our backs for three hours, the steps were done



and Lady Faber was able to open her door. “How lovely! How lovely!” she says, “I can see the Mountains”. “Good for you”, say I, “but now you’ll have to pay us off. Old man Baptiste isn’t feeling so good, he’s got the wobbles”. “But come in, my friends, dear fellows”, she says. “Come in and get warm. The maid will make you some coffee”. So we sloshed down our Upper-Nose coffee. There were six of us, the maid, us two slobs, the chauffeur, and a dog by the name of Puss-Puss that the lady cootchy-cooed at and called pussy darling. (Blais 1974: 21–22)

Some effort was made to translate typically French-Canadian lexical items. Manheim does not mistake “poudrerie” for anything having to do with “powder” (as the first translator of Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion had famously done)15 but knows “the white stuff ” is snow flying around during a blizzard. He also finds an appropriate “I ain’t come” for the original “chus [= je suis] pas venu”. Yet nothing signals the movement to and fro between French and English, culminating in Ti-Pit’s ironic comments about the “café à l’anglaise”. Ray Ellenwood, who uses this translation as a counter-example for his own practice (see below), is of the opinion that Manheim does “a good job of rendering the flow of the narration in readable English”, but leaves his reader with “little sense of how Blais emphasized the different ways of speaking in the text itself ” (1995: 105). In the words of one reviewer, Manheim “seems to be uncertain which vernacular he wishes to capture”, and therefore “makes use of English and American slang, both contemporary and period… He seems finally to have aimed at a universally ungrammatical speech” (Davies 1975: 133). Fellow translator Sheila Fischman16 found the novel’s English to be “so neutral, one can only assume that Manheim approached his translator’s task armed with just his literary and linguistic knowledge”. She urges English-speaking Montrealers to read the original instead, “and polish up their joual in the process” (1975: 51). In his attempt to produce a text posing as an American novel in a French setting, Ralph Manheim no doubt makes things easier on the average NorthAmerican reader, who has most of the deciphering done for him. In compliance with the strategy of “fluent domestication” pinpointed by Lawrence Venuti as the default mode of American translation reception, another reviewer formulates what she must have considered to be the ultimate compliment: “To translate joual so that you are hardly aware of reading a translation is to perform a miracle” (Waddington 1974: 5). Things are never quite that simple though, and Manheim’s solution does have the distinct disadvantage of smoothening out many social and ideological asperities the use of both joual and English had lent the original. What we seem to have here is a prime example of “uncon© 2006. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

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scious forces”17 that make a translator act in contradiction with the attitude towards diversity he may well profess elsewhere, for I am not implying that Manheim, the translator of highly experimental prose by Günter Grass, was conservative and deliberately thwarted Blais’ intentions. Still, his work on Un joualonais … can be termed “ethnocentric” (Berman) or, less harshly, “domesticating” (Venuti), in that it pays little attention to the (in this case, French-Canadian) subaltern’s struggle, but is tantamount to silencing her. International fame, it seems, comes with a price. St. Lawrence blues was brought out by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, an important New York publisher, only a year after it appeared in French. This is an unmistakable sign of international recognition in and of itself. The broker of Blais’ American career was the noted critic Edmund Wilson, one of the more knowledgeable Americans about matters relating to Canada. They met on one of Wilson’s trips North, in September 1962 (Wilson 1993: 152), and he would prove instrumental in her getting a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation the next year. While in New Hampshire on that fellowship, Blais wrote the novel that would propel her onto the international stage: Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel. Critics like to recall the novel’s success in France, where it won a prize thanks in no small part to lobbying by Yves Berger, Grasset’s literary editor. I would contend, however, that from the bird’s-eye view of Casanova’s ‘World Republic of Letters’, an equally significant role might well have been played by the American relay that was Derek Coltman’s translation of the book, introduced by none other than Edmund Wilson, whose high opinion of Blais’ work (see already Wilson 1965: 147–157) would thus be disseminated world-wide. Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s global distribution channels made Marie-Claire Blais known to a much wider audience than she had been before; an audience that, incidentally, stretched beyond native speakers of English to include those for whom English (and not French) was a second language. The fact that Wilson’s preface was reprinted in the Italian, Mexican, as well as Danish translations (see Oore and MacLennan 1998: 1–3) is symptomatic of the international flow of literary traffic, and might even suggest that some of these versions were, in part at least, so-called “indirect translations” (a well-documented phenomenon in translation history, see Stackelberg 1984; Toury 1995: 129–146). Another sign of the preface’s pivotal status was its translation into French by McGill University professor François Ricard (for the 1980 pocket edition of Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel in Alain Stanké’s Quebec 10/10 series). When the American reception of a French Canadian writer makes its way into Montreal’s literary criticism, we have come full circle.



Coltman would translate more of Blais’ novels for the same publisher, but for some reason, the contract for the English version of Un joualonais, sa joualonie went to Ralph Manheim (1907–1992), one of America’s most important post-war translators (Venuti 1998b: 311). Known especially for his work from German, he translated such controversial non-fiction as Hitler’s Mein Kampf (in 1943, during the war!) and Freud’s correspondence with C.G. Jung. His literary translations include a sizeable chunk of Bertolt Brecht’s œuvre (Lefevere 2004: 249–251) and several fairy tales by the Grimm brothers, as well as Hoffmann’s Nutcracker, novels by Erich Maria Remarque, Hermann Broch, Hermann Hesse, Elias Canetti, Peter Handke, and Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass, whose important Danzig trilogy (The tin drum, Cat and mouse, Dog years) Manheim made available to English-speaking audiences in the 1960s. His second source-language of choice was French, where his preference seems also to have gone to more difficult writers: Louis-Ferdinand Céline (first and foremost), Michel Tournier, André Schwarz-Bart. He was awarded a “genius grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1983, which consisted of a life-time stipend, no strings attached, of 60,000 US-dollars (Venuti 1998b: 313). For all his exposure to French literature, Manheim was not brought up with lofty Canadian ideals about official bilingualism. He did not develop a Canadian habitus.18 This would account for his being less sensitive to the achievement of cultural identity through linguistic difference, a strategy less common in the ‘American melting-pot’, where non English-speaking minorities have more readily been assimilated into the linguistic mainstream, abandoning their original language in the process, than in the so-called ‘Canadian mosaic’. The United States does not have the equivalent of Canada’s French population, whose presence in the St. Lawrence valley predates Confederation and indeed marked the beginning of European settlement in what is now called Canada. The principle of language equality being the explicit condition on which Quebec leaders joined the federation in 1867 (Kymlicka 1995: 118), their descendants would not let their tongue be turned into folklore, as happened to their French-speaking cousins in Louisiana and later, in New England. Since the 1960s, attitudes in both countries have therefore diverged quite substantially, with the linguistic factor playing in Canada many of the roles usually associated with ethnic and racial identity in American debates on multiculturalism.19


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2.4 Ellenwood’s foreignizing translation Now it is precisely these kinds of attitudes that come to the fore in translation, even more so when the source-text is heterolingual. Ray Ellenwood, for one, is adamant about this point: Granted, dealing with a mixture of languages in a translated text is always a headache for which there are no easy remedies. But for Manheim, the question is obviously not of primary importance. He is interested in translating words, not speech. The solutions he finds are good ones for him and his projected audience, who are much more concerned with a good yarn than with questions of cultural identity and integrity in Canada. A Canadian translator, on the other hand, understanding the importance of linguistic identity in this country, might look for some equivalence, some way of suggesting what is so obviously going on, linguistically, in Blais’ text. [The French-Canadian swearword] “tabarnacle” is a peculiarly Canadian expression not to be blandly rendered as “holy Mary”. Such questions are, or should be, of interest and importance to a Canadian audience. What is specific about our culture remains the sole antidote to pepsification or to what Jacques Ferron calls (using English for effect) “ketchup on a bun coast to coast”. The problem is that Manheim’s translation remains the only available one, for Canadian as well as for American readers. (1984: 28, cf. 1995: 106)

Born and bred in the Canadian West before moving to Toronto, Ellenwood (Edmonton, 1939) proceeded in an entirely different way when translating Blais’ novel Les nuits de l’Underground (1978) as Nights in the underground (1979). He has since made a name for himself as the translator of some of Quebec’s most difficult writers: the above-quoted Jacques Ferron, as well as surrealist poet Claude Gauvreau. Contrary to general practice in North America, where translators take it “as a compliment if told their work is not recognizable as a translation”, Ellenwood takes pride in doing the exact opposite: “My translation will call attention to itself ” (1995: 104 and 107). Les nuits de l’Underground gets its title from a bar where members of Montreal’s lesbian community like to gather. Considerably less use is made of joual here, but the novel contains sizeable chunks of English dialogue instead, which does not make the translator’s task any easier. Moreover, none of the characters is a native speaker of English: most heterolingual intrusions into the French narrative are attributed to a Jewish-Austrian woman called Lali Dorman, a physician by trade who speaks accented and sometimes unidiomatic English. Even though Blais does not address the politics of language as dramatically as she had done in Un joualonais, sa joualonie, it would be a mistake to gloss over



her choice to let so much of the novel’s dialogue take place in English, which is but one of many in a cluster of differences, that also include sexual, cultural, ethnic, and religious identities. Signalling every shift to English with italics and footnotes would have burdened the text with too many distracting devices, while still failing to convey linguistic difference. The solution Ellenwood has come up with is one of compensation, leaving some French untranslated where there was English in the original. In those instances where Lali switches from English to French, he will have her switch as well, even maintaining some of the awkwardness of Lali’s English. These strategies succeed in making the English-Canadian reader aware that the novel’s characters are supposed to be codeswitching in languages they do not completely master. Witness the following exchanges between Lali and her French lover Geneviève: I am so happy to see you, chérie, let me help you now, and so, here you are, I hope we could have a few weeks together… you are skinny, did you work hard? – Où allons-nous, Lali? – It will be a longer drive because of the snow… but you will see, c’est une surprise pour toi… –… – Here we are, I think, s’écria soudain Lali… We are out of town… take care in going out of the car, the wind is strong… Tu vois ce restaurant avec the red light? Quelqu’un nous attend là… (Blais 1978: 74–75, sic)

In Ellenwood’s version, they are almost identical, except for some details: Lali’s strange syntax is corrected on one occasion (“I hope we could” becomes “I hope we can”; another possibility would have been “I was hoping we could”) and “ce restaurant” becomes “le restaurant”, a change that cannot be related to some overall design. “I am so happy to see you, chérie, let me help you now, and so, here you are, I hope we can have a few weeks together… You are skinny, did you work hard?” “Where are we going, Lali?” “It will be a longer drive because of the snow… but you will see, c’est une surprise pour toi…” … “Here we are, I think”, cried Lali, suddenly. “We are out of town… Take care in going out of the car, the wind is strong… Tu vois le restaurant avec the red light? Quelqu’un nous attend là…” (Blais 1978: 52–53, sic)

To all extents and purposes, Ellenwood refuses to translate. He is motivated by the conviction that traditional translation can end up “assimilat[ing] the work too smoothly into English” (1995: 106). Refusing to conceal heterolinguistic © 2006. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

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utterances can be seen as characteristic of avant-garde Canadian translation, whose practitioners at least try to let the Other’s voice be heard.20 While his initiative was generally well-received by other translators (Mezei, Marshall), Ellenwood did come under attack in the mainstream press. In 1979, journalist Keith Garebian called Blais’ style “part marmalade, part political claptrap — alternately sticky and brittle, concrete and abstract, sensual and intellectual…” For as he was concerned, this was partially the translator’s doing: “Ray Ellenwood has produced an atrocious bilingual hybrid: ‘on demande à toi et moi if we were Jewish… ils ont dit they wouldn’t punish us’”.21 Not only did Garebian fail to understand the “atrocious bilingual hybrid” was actually Marie-Claire Blais’; he also did not recognize that the English was left in because it had been put in the original for a purpose. Ellenwood’s work on Blais, then, is a good example of the dissident cultural practice Lawrence Venuti calls “foreignizing translation”. It “signifies the difference of the foreign text … by disrupting the cultural codes that prevail in the target language”. However, as Venuti is quick to add, “[i]n its effort to do right abroad, this translation method must do wrong at home, deviating enough from native norms to stage an alien reading experience” (1995: 20). To some, it might come as a surprise that the reading skills required by bilingual writing should seem equally as alien to a journalist like Garebian, living in an officially bilingual country entirely predicated on the good will of its so-called ‘founding nations’ to continue to live together. Whether translation does in fact succeed in building bridges between Canada’s proverbial ‘two solitudes’, as was the professed intention of the programme created by the Canada Council in 1972, is a different matter altogether (Mezei 1994; 2003; Sugars 1996). English Canada’s effort to understand Quebec (exemplified by the question ‘What does Quebec want?’, a political translation of Freud’s famous aphorism) has often been seen as patronizing by the Quebecois themselves, not in the least because they perceived the federally-supported initiative as part of former Prime Minister Pierre-Elliott Trudeau’s campaign in favour of official bilingualism. French-speaking intellectuals have not minced their words. Writing in between two referenda on Quebec’s sovereignty, Jacques Godbout has gone as far as to suggest that English-Canadian translations are by and large self-serving: “The translation of Quebec literature during the last twenty years was proportional to the fear that English Canada had of seeing Quebec separate. Who are they, what do they want, what are they writing? Get that translated on the double, so we can finally understand who those people are who [are] threaten[ing] us with extinction as Canadians” (1988: 84).



3. Concluding remarks: Refraction or recognition? It will have become clear that an exclusively text-based approach to translation cannot possibly get to the bottom of what is in fact a clash between literatures qua institutions. The approach needed would combine contextual investigations of literature as a vector of (national) identity, and formal studies of literature as a body of texts with aesthetic value. Literature, of course, is both at the same time, with the emphasis forever shifting between the social and the aesthetic poles. Older, well established literary traditions such as France’s, Spain’s or England’s, have been able to create an almost purely aesthetic realm by carving out a niche for themselves within the larger “social space” (Bourdieu) of their respective countries. Literatures that have emerged more recently (in the last two hundred years or so) have conversely been at pains to establish such a sphere relatively free of political and socio-economic constraints (Casanova 2004: 108–110; 1999: 154–157). These emerging literatures, whether they can be associated with the erstwhile dependencies of now-defunct colonial empires or belong to Europe’s national minorities, tend to show more openness to linguistic diversity than the firmly established canons of the former imperial powers. Often enough, their linguistic richness has been “refracted” rather than “reflected” (as André Lefevere used to say) in translation. In the case of Quebec’s literary use of joual, one can concur with Sherry Simon’s view “that untranslatability was inscribed in it” and that the social and cultural clash exhibited in the use of English “must, in fact, remain a problem for translation. Such was its intention and its meaning” (1992: 171–172). As we have seen, joual’s irreducible cultural specificity was indeed no small part of its initial appeal for the Quebecois themselves. Rather than lament the impossibility of translating heterolingualism, or rather its unavoidable refraction in translation, one might want to reflect upon a point repeatedly made by Lefevere, but whose consequences have not been fully taken into account by either literary or Translation Studies: A writer’s work gains exposure and achieves influence mainly through “misunderstandings and misconceptions”, or, to use a more neutral term, refractions. Writers and their work are always understood and conceived against a certain background or, if you will, are refracted through a certain spectrum, just as their work itself can refract previous works through a certain spectrum. (Lefevere 2004: 240)

Regarding Ralph Manheim’s ‘ethnocentric’ translation of Marie-Claire Blais’ experiment in joual, then, one can choose to denounce the annexationist push


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of his undertaking (as has sometimes been the case in Canadian literary criticism), but this only addresses part of the issue. Translating linguistic difference is a double-edged sword. Within the larger picture of ongoing interliterary negotiations drawn by Pascale Casanova, refraction need not be entirely negative, but can also be taken as a sign of recognition by culturally prestigious centres. From a sociological point of view, the visibility and prestige (or, in Bourdieu’s terms, “cultural capital”) Blais gained from being translated in New York by someone as respected as Ralph Manheim, probably outweighed the ‘poetic injustice’ that was done to her text in the process. New York (or, in other times and for other writers, London, or Paris) did Blais a favour by lifting her work to a ‘universal’ level she could not have reached through Quebecois or Canadian channels alone. One of the sad truths of the ‘World Republic of Letters’ is that it is based on inequality. Relations between literatures (and the languages they are written in) are asymmetrical in nature, unequal and even unbalanced, so when Paris, London or New York translate in the name of selfserving universalism (one of ethnocentrism’s favourite disguises according to Casanova 2004: 154–157; 1999: 214–215), they give writers from smaller literatures their moment of fame, which can last somewhere between Andy Warhol’s notorious “fifteen minutes” and a lifetime. Recognition through refraction is precisely what writers from minorities stand to gain from being translated into global languages, no matter how imperfect the end product and how unfair the process.

Notes * Previous versions of this paper benefited from comments by Justin Edwards and Benoît Melançon, as well as Target’s external reviewers, whom I all wish to thank for their input. It goes without saying that all opinions expressed remain my sole responsibility. . In my native Dutch, anderstaligheid (cf. German Anderssprachigkeit) has a much more commonsensical ring to it; academic French, with its pronounced penchant for etymology, has also been able to accommodate my neologism (witness Moura 1999: 73–78; MacNeil 2003). 2. The danger of confusing Bakhtin’s concept with ‘multilingualism’ is far greater if one reads him in French or even Italian, since these versions consistently mistranslate ‘raznorečie’ (an obsolete word for ‘contradiction’ according to the Oxford Russian dictionary, but reclaimed by Bakhtin in an uncharacteristically Heideggerian move) as ‘plurilinguisme/o’ (see Grutman 1993: 212–214).


Refraction and recognition 3. My translation of: “Een paradoxale vertaalnorm: dialect moet niet met dialect worden vertaald. De heersende norm dat cultuurspecifieke elementen, vooral van culturen waarmee de doelcultuur in nauw contact staat, exotiserend vertaald moeten worden (het vreemde wordt als iets vreemds in de tekst gehandhaafd) wou erdoor doorbroken worden” (Koster 1997). Henry Schogt (1988: 116) is equally wary of those looking for dynamic equivalence between dialects. Having compared French, English, German, and Dutch translations of the Russian classics, he is also of the opinion that “When bilingual or multilingual texts are translated, as a rule only the main language of the text is replaced, the foreign elements remaining unchanged” (1988: 114). 4. Venuti (1995: 100–112; 1998a: 242). For a comparison of Berman’s and Venuti’s respective models, as well as a possible way out of their contradictions, see Lane-Mercier (1997: 57–64). 5. In this particular context, ethnocentric is to be taken to mean “qui ramène tout à sa propre culture, à ses normes et valeurs, et considère ce qui est situé en dehors de celle-ci — l’Étranger — comme négatif ou tout juste bon à être annexé, adapté, pour accroître la richesse de cette culture” (Berman 1999: 29). In English, less strong wording has been used to convey the same idea. Lawrence Venuti, who readily acknowledges his indebtedness towards Berman, speaks of “domesticating translations” (e.g. 2004: 334). 6. A term derived from the Greek koiné diálektos or ‘common usage’, and used in sociolinguistics to describe a standardized linguistic variety used for the purpose of interregional and official communication. 7. For a brief analysis of what happens to D.H. Lawrence’s French witticisms in French translation, see Grutman (1998). Working on Belgian-French versions of bilingual Flemish prose texts, Meylaerts (2004: 220–228, 319–322) also noticed a marked tendency towards the erosion of linguistic difference. 8. Like every rule, this one suffers significant exceptions. Commenting on his ethical choice to keep the French dialogue in Cortázar’s Rayuela, American translator Gregory Rabassa writes: “Had Julio wanted these spots in English he would have translated them into Spanish in the first place. I also saw no reason to dumb the book down for readers of English and insult them in that way” (2005: 54). Rabassa’s highly ‘fluent’ version of Hopscotch received the National Book Award for Translation in 1966. 9. Considering the fact that Casanova (1999: 189 n. 1; 2004: 374 n. 16) is well aware of EvenZohar’s polysystem approach — she even quotes the latter’s “Laws of Literary Interference” — her subsequent (2002) wholesale dismissal of work previously done by Tranlation Studies seems rather unfair. 0. Witness the Web site of the Canada Council: “In addition to providing support for the creation, translation, publication and promotion of Canadian literature, the Writing and Publishing Section funds author residencies, literary readings and festivals, as well as new areas of activity such as rap poetry, storytelling and electronic literature” (http://www.canadacouncil.ca/writing/).


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Rainier Grutman . In 1992, Marie-Claire Blais was elected to the Belgian Royal Academy of French Language and Literature (Académie Royale de Langue et Littérature françaises de Belgique). Two years later, she joined the ranks of the Académie des lettres du Québec. 2. My translation of : “Le peuple canadien-français parle … une forme avancée du franglais qui inquiète Étiemble, une forme intégrée, car les 190 millions d’anglophones pèsent lourd sur la grammaire et la syntaxe des cinq millions de francophones: ces derniers ont peu à peu inventé un créole, c’est-à-dire une langue de colonisé, pour se défendre, mais aussi sans que cela soit jamais l’œuvre d’une conscience lucide” (Godbout 1994: 64). When René Étiemble (1964) lashed out at his fellow countrymen for using too many English words out of pure snobbery, he was battling an altogether different enemy than the one referred to here, of course. Godbout’s use of the term ‘creole’ is equally problematic. 3. My translation of: “On confie à l’écrivain une certaine autorité sur la langue; il doit se montrer digne de l’exercer” (Savard 1953: 270) and “le meilleur, le plus clair, le plus pur, le plus expressif, le plus conforme au génie de sa langue” (1953: 271). 4. My translation of: “Là sévissent en pleine liberté l’anglicisme américain, et tous les mots charriés pêle-mêle par les importations, les modes, le tourisme. Que si vous ajoutez à cela je ne sais quoi de relâché dans la tenue, de ramolli dans la prononciation, même de notre bourgeoisie, l’ensemble a de quoi nous inquiéter” (Savard 1953: 274). 5. Edmund Wilson (1965: 172–173) recounts the anecdote of the sentence “Vers huit heures du soir, la poudrerie éclata” having become in the first English translation (by New Yorker Hannah Josephson): “Toward eight o’clock in the evening the powderworks exploded”. See also the essay by one of Roy’s later translators, Joyce Marshall (1991: 30). 6. He does not fare better in the eyes of Joyce Marshall: “Manheim has rendered the joual in which the book is narrated by a curious lingo, part bad grammar, part outdated slang” (1991: 31). 7. Translators, Berman argues, are not necessarily aware of the violence they inflict upon texts from other cultures. The deforming system he describes operates “as a series of tendencies or forces” to which “every translator is inescapably exposed …, even if he (or she) is animated by another aim. More: these unconscious forces form part of the translator’s being, determining the desire to translate” (2004: 278). 8. This old scholastic notion (derived from Aristotle’s hexis via Thomas Aquinas) was given new currency by Pierre Bourdieu (1985: 13), who defines habitus as a socially and culturally interiorized thought-scheme, “the incorporated and quasi-postural disposition … of an acting agent”. Like a habit, a habitus is acquired, not innate, but unlike habits, that can be individual and even idiosyncratic, habitus refers to socially acquired dispositions. Individuals develop them in collective contexts such as families, schools, work environments, all situations where they are given the opportunity to hone their social skills: “what the [blue collar] worker eats, and especially the way he eats it, the sport he practices and the way he practices it, his political opinions and the way he expresses them” (Bourdieu 1998: 8). Differently acquired habitus function as “classificatory schemes, principles of classification, principles of vision and division, different tastes” (Bourdieu 1998: 8). I contend that which


Refraction and recognition texts a translator chooses to translate and the way he translates them, are signs of similar incorporated social schemes. 9. Amongst other things because French Canadians formed a self-governing society before being incorporated into British North America and as such are a “national minority”, in Will Kymlicka’s (1995: 19) use of the term, whereas “ethnic groups (immigrants who have left their national community to enter another society)” are not. Kymlicka knows, and regrets, that the (in his view crucial) distinction between national minorities and ethnic groups is often neglected by North American political theorists. 20. The exceptional status of Ray Ellenwood’s “non-translation” strategy cannot be stressed enough. Faced with a similar challenge when translating the bilingual prologue of Tres tristes tigres, Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine also decided to leave in the Spanish, but with a twist. Whereas the original switches from Spanish to English, their translation reverses that order and systematically puts the English sentence in front of the Spanish version: “¡Arriba el telón! Curtains up!” thus becomes “Curtains up! Arriba el telón!”, without the inverted exclamation mark typical of Spanish (Cabrera Infante 1965: 17; 1971: 7). Such a reversal is not insignificant, for it effectively cushions the impact of the foreign language on an English-speaking reader who now is only passively confronted with a Spanish translation of what she just read in her own language. 2. The Montreal star, May 26th, 1979: E3, quoted in Godard (1999: 509 and 517).

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Résumé Les textes frappés au sceau de la diversité linguistique posent un défi aux traducteurs et aux traductologues. Cet article tente de comprendre ce qui arrive aux textes plurilingues en traduction. D’abord, ‘l’analytique’ développée par Antoine Berman permet de mesurer les


Refraction and recognition pertes sémantiques à l’aune des enjeux idéologiques qui sous-tendent la traduction comme pratique culturelle. Suit une prise en compte plus large des aspects contextuels de la ‘réfraction’ des langues étrangères, dont notamment la position relative de la littérature traduisante dans la ‘République mondiale des Lettres’ (Casanova). À partir d’un dossier canadien (la traduction de Marie-Claire Blais en anglais), on suggère que les relations asymétriques entre littératures dominantes et dominées n’ont pas à être négatives en soi, mais peuvent mener à la reconnaissance d’écrivains minoritaires.

Author’s address Rainier Grutman Département des lettres françaises/ School of translation and interpretation University of Ottawa 60, University OTTAWA, Ontario K1N 6N5 Canada e-mail: [email protected]


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