Portraits of the Artist's Self ˸ Translating Alexandre Vialatte's
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Portraits of the Artist’s Self translating Alexandre Vialatte’s Battling le ténébreux Frances Egan To cite this version: Frances Egan. Portraits of the Artist’s Self translating Alexandre Vialatte’s Battling le ténébreux. Literature. Université Sorbonne Paris Cité; University of Melbourne, 2019. English. NNT : 2019US- PCA043. tel-03282015 HAL Id: tel-03282015 https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-03282015 Submitted on 8 Jul 2021 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. The University of Melbourne, School of Languages and Linguistics Université Sorbonne Paris Cité Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3, ED514 : EDEAGE (Etudes Anglophones, Germanophones et Européennes), EA4398 : PRISMES (Langues, Textes, Arts et Cultures du Monde Anglophone) Thèse de doctorat en études anglophones (traductologie) Frances EGAN Portraits of the Artist’s Self Translating Alexandre Vialatte’s Battling le ténébreux Thèse dirigée par Claire Davison, Véronique Duché et Henry Méra Soutenue le 18 juin 2019 Jury: Claire Davison Professor of Modernist Literature Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3 Véronique Duché A.R. Chisholm Professor of French University of Melbourne Helen Southworth Professor of English & Comp Lit University of Oregon Clíona Ní Riordáin Professor in Translation Studies Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3 Larry Duffy Senior Lecturer in French University of Kent Isabelle Daunais Professor of French McGill University Chris Andrews Associate Professor of Europ Lit University of Western Sydney Résumé Portraits du soi de l’artiste : Battling le ténébreux d’Alexandre Vialatte en traduction Alexandre Vialatte (1901-1971) se définissait de son vivant comme « notoirement méconnu ». Les ambiguïtés de l’écrivain-traducteur l’ont relégué en marge de la littérature française, mais elles suscitent de façon paradoxale une attention critique modeste aujourd’hui. Son premier roman Battling le ténébreux ou la mue périlleuse (1928) – roman d’apprentissage peu étudié et encore inédit en anglais – incarne parfaitement la qualité inclassable de l’auteur. Cette thèse se concentre sur le fait que Vialatte était traducteur ; elle avance l’hypothèse qu’une rencontre précaire entre les cultures française et allemande façonne Battling et, en parallèle, elle examine l’idée d’une identité « en traduction ». À ce titre, nous adoptons une « lecture traductionnelle » du texte où la pratique de la traduction (vers l’anglais) alimente une étude littéraire. En raison de la nature interdisciplinaire de la traduction, nous nous appuyons non seulement sur la traductologie, mais aussi sur la littérature comparée, la création littéraire et les études féministes, afin de donner corps à un espace polyphonique et créatif entre sujets et cultures. Notre analyse du texte porte sur la « mue périlleuse » du héros moderniste et s’organise autour de deux rencontres intersubjectives : tandis que le protagoniste du roman rencontre son objet de désir (une femme allemande) et se trouve déstabilisé, le traducteur rencontre l’écrivain pour problématiser le texte original. À travers ces deux affrontements, nous bouleversons les dichotomies de soi et autre, original et traduction, pour finalement imaginer une identité plurielle et éthique en traduction. Mots-clés : traduction, identité, soi, autre, féminisme, modernisme, créativité 1 Abstract Portraits of the Artist’s Self: Translating Alexandre Vialatte’s Battling le ténébreux Alexandre Vialatte’s (1901-1971) self-proclaimed label – ‘notoirement méconnu’ – continues to define him today. The writer-translator’s incongruities have relegated him to the margins of the French literary canon yet paradoxically attract a modest academic following. His first novel Battling le ténébreux ou la mue périlleuse (1928) – a little-studied and currently untranslated coming of age tale – exemplifies the rich placelessness that defines the author. This thesis contextualises Battling in light of Vialatte’s position as translator. It suggests the text is informed by an uneasy encounter between French and German cultures and geographies and, in parallel, it investigates the very notion of an identity ‘in translation’. This thesis adopts a translational approach whereby my own process translating Battling into English frames a literary study of the text. Given the multifaceted nature of translation, such an approach is interdisciplinary: it draws not only from translation studies (both theory and practice), but also from comparative literature, creative writing, and feminist studies, to map a polyphonous and multifaceted space between subjects and cultures. The analysis centres on the modernist hero’s ‘mue périlleuse’, or coming of age, and structures itself around two intersubjective encounters; as Vialatte’s protagonist meets his foreign and feminine Other to find insecurity, translator meets writer to problematise the original text. Through these two encounters, this thesis works to unsettle the binaries of self and other, original and translation, to ultimately present a plural and ethical identity in translation. Key words: translation, identity, self, other, feminism, modernism, creativity 2 Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the people who made this project possible. First to my wonderful, and many, supervisors. Thank you to Prof Véronique Duché and Prof Claire Davison, in Melbourne and in Paris, for being so very supportive and encouraging, always. Your different approaches complemented each other perfectly: thank you Véronique for your tireless reading and wide-ranging expertise and Claire for your passion and invaluable input on those big unwieldy ideas. Thanks also go to my external supervisor Dr Benjamin Andréo for the many chats when I was lost, my secondary supervisor Dr Henry Méra for reading my translations so painstakingly, and to the other academic staff and translators who provided support and feedback throughout my candidature: Dr Bertrand Bourgeois, Dr Tess Do and Sora Kim- Russel. I am extremely grateful to those who proofread bits and pieces of this thesis throughout: Emilie Walsh especially for perfecting my imperfect French, and also Ruth McHugh-Dillon, Anna Wilson, and Gerry Egan, who marvellously read the whole thing through at the end. Thank you also to the PhD buddies who made this journey so much more enjoyable. I will be forever grateful for your friendship, humour, and time – so many thesis 3 chats! Thank you to my other friends and family too for your tireless support, and to Chris, for all the things. My candidature has been funded by the Australian Government Research Training Program and by a large number of generous travel scholarships for which I am extremely thankful. I would like to express my gratitude to the committees of the Elizabeth and Nicholas Slezak Scholarship, the Norman Macgeorge Scholarship, The University of Melbourne French Trust Fund, the Richard Gunter Bursary, the Research and Graduate Studies Scholarship and the Graduate Research in Arts Travel Scholarship. I am grateful for the funding I received to attend conferences interstate and oversas, particularly the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference which renewed my passion for the creativity of translation and introduced me to some marvellous translators. And most of all, for the funding that made possible the cotutelle experience that underlies the very nature of this bilingual, cross-cultural PhD. 4 Contents Prologue: The Beau Brooding Byronic Ténébreux ............................................................................ 9 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 14 Chapter One: Identity in Translation ................................................................................................... 21 A Context in Placelessness: Vialatte and Battling.......................................................................... 21 Translational Reading: A Framework ............................................................................................ 31 Portraits of the Self: A Brief History .............................................................................................. 51 PART ONE: THE SELF ................................................................................................... 62 Portrait of a Romantic..................................................................................................................... 63 Portrait of a Writer .......................................................................................................................... 64 Chapter Two: The Great Battling............................................................................................................ 65 ‘Il se jouait sa comédie avec un sérieux terrible’ A translation ...................................................... 65 Building the Man ...........................................................................................................................