L ARRY DUFFY Perdue en traduction: Translation, Betrayal and Death in Mérimée’s Carmen

Abstract: This essay explores Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen as a docu- ment concerned at several discursive levels with the dissemination of information about other cultures, and at the same time as a document which is morbidly fascinated with this precise area of activity as a site of mortal risk. The intradiegetic narratives of Don José and Carmen are rich in the use of words from other languages, and in the discus- sion of the use of foreign terms and languages as strategies of deceit. This essay argues that the themes of betrayal and death, central to the tale of Carmen and Don José, are inextricably linked to the motifs of language, translation, exoticism and cross-cultural communication which are key elements of Mérimée’s wider project.

One of the most striking features of Prosper Mérimée’s novella Car- men (1845-47) is its preoccupation with translation, which, as traduc- tion, is suggestively bound up, etymologically and/or pseudo- etymologically, with notions of treachery and betrayal – precisely the kind of couleur locale one associates with exoticizing nineteenth- century accounts of southern European cultures not too far removed, either geographically or discursively, from an Orient undergoing colonization.1 Indeed, the exoticizing context appears to make transla-

1 ‘Traduction. (1530; ‘livraison’, XIIIe, d’apr. le lat. traductio). […] 2. (fin xviii) Expression, transposition. Traduire. (1480; lat. traducere, proprem. ‘faire passer’) I: citer, déférer. II.1 (1520). Faire que ce qui etait énoncé dans une langue le soit dans une autre, en tendant à l’équivalence sémantique et expressive des deux énoncés. […] 2. Exprimer, 50 Larry Duffy tion, on the part of text, internal narratives, narrators and characters, an essential mechanism in pinning down the essence of various Oth- ers: Andalusians, Basques, Gypsies, women, Spanish people in gen- eral, particularly in terms of their proximity to North Africa – basi- cally, in expressing a version of anyone not French, bourgeois, classi- cally educated and male.2 The fact that death – in this case the demise of two of the three principal characters, one by stabbing, the other by garrotting, as well as that of several others – is an apparent consequence of activities to which the relative ability to translate, and wilfully to mistranslate, is central, seems almost incidental, secondary to the foregrounded theme of cross-cultural transfer, and itself part of the story’s exoticization of Mediterranean and Romany culture, just part of couleur locale. However, what becomes apparent on close examination of Mérimée’s story is that what the text actually does is to problematize translation as part of a generalized problematization of the idea of resolution, in which death as ultimate resolution is a key element. Fur- thermore, translation is exploited as a strategy precisely to prevent the essentialization of cultures. What I wish to suggest is that although on the surface the nouvelle’s narrative seeks to essentialize various cul- tures and their representatives, and although its underlying purpose may well be to convey to a particular French readership in terms it can understand (or recognize as exotic and different) an idea of Spain, and, problematically, one of Romany culture, the story ultimately, perhaps unwittingly, subverts its own essentializing discourse and highlights the difficulties and indeed contradictions involved in translation con- sidered as a straightforward process of exchange and equivalence, of conversion from one state to another, of resolution.

———————————————————————––– de façon plus ou moins directe, en utilisant les moyens du langage ou d’un art.’ (Le Petit Robert) 2 The novella’s Orientalist discourses have been comprehensively discussed in readings by, amongst others, David Mickelsen, ‘Travel, Transgression and Possession in Mérimée’s Carmen’, Romanic Review, 87 (1996), 329-44; José Colmeiro, ‘Exorcis- ing Exoticism: Carmen and the Construction of Oriental Spain’, Comparative Litera- ture, 54 (2002), 127-44; Peter Robinson, ‘Mérimée’s Carmen’, in Georges Bizet: Carmen, ed. by Susan McClary, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 1-12; Luke Bouvier, ‘Where Spain Lies: Narrative Dispossession and the Seductions of Speech in Mérimée’s Carmen’, Romanic Review, 90 (1999), 353-77.