“What ‘I’ Cannot Say: Testifying of Trauma through Translation” Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Heidi Brown, M.A. Graduate Program in French and Italian The Ohio State University 2014 Dissertation Committee: Jennifer Willging, Advisor Danielle Marx-Scouras Maurice Stevens Cheikh Thiam Copyright by Heidi Brown 2014 Abstract This dissertation proposes a new theory of translation to explain how trauma testimony is performed by survivors who have experienced a death of their selves. It shows that certain 20th century French and Francophone authors translate their voices across languages, literary genres, and bodies (both human and animal) in order to testify of trauma when they are no longer able to bear witness in the first-person. The two French works studied—Journal (2008) by Hélène Berr and La Douleur [The War] (1985) by Marguerite Duras—exhibit translations by the authors to different subject- positions within themselves. Berr translates across languages to negotiate between different socio-linguistically constructed identities and cites English literature to speak in her stead when she is no longer able to voice her experiences. On the other hand, Duras translates across different literary genres (autobiography, auto-fiction, and fiction) in order to recreate a sense of self and increase her capacity for emotional expression. The two Francophone works studied—Djamila Boupacha (1962) by Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi and Le passé devant soi [The Past Ahead] (2008) by Gilbert Gatore—exhibit translation movements across bodies. Djamila Boupacha translates her voice to Gisèle Halimi, her Tunisian-French lawyer, and to Simone de Beauvoir, a French feminist author, in order to testify of the torture she endured during the Algerian War. Each time that Boupacha’s testimony is re-voiced, it is transformed due to differences in the three women’s social positioning. Gatore translates his identity across a series of fictional selves—each of which exists in the imagination of the previous one—in order to verbalize ii the unsayable and the unknowable experiences of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. While a translation to human bodies allows him to express the unsayable, translation onto animal bodies is necessary to express the unknowable. In all four works, the first translation movement creates a new self who approximates the original subject before it was destroyed; it is marked by strength, agency, and increased emotional expression. Afterwards, a second translation movement occurs to create a self who mirrors the destroyed being. The new self is characterized by vulnerability, destruction, and death. Importantly, however, from this vantage point, it is possible to express what remains inaccessible from the original subject-position. This tripartite configuration allows the survivor to recreate a stable identity, attribute meaning to the etiological event, and process trauma. iii Acknowledgements Thank you to Dr. Jennifer Willging for your close readings of multiples drafts, your generous support and encouragement, and the exceptional guidance you have provided. Thank you to Dr. Cheikh Thiam for your invaluable comments in the dissertation workshop, for pushing me to think more critically, and for helping me to become a better writer. Thank you to Dr. Danielle Marx-Scouras for your advice, feedback, and support, and for introducing me to so many texts that I love. Thank you to Dr. Maurice Stevens for the way that you listen to people and texts, and for both the guidance and freedom you gave me during my independent studies so that I can write about what is most important to me. Thank you to Dr. Sarah-Grace Heller for your comments that were instrumental in shaping this project early on. Thank you to Douglas Roberts, Adrianne Barbo, Jaleh Sharif, and Clare Balombin for your feedback and moral support as fellow dissertators. Thank you to Dr. Angèle Kingué and Dr. Philippe Dubois for your continual support and presence, without which I could not write anything. Thank you to Dr. Scott Myers, Dr. Gilbert Hab, Dr. Salome Fouts, and Marion Busingye for answering my questions about Kinyarwanda and Swahili. Thank you also to Sarah Schultz for keeping me on track. iv Vita 2008…………………………………………………………….B.A. French, Bucknell University 2010…………………………………………………………….M.A. French, The Ohio State University 2011 to present..............………………………………….Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of French and Italian, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: French and Italian v Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………………………………...iv Vita………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………....v List of Figures..………………………………………………………………………………………………………………vii Chapter 1: Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………...………….1 Chapter 2: Translating Across Languages in Journal by Hélène Berr…………………………………21 Chapter 3: Translating across literary genres in La Douleur by Marguerite Duras…...………..54 Chapter 4: Torture and Translation in Djamila Boupacha……………………………………………..…...93 Chapter 5: Translation and Recursion in Le passé devant soi by Gilbert Gatore………………..131 Chapter 6: Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………..173 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..178 vi List of Figures Figure 1. Translation as Testimony…………………………………………………………………………………..4 vii Chapter 1: Introduction Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, two major scholars in the field of trauma studies, both conceptualize of survivor testimony in spatial terms. Felman understands survivor testimony as coming from an “utterly unique and irreplaceable topographical position with respect to an occurrence” (297). Laub considers trauma testimony to be a movement in which the survivor transmits a story to the hearer—literally putting it outside of him or herself—in order to take it back in a more integrated, less problematic way (69). While these models do much to explain the dynamics of testimony, a limitation is that they both conceptualize of the witness as a stationary figure. As such, they do not take into account the possibility of a survivor translating his or her voice to different positions within the same body, or from one body to another, if it is no longer possible to bear witness in the first person. It is important to theorize what occurs outside the limits of first-person testimony because some survivors experience their selves as having been destroyed by trauma. An analysis of translation strategies used in such instances will help to understand better how trauma is processed and how the self is (re)constructed. This dissertation creates a new model of translation in order to explain how certain 20th century French and Francophone authors translate their identities across languages, literary genres, and bodies in order to bear witness of trauma when they are no longer able to do so in the first-person. Taking into account Maria Tymoczko’s postcolonial critique of translation studies, it broadens the concept of translation to include the etymologies, cognates, and histories of the word “translate” in the languages associated with the four 1 texts studied (French, English, Arabic, and Kinyarwanda). I argue that differences in translation strategies point to divergent understandings of what the self is, how trauma is experienced, and how testimony can be performed. The four literary works examined are 20th century French and Francophone texts written between 1939 and 2009. This seventy-year period is punctuated by numerous large-scale catastrophic events and unprecedented types of warfare, prompting new research on psychological trauma, as well as unique responses from writers. While medical or psychological studies on trauma are important for their generalizability across a population, literary works allow for a deeper and more complex understanding of specific cases. It is particularly important to study those texts that do not fit models of survivor testimony because they bring to light presuppositions and limitations in current understandings. Ultimately, these limit-cases provoke the creation of new models that are broad enough to include them within the scope of their boundaries. The two French works studied—Journal (2008) by Hélène Berr, and La Douleur [The War] (1985) by Marguerite Duras—exhibit translation movements to different subject- positions within the body in order to testify of trauma. In contrast, the two Francophone works studied—Djamila Boupacha (1962) by Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi and Le passé devant soi (2008) by Gilbert Gatore—exhibit translation movements across different bodies (both human and animal). Most translation theories share a conceptual framework that assumes an original presence and a re-presentation of this presence elsewhere (Gentzler 144-45). Even deconstructionist translation theories, which challenge this supposition by hypothesizing that without translation, the original text ceases to exist (i.e. the translation reconstructs the source text), still assume that the original text exists in some form if translation has 2 occurred. Likewise, although deconstructionist theories go so far as to say that it is not we who write the translated text, but the translated text which writes us (Gentzler 145), it is still assumed that a “we” or an “us” exists. This dissertation creates a model of translation that would account