Forum for Modern Language Studies Vol. 52, No. 4, doi: 10.1093/fmls/cqw054
Advance Access Publication 9 September 2016
WHOSE NATIONAL ALLEGORY IS IT
ANYWAY? OR WHAT HAPPENS
WHEN CRIME FICTION IS
TRANSLATED?
ALISTAIR ROLLS
ABSTRACT
In this article, modern Crime Fiction is shown to have its origins in translation, and more specifically in translation from a tense national space known,
or posing, as American into another tense national space, French this time,
in which identity is being reconstructed in terms of alienation and a problematizing of self-knowledge. As French national allegory was refashioned in
response to trauma – as a result of Haussmannization in the mid-nineteenth
century and of the Second World War a century later – the United States
was always present as both ghostly Other and source of Crime Fiction.
When Baudelaire translated Poe, he rethought the Paris that Poe had
already placed at the centre of his crime-writing world; when Duhamel
translated Cheyney and Chase in the wake of the Liberation of Paris,
America was again reimagined as a new allegory for the post-war French
condition. This paper traces the role of Crime Fiction, and its translation, in
the formation of new national allegories; but it also simultaneously traces the
rewriting of (French) national allegory in the development of (French) Crime
Fiction. It concludes by pursuing this double phenomenon in the contemporary Crime Fiction scene with a review of the national allegory’s
interrogation in the context of retranslation.
Keywords: Charles Baudelaire; Crime Fiction; Marcel Duhamel; Douglas Kennedy;
national allegory; Edgar Allan Poe; retranslation; Série Noire; translation; world
literature
Introduction
The intersecting, and sometimes competing, concepts of World Literature and national literatures are of acute interest to those of us doing literary research in
Modern Languages disciplines, who find ourselves necessarily defending our turf
along national lines and thus constructing coherent programmes of study or research
of ‘French literature’ while at the same time arguing for the inclusion of our specialist areas within broader literary teaching or research paradigms. Various
disciplinary debates emerge at such intersections.1 The teaching of French history,
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ALISTAIR ROLLS
for example, lends itself well to the study of film, and we French lecturers are prone
to discuss the films of, say, Jacques Tati or those of the Nouvelle Vague in terms of
the representations of France that they articulate; and in so doing, it is possible to
exploit these texts without reference to the analytical techniques that are the stockin-trade of our colleagues in Film Studies, for whom the same films may well also be
of interest, but for markedly different reasons.2 And, of course, in French Studies itself the question of whether ‘French’ pertains to a nation called France, with its
myths, representations and recognizable national allegory, or allegories, or whether
it is a linguistic entity that extends beyond the borders of the Hexagon into the
broader Francophone world has been an important scholarly debate and a stimulus
for reappraising academic identity in recent years. Integral to this discussion have
been considerations of la littérature monde, in which French literature is always already
contained within a certain set of literary and geographic parameters just as it equally
intends beyond them, taking local, regional and national allegories across borders
onto a global stage.3 This transnationalizing of national allegories necessarily implies
the paired (but opposed and, again, competing) forces of expropriation and appropriation. And these terms strike a logical parallel with those forces at the heart of
another disciplinary area, with which Languages academics have a strong, if not always clear-cut, relationship – Translation Studies. Mapped onto that discipline’s
concerns, the mobility of textual expressions of national allegory and this tendency,
which is eminently literary, for texts to inhabit bordered spaces (books with their
covers, for example) but also to transgress them in order to fulfil their mission (at the
interface of the reader, where they are ‘read’, or of the intertext, where they integrate, for example, ‘literature’), summon the twin terms foreignization and
domestication, which describe, respectively, the degrees to which a text reflexively
stages its (status as) translation or assumes an apparently natural place in the target
culture’s literary system.
The objective of this article is to analyse what happens to textual articulations of
national allegories when they are translated. In its simplest terms, such a scenario
represents an exacerbated case of those questions that confront any literary translator: culturally specific items invariably invoke a translation strategy locatable along a
scale that has foreignization at one end and domestication at the other. A sufficient
number, or particularly powerful use, of such items can result in their becoming
metonymic of an allegorical reading at the macro level of the text. While I am interested in the processes called into play in the translation process at the micro level of
culturally specific elements, it is those that play out at this macro level – where a text
stands as a national allegory – that are my specific concern here and which bring in
the other, generic parameter of my title, which is to say Crime Fiction. In terms of
Translation Studies, I suspect, the question of interest would be whether, or the degree to which, a national allegory embodied at the macro level of the source text is
foreignized in translation, remaining an allegory of the foreign country for the target
reader, or whether it is domesticated holus bolus, becoming the national allegory of
the culture in which the translated text is read. My aim here, on the other hand, informed no doubt by my French Studies background, is to synthesize three case
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN CRIME FICTION IS TRANSLATED?
435
studies that have been of interest to me in other (literary, cultural history) contexts in
order to demonstrate how the translation of Crime Fiction into French has adopted
this massively domesticating approach at a number of key points in both French history and the history of the development of the genre in France. The case studies are,
first, Baudelaire’s translation of Poe, which simultaneously canonized the texts generally recognized as the first avatars of the modern crime story and ushered in what
we might call a new poetics of critical modernity;4 second, the inaugural texts of
Marcel Duhamel’s Série Noire, which, in 1945–1946, paved the way for French national ownership of the genre, or the development of French Crime Fiction; and
third, the strange case in France of Douglas Kennedy’s The Dead Heart, whose
retranslation appears paradoxically to strengthen the translated text’s ‘Frenchness’,
both highlighting its author’s claims to be a French author, albeit one writing originally in English, and obfuscating the domesticated, or French, national allegory
established by the first (and, certainly, original) translation. My aim with this synthesis is therefore twofold. On the one hand, I wish to put Crime Fiction on the
Translation Studies agenda, as a call for work on the micro level of the translation
process to follow these compelling stories of allegorical translation products. In this
sense, I should argue for the generic norms of Crime Fiction to be included alongside the ‘linguistic and cultural norms’, which, for Lawrence Venuti, ‘determine not
only the selection of texts for translation, but also the strategies devised to translate
them and the relations of equivalence established between the source and translated
texts’.5 On the other hand, I wish to refocus Crime Fiction Studies around translation, as process and product, for the importance of the role that it has played in the
genre’s development is matched only by the degree to which it has been overlooked
in scholarship.
National Crime Fiction, the New Realism
At a conference on Crime Fiction and the national allegory held in Australia in
2012, Fredric Jameson announced that the huge success of Scandinavian Crime
Fiction owed its very existence to translation.6 This is to say that Scandinavian difference is necessarily articulated in relation to an ‘Other’ and thus with a foreign
reader in mind. What Jameson was advancing was Crime Fiction’s key role, as contemporary literature’s most important transnational and translation phenomenon, in
the active creation and transformation of national allegory.7 What was perhaps only
meant at the time as a passing remark had a surprising effect on a number of scholars present, for whom, it appeared, the national narrative, as it pertains to this
Scandinavian context at least, is something written by and for the citizens of that nation, who are also therefore those best placed to understand it. Jameson’s point, I
should like to suggest, was twofold. On the one hand, Crime Fiction is considered
the ‘New Realism’, a form that, because of the exigencies of its highly plot-driven
structure based on the distribution of ‘clues’, showcases historically and geographically situated daily life in its most minute detail, thereby holding a mirror to a given
society at a given time. As such it is a powerful cultural vehicle for national allegory.
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ALISTAIR ROLLS
On the other hand, he seemed to be suggesting that Crime Fiction is an international genre, which takes ideas of nationhood and forces them into a dialectic with
the Other. In this way, the translator that Jameson pictured sitting at the author’s
shoulder, even as she or he writes the original crime novel, is not simply the embodiment of marketing expectations and future overseas sales figures; writing for
translation also involves producing a text that is always already transnational, which
cannot but affect the construction of national identity at the source and at the targeted destination.
These ideas are, of course, speculative. But then again, critical analysis of Crime
Fiction tends to lend itself to grand narratives, many of which are weighed down by
idées reçues, and this received wisdom in time becomes set as so many foundational
myths. So, while it is commonplace to begin studies of the genre by announcing its
vast, and growing, popularity throughout the world, the crucial role played by translation in its development is less often considered. This is to some extent due to the
tendency to classify Crime Fiction along national lines. Scandi-Noir has, as mentioned, been a successful literary marketing phenomenon in recent decades, but
French crime fiction, or so we read in the press, is now making a comeback. As
Christopher MacLehose, founder of MacLehose Press, a London-based publishing
company specialized in literature, and particularly Crime Fiction, translated into
English, explains in an interview in 2013 with the Independent newspaper:
Scandinavian crime became a commodity and far too many publishers put out too many
books of less than superb quality [. . .]. Publishers are like sheep. They go off in droves in
pursuit of the new big thing. France is the new big thing. There’s a great combination of
real writers with storytelling genius.8
The inferences to be drawn from such statements are not clear-cut. While, for example, MacLehose’s interests, however ovine their motivations, embrace literature that
is translated into English without discrimination along national lines, the discourse
in which these publishing practices are articulated adopts the same tendency to categorize Crime Fiction along national lines that has seen its scholarship crystallize
into, and become fixed within, these foundational myths.
A number of recent initiatives have sought to remobilize the genre, or perhaps to
shed new light on what has always been a literature of mobility. Jean Anderson,
Carolina Miranda and Barbara Pezzotti discuss it in terms of a transcultural contact
zone; but their study – on the foreign as it is represented in international Crime
Fiction – focuses on representations of the one inside the other, as opposed to the
translation of the one onto the other.9 Stewart King, for his part, investigates
the way in which the genre itself has ‘crossed borders and languages’;10 his focus,
accordingly, is on Crime Fiction as a model of World Literature. What King exposes
is a monopoly of ‘the Anglo-American canon’, in contradistinction to which ‘studies
of national literature are relegated to the margins with little critical engagement
between the two’.11 King’s assessment is borne out in such works as Lee Horsley’s
Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, which, despite genuine attempts at even-handedness
(Horsley decries, for example, the ‘overly schematic generalizations’ that oppose the
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN CRIME FICTION IS TRANSLATED?
437
hard-boiled, and thus American, model to the classic, and thus British, one12), assumes the Anglo-American corpus to be implicit in the words Crime Fiction. In this
vein, her use of the word ‘world’ (‘a world in crisis’; ‘the “world gone wrong” ’13) recalls its Americentric use in such expressions as baseball’s ‘World Series’. To counter
this bias, King uses the word ‘national’ (literature, language) to pertain to those nonAnglophone countries that receive Anglo-American Crime Fiction’s source texts
into their target reading cultures. The problems that flow from such models, which
ultimately seek to define national crime fictions in terms of their difference or similarity to the Anglo-American other, lead King to look to World Literature as a
means of circumventing the numbing effects that this polarity has on scholarship.
My aim here, while certainly allied with King’s, is to force the focus back onto the
problematics of this transcultural encounter in order to place translation (in this
case, into French) back at the very origins of Crime Fiction, origins that we locate in
the same place and texts as Horsley and others. For, as we shall see, the ‘original’
genre has translation at its core.
Poe, Baudelaire and original translation
Such problems are tackled head-on and obliquely by David Platten in his contribution to Claire Gorrara’s collection French Crime Fiction.14 Platten prefaces his study of
the beginnings of crime fiction with a caveat: it is not possible to trace the genre
back to one clear point of origin. Furthermore, when he begins his analysis, for begin
in one place he ultimately must, with Edgar Allan Poe, he performs two skilful manoeuvres. First, he reverts to the received wisdom while narrowing his field of study
down from Gorrara’s broad chosen descriptor Crime Fiction to the more specific
Detective Fiction: ‘Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is widely
accepted as the first detective fiction.’ Second, he moves subtly away from that other
problematic term, which is to say the ‘French’ in French Crime Fiction; he refers instead to the story’s ‘reception in France’.15 Here then, rather than translation being
considered of secondary importance when opposed to the ‘original’ work, it is
deemed to confer status on the original: ‘The impact of Poe’s short story may be
gauged by its reception in France.’16 If this tendency of Crime Fiction to ‘[move]
easily from one culture to the next’ thus occludes its (putative) origins but at the same
time increases its readership and, ultimately, its prestige, one may legitimately speculate as to whether translation is not Crime Fiction’s favoured mode.17 And to
conceptualize translation as a mode is to follow Walter Benjamin in his understanding of a text’s inherent translatability.18
While a text’s translatability is typically actualized in the form of translation (both
as practice and product), this is not a necessary precondition; rather, for Benjamin,
translatability lies in the nature of the original text. In the case of what, following
Platten, I shall consider here to be Poe’s detectival Ur-text, the setting itself is clearly
a factor: C. Auguste Dupin does not happen to find himself in Paris; he is Parisian
and his investigative methods are predicated on a critical engagement with the city’s
streets. That this critical engagement is typically Parisian is proven by the
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development, in literary and artistic terms, of what scholars like Ross Chambers and
Michel Covin consider a new form of critical modernity.19 The actualization of
Poe’s story in French translation is effected by none other than Charles Baudelaire,
whose Petits poèmes en prose plunge the reader into the very midst of Paris’s streets.
Indeed, because Baudelaire’s readers are forced to engage with the details of the
very walls and cobblestones that are the city’s lived reality, they are deprived of an
objective perspective on those streets, without which the latter cannot signify Paris.
Only metonymy – in this case the inclusion of Paris in the collection’s title, Les Petits
poèmes en prose: Le Spleen de Paris – allows the reader to situate the prose poems;
and yet, Paris’s metonymic presence is such that, even when it is absent from
view – overvalued, the focus too close – the prose poems are nothing other than an
expression of that city. This prose poetics plays out in the continual juxtaposition of
abstract values (poetic figures) and mundane events (prosaic elements), with the result that Paris is both itself (how it is experienced at a distance, as from an artist’s
garret, a Montgolfier or through a photographer’s lens, and thus, to borrow a term
from Chambers, belatedly) and other, which is to say, as it presents itself in real time
to those who live within its walls.
This oxymoronic tension of Baudelaire’s critical modernity can be felt in his translation of Poe’s story as early as the title, ‘Double assassinat dans la rue Morgue’,
where the emphasis on the ‘doubleness’ of the murder reinforces the dual elements
of Dupin’s detective praxis. For, unlike his purely objective examination of the facts
in ‘The Mystery of Marie Rog^et’, which forms the sequel to ‘The Murders in the
Rue Morgue’, and contrary to the popular conception of Dupin as the classic armchair detective, this first story sees him balance ratiocination with a physical, almost
visceral, experience of the crime scene and its urban locale. Indeed, Dupin goes as
far as to criticize Paris’s Prefect of Police for being too (or perhaps only) objective.20
While this is teased out and accentuated by Baudelaire’s translation, this critical modernity is present, as translatability, in Poe’s original text.
This originality is keenly felt by Baudelaire, who goes as far as to state that Poe’s
text resonated with him because it expressed ideas that he himself had had. It is no
exaggeration to suggest that Baudelaire considered himself the original author of
Poe’s crime stories, and that Poe’s text was a translation (even an act of anticipatory
plagiarism, or better still prescient auto-plagiarism) of the former’s prose-poetic expression of Paris.21 Ultimately, it would be upon publication of Baudelaire’s prose
poems in 1869, some decades after the publication of ‘The Murders in the Rue
Morgue’ (in 1841 in Graham’s Magazine and then in 1856 in Baudelaire’s translation,
which appeared as part of a collection entitled Histoires extraordinaires, thereby giving
Poe’s work the unity in France that it lacked in his native America) that Poe’s allegorical potential was fully actualized; and of course, it embodied then what it had
always tended towards – a French national narrative. And this narrative is duly mobilized, quite reflexively, as a translation outwards in Baudelaire’s poem ‘Any where
out of the world’ and as a metaphor for originality versus translatedness (or
Baudelaire’s debt to Poe, and vice versa) in the internal monologue posing as a dia
logue that is ‘L’Etranger’.
It is little wonder therefore that Poe’s Crime Fiction
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN CRIME FICTION IS TRANSLATED?
439
resonated with its French audience. For our purposes here, this is a foundational example of both Crime Fiction’s origins in translation, and in translatability, and its
association with the formation of allegories, not only of the source but, more importantly, of the target nation.
The ‘Série Noire’: French Crime Fiction by proxy
Clearly, the target culture is privileged in the French translation of Poe because the
story is originally set in Paris. And while we hope to have shown that Poe’s Parisianness runs deeper than a matter of setting alone, this template for a Crime Fiction
translation praxis that takes one national allegory and translates it onto another is
taken to a new level in Paris a century later when Marcel Duhamel is given charge,
in 1945, of what will go on to become France’s most famous and most prestigious
Crime Fiction series – Gallimard’s Série Noire. The origins of the Série Noire lie in
translation, of that there is no doubt. The first title of the series to be originally written by a French author, Serge Arcouet’s La Mort et l’ange (Death and the Angel), did
not appear until 1948, and when it did it was under the Anglicized pseudonym of
Terry Stewart. The idea that flows from this emphasis on translation, and which has
become the dominant scholarly interpretation of the Série Noire’s place in French
cultural history, is that the series met a local market demand for American crime fiction. For, Anglo-Saxon critics tend to agree, the new hardboiled genre of crime
fiction, of which Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are perhaps the mostcited exponents, is an ‘American’ literary form.
To emphasize the place of translation in the early years of the Série Noire is, to
some extent, to dismiss its originality. Two things get overlooked in this scenario: the
skopos of Duhamel’s team presents an extreme case of target-oriented translation;
and, furthermore, the American model that French readers devoured in the years
immediately following the Second World War did not present an unproblematic national narrative of the United States, and this for two reasons. First, as Erik Dussere
argues, hardboiled Crime Fiction develops out of a post-war crisis that ‘takes the
form of a mutually dependent and evolving tension between authenticity and commodification’.22 For Dussere this dialectic expresses a veritable anxiety at the heart
of the American national identity.23 If we replace the Baudelairean figure of the
fl^aneur with a twentieth-century model of consumerism – and the leap is not that
great, since la fl^anerie, the Parisian art of strolling, evolved alongside those first shopping arcades – Dussere’s model of a noir tradition predicated on a tension between
what is real (in this case, consumer culture) and what is mythical (what he frames as
American authenticity) is very similar to Baudelaire’s and Poe’s oxymoronic national
allegory and detective praxis, respectively. Again then, Crime Fiction’s emergence
sits alongside a national allegory of non-self-coincidence, of self-alterity. As French
scholar Frank Lhomeau describes it, the America that French readers craved was, if
not consciously conceived as such by them, at least served up to them in the form of
a myth.24 I should like to take this idea a little further by arguing that what readers
found reflected in the pages of the Série Noire, at least in those foundational years
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ALISTAIR ROLLS
1945–1946, was in fact an allegory of their own French post-war context. Second,
the American authors who embody this overweening French post-war desire for
American crime fiction (and the idea is that this is a form of readerly escapism) further problematize this American model for the simple reason that they were not
American: Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase, Duhamel’s fetish authors
whose titles dominated the early years of the Série Noire (between them they were
responsible for thirteen of the twenty-two novels published between 1945 and 1949)
were both English but wrote in what passed at the time for a recognizably American
style and set their works in America. What we have, therefore, in these foundational
early works is a national allegory (of the United States) that is reflexively mythical
and always already in translation.
Given the translatability of the original material and the ‘creative’ translation
praxis (which in the hands of Duhamel et al. at times bordered on that more generic
idea of adaptation) on which the Série Noire was predicated, it is perhaps unsurprising that one of the most eloquent examples of the translation of national allegory is
that of the text chosen by Duhamel to inaugurate the series in the autumn of 1945.
As has been demonstrated elsewhere, Peter Cheyney’s pre-war novel Poison Ivy (it
was first published by Collins of London in 1937) is skilfully appropriated for the specific target conditions of post-war France.25 This mapping occurs as early as the
title, which in French is La Môme vert-de-gris, or, literally, The Greenish-Grey Kid.
The translation of national allegory works in two principal ways here. First, there is
a cryptic reference to the German Occupation, which, when understood (if only unconsciously), allows the story of special agent Lemmy Caution’s victory over a gang
of hoods to stand as a retelling of the recent Allied victory. The French word môme is
just one word that could be used at that time to convey the sense of that classic
hardboiled English term ‘dame’; another is souris, or, literally, ‘mouse’. The colour
vert-de-gris was the precise French term for the shade of grey worn by the German
forces of occupation; and a souris grise was the word for a female officer in the
Wehrmacht. The key allegorical role of the dame, whose name is Carlotta in
Cheyney’s novel, is, then, to symbolize the forces of evil, only to change colours at
the very end, at which point she reveals herself to have been a double-agent all
along. This leads to the second way in which national allegory is translated by
Duhamel: the vague title Poison Ivy is transformed so as to give far greater prominence to Carlotta; she is in fact the eponymous hero in the French text in a much
more obvious way than in the original. Carlotta’s transformation, at the denouement
but more specifically in translation, from collaborator to double-agent, is a clear allusion to the French resistance and to those now iconic images of resistance fighters
taking back the streets of Paris in August 1944, many of whom were of course
women. The re-gendering of the eponymous hero, if not the protagonist, in the
translated text is crucial for much the same reason that the images of female resistance fighters have become iconic: the principal figure of French national
iconography is a woman, Marianne. This is the case for many European nations –
we may think of Germania, Britannia and so on – but Marianne’s presence is
particularly powerful in France where marble busts of her are an omnipresent
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN CRIME FICTION IS TRANSLATED?
441
symbol of the Republic; indeed, the resonance of photographs of female resistance
fighters owes as much to Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting of 1830 La Liberté guidant le peuple, and its central place in the iconography of the French national
narrative, as it does to their role in the Liberation, at which time the busts that mayors had hidden from the occupying forces were displayed once more.26 In this light,
Carlotta is transformed in translation into an incarnation of France and her (psychologically, mythologically) important, if belated, role in the victory over the Germans.
Translation therefore, and any emphasis on fidelity to the original, is wilfully subverted in order to restore a sense of ownership in the victory over the
German army to a liberated people still unable to speak openly of or to come
to terms, consciously, with the dark years of Occupation. The specific nature
of this translation praxis allowed a new national allegory to emerge obliquely,
between the lines. Seen in this light, Duhamel’s project offers a counterargument to the economics of literary translation markets, whose logic, as
discussed by Gisèle Sapiro, dictates that translation flows from a source of relative economic power (the United States, the net exporter) to a target of
relative economic weakness (France, the net importer);27 or, rather, Duhamel
manipulates the status quo, creating (albeit subliminally), as opposed to voicing, a new French national allegory (based again on a tension between a
myth of ‘Old France’ and the new lived reality of compromise and American
cultural and economic hegemony) in the form of ‘American’ Crime Fiction
appropriated as French. Thus, Peter Cheyney’s continued relevance in Crime
Fiction discourse in France is as poignant as his absence from scholarly considerations of French Crime Fiction. It is my contention here that the
difference between Crime Fiction in France and French Crime Fiction is
a narrow one indeed. Furthermore, the intersection of these two entities is
nowhere more complex, or more compelling, than in instances where
national allegory is translated.
Even in cases that are ostensibly less radical than the transformation of one national allegory into another, as offered by the Série Noire’s rewriting of France’s
Liberation narrative, Crime Fiction’s role as the new Realism is more subtle and
compelling than the clue-puzzle plot explanation suggests. Claire Gorrara’s work on
Crime Fiction’s role as a barometer for the evolution of the French national psyche
in the second half of the twentieth century, for example, reveals how the genre’s deployment of national allegories subverts official histories and dominant collective
memories of the Second World War.28 Gorrara reveals that Crime Fiction does
more than simply articulate the successive stages of French society’s venting of the
long-suppressed trauma of Occupation; rather, it forms part of this healing process,
writing the texts of catharsis and, in so doing, prompting change, fashioning the
Zeitgeist and redefining the national imaginary. And yet, while transnational factors
are shown to be important in the formation of national narratives in Gorrara’s
work, the role of translation is again passed over in favour of a classification of
Crime Fiction along national lines, based on the citizenship or mother tongue of the
author.
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ALISTAIR ROLLS
Retranslation and repression of the national allegory
As French Crime Fiction has increasingly – and increasingly without critical challenge, it would seem – come to denote Crime Fiction written by French authors, the
foreign texts that paved the way for their success, and this has come to mean principally those American hardboiled standards of Hammett, Chandler, Thompson and
Goodis that first appeared in the Série Noire, have been retranslated in such series
as Gallimard’s Bibliothèque Noire. This appears to be in line with the premise, as
noted by Robert Kahn and Catriona Seth, that translations become dated in a way
that the original classic does not.29 As Philippe Marty notes, the ‘re’ prefix in retranslation suggests a move backwards in time, which is picked up by Kahn and Seth’s
use of Shakespeare as an example.30 Indeed, as Venuti concurs, ‘[r]etranslations deliberately mark the passage of time’.31 And yet, in the case of the wave of
retranslations of works previously published in the Série Noire, less time has passed.
Furthermore, in addition to the relatively small lapse of time between the translation
and the retranslation, there also seems to be an assumption that the style of the prewar English original is less removed from contemporary English than that of the first
French translation, conducted generally within ten years of the original text’s publication, is from contemporary (spoken) French, which is debatable, especially when
we consider that the originals were self-consciously written by authors seeking to
carve out a new myth of America. What appears to be in question here is the specific nature of the translation praxis employed by Duhamel’s team. If these
subsequent retranslations are designed not so much to mark the passage of time but
to replace, or stand in place of, the first translation, we find ourselves in the territory
of what Marty would prefer to label ‘protranslation’.32
Implicit, therefore, is a criticism of the very translation praxes on which the origins of French Crime Fiction, which are intimately linked to those of the Série
Noire, are predicated, which is to say, versions that are colourful, perhaps ‘loose’
even, to the point that some may be considered examples of adaptation or rewriting,
and texts that are often heavily edited to fit the standard paperback format in
France.33 This assessment (or at least the logical inference to be drawn) that the early
translations of the Série Noire had gone too far in transforming the text, in terms of
both the language or setting with which the target readership would be familiar and
the format to which they were used, sees the positive potential for the development
of new, and other, national allegories replaced by a negative view of a translation
skopos at the extreme limits of domestication. The paradox here lies in the retranslatory response to this situation, which is not necessarily predicated on foreignization:
whereas foreignizing skopoi typically privilege texts that display their status as translation, these Crime Fiction retranslations are designed to revert to the original, of
which they aspire to become a neutral, unmarked vessel (the ‘re’ in this case is, as
Yves Chevrel reminds us, that of retro-translation).34 It seems clear that few translations could be more reflexively badged ‘translation’ than the titles of the Série Noire.
This paradox has also, however, to do with source and target canon formation. For
scholars like Venuti, retranslation is destined to occur periodically not because
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443
translations date and original texts do not; rather, the dated nature of the original
text is forgiven because of, or perhaps even enhances, its canonical status in the
source culture. Clearly, the Série Noire is now a powerful metonym for canonical
French Crime Fiction – appearance among its titles confers success on French crime
authors to this day. Retranslating the Série Noire can therefore be considered a
rather perverse act.
The Série Noire’s canonical status stems, I should argue, from the translation of
national allegory offered by Duhamel’s early versions, whose success owed much to
his deliberate use of the argot specific to the time and place of the target readership.
The Série Noire texts that have been famously retranslated are those whose canonical status was assured in their source culture – Hammett, Chandler et al.; and, it is
true, it is these authors who have come to represent the Série Noire in the received
wisdom of Anglo-American French Studies scholarship. It is nonetheless the case
that these authors were not those whose translated texts forged French ownership of
post-war (French) Crime Fiction; instead, as we have seen, it was those of Cheyney
and Chase that dominated the formative years of the Série Noire and whose texts
were, from their original inception, written self-consciously in the argot-ridden, and
swiftly if not always already dated, language of an America to which these authors
were thoroughly alien. And it is these very authors who have faded from their source
culture, in whose canon their place was never clear. Thus, the Série Noire, despite
these few, atypical cases of retranslation, is a rare, and largely unrecognized, translation success story for the very reason that it translated its authors’ canonical status
along with their national allegory.
A curious example of what is at stake in the retranslation process is the trajectory
in France, and in French translation, of American author Douglas Kennedy’s first
novel, The Dead Heart (1994). While this novel met with little success in the AngloSaxon world, its translation in the Série Noire, both in the collection but also, and
more importantly, in the traditional house style (Catherine Cheval, who was charged
with the task, is an experienced Crime Fiction translator), as Cul-de-sac (1997), enabled it to achieve almost immediate cult status in France, where, because of its
setting in the outback, it was received as an ‘Australian novel’ (which, in France, and
more specifically in French publishing circles, to this day summons images of the
outback rather than the coastline). For our purposes here, its reception as an
‘Australian novel’ appeared to bring into play all the exotica that the Australian
bush conjures up in the French national imaginary, in which the Australian reality,
and now more predominant mythology, of a population almost entirely located on
the coast plays little part. This, coupled with the liberal use of argot in the French
version, typical of the Série Noire and redolent of its domestication of British and
American thrillers from the mid- to late-1940s onwards, made Cul-de-sac the text that
everyone had in their hands in airport lounges and in the Paris Métro, much as
would be the fate of Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires (1998) the following year. The combination of (domesticated) Australian otherness and the crime
flavour of the Série Noire (which is just as much of a myth as the Australian bush to
the extent that Duhamel’s series was always much broader in reality than its noir
444
ALISTAIR ROLLS
image has suggested) makes this a model of crime success in and of translation (be it
Australia into France or American crime into a French crime series). It is surprising,
therefore, that only eleven years later, which is to say with insufficient passing of
time according to Venuti’s scenario, The Dead Heart was retranslated by Bernard
Cohen and published as Piège nuptial (2008). This new text, which was repackaged
for a literary, or non-crime, fiction market, was designed to confirm the evolution of
the Kennedy brand in France from ‘translated American author’ to ‘French author’,
as Kennedy deemed the new translation to be closer to his ‘own’ style (Cohen had
already translated all Kennedy’s subsequent novels and was by this time the author’s
transparent – in both senses of the term, which is to say obvious and invisible –
French voice).35 Perversely then, to become more successful as himself in France,
Kennedy chose a retranslation closer in style to the ‘original’ (American) text over
an initial translation emblematic of the Série Noire and its domesticating praxis,
which is, of course, synonymous with French Crime Fiction.36
What must be considered here is whether Kennedy’s desire to gain full recognition for himself as a native French author, as much at home when resident, and
writing, in Paris as he is in London, Berlin or his native Maine, is not realized at the
expense of the potential of the novel for which he is most renowned in France to be
read as a French national allegory. In the text, Nick Hawthorne travels from the
United States to Australia not so much to find as to lose himself in a place that, for
him, embodies uncharted space. While there he enjoys a casual, even primal, sexual
relationship with a hitchhiker named Angie. The power relations are quickly reversed, however, and it is Angie who emerges as the sexual aggressor and who
kidnaps Nick and forces him into marriage and exile in the outback. American
quasi-colonial, cultural and economic hegemony (in terms of translatability, Nick’s
name becomes nique, or ‘fuck’, in French, which sums up his ambitions vis-a-vis both
Australia and Angie) is here appropriated and exploited by the leading female character. The American export is thus physically manhandled by its importer and
domesticated, quite literally, in the uncharted town of Wollanup. In this light, it is
extremely tempting to read the text as an allegory of the translation praxis of the
Série Noire. Even Nick’s ultimate return to the United States (suggestive of the text’s
trajectory towards retranslation, or the retranslatability inherent in the original translation) fails to undo this reading entirely, since his escape from Wollanup is
facilitated by another powerful female figure with whom he falls in love and who
dies to save him – a sort of mirror image of the femme fatale of Anglo-American noir
mythology, but very much in the mould of Cheyney’s Carlotta. Thus, Marianne
changes Nick: she in turn disempowers him, frees him and leaves him empty and
broken. The final proof of the novel’s inherent potential for re-allegorization, of
course, is when this story of a search for a new identity overseas finally finds cult status . . . in France, and also in the Série Noire. In this reading, Australia shifts from a
symbol of uncharted space to one of recharting, a place where national allegory can
be reconfigured. In this sense, Kennedy’s Australia is originally constructed as what
Emily Apter has termed the ‘translation zone’, a site that ‘render[s] self-knowledge
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN CRIME FICTION IS TRANSLATED?
445
foreign to itself; a way of denaturalizing citizens, taking them out of the comfort
zone of national space, daily ritual, and pre-given domestic arrangements’.37
Tables are turned here: Nick and the text of which he is the protagonist are rendered foreign to self, which is to say that they are quite literally domesticated beyond
(self-)recognition by the target culture. And yet, because the translated text and the
original are only separated virtually, across one space – the translation zone – which
operates like a Sartrean negating strip, the rendering of self-knowledge foreign to itself is arguably a form of auto-differentiation, or one more instance of Parisian
critical modernity. In Kennedy’s case the retranslation does not follow the various
patterns described by Venuti; rather than ‘reflect[ing] changes in the values and institutions of the translating culture’,38 it appears to deny them. If Nick’s
domestication in the (re)translation zone is less marked by the reflexive argot of the
Série Noire, it is because the author himself is attempting complete domestication
into the target culture. Kennedy’s denial – in the foreign language and culture – of
his status as translation necessitates the repression, in the form of the complete erasure, of the Série Noire text and its overt associations with translation products and
processes.39 In this case, then, it can no longer be said that the translation is dated;
the language and style of the Série Noire are now timeless. Here it is its very canonicity – its signalling of Cul-de-sac as Crime Fiction – that is shunned, as such an effet de
série, such collective belonging, serves to deprive the author of his autonomy. The
perversity of this publishing manoeuvre, of course, is that the Série Noire has long
since become the most prestigious site of French Crime Fiction, and Kennedy’s
attempt to become a French author a part entière is performed at the expense of his
place in the French (crime) canon.
In conclusion, it might be considered that the reflexively domesticating skopos of
the Série Noire, with its wilful use of ‘dated’ language, has made retranslation both
inevitable and redundant. Indeed, it is almost as if French crime translation praxis
provides another take on the ‘re’ of retranslation, that is to say, the ‘re’ of re flexivity
or reiteration. In this sense, the translation of Crime Fiction into French, which reappropriates and reallegorizes, functions always already as retranslation. As Venuti
notes, ‘Retranslations reflect changes in the values and institutions of the translating
culture, but they can also produce such changes by inspiring new ways of reading
and appreciating the source texts.’40 As I hope to have shown here, the translating
praxis that has periodically come to the fore and has now effectively become French
Crime Fiction is one that drives, rather than merely responds to, change in and of
the target culture. Far from ‘prevent[ing] the translating language and culture from
effacing the linguistic and cultural differences of the source text, its foreignness’,41
retranslation of the reflexive type reappropriates the foreignness of that which is
marked as other and rebadges it as auto-differentiation, ‘render[ing] self-knowledge
foreign to itself’ inside the target culture. The passage from (the myth of ) an
American genre to (the myth of ) French Crime Fiction occurs across the translation
zone, and Frenchness, as exemplified by Baudelaire and Duhamel’s Paris, has crime,
and the blurring of originality and translatedness, at the heart of its self-alterity.
ALISTAIR ROLLS
446
Finally, in response to my own stated aim of putting Crime Fiction on the
Translation Studies agenda and refocusing Crime Fiction Studies around translation,
I hope to have shown that these two moves are effectively one and the same. As
King’s work on Crime Fiction as World Literature inevitably places translation at the
heart of the transnational mobility of the genre, Crime Fiction, which, as John G.
Cawelti has argued,42 is a great driver of literary canon revision and democratization,
can now prepare itself to become the object of its own tendency to open borders.
French Studies
University of Newcastle
Callaghan, NSW 230
Australia
[email protected]
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I should like to acknowledge my colleagues Jean Fornasiero, Marie-Laure
Vuaille-Barcan and John West-Sooby, with whom I have been involved in a
number of projects analysing the stakes at play in French translations of various
examples of Anglo-Saxon crime fiction. These projects culminated in 2016 in a
special issue of The Translator (Translating National Allegories: The Case of Crime
Fiction, 22: 2). Further collaboration with my colleagues Jesper Gulddal and
Stewart King on the transnational mobility of Detective Fiction is also planned
as part of the Faculty of Education and Arts’ Strategic Network ‘Detective
Fiction on the Move’ at the University of Newcastle, Australia, under whose auspices the present article was written.
NOT ES
1
See Greg Hainge and Alistair Rolls, ‘The Larrikin as Hero (in French Studies)’, Australian
Journal of French Studies, 51.2–3 (2014), 269–80.
2
Even in French Studies circles, the figure of Jacques Tati is a polarizing one: while his films
can be considered to critique the French national allegory in its post-war context, which is to say as
tensely opposed to, and very much in a love-hate relationship with, the United States, David Bellos
argues for a view of Tati’s Monsieur Hulot as ‘everyman’, and thus as a necessarily international figure, forever transcending, even eschewing, identification with a specific nationality. See David Bellos,
Jacques Tati: His Life and Art (London: Harvill Press, 1999).
3
See, for example, Charles Forsdick, ‘The Francosphere and Beyond: Exploring the
Boundaries of French Studies’, Francosphères, 1.1 (2012), 1–17.
4
Anderson et al. take Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ as their point of departure in
The Foreign in International Crime Fiction: Transcultural Representations, ed. by Jean Anderson, Carolina
Miranda and Barbara Pezzotti (London and New York: Continuum, 2012), p. 1.
5
Lawrence Venuti, Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice (London and New York:
Routledge, 2013), p. 99.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN CRIME FICTION IS TRANSLATED?
447
6
The ‘Telling Truths: Crime Fiction and National Allegory’ conference was held at the
University of Wollongong, 6–8 December 2012.
7
Jameson coined the term ‘national allegory’ in relation to Third-World literature, which, for
him, is necessarily political and designed to explain the ‘nation’. Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-World
Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text, 15 (1986), 65–88.
8
Nick Clark, ‘Well it is called noir . . . How French crime writers killed the competition’, Independent,
17 July 2013: <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/well-it-is-called-noir-howfrench-crime-writers-killed-the-competition-8714642.html# > [accessed 16 December 2014].
9
Anderson et al., The Foreign in International Crime Fiction, pp. 1–6.
10
Stewart King, ‘Crime Fiction as World Literature’, Clues: A Journal of Detection, 32.2 (2014),
8–19 (p. 8).
11
Ibid., p. 9.
12
Lee Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), p. 68.
13
Ibid., pp. 70, 72.
14
David Platten, ‘Origins and Beginnings: The Emergence of Detective Fiction in France’, in
French Crime Fiction, ed. by Claire Gorrara (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 14–35.
15
16
17
Ibid., p. 20.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 14.
18
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn, ed.
by Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), pp. 69–82 (p. 70).
19
Ross Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999);
Michel Covin, L’Homme de la rue: Essai sur la poétique baudelairienne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000).
20
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and
Other Writings, ed. by David Galloway (London: Penguin, 1986), pp. 189–224 (p. 224).
21
For a more detailed examination of the anticipatory plagiarism at work in this case, see
Alistair Rolls and Clara Sitbon, ‘ “Traduit de l’américain” from Poe to the Série Noire: Baudelaire’s
Greatest Hoax?’, Modern and Contemporary France, 21.1 (2013), 37–53.
22
Erik Dussere, America is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 10.
23
Ibid., p. 11.
24
Frank Lhomeau, ‘Le Roman “noir” a l’américaine’, Temps noir, 4 (2000), 5–33.
25
Alistair Rolls and Deborah Walker, French and American Noir: Dark Crossings (Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 50–71.
26
This is an interesting case of real women taking on the role of a symbol; their prominent
role in the street fighting of summer 1944 can arguably be seen to constitute an allegory of the freeing
of the hidden busts of Marianne just as Marianne’s return symbolized the emancipation of the
French people. For a more detailed account of Marianne’s return, see Maurice Agulhon and Pierre
Bonte, Marianne: Les visages de la République (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), pp. 79–85 (especially, p. 83).
27
Gisèle Sapiro, ‘French Literature in the World System of Translation’, in French Global:
A New Approach to Literary History, ed. by Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 298–319.
28
Claire Gorrara, French Crime Fiction and the Second World War: Past Crimes, Present Memories
(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2012).
29
Robert Khan and Catriona Seth, ‘Avant-propos: une fois ne suffit pas’, in La Retraduction, ed.
by Robert Khan and Catriona Seth (Mont-Saint-Aignan: Publications des universités de Rouen et du
Havre, 2010), pp. 7–10.
30
Philippe Marty, ‘Le “re” de “retraduire”: La communauté des traductions (meinen dans un
vers de Rilke: Sonnets a Orphée, I, 4)’, in La Retraduction, ed. by Khan and Seth, pp. 33–45 (p. 36).
ALISTAIR ROLLS
448
31
32
Venuti, Translation Changes Everything, p. 106.
Marty, ‘Le “re” de “retraduire” ’, p. 36.
33
In 1947 the Série Noire format was standardized at 256 pages to correspond to other famous
series at Gallimard, such as its ‘white’ literary series (la Blanche).
34
Yves Chevrel, ‘Introduction: La retraduction – und kein Ende’, in La Retraduction, ed. by Khan
and Seth, pp. 11–20 (p. 11). The essays that comprise Khan and Seth’s volume on retranslation tend
to agree that retranslation itself is predicated on a paradox: a retranslation attests to a need to replace,
or at least to add to, a previous translation and, at the same time, to the ongoing importance in the
target culture of the original text and thus, to some degree at least, to the success of that first
translation.
35
In this way, The Dead Heart’s doubly successful translation is exemplary of both the kingmaking power of the Série Noire’s at times brutally domesticating skopos on the one hand, and on the
other the urgency felt amongst many contemporary French translators of crime fiction to retranslate
texts previously featuring in the series. For a discussion of this debate, see the ATLAS (association
pour la promotion de la traduction littéraire) table ronde entitled ‘Traduire le polar’, chaired on 7 June
1997 and subsequently edited by Jacqueline Lahana: ‘Journée de printemps: Traduire le polar’,
TransLittérature, 14 (1997), 15–37.
36
For more detailed analyses of this case, see our respective chapters in Masking Strategies:
Unwrapping the French Paratext, ed. by Alistair Rolls and Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan (Oxford: Peter
Lang, 2011), pp. 47–67 and 698–84, respectively.
37
Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 6.
38
Venuti, Translation Changes Everything, p. 107.
39
The publication of Piège nuptial by Belfond obliterated Cul-de-sac’s existence as a legal entity.
It has been removed from Gallimard’s catalogue.
40
41
42
Venuti, Translation Changes Everything, p. 107.
Ibid., pp. 107–08.
John G. Cawelti, ‘Canonization, Modern Literature, and the Detective Story’, in Theory and
Practice of Classic Detective Fiction, ed. by Jerome H. Delamater and Ruth Prigozy (Westport, CT and
London: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 5–15 (p. 6).