Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation,
Creativity: A Case Study
Gillian Lane-Mercier
McGill University
Abstract
One of the most formidable problems faced by English Canadian translators of
Quebec literature is the presence of joual in the works of novelists and
playwrights since the 1960s. Defined as a substandard variety of French spoken
in the working class neighbourhoods of Montreal, joual stands out from the other
varieties of Quebec French due to the large number of anglicisms it contains and
the nationalist connotations it conveys. As such, one of literary joual’s most
obvious features is its untranslatability. This paper proposes to explore some of
the issues joual’s untranslatability has raised in the Canadian and Quebec
contexts by using David Homel’s 1984 retranslation of Jacques Renaud’s novel
Le cassé (1964) as a case study. Homel’s translation strategies serve to
corroborate the hypothesis that untranslatability can be a powerful source of
linguistic and ethical creativity in a given literary, political and socio-cultural
context.
I should like to begin by briefly commenting on some of the linguistic,
ideological and ethical translation effects produced by two English
renderings of a passage from the same French source text. My
comments will conform to the following – momentarily erroneous –
scenario: I am a unilingual, English-Canadian reader with an interest
in Quebec literature, culture and politics since the 1960’s, who must
rely on translation to acquire an insight into the Quebec perspective
on such matters. I wish to know more about Quebec’s desire to
separate from Canada. I have just come across two English versions
of a novel by Jacques Renaud published in 1964, one year after the
first bombs set by the separatist movement’s radical fringe exploded.
The cover page of the first translation has caught my eye due to its
rather unsettling – albeit ultimately reassuring – political implications,
together with its confrontational bilingualism.1 It reads:
the entire
explosive
Quebec best-seller
by J. RENAUD
Translated from Quebekish
by GERALD ROBITAILLE
IVE
EBEC
IBRE
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Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study
FLAT BROKE AND BEAT
(Le Cassé)2
The unsettling aspects stem as much from the partially effaced but
easily recognizable (even for unilingual Anglophones) separatist
slogan “Vive le Québec libre” as from the words “explosive” and “bestseller,” with their respective terrorist and collectivist connotations,
whereas the more reassuring aspects can be found at once in the
quaint, vaguely ridiculous neologism “Quebekish,” the implicit causeand-effect relationship between “explosive” and “Beat”, as well as the
mainstream implications of “best-seller” which counteract the more
politically oriented collectivist connotations. In contrast, the cover of
the second version conveys significantly less information: title: Broke
City; author: Jacques Renaud; translator: David Homel. I have further
noted that Robitaille’s translation was published the same year as the
original (1964), whereas Homel’s retranslation appeared in 1984,
accompanied by the following disclaimer: “The publication of the
present translation should not be construed as a critical refutation of
Le cassé’s first translation.”
Bearing this scenario in mind, here are the translated excerpts.
The hero, Ti-Jean, who believes his girlfriend Philomène is having an
affair with Bouboule, has just awakened from a nightmare in which he
threw Philomène out the window:
Ti-Jean sat up on the edge of the bed...The slut, I
pitched her out... […]. I pitched her out... The bitch!
I want her to get a mug nobody can look at... I don’t
want anyone to put his dirty paw on her... No one
‘cept me... Me! No one but me! Kryce! Bouboule, it
must be true... He’s nothing but a fuckin’ runt! I’ll
bust his mug in, that lousy son of a bitch! I’ll smash
him to bits! Kill him... just hit an’ kick till he’s done
for! Bouboule is a son of a bitch... I’m sure Yves is
right... Bouboule, he sleeps with Mémène... And
her, she lets him the tramp. Bouboule’s a good fer
nothin’ bum... It’s him sells dope... He’s a dirty pig...
Her, I’ll break her to bits! To bits, goddam it! ... I’ll
kill ‘em both!...Bouboule, you I’ll kill ya! The filthy
dog! (Renaud, 1964b, pp. 54-56)
Johnny sat up on the edge of the bed... I threw that
cunt right out the window... […]. I threw her right out
on her ass, that bitch...! I wanted to carve her face
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Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study
up but good... So nobody’d wanna touch her... Cept
me... Just me! Dammit! Must be true, her and
Bubbles... That little snot-nose scum! Gonna kill that
bastards ass! Gonna waste him but good! Kill him
with my fists and my feet! Bubbles is a son of a
bitch. ... Ask me, Yves is right. Bubbles sleepin with
Mena... And she lets him do it, that bitch! Bubbles a
fuckin bum... A pusher... A bastard... I’m gonna
break that bitch in two! In ten, goddammit...! Im
gonna waste the both of em...! Bubbles, Im gonna
kill your ass! Son of a bitch! (Renaud, 1984, pp. 4849)
I would like to argue that, in the Anglo-Canadian context of the mid1960’s, Robitaille’s translation strategy produces a number of
alienating effects with respect to Quebec’s otherness that Homel’s
very different translation strategy defuses and displaces in the AngloCanadian context of the mid-1980’s. My overall aim is to test the
general hypothesis according to which the translator may be
perceived as a writer and, by extension, a creator in his or her own
right insofar as the translation process relies heavily on problem
solving which, in turn, implies an uneasy and ever-shifting balance
between novelty and appropriateness, liberty and constraint
(Balacescu & Stefanink, 2003). By so doing, I should like to test the
more limited hypothesis that the ensuing notions of the translator’s
agency and creativity cannot be reduced to questions of mere
linguistic or stylistic prouesse, as much recent scholarship on the
subject has tended to do. Rather, the translator’s writerly and creative
activity should also be linked to questions of ethical novelty and
appropriateness, where ‘ethics’ is defined not only as the relationship
between self and other, but also as the translator’s responsibility – or
lack thereof – with respect to the source text, target reader
expectations, and, as the case may be, previous translations of the
same source text. As I hope to show, the translator’s writerly and
creative activity is as much a result of his or her linguistic liberties as
of what I shall call context-bound freedoms which include not just the
source-text, but pre-existing images of otherness as well that act as
ethical constraints against which context-bound freedoms derive their
innovative power. In other words, the translator as writer-creator must
be attentive to the images of self and other generated by his or her
writerly and creative activity within the target culture, especially when
he or she is faced with certain types of translation problems, such as
untranslatability, which demand a heightened sense of linguistic
creativity.
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Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study
Let us return now to our two translated passages for, as we
shall soon see, untranslatability is indeed the source of some of the
conflicting ethical effects they convey. The question we must ask is:
what images of English Canada (self) and of Quebec (other) do these
passages construct, and how? While there are obvious similarities
between the two excerpts, most notably the uneducated level of TiJean’s/Johnny’s speech, the abundant use of vulgarisms and
obscenities, together with the vocabulary of violence, sex and drugs,
there are just as obvious differences that seem to point to two
opposing translation strategies and two opposing ethical stances.
From a linguistic perspective, Robitaille’s version not only
retains the characters’ French nicknames, more importantly, it
contains unidiomatic expressions such as “kryce” and “pitched her
out,” as well as a fairly impressive series of Gallicisms.3 It also
presents significant variations in language register which alternate
between vulgarisms (“fuckin’”), familiar insults (“dirty pig,” “tramp”),
colloquialisms (“good fer nothin’”, “paw”) and standard speech (“I’m
sure Yves is right.”). When combined, these choices point to a literal –
or, as Sherry Simon (1994) has called it, an ethnographic –
translation strategy ostensibly designed to respect both the authority
of the original and its cultural difference (literally: Quebec’s
untranslatability). Readers of Flat Broke and Beat can not for one
second forget that they are reading a ‘foreign’ text.4
From an ethical perspective, such a strategy, in particular the
very insistent presence of unidiomatic expressions and literalisms,
serves at once to remind Anglo-Canadian readers that the cultural
divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is intact, and to create the (self-?)
satisfying illusion that ‘we’ are being provided a direct insight into
contemporary Quebec society, per force very different from ‘our’s’.5
More to the point, from an ideological perspective such a strategy
also serves to attenuate the “explosive” potential of the novel’s verbal
and thematic violence by inducing an alienating effect that sets the
Anglophone reader at a distance from the folklorish, colourful, at
times incomprehensible (“Kryce?”) and consequently politically
innocuous speech of the cultural other. One can almost sense the
reader’s political relief: Quebec separatism doesn’t stand a chance
with people who say “filthy dog,” “Bouboule, you I’ll kill ya,” (and
elsewhere) “Bunch o’ nitwits,” “It’s daffy this” or “Ti-Jean swallows his
own spit.” In other words, Robitaille’s literal, more often than not wordfor-word rendering reinforced current day Anglo-Canadian
stereotypes and condescending attitudes with respect to Quebec,
31
Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study
maintained the cultural gap (read: imbalance) between the two
founding nations, together with the diglossia (cultural and linguistic
inferiority) it fostered, thereby allaying the fears ignited in English
Canada by the terrorist factions of Quebec’s nationalist movement.
After all, Quebec language, culture and nationalist politics were no
more than harmless “quebekish” – whatever that means –, as the
translation’s cover page had already suggested.
In contrast, Homel’s version tends heavily toward the
idiosyncratic; it also contains a larger quantity of vulgarisms which
strengthen the thematic violence, as well as numerous syntactic
deformations, notably the frequent elision of the grammatical subject.
Furthermore, his consistent recourse to North American street slang,
which Homel himself qualified as “a generalized, big-city, workingclass, northern, white dialect” (1985, p. 23), allows for very little
variation in language register. The term “generalized” is key here, for
it underscores the ‘delocalized,’ quasi-universal aspect of this
register. Indeed, by occulting the geo-political and cultural origins of
the main characters – who, after all, could just as well be from
Toronto or Chicago or San Francisco – urban street slang eschews
questions of local colour and cultural difference in the name of
sociolinguistic equivalence or sameness. Of course the informed
reader knows the characters are from Montreal,6 but he or she may
not realize they are supposed to be French-speaking, for their
substandard register is distinctly ‘our’s,’ as are the anglicized names
of the main characters. Homel’s use of equivalence, which is usually
associated with conservative translational practices of acculturation
and assimilation from a political and ethical standpoint, thus produces
the exact opposite effect of Robitaille’s rendering, at least on the
surface: rather than calling attention to the cultural gap so as to better
consolidate it, the characters’ idiomatic speech fosters a sense of
(self)recognition: ‘they’ are/could be (like) ‘us.’
This, however, is only half the story. On the one hand, Homel’s
acculturating translation flouts the condescending ethnographic
discourse of cultural curiosity informing Robitaille’s literal version; on
the other hand, it brings into focus the otherness – that is, the
stigmatized, the excluded, the downtrodden – existing within, rather
than without, the linguistic and sociocultural parameters of ‘our’
society. Put differently, whereas Robitaille’s supposedly foreignizing,
source-oriented translation choices ultimately serve the dominant
target-language culture by reassuring the Anglophone reader,
Homel’s supposedly domesticating, target-oriented translation
choices challenge the reader to confront head-on issues of
32
Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study
sociolinguistic marginalization, colonization and (counter-)violence
that not only plagued Québec society during the 1960’s, but plague
Canadian society as a whole twenty years later. I shall return to this
point in a moment.
In order to link these linguistic and ethical effects to questions of
writing and creativity, I should now like to modify my initial scenario:
our English Canadian reader is in fact perfectly bilingual and,
understandably confused, wants to confront these two very different
renderings with the original passage:
Ti-Jean s’est assis sur le bord du lit... L’hostie, j’lai
pitchée dehors... […]. Je l’ai pitchée dehors... La
chienne! J’voudrais qu’a soye pus r’gardable... Que
pas personne mette la patte dessus... Excepté
moé... Moé! Rien qu’moé! Crisse! Bouboule ça doit
être vrai... C’est rien qu’un petit crisse de morviat!
M’as d’y casser a yeule à c’te chien sale-là! M’as
d’y péter a face! A coups de poings pis à coups de
pieds! Bouboule c’est un hostie d’chien... Pour moé
Yves a raison... Bouboule y couche avec Mémène...
Pis elle, a s’laisse faire, la crisse! Bouboule c’est un
bomme. C’est lui qui vend d’la dôpe... C’est un
écoeurant... Elle, m’as t’la casser en dix! En dix,
tabarnac!... M’as les tuer tous é deux! (Renaud,
1964a, pp. 42-44)
What we have here is an excellent example of literary joual, defined
as the lexically impoverished, grammatically incorrect, phonetically
deviant variety of French spoken in the industrialized working class
neighbourhoods of Montreal. Associated with issues of economic
disempowerment, social hopelessness, cultural non-identity and
linguistic ‘pollution,’ joual stands out from the other varieties of
Quebec French due, on the one hand, to the large number of
anglicisms and vulgarisms it contains and, on the other hand, to its
use as an aesthetic and political tool in the writings of a group of leftwing, separatist Quebec artists between 1964 and 1968, of which
Renaud’s Le cassé instantly became – and has remained –
emblematic. These writers hoped at once to achieve a high degree of
social realism, to violently denounce the tragedy of the French
Canadians whose substandard speech was seen as symptomatic of
their economic and social colonization by English Canada, and to
shock the bourgeois Québécois reader into political action. Better still,
by making joual synonymous with Quebec French in general, they
33
Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study
relativized the initial sense of place it evoked – east-end Montreal –
so as to explicitly foreground its potential to become the symbol of all
dominated languages and a universal call-to-arms. Many
contemporary commentators criticized Renaud’s narrator for his
(condescending?) ability to revert at will to standard French, thereby
creating an unresolved contradiction within the novel. Conversely,
others saw in joual a subsystem of standard French rife with
innovative possibilities for creative freedom with respect to dominant
literary conventions and, as a result, a way of consolidating the then
fledgling Quebec literary institution.
It follows that, from a translational perspective, literary joual
poses formidable problems for translators in general and for EnglishCanadian translators in particular. Not only must they grapple with the
untranslatability of the anglicisms – as Homel noted, “English invades
French, not the other way around” (1985, p. 23) –, they must also
seek to convey literary joual’s hopelessness, its seething inner
violence, its revolutionary political and aesthetic objectives, as well as
its intense sense of place. Translators who translate for an EnglishCanadian readership must further grapple with the ethical paradox of
translating controversial Quebec works that openly attacked the target
readers by denouncing the latter’s cultural and economic imperialism.
Indeed, as Homel points out, “not only does joual accept English
words into its lexicon, it also distorts them once they are inside, in a
kind of sabotage action against a linguistic occupying force. These
English words better betray the domination, both economic and
linguistic, under which these people live” (1985, p. 24). In Le cassé,
this sabotage action is exerted by phonetic transformation (“dope”
becomes “dôpe”), syntactical and lexical calques (“except me”
becomes “excepté moé,” “broke” becomes “cassé”), as well as
morphological integration (“to pitch” becomes “pitcher”) that assimilate
the English words into French linguistic patterns; however, rather than
politically empowering the characters, such sabotage only
accentuates their sense of abjection and despair.
In the Anglo-Canadian context, literary joual thus raises an
intriguing complex of issues pertaining not only to untranslatability
and, in the case of Le cassé, to retranslatability, but to nontranslatability as well. For, over and above the question of how to
translate joual, one might well ask whether joual should be translated
at all. Canadian translation scholar Kathy Mezei (1995; 1998) has
argued that translating joual into English is the ultimate betrayal, the
final, assimilative blow to a humiliated, alienated ‘non-language’
already on the verge of collapsing into English. It is tantamount to
34
Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study
forcing the Québécois to “speak white” (Mezei, 1995; 1998). Mezei’s
view may well be shared by many translators: to this day, Le cassé is
the only joual novel of the period to have been rendered – twice – into
English. I will, however, leave the question of non-translation to one
side so as to better focus on the other two, for as our examples make
clear, the inherent untranslatability of joual can perhaps best be
approached by seeking a link between the context-bound linguistic,
ideological and ethical issues just alluded to and recent scholarship in
translation studies that redefines translation as a form of creative
writing, thereby ushering in what some scholars deem to be a
‘creative turn’ in the field. As Eugenia Loffredo and Manuela
Perteghella write, “a ‘creative turn’ in translation studies embraces
subjectivity, textuality and discursivity, selfhood and cognition,
experience and experiment” (Loffredo & Perteghella, 2006, p. 11) – to
which I should like to add the more culturally specific notions of
contextuality and otherness.
While untranslatability has traditionally been equated with
translational loss or failure, it can be a powerful source of creativity in
a given literary, political and sociocultural context when combined
with an ethics of translation that refuses the “replication paradigm”
(Folkart, 1993) based on the idea of faithfulness, loyalty, accuracy
and equivalence. The fact that faithfulness or accuracy presupposes
the superiority of the source-text, whereas equivalence implies a
relation – albeit idealistic – of identity, equality, congruence or parity
between source-text and target-text (Van den Broeck, 1978), is
irrelevant insofar as the result is the same, namely a mimetic
approach to the foreign work that inhibits or curbs creative input on
the part of the translator. As Michel Ballard has observed, historically
“l’idéal conscient ou inconscient de l’équivalence est le littéralisme”
(Ballard, 1997, p. 90). In this light, both Robitaille’s servile, word-forword literalism and the highly idiosyncratic, universalizing tendency of
Homel’s choice of equivalent adhere to the replication paradigm, thus
producing what Barbara Folkart has decried as “degenerate texts”
(Folkart, 1993, p. xvi) predicated on impoverishment, incoherency and
hypocrisy, as in the case of Robitaille, and on misrecognition,
normalization, illusion and expropriation, as in the case of Homel.
Most researchers associated with the creative turn in translation
studies tend to corroborate Folkart’s view on literalism which, I would
argue, applies to Robitaille’s translation on both the linguistic and
ethical levels where, as we just saw, it promotes a particularly
insidious form of cultural and political hypocrisy – notwithstanding (or
because of?) a possible ironic intention on the part of the translator.
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Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study
There appears, however, to be some disagreement among scholars
with respect to equivalence, conventionally associated with fluid,
idiosyncratic renderings expressly designed to suppress otherness
and reinforce domestic values (Venuti, 1995). Ballard (1997), for
instance, distinguishes between “fixed equivalence”, based on
idiomatic choice (between two synonyms in the target language, for
example), and “creative equivalence,” based on innovative solutions
to source-text problems such as repetition, word play or ambiguity.
Folkart (1993) herself admits that certain forms of equivalency involve
“direct writing” or creativity, as opposed to “rewriting” or cloning. By
avoiding replication, these forms can actually improve on the source
text and transform it into a work in its own right: “Appropriation is
something I believe in strongly: if you can not make the text yours,
you will not be able to make a text, period” (Folkart, 1993, xvii). In this
sense, appropriation – and equivalence – take on more positive
connotations: it is not a question of expropriating or normalizing and
thereby misrecognizing the source-text; rather, it is a question of
producing a writerly or, better yet, a creative translation that is “very
close to the stance of the author writing directly” (Folkart, 1993, xxi).
Whereas literal translators are rewriters, appropriative translators are
writer-creators: instead of using equivalence to imitate, they use it to
“blaz[e] paths, and bulldoz[e] new roads” (Folkart, 1993, xxi). One
must, however, refrain from interpreting this to mean merely the
blazing of new linguistic or aesthetic paths. Creative equivalence
involves not only issues of innovative linguistic engineering, it also
involves the translator’s responsibility for the images of self and other
created by his or her writerly stance and the innovations such a
stance fosters.
Homel’s choice of North American street slang aptly illustrates
Ballard’s notion of creative equivalence and Folkart’s notion of
translation as a text in its own right. As we have seen, his solutions to
the problems raised by literary joual’s untranslatability attest first and
foremost to a linguistic inventiveness ostensibly designed to
compensate for the impossibility of rendering the cultural and social
dispossession inscribed in anglicisms such as “pimme” (pimp) or
“bomme” (bum) by releasing street slang’s own latent verbal violence
and stigmatized status. This he does by way of a very significant
increase in the number of vulgarisms with respect to the original,7 a
tendency to translate sentences in standard French by using
substandard English,8 the frequent elision of the grammatical subject,
systematic recourse to double negatives and to the phatic use of the
pronoun ‘you’,9 and, significantly, the pointed ‘over-translation’ of
several passages containing one or the other of the novel’s main
36
Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study
themes of violence, sex and death.10 This being said, Homel’s
idiosyncratic linguistic solutions are embedded in a provocative
ethical inventiveness aimed at 1) overturning the cultural assumptions
of the target reader along with the paternalistic images of Quebec
these assumptions convey, and 2) criticizing, via a potentially
offensive retranslation that implicitly engages with Robitaille’s initial
rendering11, dominant Anglo-Canadian translation strategies
traditionally grounded either in the radical acculturation of otherness
or, as in the case of Flat Broke and Beat, in the alienation of the
‘untranslatable’ Quebec other, deemed essential for reasons of
national unity but not quite one of ‘us.’ The result, as we already saw,
is an unfamiliar, rather disturbing vision of Canadian society in the
mid-1980’s that, despite its domesticating thrust, resists complete
assimilation into the target culture by paradoxically undermining
reader preconceptions and expectations.12
In conclusion, regardless of its undeniable fluidity and
idiosyncratic character, Broke City transcends both the replication
paradigm and the problem of untranslatability by virtue of the creative
rendering of the linguistic, political, aesthetic and ethical assumptions
inherent to literary joual. Indeed, joual’s status as a translational case
vide can be construed as exemplifying one of the interfaces between
translation and (re)writing, insofar as its very untranslatablity requires
the translator to literally fill in the blanks it leaves in the target text
and, by so doing, reveal his or her subjectivity and agency, as well as
his or her conception of language, translation and writing. Homel’s
translation strategies further show the extent to which
untranslatability, and the sort of (re)writing it allows, are bound by
context-specific issues – such as pre-existing representations of self
and other in the source and target cultures – that act as constraints to
the creative linguistic licence untranslatability appears to foster.
Translational creativity, in spite of the possibilities for subjective
expression and stylistic liberty it connotes, must be construed – and
analyzed – as an eminently ethical practice that engages the
translator’s responsibility to otherness within a given cultural, social
and political context. To translate is to write and create en
connaissance de cause, for expressions of subjectivity are
inextricably linked to representations of otherness.
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Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study
Endnotes
1
The expression “confrontational bilingualism” is taken from Mezei (1998,
p. 239).
2
A drawing hides the first letters of “ive ebec ibre,” greatly reducing the slogan’s
political potency.
3
Further examples of literalisms and gallicisms: “It’s Ti-Jean had finally paid”;
“Moving, Philomène loves it”; “Ti-Jean opens the radio”; “What a bitchy life”; “We
had a little heart in the stomach”; “Berthe knows someone who deals in them,
these goofs.”
4
The foreign, in the Canadian context, is an intranational concept. Hence the
quotation marks.
5
It should be noted that Gérald Robitaille was, as he put it, a French-speaking
“Quebeker [sic] in exile” (Renaud, 1964b, p. 121) abroad since 1953. It is entirely
possible that his literal translation strategy was designed to give an ironic,
tongue-in-cheek – albeit very conservative – vision of Quebec society in the
1960s. It is also possible that the overriding presence of Gallicisms – that is,
French within the English language – was meant to symbolize the Quebecer as
“outsider” with respect to English Canada. While I cannot develop either of these
hypotheses here, I would argue that they nonetheless produce, for a unilingual
Canadian reader, linguistic and ethical effects very similar, if not identical, to the
ones I describe here.
6
Montreal is very present in the novel on both the toponymic and thematic levels.
Interestingly, Robitaille tends to translate “ville” by the less threatening term
“town”, whereas Homel uses the more topographically appropriate and, from an
Anglo-Canadian viewpoint, aggressive word “city.”
7
Examples: “Une femme” => “Shit a woman”; ”Elle avait perdu sa djobbe” => “So
she lost her funkin job instead”; “Comment qui s’appelle lui calvaire!” => “What
the fucks his name goddammit?”; “Mais pas de farces plates” => “But no screwin
around”.
8
Examples: “comprend” => “got the picture”; “Ti-Jean le sait bien” =>”Johnny was
hip to it”; “Philomème a peur de mal parler” => “Philomena was afraid a not talkin
right”; “Elle s’en veut” => “She was pissed off at herself “; “C’est agreeable” =>
“She was eatin it right up”; “Il était un peu éberlué” => “He looked real fuckin
stunned”.
9
Examples: “Il y a encore” => “You still had”; “Les cassés sont trop sales” =>
“When youre broke youre too dirty”; “Un bruit de célophane qu’on froisse” =>
“Like when you crumple a cigarette wrapper in your hand”.
10
Example : “Ti-Jean arrive souvent après le départ de Philomène. Il tasse
Louise dans un coin. Louise se laisse faire. Le lecteur s’attend sans doute à une
description cochonne. Qu’il se réfère à ses expériences personnelles ou à défaut
de celles-ci, qu’il sacre.” => “Johnny got there just after Philomena split. He got
Louise in a corner. Louise gave him what he wanted. The reader is probably
expecting some kind a ‘love’ scene. Forget it. The reader can refer to his own
experiences, and if he doesn’t have any of those, he can put his fist through a
wall.”
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Untranslatability, Non-Translation, Retranslation, Creativity: A Case Study
11
As Venuti has recently argued, retranslations typically “justify themselves by
establishing their differences from one or more previous versions” (2004, 25).
12
These results are discussed more at length in Lane-Mercier (forthcoming).
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