Abstract
This chapter explores the significance of the international origins of Joseph Kessel’s French Resistance chronicle L’Armée des ombres. Examining the publication history of this book demonstrates that understanding the complex origins of the source text is a crucial component of translational analysis. Written in London during the Nazi Occupation of France and published in Algiers in 1943, L’Armée des ombres was the first substantial legally published account of the interior French Resistance. The story of its publication by Edmond Charlot illustrates the functioning of publishing structures through which material from and about occupied France circulated internationally during the war. The chapter views wartime Algiers as a transnational cultural space that functioned as a zone of hospitality for wartime writers without access to mainland France.
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Whether or not the text can be described as a ‘novel’ is a moot point: it is not structured continuously, but rather is composed of a series of interconnected sequences.
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Sales of the Harborough edition dwindled through 1961, according to figures provided by Peters, Fraser, and Dunlop literary agents. A bilingual edition of Cyril Connolly’s 1944 translation of Le Silence de la mer was published in 1991 and reprinted in 2002 and is still available (Vercors 2002).
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La Marseillaise was founded in London, and Combat began as clandestine publication in France. Both were published in Algiers once the city came under Free French control in 1943.
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Whilst in July of 1943 Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had reassured the French, via the BBC, that her sovereignty would be restored after the war, Jan Smuts of the British War Cabinet suggested publicly that November that post-war France would disappear as a European power (Chadwick 2015, 436–37). Buton suggests that for Gaullists in the immediate post-war years, subjection to ‘Anglo-Saxon powers’ was feared as a ‘mortal danger’ (Buton 2007, 235). As Judt points out, ‘With the exception of Germany and the heartland of the Soviet Union, every continental European state involved in World War Two was occupied at least twice: first by its enemies, then by the armies of liberation’ (Judt 2010, 36).
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Derrida discusses the history of Jewish and Muslim citizenship in Algeria in Derrida and Dufourmantelle (2000, 141–47).
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The centenary of Charlot’s birth in 2015 produced a clutch of publications which give a good overview of his life and work. These are listed on the ‘Centenaire Edmond Charlot’ website. See for example Dugas (2016) (proceedings of a conference held in September 2015) and Khadda (2015). For further biographical details, see Puche (1995, 15–34) and Puche (2007). On Charlot’s cultural activities in Algiers, see Foxlee (2010, 68–74), Caduc (1999, 90–95), Rufat (2004), and Déjeux (1986).
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On Charlot’s move to Paris, see Mollier (2016).
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On the level of French-language competence in pre-war and wartime Britain, see Footitt and Tobia (2013, 12–16).
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For a clear and concise exposition of Derrida’s reworking of Saussure and his concepts of différance and trace, see Spikes (1992, 334–38).
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Kershaw, A. (2019). Zones of Hospitality. In: Translating War. Palgrave Studies in Languages at War. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92087-0_2
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