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The Goncourt Prize and the Second World War in France and Britain, 1945–51

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Translating War

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Languages at War ((PASLW))

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Abstract

Of the seven novels awarded the Goncourt prize in France between 1944 and 1949, five were war novels. This chapter examines the translation into English and reception in Britain of Elsa Triolet’s A Fine of Two Hundred Francs, Jean-Louis Bory’s French Village, Jean-Louis Curtis’s The Forests of the Night, Robert Merle’s Weekend at Zuydcoote, and Francis Ambrière’s The Exiled. Translational interventions within the texts and their paratexts, including word-level translation choices, abridgement, the addition of prefaces, and the discourses generated in reviews reframed these French texts for a British audience. Whilst the novels retained a prosthetic memorial function for British readers, domestic myths about the war were reinforced by translatorial interventions such that foreign texts were not allowed to challenge dominant British war memories.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Druon’s Les Grandes Familles was published as The Rise of Simon Lachaume in 1952, translated by Edward Fitzgerald (Druon 1952). Gautier’s Histoire d’un fait divers does not appear to have been translated into English.

  2. 2.

    On Triolet’s conception of the relationship between literature and politics, see Lewis (1986b).

  3. 3.

    The translator’s name is absent from all three editions (Triolet 1947, 1949, 1986), but Golffing is identified as the translator in the Library of Congress Catalog of Copyright Entries, 424.

  4. 4.

    Files for the Hutchinson International Authors series are held by Penguin Random House UK, but according to correspondence with the library in July 2016, no drafts or papers, other than contracts, relating to A Fine of Two Hundred Francs have survived.

  5. 5.

    As various commentators have noted, it was significant that the Goncourt jury awarded the prize to a woman in the same year that French women voted for the first time.

  6. 6.

    On literary representations of the milice in post-war French novels, including Mon village à l’heure allemande, see Grégoire (2007).

  7. 7.

    This ‘Avertissement’ appears in the first edition of Les Forêts de la nuit but is not included in the subsequent paperback J’ai lu edition.

  8. 8.

    For a recent study, see however Duquesne (2017).

  9. 9.

    On British cultural memory of Dunkirk, see Summerfield (2010), Alexander (2013), Connolly (2014, 54–90), and Munton (1989, 38–41). For a comparative reading of the events that also pays attention to their role in national memory, see Bell (1997, 8–26).

  10. 10.

    Marghanita Laski, atypically, thought the book ‘most excellently translated’ (Laski 1950).

  11. 11.

    The English translation begins with a scene in a tobacconist’s shop which is not in either the first edition or the paperback reprint of the French text (Merle 1950, 7–9). I have been unable to establish the provenance of this section of the English text.

  12. 12.

    These passages are present in the American version (Ambrière 1948, 17–20, 178, 214).

  13. 13.

    Brownlie (2016, 109–23) discusses excision and reframing in translations of Walter Scott.

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  1. Department of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Angela Kershaw

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Kershaw, A. (2019). The Goncourt Prize and the Second World War in France and Britain, 1945–51. In: Translating War. Palgrave Studies in Languages at War. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92087-0_5

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