Abstract
This chapter considers the functions of multilingualism and translation within texts even before they are translated. In the war novels examined in Chap. 5, the presence of the translating language—English—in the French source text poses particular problems for translation. In the more complex case of Holocaust novels by translingual writers, multilingualism is an aesthetic resource used to convey trauma. Multilingualism cannot resolve the problem of Holocaust representation, but can function as what Michael Rothberg terms ‘traumatic realism’. In André Schwarz-Bart’s Le Dernier des Justes, translation remains when language breaks down in the face of horror. In Anna Langfus’s fiction, instability and confusion around the languages characters are speaking draw the reader’s attention to language as the medium of communication of trauma.
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Notes
- 1.
Koestler was educated in Hungarian but spoke German at home with his Austrian mother, and was raised with help from French and English governesses (Saunders 2017, 16–17).
- 2.
- 3.
‘In the space of a few weeks, she typed roughly 1000 pages of text—sometimes taking dictation in English, sometimes in Polish, and sometimes simultaneously translating from Polish to English as Jan spoke. Since her English was better than Karski’s, she reworded his thoughts when he spoke that language’ (Wood and Jankowski, 226). Wood and Jankowski go on to discuss the role of Karski’s publisher in adapting his text for the perceived needs of its American audience (226–29). See also Haenel (2009, 140, 145).
- 4.
- 5.
I shall not go into detail about the difference between these terms: though it is of course important, it is not central to my discussion. For an overview of the issues, see Boase-Beier et al. (2017a, 2).
- 6.
Delabastita and Grutman evoke the example of the use of French in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, which is completely lost in the French translation of the novel (Delabastita and Grutman 2005, 27).
- 7.
Taylor-Batty (2013) discusses the ‘funny foreigner’ convention in English literature (59–61). Given that Merle was an Anglicist, his use of this trope might be seen as a further reversal since he would certainly have been familiar with English examples.
- 8.
The meaning of the phrase is explained in the preface to the 1986 Virago reprint of the translation (Lewis 1986, xiii).
- 9.
Delabastita and Grutman (2005) provide a useful overview of the subject.
- 10.
For a discussion of this problem in relation to the Franco-English writer Tatiana de Rosnay’s Holocaust novel Sarah’s Key/Elle s’appelait Sarah, see Vice (2017).
- 11.
Terminology varies. Isabelle de Courtivron’s Lives in Translation collects essays by writers who would correspond to Kellman’s definition, but are termed ‘bilingual’ (Courtivron 2003).
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
Le sel et le soufre won the Charles Veillon prize in 1961.
- 15.
Francine Kaufmann summarises the reception of Le dernier des Justes and the polemic it provoked in her obituary of Schwarz-Bart (Kaufmann 2006).
- 16.
- 17.
On one occasion, in his discussion of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy, written originally in German, Rosenfeld does present both source and target text (Rosenfeld 1980, 140–41).
- 18.
On the problem of authenticity in relation to the acknowledgement of translation, see Boase-Beier et al. (2017a, 3–4, 6).
- 19.
Accessible general discussions of the question of the relationship of different languages to Holocaust writing are to be found in Rosen (2005) and Seidman (2006). See also Ezrahi (1980, 10–15). Rosen’s Literature of the Holocaust contains essays on Holocaust literature in Italian, German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, English, Polish, Hungarian, and French (Rosen 2013a, b).
- 20.
- 21.
Haft lists examples of ‘deportees’ vocabulary’ in both German and French and ‘Nazi and SS terminology’ (Haft 1973, 196–210).
- 22.
Despite its title, this essay provides a comprehensive overview of Polish Holocaust memory from the war years to the present.
- 23.
- 24.
Taylor-Batty (2013) and Suleiman (1996b) both draw on Sternberg’s framework. Other critics have also addressed similar issues. For example, Berman 2000 discusses the tendency of translation to efface literary multilingualism, and Bakhtin discusses ‘the study of specific images of languages and styles’, using the example of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, in his essay ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’ (Bakhtin 1981, 41–83 (49–51)).
- 25.
Here I follow, for example, Taylor-Batty’s discussion of the translational nature of Katherine Mansfield’s English stories about France (Taylor-Batty 2013, 67–79).
- 26.
Boase-Beier et al. (2017a, 15) make the same point in relation to Alison Owings’ literal translations of German women’s testimony into English in her 1993 book Frauen.
- 27.
The Hebrew letters symbolise the number 36: lamed (30) and vav (6). The word is more often transliterated as ‘lamed-vav’, or ‘lamedvovnik’ in Yiddish. In the wake of discussion of the legend provoked by Schwartz-Bart’s novel, the Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem published an essay explaining its history entitled ‘The Tradition of the Thirty-Six Hidden Just Men’ (Scholem 1971).
- 28.
- 29.
- 30.
As Potel’s biography of Langfus demonstrates (Potel 2014), despite the obvious autobiographical sources of Langfus’s fiction, there are significant differences between her life and her novels, and her texts cannot be taken as straightforwardly testimonial.
- 31.
This lecture was given to the Jewish women’s organisation WIZO in March 1963. It reprises comments Langfus had already published in a contribution to the French Jewish monthly magazine L’Arche in 1961 (Langfus 1961, 33).
- 32.
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Kershaw, A. (2019). Layers of Translation: Multilingualism in War and Holocaust Fiction. In: Translating War. Palgrave Studies in Languages at War. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92087-0_6
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