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La traduction au miroir

From Voluptuous Pleasure to Voluptés: Delving into the Literary Translation Process1

Madeleine Stratford
p. 120-133

Résumés

Au titre de traductrice littéraire, je joue à la fois le rôle de lectrice et de réécrivaine. Ma tâche consiste donc à réconcilier impératif artistique et jugement esthétique. Cet article vise à exposer les effets concrets de cette dichotomie entre création et critique sur ma propre pratique. En l’occurrence, je me pencherai sur ma traduction de trois récits de la Torontoise Marianne Apostolides présentant une tension physique ou sexuelle particulièrement marquée : « Ce qu’on peut faire pour de l’argent », « L’éveil » et « Le jeu du chat ». Puisant dans les principes de la recherche-création et de la traductologie génétique, je retracerai mon processus créatif, depuis mes lectures préliminaires et interprétations jusqu’à la réécriture des récits, en analysant des ébauches produites sur plusieurs mois, puis en verbalisant et en catégorisant mes émotions par rapport aux orignaux et à mes traductions.

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  • 1 . This work was supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et Culture (Appui à la rec (...)

1According to Nathalie Watteyne, reading is an integral part of an author’s creative process (Watteyne, 2001: 17). In literary translation, an intimate, close reading of the original is definitely a sine qua non, as the translator needs to “grasp” the source text, both in the proper and in the figurative sense. According to Henri Meschonnic, most translators harbour a wealth of preconceived ideas that have an impact on their translation choices: as the target text is written, the translator’s own grid is incorporated into it (Meschonnic, 1999: 89). Whether they wish to or not, translators can thus only translate from their personal “filter,” itself influenced by their day and age, and the culture or social class they belong to. Andre Lefevere distinguishes between two “grids” that can influence the translation process: a conceptual, and a textual one, both of which would be the result of a socialization process (Lefevere, 1999: 75). In some ways, this relates to what is now commonly called “situated knowledge.” As Silvia Gherardi (2008: 521) explains, everyone’s knowledge (including the translator’s) is situated on at least four levels: 1. in the body (which is necessarily gendered); 2. in the dynamics of interaction (not only between individuals, but also with anything else that makes up the natural world, which could include texts); 3. in language (for translators, the word should be plural); 4. in a physical context (any material conditions that may influence translation practice). All of these factors (including gender identity, which Meschonnic and Lefevere seem to leave out) will have an impact on how a given translator will interact with certain texts or passages. Unfortunately, translators are often unaware of their own situatedness and of the ways in which it can “filter” information and influence the translation process and outcome. For instance, Susagna Tubau observed in her study of Rivera Garreta’s translation of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own an involuntary and unconscious “gap between the translator’s intention to be sensitive to gender issues […] and the result” (Tubau, 2013: 53). It is not enough for translators to “possess in-depth knowledge of the ideas, beliefs, and values that connect languages being translated” (Nissen, 2013: 25); they must also acknowledge their own situatedness and filters, and learn to explore their characteristics; because they may only reduce their interference once they become aware of their existence (ibid.: 81). So the translator’s task not only consists in working on the target text and language, but also on his or her own ideas about language and culture (Meschonnic, 1999: 98-99). Becoming aware of one’s grid and influence, however, takes time and effort: “A meticulous source-target text description therefore becomes a type of forensic analysis with the aim of uncovering not just what the source or the target text independently ‘mean’ but whether the target text is altering the message of the source text.” (Munday, 2007: 197)

2A “forensic analysis” of my translation practice is precisely what I intend to present here. As a literary translator, I am well aware that I am both a reader and a rewriter of the texts I tackle. It is the very nature of my work to straddle the creative-critical divide. As a white, female, cis-gendered professor and researcher from Quebec, I am also well aware that my knowledge is situated. But how do my situatedness and inherent filters affect my creative process? What interests me is my own practice and how it has played out and evolved as a form of creative reading/writing in the course of a concrete translation project. Drawing from the principles of research-creation and genetic translation studies, I will give a hands-on account of how the creative-critical divide impacted on my French translation of a book of short stories entitled Voluptuous Pleasure: The Truth About the Writing Life by Toronto author Marianne Apostolides (originally published by BookThug in 2012) for La Peuplade publishers.

3I will focus on the translation process of three stories where bodily/sexual tension was most present: “What We Do for Money,” “Coming of Age” and “Like a Cat.” I chose these three stories because “sex-related language” is an area where “translators tend to censor themselves—either voluntarily or involuntarily—in order to produce rewritings which are ‘acceptable’ from both social and personal perspectives” (Santaemilia, 2008: 222). I will retrace my creative process from reading and interpreting Marianne’s stories to rewriting them. To do so, I will analyze representative excerpts of drafts produced over several months, then verbalize and categorize my own feelings (positive, negative or neutral) toward the original and my translations. Jeremy Munday suggests that “shifts in key features, when they do occur, may arise both from the conscious strategy of the translator but also […] from less conscious translation choices […] that pertain to the translator’s unique experience of the two languages” (Munday, 2007: 213), to which I would add those pertaining to her unique experience of a text. Indeed, we shall see that the way I received each individual text noticeably influenced my translation process.

1. Research-Creation

4Research-creation is a relatively new paradigm in the Humanities, and it has not yet been formally incorporated into Translation Studies. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council describes it as “[a]n approach to research that combines creative and academic research practises, and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation. The creation process is situated within the research activity and produces critically informed work in a variety of media (art forms).”2 What differentiates it from more conventional, empirical or applied research is the fact that creative practice is the very locus of the investigation: “La démarche de création constitue […] le lieu d’expérimentation, d’observation et l’objet d’analyse.” (Bruneau and Burns, 2007: 115) In the Canadian context, according to Chapman and Sawchuck, research-creation “is not so much a ‘new’ method as it is a ‘newly recognized’ academic practice that has gained ground […] since the beginning of the 21st century.” (Chapman and Sawchuck, 2012: 6)

5The project and methodology I am putting forward fall within the scope of what Bruneau and Burns describe as “Théoriser sa pratique par l’élaboration d’un projet artistique.” In this type of investigation, they explain, the work “mediates” between theory and praxis (Bruneau and Burns, 2007: 166-167). This approach would correspond to what Chapman and Sawchuck (2012: 7) call “Research from Creation,” where art productions “can also be ways of generating research data that can then be used to understand different dynamics” (ibid.: 16).

6While literary translations have often been the subject of translator “commentaries,” they have rarely, if ever, to my knowledge, been studied from a research-creation perspective, at least not in the academic sense I am referring to here3. Here is a case in point: while creative writing appears among the twenty-odd fields listed by SSHRC as potential venues for research-creation, literary translation is nowhere to be seen. It is also absent from the list of eight “Literary Production and Experimentation” fields listed by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et Culture4. I, however, believe that research-creation is an ideal framework to pave the way for translation scholars/practitioners to study their own practice from a heuristic point of view. According to Clark Moustakas, heuristic research “refers to a process of internal search through which one discovers the nature and meaning of experience and develops methods and procedures for further investigation and analysis” (Moustakas, 1990: 9). Because heuristics takes its roots in the study of the researcher’s personal experience, it has been widely applied in the Arts and Humanities, and also seems relevant to literary translation.

2. Methodology

  • 5 . See Stratford 2014.
  • 6 . See Chaffin, Imreh and Crawford, 2002 ; Héroux and Fortier, 2014.
  • 7 . For a discussion of traditional models used in poetry translation, see Stratford 2014.

7At a conference on “La recherche-création dans l’Université du 21e siècle” in May 2012, Isabelle Héroux (2012) presented the results of a research on her creative process as a guitarist when learning to play from sheet music a piece she had never heard before. In her talk, Héroux introduced a model developed by Chaffin, Imreh & Crawford (2002: 100-135) to describe the creative process involved in learning to play a piece of music. Literary translations, like musical interpretations, are derivative works. Translators and musicians alike work from an already existing object—a source text or a score—to create a new object: a target text or a performance. This musical analogy has often been brought forward in Translation Studies5. Conceptually, then, literary translation can be conceived of as a process of appropriation akin to that of the interpreter practising towards a performance. It seems particularly fitting, then, to study my own creative translation process by adapting a model developed by music scholars6. Because it was based on descriptive, empirical observations instead of a prescriptive approach, I find this model more relevant than the ones traditionally applied in literary translation7.

8I kept the different stages outlined by Chaffin, Imreh & Crawford, but defined them in relation with the act of translating, instead of music interpretation. The first stage, “scouting it out,” would involve the first readings of the source text in order to have an overview of the main challenges and issues. The second stage, “section by section,” would deal with the first rough drafts of a text, not necessarily in chronological order, to try my hand at reproducing the author’s voice. The third, so-called “grey stage” would focus on editing drafts in order to produce a satisfying complete version. The fourth stage, “putting it together,” would aim at producing a first “final” version of the manuscript. Finally, the fifth stage, “polishing,” leading to the definitive, publishable version, would involve third parties: a bilingual editor proposing an edited version based on a thorough comparison of the source and target texts, and a unilingual editor proposing (usually minor) corrections before publication.

  • 8 . See Cordingley and Montini, 2015.

9In many ways, my methodology would fit into genetic Translation Studies, since I have put together avant-textes to form what could be viewed as a “genetic dossier”8. The main difference with traditional textual genetics is that I traced the history of my own process, not somebody else’s. Indeed, in order to map out those five stages in my translation process, I recalled my own initial feelings about each story, and put together all successive drafts of the stories, including the results of changes made by the bilingual and unilingual editors. In each of the stories, I identified twelve segments dealing with sexual tension, in order to study how I had dealt with them in each draft. I will focus here on the segments that show changes. As we will see, the successive drafts of the text that I most liked show almost no changes, and very few shifts in meaning, tone and style. In contrast, those of the two texts I felt uncomfortable with show significant changes and quite a lot of shifts, both in meaning and tone, which were edited heavily thoroughly during stage 3 (the so-called “grey stage”).

3. Case Study

10I translated Voluptuous Pleasure from June 2013 to August 2014, but the process really began when I got the book from the publishers in March 2013. That is when I first read the book in order to decide whether or not I would accept the contract. From the moment I started reading the book, I knew it would be challenging. Composed of nine stories inspired from the lives of the writer and her family, it constantly blurs the boundaries between autobiography and fiction, questioning the very act of writing stories and history itself. But one of the things that proved to be most challenging throughout the process was preserving the continuous physical—and oftentimes sexual—tension pervading the narration. One of my main issues, once I had produced my first drafts, was to retrieve the numerous allusions to the body and to sex (more or less subtly) omnipresent throughout the book and make a conscious effort to carry them across into French without unwittingly censoring them or turning them into some kind of purple prose. That issue, however, was not present at the same level in all three stories. In fact, it would seem that my first perception of each text as a reader (itself a result of the first stage of my translation process—“scouting it out”) had an impact on my capacity to render sexual connotations adequately, especially during the second stage of the process (“section by section”).

3.1. First Encounters with the Stories: Stage 1 – Scouting it Out

11“What We Do for Money,” the second story of the book, was the first text that caught my eye and made me want to translate the book. It follows Marianne as she visits a brothel in Nevada to interview prostitutes and owners about legal prostitution. Told from Marianne’s point of view in the present tense, it puts the reader in her shoes and in the middle of the brothel itself. I was on the bus to Montreal when I read it, and I could easily identify with the author’s voice: I recognized myself in this Princeton undergrad, who had wanted to find out all about sex by writing a research paper. At the beginning of the text, Marianne feels out of place and uncomfortable as she interacts with George, a huge, imposing man who owns the brothel. At the end, Marianne shortly regains her cool in a dialogue between herself and a prostitute whom she finds attractive. The whole scene is full of brutal sensuality. I loved it and felt entirely in tune with it. I felt sure that I would find Marianne’s voice in French, and that this would be the story to try my hand at it. Thus, my feelings on “What We Do for Money” qualify as overall very positive.

12As I read the four following stories, I was convinced of my capacity to render Marianne’s stories in French. So I accepted the contract and signed it before having read the whole book. Then I came upon “Coming of Age.” That story made me so uncomfortable that I almost regretted signing the contract. I instantly felt the burden that translating it would represent. The text focuses on the forced friendship between twelve-year-old Marianne and a mentally disabled fifteen-year-old called Becky. It contains a lot of sexually charged puns and swearwords (which fascinate Becky), but many descriptions of Becky’s demeanour and of the church grounds where Marianne finds refuge abound in sexual connotations. Becky’s relationship to sex is completely shameless: at the end of the story, she even masturbates in front of Marianne as if it were the most normal, casual thing. But for teenage Marianne, who is only starting to discover her budding sexuality, this is disturbing, shocking, and shameful. And the author very aptly passed on those negative feelings to me, a necessarily close reader of the text. It was hard getting over the discomfort I felt as I read—and reread—the text before translating it.

13In the book, “Like a Cat” immediately follows “Coming of Age.” It is a much longer text than the previous two, almost twice as long. It focuses on adult Marianne, as she struggles financially after her divorce, working nights as a belly dancer in a Toronto Greek restaurant. But the story is actually about her meetings with a married man whom she hopes to seduce with her belly-dancing anecdotes. The erotic charge of the story is obvious, but it is also extremely specialized from a lexical point of view. As I first read the text, I was keenly aware of the sensuality of the scenes, yet felt overwhelmed with the English terminology for belly-dancing, much more precise than French when it comes to describing movement. I was not uncomfortable with the sexually charged atmosphere of the story per se, so my feelings toward the text were neutral in that respect. However, I did feel challenged by how the dancer’s movements were expressed linguistically: I sensed that the actual words and the syntax would be hard to render fluidly while retaining the erotic charge. For me, then, that text presented technical translation issues.

14How I felt about each of these texts had an impact on how I tackled the translation of sexually charged passages. Santaemilia writes that “[a]mong the least obvious types of self-censorship– which can, however, be revealed through rigorous linguistic analysis—are partial translation, minimisation or omission of sex-related terms” (Santaemilia, 2008: 225). As we shall see, I fell prey to all three types of self-censorship in the first drafts of the two stories I had negative and neutral feelings about, but did not censor myself when translating the story I felt positively toward.

3.2. Translating the Stories: Stages 2 to 5

3.2.1. Stage 2: Section by Section

15For this project, stage 2 of my creative process (“section by section”) started with “What We Do For Money,” the very first story I translated. Six drafts (June 25-29 and July, 27) correspond to when I started translating the book, and was still “playing it by ear.” Most of these are incomplete (the first complete one is dated June 28). About six months later, I got to work on “Coming of Age,” the fourth story I translated (after “What We Do for Money,” “Boxes,” and “Coyote Pup”). At that point, I was starting to feel more confident “writing like Marianne” in French. Five drafts correspond to the second stage, all of them produced in January 2014 (15, 16, 30 [2 drafts], and 31). The January 31 draft of is the first complete one. I started translating “Like a Cat” in March 2014, little over a month after finishing my first complete draft of “Coming of Age,” but the heavy work seems to have happened mid-May. All in all, there were 14 drafts of “Like a Cat.” The “section by section” stage spans over eight drafts. The first two drafts were produced in March 2014, but two weeks apart, (March 6 and 21). The six others were done over two months (two on April 14; three on May 15; one on May 16).

16What this draft calendar reveals is that the first story was translated over four consecutive days (June 25-28, 2013); the second, also over four days, but split into two groups of two consecutive days (January 15, 16, 30 and 31, 2014); and the third, over five days spread over two months (from March until mid-May). Of course, I did not always spend full days translating. Also, not all texts are equal in length, ranging from 2418 to 4300 words. There may be no correlation between the length of a text and the time it took to translate. Yet it is telling that the longest text (the third) only took one more day to translate than the two previous ones, even though it is twice as long, which suggests that I was picking up speed, feeling more comfortable with Marianne’s style and getting a better feel of how it should sound in French.

17However, when comparing the various drafts of the second stage, I made another discovery. In the case of “What We Do for Money,” I seem to have barely questioned my first translation choices as far as sexual innuendoes are concerned. Of the 12 relevant excerpts I analyzed, 7 do not show any variation, from the very first to the very last draft. This could indicate that I felt at ease translating the passages, and that my translation corresponded to what I perceived to be the original meaning and effect. Of course, it does not mean that it contains no shifts. Indeed, the equivalence of a given effect is sometimes not immediate in the translation, but achieved later in the text. For instance, the allusion to male masturbation (“jerk off”) in “He jerked himself onto a stool” (Apostolides, 2012: 41) is lost in my translation, “Il a grimpé lourdement sur un tabouret” (Apostolides, 2015: 51), which focuses solely on the movement of sitting down with difficulty. And I remember thinking at the time that it was an unavoidable loss, since I could find no verb that could convey both actions at once. However, a few lines later, I compensated for said loss by translating “The fabric parted for her fingers” (Apostolides, 2012: 41) as “Le tissu s’est entrouvert pour laisser passer ses doigts.” (Apostolides, 2015: 51) Here, laisser passer evokes the expression se passer le doigt, which alludes to female masturbation.

18Of the four excerpts that do present changes during the “section by section” phrase, two mainly contain minor grammatical changes, such as the addition of pronouns and auxiliaries for a more fluid structure or a change of verb tense (from the descriptive “imparfait” to the active “passé composé”). The two other excerpts are worth further comments. The first concerns an enhancement of sexual connotation. This happened when I translated “I licked my lips which tingled with an unfamiliar wide-alive numbness” (Apostolides, 2012: 45), first as “Je me suis léché les lèvres, qui picotaient, prises d’un curieux engourdissement,” then as “Je me suis léché les lèvres; elles picotaient, prises d’un vif engourdissement jusqu’alors inconnu” (Apostolides, 2015: 56). First, the use of the semicolon helps focus on the lips, putting them “on the spot.” Then, the use of the adjective prises alludes to the sexual act (figurative meaning of prendre), which, coupled with the vif engourdissement jusqu’alors inconnu gives the impression of lips that are being “deflowered.”

19The second excerpt concerns a passage about George, who invited Marianne over to his brothel, saying “he could show me a good time” (Apostolides, 2012: 44). Curiously, right from the first translation, I changed the narrative point of view of that segment, making Marianne the active subject and trying to find equivalents for show a good time. On June 25, I hesitated between “il s’assurerait que je passe un bon moment” and “il s’assurerait que j’allais bien me divertir.” The next day, I opted for a solution that remained until publication: “me garantissant que j’y prendrais du bon temps” (Apostolides, 2015: 55) instead of the more obvious “qu’il m’y ferait prendre du bon temps.” I did something similar later in the text, with a passage that has not changed at all from my first draft on June 28 up until publication. That excerpt consists of a sexually charged interview with a prostitute. At one point, Marianne writes, “My breath released—a small moan—and her contempt spread over me, thick” (Apostolides, 2012: 47). Right from the first draft, I translated the last part as “et j’ai senti tout son mépris s’abattre sur moi” (Apostolides, 2015: 60), which put the focus explicitly on Marianne’s feelings. The fact that I did not notice those slight shifts until now is revealing. It suggests that I was unconsciously putting myself in Marianne’s shoes, perceiving the original subject and myself as the new one, as central to the story, so much so that I let her become, in French, the active subject of sentences where she stayed passive in English.

20In “Coming of Age,” most of the sex-related elements that I struggled with were translated late, at the very end of the “section by section” stage (January 30 and 31), and they eventually led to extensive changes during the next “grey” stage, so I will come back to them further on. During the “section by section” stage per se, there are only three significant variations in the relevant excerpts: the title, an onomatopoeia, and a riddle. The title refers to Marianne’s discovery of sexuality: her own and that of others. In the two first drafts, I was considering calling it “L’initiation.” That choice, although it theoretically can allude to a sexual initiation, did not quite carry the original meaning. Indeed, Becky does not really “initiate” Marianne (she never touches her): she just opens her eyes to a new reality. That is when the possibility of calling it “L’éveil” (the awakening) appeared: it could also suggest something sexual, but more from the “revelation” side of it.

21The onomatopoeia is in the following passage: “‘Uhn…’ a Mexican gardener grunted” (Apostolides, 2012: 122). In the first three drafts, I translated it literally as “Un jardinier mexicain a grommelé un ‘han’.” However, the han bothered me: although it does exist in French, it does not sound natural. Besides, the Mexican gardeners are depicted as very sexually aware beings in the story. So that Unh needed to sound more carnal. At the end of the “section by section” stage, I changed the han to a cri d’effort, but I still wasn’t satisfied. The final solution would have to wait for the “grey stage,” which I will come back to in the next section of this article.

22For now, let us move on to the riddle: “‘What’s black and white and red all over?’ Her pelvis punched up three times: red—all—over. […] A newspaper!” (Apostolides, 2012: 127) The riddle relies on what Ronald Landheer would call “spoken ambiguity” (1989: 34). Indeed, it is only when you hear it that there can be a confusion between the colour red and the past participle read. The riddle itself is barely funny, and contains, in fact, no sexual connotation. However, the way in which Becky tells it is sexually charged: she punches her pelvis upon saying “red all over,” giving the segment a whole new, lewd meaning. I wanted to find a simple, childish riddle that I could turn into something a little less innocent. On my first try, I came up with “Qu’est-ce qui peut aller partout en restant dans son coin? Elle a ponctué les derniers mots de trois coups de bassin : dans – son – coin. […] Un timbre!” However, that sounded forced, especially the pelvic punches on “dans son coin.” I slept on it, and the next day, I went back to look for more riddles on Google, and found this, which ended up being my final solution: “Qu’est-ce qui fait le tour du bois sans jamais y pénétrer? Elle a ponctué le dernier mot de trois coups de bassin : pé – né – trer. […] L’écorce!” (Apostolides, 2015: 167) What was fun here was that I had found a three-syllable long graphic verb for the pelvic punches: penetrate.

23These few changes, especially in the title and riddle, reveal how aware I was of the sexual undertone of the story. That said, they are very real translation challenges: titles, onomatopoeia and riddles often have to be adapted. And that made me conscious of the need to deal with them adequately, as opposed to the passages I reworked during the “grey stage,” which contained less obvious, but no less tricky, challenges.

24When I translated “Like a Cat,” there were virtually no changes made during the “section by section” draft, and three of the identified passages did not change at all and were published as such: they all relate to the last part of the story, which recounts Marianne’s last encounter with the married man, and have nothing to do with belly-dancing. A closer look at the drafts, however, clearly suggests that many sexually charged passages relating to belly-dancing caused me problems: no matter where they were in the original text (beginning, middle or end), I only translated them on May 16, the last day of the second stage, where I finally produced a full draft of the story. Also, I underscored three passages and put the English original in a footnote: this points to my dissatisfaction with my solutions and my desire to come back to them to make changes. Two of those three underscored passages, as well as a few others, would undergo significant edits during the following grey stage.

3.3.2. Stage 3: Grey Stage

25The third stage (so-called “grey”) for the three stories took place while I was in residence at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, in June 2014. At that point, I had complete drafts of all three texts but was not ready to call them done. Each of the three translations was revised separately on June 9, shortly after I arrived, as a way for me to get back to work. “What We Do for Money” did not change, at least as far as the excerpts analyzed here are concerned. However, “Coming of Age” underwent significant changes in the draft dated June 19, and “Like a Cat” was heavily revised twice, on June 11 and 20.

26As was said before, the first text was the one that made me want to translate the book, and it was also the one I had submitted as a sample of my work to be selected for the Banff residence program. It was the story I had felt most comfortable with, and the one I had spent most time revising. Moreover, I had had a few close friends and colleagues read it before I sent in my application. So by the time I finally got to Banff, that particular translation was finished. The two other stories are the ones I most pored over while in Banff. An expert literary translator acted as a mentor, reading them thoroughly and making some highly valuable comments, which prompted me to spend a lot of time retranslating some passages. Indeed, she identified significant problems in each story, namely the unconscious censoring of sexual connotations in “Coming of Age,” as well as overly technical or the purple-prose like descriptions in “Like a Cat,” which drifted away from the original allusions to sex.

27In “Coming of Age,” all descriptions linked to the church grounds had a sexual undertone. In one passage, there is the “long-limbed churchman on hands-and-knees,” further described as “that lone churchman on all-fours” (Apostolides, 2012: 122). On January 30, I first translated those passages as “un homme d’église élancé qui était à quatre pattes” and “un religieux à quatre pattes qui s’affairait tout seul.” On the same day, I then changed the second passage for “un religieux tout seul dans son coin, en petit bonhomme.” In English, there is a true insistence on the man’s body, which is “long-limbed” and on the ground, in a submissive position. The problem with my solutions was that the man’s “limbs” had disappeared, and that he was basically just crouching. In a second passage, the church is described in a way that recalls the male sexual organ: “it rose erect,” its base being “where the bushes were most dense” (ibid.: 122). In my first translations, the spire (“flèche” in French) “se dressait bien droite” which is an accurate description, but devoid of sexual connotation. Further in the text is the Mexican gardener’s uhn I mentioned earlier, which I had translated as han and then as cri d’effort. The final example is taken from the paragraph where Marianne discovers a hidden place behind the bushes, which is vaguely reminiscent of the female sexual organ: “The place was pungent and hidden; it was cramped tight, the bushes tangled, unruly beside the shaft of the church” (ibid.: 123). I was uncomfortable with the description, but did not know why, and I was not conscious of the sexual undertones at the time. So I translated the words, but not their connotations: “C’était un endroit isolé qui dégageait une odeur âcre; on s’y sentait à l’étroit parmi les buissons enchevêtrés et rebelles qui longeaient l’église.” The French description was wordy, and watered down: it had lost its evocative power.

28While in Banff, I showed this story to my mentor. I wanted her to take a look at how I had adapted the puns, riddles and swearwords, which I thought were the most challenging parts of the text. When I met with her to discuss my translation, she told me that the problem was not the translation of the puns per se, but that the French descriptions were not as sexually charged as in English. She also pointed out that in my French draft, Becky had panties on when masturbating, while the English text suggested that she had taken them off. “Did the scene make you uncomfortable at all?” she asked me. Then, I realized that it had made me unconformable indeed. This awkward masturbation scene with same-sex undertones made me uncomfortable—very much so, and on an intimate level. Suffice to say that my mentor’s comment hit home: I had felt threatened by this scene, and this feeling had tinted my perception of the whole text. Up to that moment, I was not fully aware of my complete discomfort with it. I realized that it had made me leave out, quite unconsciously, some very important stylistic aspects of the text in my translation.

29Then, once the grid that Meschonnic refers to had been uncovered, I was able to solve the problems. The churchman regained his limbs (“un homme d’église aux membres élancés”), working knees on the ground (“à genoux par terre”) and then literally on all-fours (“à quatre pattes”), and the Gothic spire “se dressait bien dure” (Apostolides, 2015: 160). As for the Mexican gardener, “[il] a poussé un long gémissement”, and the hidden place behind the bushes became “un lieu couvert qui sentait fort, enfoui sous les buissons enchevêtrés et rebelles autour de la flèche” (ibid.: 161-162). All those solutions were found on June 19, several days after having met with my Banff mentor, and they stayed the same until publication.

30A similar thing happened when I showed the same mentor my translation of “Like a Cat,” the difference being that I was fully aware of how inadequate some of my descriptions were. I told her to pay special attention to the passages I had underscored. She focused on the following:

I down-hip shimmy-walk toward a group of three boys, then I settle into a loose, fat shimmya motion that slowly constricts, still wet but gripping as the music heightens. […] I muss my hair, shaking my head back-and-forth, my fingers soft and swirling. I close my eyes. My shimmy comes tighter, faster, till I slip into vibration; my legs now move in unison, convulsing the body […] (Apostolides, 2012 : 141)

She said that my translation did not do justice to the fact that the whole dance evoked a stimulated vulva and vagina as they progressed towards orgasm. It contained far too many adjectives making it overly mechanical, so that the image was lost. She added that I had been overly wordy in other places too, as when I had translated “I shimmy hard, with a playful pelvic thrust, up on the beat” (Apostolides, 2012: 140) as “Mon corps vibre à un rythme endiablé, et je bats la cadence de joyeux coups de bassin”; or like when I had translated “they like the grinds, the scoops, the deep undulations” (ibid.: 140) as “ils aiment les déhanchements lascifs, les coups de bassin, les ondulations profondes”. According to her, there were so many epithets that I was turning the text into purple prose. And she was right. “Keep it simple and effective,” she advised me. Once again, she had opened my eyes and enabled me to see past my own grid. In this case, my issue was not the sensuality of the text, but the technicality of the moves described. Teaching general translation for over 10 years has made me acutely aware of how important terminology is. But talking to my Banff mentor, I realized that exact terms did not matter in this case: it was all about carrying over the look and the feel of the scenes. I also realized that reading about sensuality/sexuality in private was not as threatening to me as having to recreate it for the public eye. Translating passages describing the female sex made me feel like I was being watched, and potentially judged. I was not being prude: I was just used to keeping secrets when it came to sexuality.

31I thus edited the passages. The first short segment became much more direct, focusing on the speaking subject: “Je vibre allègrement à un rythme endiablé, ponctué de coups de bassin” (Apostolides, 2015: 195). I also tightened up the second short segment: “ils aiment les déhanchements, les coups de bassin, les longues ondulations” (ibid.: 186). The long dance description, however, took days to fix. On 11 June, I was still struggling with the “loose fat shimmy” evoking the vagina, and was not ready to deal with it. Then, on June 20, I found the answer. I even posted a status on Facebook asking friends what they were reminded of when reading “une ondulation molle et humide qui se contracte à mesure que monte la musique” (ibid.: 186). When one of them answered “Musical intercourse!” I knew I had finally succeeded in finding the right wording. Here is a comparative chart of how this passage evolved after I was made aware of its shortcomings:

May 16 to June 9

J’avance vers un groupe de trois jeunes hommes en balançant une hanche de haut en bas, puis j’opte pour un shimmy plus relâché, plus langoureuxun lent mouvement de contraction toujours fluide mais de plus en plus vif à mesure que monte la musique. […] Je mets les mains dans mes cheveux. Je les ébouriffe en tourbillonnant doucement des doigts et en me secouant la tête d’avant en arrière. Je ferme les yeux. Mon shimmy s’accélère, devient de plus en plus trépidant, jusqu’à ce que j’entre en mode vibration; mes jambe bougent maintenant à l’unisson, faisant trembler tout mon corps.

June 11

J’avance vers un groupe de trois jeunes hommes en balançant une hanche de haut en bas, puis j’opte pour un shimmy plus relâché, plus langoureuxune lente ondulation humide qui accélère et se resserre à mesure que monte la musique. […] Je mets les mains dans mes cheveux. Je les ébouriffe en tourbillonnant doucement des doigts et en me secouant la tête d’avant en arrière. Je ferme les yeux. Mon shimmy s’accélère, devient de plus en plus trépidant, jusqu’à ce que j’entre en mode vibration; mes jambe bougent maintenant à l’unisson, faisant trembler tout mon corps.

June 20

J’avance vers un groupe de trois jeunes hommes en balançant les hanches, puis j’opte pour

un shimmy plus langoureuxune ondulation molle et humide qui se contracte à mesure que monte la musique. […] Je mets les mains dans mes cheveux. Je les ébouriffe doucement des doigts en secouant la tête. Je ferme les yeux. Mon shimmy s’accélère, de plus en plus trépidant, jusqu’à ce que j’entre en vibration, les jambes à l’unisson, tremblant de tout mon corps.

What this shows is how I went from a very wordy, somewhat literal, and exaggeratedly redundant description of the dance to a more compact, vivid one. By leaving out some neutral terms and concentrating on the most evocative ones, I could produce a much more effective and faithful image of the scene. Also, I was able to find a substantive (ondulation), adjectives (molle and humide) and a verb (contracter) that could apply both to the dance and to the female sex organ when it is aroused. I had achieved the desired effect: all new solutions found on June 20 stayed the same until publication.

3.2.3. Stages 4 and 5: from putting it together to polishing

32In August 2014, I reread the whole book several times, preparing to hand in the manuscript. At that point, no significant changes were made to the chosen excerpts. This means that the fourth stage of “putting it together” did not involve challenges related to the translation of sexually charged passages: I had overcome the initial curveballs that my own subjectivity had thrown, or so I thought.

33The two last drafts of each of the three texts correspond to the fifth and last stage (polishing): one (September 19) where I received corrections from the bilingual editor and the other (November 30), when I received the blueprints with last edits made by the publisher. As it turns out, one last revealing change was made during that fifth stage, in the story that made me most uncomfortable, “Coming of Age.”

34During the bilingual editing process, the reviser made me aware of another passage I had euphemistically translated in “Coming of Age.” At one point in the text, twelve-year-old Marianne talks about her lack of understanding of two expressions: “oral sex” and “zipper fuck” (Apostolides, 2012: 127). Now, oral sex is easy enough to understand, but the meaning of zipper fuck is not clear. The Urban Dictionary describes it as “inserting your penis on the zipper and zip up, causing massive devastation to your penis” (which it is not relevant to this particular story), or “Random sex for fun, but not having any regrets”9. When I asked, Marianne said she used it meaning a quick, casual and remorseless sexual encounter. Through all my versions, I had adapted it to “se faire peloter” (to be felt up), which is certainly sexual, but almost innocently so. I used it because I felt the meaning of the expression might have been hard to grasp for a young girl, especially since a pelote is a mere ball of wool. However, the bilingual editor, suggested that I dare use “faire une pipe” (give a blow job), because of the way it sounds. I had thought of it before but had not dared to use it. It must have been the last remnant of my discomfort with the text. I changed it to faire une pipe as soon as I read the editor’s comments. During stages 4 and 5, this was the only significant edit to any of the sexually charged passages, in all three stories combined. This shows just how powerfully my negative feelings impacted on my translation process of “Coming of Age,” as I needed not one, but two external wake up calls before I could produce a translation that would fully convey the effect of the original, one that could make its readers just as uncomfortable reading as I myself had been.

Conclusion

35At the results of this case-study show, the creative-critical divide had significant impacts on my translation process of the three selected stories of Apostolides’ Voluptuous Pleasure, especially during the “section-by-section” and “grey” stages, that is, the active translation phases. My own life experiences influenced how I read the texts, creating a discomfort that affected my translation of sexually charged passages. First, I proved to be creatively free as I translated the story I most liked, identifying with the narrator so much that I instinctively made her more active and empowered in French. Then, the story that generated most discomfort also caused cases of unconscious self-censorship, even until the polishing stage of the process. I needed outside help from a mentor to become aware of it so that I could overcome my unease at producing a translation that would make the reader just as uncomfortable as I had been. Finally, when I translated the story I felt “neutral” about, my focus was too cerebral and too little attuned to the text’s subtle sensuality. Again, the eye-opening comments of a mentor allowed me to acknowledge and address the shortcomings of my translation. As for the final, published versions of the stories, they contain no more traces of self-censorship.

36While literary translators will always leave their mark in target texts, this case-study has shown how they can gain self-awareness during the translation process in order to stay true to the source text. It has also shown that unconscious self-censorship can be avoided before handing in the final manuscript, all the more so if the translator benefits from an objective, external reader. This incursion into possible applications, in the field of Translation Studies, of a research-creation framework and textual genetics methodologies has proven fruitful in opening a literary translator’s “black box.” It would thus be worth pursuing further, especially with regard to transgressive or subversive texts that can bring readers and translators alike out of their comfort zone.

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Notes

1 . This work was supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et Culture (Appui à la recherche-création) under Grant 2016-RC-191316. The author thanks Benoit Laflamme for proofreading this article.

2 . See http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/funding-financement/programs-programmes/definitions-eng.aspx#a22. [All URLs referred to in this chapter were accessed on 10 may 2020.]

3 . Translator commentaries tend to be prescriptive instead of descriptive, aiming at justifying solutions or explaining why a given strategy was chosen instead of another.

4 . See http://www.frqsc.gouv.qc.ca/en/le-frqsc/mission-et-domaines-de-recherche#2-WFA.

5 . See Stratford 2014.

6 . See Chaffin, Imreh and Crawford, 2002 ; Héroux and Fortier, 2014.

7 . For a discussion of traditional models used in poetry translation, see Stratford 2014.

8 . See Cordingley and Montini, 2015.

9 . See http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=zipper%20fuck.

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Madeleine Stratford, « From Voluptuous Pleasure to Voluptés: Delving into the Literary Translation Process »Palimpsestes, 34 | -0001, 120-133.

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Madeleine Stratford, « From Voluptuous Pleasure to Voluptés: Delving into the Literary Translation Process »Palimpsestes [En ligne], 34 | 2020, mis en ligne le 30 septembre 2020, consulté le 15 mai 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/palimpsestes/5843 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/palimpsestes.5843

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Auteur

Madeleine Stratford

Madeleine Stratford est traductrice et professeure agrégée à l’Université du Québec en Outaouais. Elle a publié plusieurs articles dans des revues scientifiques, dont TTR, Meta et la Revue d’études canadiennes. Membre de l’Association des traducteurs et traductrices littéraires du Canada, elle a aussi signé plusieurs traductions littéraires, dont Elle nage de Marianne Apostolides, finaliste en 2016 au prix du Gouverneur général.

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