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Palimpsestes 40 :  Call for articles. From Exploration Narratives to Ethnographic Writing(s): Translational Perspectives

CENTRE DE RECHERCHE EN TRADUCTION ET COMMUNICATION TRANSCULTURELLE ANGLAIS-FRANÇAIS / FRANÇAIS-ANGLAIS

"I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions", the famous opening line of Tristes Tropiques, which goes beyond Lévi-Strauss's personal case, underlines the ambivalent and paradoxical relationship anthropologists have with the tradition of travel writing, as it has enthralled the European public ever since Marco Polo's Description of the World (1298); this book, "translated into all European languages" and whose "narrative," writes Florence Weber, "hesitating between the novel of chivalry and geographical description, fascinated its contemporaries and was republished many times". (Weber 2015, 42-43). Here we can see a characteristic of travel narratives that persists throughout their metamorphoses over the centuries — namely the oscillation between fact and fiction, as if putting travel into words necessarily entailed some sort of fictionalization.

However, both Florence Weber and François Laplantine, in his own Introduction to Anthropology, agree that the first accounts of travellers-explorers in the Renaissance period represent "the prehistory of anthropology". Montaigne, in his famous essay “Des cannibales”, which is based on Jean de Léry's Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil "[recognized] today as a monument of ethnography" (Weber, 2015, p. 60), is another pioneer of the ethnographic gaze, and it even proposes a reflection on the place of translation "carefully distinguishing between the ethnographer and the interpreter [...]". For instance, while talking about the Tupinamba, Montaigne recounts his disappointment with the interpreter. "I spoke to one of them for a very long time; but I had a truchement [interpreter] who followed me so badly, and who was so prevented from receiving my imaginations by his stupidity, that I could derive little pleasure from it.'" (Weber 2015, 62).

The link between travel and translation, as dépaysement [change of scenery/defamiliarization], as an encounter with the foreign, with the Other, has practically become a cliché, as Susan Bassnett writes:

both translators and travel writers inhabit a contact zone where cultures converge […] both travel writing and translation are target-oriented, since both are aimed at a domestic readership, and this may serve as the framework within which to consider both modes of writing. [...] Travel writing is itself a form of translation, a point made also by Duncan and Gregory, who highlight the linguistic dimension: ‘In representing other cultures and other natures, then, travel writers « translate » one place into another, and in doing so constantly rub against the hubris that their own language-game contains the concepts necessary to represent another language-game. (“Translation and Travel Writing” in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, 2019, 550/563.)

Bassnett draws a parallel between travel literature and translation through concepts directly derived from translation studies (“target-oriented”); it is obviously the metaphor of displacement, of "translation", that is appropriate for such an analogy. For his part, F. Laplantine apprehends this link between the translational and anthropological approaches perhaps even more radically, when he writes: "[...] a translational journey is an anthropological journey. It is a nomadic journey in which no privilege is accorded to the source text or the target text " [emphasis added] (Lavieri and Londei 2018, 29.) And, once again, he summons two notions belonging to the field of translation studies.

However, in the introduction to their book, Antonio Lavieri and Danielle Londei make the following remark, echoing a recurring observation made when reading anthropological works:

Often relegated to a question of method, or equated with techniques pertaining to interview protocol in fieldwork (Simon 1988), translation has, as a result, very rarely played a central role in reflection on the discursive practices of anthropologists (Tedlock 1983; Hanks and Severi 2014). (Lavieri and Londei 2018, 12)

There are, of course, exceptions. For example, one of the founders of "modern" anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski, offers a profound reflection on the role of translation in ethnographic inquiry — and, more generally, on the interweaving of culture(s) and language(s). In his book Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935), Part IV is entirely devoted to what he calls "An ethnographic theory of language and some practical corollaries". This includes a section entitled "The translation of untranslatable words", which, long before the advent of translation studies, offered a critical look at the translation problems associated with "indigenous" concepts, which only make sense within the culture of the people the ethnologist has undertaken to describe/translate. Malinowski remarks that the Trobrianders have a number of words to designate what, in English, would be referred to by the same term: "garden". The method he proposes seems to herald the principles of "thick translation" later developed by Kwame Anthony Appiah, based on the "thick description" expounded by the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Geertz, who initiated a rethinking of the ethnographic gaze, came to see "culture as an assemblage of texts and ethnographic writing as fiction" (Costey 2003).

The form and purpose of travel narratives naturally evolved over time. Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, with the rise of the "will to know" and scientific knowledge, the art of travel was codified in ars apodemica. This was also the period when "the figure of the missionary acquired new importance within the Catholic Church":

The missionaries' interest in native languages gave them a special status among seventeenth-century scholars [...] Thus their stay was characterized by a long presence and frequent contact with the natives, the very model of ethnography by familiarization. (Weber 2015, 84/86)

In the Age of Enlightenment, scientific travel “had finally acquired its letters of nobility. It had become an expensive expedition supported financially by governments and scientifically by learned institutions" (Weber 2015, 100). In the 19th century, the scientific objective persisted, but the context of colonization and rivalry between European nations changed all that. In addition, the middle of the century saw an increase in the general public's interest in travel accounts, which were "from then on very often abridged to highlight the most spectacular parts, such as Stanley's famous encounter with Livingstone" (Hist. des traductions en langue française, XIXe siècle, 2012, 1113). This was also the time when more and more accounts by women travellers were translated (ibid., 1114). Finally, in the twentieth century, the development of ever faster means of transport and the fact that virtually no regions of the globe were left to discover, further modified the perspectives and modalities of travel relations and encouraged authors to reinvent the forms of travel literature, often blurring the boundary between fact and fiction even more sharply than before. And, of course, this is also the moment when anthropology, ethnographic writing with a scientific claim, detached itself from travel writing, or even proclaimed its break with travel, as seen with Levi-Strauss at the start of this short overview.

The contributions will examine the linguistic challenges posed by the translation of the unknown, the unexplored and the unheard-of in travel writing, with particular reference to (proto)ethnographic writing.

Possible areas of research: (papers may of course involve languages other than English and French, but one of these two languages should be included).

  1. The specific features of exploration narrative and ethnographic writing and the related translation problems: in particular, the representation of cultural otherness, the description of the environment and of cultures, and the recounting of lived experiences.

  2. Representation of the translator or interpreter in exploration narratives. Metadiscourse on translation problems.

  3. Diachronic perspective: analysis of the translation of exploration narratives and ethnographic writings across different historical periods.

  4. Study of the linguistic and stylistic choices made by translators when translating travel texts into different languages, and the impact of these choices on interpretation and reception.

  5. Travelogues and identity: representation and construction of identity in translated travelogues, and the potential influence of the translator's identity on the interpretation of the text.

  6. Reflection on ethical and political issues related to the translation of travel writing and ethnographic writing, including cultural representation, cultural appropriation, and the preservation of marginalized and minority cultural voices and colonial legacies.

  7. Postcolonial and decolonial approaches to the translation of travel writing and ethnographic writing.

  8. The spoken word vs. the written word in the translation of narratives freezing the word of the other and fieldwork exchanges.

  9. Reflection on the notion of untranslatability in travel writing, in relation to the cliché of the incommunicability of the travel experience.

  10. Study of the translation of rhetorical devices aimed at proving the authenticity of the narrative / Study of the translation of auctorial devices and the writing of otherness.

  11. An intermedial approach to translated narratives: analysis of the selection, adaptation and distribution of illustrations and maps, and their relationship to texts.

Articles in English or French should be sent by 15 January 2025 to Bruno Poncharal (bruno.poncharal@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr) and Anne-Florence Quaireau (anne-florence.quaireau@univ-angers.fr)

Bibliographie

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Appiah, Kwame Anthony, “Thick Translation” in Lawrence Venuti (ed), The Translation studies Reader, London & New York, Routledge, 2000.

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Bassnett,Susan, “Travelling and translating”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 40:2 (2004), pp. 66-76.

C. Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York, Basic Books, 1973.

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Costey, Paul « Description et interprétation chez Clifford Geertz. La thick description chez Clifford Geertz », Tracés. Revue de Sciences humaines, 4 | 2003, 103-108.

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