Atelier XII :
Rôle et erreurs des traductions dans les théories postcoloniales
(Amphithéâtre au 105, bd Raspail)
Président: Alain Messouadi (EHESS)
From Beirut to New York: Middle East Politics and Post-Colonial Translation. Christophe Ippolito (USA. Georgia Institute of Technology)
La littérature « mineure » : de Kafka à la théorie postcoloniale en passant par Deleuze/Guattari : histoire d'un malentendu fécond. Dirk Weissmann (France. Université Paris Est)
Transcultural Contexts, Indigenous Language, and Translating the Life Stories of Poogleedee (James Sewid) and Axux (Agnes Alfred) of the Pacific Northwest Coast Kwakwakәẃakw Peoples Robert Rutherdale. (Canada. Algoma University—Sault St. Marie, Ontario)
Abstracts /Résumés/ Zusammenfassungen
From Beirut to New York: Middle East Politics and Post-Colonial Translation by Christophe Ippolito
As the editor of a recently published bilingual edition of poems written in French by Nadia Tuéni, a Lebanese author, on the civil war in Lebanon, I had to prepare a scholarly edition of translated poems for a cross-cultural audience, negotiating meaning between linguistically and culturally different audiences both in Lebanon and the United States, in French and in English. The book was a joint publication between Syracuse University Press and a Lebanese publishing company, Dar An-Nahar. In the process of editing this translation there were facilitating factors, but the editing and translating processes also went through several challenges that are directly relevant to questions involving the relationships between translation, on the one hand, and culture, postcolonial studies, and more generally politics and globalization on the other hand. As authors such as Sherry Simon or Harish Trivedi have noted, translations are based on theories of the given cultures that surround them and delineate the markers of identity and difference. This paper, anchored in a practical experience of edition and translation, will discuss the intercultural operations inherent to such an enterprise. After giving some background on the publishing aspects of this enterprise, on the author and her situation in the context of the Lebanese civil war, and on the edited translation, this paper will deal with what became the central issue in the editing/translating process, i.e. how is one to negotiate translation of culture in a co-publication between a Western, dominant press and a local press (with special attention given here to politics). Finally, the paper will present some practical solutions to the challenges that arose from this close contact between cultures, and address this practice of “in-betweeness” some have seen as central to the translator and editor of postcolonial works.
La littérature « mineure » : de Kafka à la théorie postcoloniale en passant par Deleuze/Guattari : histoire d'un malentendu fécond. de Dirk Weissman
Depuis la publication, en 1975, du livre de Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari intitulé Kafka, pour une littérature mineure, la notion de littérature mineure a connu une belle fortune dans les sciences humaines et sociales. Aujourd’hui c’est surtout dans le domaine des études postcoloniales qu’elle est devenue l’un des concepts clés des cultural studies. Or, la genèse de ce concept repose sur un malentendu productif du fait d’une traduction biaisée de textes de Franz Kafka, traduction qu’on a pu qualifier de « tendancieuse » et qui semble hypothéquer le discours actuel sur le mineur en littérature. En effet, Kafka, dans son Journal de l’année 1911, entreprend de décrire les mécanismes d’émergence, à son époque, des jeunes littératures nationales dont la littérature tchèque. Aussi parle-t-il de « kleine Literaturen », c’est-à-dire de la littérature des petits pays par opposition aux grandes littératures nationales telles que la littérature allemande qui dominait alors complètement le paysage littéraire à Prague. Utilisant Kafka comme caution de leur propre théorie, Deleuze et Guattari ont ainsi réduit la spécificité historique des analyses de Kafka, en transformant un écrivain soucieux des questions politiques de son temps en prophète d’une pensée révolutionnaire à venir. Sans remettre radicalement en cause la légitimité de la démarche de Deleuze et Guattari, notre communication entend s’interroger sur les tenants et les aboutissants d’une telle traduction « active », en commençant par retracer la genèse du concept de petite littérature chez Kafka, pour ensuite décrire sa transformation à l’intérieur d’un discours sur le mineur. Dans quelle mesure la notion de littérature mineure est-elle entachée de cette instrumentalisation anachronique des textes de Kafka ? Le discours actuel sur la littérature mineure peut-il encore légitimement se référer à cet écrivain ? Ne devrait-on pas plutôt refonder cette notion sur d’autres bases que celles des réflexions de Kafka dont la situation littéraire n’a finalement si peu de choses en commun avec le champ d’application de la théorie postcoloniale ?
Transcultural Contexts, Indigenous Language, and Translating the Life Stories of Poogleedee (James Sewid) and Axux (Agnes Alfred) of the Pacific Northwest Coast Kwakwakәẃakw Peoples by Robert Rutherdale
In recent decades, the post-colonial struggles of indigenous peoples have become inseparable with increased sensitivity to indigenous language use, preservation, enhancement, and continued transmission from native-speaking elders to youth. Western-based anthropologists have become, since the 1970s, acutely aware of the the challenge not only of linguistic barriers but of the comparatively rapid disappearance of traditional languages in conducting and publishing ethnographical fieldwork. Most sensitive to this, however, have been the Aboriginal elders themselves, in primarily local and regional communities around the world facing proliferating modernization and the intergenerational effects of colonialism. This has been clearly the case among Northwest Coast communities. As Martine J. Reid has stated in reference to her collaborative work in translating the life and learning of the Kwakwala -speaking Qwiqwasuťinuxw noblewoman Axuw (Agnes Alfred), ‘[d]uring the 1970s there was increasing awareness among both Aboriginal peoples and scholars that unwritten languages were facing extinction. Northwest Coast Aboriginal languages and all their associated cultural knowledge were disappearing, along with their practitioners.’ Anthropologist James Spradley presented first, in 1969, in English the life of James Sewid (Poogleedee) as an as-told-to life story. Spradley commented that Sewid’s command of English was ‘sufficient’ for him to present in that language, though Sewid had grown up as a fluently bilingual Kwakwala- and English-speaking person. Thirty-five years later, Reid published the life story of Sewid’s mother-in-law, Axuw (Agnes Alfred). Clearly evident in Reid’s methodology and approach, in collaboration with Daisy Sewid-Smith, Poogleedee’s daughter and Axuw’s granddaughter, is increased sensitivity to representing Kwakwala and to the significance of language in the translation of cultural difference. Since anthropologists such as Reid, James Spradley, and many others began working in the 1960s and 1970s respectively, histories around the globe of traditional native language preservation, enhancement, and inter-generational transmission have accompanied efforts to disrupt the negative impacts of colonial power and resituate loci of cultural change, a salient aspect of the lives of both Poogleedee and Axuw among the Kwakwakәẃakw peoples.
Bios:
Christophe Ippolito, professeur adjoint au Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta), travaille sur la modernité et l’antimodernité. Son dernier livre édité est Lebanon: Poems of Love and War / Liban: Poèmes d’amour et de guerre, de Nadia Tuéni (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press ; Beyrouth : Dar An-Nahar, 2006) ; son dernier article publié est « La conclusion d’Indiana», Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France (2009-3) : 555-572) ; pour plus d’informations, consulter http://christopheippolito.com/
Agrégé de l’Université, Dirk Weissmann est Maître de conférences à l’Université Paris-Est Créteil. Après une thèse de doctorat consacrée à la réception française de Paul Celan et plusieurs travaux dans le domaine des transferts culturels et de la traductologie, ses recherches actuelles portent sur l’histoire de l’écriture littéraire bilingue en France et en Allemagne.
Robert Rutherdale is an Associate Professor of History at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. He has most recently published Hometown Horizons: Local Responses to Canada’s Great War (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004), a study of French- and English-speaking cultural responses to the First World War and has co-edited, with Magda Fahrni, Creating Postwar Canada: Community, Diversity, and Dissent, 1945-1975 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008). He is currently completing a cross-cultural comparative study of fatherhood in postwar Canada.
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