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ABSTRACT
Language plays a key role in the crime novels of Peter Temple, where it serves both as a means of constructing a distinctive Australian identity and as a vehicle for expressing Temple’s critique of Australian society and its ills. A close comparative reading of his two landmark novels, The Broken Shore and Truth, and their French translations highlights the significance of their linguistic features and the challenges they pose to translators. By focusing on particular aspects of Temple’s style, the lexicon he favours and his use of the Australian vernacular, notably swear words, we can see how crucial language is to his construction of the national allegory – and the impact that differing translation strategies and practices can have on the representation of that national allegory for a different target audience.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. ‘Sisters in Crime’ web page announcing the conference: ‘Telling Truths: Crime Fiction and National Allegory’. http://www.sistersincrime.org.au/content/telling-truths-crime-fiction-and-national-allegory-conference. Accessed 12 November 2014.
2. Hobsbawm further observes that the ideal of a linguistically and culturally homogeneous population is intrinsically dangerous, as it can be harnessed to justify such atrocities as ethnic cleansing and genocide.
3. It is important to note here that, even within Australia, there exists a significant range of English uses. As Arthur Delbridge (Citation1991) reminds us, Standard Australian English has ‘never been the only English used in Australia’.
4. For an analysis of the extent of social and institutional dysfunction in The Broken Shore, see West-Sooby (Citation2014).
5. For quotations from the novels, the abbreviations BS and T will be used for the original English versions of The Broken Shore and Truth, respectively. For the French translations, the abbreviations S and V will be used to designate Séquelles and Vérité. Editions are as indicated in the References section. Where literal translations are provided, these are my own.
6. Russel Ward, in The Australian Legend (Citation1958), famously wrote that the ‘typical Australian’ is ‘taciturn rather than talkative’. His views on the national character, though often criticised, have remained influential. An interesting re-evaluation, some 20 years after the publication of Ward’s book, is provided by John Rickard (Citation1979).
7. As Louis Truffaut (Citation1974, 161) notes, ‘Le procédé paratactique reposant sur l’absence d’outils hiérarchisant le temps ou l’espace supprime tout étagement, tout recul, toute perspective. […] Le français moderne continue à user de la parataxe pour obtenir un effet de coupé, de haché’ (‘As parataxis is based on the absence of any device that would create an ordering of time or space, it removes all sense of rank, distance or perspective. […] Parataxis continues to be used in modern French to obtain a fragmented, broken effect’). Would it be too much of a stretch to see in Peter Temple’s use of parataxis a reflection of the Australian tendency towards the rejection of authority and hierarchy?
8. Parataxis is a particular feature of most mediaeval European languages, such as Old French, which had a limited number of subordinating conjunctions. It was during the Renaissance that large numbers of subordinating and coordinating conjunctions were introduced into the French language, resulting in a major shift in prose style. Interestingly, as Truffaut (Citation1974, 161) notes, the development of hypotaxis around the end of the fourteenth century corresponds with the emergence of perspective in painting.
9. On this link between form and content, see West-Sooby (Citation2014).
10. The mistranslation here – in the original text Cashin is saying he will be there in 15–20 minutes, not at 15:20 – highlights the work required on the part of the reader to add the word or words that Temple has left out.
11. She has translated into French several of Kenneth Cook’s novels, for example, as well as Anna Funder’s Stasiland.
12. As Lara Cain (Citation2001, 52) points out, ‘when translating, a substantially different slant may be given to a situation by the use of a more or less harsh vulgarity’. She goes on to note: ‘Like all things deemed socially acceptable or otherwise, the taboo loading of a word is a societal construct – hence, logically, difference will occur between cultures’. ‘Taboo loading’ is the term coined by Taylor (Citation1976) to designate the level of unacceptability of swear words and other terms of insult.
13. As Cain (Citation2001, 50) notes, ‘certain terms or words may move from the periphery (that which is highly offensive) to a more central position (generally acceptable) through frequent usage. A level of desensitisation towards vulgarities comes with watching contemporary cinema, for example’. Murray Schellenberg (Citation1996) has also demonstrated that ‘the loading of any specific word is not fixed diachronically. The taboo loading can shift with time, the word becoming either more or less offensive. These shifts can occur in a relatively short period of time. Another way of viewing this would be to say that general levels of offendedness have shifted with time’.
14. Some examples, showing either the introduction of an expletive or a shift of the profanity to a different part of the speech utterance: ‘Me? Like I’d kill my job? I’m a late starter, still got two kids on the tit, mate’ (BS, 19) is translated as ‘Moi? Et foutre mon boulot en l’air? Je m’y suis mis sur le tard, mon pote. J’ai encore deux gamins qui me pendent aux mamelles’ (S, 35) (‘Me? And throw my fuckin job away? I’m a late starter, mate. I’ve still got two kids stuck to my breast’); ‘Old buggers with nothing better to do than stickybeak’ (BS, 22–23) becomes ‘Des vieux cons qui n’ont rien d’autre à foutre que de fourrer leur sale nez partout’ (S, 40) (‘Old buggers who’ve got nothing else to fuckin do than stick their dirty nose in everything’); and ‘Put the hard word on Debbie. She won’t listen to her mum and I’m a fuckin non-starter’ (BS, 30) is rendered as ‘Foutre un peu la trouille à Debbie. Elle veut pas écouter sa mère et moi, n’en parlons pas’ (S, 50) (‘Put the fuckin wind up Debbie. She won’t listen to her mother, and don’t even talk about me’).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
John West-Sooby
John West-Sooby is Professor of French Studies at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He is the co-author, with Jean Fornasiero, of French Designs on Colonial New South Wales. François Péron’s Memoir on the English Settlements of New Holland, Van Diemen’s Land and the Archipelagos of the Great Pacific Ocean (2014, The Friends of the State Library of South Australia). With Jean Fornasiero, he has recently translated into English Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, Painter and Naturalist: A Forgotten Treasure (2016, Editions de Conti), by Gabrielle Baglione and Cédric Crémière.