Complexity and unpredictability in cultural flows: Two French Holocaust novels in English translation

Abstract

This article analyses the presence of translated fiction in the contemporary globalized UK book market, using the metaphor of “landscape”. It focuses on two French novels about the Second World War and the Holocaust: Fabrice Humbert's L'Origine de la violence (2009), translated by Frank Wynne as The Origin of Violence (2011), and Agnès Desarthe's Dans la nuit brune (2010), translated by Adriana Hunter as The Foundling (2012). By analysing interviews with publishers, author appearances at literary events, and published reviews, the article considers the processes of circulation and reception that govern the flow of translated literature. War literature is an interesting case because its themes are nationally specific and politically and aesthetically contentious, whilst its subject matter is also potentially universal. Questioning the equation of “fluency” with domestication and assimilation, the article suggests that the outcomes of cultural transfer are unstable and unpredictable.

Keywords:

• Holocaust literature
• literary publishing
• landscape
• reception
• Fabrice Humbert
• Agnès Desarthe

Notes on contributor

Angela Kershaw is a senior lecturer in French studies at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of two monographs, Forgotten Engagements: Women, Literature and the Left in 1930s France (2007) and Before Auschwitz: Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-War France (2010), and co-editor of Women in Europe Between the Wars: Politics, Culture, Society (2006) and Parcours de femmes: Twenty Years of Women in French (2011). Her research interests include twentieth-century French literature, women's writing, travel writing and the translation and reception of French war and Holocaust literature.

Notes

1. Public Culture is the journal of the Society for Transnational Cultural Studies. Arjun Appadurai is a founding editor of this journal.

2. This section is based on face-to-face interviews with Rebecca Carter by Angela Kershaw (9 March 2011) and with Christopher MacLehose (9 February 2011) by Gabriela Saldanha and Angela Kershaw, and on telephone interviews with Laura Barber and Pete Ayrton (both 14 June 2012) by Angela Kershaw. I should like to take this opportunity to thank them for kindly agreeing to assist me with this research.

3. The Dalkey survey includes respondents from a range of anglophone countries (i.e. Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, UK and USA) and does not distinguish between them in the reporting of the results.