National allegories born(e) in translation: the Catalan case

ABSTRACT

This article examines the ways in which Catalan crime fiction is entwined with the concepts of world literature, national allegory and translation. Crime novels have been singled out for two reasons: first, because the genre’s origins are steeped in translation; second, because crime novels are often beholden to a particularly strong sense of place. Crime fiction in translation serves as national allegory insofar as it represents and re-presents a nation. The article explores what happens when such novels move beyond their culture of origin, in particular which national allegory is played out, and how it is read in the foreign context. Through an analysis of novels by Maria Aurèlia Capmany and Teresa Solana, this article maps the transformations that national allegories undergo when they are translated from one linguistic context to another: in the case of Capmany’s Traduït de l’americà, from the US to Catalonia; in the case of Solana’s Un crim imperfecte, from Catalonia to the rest of the world. As novels both born and borne in translation, these works point to a truly worldly understanding of literature and the nation’s place within it.

KEYWORDS:

• crime fiction
• translation
• national allegory
• Catalan
• Rebecca Walkowitz
• world literature
• Maria Aurèlia Capmany
• Teresa Solana

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Unless otherwise stated, all translations into English are by the authors.

2. By Catalan crime fiction we mean works written in Catalan. The novels of Catalan authors who write in Castilian, such as Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (perhaps the most internationally recognised crime writer from Spain), are not considered here.

3. Gideon Toury (1995, 40) defines pseudotranslations, or fictitious translations, as ‘texts which have been presented as translations with no corresponding source texts in other languages ever having existed’. Carol O’Sullivan ([2004] 2005) and Brigid Maher (2013) have argued that the concept of pseudotranslation can be broadened to include works of contemporary literature (often genre fiction) that ‘behave’ and ‘are consumed’ as translations, incorporating foreign concepts, terminology and settings in order to evoke a certain foreign flavour (O’Sullivan [2004] 2005, 66). Walkowitz, indeed, includes pseudotranslations in her definition of ‘born-translated’ literature. Born-translated works, she writes, are ‘often written as translations, pretending to take place in a language other than the one in which they have, in fact, been composed. Sometimes they present themselves as fake or fictional editions: subsequent versions […] of an original text […] which doesn’t really exist’ (2015, 4).

4. One striking example is the case of Fernanda Cano, who in the 1950s and 1960s penned 13 novels in the English classic detective tradition under the pseudonym Mary Francis Colt, including Billete de ida [One-Way Ticket] (1959). This novel is purportedly a translation into Spanish of The Datchet Road Mystery. The illusion of translation is achieved by providing an original (English) title and by naming the translator, F. Cano Caparrós (in reality, the author of the original, Spanish-language, novel).

5. Capmany (1918–1991) was a leading feminist writer in Catalan whose works varied from high modernism in the Woolfian tradition to crime fiction. She was also a translator and translated 12 novels in the ‘La Cúa de Palla’ series, including James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity (1943). All quotations are taken from the third, retitled edition Vés-te’n ianqui [Yankee Go Home] (2005).

6. Readers of the emerging genre of crime fiction in Spain would have had practice in interpreting foreign settings as a displaced national allegory via Mario Lacruz’s 1953 Spanish-language novel El inocente [The Innocent Man], a novel set in an unnamed country whose foreignness is marked in the text through vaguely Italianate personal names, modified Catalan toponyms that ‘still sound more foreign than domestic’, rugby players and Pernod drinkers (Hart 1987, 30). Although considered a crime novel, El inocente owes more to French existentialism than to the American crime novel.

7. Other parallels that facilitate recognition between Albania and Catalonia/Spain are: Albania missing out on being liberated by the Allies at the end of the Second World War (Capmany 2005, 37); a police officer’s rhetoric about his fellow citizens being unprepared for democracy, and how it is the role of the state to civilise those citizens who ‘encara no han assimilat el nostre ordre’ [have not yet accepted our order] (40); the nation’s subordinate position between two dominant powers: Mussolini’s Italy and the Ottoman Empire, the latter of which embarked on a process of cultural colonisation, here called ‘turquificació’ [Turkification] (56, 136); the discussion of a nineteenth-century cultural and literary revival that resisted Ottoman cultural imperialism (135); and Capmany’s description of police raiding a private poetry reading, prompting the protagonist to reflect upon a country in which ‘el contraban era legal i la poesia delicte’ [contraband is legal and poetry a crime] (145, 147).

8. For a discussion of the role of translation in the Catalan polysystem, see Crameri (2000).

9. The 2014 Report of the Institut Ramon Llull states that they subsidise 100 translations per year (2014, 9). The translations vary from mediaeval classics to modernist gems to contemporary crime and erotic fiction.

10. Solana is also a literary translator who directed the Tarazona Translation Centre before publishing her first novel.

11. For a discussion of Barcelona as a city of/in translation, see Simon (2012, 88–116).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stewart King

Stewart King teaches in Spanish and Latin American Studies and coordinates the International Literatures programme at Monash University. He has published extensively on contemporary Spanish and Catalan narrative and on crime fiction as a form of world literature. He is the author of Escribir la catalanidad. Lenguas e identidades en la narrativa contemporánea de Cataluña (Tamesis, 2005) and the editor or co-editor of The Space of Culture: Critical Readings in Hispanic Studies (University of Delaware Press, 2004, with Jeff Browitt), La cultura catalana de expression castellana (Reichenberger, 2005), ‘Beyond the Periphery: Narratives of Identity in the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia’ (Antípodas 18, 2007) and ‘The Global Crime Scene’ (Clues 32.2, 2014, with Stephen Knight).

Alice Whitmore

Alice Whitmore is a writer and literary translator based in Melbourne. She is currently completing a PhD in Translation Studies at Monash University. She is a coordinator of inter-campus events with the Monash-Warwick Migration, Identity and Translation Network (MITN), and assistant editor of The AALITRA Review. She has published a number of articles on translation and comparative literature, including: ‘The “Permanent Unease” of Cultural Translation in the Fiction of Guillermo Fadanelli’ (New Voices in Translation Studies, 2014); ‘The Cosmogony of Translation: Translating Yaxkin Melchy’s Los Planetas’ (Reinvention, 2013); ‘Four Poems by Yaxkin Melchy’ (The AALITRA Review, 2013); and ‘Dirty Realism’s Other Face’ (The Sydney Review of Books, 2016). Her literary translations and creative writing have been published by Penguin Specials, Ox and Pigeon, Asymptote, Kodoma Kartonera, Voiceworks, Dumbo Feather, Mexico City Lit, Egg Poetry and Askew. Her translation of Guillermo Fadanelli’s See You at Breakfast? was published with Giramondo in 2016.