Howdunnit? The French translation of Australian cultural identity in Philip McLaren’s crime novel Scream Black Murder/Tueur d’Aborigènes

ABSTRACT

With the growing acceptance by scholars that crime fiction narratives can serve as a vehicle for authors to construct a sense of ‘self-identification’, the possibility emerges for ‘home-grown’ crime fiction texts to be harnessed by authors to evoke particular national traditions and identities. Together with the recognition by translation theorists that literary translation has the ability to perform a culture for a new target readership, this has led to intense debate surrounding the difficulties posed by the translation of cultural specificities and the possible effects that chosen translation strategies may have on perceptions of the source culture for the new target readership. This article forms part of a larger project that examines what happens to the culturally specific features of Australian crime fiction novels produced and published in the last 30 years when they are translated into French for consumption by the francophone world. It will take as a case study a crime fiction novel by Australian Aboriginal author Philip McLaren, Scream Black Murder/Tueur d’Aborigènes, in which the author has consciously set out to construct a distinctive sense of Australian cultural identity and difference.

KEYWORDS:

• Australian cultural identity
• crime fiction
• cultural specificity
• French translation
• intercultural transcreation
• national allegory
• Philip McLaren
• translator practices

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank John West-Sooby, Alistair Rolls, the two anonymous reviewers and the journal editors for their meticulous and insightful comments and advice on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The 2001 Magabala Books edition of Scream Black Murder and the 2005 Gallimard edition of its translation as Tueur d’Aborigènes are referenced in the comparative textual analysis.

2. ‘Les Accords de Matignon’ were signed on 6 June 1988 between France and the Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste (FLNKS), bringing an end to the conflict of that time.

3. This Greenpeace ship had been involved in protests over French nuclear testing in the Pacific at Mururoa Atoll, French Polynesia and was bombed by French operatives while moored in Auckland Harbour. NZ History Online http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/politics/nuclear-free-new-zealand/rainbow-warrior (nzhistory.net.nz). Accessed 15 October 2013.

4. French President Jacques Chirac announced the resumption of nuclear testing in the Pacific on 13 June 1995. This news provoked widespread protests in the Pacific region, which culminated in violent riots in Pape’ete on 6 September 1995.

5. For further discussion on the increase in Australian cultural productions, see Turner (1986, 1994), Clancy (2004) and Gelder and Salzman (2009).

6. The exponential increase in the number of home-grown crime fiction narratives produced by Australian authors was bolstered by decisions made by Australia’s transnational and independent publishing houses to reissue iconic Australian-authored crime fiction titles which had been published up to 100 years earlier. Jean Fornasiero notes that the re-publication of Australian authors in the Crime Classics Collection by Wakefield Press in 1988 enjoyed great success, coinciding as it did with a push by Australian publishing companies for Australian authors to become more prominent on the world literary stage. In this context, being Australian was actually used as ‘a selling point’ (Fornasiero 2009, 151).

7. From my research of more than 850 titles of crime fiction novels produced by Australian authors since 1980, over 109 have been translated into French and published in France during this time. Crime fiction is taken so seriously in France that the City of Paris and the mayor’s office of the 5th arrondissement decided to create a new library in October 1995, at a cost of more than $1.2 million, as the official place to keep all crime fiction novels published in France together with over 3500 reference books on the subject. The Bibliothèque des littératures policières (BiLiPo) is the home of the original and renowned Gallimard Série Noire collection, in which several Australian authors feature. In 2013 the library had 50 Australian authors in its collection (Reed 2015).

8. There are many detailed studies on the genre of crime fiction and its use as a social commentary on a particular society at a particular time. Claire Gorrara believes that the crime fiction genre ‘was conceived at the intersection of three national cultures: France, Great Britain and America’, and has become a useful mechanism for international inquiry into the historical, social and cultural representations of our globalised world (Gorrara 2007, 214). (See also Jameson 2012; Anderson, Miranda, and Pezzotti 2012.)

9. For more on the cultural turn in Translation Studies, see Bassnett (1998). As translation scholar Lefevere states, ‘in translation, a sentence is always “somewhat more” than a string of equivalent words, and a text is always “somewhat more” than a string of equivalent sentences. It supports meaning, cultural meaning and even the translation of a whole culture’ (Lefevere 1992, 8).

10. Proponents of foreignisation in translation suggest a strategy whereby foreign words and concepts are maintained in the translation, sometimes with a gloss, but specifically in order to facilitate understanding of the source culture by highlighting cultural difference and to render the translator visible. Proponents of domestication suggest an approach through which the text is completely appropriated by the receiving culture and markers of cultural difference are neutralised, naturalised or even eliminated altogether, rendering the translator invisible. For more on the foreignisation/domestication dichotomy, see Venuti (1995), Bassnett (1998) and Tymoczko (2006).

11. The more recent acknowledgement by scholars that translation is responsible for translating elements of cultural specificity, to encourage better understanding between cultures or, conversely, to deliberately mislead them, Tymoczko calls ‘intercultural transference’ (2006, 442–461).

12. ‘They [the French] are reading from Indigenous perspectives and perhaps these are voices they haven’t considered before. They are so enthusiastic and I felt quite emotional at times to see just how much the French have embraced Aboriginal culture’ (Sword 2010).

13. Philip McLaren was born in 1943. He can trace his heritage back to the beginning of recorded history in the Warrumbungle Mountains region of New South Wales (McLaren 2007) and identifies as a descendant of the Kamilaroi people (Rusden 1994, 99). McLaren’s career includes the television and film industries, design, painting and sculpture (McLaren 2007). In 2005 he wrote and directed a short film entitled Mabo, which explored the mystical link between young Aboriginal people and drew attention to the neglect McLaren saw by consecutive Australian governments in dealing with the rights of young Indigenous Australians. McLaren’s short film should not be confused with a movie-length documentary film directed by Rachel Perkins, also entitled Mabo. Synopsis retrieved from Screen Australia website at http://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/find-a-film/detail.aspx?tid=23916 on 12 June 2015. Other bibliographical details obtained from ‘ABC Radio National Radio Eye – The Writers Train: Ali Curung’. Retrieved from www.abc.net.au/rn/legacy/features/train/alicurung/ on 12 January 2015. For a detailed study of Philip McLaren’s ‘ethnographic’ crime fiction, see Ramsland and Ramsland (2012).

14. Kath Walker (1920–1993), who later became known as Oodgeroo Noonuccal, was a respected spokesperson for Indigenous people who fought for the advancement and rights of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders through public speaking, visual arts and education (Cochrane 1994).

15. The subtitle of McLaren’s Senate Select Committee submission, ‘le fil indigène invisible’, is interesting. Le fil invisible is the name of the publishing company that co-published the first French translation of his novel Scream Black Murder as Tueur d’Aborigènes in 2003.

16. See Philip McLaren, ‘Redfern: Politically Wrecked Families’, The Guardian, 25 February 2004; and, ‘For the Cause, Revisit Aboriginal History’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 April 2012.

17. For a particularly informative study of the Australian setting within Australian crime fiction, see Knight (1997), particularly Chapter 4, ‘Place and Displacement: The Role of Setting’ (143–172).

18. The link between crime fiction and the national allegory was eloquently demonstrated in a paper given by Fredric Jameson at a conference in Australia in December 2012 . He stated that Australia was ‘pre-occupied with the politics of space’ (Jameson 2012).

19. See NSW Government Environment and Heritage Department guidelines: ‘Aboriginal People’s Relationship with Their Country’. Retrieved from http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/jointmanagement/relationshipwith

country on 14 April 2014.

20. This is with particular reference to the crime fiction novels of Arthur Upfield (1890–1964) that brought prominence to the cultural and spatial distinctiveness of the Australian Outback. For a detailed study of the life and works of Arthur Upfield, see Browne (1988).

21. ‘A number of Aboriginal communities have their own alcohol outlets, in the form of “canteens”, operated in all instances by their Councils’ (Martin 1998).

22. Tymoczko states that more recent scholarly interest in the cultural specificity of translation has diverted translation focus from ‘simple questions of how to translate “correctly” to larger questions involving the perception of and self-reflexivity about differences related to the nature and role of translation in diverse cultural contexts’ (Tymoczko 2006, 445).

23. For an informative collection of essays arising from research into France’s long-standing fascination with Australia and the Pacific, see West-Sooby (2013).

24. It is thought that ‘tucker’ originates from the English word ‘tuck’, to consume food, which was then Australianised into ‘tucker’, used by early Australian settlers when referring to food rations. Retrieved from Australian National Dictionary at www.australiannationaldictionary.com.au/index on 8 August 2014.

25. For an informative study of ‘cultural outsiders’ and translation, see Carter (2014).

26. For an informative précis of Skopostheorie, see Nord (1997), particularly Chapter 3, ‘Basic Aspects of Skopostheorie’ (27–38).

27. It should be noted that the translator of this particular novel, François Thomazeau, is also one of the co-publishers of the French translation (L’Écailler du sud) and an author himself of French crime fiction.

28. For a discussion on the role of ‘scholar-translators’, see Porter (2013, 66).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Reed

Sarah Reed completed a BA with First Class Honours at the University of Auckland in 2011 with a thesis on the translation into English of a work by Tahitian author Chantal Spitz. In 2012 she was awarded a PhD scholarship by the University of Adelaide to conduct research into the translation of contemporary Australian crime fiction into French and its effects on French perceptions of Australian cultural identity. Her doctoral thesis, “The Perils of Translation: The Representation of Australian Cultural Identity in the French Translations of Crime Fiction Novels by Richard Flanagan and Philip McLaren”, was accepted by the University of Adelaide in October 2015.