Translating national allegories: the case of crime fiction

The title of this special issue represents an attempt to chart the interrelationship of three sites of tension, each of which might easily justify its own discrete study: first, the translation of crime fiction; second, the translation of national allegories, including here the markers of specific national identities, or culture-specific items; and third, the articulation of the national in crime fiction, including the importance of place in the latter. As Peter Flynn, Joep Leerssen and Luc van Doorslaer (2015) note, translation studies and imagology, which is to say, the study of the ways in which national (stereo)types are constructed, are both necessarily focused on the transnational, the translational; indeed, these disciplines, taken together or individually, depend on borders, typically national but also other geographic or linguistic ones, in order to assess the kind of transfers necessary for cultural mobility. For Flynn, Leerssen and Doorslaer, the tendency among scholars to overlook national characteristics over the last 20 years has led to a rather ‘vaguely termed intercultural hermeneutics’ (2015, 1). They note further that imagology derives from literary studies, and they place their emphasis on a certain ‘literary canonicity’ whose guarantee of historical longevity assists the construction of ‘ethnotypical perceptions’ (2015, 4). Canonicity also influences translation choices as well as, often, being facilitated by translation. While the question of crime fiction’s relationship to the canon is not yet entirely settled, its successful adaptation to translation markets is long since proven. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, Flynn, Leerssen and Doorslaer consider crime fiction interesting by virtue of its very conventionality (2015, 13).¹ One of our aims in this issue is to support the notion of crime fiction’s relevance to the fields of translation studies and imagology; our second aim is to focus on what happens, what sometimes fails to happen and what is lost, and sometimes gained, when national characteristics described in crime fiction are translated; and our final aim is to show how translation can force us to rethink the genre as unconventional, or perhaps as a series of conventions that mask the tendency of individual crime novels to refuse to be contained. Like the walls of the locked room, the conventional borders and bordering conventions of crime fiction are designed to be breached. With this in mind, we shall begin here by saying a little about our three concepts before aiming to convey what happens when they are brought together.

Crime fiction and translation

Fredric Jameson’s essay ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ (1986) has become a reference point in discussions of national allegory; indeed, in scholarly circles Jameson may be considered to have coined the term, in much the same way as Julia Kristeva gave us the intertext. His discussion of third-world literature, however, is related, albeit obliquely, implicitly, to our first category, of translation and crime fiction. Certainly, Jameson couches his famous discussion of third-world literature in language familiar to those of us who work with crime texts: from the outset, ‘the national situation itself’ and ‘non-canonical forms of literature’ are evoked, and Dashiell Hammett is compared to Dostoyevsky (1986, 65). And elsewhere, when he addresses crime fiction explicitly, translation is quickly thrown into the mix. In his keynote address at a conference on crime fiction and the national allegory (2012), Jameson problematised the idea of crime fiction’s role as the new Realism (which it has the potential to occupy because of the importance it places on detailed plotting and thus the overvaluation in its narratives of the minutiae, and historical and geographical specificity, of the social fabric of our daily lives), countering suggestions that Scandinavian noir, for example, can best be understood by those with an intimate connection to Scandinavia by positing a translator at the shoulder of the Scandinavian crime writer at the very moment of that writer’s production of the text (and it was not entirely clear at the time of Jameson’s lecture whether this translator was intended as a conceptual figure and that the translation, especially, one assumes, into English, of the texts guided the original from its point of conception, or whether he was hinting at a real translatorly presence and a kind of writing in tandem, a co-writing of an original-translated text). There is a shift here from a jealously guarded relationship, ungraspable for outsiders, to an intimacy of shared connection, of the one connecting with the other; this is an intimacy of space in translation, of the other discovering the one, reading it in the other’s terms and, ultimately, re-creating it at the moment of its original creation.

Such musings on place appear particularly appropriate for theorisations of crime fiction’s relationship to space, which is so often articulated in transit. Space, as Jameson observed in that same keynote address, has always been a defining feature of crime fiction: the scene of the crime, self-evidently, but also space in the sense of setting – the landscape, the geography of a particular city, which generate particular forms of crime and localised or national ways of policing it – and space in the political sense – land, real estate, who owns it, who controls it, what is done with it (hence the prevalence in contemporary crime novels of sub-themes such as environmental degradation or the gentrification of working class suburbs). In this sense, place speaks to both the insider and the outsider: it has the potential to be strongly marked in socio-cultural terms and thus a vector for national allegory, but the issues that pertain to it are in many respects universal. This mobility of space in crime fiction plays out in a variety of ways. We might think of the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle or Fergus Hume, whose pioneering works display London and Melbourne, respectively, through the windows of hansom cabs. In this way, Doyle and Hume give a specific, and actual, edge of mobility to the concept of the locked room mystery, which necessarily founds that particular genre of detective mystery on a paradoxical hermeneutics of mobility: the locked room must necessarily be imperfectly sealed, and thus signifies its very opposite, becoming a figure of movement across thresholds.

Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of ratiocination are emblematic of the locked room mystery. They also speak to the foundational role of translation in crime fiction. Stephen Knight (2015, 13–33) is, of course, right to deconstruct a critical tradition that so often takes Poe as its starting point (a sort of immaculate conception) by pointing to those authors of what is recognisably crime fiction who predated him. In the context of this special issue, we can enrich Knight’s argument by discussing the key role played by translation in, for example, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. Not only does Poe choose to situate his story in Paris, but he does so in such a way as to cause Charles Baudelaire, his French translator, to consider his story an act of anticipatory plagiarism. In this way, Baudelaire becomes the very model of the translator perched on the shoulder of the crime fiction writer. It is not sufficient, however, to say that Poe created crime fiction and that the genre is an Anglo-American form which gives rise to other national fictions that model it onto their specific situations, typically after those nations’ readers have been exposed to it via translation. By translating Poe, Baudelaire created a new poetics of modernity which he simultaneously felt coming through in Poe’s crime stories, as though Poe had thought Baudelaire’s own thoughts before him. We should suggest that it is fitting in such a scenario to talk in terms of a nexus of translation, or perhaps a ‘contact zone’, to use the terminology of Stephen Greenblatt’s manifesto of cultural mobility (2009), in which two genres (‘American’ crime fiction on the one hand, ‘Parisian’ prose poetry on the other) arise together as a result of transnational exchange. Translation (out of English) does not simply follow the original production of crime fiction, in other words; instead, crime fiction’s pioneering works emerge out of (a most original form of) translation (Rolls and Sitbon 2013). It is such a reversal of anticipated logics of mobility that informs the play on ‘born in translation’ versus ‘borne in translation’ in Stewart King and Alice Whitmore’s article in the present issue.

Translation and national allegories

Fredric Jameson’s discussion of national allegory is re-examined by Brian Larkin in an anniversary issue of Social Text (its 100th number). Larkin notes that ‘[a]llegory is not always a feature immanent to a text but is something texts have placed upon them through the act of circulation across cultural difference’; in this way, then, allegory ‘is not tied to the imagination of writer or director but is derived externally from the movement of the text in and out of different publics’ (2009, 165–166). As Brigid Maher’s article in the present issue demonstrates, this idea is crucial for the understanding of crime fiction translation on which this issue of The Translator is predicated. While a strong case can be made for the way in which the overvaluation of place in crime fiction makes the genre a privileged vector of a national allegory, and while that heavily marked articulation of national, and quite often local, space makes the genre particularly difficult to translate into other languages (or at least makes it exemplary of translation difficulties associated with markers of local or national identity, as documented here in Sarah Reed’s comparative analysis of an Australian crime novel and its French translation), it is perhaps more interesting to consider the degree to which national allegory is produced in the translation of crime fiction. National allegories – like crime fiction, which has from its earliest manifestations, and often in its most iconic texts, eschewed the very rules (of fair play between reader and writer, the hermeneutics of the hermetically sealed and so on) upon which it appears to be constructed – are far from being static and impervious to change. They therefore speak to Greenblatt’s study of mobility, which Charles Forsdick has described as crystallising ‘around the place of travel, translation and transfer as phenomena constitutive of cultures in their historical emergence and contemporary reality’ (2014, 250). The conveying of meaning that is at the heart of allegory, which reveals hidden meanings but also hides meaning, speaking it differently, is one of these mobile foundations: if nations are experienced face-to-face by their citizens, they are embodied as allegories for those who read them, and such reading implies a certain critical distance. Thus, it may be argued that translation, with its packaging of the original self for the receiving other, is an ideal model of writing the national allegory.

The tendency of an original text to establish the conditions for its own rendering as other in translation is discussed by Walter Benjamin in terms of ‘translatability’ (1968, 70), of a certain way of calling for translation. This form of textual mobility can be studied, Benjamin asserts, even in the absence of an actual translated text. In this way, it may be said that Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ calls powerfully to its French other, that it is virtually translated, virtually French, even before its actualisation as such in Baudelaire’s version, which it anticipates.² Indeed, as we have noted, Baudelaire’s translation is effected by him as a response to this call; after all, Baudelaire felt that the original presented itself a priori as a translation of his own (virtual) text. What is perhaps easier to establish historically than the virtual Frenchness of Poe’s original text is the increased stature that Poe gained in France as a writer of innovative and influential fiction, including his role in the founding of what is recognisable as the modern crime story. What W.T. Bandy famously termed Baudelaire’s ‘campaign to make of the American writer “a great man for France”’ (1952, 66) almost certainly also made him a great American writer. His works, including his tales of ratiocination, were more systematically published in book form in France than in his native United States, and, as Roger Asselineau notes, the extent of his renown in France, where he is part of the national heritage, is ‘something anglophone scholars sometimes find a little hard to understand’ (2010, 7, our translation).

The national in crime fiction

There has been a push in recent years to bring crime fiction into the World Literature fold (King 2014). This is in part an attempt to push back against the dominant critical model of national taxonomies. The genre is, as suggested above, typically portrayed as an Anglo-American one which has gained a foothold in other national literatures following an initial wave of translations. While critics like Lee Horsley (2005) are conscious of the pitfalls associated with this privileging of the Anglo-American, their studies benefit from the neutral position with titles like Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (and not ‘Anglo-American’ Crime Fiction) as opposed to, say, Claire Gorrara’s French Crime Fiction (2009), where the use of the term ‘French’ requires some degree of justification (Gorrara’s edition includes studies of some European francophone writers, like Georges Simenon, but not of crime written in French by authors from other continents, which she herself acknowledges). For all that these and other studies like them outline their rationales explicitly and note the transnational exchanges that have been formative in the development of crime fiction, the native tongue of the individual writer somehow still remains the dominant element in crime fiction classification. Translation’s role is in this way consigned to that of passive partner, invisible conveyor of the original text.

A good example of major (national) phenomena that fall through the gaps of the national-crime-fictions approach is the development of the Série Noire in France in the aftermath of the Second World War. The formative years of this series, one of the most influential forces in twentieth-century crime fiction publishing and a name synonymous with noir fiction (la noire) in France, constitute a significant blind spot in studies of French crime fiction, precisely because no ‘French author’ appeared in the series for the first three years of its existence. When Serge Arcouët became the first to achieve this status in 1948, his Frenchness was downplayed (the book appeared under the pseudonym of Terry Stewart), and this as a result of the prestige associated with works translated from the American.³ The centrepiece of Marcel Duhamel’s strategy, as director of the Série Noire, was Peter Cheyney, whose legacy as one of the great crime writers of his generation has, like Poe’s, endured in France, where he is still revered as part of Série Noire legend, while it has faded in his native homeland. As Alistair Rolls and Deborah Walker (2009) have noted, the success of the Série Noire at the time of its inauguration in 1945 lay precisely in the way that it captured the national mood in France without addressing it directly. The role of translation was crucial in two ways. First, the authors chosen to embody Éditions Gallimard’s new series were given an aura of exoticism. In effect, they were packaged as a national allegory, their novels arguably being less important intrinsically than their authors’ ‘Americanness’, the national literature and culture from which they were translated. Perversely, both Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase were English, not American. Or perhaps this is a fact more appropriate than perverse, for the artificiality, the constructedness of their origins, their originality, served to highlight the importance of the target culture in which they were not only assimilated but took on renewed importance. What these texts, especially the first one, Cheyney’s La Môme vert-de-gris (originally published as Poison Ivy in 1937), achieved in Duhamel’s wilfully biased and consciously paradigm-constructing translation was the expression of a powerful new national allegory for France. When mapped onto the national context of post-war France, the story of special agent Lemmy Caution took on a new edge, its very title giving increased valency to the lead female character, and now more clearly the eponymous heroine, Carlotta. The victory of the American government over a band of gangsters is achieved only because Lemmy is assisted by Carlotta, who shows her true colours at the end and saves the day. Allegorically, this translated crime novel casts new, different light on the role of the French resistance in the Allied victory over the occupying German forces in France. This is the second key role of translation therefore: it creates a new national allegory in and of the target culture. Crime fiction that is made American for export is, crucially, made French not only in the simplest linguistic terms, but via its role in the post-war redefinition of the French national identity. That these texts create this new French national allegory in translation, which is to say indirectly, through the mediation of an ‘original’ text, is important psychologically. For, as testified by the posters of artists like Paul Colin, with their images of a Marianne blinded by the light of Liberation, the transition from Occupation to Liberation was brutal and a deal of memory work and revisioning was to be required before recent history could be discussed openly. American novels that made room for French insight into France’s immediate past and future played an important, if subliminal, role and shaped what would become recognisable to subsequent generations as French crime fiction.

Translating elements of national culture

The translation of terms designating cultural referents has become an important niche for specialists of translation studies, such as French scholar Michel Ballard, who prefers the more succinct term culturèmes, which he describes as ‘signs pointing to cultural referents, which is to say elements or traits that, when taken together, constitute a civilization or a culture’ (2003, 149, our translation). Of course, culturèmes are crucial in crime fiction texts, which are so pointedly anchored in their social and geographical realities and which, as a result, contain extremely precise descriptions of place. These descriptions present any number of challenges for the translator, especially if a premium is put on readability, which is often a key factor for this market. Several options are available to the translator, depending on the Skopos, or translation goal, that he or she is given.⁴ If the goal is to introduce a foreign author to a new readership, the transfer of culturèmes may be minimal, even nil, with preference being given instead to equivalent expressions in the target language and culture; in this case, the style of the original narrative takes precedence. Other translations may have a more ethnological purpose, in which case far more of these cultural referents will be preserved, either by way of an explanation incorporated into the translated text or with a footnote. This attention to the cultural specificity of the source text, which is encouraged by translation scholars such Antoine Berman (1984), is a recent phenomenon in literary translation, and is all the more so in the case of crime fiction translation.

As noted above, crime fiction in France is synonymous with Gallimard’s Série Noire, which celebrated 70 years of publishing in 2015. It is widely known today that, for a long time, the translations carried out in the Série Noire were excised and adapted for the post-war French readership. Certainly, Duhamel gave French readers access to best-selling Anglo-Saxon authors like Peter Cheyney, James Hadley Chase, Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson; at the same time, he also put in place a very particular style of translation, one that was flavoured by the argot of French gangsters of the time, while imposing extraordinarily precise limits on each novel in the series in terms of the number of pages. The famous Série Noire Manifesto of 1948 lays out clearly the translation choices imposed on the team, who were expected to use ‘highly unacademic language, always privileging humour, be it of the black or a lighter variety’ (Cerisier and Lhomeau 2015, 40, our translation). This practice led to some notable liberties being taken with the text as well as to many cuts that are still being discovered today.

The style of the Série Noire has nonetheless generated a tradition that has inspired many translators and authors. Its characteristic argot was popularised in the 1950s, including in the novels of Albert Simonin and their adaptations for the cinema (we might think of the films Touchez pas au grisbi [Hands off the Loot, 1954] or Le Cave se rebiffe [The Counterfeiters of Paris, 1961]). More recently, however, these translations have been called into question: the Skopos of the series has changed and noir fiction has achieved a certain canonicity, whereas in Duhamel’s day it was accorded an inferior status. Translations are now expected to be far closer to the original text, which includes respecting, as far as possible, cultural referents and the author’s style, in short those aspects that had previously been ignored. An example of this new direction is provided in the present issue by French crime fiction translator Pierre Bondil, who has been commissioned to undertake several retranslations, notably of Dashiell Hammett (for Gallimard) and Jim Thompson (for Rivages/noir).⁵ Indeed, François Guérif, director of literature at Éditions Rivages, has obtained the rights to retranslate various works that have previously been published in the Série Noire. To give a notable example, the famous 1000th number of the Série Noire, 1275 âmes [1275 Souls], was a translation of Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 (1964); the reduction of the population of Thompson’s Pottsville in Duhamel’s version is inexplicable, and rumours that he simply thought it sounded better have become the stuff of Série Noire legend. The retranslation, Pottsville, 1280 habitants, by Jean-Paul Gratias, has just appeared (2016), with all five missing souls restored. As Gratias notes, ‘I have a lot of respect for Duhamel, but he tended to make the style rather idiosyncratic. There are also mistranslations. He probably worked too fast’ (2016, our translation).

In his conversation piece here, Bondil recounts his experience of translating An Iron Rose by Australian author Peter Temple, which has just been published for the first time in France (as La Rose de fer). What comes through is the absolute respect for the language and culture of the source text: ‘The book’s setting is Australia; Australian it must remain’. Refusing equivalent expressions or long explanations in the body of the text, Bondil opts for footnotes, including 16 explaining allusions to typically Australian referents (footy, Milo, Colac, Coles and so on) and 10 explaining allusions to British and American culture. As he notes, in the past passages including cultural referents of this kind could be cut or the references could be replaced by French culturèmes. Far from representing an admission of failure on the translator’s part, footnotes, which have the advantage of being present but without necessarily having to be consulted, are a valid, and, in Bondil’s opinion, sometimes the only, solution for respecting the cultural environment and rendering it explicitly without weighing down the target text. Bondil’s thoughts are interestingly complemented here by John West-Sooby’s interview with Peter Temple, in which the latter gives the author’s perspective on the translation process.

In agreement with Bondil, we consider the translation of crime fiction worthy of footnote. What we hope will emerge in this special issue is that the role of translation in the development and reconfiguration of national allegory, rather than its simple rendering in a foreign language, as if such a thing is ever simple, is worth far more than a passing footnote.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Their book contains a chapter by Marija Zlatnar Moe and Tanja Žigon (2015) in which popular fiction, including crime fiction, is chosen as the perfect place to study what happens to national images in translation because of the lack of creativity required on the part of, or invested in it by, its translators and, by extension, the formulaic approach taken by its authors. While it is true that this ostensible settledness serves Zlatnar Moe and Žigon’s purpose well, for it is precisely the type of fixity, against which other movements stand out, that Flynn, Leerssen and Doorslaer prize in national borders, it promotes the study of translation and national tropes at the expense of the literature of the corpus.

2. Andrea Goulet goes as far as to state that with ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ Poe ‘invented French crime fiction’ (2015, 3).

3. The Vernon Sullivan Affair, which saw the white French author Boris Vian pass himself off as the translator of novels written by a black American author (Vernon Sullivan), is an interesting case that speaks volumes of, while also standing as an ironic commentary on, the power of translation in the Parisian publishing systems of the mid-1940s.

4. Skopos theory, as advanced by Katarina Reiss and Hans Vermeer (1984), emphasises the goal of the translation, which is adapted to the target readership(s). According to this approach, the Skopos determines every decision made by the translator.

5. Bondil worked with Natalie Beunat on the retranslations of Hammett that appeared in a new Gallimard collection in 2009, and which included Moisson rouge (Red Harvest), Sang maudit (The Dain Curse), Le Faucon maltais (The Maltese Falcon), La Clé de verre (The Glass Key) and L’Introuvable (The Thin Man). His retranslations of Jim Thompson include L’Échappée (The Getaway), which was published by Rivages/noir in 2012.