Translation and Affect in Rachid Boudjedra’s La Prise de Gibraltar

Abstract

Rachid Boudjedra’s novel La Prise de Gibraltar stages a post-traumatic engagement with history, which hinges on the repudiation of the myth of the Arab conquest of Spain, the “phantasme central” undermining Algeria’s present. The repressed traumatic experiences suffered by the main protagonist, Tarik, generate aesthetic, affective, and psychological après-coups.¹ Reverberating with the rippling effects of trauma, this apprehension of reality focuses on moments of feeling physically manifested through sensory misperceptions and medical afflictions. This article reflects on the affective forms of counter-historical writing staged in the novel—particularly in relation to the trope of translation. Building on Emily Apter’s ascription that misperformed translations beget war-like circumstances, I explore the correlation between the novel’s martial ethos and the failed tactics of literal translation (mot à mot) favored by Tarik’s father. In contrast, Tarik’s subversive linguistic transpositions dismantle any cohesive concept of historical origin and purvey their own distinct model of cultural self-definition. Tarik’s translations thus reveal the intractable part of illegibility intrinsic to the novel’s coexisting narratives—a residual kernel of opacity purveyor of historical agency for the post-traumatic subject.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• trauma
• après-coup
• historiography
• translation
• Boudjedra

Notes

1 Laplanche, Jean. Problématiques VI. L’Après-coup. Paris: PUF, 2006.

2 See note 1.

3 1987 marks the publication of the French translation under the author’s supervision. The original Arabic text was published in 1986. All unattributed translations are mine.

4 I have pondered the resonance of Al-Andalus as a post-traumatic mythopoetic trope in Talbayev, Edwige Tamalet. “Chiasmus and Après-coup: Andalusia as Trauma in Rachid Boudjedra’s La Prise de Gibraltar.” Journal of North African Studies 23.1–2 (2018): 90–108.

5 Berger, Anne-Emmanuelle. “The Impossible Wedding: Nationalism, Languages, and the Mother Tongue in Postcolonial Algeria.” Algeria in Others’ Languages. Ed. Anne-Emmanuelle Berger. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Edwige Tamalet Talbayev

Edwige Tamalet Talbayev is Associate Professor of French at Tulane University. She is the author of The Transcontinental Maghreb: Francophone Literature across the Mediterranean (Fordham UP, 2017) and the co-editor of The Mediterranean Maghreb: Literature and Plurilingualism (Expressions maghrébines, 2012) and Critically Mediterranean: Temporalities, Aesthetics, and Deployments of a Sea in Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). In 2015, she became Editor of Expressions maghrébines, the peer-reviewed journal of the Coordination Internationale des Chercheurs sur les Littératures maghrébines.