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Abstract
This article considers translations of African texts from English to French in the context of recent conceptualizations of world literature as a critical approach. Translation is a key mechanism, dynamic and metaphor in world literature. However, its idealized connotations should not distract from the material realities of a process governed by uneven structures of production and reception. Two cases are illustrative: Amos Tutuola’s L’Ivrogne dans la brousse (The Palm-Wine Drinkard) (trans. Raymond Queneau 1953; 1952) and Chinua Achebe’s Le Monde s’effondre (Things Fall Apart) (trans. Michel Ligny 1966; 1958) published respectively by Gallimard and Présence Africaine. The rapturous mainstream reception of Raymond Queneau’s stylistic appropriation of Tutuola is here contrasted with the subdued reception of Achebe’s text in France in the late 1960s. The translators’ spectral presence in text and paratext is key to understanding the position of the translated texts in relation to the aesthetic, political and commercial stakes of their publishing contexts. Colonial and postcolonial book history thus confirms the material instability and relationality of any totalizing model of a world literary system and the methodological limits of a singular abstract concept of world literary time or space.
Notes
1. Présence Africaine (non-italicized) refers to the publishing house and bookshop. Présence Africaine refers specifically to the journal.
2. An optic of “world literature” which foregrounds translation negotiates the perceived anglocentrism and ahistoricism of postcolonial studies, criticized, albeit reductively, in the work of Richard Serrano and Jean-François Bayart.
3. Lusophone translations accounted for an even smaller proportion of post-war African literature and there were few translations from African languages, reflecting both the small number of texts written in these languages, and their limited symbolic capital in the transnational literary field.
4. Both approaches should be considered against the complex debates surrounding Bourdieusian and Marxist approaches in postcolonial contexts. See Brown, Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Art, Literature, and Culture; Zimbler; Burawoy).
5. Recent work in postcolonial book history and material cultures has begun to identify and unpick the significance of such mediation in the chain of literary production (See Huggan; Watts; Fraser; Lowe). A differential account of anglophone and francophone book histories opens new avenues for a comparative understanding of this important work.
6. He received 19,544 francs (equivalent of approx. £19) in advance royalties (Tutuola archives, University of Texas, Austin).
7. Despite the agent’s efforts, Queneau did not translate Tutuola’s second book, which appeared 34 years later in French.
8. Tutuola’s first book has been republished in four editions by Gallimard, most recently as the first title in the “Continents noirs” collection in 2000 and 2006.
9. This concern with authorship has emerged in several cases where African authors have been accused of plagiarism or their textual ownership put into question. See King; Thomas, Hargreaves, and Hitchcott.
10. Nicholas Brown describes the “evental nature” (Utopian Generations 30) of Things Fall Apart, while Simon Gikandi has repeatedly defended his claim that Achebe is the “inventor” of African literature as an institution (e.g. in “Chinua Achebe and the Institution of African Literature” and his introduction to Things Fall Apart).
11. The archives which may shed further light on the relationship between Achebe and Présence Africaine are due to open in 2013.
12. Checked on Amazon and the publisher’s website (7 Jan. 2012).
13. In a veiled response to Casanova, Moretti in “More Conjectures” makes a significant but undeveloped distinction between material and intellectual hegemony, suggesting that 19th-century France’s position as “an eternal second in the political and economic arena, encouraged investment in culture” (Section III, para. 3).