Transcultural memory and literary translation: Mapping the Field (with a case study on Lydie Salvayre’s Pas pleurer and its Spanish translation)

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to map the role of translation in literary and cultural memory studies and of memory dynamics in transcultural contexts. “Translation” is understood both as interlingual translation, that is the rephrasing of a literary text in another language, and in a broader and more metaphorical sense as transfer, transmission and relocation across different kinds of spatial and temporal borders. The first part gives an overview of the state of research, presents basic theoretical and conceptual reflections regarding the intersections of literary memory and translation, and proposes a general framework for analyses of literary texts and their translation that want to elucidate the role of translation for transcultural memory circulation. The second part is dedicated to a particular case study: the translational aspects of the literary memory of the Spanish Civil War, the anarchist revolution and exile in Lydie Salvayre’s novel Pas pleurer and the role of Javier Albiñana’s Spanish translation No llorar as a medium of transcultural memory.

Introduction: Literary memory studies and the oblivion of translation

The purpose of this article is to map the role of translation in literary and cultural memory studies and of memory dynamics in transcultural contexts. ¹ “Translation” is understood both as interlingual translation or “translation proper” (Jakobson, 1992), that is the rephrasing of a literary text in another language, and in a broader and more metaphorical sense as transfer, transmission and relocation across different kinds of spatial and temporal borders. The essay seeks to lay the foundations for an integrative approach to the study of translational issues in the discipline of literary memory studies. It sets out to describe the role of translation as a medium of literary memory’s transcultural circulation and remediation and to outline a framework for future research at the intersection of memory (studies) and translation (studies). In doing so, it also seeks to meet a striking shortcoming in the scholarly debate because up till now, in the words of Brownlie (2016: 12), “the research concerning translation and memory [. . .] has not been conceptualized as a whole.” With her monograph Mapping Memory in Translation (2016), in which she systematically scrutinizes the role of memory in and from the perspective of translation studies, Brownlie makes an important contribution to this field of study. In adopting her “mapping” metaphor in the title of our article we want to indicate that we consider it to be a complementary reflection from the perspective of literary memory studies—of course on a much more modest scale. In this sense, the purpose of this contribution lies in “mapping translation in memory” from the standpoint of literary (memory) studies in order to respond to the Übersetzungsvergessenheit (“oblivion of translation”) in an academic field in which the importance of translation as an indispensable basis for cultural transfer has up till now largely passed below the radar.

This contribution examines the productive potential of the still widely unexplored interfaces, contact zones and cross-fertilizations between memory studies and translation studies, in order to outline an innovative research perspective that results from an opening up of memory studies toward the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of translation studies and toward the “translational turn” in cultural studies. This will be done from two perspectives using two different approaches. The first part of the article is centered on theoretical, conceptual and methodological reflections. We give an overview of the existing research at the intersection of literature, memory and translation, and discuss relevant concepts as well as dimensions and challenges for future research. The second part looks at these issues from the point of view of a concrete case study of one contemporary French novel and its Spanish translation: the Goncourt-winning Pas pleurer (2014) by Lydie Salvayre, which was translated into Spanish as No llorar by Javier Albiñana. The case study not only wants to contribute to the research on this specific literary text and its translation but aims at further sharpening the reflections on the memory-translation-nexus from a more “practical” angle. The choice of Salvayre’s novel is motivated by the fact that the French source already has a strong translational character and that it addresses the topic of the Spanish exile to France—a transnational and transcultural phenomenon which makes the study of the Spanish translation seem particularly promising.

Translation in literary memory studies: Toward a framework of analysis

Translation in memory studies, memory in translation studies: The state of research

While questions of translation play a key role in the field of comparative literature (see Apter, 2006; Lefevere, 1995; Ning and Domínguez, 2016), literary and cultural memory studies have so far very rarely and only tentatively engaged with this idea. Translation is mainly relevant for one of the currently most vibrant areas of memory studies: the research into transnational and transcultural memory, that is on mnemonic transfers, transmissions, and migrations across and beyond the limits of specific national and cultural spheres. As Bond et al. (2016: 1) observe, in the discipline of memory studies “the transcultural or transnational circulation of memories has moved to the centre of attention.” While literary memories can certainly circulate between cultural, social, and national realms without translation (for instance in international contexts with one dominant lingua franca or in the case of readers who are able to read different languages), translations are the conditio sine qua non for memory’s migration across those linguistic borders which otherwise could not be transgressed. This aspect of literary memories has not yet been sufficiently acknowledged in existing scholarship on transnational and transcultural memory. In her very valuable article on “Travelling Memory,” Erll (2011b) distinguishes five dimensions of memory’s movement: carriers, media, contents, practices, and forms. Translations would have to be categorized in the “media” section; however, they are not explicitly mentioned as “media” of travelling memory but (implicitly) subsumed under the general rubrics of “writing,” “printed texts,” or “books.”

Similarly, recent publications dedicated to the transcultural dynamics of memory do not take into account the importance of translations for memories’ transcultural moves, although they partly draw on translated texts in developing their arguments (e.g. Bond et al., 2016, on “memory unbound”; Bond and Rapson, 2014, on the transcultural turn in memory studies; De Cesari and Rigney, 2014, on transnational memory; Rothberg, 2009, on “multidirectional memory”). In her article on rewritings of the Homeric epics published in the special issue of Memory Studies dedicated to Cultural Memory Studies after the Transnational Turn, Erll (2018) highlights the importance of the epics’ translations for their transnational dissemination, without however explicitly reflecting on questions of translation in more general or theoretical terms. One outstanding example that does explicitly acknowledge and tackle the role of translation for transcultural memory dynamics, and that presents innovative and thought-provoking reflections on the nexus of literature, memory and translation, is the recently-published monograph by Angela Kershaw, Translating War (2019). Here, the author adopts a broader translational perspective and studies the English translations of French fictions on the Second World War, focusing on how the translations enable the transnational spreading of cultural memory as well as on memory’s relationship to questions of national identity. Kershaw’s book is a remarkable exception; in literary and cultural memory studies the importance of translations for the transcultural transfer of memory has largely remained a blind spot.

However, literary memory studies are also connected with issues of translation on a more general level because, as with other academic disciplines, they are affected by the so-called “translational turn” in the humanities which “is born specifically out of the translation category’s migration from translation studies into other disciplinary discursive fields” (Bachmann-Medick, 2009: 3). The notion of the “translational turn” refers to an epistemological shift that proposes to understand “translation” as a “new means of knowledge and a methodologically reflected analytical category” (Bachmann-Medick, 2009: 4). Although Bachmann-Medick explicitly highlights the importance of drawing on the expertise of translation studies, this specialized knowledge hardly plays a role in her reflections which eventually lead to a general conceptualisation of “culture as translation” in the sense of Bhabha’s (1994) reflections on the negotiation of difference in “hybrid” cultures. As Heller (2017: 95) observes, the proclamation of a “translational turn” curiously did not involve a greater attention to the scientific discourse and specialized knowledge of translation studies. Moreover, the impact of the “translational turn” on the particular academic field of literary memory studies has not yet been systematically explored.

In translation studies it was the “cultural turn” of the 1980s which paved the way for a greater attention to memory matters (see Bassnett, 2014: 30–32). An important contribution has been made by Brodzki who in her book Can these bones live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (2007) draws on Benjamin’s (1972) reflections on the “task of the translator” and considers translation as a critical and dynamic displacement enabling the source text’s survival beyond its own limitations. Brodzki’s approach links the narrow concept of “translation proper” with a broader concept in which for instance memory practices, experiences of survival and intergenerational transmission are also considered as acts of translation. More recent engagements of translation scholars with memory issues particularly focus on translations of Holocaust writing and of survivors’ testimonies. Deane-Cox (2013) proposes that we consider the translator as a “secondary witness,” that is as a mediator that occupies an ethical position in relation to the survivor. More recently, the volume Translating Holocaust Lives (Boase-Beier et al., 2017) and Davies’ study on the translation of Holocaust testimonies (Davies, 2018) aim at bringing together translation studies and Holocaust studies in order to highlight the relevance of translation for our knowledge of the legacy of the Holocaust; and the edited collection New Approaches to Translation, Conflict and Memory: Narratives of the Spanish Civil War and the Dictatorship (Gutiérrez and Villanueva, 2018) studies the role of translation in the violent conflicts of Spain’s contemporary history. On a more general dimension the already mentioned monograph Mapping Memory in Translation (2016) by Siobhan Brownlie systematically reflects on different types and concepts of memory, and explores their application in the context of the study of translation. The need for an opening up of translation studies to other disciplines (which has increasingly been claimed by translation studies scholars (see e.g. Gentzler, 2017)) implies an opening up toward the concerns of memory studies. One valuable initiative is Sharon Deane-Cox’ and Anneleen Spiessens’ book project on Translation and Memory for the Routledge Handbook series.

To sum up, we can say that the last years have seen a growing academic interest in the interplay of memory (studies) and translation (studies), as some of the works mentioned above show. ² Interestingly though translation studies scholars appear to be more attentive to memory than memory studies scholars to translation. This observation seems to be confirmed by the program of the last conference of the Memory Studies Association (Madrid, 2019)—an enormous event with 248 panels, 27 roundtables plus many other activities. While many presentations and discussions addressed “transcultural” and especially “transnational” memory dynamics and while these two adjectives appear quite often in the conference program (e.g. “transnational migration,” “transnational heritage,” “transnational memory activism,” “transnational networks”), “translation” is not mentioned transversally in different sections of the program but confined to one particular panel on “translating memories”—although one can assume that many of the discussed “transnational” phenomena also have “translational” implications.

Theoretical, conceptual, and methodological foundations

In this and in the following section we will outline a basic theoretical, conceptual, and methodological framework which still has to be elaborated, refined and tested further, but which could serve as a starting point for future research in the field. To start with, we can say that memory and translation have strong resemblances and affinities. On the one hand memory is a translational phenomenon because the act of remembering past events entails transfers across time and space. On the other hand, translation implies remembering, because the target product always encapsulates the memory of the source text which has been transposed in the process of interlingual transmission. In this sense, translation is “the afterlife of a text, ensuring its existence in another time and place” (Bassnett, 2014: 13).

Our understanding of “literary memory,” which will be the basis for the following reflections, goes back to the concept of “cultural memory” as it has been developed in the seminal works by Jan Assmann (1992) and Aleida Assmann (2012). Following their approach, “cultural memory” designates collectively-shared visions of the past which emerge from historical knowledge stored in and transmitted by “reusable” material objects and symbolic practices (images, texts, performances, rituals, monuments, music, etc.), which circulate and are negotiated in social and cultural contexts, and which convey and stabilize a group’s needs for identity and belonging. ³ Literary memory can then be understood as a form or sub-type of cultural memory: literary texts use their specific modes, techniques and aesthetic devices in order to represent and remember past political, social, cultural, individual, and psychological realities. They imagine fictional worlds set in distant epochs, refer to historical events and processes, reflect and reshape existing visions of history, negotiate public discourses on local, national or transnational history and memory, show the workings of memory and practices of individual or collective remembrance, and so on (see Erll, 2011a). More often than not, the texts also contain intertextual references to preceding texts from the literary heritage—literature, too, remembers its own past and history. Following Erll (2011a: 114–171) we can thus say that literary texts are language-based media of literary and cultural memory in the sense that they store and transmit, reflect and reshape a knowledge of the past that transcends the individual experience and circulates in the public sphere. Literary memories frequently have a transcultural outreach because linguistic borders are certainly not congruent with cultural ones. Literary texts written in, for instance, French can potentially move across the confines of cultures, societies, nations, and continents because there exists a Francophone-reading public in many places of the world.

Memory’s transcultural outreach becomes even greater if a text is translated into other languages: Translations—manifestations of the “Writing-between-Worlds,” in Ette’s (2016) terminology—are genuine media of transcultural memory, because they ensure the accessibility and dissemination of literary texts in linguistic and cultural environments different from their original ones. Translations mediate and negotiate (see Eco, 2004) between the source and the target culture, guarantee the “afterlife” (see Benjamin, 1972) of texts and of the textual knowledge in other contexts, and contribute to memories’ “travels” across the borders of book markets, languages and cultural spheres. They have both a mnemonic and a projective function and serve as a temporal, spatial and cultural relay, connecting both “back” with the source text and its cultural surroundings and “forward” with their respective target cultures. Translation produces contact zones and permits transgressions; at the same time, it is itself a liminal phenomenon that makes borders visible in the first place. Translations draw on a “play of difference and similarity, of distance and proximity” (Kershaw, 2019: 268). On the one hand the translation reconfigures the source text in another language; on the other hand it never completely flattens out the source text’s particular singularity because it adapts the text to the needs of the target culture in which it achieves an existence in its own right.

In order to conceptualize more precisely the difference between the mnemonic function of source texts and translations we can draw on the concept of “remediation.” In the context of cultural memory studies, the notions “mediation” and “remediation” have been coined by Erll and Rigney (2009: 4): “Just as there is no cultural memory prior to mediation there is no mediation without remediation: all representations of the past draw on available media technologies, on existent media products, on patterns of representation and medial aesthetics.” In this sense, translation is remediation because it goes back to “existent media products,” namely the source text which is to be reproduced in another language. While Erll and Rigney (2009) focus on remediation that uses media formats different from the original one (e.g. the remediation of literary knowledge in film), in interlingual literary translation remediation is not a case of inter- but of intramediality, as it takes place within the limits of one medium—the literary text. We can therefore conceptualize the dynamics of mediation and remediation also in terms of intertextuality: there exists an intertextual relation between the source text and the translation. ⁴

The above mentioned lack of exchange between translation studies scholars interested in questions of memory, and cultural memory studies scholars interested in questions of translation is partly a consequence of the different concepts of “translation” that are at play. On the one hand, cultural studies scholars such as Bachmann-Medick (2009, 2013) advocate for a wide-ranging concept that understands “translation” in a broad and metaphorical sense, referring for instance to the transfers between cultures, areas of knowledge, and academic disciplines or even to “culture” tout court. On the other hand, translation studies scholars favor a literal understanding of translation, relating it to the task of the (literary) translator. The latter tend to criticize the conceptual widening and claim the importance of a more specific and narrow concept of translation (see Heller, 2017). As translation studies scholar Dizdar (2009: 90) puts it, “a ‘translational turn’ can only take place effectively if all attempts to broaden the concept of translation (and/or to use it in a metaphorical sense) have ‘translation proper’ as their point of reference.” One of the challenges of future research lies in overcoming this dichotomy of a literal and a metaphorical understanding of the concept, of the narrow concept of “translation proper” on the one side and the broad concept of “culture as translation” on the other. ⁵ A promising step in this direction is Angela Kershaw’s integrative method of “reading translationally” which is informed by Brodzki (2007):

“Reading translationally never discards actual translation, that is, translation understood as a contact between (at least) two different languages, even as it locates interlingual transfer as a practice that is inseparable from a wide range of other material, social, political, and textual operations.” (Kershaw, 2019: 8)

Kershaw’s approach is interesting in two respects. First, she does not start from the idea that translations are particular and distinct textual phenomena which exist “out there,” can be identified and subsequently analyzed. She rather proposes a research perspective or research outlook that can be applied to a great variety of cultural products, that does not “know” its objects of investigation beforehand but constructs its corpus and archive in the first place. Second, she finds a way of taming the above-mentioned danger of conceptual arbitrariness by claiming—just as Dizdar (2009)—that at the heart of any translational analysis are phenomena of interlingual translation, even if other forms of cultural transmission and transfer also have to be taken into consideration.

One last conceptual aspect has to be highlighted, namely the question of the translation of concepts themselves. Different national, cultural, linguistic or academic traditions have produced particular concepts which, to a greater or lesser degree, have been translated into other academic settings. Olick (n.d.) addresses, for instance, the very practical issue of the (non-)existence of English translations of the works of Aleida and Jan Assmann on “cultural memory” (written in German) or of Maurice Halbwachs on “collective memory” (written in French), whose absence at the outset partly prevented the circulation of these approaches in the international academic sphere. In other cases—and for reasons that we cannot explore here—some concepts simply did not “travel” but stuck to their context of origin where they gained a great prominence and heuristic value—we can think for instance of “memoria histórica” (“historical memory”) in Spain or “récit de filiation” (“filiative story”) in French literary studies. Because of their rootedness in a particular social and academic environment, they cannot easily be translated and adopted elsewhere. Investigating the translation of memories therefore implies the necessity of being sensitive to the problem of translation and (un)translatability in academic language itself—a topic that has also been addressed at the roundtable “Connecting Memory Traditions around the World” at the last Memory Studies Association conference in Madrid (2019). ⁶

Translating literary memory: Dimensions of analysis

We now want to turn our attention from the basic theoretical and conceptual reflections to more specific methodological issues: how can we analyze literary memories from a translational perspective? The general framework that will be outlined in this section could serve as a starting point for future investigations in the field of literary memory studies—of course it has to be refined, readjusted and completed. The proposed model is twofold and distinguishes between two dimensions: the “poetics of memory and translation” on the one hand and the “cultures and politics of memory and translation” on the other.

The poetics of memory and translation I: the source texts

The study of the poetics of memory and translation focuses on the literary texts themselves and consists of the analysis of both the source texts and the translations: How do the source texts represent history and construct individual and cultural memory? What are their translational features and how are these related with memory matters? And what are the translation strategies used in the “rewriting” (see Bassnett and Lefevere, 1998) of the source text’s memories in another language? The literary construction of memory in the source texts can be analyzed on the basis of the insights of existing scholarship which has already provided relevant models, methodologies and analytical tools (see e.g. the overview in Erll, 2011a). More challenging still is the investigation of the source texts’ translational features and their relationship with memory issues. Two important translational features of literary texts that may be relevant here are multilingualism and intertextuality. These two phenomena are closely linked to translation because they imply processes of transfer, movement and exchange—between “languages” and between “texts” respectively. Many, if not all, literary texts are produced in multilingual realities; hence they frequently reflect the co-existence and co-presence of the different idioms that characterize these realities: (standard) national languages, vernacular and regional languages, dialects, sociolects, and other. The different idioms are often connected with different individual or collective historical experiences, and indicators of particular memory discourses negotiated in the text. In provoking an ongoing translation process between the different languages in the act of writing and reading (see Meylaerts, 2013: 520), multilingual literary texts not only reveal and interrogate the “myth of monolingualism” (Minnaard and Dembeck, 2014: 9) but also complicate the idea that translation happens between one source and one target language. Furthermore, they present a great challenge for any translator who necessarily has to reflect on the question of adequate solutions in another language—translating multilingual literary texts requires a lot of creativity and inventiveness on the side of the translator.

Regarding the role of intertextuality we can say not only that translation is an intertextual phenomenon (as we have highlighted above), but also that intertextuality is a translational phenomenon: texts or textual fragments are decontextualized, transferred and resemanticized in new textual environments. Intertextuality is connected with memory in more than one way: it “remembers” literary history (the preceding texts) and it “remembers” other histories and memories (that have been articulated in the preceding texts). Textual cross-references may imply interlingual transfer because writers frequently draw on texts that have been written in a language different from their own. The spatio-temporal and linguistic shift may even get more complicated, namely when the writer—particularly if she quotes directly from a “foreign” text—draws on an already existing translation. In this case a fourth text (in addition to the source text, the intertext and the target text) comes into play.

The poetics of memory and translation II: translation strategies

If we turn to the translation strategies used in the process of interlingual rewriting, it is particularly fruitful to identify those choices of the translator which introduce semantic shifts and alterations and which are motivated by the translator’s task of connecting the “new” text with the target reader’s literary and cultural milieu. It seems unproductive, as we examine the translation of literary memories across cultural and linguistic borders, to adopt a normative perspective and to ground our framework on a narrow idea of “equivalence” between the source text and the translation. Rather, the focus on transformation and on the above-mentioned play of similarity and difference from a descriptive point of view can shift our attention from what is lost through translation to what is gained in translation (see Bassnett and Lefevere, 1998). ⁷ This also implies that the translator’s distinct voice, subject position and agency in the process of cultural transmission become more apparent (see Hermans, 1996, 2003).

In the analysis of a particular translation’s role in transcultural memory transfers, potentially all textual dimensions become relevant. For this reason, in each case study one of the researcher’s first tasks will be to decide which textual features should be considered. However, it is possible to raise some issues that are interesting in more general terms—we will briefly mention four (see also Jünke and Schyns, forthcoming). First of all, one has to look at the translation strategies regarding the source text’s possible translational aspects, such as the above-mentioned multilingualism and intertextuality. How do the translators deal with vernacular languages, dialects, and sociolects that are closely bound to very particular social realities, histories, and memories, or with intertextual references to a source culture’s literary canon and tradition which is not well-known in the target context? Second, the translation of metaphors—especially metaphors for memory—is a significant aspect. A metaphor is not only a key device in literary language, but it is also genuinely translational because it “translates” meaning from a source to a target domain. Its semantic operations are culture-specific, its decoding may require a certain cultural knowledge, and it may be more or less lexicalized. The translator therefore has to make decisions (e.g. whether to translate the image literally, to create a new one or to not draw on figurative speech at all), which may lead to noticeable changes of meaning.

Third, the translation of realia, that is, cultural, social, and material elements from a particular context that do not have an exact equivalent in the target culture is an aspect worth investigating. Here, the attention focuses on those culture-specific elements that are related to aspects of cultural memory and historical experience. Obviously, there are different strategies to deal with them in translation—in a spectrum stretching from a “foreignizing” approach (through borrowing the unaltered “foreign” element, exposing the differences between source and target culture and disrupting the norms of the target language) on the one hand, to a “domesticating” approach (through assimilating the “foreign” element by replacing it with an element of the target culture) on the other (see Venuti, 2002). Fourth, it is interesting to look at the peritexts ⁸ of a translation: does the translator add something to the text, that is does she include her own texts, for instance an introduction or translator’s notes? If she does: how does she demonstrate her agency in directly addressing the reader?

The cultures and politics of translation I: literary texts and memory cultures

In order to analyze memories’ “travels” via literary translation, a close analysis of the source and the target text is not sufficient. One also has to take into consideration the cultures and politics of memory and translation, that is the relevant mnemonic, cultural, social, and economic conditions. One important contextual aspect is the larger memory culture in which the literary text—both the source text and the translation—is embedded. Regarding the source texts it is vital to look at the relationship between the texts and the memory discourses which circulate in their cultural and social environment. How do the literary texts reflect and reshape, confirm or call into question, stabilize or subvert existing visions of the past, politics of memory and images of history? Regarding the translations, the task consists of examining their reception in the target memory cultures and the connection and interaction of the translated memories with their “new” mnemonic contexts, for example with dominant (national) narratives about the past. Are the “imported” stories and memories rather smoothly adapted to, or even appropriated by, the receiving culture, or are there gaps and fissures between the memories articulated in the translated literary text and those that circulate in the target context? How far do the translations contribute to creating a transnational or cosmopolitan memory and how far do they make visible the tensions between competing national forms of cultural remembrance? Do they provoke cultural distancing or cross-cultural understanding? Hostility or hospitality (Kershaw, 2019)? In order to elucidate these questions, the epitexts (Genette, 1987) of the literary texts and the translations as well as book reviews, are a primary source of information.

The cultures and politics of translation II: Publishing industry and book markets

Besides the mnemonic contexts, the publishing industry, the book markets and the logic of the literary scene play a vital role for the transcultural transfer of memories via translation. Here, the “politics of literary translation” (Jones, 2018) and the political, economic, gender-specific, and symbolic power structures that are at work in the process transnational transfer become particularly palpable. It is the publisher who decides which texts (and consequently which memories) are selected for translation. While undoubtedly the neoliberal market economy and the expected sales quotas are important factors for decision-making, other considerations can also play a role—books are both commodities and cultural goods. And, of course, there are big differences between the policies of a multinational publishing company and a locally-rooted small publisher. Hence, the publisher’s policies, practices, and market strategies have to be taken into account; they can be examined, for example, on the basis of editorial paratexts such as book covers, blurbs or marketing material (see Schyns, 2016). Besides the publishing houses, other institutions and agents of translation, such as literary foundations or major book prizes, can have a considerable impact on translation activities—their policies should also be the subject of a study. Moreover, and on a more general level the mechanisms of book markets are a relevant factor as their extension and limits assume a key role for the diffusion of books in a transcultural sphere. Although, for example, the Francophone world spans across different countries, continents, and world regions, this by no means automatically guarantees a free and unrestricted circulation of all books written in French (see Casanova, 2008; Ruhe, 2015) because of the often asymmetrical power relations, for example the ethnocentrism of dominant literary institutions that are at play.

Memory and translation in Pas pleurer by Lydie Salvayre and its Spanish translation

In order to illustrate the relevance and productivity of the concept of translation for literary memory studies and to sharpen the analytical tools presented in the first section of this article, the second part of the paper will present one case study dedicated to the novel Pas pleurer (2014) by the French author Lydie Salvayre and its Spanish translation by Javier Albiñana, published as No llorar (2015). Firstly, we will analyze the French source text Pas pleurer, focusing on the literary memories from a translational perspective and secondly, we will have a look at the Spanish version as a medium of transcultural memory.

Salvayre’s novel is only partly fictional because the author, or more correctly her textual alter ego Lidia, presents her mother’s early memories. The mother Montse is 90 years old and principally remembers the summer of 1936, when she was fifteen and seized by the euphoria of the anarchist revolution in Catalonia. In Barcelona, she experiences a summer full of joy and freedom and a passionate first love. When she becomes pregnant, she returns to her home village, accepts a marriage of convenience and leaves Spain together with her husband and her child at the beginning of 1939, when the victory of the Francoists already seems to be inevitable. They exile to France where they settle down and where Lidia is born at the end of the 1940s. Aesthetically, the text is characterized by a certain complexity which results from the double narrative structure, based on the coexistence and entanglement of two homodiegetic narrators: Lidia narrates what her mother has narrated to her. On the one hand Lidia is the narrator, on the other hand the text constantly slips into passages in which Montse herself tells her life story and conveys her memories directly. Moreover, Lidia not only talks to her mother but also reads Les grands cimetières sous la lune (1938), a book in which the French author Georges Bernanos describes his experiences during the Spanish Civil War. Lidia quotes, paraphrases and comments on Bernanos’ words, and thus introduces a third “voice” into the text.

Pas pleurer: Literary memory in a translational perspective

In Pas pleurer, the literary memory of the Spanish Civil War, the libertarian revolution and exile is the result of a complex constellation of translation and transmission. The following analysis of the novel’s translational features is structured on the basis of the three main voices articulated in the text—Montse, Bernanos and Lidia—and on the three forms of literary memory and transfer that correspond with them. We will start with Montse, the communicative memory and interlingual transfers. In her personal memories of the summer of 1936 Montse is not first and foremost evoking the violence of the beginning civil war but the anarchist-libertarian revolution in Catalonia with its social utopias—a movement that fills her with enthusiasm. Consequently, her memories are happy memories and have positive connotations. ⁹ Montse’s memories of this “unique aventure de son existence” (p. 15) [“sole adventure of her existence”] are “communicative memories” in the sense of Assmann (1992), that is personal, informal, everyday memories characterized by a lack of specialization and organization that refer to the recent past and are transmitted in oral communication. Montse is remembering her youth in the context of a private, intimate conversation with her daughter, to whom she passes on her biographical reminiscences in an oral narration. The “communicative” character of her narrative becomes particularly apparent in her use of language which dominates large parts of the book. Here are two short but representative examples:

mon cerveau qui dormait depuis plus de quinze ans et qui me facilite de comprendre le sens des palabres que mon frère José a rapportés de Lérima. Alors quand on se retrouve en la rue, je me mets à griter (moi: à crier), à crier Elle a l’air bien modeste, tu comprends ce que ça veut dire? [. . .] (p. 12; italics are my emphasis)

Des heures inolvidables (me dit ma mère) et dont le raccord, le souvenir ne pourra jamais m’être retiré, nunca, nunca, nunca. (p. 88; italics are my emphasis)

When she presents her mother’s narrative, Salvayre keeps the characteristic features of oral discourse such as the situational proximity of speaker and addressee. ¹⁰ Moreover, she renders the specific features of Montse’s fragnol, that is her particular variant of the French which is characterized by interferences with the Spanish, more precisely by hispanicisms and untranslated Spanish words and phrases. Montse not only transfers her past experience into the actual memory narrative but she also translates it in a very concrete sense. For her, remembering essentially implies the translation of an experience lived in the Spanish language and in a Spanish context into French, the language of exile—however, not into a French that would correspond with the official linguistic norm but into the particular “langue mixte et transpyrénéenne” (p. 15) [“mixed and transpyrenean language”] that characterizes her way of speaking. In Montse’s fragnol, language itself becomes a medium of memory: an archive of the historical experience of transnational and transcultural migration and a site of memory of Spanish anti-Francoist exile to France. Moreover, the fragnol can be considered both as a metonymy and a metaphor of dislocation: it is a direct consequence of the character’s journey from Spain to France, and the linguistic fractures mirror the fractures in her biography. At the same time, and from the reader’s perspective, the multilingualism and the phenomenon of language contact create textual alterity and resistance, because every now and again, we find words or passages written in Spanish without any translations into French given, for instance, in a peritext. In reproducing Montse’s code switching and use of Spanish, Salvayre herself thus forgoes translation to a certain extent, highlighting the “untranslatability” and the “resistant singularity” (Apter, 2013: 235) of the character’s particular way of speaking.

The second voice in the text is the voice of the writer, Georges Bernanos, which is linked to cultural memory and to intertexual transfers. Parallel to the conversation with her mother, Lidia reads Les grands cimetières sous la lune (1938) and integrates parts of the book into her own account, quoting, paraphrasing and commenting on Bernanos’ text. Just like Montse, the French catholic and politically reactionary author Georges Bernanos, who lived in Mallorca between 1934 and 1937, is a direct witness of the events in Spain in 1936. His book is a pamphlet that severely condemns the barbarism of the Francoist repression against the Majorcan civilians—a repression supported by many officials in the Catholic Church. His criticism is all the more insistent, since Bernanos had sympathized with the fascist Falange and welcomed the putsch against the Second Republic.

With Bernanos’ Les Grands cimetières sous la lune—a text written in view of its publication and circulation by an author who was already an established figure at that time—Salvayre integrates an element of the cultural memory of the Spanish Civil War into her own literary text. Following Jan Assmann, “cultural memory” is the material stock of texts, images, rituals, monuments and so on that has consciously been created and shaped, retains the memory of a past considered as significant, has a symbolic meaning and can create social cohesion and identity on a collective dimension. The “objectified” cultural memory represented by Bernanos’ pamphlet is very different from Montse’s communicative memory discussed above. On the one hand, we have the fugitive, informal and private account marked by orality and linguistic interferences, and on the other hand, there is a publicly-circulating book written in standard French by a professional writer. However, the two memory modes are not only different regarding their form, but also regarding their content. While Montse remembers nearly exclusively the positive revolutionary moments, particularly the joy of the summer of 1936, Bernanos documents the negative side: the rebels’ violence, especially the excessive and illegal arrests and executions supported by parts of the Catholic Church.

Finally, we want to comment on the voice of the narrator Lidia, postmemory and intergenerational transfers. Lidia, Montses second daughter, was born in France at the end of the 1940s and represents a memory of the Spanish Civil War and the libertarian revolution that can be termed postmemory. This notion has been famously coined by Hirsch (1997, 2012), who uses it for the relationship that children of Shoah survivors have toward powerful traumatic experiences from the time before their own birth. The violence of the past is transmitted to this second generation as a kind of intrafamiliar knowledge mediated by narrations, diaries, photography, etc. This knowledge is highly charged with impressions and emotions, and therefore acquires the quality of memory—although it is not “memory” in a direct and narrow sense. In postmemory, temporal distance and affective identification collapse into each other. Therefore, postmemory is a translational phenomenon as it entails the intergenerational transfer of experiences between the generation of witnesses and the generation after.

Although the conversation between the mother Montse and the daughter Lidia is centered, for the most part, on joyful, rather than traumatic, memories, Lidia can be considered a representative of postmemory. Regarding Lidia’s relationship to the past of the 1930s, we want to highlight three aspects. First, it is Lidia who arranges the predominantly non-fictional material that is related to history and memory in a particular way—she therefore bears responsibility for the text’s particular poetics. These poetics result mainly from the way the two testimonies of Montse and Bernanos are framed, arranged, commented on and allowed to dialogue with each other. Lidia presents them as complementary, as “deux scènes d’une même histoire” (p. 221) [“two scenes of the same story”]. ¹¹ Second, it is Lidia who draws a connection between the events of the past and those of the actual present. On different occasions she compares the right-wing nationalist program of the Spanish Francoists with the right-wing nationalist tendencies in today’s France—in her vision, the past also becomes a reminder for the present. ¹² Third, Lidia plays an important role in the process of founding her own cultural memory because, in writing her book, Pas pleurer, she “objectifies” and thus saves her mother’s fragile and fugitive communicative family memory “du néant auquel il était promis” (p. 14) [“from the nothingness to which it was destined”].

No llorar: Interlingual translation as a medium of transcultural memory

What happens now to these interlingual, intertexual, and intergenerational transfers and to the novel’s translational character when it is translated into another language? In this last section of the paper we want to have a look at the Spanish translation No llorar by Javier Albiñana and focus on the role of translations as a medium of transcultural memory. The Spanish translation is particularly interesting, because of the novel’s “Spanish” topic and the fragments in Spanish language that we find in the French source text. On the level of the poetics of translation, the translation strategies regarding the fragnol are specifically pertinent: how to translate the hybridity of a text characterized by linguistic interferences and code switching, when what was the “marked” exception in the source culture (the Spanish) becomes the “unmarked” target cultural norm? From a linguistic point of view, the Spanish translation has already been analyzed by Filhol and Jiménez-Cervantes Arnao (2018) on whose findings we can build our own reflections. As Filhol and Jiménez-Cervantes Arnao (2018) show, the multilingualism of the original text is very much reduced, and even partly disappears completely. We can see this, for example, with regard to one of the fragments that we already analyzed above in a different context:

Des heures inolvidables (me dit ma mère) et dont le raccord, le souvenir ne pourra jamais m’être retiré, nunca, nunca, nunca. (p. 88)

Momentos inolvidables (me dice mi madre) y cuyo vínculo, cuyo recuerdo, nadie podrá arrebatarme jamás, nunca, nunca, nunca. (p. 85; bold in the Spanish text)

The source text’s multilingualism and heterogeneity are, to a large extent, transposed into a Spanish monolingualism, because the French hispanicisms are translated into a correct standard Spanish (“inolvidables,” “vínculo”) and the Spanish fragments remain preserved (“nunca, nunca, nunca”). In comparison with the French text, there are fewer moments of textual resistance, that is the translation strategy is rather “domesticating” and adapts the text to the target culture’s linguistic norms and standard. ¹³ Linguistically, the Spanish text is much more homogeneous; consequently, the emphasis lies more on the narrated world than on the level of narration. In our quote, the only element of textual resistance is the bold typesetting of those words that were already Spanish in the French text—this is a recurrent strategy in Albiñana’s translation. As there is no explanation for this particular typography, it is up to the reader to identify its meaning and function. ¹⁴

Besides this homogenization that results from the reduction of linguistic hybridity and textual alterity, we can observe another interesting translation strategy that can be termed “catalanization.” The translator makes the decision to locate the history of Montse’s childhood and adolescence much more explicitly in a Catalan cultural environment than is the case in the French version. I want to give three brief examples related to culture-specific realia (see also Filhol and Jiménez-Cervantes Arnao, 2018). Salvayre locates the story in the surroundings of a city called “Lérima”—a name that does not correspond to a real geographic place. In the Spanish version this is translated as “Lérida,” the capital city of the Catalan province of the same name—this allows a more precise location of the narrated action in the geography of Catalonia. ¹⁵ Salvayre mentions the “jota,” a popular dance that exists in different Spanish regions where it has its particular local variants. Albiñana translates this into “sardana”—the epitome of Catalonian popular dance. And instead of the Spanish first names that Salvayre uses the translator puts the Catalan ones: Montse’s brother is not called “José” anymore but “Josep”; the local big landowner “Don Jaime” turns into “Don Jaume.”

The literary memory of the civil war, the anarchist revolution and the exile thus undergoes some significant changes in the process of the text’s translation and transnational circulation. In the Spanish text, the memory of the particular Catalonian setting of the libertarian revolution is much more underlined, while language as a site of memory of Spanish exile is rather pushed into the background because of the reduction of linguistic diversity. Hence, the translator’s agency and his distinct role in the process of transcultural transmission are quite visible. Shifts and alterations in meaning also become apparent in the reception of the novel—we want to conclude our analysis with a few observations regarding the cultural context of this particular translation.

As a consequence of the rather domesticating translation strategy that noticeably adapts the text to the target culture, in Spain No llorar is perceived not so much as a contribution from a French perspective nor as a story of Spanish exile to France. It is rather related to the great number of contemporary Spanish literary texts dealing with the civil war and, to a lesser extent, with the anarchist revolution of 1936. Hence, Spanish book reviews tend to consider the novel’s topic and subject matter as unoriginal: “Temáticamente, No llorar no aporta nada nuevo a la literatura sobre la lucha entre nacionales y republicanos” [“Thematically, No llorar does not contribute anything new about the struggle between the nationalists and the republicans”] (Sánchez, 2015) or: “al menos para el lector español, es un episodio de sobras conocido” [“at least the Spanish reader knows this episode more than enough”] (Fernández de Castro, 2015). Interestingly, we find the opposite from a French perspective, where one critic speaks for instance of “un livre fort utile pour relire ces pages sombres et méconnues de l’histoire récente.” (Artus, 2014) [“a book that is very useful to read once again about these dark and unrecognized pages of contemporary history”] What appears as a blind spot in cultural memory from the French point of view (“ces pages [. . .] méconnues”) seems a redundant contribution to an already saturated memoria histórica in Spain (“no aporta nada nuevo,” “de sobras conocido”).

Furthermore, the French reception emphasizes more strongly the novel’s linguistic potential to irritate and challenge its reader, which is, as we have seen, a consequence of the fact that the experience of migration is not just a topic on the level of histoire, but also inscribed into the discours and the materiality of the text itself. This potential to cause irritation is very well reflected in one statement by Bernard Pivot, well-known cultural journalist and jury member of the Goncourt prize: “Nous avons d’abord couronné un roman d’une grande qualité littéraire, un livre à l’écriture très originale, même si je regrette qu’il y ait parfois trop d’espagnol.” (Franceinfo Culture, 2014) [“We have honored first and foremost a novel of great literary quality, although I regret that sometimes it contains too much Spanish.”] While in Spain the novel is embedded in a memory culture marked by contemporary literary fiction and public discourses around the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, the contexts and embedding are quite different in France—as the last quote shows, one context is the French “monolingual imperative” (Edwards, 2020) and tradition of linguistic purism, which leads to a perception of Salvayre’s “impure” text not so much as an enrichment of the own but as something “strange” and “other.” ¹⁶

Conclusion

The analysis of Lydie Salvayre’s novel, Pas pleurer, and its Spanish translation, No llorar by Javier Albiñana, has given insight into the productive potential of research endeavors in the field of literary memory studies which focus on processes of translation and transfer, and take into account the significance of interlingual translation for transcultural memory circulation. Pas pleurer is a literary text in which memory is presented as a translational phenomenon; through the three main narrative voices, Salvayre shows how communicative memory, cultural memory, and postmemory are formed in the process of interlingual, intertexual, and intergenerational translation. In our context, the interlingual transfers are of particular interest: Montse’s fragnol testifies to her experience of transnational migration and is an archive of the memory of the Spanish exile in France during or in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Her use of code switching and Spanish language represents a certain challenge in the French target culture—both for the individual reader and for the institutions of literary criticism which are still oriented toward a monolingual norm. While the novel’s topic seems to introduce new aspects into French memory culture, the Spanish translation No llorar permits the text’s circulation in a book market and mnemonic context which is, in certain respects, already saturated with the memoria histórica of the civil war. Moreover, Albiñana’s rather domesticating translation strategy that homogenizes the text in reducing its linguistic diversity and hybridity, covers over to a great extent the traces that the experience of dislocation has left not only in Montse’s language, but also in her identity and her way of relating with the world: the traces of her in-betweenness—not only between two countries, cultures, and languages, but also between the present and the past. The memory of exile is thus much more accentuated in the French than in the Spanish text.

To conclude, we can say that translations as media of transcultural memory should be taken more seriously and acknowledged as a distinct object of investigation. They are not neutral “containers” of memory, nor do they just transmit meaning and memory from one cultural and linguistic sphere to another. Rather, they actively contribute to creating meaning and memory, and to shaping the target memory culture. In “travelling” from the French to the Spanish sphere, Salvayre’s book undergoes changes and alterations that are not merely linguistic, but affect the production of meaning and the work’s intervention into memory discourses. The case of Salvayre/Albiñana is of particular interest because, at the heart of the novel, is the experience of exile and transnational migration—an experience that challenges national memory discourses and contexts of reception, and makes visible their limits and mechanisms of exclusion.