A (Mis)Translation of Politics: From L'Evénement to Happening

Abstract

Literary translation, like literature itself, has been theorized as a political act that embodies the political ideologies of either the translator or the receiving culture. Happening , Tanya Leslie's translation of Annie Ernaux's L'Evénement , proves to be no exception. Echoing the substance of L'Evénement, Happening stages a young woman's search for a means to abort in 1963. Instead of reproducing Ernaux's indictment of the Bourdieusian dominant society put on trial in L'Evénement , however, Leslie's translation condemns the narrator, Annie, and by extension, the female gender. Annie, the unconventional heroine of L'Evénement becomes a participant in her own victimization in Happening; thus the source text's politics of resistance becomes a politics of collusion in translation. The results of such a translation are extensive. Ernaux scholars have long commented on Annie Ernaux's absence from dialogues concerning feminism, observing that unlike authors such as Irigaray, Cixous and Wittig, Ernaux is not seen in Anglophone countries as representing "French feminism." It is likely that Ernaux's absence from such dialogues derives in part from the translations of Ernaux's texts. Were the feminist ideologies of Annie Ernaux's texts to travel intact into English, she would almost certainly receive the attention she deserves from feminist scholars, Women's Studies programs, and the broader reading public. This article proposes a productive rethinking of the translation of L'Evénement into Happening , one that questions the variances between the discourse of the source text and its translation, offers alternatives to the anti-feminist discourse of Happening , and ultimately confers on the translation of L'Evénement the status of an Event.