Abstract

The powerful impact of the plays by African American playwright August Wilson largely relies on the way his words appeal to the senses, whether explicitly by calling upon the characters’ sensory experience or more indirectly through his use of syntactic rhythm, or indeed his specific modulation of AAVE. When we set out to translate Gem of the Ocean, the first of the ten plays in his Pittsburgh cycle, for the stage, we had to try and convey similar effects in French, first somehow finding a way of negotiating the specificity of the African American idiom. The article discusses the translating issues raised in the central scene in this play which is located at the very beginning of the twentieth century, so at a time when slavery is still very much present in people’s memories, and stages a hypnotic trance in which a young man who needs to have his “soul washed” is made to live the Middle Passage and reach the mythical City of Bones where the drowned slaves literally have “tongues on fire”; this can only happen because all his senses are called upon simultaneously, including through the collective singing of spiritual songs. The peculiar rhythms of August Wilson’s poetics, the AAVE accent and flow as well as the alliterative, anaphoric use of language channel the climactic, sensory experience depicted in that trance scene which leads to a reconnection with the spiritual forces of the submerged people. This article describes how the translators tried to create a French idiom that induces the same sensory impact on an audience and, at the same time, reflects the multilayered referentiality of the text.

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