La pseudo-traduction chez Nancy Huston : vers une poétique de l’absence

Abstract

This article seeks to examine the relevance of the notion of pseudo-translation in the literary œuvre of Nancy Huston. This Canadian-born author has self-translated all her novels, with the exception of Trois Fois Septembre (1989). This key-text invites us to reconsider pseudo-translation in view of the linguistic issues at stake in the case of a bilingual author. Within Huston’s poetics, the fictional representation of the translation-process becomes a way of reintroducing a rejected mother tongue into the literary text. However, this idiom can no longer be recuperated in its original state, since it has been permeated by the strangeness of Huston’s second language, French. This lost language can therefore only be represented in its absence, that is to say, in translation. Here, the notion of pseudo-translation no longer refers to a form of deception or misrepresentation by the author. Rather, it points towards a specific process of interpretation, invoked by the author herself through the staging of a fictional translation, which aims to justify the transition from monolingual to bilingual writing.