Tenses in translation: Benveniste’s ‘discourse’ and ‘historical narration’ in the first-person novel

Abstract

This article deals with Emile Benveniste’s theory of enunciation (see ‘Subjectivity in Language’ and ‘The Correlations of Tense in the French Verb’ in Problems in General Linguistics, 1971 [1966] and ‘L’appareil formel de l’énonciation’ in Problèmes de linguistique générale, tome 2, 1970), in particular his distinction between historical narration and discourse, and the way it applies to the translation of first-person fiction. In French narratives, the main tense of discourse is the passé composé, which is related to the time of enunciation, while the tense of historical narration is traditionally the passé simple, which is related to the moment of the events reported. The passé composé thus draws attention to the narrating I’s retrospective gaze, while the passé simple reflects the experiencing I’s perspective within the story. This raises complex issues of translation because the narrative use of the passé composé has no equivalent in English, so that the distinction between the perspectives of the retrospective narrator and of his former self are expressed differently in the two languages. This article explores the impact of this phenomenon on four different French translations of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Llona, 1926; Tournier, 1996; Wolkenstein, 2011 and Jaworski, 2012).