The Boom of the Latin American Novel in French Translation

Abstract

Chapter 11 analyzes the translation in France of Latin American novels of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its aim is to shed light on the role that France played in the “boom,” a hybrid literary, editorial, and market phenomenon that was characterized by the internationalization of the Latin American novel. To do so, it relies on an extensive understanding of the concept of translation, understood here as an operation of creative language transfer but also as a cultural and ideological process, while taking into account the editorial and commercial dimension of the phenomenon. After having placed the boom in the long time frame of the diffusion of Latin American literature in France, reactivated in the 1950s with the pioneering collection La Croix du Sud, this chapter offers a brief panorama of the context of its emergence, with the armed struggles putting Latin America at the political and cultural forefront in a France shaken by decolonization and the emergence of the so-called Third World. New collections of foreign literature emerged, like the Cadre vert of Le Seuil, that developed an editorial policy based on an aesthetic reading of the Latin American novel that contrasts with the previous ethnographic reading, while also handling the codes of the market. In this convergent group, the Latin American novel was seen as a promise of renewal in the eyes of French critics weary of the exhaustion of the nouveau roman, even if this infatuation reactivated old ideological reflexes. Finally, a detailed analysis of some translations gives an idea of the creative role of translators who were able to translate in collaboration with the writers of the boom and thus give a lively and up-to-date version of their novels.