The "Impassable Morass" in Translation: Louisiana's Wetlands, Chateaubriand's Atala, and the Aesthetics of Colonial Ambivalence

Abstract

In 1682, La Salle claimed for France all the countries watered by the Mississippi and named them Louisiana. Over the next century, as published accounts of this territory proliferated in the Atlantic world, it was described simultaneously as a "New Eden" and an "impassable morass," while colonial observers also speculated about its potential as a pastoral middle ground. Freely adapting such accounts into his own prose, Chateaubriand composed in Atala, ou les amours de deux savages dans le désert (1801) a likewise ambivalent picture of the region. This essay locates the novella at a narrative intersection of several of these descriptive accounts and argues that it provides a literary node for examining the hemispheric text-network that documented and translated Louisiana's settlement within an uneasy, yet increasingly coherent wetlands discourse. This process of translation is linguistic, as English and Spanish editions of Atala began circulating soon after its publication, but it is also the founding matter of the novella. While a landmark of French fiction, Atala's aesthetic appeal cannot be uncoupled from the environmental and topographical specificity of its source material, and in this light the novella is also an early American text in translation, one that is itself a melancholy document of the colonial project.