Variable Frames: Women Translating Cuban and (Afro-) Brazilian Women Writers for the French Literary Market

Abstract

This article seeks to examine how contemporary works of fiction and non-fiction by women from Cuba and Brazil are translated and marketed for Francophone readers. It will focus on Wendy Guer­ra’s novels, translated into French by Marianne Millon, and on contemporary Brazilian (non) fic­tion translated into French by Paula Anacaona, the head of Anacaona Éditions, a publishing outlet specialized in Brazilian literature for Francophone readers. The contribution will start with a brief presentation of the French publishing sector and some of the recurring patterns observed in what is often labeled as littérature étrangère or littérature monde (foreign literature and world literature, respec­tively), exploring various layers of intervention that appear in translated fiction. The article will then further explore the role of paratext in the marketing of Caribbean literatures for (non-)metropolitan French audiences, before it examines the translations of Todos se van and Domingo de Revolución by Cuban writer Wendy Guerra. Paratextual matter in Marianne Millon’s Tout le monde s’en va and Un dimanche de révolution will be analyzed as a site of feminine co-production, in which the author and the translator’s voices at times collide in unison and at others create dissonance. In the case of Do­mingo de revolución, the French translator’s practices will be compared to Cuban-American Achy Obe­jas’s English translation (Revolution Sunday), in the hope of highlighting varying degrees of cultural appropriation and/or acculturation, depending on the translator’s habitus and trajectory (Bourdieu) and her own background. These reflections will lead to a broader analysis of paratext as a site of further agency and potential redress as (Afro-) Brazilian history and literature are examined in works circulated by writer/translator/publisher Paula Anacaona. Ultimately, figures traditionally sidelined from hegemonic and patriarchal (his)stories, whose voices are restored in Anacaona’s paratextual practices, will serve as illustrations of feminine publishing practices that challenge (phallo-)centric models from the metropolis.