Faulkner Journal Francois Pitavy The Making of a French Faulkner: A Reflection on Translation Introduction T he first part of this title is not to be read at all as proprietary or pro grammatic. Even as it ventures at first into literary history, this reflec tion on the making of a French Faulkner aims really at being a case study in examining the process of translation, displacement, of a given literary text from production to reception. Obviously, this is a process that can be studied within one language at different places and times (we never stop rereading Strindberg, or Shakespeare, or Faulkner, from differing standpoints and cultures), or in the more obvious and expected register of translation, that is, from one language to another, in the current meaning of the term. It is a truism to recall that reading a work of fiction is also a matter of re creation—contingent upon geographical and historical environments, cultural and intellectual backgrounds, and the reader’s personal history, expectations, and phantasms. The process may be all the more remarkable with Faulkner be cause of his incredible pitch and intensity, his power of darkness, which stir the reader’s imagination so profoundly as to bring him/her almost forcibly into an experience of re-creation, or co-creation—what the dramatist Paul Claudel apt ly named co-naissance, playing upon the process of knowing (connaissance) as a rebirthing or cobirthing that gives existence again to the work along with its cre ator.1 This has become an accepted stance, particularly in Faulkner’s case. With such novels as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner so disrupts the readers’ habits and expectations that he forces them to devise new codes of reading—a new experience in reading. Or the French philosopher Claude Romano says that Faulkner’s writing “never is a medium subservient to the narration . .. but first of all ‘an optics,’ to take up a word of Proust. Faulkner sees the real through the writing.”* 2 And he shows how, in The Sound and the Fury, for example, Benjy forces upon us a new, unmediated, synesthetic apprehension of the world. ’Claudel’s notion of re-creating mirrors Faulkner’s own claim and intent: “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that 100 years later when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life” (£G 253). 2“Chez lui . . . l’ecriture n’est jamais un medium au service de la narration . . . mais ‘une optique’ d’abord, selon l’expression de Proust. Faulkner voit le reel a travers l’ecriture : c’est pourquoi il n’y a pas de ‘technique’ chez lui”(Romano 34). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 83 84 Francois Pitavy The Making ofa French Faulkner This process of re-creation is compounded in the case of translation from one country to another, from one language to another; it becomes, in effect, a co-creation—in a different language. George Steiner has underlined Borges’s idea of the consubstantial relation between writing and translation, meaning, as Paul Valery points out, that the translator ideally aims at putting his steps in the author’s tracks (“ [il] nous fait en quelque maniere chercher a mettre nos pas sur les vestiges de ceux de l’auteur”), positioning himself at the moment of writing, not so much fashioning a new text from the original as going back to the virtual moment of its inception (“remonter a l’epoque virtuelle de sa formation” [qtd. in Steiner 346]). This romantic conception of an ideal iden tification in translation, however, shows its limits in the concurrent claim of the irreducibility of the relation between the source text, mediated through the translator as reader, and the target language. As Walter Benjamin has noted, the translation of a translation is an absurdity (81). Such a dual stance (or contradiction) has long been held in France, where traductology flourished rather late (Derrida, Kristeva), long after the theoretical works of the German romantics, the Anglo Saxons, or the linguists of Eastern Europe.3 Translation is all the...