Capturing Voice and Place in Translation: The translation of three twentieth-century French writers steeped in the landscape, mores, traditions and language of the south of France

Abstract

In this thesis I explore the question of how a translator approaches the task of capturing the ‘voice’ of a writer when the voice of the writer is steeped in a particular region including its mores, traditions, culture, and language variants. I translate an autobiographical novel, Chronique d’un été cévenol, by the contemporary French novelist René Barral and compare and contrast my approach with that taken to the translation of an autobiographical novel by André Chamson and an early novel of Jean Giono. The works selected for comparison by these two eminent French twentieth-century authors are anchored in the same region, historical era and socio-economic class as that evoked by Barral. I compare and contrast the style and voice of Barral with these authors, one of whom, André Chamson, was raised in the same département of France (the Gard) and the other, Jean Giono, who lived and worked in neighbouring Haute Provence. Each of the three authors has chosen a different creative approach to portraying rural peasant protagonists, to the rendition of dialogue and dialect and to capturing a distinctive regional, social and tonal register. The variation in the creative approaches adopted in the source texts necessitates a similarly differentiated approach on the part of the translator. My thesis reviews the concept of voice as elaborated in Translation Studies literature and develops my own conceptual approach. I consider some theoretical approaches to translating ‘voice’, which I see, inter alia, as embracing the elusive qualities of style and register. René Barral’s novel has generated considerable readership appeal precisely because it is redolent of its particular context. The yarns and vignettes evoke a uniquely harsh and rugged landscape, a historical era, a socio-cultural class and lively episodes in the life of a typical mountain village. I provide a commentary on the challenges Barral’s novel poses for a translator which focuses inter alia, on the difficulties involved in capturing the strong sense of place embodied in his novel and the challenges involved in translating dialogue, dialect and colloquialisms informed by the theoretical observations of Levy, Chukovsky and Leighton. I consider the sources of translation loss and apply this theoretical analysis to my translation. I also review and evaluate the strategies adopted to address these dilemmas by the respective English-language translators of the selected works by Chamson and Giono.