ABSTRACT
Any attempt to depict reality within a text implies translation. Writing is per se a multifaceted transfer of a specific perception of the world into a text. This becomes particularly relevant when texts focus on traumatic events that resist translation into words. Texts aim to arrange the unnameable through the selection of information, its structuring, and narration. However, traumatic experiences elude representability. What possibilities does language offer us to approach the unnameable without trivialising it? How can disturbing events be translated into texts that preserve for them a place within collective memory without reducing them to historiographical and vaguely verifiable facts that exclude the individual or social traumatic perspective? Esther Mujawayo, together with Souâd Belhaddad, has taken up this challenge by publishing her eye-witness account of the genocide in Rwanda in book form. I will analyse the French and German versions to identify the translation strategies used to transfer the traumatic experiences within the strategies of edition and translation in both literary fields.
