ABSTRACT
Patrick Modiano’s first novel, La place de l’étoile (1968), is a provocative work in which the author struggles with the memory of the Occupation in French postwar society. De plaats van de ster, the Dutch translation, had appeared as early as 1973. It was not until 2010 that the German edition of Modiano’s debut saw the light in Elisabeth Edl’s translation. More recently, in 2015, the English translation was published (translated by Frank Wynne). In my contribution I will create a context for the interpretation of this novel on entangled memory related to the French Occupation, Vichy, anti-Semitism, collaboration, and the search of Jewish identity. I will pay attention to the rewritings of the novel undertaken by Modiano, and will comment on the intertextual references to Louis-Ferdinand Céline. I will further try to answer the question of how this already mediated and readapted discourse based on memory, intertextuality and pastiche, deeply rooted in French intellectual life and history, has been translated into Dutch, German, and English. I will pay particular attention to explanatory endnotes and afterwords in order to show the differences in cultural mediation that took place at different moments in time to ensure an afterlife for Modiano’s first novel.
