ABSTRACT
Focusing on the (re)mediation of traumatic pasts in literary texts and their translations, this chapter probes the heuristic value of conceptualizing literary memories as practices of translation and literary translations as practices of memory. Through a case study of the French novel Zone (2008) by Mathias Énard and its English (Charlotte Mandell 2010) and German (Holger Fock and Sabine Müller 2010) translations, it first explores the literary mediation of individual and collective trauma in the French source text before considering the remediation of these memories in translation. The analysis of three aspects of the translations – images of trauma, memories of the Algerian War of Independence and paratextual framings – demonstrates that translations, as products of interpretative reading and rewriting practices, produce difference and entail transformation. While they preserve the traumatic memories figured in the source text, they also modify and remediate them for the target reader. Negotiating between source and target cultures, literary translations are therefore important media of (trans)cultural memory because they guarantee the afterlife of texts in new environments, and contribute to memories’ ‘travels’ across the borders of book markets, languages and cultural spheres.
