Genres littéraires et traductionTranslation requires the recognition of discourse typologies in order to ascertain the fundamental characteristics of particular texts to be translated. That is to say that the conscious theorization of the problematic embodied in a particular source-text is a useful and, I would argue, necessary step in achieving a 'satisfactory' translation. This is one way in which translation constitutes itself as what might be called an "interdiscipline," for the tools of translation do not reside entirely within the discipline itself. Translation in general and literary translation in particular have benefitted greatly from the developments which have taken place in literary and cultural theory during the past thirty years in that these have done much to provide a renewed conceptual basis for translation methodologies. In what follows I would like to suggest how translation methodology has been assisted by discourse analysis to examine a specific case of this. At the same time, in relation to this case I would like to enquire into a familiar question of cultural politics which returns repeatedly to haunt translators and cultural historians: what factors determine whether a text will be translated or not? Reception history would be a good place to begin.
Translating the TrilogyThe texts I shall discuss are the major literary works to come out of the Paris Commune of 1871. They are the Jacques Vingtras trilogy by Jules Vallès, comprised of L'Enfant (1879), Le Bachelier (1881), and L'Insurgé (1885). To date, there exists no complete English translation of these texts, a situation which must certainly signal a "significant absence" (Macherey, 1966, pp. 105-110) in the corpus of translated XIXth century French literature. In order to understand why Vallès has not been translated into English, we must first examine a few salient characteristics of the publication and reception history of the trilogy in France. My aim in doing this is to suggest here that the most important reasons for the neglect of the trilogy in English speaking countries are intimately related to attempts at ideological marginalization and delegitimization of these novels within the French educational apparatus itself.Though many texts written within the main nineteenth century counter-discourses 1 (socialism, nascent feminism, aestheticism) have eventually been absorbed into the institutionalized canon of French literature, some texts have not. Amongst these one must count the Jacques Vingtras trilogy. These novels describe, in terms of an autobiographical/ historical narrative, the process by which a young bachelier becomes a communard: generically, these novels constitute a Second Empire Bildungsroman but one in which the very function of bourgeois humanistic culture is challenged and subverted. In many ways the protagonist's marginalization and ultimate end is not so very different from the situation of other XIXth century heroes. In fact it is meant to be quite representative: one has only to think of that other archetypa...
