Annie Ernaux translated into Creole, a new first – Liberation

2023-04-17 08:58:49

The first Frenchwoman to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the author of “La Shame” became the first non-Caribbean writer published in her lifetime in Creole.

Annie Ernaux is becoming accustomed to great premieres. This Wednesday, at Caraïbéditions will appear «Plas-la», the Creole translation of the 1984 Renaudot prize, «La Place» by Annie Ernaux, thus making the first French Nobel laureate in literature the first non-Caribbean writer published in her lifetime in Creole.

In this short autobiographical novel, the author describes through a stripped-down story the daily life of her father, a Norman worker who became a small trader who hopes that his daughter can get by through studies. Signed Hector Poullet, the translation of the story unfolds as follows: “She was a full-fledged boss, in a white coat. He kept his blue to serve. Which, in Creole, gives: “Mother, dressed in a white blouse ay si-y, was indeed a boss. Father, he was able to look at the wheat and work as well as to serve people.

“Translating Annie Ernaux was stimulating but not easy. She has a very special style. When it is said that she simply writes, it is not true. It’s not flat”, delivers the translator. Likewise, in «La Place»the variety of sentence types, from the longest to the shortest, including nominal sentences, gave the translator a hard time: “A sentence without a verb in Creole, which is not at all a passive language but an active language, that forces you to add words!”justifies Hector Poullet.

Forging neologisms

One of the translator’s regrets is not having been able to keep these «il» et «elle» which most often designate the parents, as if to put some distance between the narrator and them. Because Creole has the same personal pronoun for both genders. It was necessary to forge neologisms for French terms without equivalent. Example : “It was summer” became “It was summer”.

A translation whose initiative came back to the editions Gallimard, who had already ceded the rights to key writers in their catalog. After «Tiprens-la» ( «The little Prince”) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, «Man-andero» (“The Stranger”) by Albert Camus, Caraïbéditions produced in 2022 the first worldwide translation of «Guerre» by Louis-Ferdinand Celine (“The Ladge”), translated by the Martinican Raphaël Confiant.

“It made me happy that Gallimard offered because, usually, it’s the opposite”, commented the managing director of Caraïbéditions, Florent Charbonnier. “And Annie Ernaux agreed, knowing that she has the right to look over everything”. Finally, the choice of translator was crucial. The latter had to master both Guadeloupe and Martinique Creole, the hybrid chosen by Caraïbéditions. And Hector Poullet had another advantage: he grew up in metropolitan France at the same time as Annie Ernaux, who is two years younger than him.

The buyers of these translations of the classics of French literature are traditionally students and teachers in Creole, curious Creole speakers, and West Indians who, if they do not usually read in this language, like to have this type of work in their library. Official statistics estimated in 1999 that French-based creoles had more than 10 million native speakers, including 1.6 million in French overseas territories.

Annie Ernaux was already published in 42 languages ​​at the time of her Nobel Prize six months ago. The total should rise to around fifty once all the translation projects in progress have been completed.