Achromatising brilliance: French translations of Katherine Mansfield's fiction

Katherine Mansfield’s reputation in France has always been greater than in England. Since her untimely death in 1923, the French reception of Mansfield has idealised her persona to the extent of crafting a hagiography. In this paper, I propose to determine how the translations of her fiction collude in the hagiography of her personality, thereby determining whether the beliefs and principles expressed in the original texts have been diluted during the translation process. We now know that the early editions of her Journal and Letters had already been censored by her husband, the critic John Middleton Murry, who included nothing which would further stain his own tarnished image in England, or anything which would seriously condemn his dead first wife. There was a deliberate editing out of things distasteful, shocking, anti–French, colloquial, political, cruel, blasphemous and especially humorous. If the subsequent French versions are also viewed as a severe bowdlerisation, one must ask what remained of the real Katherine Mansfield for the French audience to appreciate. I shall demonstrate how – factual and biographical distortions not withstanding – the Katherine Mansfield legend in France was also dependent on the presentation of her fiction to the French reading public. The sharp–witted comedienne perceived in her original writing hardly surfaces in translation. Jeremy Munday considers that translation studies encompass the ‘central recurring theme of ‘word–for–word’ and sense–for–sense’ translation’. This paper will highlight how difficult Mansfield’s fiction is to translate, and how French translators have consistently sought to replicate her words rather than interpret their meaning, thus diluting her narrative aesthetic. Munday sums up the work of a translator as follows: Translating is an intellectual process that consists in re–articulating a thought expressed in a context. Just as knowing how to write is not enough to make one a writer, knowing two languages is not enough to make one a translator (Munday, p. 28). I shall highlight the difficulties facing the translators of Mansfield’s fiction, particularly with regard to idiolects and general speech patterns, which are intimately connected with the narrative process. Mansfield’s gift for impersonation – and her ability to transpose this gift to the written page – is one way in which her characters are so acutely brought to life. The brilliance of her writing, combining the vivacity of her wit, the sharpness of her tongue, the concerns of her mind, is, on the whole, achromatised and enfeebled in translation, thereby creating an urgent case for remapping these texts against the grain of the accumulated mistranslations