GREGORY J. REID AND CHRISTINE FAMULA
Cet article examine l’utilisation de la catachrèse dans La Sagouine d’Antonine Maillet et dans la version anglaise de Luis de Céspedes. Cette étude comparative du texte original et de la traduction démontre que la catachrèse y est le trope définitif des monologues de la Sagouine, un dérivé important du processus de traduction, et un indice significatif de la grande popularité de la pièce, qui persiste malgré sa spécificité culturelle et linguistique.
The central contention of this paper is that catachresis, with its deeply rooted connections to irony and the origins of the linguistic sign, is the defining trope of Antonine Maillet’s La Sagouine. The term “catachresis” identifies a figure of speech in which new words (signifiers and their signifieds) are created or words which already exist in a language are given new meanings. Like la Sagouine herself, catachresis, as Patricia Parker points out in her essay “Metaphor and Catachresis,” is typically “connected with paucity and poverty” (69). Our project, at the outset, was simply to determine if Luis de Céspedes’s English translation had successfully transferred this important, characteristic figure of speech from the original text. However, over time our methodology has become an extrapolation of B. Folkart di Stefano’s claim that “literary translation is intrinsically an act of literary criticism” (241). “Any translation,” as di Stephano points out, “is inevitably a reading of the text” (241). Consequently, we have used de Céspedes’s translation not as a copy to be tested for accuracy and coherence but as a mimetic close reading of the original dramatic monologue in order to tease out and identify the catachreses revealed in each of the texts, which we could then more fully analyse when original and translated utterances are compared.
Our approach sidesteps the central conundrum of theatre translation — how to deal with a text destined for performance. As Susan Bassnett has argued in her conclusion to “Theatre Translation: The Case Against Performability”:
[...]the principle problems facing the translator involve close engagement with the text on the page and the need to find solutions for a series of problems that are primarily linguistic ones – differences in register involving age, gender, social position, etc., deictic units, consistency in monologues and many more. […] these considerations should take precedence over an abstract, highly individualist notion of performability. (111)
Although performance is an important consideration for any theatre translation, the focus of the translation process, as Bassnett outlines, remains the written text. Our project has been based on a comparison of published texts.1 As George Steiner observes in What Is Comparative Literature?: “[…] comparative literature is an art of understanding centred in the eventuality and defeats of translation” (10). Our objective, in keeping with the project of comparative literature, has been to focus on the meanings and insights which emerge from an analysis of the differences (and similarities) between an original text and its translation.
Catachresis, as Parker points out, emerges from the “lack of an original proper term – the lexical gap or lacuna” (60). In La Sagouine, Maillet has created a character whose ostensible linguistic poverty, the gaps in her education and vocabulary, necessitates the creation of new words and causes the creative misuse of existing words and expressions. La Sagouine’s catachreses include spoonerisms, malapropisms, borrowings, abrupt shifts of register and code, dysphemisms, and the stretching of typical expressions and common metaphors. However, her speech rarely displays pure farce; that is, her “errors” are, almost invariably, pregnant with satiric meaning. It is this rhetorical feature which closely ties la Sagouine to a prototypical notion of irony. In fact, it is her catachreses which best exemplify her role as the quintessential dissembling ieron whose superficially inferior speech always means other and more than it says.
In Aesthetic Ideology, Paul de Man comes to define irony as the “trope of tropes” and (citing Schlegel) as “permanent parabasis” (179). “Parabasis,” in de Man’s words, “is the interruption of a discourse by a shift in rhetorical register” (178). This definition offers an apt description of la Sagouine’s ability to disturb the established discourses of church, state, and community through a shift of register frequently expressed in a catachresis. In the matrix of associations which de Man sketches among irony, parabasis, catachresis and, eventually, “authentic language” (181), we can begin to appreciate the paradoxical primitivism and potency of la Sagouine’s monologues which are, at various points, indicated, replicated, highlighted, and illuminated by the translation. As Parker points out in her description of its history, “catachresis becomes literally the master trope, reigning over all figurative language” and eventually “not only over the other figures but finally […] over language itself” (65). Catachresis – as an act of naming that which has not yet been named within a language – is the ultimate challenge and accomplishment of translation and causes us to note that Maillet’s La Sagouine is itself very much like a translation, albeit a simulacral translation for which there is no source text.
Within translation studies the argument is now often repeated (with both a post-colonial and postmodern flavour) that a translation, in order to respect and honour the source text and its language and culture, should show signs of itself as a translation. This dichotomy of loyalties and modes of translation, as Ortun Zuber-Skerritt outlines in “Translation Science and Drama Translation,” dates to the early nineteenth century:
[…] the translator might either closely follow the author of the original and neglect the reader, or closely approach the reader and neglect the author […]. These two approaches have become known under the terms Verfremdung and Entfremdung. Verfremdung means distancing, estrangement or alienation of one’s own language by understanding, following, and adapting the language of the original. Entfremdung is dealienation of the foreign language […]. (4)
In The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, Lawrence Venuti contrasts “domesticating” and “foreignizing” modes of translation (81). Nancy Senior, in “Translators’ Choices in Tartuffe,” claims that the translator “stands on the continuum between, on the one hand, bringing the work to the public, and on the other hand bringing the public to the work” (39-40). Similarly, in “Hosanna in Toronto: ‘Tour de force’ or ‘Détour de traduction’?,” Jane Koustas points out that “[l]ike all translators, the theatre translator is confronted with the much studied yet never resolved dilemma of ‘allegiance.’ Should he or she ‘invade, extract and bring home’ (Steiner) or ‘traduire oui, mais sans traduire’ (Brault)?” (130). Underlying these dichotomies, “the main problem of translation,” as Zuber-Skerritt highlights, is “its ‘irrationality,’ i.e., the fact that not everything has an equivalent in another language” (3). This “main problem” signals the necessary turn to catachresis, but these discussions of the dilemmas of translation also alert us to the fact that Maillet’s La Sagouine, the original, French-language monologue, sounds and reads like a “foreignized” translation with a strong “allegiance” to a source culture. This recognition encourages us to consider the de Céspedes translation as an attempt to repeat and share in the translation-like process of the original play.
Common definitions of catachresis such as “a mixed metaphor” (Random House Dictionary), “a paradoxical figure of speech” (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary), “a traditional term for the mistaken use of one word for another” (The Oxford Companion to the English Language), “abuse of a trope or metaphor” (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary), “an extravagant, unexpected, farfetched metaphor” (Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, qtd. in Parker 61), and an “unexpected or violent metaphor” (Anatomy of Criticism, qtd. in Parker 61) have proven only moderately useful in our study. The most frequently repeated example of catachresis is the expression “table leg.” Though the term “leg” is borrowed from human and animal anatomy, in this context the word does not replace a previously existing term because there is no other word in English for what holds table tops in the air. In other words, “table leg” is a catachresis because it cannot be reduced to a more literal expression. In contrast, for example, when Romeo calls Juliet’s eyes “stars” he is using a metaphor because the proper term “eyes” already exists and we understand that he is ornamenting his speech and complimenting Juliet’s eyes by calling them stars. If we might imagine that Romeo for some reason did not know the words “eyes” or “stars” and, in reference to Juliet’s eyes, began waxing poetic about her “stares,” his abuse of the language would be a catachresis (and very much in keeping with its etymological root–abusio).
In “Translating Antonine Maillet’s Fiction,” Philip Stratford claims that
[…] Antonine Maillet doesn’t write pure acadien at all. Acadien is just her base.To this she adds, instinctively, her own accents, images, rhythms, expressions. The product is an imaginative equivalent of acadien, heavily laced with Rabelais, Perrault, Molière, folk tales, the Catholic missal, Jean Giono and other sources that have influenced her. What she writes is an amalgam of all these parts, not academic acadien, but a new language. To give it its true name one should call it Antoninais or Mailletois […]. (95)
In the present instance, we are in fact dealing with a specific dialect of “Mailletois”: Sagouinais. It is precisely because la Sagouine does not substitute one proper term for another but meaningfully misuses existing words and creates neologisms that the translation becomes useful.
In the first place, the translation confirms that the original catachreses are meaningful — that is to say, that they are, to a degree, repeatable in a new context. We have to keep in mind that the use of completely new signs, both signifiers and signifieds, risks creating incomprehensible nonsense and gibberish. The translation also allows us to consider the polysemy, the full range of meanings, of the source figures. In most instances, as we shall see, the translation leaves behind and/or adds meanings to the source catachreses. This process of analysis also brings us to reconsider the concept of catachresis in relation to translation in general. Although we have not found confirmation of a correlation in translation research or in studies of rhetoric, our research supports the idea that translation is a catalyst of catachresis because it must occasionally express the signified of a source language in a target language which does not have a corresponding signifier. Finally, the joint consideration of catachresis and translation brings us to consider their connections to the very nature of creative and/or “authentic” language as the basis of La Sagouine and its dramatic and literary appeal.
We have organized the selected examples gleaned from the texts (Maillet’s original and de Céspedes’s translation) into three groups: 1) catachreses in the original text but not present in the translation, 2) catachreses present in both texts, and 3) catachreses in the translation but not present in the original. Based on our own intuitions and Philip Stratford’s description of the de Céspedes translation, we anticipated a significant shortfall in the transposition of catachreses from one language to another. According to Stratford: “In translating La Sagouine for the stage Luis de Céspedes used a slurred rural speech full of ain’t’s and nohows and dropped g’s and flocks of apostrophes per page. [...] not entirely successful, at least not for my purposes” (94). However, of the three categories into which we have divided the data, this first (catachresis in the original but not in the translation) held the fewest examples.
The dominant motif of la Sagouine’s catachreses is the collapsing of references to church and state. She conflates Catholic liturgy, praxis, and ritual with terminology related to economics, politics, and bureaucracy in the form of parabases. As René Plantier points out, “Les déformations des signifiants et des références, provoquent une connivence, ce sont les signes de la création populaire […]. Les clichés et les stéréotypes du langage «en grandeur» sont remplacés dans le langage vif” (118). Catholic terms which la Sagouine turns into satiric catachreses that are not recaptured as catachresis in the translation would, for example, include: “bondieuserie” (141) and “saints siéges” (141). La Sagouine uses “bondieuserie” to mean God’s “job,” “l’ouvrage du Bon Dieu.” However, the correct sense of the word is superficial religiosity or false piety. She uses “saints siéges” [holy seats] when she means le Saint-Siège [the Holy See: the pope’s jurisdiction and the papal court]. Her “error” is in keeping with the common metonyms for power – seat of power, the throne – and, at the same time, reduces the papal auspices to something more common and down to earth.
In the English translation de Céspedes uses the phrase “all of that holy stuff” (151) for “bondieuserie” and thereby abandons the catachresis while maintaining the parabasis, the shift to a lower register.The translation captures the basic denotation of the word, but the strong satiric effect of the catachresis is lost as intimations of false piety are nowhere to be found in the English rendering. In the translation of “saints siéges” as “holy sees” (151) de Céspedes introduces the common grammar error of presenting an abstract or mass noun as if it were concrete and countable (like the common errors: beers, fishes, sugars, etc). The sanctity of the Holy See is somewhat reduced by the idea that there could be many of them; however, the satiric effect, reminding us that the Pope’s court is like many other more earthy jurisdictions and icons of authority — the judge’s bench and the speaker’s or president’s chair — is lost in the translation. However, to reiterate, in these instances the translation uses literal language rather than catachreses and thus confirms the denotation (that is, the repeatability of the basic meaning) of the original catachreses. The literal rendering also provides a foil against which the rich, multiple connotations of the original figures are cast in relief.
Within our second category (catachreses in both original and translation) there are varying degrees of equivalence between the original and translated catachreses. Translation samples which are comfortable equivalents of the original signifiers and signifieds are relatively numerous. For example, in de Céspedes’s English version,“propagation” (81, 82, 87), as in “propagation of the faith,” maintains the usage and connotations of the French original. La Sagouine confounds “propagation” (73, 74, 79) with the word “propagande,” quoting her husband Gapi’s sceptical reactions to both the moon landing and the Vietnam war:“C’est de la propaga- tion, tout ça, qu’il a dit : ils faisont tout ça pour la propagation . […] Les gouvarnements pensont rien qu’à ça, leu propagation” (73-74).
Similarly, de Céspedes uses the puerile term “explosed” for Maillet’s “explosé”: “then, they explosed the Blessed Sacrament, and it stayed explosed fer the whole auction” (93). This deliberate confusion of the English expression “to expose the Blessed Sacrament”with the idea of an “explosion” is an adequate translation of the French original: “Pis là, ils avont fait exploser le Saint-Sacrement. Pis il a resté explosé coume ça tout le temps […] ” (86). Plantier observes that “[l]a paronymie et l’ajout du «l» donnent […] à la métaphore toute sa lumière spirituelle” (118). There is often a flash or glint of light when the Eucharist and chalice are removed from the tabernacle. La Sagouine’s choice of verbs might be a literal recounting of events in exaggerated yet concrete terms.
Among de Céspedes’s many accurate transpositions of catachreses we would include his use of “arthrism”(21) for “arthritis,” “limitates” and “limitation” (37) for “imitates” and “imitation,” and “barber” (50) for a “sheep shearer.” Relatively flat catachrestic errors such as calling bifocals “double vision glasses” (62), a photographer a “phonographer” (114), and curettage “incurretage” (133) seem easy to translate, as do spoonerisms such as “Rollefellers ‘n Rollerroyces” (152) and “Joe Graphy’s books” (165) for “geography books.” Even significantly more witty examples such as “circumscription” and “circumscribed” (102-03) for “conscription”and “conscripted,” the description of Biblical Joseph as “the presumptuous father”(40), and the lyrical rendering of the Holy Spirit appearing as a tongue of fire on Pentecost as “a firefly on Pentecost”(156) are accurate, though not particularly challenging translations. This selection of examples from our second group demonstrates, contrary to our expectations, the relative ease with which a significant number of French catachreses can be translated into English catachreses. The similarities and shared histories of the two languages account, in large part, for this fungibility. We have also come to realize that the successful translation of a catachresis as a catachresis depends upon the sharing of what Linda Hutcheon calls a “discursive community” (89). Very frequently, in the case of La Sagouine, the translatability of a catachresis depends on the translator’s and his target audience’s knowledge of Catholic catechism.
Despite this potential limitation, La Sagouine has become both internationally acclaimed and a Canadian classic. Viola Leger, who first created the role on stage and has, over the decades, come to incarnate la Sagouine, recently (January, February 2003) celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the play’s Montreal premiere at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert with a performance run entitled La Sagouine et son monde. Like the texts published in 1973 (Leméac) and 1990 (BQ), the program from these performances included a selected glossary of la Sagouine’s lexicon with translations into standard French (under the title “Quelques jouyaux de langue ancienne dans la bouche de la Sagouine”). As we have seen, Philip Stratford’s comments suggest that its renown cannot be accounted for by the fact that la Sagouine accurately represents Acadian speech. However, in her entry on La Sagouine in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre, Louise Forsyth claims that:
The thematic and documentary interest of La Sagouine is closely linked to the language of its only character. She uses a roughened version of the popular speech, specific to Acadia, brought to New France in the seventeenth century by her ancestors (the first time these authentic accents were used in a literary work). (Forsyth 482-83)
In contradiction to the notion that interest in the play is based on the historical authenticity of its language, Forsyth goes on to point out that “the English version of La Sagouine, translated by Luis de Céspedes (1979), received the 1980 Chalmers Award.
An assessment of the reception of La Sagouine and its translation is beyond the scope of our present analysis, but our study has led us to ask of La Sagouine the question which Steiner asks of literature in general:
Why do certain authors, works, literary movements “pass” (to use a French idiom) whereas others remain stubbornly native? […] Too often, we simply do not know a good reason. But the phenomenology of the untranslatable, the untranslated, the “unreceived” (le non-recevoir) is one of the subtlest of challenges in comparative literature. (13)
Neither the historical authenticity of its language nor its theatricality can account for the play’s broad popularity or its longevity.
In a paraphrase of Schlegel, Paul de Man describes “authentic language” as “the language of madness, the language of error, and the language of stupidity. […] this authentic language is a mere semiotic entity, open to the radical arbitrariness of any sign system and as such capable of circulation, but which as such is profoundly unreliable” (181). This “authentic language” is, of course, ahistorical, an always-present precondition for the existence of any single language. It copies the original, primordial process of consciousness (as described by Johann Gottlieb Fichte; see de Man 172-77) assigning properties to objects through acts of judgment. All established language systems restrict this movement, this circulation of properties. “Authentic language,” in contrast, as de Man suggests, circulates freely. Catachresis, as we have seen, imitates or, perhaps more properly, is authentic language. Insofar as it is a relatively arbitrary assignation of a sign, it circulates fluidly and freely; however, to the degree that individual examples of catachresis can be translated they are also demonstrably rigid, reliable, repeatable, and therefore meaningful across time and space.
Our analysis highlights the wit and expressive, polysemous irony of the play which cannot be or has not been fully captured in translation. The shortfalls of the translation cast the qualities of the original text in relief. At the same time, the translation demonstrates the degree to which the most radically arbitrary, fluid, “unreliable” linguistic features of the original monologue can be recaptured. Our analysis shows that the translation manages to convey a good part of the original text’s meaning while imitating its “authenticity” and creative abuse of established language.
For example (still within our second category: catachresis in both original and translation), in her use of the expression “crache écumunique” (97, 142) to refer to the “krach boursier” or “krach économique,” meaning the economic (stock market) crash of 1929, la Sagouine’s “mistaken” use of the term “écumunique” [ecumenical], designating the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, encapsulates a theme that runs throughout the monologues in which the Church is seen both to actively participate in the capitalist governmental system and to reinforce the oppression of la Sagouine and her disadvantaged social group. The use of the term “crache” [to spit] instead of the correct term “krach” “accidentally” reveals la Sagouine’s disdain. The English translation “ecumenic crash” (160) maintains the association of Church and finance but, of course, the connection with “spit” would be lost to English readers and audiences.
La Sagouine’s speech also plays extensively on the word “recenser” [to take a census]:
Et pis ils nous avont toute recensés, pas de soin : ils avont recensé Gapi, pis ils avont encensé la Sainte, pis ils m’avont ensemencée, moi itou . . . Parce que lors d’un recensement, coume ça, il leur faut encenser tout le monde, avec les poules pis les cochons. Ben chus nous, j’avons ni tet à poules, ni soue à cochons, ça fait qu’ils avont ensemencé les matous. (151)
La Sagouine’s new word seems to find its origins in the archaic religious verb “censer,” meaning to burn and spread incense smoke over the congregation. It can also be read as “encenser,” used figuratively to mean “flatter,” “shower with praise” or “butter up.” “Ensemencer”is “to impregnate.” “Ensensé” is a false cognate of the English “incensed,” so we would expect most Acadians and most bilinguals, in general, to notice the connotative connections between the words. Consequently, in a language all her own, la Sagouine is able to maintain a posture of perfect innocence and ingenuousness, all the while intimating that the census takers arrived like missionaries spreading smoky rituals, falsely flattering the residents all the while incensing and disturbing everyone and everything to the point of impregnating the cats — the male cats.
The translation reads: “they took a census of us all: they censed Gapi, and they censed la Sainte, and they censed me too. . . . See, when the’re incensin, they gotta cense everybody, includin’ chickens ’n pigs. But us, we ain’t got a chicken coop ’r a pigsty, so they went right along ’n censed the cats. They nose about your clothes too […]” (163). In a review of the translation Barbara Godard comments:
A comparison of this version of “The Census” by Luis de Céspedes with two other renderings of the same sketch reveals that, although the text reads well on the whole, de Céspedes has not fully risen to the challenge. Using a modified phonetic spelling he has attempted to create the oral effect, but has failed to find colourful colloquialisms as Mantz and Stratford have. More fundamentally, la Sagouine’s malapropism-pun is betrayed by de Céspedes in his translation of “censor.” Mantz’s “senseless takers” is equally weak, though more playful, while Stratford’s “incensers” goes straight to the point. Though la Sagouine’s linguistic comedy remains inaccessible in English, the strong core of the theatrical experience remains in this translation and should provide a rich experience for new audiences. (48)
Godard’s review notwithstanding, de Céspedes’s use of the word “censed” brings to mind the homonym “sensed,” which might inadvertently suggest the census takers “becoming aware of their subjects” while later references to “noses” remind us of la Sagouine’s frequent references to outsiders’ averse and peevish reactions to the smells of the local inhabitants. The false cognate “incensed” is also confirmed in de Céspedes’s translation.
The use of the term “censors”(164) for “census takers” makes a significant addition to the original catachresis, implying that these bureaucrats, rather than taking into account la Sagouine and her kin, are actually imposing a kind of censorship and denigration. Although this “censors” connotation is not found in the original work, it is certainly in keeping with the themes developed in this section of the play. For example, on the same page we find la Sagouine’s references to “conformé” and “conformâtion” (152), which de Céspedes aptly translates as “[…] bein baptized ’n conformed by a real archbishop on a conformation tour” (164). This confusion of conformity and the sacramental ritual of confirmation is richly ironic and, in the best traditions of satire, turns the meaning of the religious custom upside down. In this respect, de Céspedes’s catachresis (“censors”) has much the same effect as the original text from which it was created.
Other Catholic terms which la Sagouine turns into satiric catachresis include “la Rusurrection” (141-49) and “libératché” (102).“Rusurrection,” the title of one of the monologues, is used to replace “resurrection,” the central mystery of Catholicism. La Sagouine’s spoonerism attaches the idea of “ruse”to the signifier of the mystery. Within the text of the monologue, she substitutes the word “russusciter”: “ . . . Pourquoi c’est faire qu’il est mort? . . . Ils nous avont dit que c’était pour mieux ressusciter”(141). This confusion of “resurrection” and “resuscitation” has the effect of turning the miracle and its figurative implications into a banal, concrete, analytic or tautological truth. Jesus had to be dead or they could not have resuscitated him so well.
The translated figure can rarely be absolutely controlled or restricted from taking on new implications and connotations. The translated catachrestic sign becomes a neo-utterance stirring up a myriad of intertextual connections in a new social, cultural, historical, and linguistic context. De Céspedes translates “rusurrection”as “risurrection” (151ff). In the new English catachresis the association with “ruse” is lost and the new term is more concrete and redundant. The literal sense of resurrection as “rise”is reinforced. At the same time, any adjustment of this word’s pronunciation is liable to underline the contained word “erection.” The new catachresis, the pleonastic “ris(e)-erection,” suggests a bawdy joke which may or may not have been present in the original.
“Libératché” (102), suggesting the glitter of Mr. Showmanship, Liberace of Las Vegas fame, is la Sagouine’s version of the “libera,” the prayer for the dead often sung at Catholic funerals. (Liberace was a very familiar figure to French-Canadians at the time Maillet wrote La Sagouine, having “discovered” René Simard and promoted the young Quebecois singer’s career internationally.) The catachresis is an appropriate icon of the monologue in which it appears, “L’enterrement,” which focuses on the elaborateness, expense, and ostentation of funerals. De Céspedes repeats “libératché” in the English text (without italics) exactly as it appears in French. The use of “libératché” (112) in English redoubles the original catachresis. That is, while English audiences/readers would likely spot the connection with Liberace, the word would likely seem even more foreign and erroneous in an English context than it did in French.
De Céspedes’s “pewgatory” (176) gives “purgatory” intimations of church pews and bad smells, in contrast to the singular swine allusion of the original “pigatoire” (140). Not surprisingly, the translator often changes the degree of the catachresis in the process of transposition. For example “a shit-house in his bus”(84) is a stronger dysphemism than la Sagouine’s original “bécosse” (76) [outhouse: from the English “back-house”], whereas “clothes” (41) for the priest’s vestments is weaker than the original “hardes” (37) [rags].
The starting point of our research was the idea that the catachreses in La Sagouine would prove extremely difficult to translate and that these figures would have to be deconstructed and rendered in accessible, straightforward, standard English — in other words, eliminated. Contrary to our expectations, overall we have discovered an increase in the number and degree of the catachreses as we moved from the original to the translated text.As we move into our third category (catachresis in translation not in the original), the most significant example is, of course, the expression “la sagouine” which is maintained in the title and used throughout the translated English version. There is no English equivalent of the term. Literally and etymologically “un sagouin” is “a squirrel monkey”; figuratively “a slovenly or dirty individual” (Harraps). Terms like “crone,” “harridan,” “hag” or “shrew” would not capture the specificity, individuality and uniqueness of la Sagouine. “Sagouine” as a term borrowed from French is catachrestic in English, whereas it is only rare or archaic in French.
De Céspedes also creates catachreses through his use of a number of other French expressions in the English context. For example, he maintains la Sagouine’s French usage in the identification of various people through name and lineage: “Pierre à Pierre à Pierrot” (168) and “Jos à Polyte, Laurette à Johnny” (169), etc; for food such as “poutine râpées” (51-2) and “poutines” (158); French Catholic designations such as “mois de Marie” (147), “Les Saints martyrs canadjens” (167); and common expressions which could have easily been translated into English such as “les Français de France”(165). De Céspedes also creates a number of catachreses by giving literal translations of French expressions rather than using equivalent English formulae. For example, he translates “langues” (147) as “tongues”(156) instead of “languages.”In the same vein he uses the literal translation of the expression “passer la paroisse au peigne fin”(64) — that is,“the whole parish all combed out”(72) to indicate that everyone has had confession and been cleansed of their sins. To translate la Sagouine’s “de goule en oreille” (66), he uses “from mouth to ear” (73), remaining closer to the literal sense of “de bouche à oreille” rather than using the English expression “by word of mouth.” De Céspedes also creates a number of original words by adjusting spelling and pronunciation. For example, “newmonia” (47) takes on the air of some new disease rather than just “pneumonia”; “tooberculous” (53) hints at too much of something, more than just tuberculosis.
In examples such as “got their throats blessed all they can” (16), “an operation room” (20), “water knees” (21), “to talk highclass” (17), “rich sickness […] poor sickness” (21), “buy […] a pagan” (64), “put up her bans” (74), “sins from Quebec” (77), “a nerve sickness” (21), “he ain’t easy” (81), and “sprayin’m with holy water” (115), de Céspedes creates the erroneous impression of a fixed or formulaic expression in English, when this impression is not created in the French original. The sense of outlandishness or degree of separation from the standard is greater than what we find in the original French text. In addition de Céspedes also creates a number of interesting, ironic catachreses in situations where the original is in standard, straightforward French. For example, whereas Maillet uses the correct expression “il avait point payé sa dîme” (61), he uses the expression “paid his dues” instead of “tithe” or “contribution,” therefore stretching the figurative sense of “paying one’s dues” to this religious context. The translator creates a new comic irony with the expression “a Fall of elections” (47), whereas the original expression “un automne d’aléctions” (43), pronunciation aside, is neutral.
Examples throughout the play and its translation show a pattern of confounding literal and figurative meanings, a shifting of register from the elevated, airy, and abstract to the basic, earthy, and concrete. They also serve as mise-en-abymes of the themes and the style of the work. The mild iconoclasm, the irreverence, the wry rebelliousness, the ironic winks, and the closely framed awareness of the world which causes us to see it in new ways — these elements revealed in the catachreses illustrate the tone, wit, and ideology of the literary work as a whole.
As we have seen in La Sagouine and its translation, catachresis both gives birth to and destabilizes language. In contradiction to la Sagouine’s definition of literature as “the priest […] shellin’ out some big words he can turn into a mean sentence”(73), catachresis (such as we find in La Sagouine) may well be its creative apotheosis. Certainly it is often claimed that the ultimate proof of literary achievement (e.g., Shakespeare and Dickens) is the introduction of new words into the language. This consideration of catachresis in both original and translated texts offers a partial, tentative response to the question of why and how certain authors and works manage to cross barriers of language and culture. A feature of that kind of writing we call literature would seem to be its willingness to revisit the source, to re-engage in something like the original practice of language creation in an attempt to make a language say more than it seems designed for. The literary artist and the translator work in the interstices, in the gaps, of what a language is able to say. Their shared ability to invoke “authentic language” in a way that is meaningful to readers and audiences is what allows a work to transcend the limits of any one language or community.
NOTES
1. For convenience all page references are to the 1990 BQ edition of
Maillet’s La Sagouine. However, each of the examples cited in this
article can also be found in the 1973 Leméac edition. De Céspedes’s
English translation was published in 1979.
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