Fidelity, Infidelity, and the

Adulterous Translator
RICHARD PHILCOX

“‘The translator’s first duty,’ says Mr Newman, ‘is a historical one, to be faithful.’
Probably both sides would agree that the translator’s ‘first duty is to be faithful’, but
the question at issue between them is, in what faithfulness consists.”
Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer

Webster:
Fidelity: 1. strict observance of promises, duties, etc. 2. see LOYALTY.
3. conjugal faithfulness. 4. adherence to fact or detail. 5. accuracy, exactness.
Infidelity: marital unfaithfulness, adultery 2. disloyalty.
3. a breach of trust; transgression.

“Translating is always ideological because it releases a domestic remainder,

an inscription of values, beliefs and representations linked to historical
moments and social positions in the receiving culture. In serving domestic
interests, a translation provides an ideological resolution for the
linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text.”
Lawrence Venuti1
Coined as “les belles infidèles”, beautiful but unfaithful, in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, translations at that time were strongly domesticating and
the translator felt free to assimilate foreign literatures to the linguistic and cultural
values of the receiving situation. They were used in the construction of a national
culture, appealing to the canons of the target language and familiarizing language
and style so that the translation passed for the original. The seventeenth-century
French translator Nicolas D’Ablancourt, in his preface to Lucian, argues that
“[d]iverse times require not only different words, but different thoughts”.2 The
twentieth century changed all that and translation was studied as an autonomous
text in its own right, an independent work of signification, a literary genre apart.
Translation studies came into being, as did the notions of cultural translation,
translatability, fluency, equivalence of effect, linguistics, gender identity, translation

1
Lawrence Venuti, “Translation, Community, Utopia”, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The
Translation Studies Reader, second edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p.498.
2
Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt, “Preface to Lucian” (translated by Lawrence Venuti), in Venuti
(ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, p. 35.
30  Richard Philcox

theory, cultural and postcolonial studies, cannibalism and the global hegemony of
English.
Let us take a closer look at that terrible cliché traduttore traditore and the
notions of betrayal, transgression, freedom and fidelity in my translations of Maryse
Condé’s novels. Walter Benjamin wrote in his essay “The Task of the Translator”:
Fidelity and freedom in translation have traditionally been regarded as
conflicting tendencies […] In all language and linguistic creations there
remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be
communicated; depending on the context in which it appears, it is something
that symbolizes or something symbolized [….] A free translation bases the
test on its own language. It is the task of the translator to release in his own
language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate
the language imprisoned in a work, in his re-creation of that work.3
In a recent article, Emily Apter points out that, “[i]n what is perhaps a unique
case of art as authorized plagiarism or legal appropriationism, [. . .] translation
is encouraged to pilfer the original with no risk of copyright infringement or
allegations of forgery”.4 In other words, legalized infidelity or adultery.
I will divide this article into two parts. First, I will discuss the distinctly
Caribbean novels of Maryse Condé where I am unfaithful to the French-speaking
context and faithful to the music and register of a canon in the English language.
Translation implies fidelity not so much to the original, but to another form. It is
the translator’s intertextuality that comes into play. The act of translating plunges
us into a network of textual relations. To translate the text, to discover its meaning,
is to trace those relations. Meaning becomes something that exists between a
text and all the other texts to which it refers and relates. In other words, I take a
familiar signifier, a familiar music, in order to translate the signified in Maryse
Condé. Roman Jakobson writes: “Equivalence in difference is the cardinal problem
of language and the pivotal concern of linguistics. […] No linguistic specimen
may be interpreted by the science of language without a translation of its signs
into other signs of the same system or into signs of another system.”5 A literary
translation, argues Anthony Appiah, doesn’t communicate the foreign author’s
intentions, but tries to create a relationship to the linguistic and literary conventions
of the translating culture that matches the relationship between the foreign text
and its own culture. 6 For the Brazilian essayist, Harold de Campos, translation

3
Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”, trans. Harry Zohn, in Venuti (ed.), The
Translation Studies Reader, p.81.
4
Emily Apter, “What is Yours, Ours and Mine: On the Limits of Ownership and the Creative
Commons”, Angelaki, 14, 1 (2009), 87–100 (p. 89).
5
Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”, in Venuti (ed.), The Translation
Studies Reader, p.139.
6
“Thick Translation”, in Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, p. 397.
 Fidelity, Infidelity and the Adulterous Translator  31

is a “parallel canto”, a dialogue not only with the original’s voice but with other
textual voices. Secondly, I shall look at Condé’s novels of globalization, the romans
nomades – romans d’errance which are not anchored in a Caribbean context, but in
the modernity in which I and the reader are currently living, and do not need to be
transferred elsewhere since the context is already familiar.
But before addressing these issues I would like to stress the importance of
the bond between author and translator as wife and husband. It is a permanent
interaction between two people living in harmony, traveling and living together.7
How I took Maryse to an old sugar mill on Grande Terre in Guadeloupe in one
of the most desolate parts of the island that for me symbolized the landscape she
described in La Migration des coeurs which I translated as Windward Heights8 as a
reminder of her Caribbean adaptation of Wuthering Heights. How Rivière au Sel in
Crossing the Mangrove9 is in fact Montebello, where we lived in Guadeloupe, with
its forest paths, its trees, old change-of-air houses and the view of La Soufrière on
one side and across the bay to Le Gosier on the other. How our trip to Charleston,
South Carolina in December 1989, where the roofs were still covered in blue
tarpaulins three months after hurricane Hugo, became her inspiration for The Last
of the African Kings.10 Charleston, where the Caribbean and the United States meet
historically and geographically. How we took the boat to La Désirade and climbed
la montagne and found the spot balanced above the ocean where you could hear the
commotion of the waves breaking below, mingled with the roar of the wind and the
cries of the seagulls, the very spot where Antonine Titane, known as Nina, might
have lived in the novel Desirada.11 How we survived two journeys to South Africa,
and lived through the experiences that came to be portrayed in The Story of the
Cannibal Woman.12 How I can identify and know full well the inspiration for her
characters, though I would never tell.
So I feel free to let my imagination roam in the English language and flesh
out what Gayatri Spivak calls the rhetoricity of the original, which I have taken to
be the strategy of a discourse.

7
I have already written about translating Maryse Condé in “Translating Maryse Condé: A
Personal Itinerary”, Sites, 5, 2 (Fall 2001), 277–282, and in French in the book Maryse Condé:
Une Nomade Inconvenante, ed. Madeleine Cottenet-Hage and Lydie Moudileno (Guadeloupe:
Ibis Rouge, 2002).
8
Maryse Condé, Windward Heights, trans.Richard Philcox (London: Faber and Faber, 1998).
9
Maryse Condé, Crossing the Mangrove, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Anchor Doubleday,
1995).
10
Maryse Condé, The Last of the African Kings, trans. Richard Philcox (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1997).
11
Maryse Condé, Desirada, trans.Richard Philcox (New York: Soho Press, 2000).
12
Maryse Condé, The Story of the Cannibal Woman, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Atria
Books, 2007)
32  Richard Philcox

The task of the translator is to facilitate this love between the original and
its shadow, a love that permits fraying, holds the agency of the translator
and the demands of her imagined or actual audience at bay. The politics
of translation from a non-European woman’s text too often suppresses this
possibility because the translator cannot engage with, or cares insufficiently
for, the rhetoricity of the original […..] Rhetoric must work in the silence
between and around words in order to see what works and how much […..]
Unless one can at least construct a model of this for the other language, there
is no real translation.13
Now let us return to the novels that are anchored in a Caribbean context
where I have focused on fidelity to the music, tone and register. First, Crossing
the Mangrove, the most Caribbean of Condé’s novels, the story of twenty voices
speaking from a wake ceremony in the course of one night, where I found the way
the colors of Nature interweave in the personal lives of the characters, the way the
reader is made to look at the horizon and then back again to him or herself, all
those trifling details with a universal significance, I found an equivalence of effect
in Virginia Woolf, and in particular in her novel To the Lighthouse. Her stream of
consciousness spoke to me as a translator. I like the way the narrator slips in and
out of the characters’ lives and talks to us in a voice that touches the right chord.
You might be wondering how the register for an English middle class family could
be appropriate for the inhabitants of a small village in Guadeloupe. It is because I
sense a similarity of purpose and a mastery of style in both authors that transcend
the two very different contexts of a holiday home on the English coast and a tropical
village in the French Antilles. It was a way of being faithful in my manner, yet
unfaithful in another, of introducing the English-speaking reader to another culture
by making him feel at home in a music he is familiar with yet speaking to him of an
alien culture. Lawrence Venuti sums this up nicely when he writes:
[T]translation is readily seen as investing the foreign language text with a
domestic significance […] Translation never communicates in an untroubled
fashion because the translator negotiates the linguistic and cultural differences
of the foreign text by reducing them and supplying another set of differences,
basically domestic, drawn from the receiving language and culture to enable
the foreign to be received there. The foreign text, then, is not so much
communicated as inscribed with domestic intelligibilities and interests.14
Even the English translation of the trees in the forest focused on the music rather
than complete accuracy of their exact equivalents, although they are all tropical trees
from the Caribbean: “Candlewood. Mastwood. Bladdernut. Golden Spoon. Trumpet

13
Gayatri Spivak, “The Politics of Translation”, in Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies
Reader, pp. 370, 371.
14
Venuti, “Translation, Community, Utopia”, p. 482.
 Fidelity, Infidelity and the Adulterous Translator  33

Wood. Myrtle. Incense Tree. Magnolia. Cigarbox Cedar. Crabwood. Resolu. Star
Apple. Saltfish Wood. Sweet Plum. Manjack. Marmalade Tree. Mapou.”
Another example of this intertextual fidelity/infidelity is my translation of
Les derniers rois mages, which I translated as The Last of the African Kings. I have
already mentioned that special bond between author and translator where I read
what she reads, see the movies she sees and listen to the music she listens to. I try
to gauge what is influencing her at the moment of creation so that I can formulate
a strategy for translating her novels. In the case of Les derniers rois mages, she
would listen over and over again to African-American music, and especially the
blues. Lena Horne’s rendition of Stormy Weather inspired the book’s epigraph,
reflecting the troubled relationship and disintegration of the two main characters.
The lyrical impromptus of the chapters called The Notebooks of Djéré clash with
the haunting, bluesy mood of the rest of the book as Spero, the main character
from Guadeloupe, reviews his life over a twenty-four hour period on an island
off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina. Just as jazz is a reworking of African
rhythms so the structure of the book reworks the links between Africa, its Diaspora
of Guadeloupe and South Carolina.
I also happen to know that an important source of intertextuality for the
book was Bruce Chatwin’s The Viceroy of Ouidah. Not only is there a similarity
of structure – working backwards in time – but there is a similarity of tone: that
terrible irony. Both novels are iconoclastic, unorthodox and nomadic. I therefore
took Chatwin’s novel as a strategy for translation in the same way I took Virginia
Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Using a European literary tradition I endeavored to
convey the Caribbeanness of the text which is very much the inner relationship of
the individual to his or her environment, culture and self.
In the words of George Steiner in After Babel:
Fidelity is not literalism or any technical device for rendering “spirit”. The
whole formulation, as we have found over and over again in discussions on
translation, is hopelessly vague. The translator, the reader, is faithful to his
text […] only when he endeavors to restore the balance of forces, of integral
presence, which his appropriative comprehension has disrupted. Fidelity
is ethical, but also in the full sense, economic. A translation is more than
figuratively an act of double-entry, both formally and morally the books must
balance.15
Further examples of this infidelity to the author’s world are my translations
of the titles of Condé’s novels. I translated La Migration des coeurs as Windward
Heights, as an echo of Wuthering Heights. It was a deliberate choice to remind the
English-speaking reader of the source of the book’s inspiration, so that he could

15
George Steiner, After Babel, third edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 [1975]),
pp. 318–319.
34  Richard Philcox

identify with the time and place, constantly keeping in mind the atmosphere of
the original, placing it in an historical context and facilitating his transposition
to a Caribbean context and the Windward islands of the Lesser Antilles. Here
intertextuality is of the utmost importance.
I translated Célanire Cou-Coupé as Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat?16
Knowing full well that no English reader, (and by the way, very few French readers)
would get the reference to Apollinaire or Césaire (“soleil cou-coupé”), I made a
deliberate choice to make it sound more like a thriller, and thus more commercial,
more reader-friendly. It was being deliberately unfaithful to detach the text from the
French-speaking world and open it up to an English-speaking readership. I am one
of those translators who is constantly thinking of the readership, and placing the
language in the twenty-first century. A vivid example of this is my new translation
of Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre17 and Peau Noire Masques Blancs 18
where I have modernized the vocabulary for the twenty-first-century reader.
I shall now come to those novels where I have been faithful to the text because
precisely they spoke to the reader of a world with which he is already familiar with.
Here I am talking about Desirada, Celanire Cou-Coupé and, above all, Histoire de
la Femme Cannibale. These are the novels of globalization. “It’s this wandering
that engenders creativity,” Condé says in Conversations with Maryse Condé. “You
must be errant and multifaceted, inside and out. Nomadic.”19 In Desirada we are
taken from Guadeloupe to France to Santo Domingo to the island of La Désirade
and finally to Boston. In Célanire Cou-Coupé the reader travels from the Ivory
Coast to French Guiana to Guadeloupe to Peru and back to Guadeloupe, and in
Histoire de la Femme Cannibale, we are constantly being transported from South
Africa to Tokyo to New York to a fictitious African country based on Gabon and
plunged into a world where nobody ends up where they were born, reminding us of
the migratory flux that is part of our world.
It is very difficult to give concrete examples of a translation strategy here.
The best way of explaining this is that I translate myself into the author, place
myself in the historical or present-day context and relive the experience that inspired
the original work. I have learned the virtues of empathy, changed color and sex,
crossed borders and cultures. This way I can remain faithful yet free. Translating
Histoire de la Femme Cannibale was so familiar to me that I felt as if I were writing
the book myself. There were moments when it became so personal that I couldn’t

16
Maryse Condé, Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? (New York: Atria Books, 2004).
17
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans.Richard Philcox (New York: Grove/Atlantic,
2004).
18
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove/Atlantic,
2008).
19
Francoise Pfaff, Conversations with Maryse Condé (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1996), p. 28.
 Fidelity, Infidelity and the Adulterous Translator  35

help thinking of Gayatri Spivak’s remark: “… translation is the most intimate act
of reading. [….] To surrender in translation is more erotic than ethical.”20 For in
no other text, except perhaps Célanire and Thomas de Brabant in Célanire Cou-
Coupé, are we, author and translator, husband and wife, closer than in Histoire de
la Femme Cannibale, crystallized as Stephen and Rosélie. Translation as an act of
interpretation is a special case of communication, and communication is a sexual
act. “Eros and language mesh at every point,” writes George Steiner. “Intercourse
and discourse, copula and copulation, are sub-classes of the dominant fact of
communication […] Sex is a profoundly semantic act.”21
Everything is translatable. Nothing is translatable. Fidelity in translation,
as in marriage, is something we take for granted, and then, perhaps, as in all
marriages, it should never be taken for granted. We are bound by a contract, an oath
that is almost impossible to keep. Jacques Derrida, in a 1998 lecture delivered to a
French translators association, uses Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice as
an allegory of translation, recalling Shylock’s oath to respect the original text of the
contract, refusing to translate the pound of flesh into monetary signs.
First there is an oath, an untenable promise, with the risk of perjury, a debt
and an obligation that constitute the very impetus for the intrigue […]
Now it would be easy to show […] that all translation implies an insolvent
indebtedness and an oath of fidelity to a given original – with all the paradoxes
of such a law and such a promise, of a bond and a contract, of a promise
that is, moreover, impossible and asymmetrical […] like an oath doomed to
treason or perjury .22

New York and Perth, Western Australia

20
“The Politics of Translation”, in Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, p. 372.
21
Steiner, After Babel, third edition, pp. 39–40.
22
Jacques Derrida, “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?”, trans. Lawrence Venuti, The Translation
Studies Reader, p. 431.