I present the rich and strange in-between space that the text and its characters inhabit as the source of its wonder, that threshold of the legible. His background as a writer-translator imbues the text with a foreignness so that it sits between French and German traditions, and his characters, unable or not-wanting to fit in or understand their world, depict their otherness with foreign and otherworldly art. Instead of analyzing or justifying my reproduction of the original text, I articulate the obstacles to translation-ambiguities, cultural and ideological differences, intertextuality-for a study of the underlying intention of the original text and a vision of its potential afterlives today.Īlexandre Vialatte’s Battling le ténébreux occupies a strange space between worlds and between languages. This article draws from my own experience translating Alexandre Vialatte’s novel Battling le ténébreux ou La mue périlleuse (1928) into English. The wrestle for meaning between writer and translator, across times, languages, and cultures, warrants attention in literary studies. If literature is a product of the writer’s personal encounter with words, at the threshold between individual and social existence, the translator’s experience is uniquely inter-subjective. I propose engaging with the translating subject and the translator’s imaginary for the purposes of literary analysis. Recent research has rendered the translator visible in translation studies but less so in literary studies.

Historically, the translator has effaced herself to reproduce the author’s voice and the original text.

Le Ténébreux by Boulet