From American Frontier to European Borders: Publishing French Translations of Mark Twain's Novels Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1884-1963)

As Meredith McGill put it, "publishing history is most valuable to literary history when it dislocates its subject—when it redraws the boundary between the literary and what lies outside of it."¹ Literary translation being a particular area of the literary, the corpus of French translations of Mark Twain's novels illustrates the accuracy of this statement. Far from being self-contained fields of study, book history and literary translation combined help to shape a truly international approach to the history of the book insofar as they allow for a comparative and contrastive approach from which the common points and differences between the several histories of books emerge.

Given Mark Twain's popularity and his central position in American literature, it is not surprising that his novels should have been translated into French at a very early stage nor that they were published or translated again so many times. The corpus of translations of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is vast indeed.² This article takes into account all of the existing versions, with special emphasis on the first translations and on those that are still available for readers at the turn of the twenty-first century. Of the total number of versions, only a handful are still being published and make up what can be called today's canon.³ The first remarkable feature of this canon is that two versions of each novel are currently available on the market. The second is that one of each of these versions addresses a different readership than the one they were initially meant for.⁴ The canon is therefore marked by mutability and border-crossing. The novels were first translated in 1884 and 1886 respectively—a fairly short delay for American novels at the time—and even though these versions are faulty from a literary point of view, they still deserve attention insofar as they introduced the novels into a new culture and environment. The versions that make up today's canon—namely the 1904 and 1963 versions of Tom Sawyer and the 1948 and 1960 translations of Huckleberry Finn—deserve attention because they have a high degree of visibility for the French readership. These versions were interspersed with, and followed by, a string of others that quickly faded into oblivion and were never published again, or rarely so. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate why some versions outlived others and why some versions came to cross the border between adult and children's literature. In the light of recent research, it is now common sense to assert that "books … are no respecters of national borders,"⁵ and translations, which are the result of cultural exchange, obviously cross them. But borders can also refer to the dividing lines between literary genres, in which case they conjure up the central notion of readership. The progress of Twain's novels illustrates that books are indeed no respecters of borders, be they national or literary.

The case of Tom Sawyer provides, from the outset, an example of the influence borders and the absence of an international copyright agreement can have on the distribution of a book. Because the book's publication was delayed in the United States until late 1876 in order to secure a British copyright, the American market was flooded with cheap pirated versions published north of the border and copied from hastily imported British ones, which infuriated the author and entailed a substantial financial loss.⁶ When it was translated into French from the same British version, the novel, originally aimed at a wide audience in terms of age and sex groups, was turned into a children's book and crossed both the Channel and the border between genres.

An amazing criss-cross pattern can also be found in...