Translating Jacques Stephen Alexis

Book Discussed:

In the Flicker of an Eyelid. By Jacques Stephen Alexis. Trans. Carrol F. Coates and Edwidge Danticat. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P 2002. 277 pp. ISBN 0-8139-2139-2.

The mystique surrounding Haitian writer Jacques Stephen Alexis (1922-61) is related to the comparative ephemerality of an exciting life of social activism, crowned by the production of three brilliant novels and a collection of novellas within a brief five-year period (Compère Général Soleil -1955, Les arbres musiciens -1957, L'espace d'un cillement -1959, and Romancero aux étoiles -1960), and cut short abruptly by anunusually horrific death by stoning, described by J. Michael Dash in one of the earliest comprehensive critical studies of the writer, "Jacques Stéphen Alexis"in Black Images 3.4 (1974), as a "macabre and tragic ending" (5). In the Flicker of an Eyelid, the English-language translation of L'espace d'un cillement¹ is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of francophone texts available for a wider English-speaking reading public that would otherwise have no access to these literary productions.

This edition of In the Flicker of an Eyelid has special value, not only with respect to the quality of the translation, but also in relation to the appended material that accompanies the translation of the Alexis narrative. The "Letter to Jacques Soleil," written by Alexis's daughter, Florence, which appeared as the preface to the 1983 Gallimard edition, provides illuminating insights on the novel: "You wanted to undertake that enigmatic geometry, the eternal challenge, and the hypothetical solution of love between a man and a woman in a universe, the Caribbean, where those relations are often carried to a point of absolute caricature" (FE 242). The background information presented in the Afterword, "The Political Context of 1959," "Labor Unrest in 1948," "Cuba in 1948," "Haiti in 1948," "Cultural Background" (which provides explanations not only of the music alluded to in the novel, but also of Alexis's use of epigraphs to announce the major theme of each part), and "Religion: Vodou and Catholicism" is invaluable for readers who have little knowledge of the sociocultural and political context in which the action of the novel is set.

Translating French Caribbean texts offers unusual challenges, partly because of the tension that exists between the "French" of the source text, a French that as in all those territories that have been subjected to linguistic imperialism often carries even at the best of times, and even without the intention of the user/writer, subtle traces of diglossic slippages (lexical, syntactic, semantic, and even stylistic/discursive) and, in the case of a country such as Haiti, that has its own highly developed, fully functional, native language, Kreyòl (to use the orthography of the translators). These challenges are intensified when the writer, Alexis, deliberately inserts Kreyòl as well as Spanish into his narrative, and also uses frequently a highly imaged, profoundly poetic style. These challenges, which require a wide range of competences on the part of the translators, have been met in this translation of Alexis's 1959 L'espace d'un cillement by a collaboration that brings together the authority of a respected literary commentator and translator and the creative and cultural authenticity of a distinguished Haitian-American novelist. Coates's credentials as a translator are impressive. His was the monumental achievement of translating Alexis's first (1955) novel, Compère Général Soleil, under the title of General Sun, My Brother (1999). In the Flicker of an Eyelid is an equally significant accomplishment. The translators have succeeded in producing a version that admirably captures much of the sense of Alexis's text while developing a less exuberant, more muted tone that is compatible with much of the anglophone North American literary production.

In a 2000 article entitled "Problems of 'Translating' Bi-Multi-lingual Literary Texts: The Haitian French of Jacques...