The Thousand and First Author: Thomas-Simon Gueullette's Repeating Fictions

C'est un des plus jolis de tous ces Recueils, intitulés Mille & un. Je les ai sous les yeux […] Je conseille à mes Lecteurs de lire toujours l'imitation moderne, de préférence à l'original & aux vieilles Traductions.¹

—Paulmy d'Argenson (316-17)

In his praise for Thomas-Simon Gueullette's Mille et un Quart-d'heure, Contes tartares (The Thousand and One Quarters of an Hour, Tartar Tales, 1715-17), Paulmy d'Argenson evokes one of the more scandalous notions in evaluating translations: the possibility that a reader could prefer a translation to an original. Gueullette's is a peculiar case because his activity was not solely translation proper, but also pastiche. His first collections of tales appear to be renditions of original manuscripts into French, and the prefaces adhere to the conventions followed by the translators of his time. Yet, over the course of his career, he reveals that the initial pretense of translation had been a charade and that his storytelling method really consisted of gathering disparate materials and assembling them within a new frame.

Gueullette's tales drew from texts of dizzying geographic and temporal scope. Carmen Ramirez notes that, in addition to various plays and classical Greco-Roman works, other sources for the Quart-d'heure alone include Christian lore, fables, the Gesta romanorum, the Centes Nouvelles nouvelles and related Italian works, tales of chivalry, the Pantchatantra, the Talmud, the Qur'an, travel narratives, Barthélemy Herbelot's Bibliothèque orientale, Herodotus, Ovid, and fairy tales (Ramirez 194-95). The frame tales and prefaces were clearly inspired by the wildly successful Mille et une nuits, Contes arabes (A Thousand and One Nights, Arab Tales, 1704-17) of Antoine Galland and the Mille et un jours, Contes persans (A Thousand and One Days, Persian Tales, 1710-12) of François Pétis de la Croix, and the titles of Gueullette's collections place them directly in the line of the "thousand and one" lineage.² Yet Gueullette's revisionary methods are closer to those of the "belles infidèles," or the "beautiful but unfaithful" translators of Greco-Roman classics into French, as well as the salonnières such as Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, whose fairy tales were often radical rewritings of Italian sources. Gueullette thus brings the overt mediation of the belles infidèles and the salonnières into dialogue with the more scholarly and putatively faithful approach of the French orientalists.

Gueullette's career as a conteur describes its own narrative arc as he gradually provides insights into his storytelling process. His first collection, Soirées Bretonnes: Nouveaux contes de fées (Breton Evenings: New Fairy Tales, 1712) begins with a translator's preface claiming that the stories were derived from a Breton manuscript. Most of the tales, however, are actually rewritings of stories from the Voyages et aventures des trois princes de Serendip (The Travels and Adventures of the Three Princes of Serendip), which appeared in French translation from 1610, in turn based on an Italian translation, attributed to Cristoforo Armeno, of a Persian source. The authenticity of this Italian translation has itself been subject to debate, and it is unclear whether Armeno ever even existed. The sources for Gueullette's collections of tales are thus deeply embedded in the story of pseudotranslation and its relation to the portayal of the exotic in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France.

By imitating orientalists' work, which conformed to scholarly as well as literary standards that adjusted representations of other cultures to meet readers' expectations, Gueullette relativized their projects by relocating them within a fictional frame. The paratexts-including prefaces as well as titles, footnotes, and illustrations-to his collections of tales progressively reveal that the reproduction of prefatory formulae provides implicit commentary about the French tradition of translation. Pseudotranslations, according to David Martens, provide venues for such critique: "À travers une mise en œuvre factice des caractères formels de la traduction et de ses protocoles paratextuels conventionnels, ces supercheries posent la question de l'identité de la traduction en ironisant à plaisir, et en mettant ainsi en question certaines des...