"O Loire, what a fine bridge!": Foreignizing Domestications and Illustrating Bridges in James Joyce's The Cat and the Devil and Its French Translations

This article examines the French translations and illustrations of James Joyce's children's story The Cat and the Devil. The story itself is an act of translation, as Joyce heard it in his travels through France and, writing it in a letter to his grandson Stephen, adapts the tale to bring in Irish elements; nonetheless, Joyce keeps all the dialogue in the story in French, and adds a further language by signing the letter in Italian. This polylingualism is expressive of the international nature of modernism, and provides a challenge to the work's many translators. In particular, the translation of the story "back" into French complicates conventional distinctions of domestication and foreignization: what was originally domestication becomes foreignization, and Joyce's Irish remaking of the tale risks being overlooked. To avoid this, Joyce's French translators estrange what would naturally be domestic, were it a French story: the French language itself. In contrast to these translation decisions, the new French illustrator of the book, Roger Blachon, bridges differences by making links between source and target cultures, through their shared history of Catholicism. Where the French translated texts strain domestications into foreignizations, Blachon's art opens the way for a middle ground between these two.