Political (Mis)Use of Translation: Poetry Pseudotranslations in Occupied France (1940-44)

During the German Occupation of France (1940-44), literature in French was produced alongside translations of foreign authors. The latter, supported by the Aktion Übersetzung ("Action Translation"), were particularly favoured for both cultural and ideological reasons, as demonstrated by the programme of prioritized translations ("liste Matthias") launched under the aegis of the Institut Allemand de Paris from the very end of 1940, that aimed at translating around 500 German works into French across all areas, including literature, history, philosophy, law, and art. Almost half of these were effectively completed by 1944.

Poetry and poetry translations featured prominently in the literature of the period, as several studies already conducted within the TSOcc research program have shown:¹ as they were easily memorizable and distributable, and could contain encrypted allusions that were undetectable by the layman, French and foreign poems were amongst the immaterial weapons in the resistance in France, both legally and clandestinely. This paper, which draws upon previous studies of poetry pseudotranslation in France,² discusses the potential political uses of supposed poetic and fictional translations during World War II. If pseudotranslation may have been used in times of war to compensate for the lack of available literary texts, the poems that were pseudotranslated provide a fascinating testimony of the concerted construction of an image of the "Foreign," the fictional product necessarily having to reproduce some of its typical traits in order to convince the reader of its authenticity. They also allow the questioning of poetic pseudotranslation as a powerful vector of stereotypes, whilst approaching as much as possible the ideological stakes of writing under constraints.

1. L'Honneur des poètes II-Europe (1944): Context

The anthology L'Honneur des poètes II-Europe was clandestinely released by the Éditions de Minuit in May 1944. It is a sequel to the initial work L'Honneur des poètes, published in July 1943 under the direction of Pierre Seghers, Paul Eluard, and Jean Lescure, who collected poems by twenty-two authors writing under pseudonyms, including Eluard, Aragon, Tardieu, Desnos, Guillevic, and Ponge.³ The Éditions de Minuit, founded in 1941 in the Paris underground by Jean Bruller and Pierre de Lescure, already had several prestigious texts in its catalogue in 1944, including its first release, Le Silence de la Mer by Vercors (alias Jean Bruller), which had a considerable impact in France and abroad. The project of honouring poets was certainly in tune with the times in a France thirsty for poetry, as Lottman highlights: "Dans les jours qui suivirent l'entrée des Allemands à Paris, les gens se précipitèrent sur les œuvres classiques, et particulièrement la poésie-'une patrie, c'est surtout un langage'" (265).⁴

Nevertheless, L'Honneur des poètes II-Europe cannot be simply understood as the continuum of the initial publishing project of 1943; the May 1944 volume is doubly original. On the one hand, it is a question of opening the floor not only to French poets but also to European ones, as demonstrated by the title of the work. Moreover, upon the completion of the book, Lescure declared, "Il faut insister sur cette grande idée de l'Europe" (qtd. in Lachenal 46).⁵ On the other hand, it is obvious that this European opening also adheres to political and ideological incitations:⁶

L'idée d'Europe est venue à Paul lorsque nos sentiments internationalistes ont rencontré le développement des nationalismes et le rôle prodigieusement moteur qu'ils jouaient dans la Résistance. […] Quand nous nous en sommes avisés, il fallait prévenir les conséquences désastreuses de la victoire des nationalismes. On se souvenait de Versailles. D'où l'Europe. Non pas comme politique, plutôt comme fraternité.

(qtd. in Landes 54)⁷

What drives and preoccupies Lescure and Eluard, the organizers of the anthology, is not simply their engagement against fascism, but also the rise of nationalism in the ranks of the resistance poets themselves, such as Aragon's defence of "French Europe" invoked in Fontaine in his famous "Leçon de Rib...