Reading, Translating, Rewriting: Angela Carter's Translational Poetics

Introduction: Angela Carter’s French Connections

Each reading is a translation. —OCTAVIO PAZ, “TRANSLATION: LITERATURE AND LETTERS,” 159 Introduction angela carter’s french connections Translation is a little explored facet of Angela Carter’s rich creativity, even though it formed the background for and counterpoint to her fairy-tale rewritings in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979). Always a curious traveler, Carter liked to move between continents, cultures, languages, literatures, genres, and media, and this gave her writing its distinctive experimental edge, adventurous spirit, and provocative force. Deliberate decentering through linguistic and cultural translation characterizes her life and her work. This probably began when she “ran away” to Japan in 1969, as Neil Forsyth, who first met her in Tokyo, confirms: “Her brilliant essay on the Japanese tattoo is an obvious instance of this fascination. She did not know Japanese, so could not ‘translate’ exactly, but the power of the images around her was already a powerful stimulus.”1 Carter’s experience of Japan echoes that of Roland Barthes in his 1970 essay, L’empire des signes (The Empire of Signs), as Lorna Sage has aptly noted. Barthes, like Carter, considered the encounter with a radically different environment and the resistance to translation as a unique occasion to think, write, and create. Carter even combined several forms of linguistic and cultural displacement during her stay in Japan when she translated Xavière Gauthier’s Surréalisme et sexualité into English while working on The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972).2 2 introduction A few years later, Carter seized an opportunity to brush up her French when she was commissioned to retranslate Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des Moralités (1697) into English for Victor Gollancz.3 She deliberately modernized their language and message in The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault before rewriting them for adults in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. Despite the linguistic, historical, and cultural gap, Carter found in Perrault’s contes a type of imaginative literature compatible with her own “demythologizing” project. Their worldly morals in particular chimed in with the idea that “this world is all that there is” (“Notes from the Front Line,” 38), and lent themselves to Carter’s materialist , socialist, and feminist standpoint.4 Not only did Carter become closely familiar with Perrault’s collection on this occasion, but she also immersed herself in the international fairy-tale tradition. Although her translation for children foregrounds Perrault’s teaching of down-to-earth lessons about life, against standard commonplaces about the genre as escapist, Carter’s self-styled “book of stories about fairy stories” (“Notes from the Front Line,” 38) explores the potential for re-creation and alternative retellings, inviting us to rediscover the tales anew, just as she did herself in the hot summer of 1976. In “Notes from the Front Line” Carter encourages “the reader to construct her own fiction for herself from the elements of my fictions” (37). She memorably adds, if only parenthetically: “Reading is just as creative an activity as writing and most intellectual development depends upon new readings of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode” (37; italics mine).5 I propose to examine some of the forms that this kind of active reading takes in Carter’s work both as a translator from the French and as an author in her own right. Further, in this study I argue that Carter’s view of creation as stemming from the dynamic interplay of reading and writing was intimately connected to, and perhaps even originated in, her experience as a translator. To do so, I trace the interrelationship between reading, translating, and fiction writing as continuous and intricately related activities that reflect a coherent aesthetic and pragmatic project. In other words, translation was for Carter the laboratory of creation in which she conducted her literary experiments, and it gave a new impulse and direction to her writing. Angela Carter’s French Connections 3 In The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977) Carter tried to recover a sense of the French author’s original project (as she saw it), which paradoxically entailed adapting and reformulating the seventeenth-century contes for young readers steeped in a completely different context. The work of translation brought an awareness of the agency of the translator as mediator and re...