Abstract
Jorge Semprún (1923–2011) was a Spanish exile and Buchenwald survivor whose memoirs and novels were written principally in French. Writing translingually with frequent recourse to citation, translation emerges throughout his oeuvre as a courteous and fraternal act, in defiance of totalitarian uses of language. This chapter considers Semprún’s articulation of his translational vision in the essay Mal et Modernité (1990), before going on to explore how his earlier, bilingually titled novel L’Algarabie (1981) both questions and affirms that vision in the context of ideological breakdown. It goes on to explore how Semprún’s only novel in Spanish, Veinte años y un día (2003), revisits L’Algarabie’s concern with the ideological shaping of modernity in the context of Francoist Spain in the 1950s, offering translation as a metaphor for democratic thought.
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Notes
- 1.
The title of this novel, a French neologism derived from a Spanish word, might best be rendered in English as ‘Babel’, though the word’s resonances are discussed in detail in this chapter’s middle section.
- 2.
‘[S]’il n’est pas question d’extirper de l’être de l’homme sa libre disposition spirituelle au mal; s’il est impossible, heureusement dirais-je, de façonner l’homme nouveau autrement que sous la forme de cadavre, il est tout aussi impossible d’interdire à l’homme, dans son irréductible liberté, l’expression concrète de sa volonté de bien […]’ (Semprún 1990, 62) [[I]f it is not a question of stripping from man’s being the free disposition of his spirit towards evil; if it is impossible (fortunately in my view) to fashion the new man other than in death, it is also impossible to forbid man, in his irreducible liberty, the concrete expression of his will to do good […]].
- 3.
In a spirit of fairness he also notes that prejudice between the French and Spanish is not one-sided, quoting a ditty discovered in a school history book in which God, faced with the dilemma of making the King of France a saint, is obliged to forgive him for being French: ‘San Luis rey de Francia es/ el que con Dios pudo tanto/ que para que fuese santo/ le perdonó el ser francés […]’ [Saint Louis King of France/ so wanted to be a saint/ that he persuaded God himself/ to forgive him for being French] (Semprún 1998, 64; 1981, 363).
- 4.
Artigas was one of the noms de guerre Semprún employed during his clandestine service with the Communist Party in Madrid during the 1950s. In spite of clear autobiographical links between Semprún and his protagonist, and despite the novel’s concern with both identity and writing, the novel is in fact one of the author’s more imaginative fictional works.
- 5.
In Adieu, vive clarté…, Semprún remembers that it was in Gide’s Paludes that he discovered the keys to the kingdom of French. Recounting his pain and humiliation at being derided as an ‘Espagnol de l’armée en déroute’ [‘Spaniard of the retreating army’] by a boulangère who mocked him for his accent, he explains that while those words of derision might have excluded him as a foreigner, Gide’s prose brought him right into the fold of the French language, which became for him a terre d’asile, a patrie possible, an ancrage solide (Semprún 1998, 133) (land of asylum, possible homeland, safe harbour) in the terrible déracinement (66, 79) or uprooting of exile. Semprún focuses on two features of Gide’s prose: the first is its expert mastery of the particularities of the French language, especially what he perceives as its measured syntactical and stylistic balance (1998, 131–132). This is in contrast with the complex, baroque tendencies of Spanish phrasing, which he claims make Proust more readable in Spanish translation than in the original French; and as such he can claim that the ‘Proustian’ tendencies of his own writing are not imitative but rather a property of ‘la matière même, originelle et matricielle, du langage, de l’essence même du phrasé castillan’ (1981, 40) [‘the very matter, the original and maternal matter of the language, the very essence of Castilian phrasing’]. The second thing Semprún admires in Gide’s prose is its universality, a universality arrived at, paradoxically, through a use of language so particular as to make its essence, if not its sense, almost untranslatable. This is intriguing, especially as Semprún is critical of untranslatability elsewhere. But where he is critical, namely in relation to Heidegger’s tortuous German (1994, 126), the distinction lies in the relative clarity or obscurity of the prose, in the translatability of sense. The untranslatability of Gide has nothing to do with a lack of clarity: on the contrary, and in an echo of Benjamin (1923), for Semprún his writing is luminous. The effort required on the part of the non-native Semprún to master the particular French idiom of Gide’s literary prose, allows him to move beyond the translation of sense and into the essence of the work, which is also the essence of the language as he interprets it. Though this may still be understood as a form of translation, it opens up the reader’s universe to something more, rather than duplicating or replacing what he already has in his own language. It is an addition or multiplication, rather than a substitution, allowing Semprún to declare, as he did repeatedly, that ‘ma patrie n’est pas la langue, ni la française ni l’espagnole, ma patrie c’est le langage’ (quoted in Brodzki 2007, 169) [‘my homeland is not a language in particular, French or Spanish, my homeland is language itself’].
- 6.
My English paraphrase of the poem reflects the slight differences between Semprún’s Spanish and French versions.
- 7.
In another example of linguistic and intertextual ‘ghosting’, Artigas observes in French that ‘la vie n’est qu’une songe’, paraphrasing the title of Calderón’s theatrical masterpiece, La vida es sueño (1635) [Life is a Dream]. Such unacknowledged references reveal turns of phrase and habits of mind that in other parts of the novel are made explicit, for example: ‘les Espagnols, quand ils parlent en français, truffent cette langue de modismes (tiens, le Narrateur aussi: “modismes” étant justement un hispanisme pour dire “tournures”) (75) [‘the Spanish, when they speak in French, stuff the language full of modismes (look, even the Narrator is at it, “modismes” coming precisely from the Spanish word for “turn of phrase”)’]. The unacknowledged reference to Lorca is perhaps surprising, given that elsewhere in the novel the narrator dismisses him as a second-rate author. But the reference to his elegy in accounting for Artigas’s death achieves a number of things: it not only fixes him in the cultural frame of his elusive mother country, but does so specifically in the context of a work written by one popular Spanish icon in praise and lament of another. Furthermore, it gives Artigas’s death a sacrificial weight thanks to the circumstances of Lorca’s own death—shot by Nationalist forces at the outbreak of the civil war—and the ritual context of the bullfight, that most Spanish of spectacles, which so significantly informed Lorca’s aesthetic vision and which caused Sánchez Mejías’ death in the ring. Finally, both Lorca and bullfighting crop up among the many clichés of Spanishness that Semprún lays out in his later novel Veinte años y un día, as we will see.
- 8.
This is a view he expresses in a number of places, summed up in his essay ‘Estalinismo y fascismo’ [‘Stalinism and Fascism’]: ‘Sólo Dios conoce, o pretende conocer, el orden cronológico. Pero yo no conozco a Dios’ [‘Only God knows, or claims to know, the chronological order of things. But I don’t know God’] (2011d, 24).
- 9.
A chisgarabís is a colloquial term for a small-time deceiver and cheat, someone who causes trouble and confusion; but the word’s meaning seems to be secondary here to its sound.
- 10.
Semprún explained his reasons for writing the novel in Spanish as follows: ‘Dans ma mémoire, c’est avant tout une histoire espagnole. Les gens qui me l’ont racontée sont des Espagnols, j’ai encore l’écho des paroles espagnoles de leur récit […] Mais la vraie raison est peut-être que j’ai voulu reprendre ma langue première, comme un défi à moi-même: “Es-tu encore capable d’écrire en espagnol?” Comme un hommage, aussi, à cette langue. […] Finalement, écrire un roman directement en espagnol est une expérience tout à fait nouvelle pour moi’ [‘Rencontre’, n.p.]. [‘In my memory, it is above all a Spanish story. The people who told it to me are Spaniards, I can still hear the echo of their Spanish words […] But the real reason is perhaps that I wanted to take up my first language again, as a challenge to myself: “Are you still capable of writing in Spanish?” As a homage, too, to this language […] The fact is, writing a novel directly in Spanish is a completely new experience for me.’].
- 11.
The auto sacramental was a Spanish dramatic genre that reached its height in the seventeenth century, with the works of Calderón. They were short allegorical works in verse akin in some ways to English morality plays.
- 12.
The same idea of collective ownership of the war is expressed in L’Algarabie: ‘la guerre d’Espagne […] la nôtre, disent les Espagnols, comme si le fait de s’approprier ce passé sanglant et stérile les enracinait paradoxalement dans une identité’ (377) [‘the Spanish war […] our war, the Spanish say, as if taking ownership of this bloody and sterile past somehow rooted them, paradoxically, in an identity’].
- 13.
As Semprún explained in an interview, twenty years and one day was the typical ‘tariff’ incurred by senior anti-Francoist activists: ‘ce jour rajouté rendait la procédure de liberté conditionnelle beaucoup plus difficile. Ce jour en plus était donc le jour fatidique. Il y a donc un jeu de miroir entre la temporalité des deux parties de l’histoire, celle du vécu et celle de la mémoire, et la peine qui menace le personnage de Federico Sánchez’ (‘Rencontre’, n.p.) [‘this extra day made the process of securing conditional liberty much more difficult. This additional day was therefore the fatal day. There is therefore a game of mirrors between the temporal frame of the two parts of the story, the part that is lived and the part that is remembered, and the sentence that hangs over the character of Federico Sánchez’].
- 14.
This is the only book about Spain that Semprún chose to write in French, and the only one he translated himself into Spanish. He explained his reasons as follows: ‘¿Por qué escribí ese libro en francés, cosa un poco absurda? Federico Sánchez se despide de ustedes, la experiencia como Ministro en España, todo el tema es España. Por una razón muy sencilla. Me dije, y estoy convencido de que así fue, que al escribirlo en francés el idioma francés me protegería—sencillamente por ser el francés—de la explosión de pequeñeces, chismografía, en el texto. […] No quería hacer un libro de pequeñas anécdotas, pequeñas maldades, porque eso es lo más fácil y además no tiene mucho interés, así que lo escribí en francés. Pero claro, eso era absurdo, dejarlo en francés y que alguien me tradujera a mí al español’ (quoted in López-Gay 2008, 157) [‘Why did I choose to write this book in French, which might seem absurd? Federico Sánchez bids you goodbye; my experience as a Minister in Spain; the whole subject of the book is Spain. For a very simple reason. I told myself, and I’m convinced that it’s true, that by writing it in French the French language would protect me—simply by being French—from the proliferation of trivia and gossip in the text. […] I didn’t want to write a book of little anecdotes and minor malice, because that’s too easy and in any case it doesn’t hold much interest, so I wrote it in French. But clearly it would have been ridiculous to leave it in French and let somebody else translate me into Spanish’].
- 15.
The novel suggests that the age-old distinction between moros y cristianos (Moors and Christians) has been transferred onto a distinction between Communists and Francoists, in an example of the way structural divisions are perpetuated through time.
- 16.
In the sixteenth century blood purity laws were passed in Spain, strengthening existing legal discriminations against conversos (Jewish converts) or anyone of Jewish ancestry, which also applied to moriscos, or those of Muslim ancestry.
- 17.
The word cursi in Spanish means pretentious, affected and bourgeois.
- 18.
It has indeed been alleged that Ortega’s ‘secret debt’ to other philosophers was ‘buried’ in certain instances. As John Graham explains, in 1961 the right-wing ideologue Vicente Marrero claimed that ‘Ortega had concealed his sources, but, boasting that he had discovered them all, he denied that any “secrets” remained. By appearances, however, Ortega still had some big secrets: James, Schlegel, and Croce, even Comte and Tocqueville—sources that Marrero never suspected’ (1994, 18; 21).
- 19.
Interestingly, in the Aranguren lectures that Semprún gave in 2003, the same year he published Veinte años, the author mentions once again this connection between Avenarius and Ortega, but is slightly more generous in his interpretation of Ortega’s debt to the German philosopher, acknowledging that Ortega developed rather than simply lifted his idea. The perspective offered in the novel, then, is perhaps closer to that of Federico Sánchez of the 1950s than to that of Semprún in the 2000s (2011c, 385).
- 20.
The narrator supplies an alternative ending to the twins’ story. Having discovered some photographs of their mother naked on her honeymoon, Lorenzo and Isabel choose not to commit suicide but to separate. Semilla Durán reads this as a form of liberation in the ‘epiphany of Eros’ (2014, 166), an idea that lends itself to the novel’s at least partial conflation of sexual liberation with political emancipation.
- 21.
In Semprún’s novel this idea is expressed in response to Hemingway’s observation, cited earlier, that ‘La muerte, eso es lo que os une’ [‘Death, that is what unites you’] (13–14); but Hemingway in fact also formulated the connection between death and vigour in relation to the bullfight, which he considered a form of ‘rebellion against death’ (1932, 200).
- 22.
The characters cited here are from Cervantes’s story, ‘La Gitanilla’ [‘The Little Gipsy Girl’], in the Novelas ejemplares (1613) [Exemplary Novels]; Lorca’s poem ‘Preciosa y el aire’ [‘Preciosa and the Wind’], from the Romancero gitano (1928) [Gipsy Ballads]; and Lorca’s play, La casa de Bernarda Alba (1935) [The House of Bernarda Alba]. Incidentally, in the Romancero gitano Lorca also treats the incest taboo and the subject of rape in ‘Tamar y Amnón’, itself the subject of the biblical story of Absalom.
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Lonsdale, L. (2018). Totalitarianism and Translation in Semprún. In: Multilingualism and Modernity. New Comparisons in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67328-8_5
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