TRANSLATION AND TESTIMONIAL WRITING IN MÉMOIRES DE PRISON

ABSTRACT

We propose a reflection on the translation process of Graciliano Ramos’ Memoirs of Prison (1954), shedding light on marks of the contact with Ramos’s “grievous” writing that its translation, Memoires de Prison (1988), by Antoine Seel and Jorge Coli, reveals. The original testifies to the arbitrary arrest the author suffered during Vargas’ dictatorship and the traumatic experience witnessed in prison. In narrating these memories, he offers insights into the troubled writing process of extreme situations, enacting an aporia that, according to Jacques Derrida (2000b), commands translation: the imperative necessity of translating and, at the same time, this task limitations.This aporia extends to the philosopher’s reflections on testimony. As he states, by presenting themselves as the only witness to a truth, the witness refuses translatability and the possibility of being replaced (DERRIDA, 2000a), performing the last verses of Paul Celan’s Ashenglorie: nobody bears witness for the witness. However, Derrida (2000a) argues that testimony as such must be translatable and thus communicable. Given the imperative need for translation that coexists with the impossibility of suffering and surviving in the witness’ place, the first obstacle for translators emerges. How can one repeat Ramos’ testimony, translating his wounds, considering the impossibility of bearing witness in his place? Reflecting on translation and testimony, Marc Crépon (2006) suggests that, facing the impossible translation task, one must bear witness to the encounter with the original and make the translation into a document of this encounter. That is to say, instead of testifing for the witness, one testifies in translation one’s own impressions of the contact with the wounded original text. As we argue, Memoires de Prison constitutes a process of recreation in which the translators were wounded by Ramos’tense writing, and which turned their translation into the testimony of their impressions in witnessing the orginal.

Keywords: Memoirs of Prison; translation; testimony