Other attestants: the translator comes forward

Abstract

This paper, which takes into account a parallel between translation and testimony, proposes to shed light into the translation process of Euclides da Cunha`s Os sertões into French. Antoine Seel and Jorge Coli testify the translator’s ceaseless struggle with languages as they perform their task. In this clash, the translator is haunted by the mandatory task of rewriting in his language an original that refuses to be written in a different form. Given this situation, translation and testimony are surrounded by a double bind between the impossibility and the necessity of fulfilling the promise of translating what resists to be translated: a trauma or an original. This reflection follows the thread of Derrida’s thoughts in Des tours de Babel (2002) and Demeure (2000), where translation and testimony are considered necessary but impossible actions. The original text and its author demand translation since they cannot speak for themselves in another language without the translator’s work. Although it is demanded, translation cannot transfer or repeat the totality of any signification; neither can translators reproduce “faithfully” the author’s voice in the target language.  In order to support such argument, we discuss how Os sertões, as an original testimony, becomes a trauma for its translators. Therefore, they have to bear testimony to this trauma in the target language.  We investigate the translations to French and the translators’ testimony about their anguish in witnessing da Cunha’s traumatic narrative. We take the translation of this book, which is the testimony of a war crime, as an example to attest that translation is a process in which one witnesses the language trauma: struggling with one’s own language while translating whatever resists translation.