Témoignage de guerre et intraduisibilité: traduire les textes de résistance d’Albert Camus

Abstract

Albert Camus’ war testimony is included in a few articles from the underground war newspaper Combat and in the essay Return to Tipasa in which he elaborates on how war has changed him forever. Two of these articles from Combat were selected by Camus himself to be part of his American anthology Rebellion, Resistance and Death whose essays were translated by Justin O’Brien in 1960. O’Brien also translated Return to Tipasa earlier in 1955. O’Brien worked for the OSS in London during the war and he personally experienced some sides of the conflicts. How his work as a translator of war texts was influenced by this experience remains to be discussed. In order to do so, I will compare O’Brien’s translations to the retranslations of the selected corpus and I will show how O’Brien incorporates his own war testimony in his translations of the texts. First, I will explore the sensory dimension of the testimony in the way Derrida understands it in Poetics and Politics of the Testimony. Then, I will demonstrate how O’Brien positions himself as a war witness who «saw» and «heard» by altering the expected translation of some aspects of Camus’ war testimony that are related to sight and hearing, using senses to move beyond the frontiers of language which always fails to describe how war is really like.