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The re-imagining inherent in crime fiction translation

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posted on 2025-05-10, 12:22 authored by Alistair RollsAlistair Rolls
When a text is said to be re-appropriated, it is at times unclear to what extent this appropriation is secondary, repeated, new; certainly, the difference between a reiteration and an iteration has more to do with emphasis than any (re)duplication. And at a moment in the development of crime fiction in France when the retranslation of now apparently dated French translations of the works of classic American hardboiled novels (especially those of authors like Dashiell Hammett, whose novels were published in Marcel Duhamel's Série Noire at Gallimard in the decades following the end of the Second World War) is being undertaken with the ostensible aim of taking the French reader back (closer) to the American original, one may well ask where the emphasis now lies. In what ways, for example, is this new form of re-production, of re-imagining the text, more intimately bound to the original, and thus in itself less 'original' than its translated predecessors? Or again, is this more reactionary 're-' in fact really that different from those more radical uses that cleaved the translation from its original text in those early, foundational years of twentieth-century French crime fiction?

History

Journal title

M/C Journal

Volume

18

Issue

6

Publisher

Queensland University of Technology, Creative Industries Faculty

Language

  • en, English

College/Research Centre

Faculty of Education and Arts

School

School of Humanities and Social Science

Rights statement

All articles published in M/C Journal are published under a Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - No Derivatives 3.0 Licence.

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