Marie Cardinal in Translation: The International Journey of her Writing

Abstract

This paper introduces a survey through the work of Marie Cardinal, a francophone writer, and aims to analyze the diffusion of the translations of her books. The study begins with a brief review of the author's life and work, exhibiting their main aspects and explaining the discursive axes that compose her writing.  Afterward, a mapping of the translations of her works published worldwide is presented, considered as a quantitative overview that introduces the international analysis of the author’s state of the art. On the basis of this mapping, the translation analysis focuses on the author's best-selling and most translated book: Les mots pour le dire (1975); it also analyzes the situation of Autrement dit (1977) which, even though it is a sequence of the first and therefore directly connected to it, ended up having very different reverberation. This analysis has as object the paratexts (génette, 1987) of the English and Portuguese translations of Cardinal’s books. Reviewing the information included in peritexts and epitexts, in preliminary and macrostructural levels (lambert; van gorp, 1985), indications of the reception of those books by the lusophone and anglophone target culture were found. Through this research, it is acknowledge that Cardinal’s work constitutes a particularly malleable writing, which can be interpreted by several angles; each one of the analyzed translations point out, through the paratexts, a direction to read the text in question. One assumes that translation projects aiming to maintain that malleability, characteristic of the author’s writing, must take into account a global and balanced assessment of the aspects identified as central to her discourse. The interest on Cardinal’s writing to fields such as feminist critique, cultural studies and psychoanalysis is explicit in the original texts; finally, this historical-critical research is intended to be developed by delving into the author's contribution in such areas, as well as proposing new translation projects that address such interests.