Impossible mourning and melancholy in the translation of Memoirs of Prison

Abstract

We propose to draw a parallel between the endless work of mourning and the translation scene in Graciliano Ramos' Memoirs of Prison, and its translation Mémoires de Prison. Following the tread of Jacques Derrida's thought, we argue that translation sets in motion an enduring process of mourning due to the imperative necessity of introjecting the “original” text and, paradoxically, to the impossibility of accomplishing such intent ”“ since the other and their writing are not available in a fully approachable present. Once assimilation has been interrupted, the work of mourning remains open in its undecidability and, therefore, open to the melancholic condition of longing for a “nonexistent completeness” (PERES, 2011) of the original. Through investigation of the translation of Graciliano Ramos' testimonial narrative into French, we attest a bereaved translation task that, in an effort to repeat wounds of the other who had been imprisoned, transforms his writing, showing marks of a mourning for a non-present origin. Therefore, translators engender a gesture of appropriating without completely appropriating the other, speaking with him without silencing him, writing over his text, without destroying it, but counter-signing it and a secret rest of his otherness that cannot be appropriated. We notice traces of this bereaved ex-appropriation in non-translated words, and in its explanatory notes, in the expressions that constitute the melancholic atmosphere of Graciliano's testimony that the translators transform, creating, in this way, a different melancholic atmosphere in their rewriting, and, at last, in the mutation they operate in the melancholic antagonistic movement and the elliptical language of Memoirs. As a consequence of such gestures, traces of an open wound in Memoirs of Prison become relevant in Mémoires de Prison, in the sense that Derrida (2000) engages to the action of  making “relevant”: suppressing and elevating, in the same movement of iterability (repetition and deferral) that keeps the mourning for the non-present other and his non-appropriable signature. The data presented in this paper are based on the analysis of the first volume of Memories, entitled “Voyages”, and its translation.