BEYOND GARY-AJAR: ORIGINAL AND SELF-TRANSLATED FACE(T)S OF ROMAIN GARY

Back to Page Authors: Eugenia Kelbert Rudan

Keywords: Romain Gary, stylistics, self-translation, translingualism

Abstract: Romain Gary enjoyed three successful careers as a writer: in French, then in English, and then in French again under the name of Emile Ajar. Neither of the two languages was his mother tongue. Born in Vilnius to a Jewish mother, the future novelist, war hero and French diplomat spoke Russian at home, Polish at school, and belonged to a multilingual but largely Yiddish-speaking community. In "White Dog," Gary makes it clear that he thinks in Russian at least sometimes when writing. Yet, rather than in either of his childhood languages, he chose to write in French, which he first learned at the age of fourteen, and in English, which he acquired as a war pilot stationed in London. The first earned him, twice, the highest award of the French literary world, and the second resulted in a series of bestsellers. Of these, this article focuses on four novels that were self-translated by the author in both directions, the English "Lady L" and "The Ski Bum" (translated into French as "Lady L" and "Adieu Gary Cooper," respectively) and "La Danse de Gengis Cohn" and "Chien blanc" (translated into English by Gary as "The Dance of Genghis Cohn" and "White Dog"). This provides the researcher with rich material on the minutiae of translingual self-translation (which left an imprint on Gary’s manuscripts, some of which informed the present paper). Gary is unique among translingual to write in two acquired languages and to self-translate most of his novels, sometimes in collaboration with a professional translator. As a result, the writer left us with multiple examples of four kinds of fiction: written in acquired French, self-translated into acquired French, written in acquired English and self-translated into acquired English. A close study of these texts, complemented by quantitative analysis, allows an insight into a question that has long interested scholars of translation but has hitherto remained largely abstract: namely, whether or not we can speak of original work and self-translation as two distinct kinds of writing. In the case of more well-researched self-translators such as Vladimir Nabokov, this question is complicated by the fact that one of the languages is the author’s mother tongue while the other is (arguably) not. In Gary’s case, both of Gary’s languages were equally acquired, equally acclaimed by the reading public in both languages and equally the playing field of a self-acknowledged literary trickster. The potential stylistic differences between his original vs self-translated work in the same language are therefore likely to be at least partially due to the very process of self-translation. This paper, then, combines close and distant reading strategies to pin down the possible distinction between the original and the self-translated work of the Russian-born writer in each of his two languages. Thus, it offers a novel view of the nuances of translingual writing, an insight into Gary’s published work and its manuscript versions, as well as a contribution to the theory of style in self-translation.