Deux étés (1997): The (Auto)fiction of the French Translation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor (1969)

Abstract

Focusing on a little-known autobiographical novel about the French translation of Vladimir Nabokov’s multilingual magnum opus, Ada or Ardor (1969), this paper discusses the use of autofiction as a generically unstable form of life writing to examine contemporary questions of identity, authenticity, and authorship raised by the practice of literary translation at the turn of the twenty-first century in France. Through a reading of the novel as partial biography of translator Gilles Chahine, this article argues that the autobiographical mode in Deux étés allows the author, Erik Orsenna, to witness, through a collective ‘we’ that looks forward to the narrative voice in Annie Ernaux’ Les Années (2008), the combined economic forces of post-colonial literature and the internet change the way French readers approach English texts. While examining a form of life writing rooted in France’s 1970s avant-garde (Gasparini 191), autofiction is an opportunity to read Nabokov’s own literalist approach to translation in the light of the issues of identity and authorship raised by self-reflexive fiction, notably by drawing a portrait of the translator as writer in their own right.