I haven’t taken part in Women in Translation month (#WITmonth) before but decided to dip my toes in this year with a translated short story. I hoped to find one online and I did, “The Blue Cross” (or, in its original French, “La Croix bleue”) by New Caledonian writer Claudine Jacques. Coincidentally, I found it was translated by Patricia Worth who now, apparently, lives in Canberra. She translated it as part of her Master of Translation Studies. It was published in The AALITRA* Review, with the English presented alongside the French.
I didn’t know Claudine Jacques, but Worth provides some information on her website. Jacques was born in Belfort, France, moving to New Caledonia as a sixteen-year-old with her parents. She’s lived there ever since. She ran a vocational training centre, before establishing a publishing company, but she now, says Worth,”devotes herself almost exclusively to writing”. She and other authors founded the Association des Écrivains de la Nouvelle-Calédonie (New Caledonian Society of Authors) in 1997.
Literary Bureau Trames adds that Jacques lives “in the bush”, and has run the local village library for 20 years. She also runs the Boulouparis comic strip festival, is involved in writing workshops for schoolchildren and in an initiative of the Association Écrire en Océanie (Writing in Oceania) which has identified talent in young Caledonians.
Worth says she finds Jacques’ writing “compelling” and is particularly interested in “the social problems laid out in her stories”. She “was surprised to find numerous similarities between the histories of Australia and New Caledonia”. Her favourite Jacques novel is Cœurs barbelés, which is about the “painful experiences of white Caledonians and the indigenous Kanak people trying to live harmoniously on an island”.
Worth has translated several of Jacques’ short stories, with three available online. “The Blue Cross” is the first I found. It comes from a collection, Le cri de l’acacia. Google translate summarised the description I found: “The cry of the acacia or all those cries that you can’t hear! Because they would be too strong, too present, too throbbing … hear the life that endures in banal tragedies or squeaky comedies, universal deep down in the intimate and the tiny, the grandiose and the derisory. All these crumpled fates are those of everyday heroes” who are the “valiant men and intrepid women with extraordinary courage … in the face of violence, alcohol, pornography and the addiction of their own lives”.
“The Blue Cross”** certainly fits this description. Its story is one of those universal, banal, domestic tragedies, one with alcohol at its centre, and a courageous woman who does the right thing. Jéhovana, the woman and wife at the centre of the story, is married to an alcoholic who is no longer fully employed due to his drinking. She has tried to maintain appearances:
She wasn’t used to making certain judgements and, out of decency, put them off. What would the neighbours and the family say, seeing her speaking and acting for him? Yet at the last family meeting it was to her that they spoke; she had given her opinion while stating plainly that it was for both of them and that she was doing it under her husband’s control, but it seemed to her that no one had been fooled.
She’s behaving as a widow would and wonders if she’d be better off if it were true
freed from all these constraints, this waiting, this shouting, these beatings, this fetid washing stinking of vomit and alcohol, and especially from the shame that she and her children bore!
For his part, he is conflicted. She is no longer interested in him, “had banished him” from her bed.
Now and then he forced himself on her, he had the right, she was his wife, but he had less and less strength and his desire for her had softened with time. And then he didn’t like to see her sad preoccupied look; she was so happy at the beginning of their marriage but now would often cry. How could he continue to desire a woman who cries?
It all comes to a head at their son’s Communion celebration. She begged him to not drink, but, well, of course he’s an alcoholic and is unable to keep his promise. What happens next is not particularly surprising, but the resolution is, perhaps, though, then again, perhaps not. The story certainly conveys, without telling, the complexity of situations like this – particularly for women.
It’s hard to comment on the writing, given I’m reading a translation, but I enjoyed reading the story. It is told well, giving us just enough information for us to get a sense of the two main protagonists, and just enough description to set the scene for us. The most interesting thing about the choices the author has made is to name the woman, Jéhovana, but not the man. Does this suggest that he stands for all such men, while Jéhovana’s situation and decisions are individual? And Jéhovana’s name? I don’t know it, but it does bring to mind the God, Jehovah. Does this give us a hint regarding her character?
In all, an interesting story. I can see why Worth likes Jacques’ work.
Notes on the translation
Worth prefaces her transaction with some comments. She says that she left in the text “culture-specific expressions – from New Caledonian-French, Wallisian and Polynesian languages – whose meanings were clear, feeling this added “richness to the story in the way Jacques allowed them to enrich her French”. That makes sense. She includes a glossary, as Jacques did. In some cases, however, she expanded where a French expression has a specific cultural meaning in New Caledonia.
I can’t really comment on the quality of the translation, as my French isn’t up to that, but I did notice that Worth changed some of Jacques’ punctuation. For example, there’s one long sentence in French, with just commas separating the different parts, that Worth breaks into two sentences, and uses a semi-colon. It looks sensible to me, but I wonder if it says something about French style versus English style. Does anyone have any ideas on that?
* AALITRA: The Australian Association for Literary Translation.
** The Blue Cross: an international organisation “engaged in the prevention, treatment and after care of problems related to alcohol and other drugs”.
Claudine Jacques
“The Blue Cross” (“La Croix blue”) from Le cri de l’acacia (2007)
(trans. Patricia Worth)
in The AALITRA Review Vol. 0 No. 2 (2010)
Avalailable online at LaTrobe University’s Open Journal Systems site.
Whispering Gums 
It is an interesting ending (I just read it) – a woman’s duty. I wonder if the author is advocating or warning. It feels like the former.
Yes, I didn’t want to give away the ending in the post… But it is interesting, Bill, I agree. I wouldn’t call it a warning but, hmm, is she completely advocating? She does show what Jéhovanah is giving up in taking this risk, shows that she had options, so I read it as also showing her humanity. Perhaps that’s advocating. We know they’d been happy early on, but there are hints of earlier issues too?
I don’t think I’ve ever read anything from New Caledonia… though I remember buying some novels in French from the airport. So cheap compared to buying French books in OZ!
I haven’t read any of them yet. I’ve just (finally!!) finished Arsene Lupin and have started Francoise Sagan’s Aimez-vous Brahms…but even short books take me ages to read in French.
No, I haven’t Lisa, which is why I loved finding this. And I bet those French books do. Are you finding, though, that you are getting faster?
It depends on the text. Petit Pays was YA and it was about the Rwandan genocide so I was familiar with the issues, so it had easier vocab but a bit more slang; anything C19th or early C20th uses the literary past tense which I’m not very good at. But yes, I’m slowly getting more confident, it’s really just a case of having a go, using the dictionary when really stuck and having a book that motivates you to keep going.
Sounds perfect advice. I can read bits with me schoolgirl French. I did top level French for matric but nothing serious since so am not really up to a book!
Well then, you did more than me. Even though I’ve been learning at a language school for four years, we don’t cover in 90 minutes enough to be at Matric standard.
Yes, but I’m not at matrix standard now! I’m proud though that back then I read Camus and Gide in French. Problem was that the focus was text with only 10% of our mark for oral. I think things have changed now.
I know, at least, that both French and Italian fiction (since that’s all I’ve managed to struggle through, ever so slowly) contains roughly a third of the punctuation used in writing Englsh.
That’s interesting M-R. I hadn’t ever realised that. I was probably, in my French reading days, focusing too much on vocab and meaning! I’ll have to look at this story more closely. In the little bit I described there’s the same number of punctuation marks, but more variety in the English.
Sue, I’ve just finished Love after Love by Ingrid Persaud, a Trinidadian now living in London. The story, along similar lines to The Blue Cross, is firmly set in Trinidad in modern times. The dialogue contains lots of patois and is written as I assume English would be spoken there. It was easy to read without a glossary and opened a window onto a culture I know nothing about. And for me, that is one of the reasons I read. After picking it up at a friend’s place I noticed that it was nominated for one of the recent awards under the Man Booker category for women’s writing, I believe.
Thanks Marie. Sounds great. I agree about reading introducing us to cultures we don’t I now. I love how you find out about different lives and ways of living, different values too, and yet also that so much of human behaviour is universal.
Oh and re your book, I love writing that captures different ways of speaking English in a way that is easy to read. I’m guessing you can almost hear it as you read?
Pingback: Review of ‘The Blue Cross’ – Patricia Worth – Translator
Thanks for the review, whisperinggums. I chose this story to translate because I understood the situation and even the ending (from family experience). The wife can see that he has lost his way, wants to help him get back on the straightish and narrowish. Years ago I used to follow blogs when I was blogging myself, and yours was one I followed. I’m going to come back!
Thanks very much Trish. It’s great to hear from you, and why you chose it.
I’d love to hear your comments on the punctuation issue we discussed in the comments re English versus French writing.
And of course it would be lovely to have you following along.
Regarding punctuation translation, here’s an example from another story I did, “The Lydian” by Théodore de Banville, published in Black Sun Lit in 2018. You’ll see I made 3 sentences out of 1. The French sentence is too long and would be cumbersome in English. I read all my work out loud when I’m proofreading, which is a good way to know when to stop or pause. The story is about a statue and her sculptor.
Il n’avait pas dormi, il n’avait pas bougé de place ; mais enfin il se sentit accablé, brisé par la fièvre, et alors, comme pour mourir dans la douloureuse extase de sa passion, n’ayant plus en lui rien de vivant que son désir, il se rapprocha de la statue, lui prit les mains dans ses mains frémissantes, et follement, furieusement, avec l’effroyable intensité que peut acquérir la pensée humaine dégagée de tout et rassemblée sur un seul point, désira la voir et la sentir vivre !
He did not sleep, he did not shift from the spot. But, overcome and broken by his feverish ardor, he finally approached the statue as though to die in the painful ecstasy of his passion, having nothing alive in him but his desire. As his trembling hands took hers, he madly, furiously, with the awful intensity that human thought can acquire when disconnected from everything and focused on a single point, longed to see and feel her living!
Thanks very much Trish. That makes great sense, that is, to read your translations out loud when you are proofreading it. It’s so long since I read original French, but are long sentences more common, overall, in your experience?
Long sentences occur in most French literature and are often discussed on translation forums. The example above from Théodore de Banville was written in 1882, but in a story published just last year I can find several sentences broken up with commas where in English we would put full stops. I suppose English-language readers need longer to think about what’s just been said, and a full stop gives you a space to do that.
I wondered when it was written, Trish, so thanks. And, readers like me love to know things like what translators think and talk about.