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thelinguist.uberflip.com JUNE/JULY The Linguist 19 FEATURES The longstanding hostility between the wealthy mayor and the communist farmer Benoît is played out in the mayor's decision to collaborate and Benoît's decision to resist. The arrival of a battalion of handsome soldiers in a village whose young men have departed for war leads to amorous relationships between French women and German men who are supposed to be enemies. The young villager Celine sees them as young men like any others, while Lucille uses her relationship with Bruno to further the cause of resistance. Némirovsky's complex portraits of collaboration and resistance are an important part of the novel's popularity, and this has translated well to the big screen. This is a film that relies to a significant extent on translation. Had it not been for the success of Smith's version of the book, it may never have been made. While the plot of Matt Charman and Saul Dibb's screenplay is fairly close to the novel (though there are various alterations), the script is a free adaptation. Adaptation from novel to film is a form of intersemiotic translation: transforming an artistic product from one genre and medium to another is akin to the transformative process of interlingual translation. The film also contains a good deal of foreign language material, which is subtitled in English, lending an air of authenticity. When the Nazis converse between themselves, they do so in German, and the extent of the mayor's collaboration is symbolised by his ability to communicate with them in their own language. The French characters speak English, so the viewer has to imagine that the action is happening in French. It is a pity that the social stratification of the villagers is not marked by any variation in their accents, since social division is a strong theme in the novel. However, marking this sort of intralingual difference in a dialogue that is supposed to take place in a foreign language is notoriously difficult: which accent would be suitable? Could any British accent ever adequately convey linguistic variation in French? A regional accent could sound completely incongruous or even inappropriately humorous, so the flattening-out of the social differences between, for example, the bourgeois Lucille and the working-class Celine may be the best compromise. Found in translation Suite française demonstrates the extent to which our knowledge of the Second World War and the Holocaust depends on various forms of translation. This fact has rarely been acknowledged and has only recently started to attract academic interest. 1 War is an international – and therefore a multilingual – event, and it causes people to move between countries and languages, whether on military manoeuvres, diplomatic missions, journalistic assignments or because of the horrors and tragedies of exile or deportation. Texts that bear witness to the experience of those who lived through or fell victim to WWII are very often read in translation: think of iconic Holocaust texts such as Anne Frank's diary, Primo Levi's If this is a Man and Elie Wiesel's Night. The intervention of translation in Holocaust writing can be viewed as problematic as it introduces a voice between the witness and the reader, threatening to compromise the validity of the account. The high value placed on authenticity in relation to Holocaust writing is one reason why the fact of translation has frequently been ignored. Acknowledging translation means recognising the presence of this other, translating voice, which raises difficult questions – most importantly, could the translator, however inadvertently, be misleading the reader? Even where a translation is apparently neutral, it will inevitably reflect the concerns and values of the translator's time and culture. Readers of translations have to accept that they are reading a newly created work that can never be identical to the text that inspired it. But translation and adaptation can bring positive new dimensions to source texts. The film of Suite française is certainly not identical to the book Némirovsky wrote. Nonetheless, it retains a strong sense of the original work. The credits show several pages of manuscript written in violet ink in Némirovsky's hand. The writing comes to an end and only a blank page remains, marking the moment that Némirovsky's writing was interrupted by her arrest. The presence of the French manuscript as a conclusion to the film ensures that Némirovsky and her adopted literary language remain visible in this 21st- century English language adaptation. Notes 1 See, e.g. Boase-Beier, J, Davies, P, Hamel, A and Winters, M, 2015 (forthcoming), Translating Holocaust Lives, Bloomsbury, London and New York; and 2014, Translation and Literature, 23.2 (papers from the 'Holocaust Writing and Translation' series of workshops in 2010-11, funded by the AHRC and run by Prof Peter Davis and Dr Andrea Hamel NEW AUDIENCE Stills from the film (l-r): German troops occupy the fictional village of Bussy; and Kristin Scott Thomas as Madame Angellier The intervention of translation in Holocaust writing can be viewed as problematic