Disparitions et réapparitions, Mort et Renaissance: les traductions fantasques de Marcel Duhamel

This article examines the curious trajectory in France, and in French translation, of Jim Thompson’s 1964 novel Pop. 1280. First translated into French in 1966 by Marcel Duhamel as the 1000th title of Gallimard’s famous Série Noire crime fiction collection, the novel became notorious for the loss of five of Thompson’s original population: Duhamel’s title was 1275 âmes [1275 Souls]. In 2000 novelist Jean-Bernard Pouy joined the ranks of those puzzled by this translation choice; he went further than most, however, by writing his own novel, entitled 1280 âmes [1280 Souls], in which his protagonist sets out to find the five missing characters. We argue that the ingenious solution found by Pouy is deliberately convoluted, that it wilfully overlooks a more obvious reason for choosing this different title, which is to say, to emphasise the fact that Duhamel’s translation aspires to a status beyond mere interlingual transfer, something closer to an adaptation or French appropriation of the original text. We then contextualise this argument by discussing the ways in which the early novels of the Série Noire, notably those by Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase, functioned as allegories of France in the years immediately following the Second World War, even though their “original versions” were written before the war and ostensibly in an effort (by these two British authors) to appear American. The article concludes by suggesting that Thompson’s novel can be considered, like those of Cheyney and Chase before it, a classic of the French crime fiction canon, or at the very least that much can be gained from reading it through that lens.