AustLit

'Recently a new English translation of Chateaubriand’s Memoirs From Beyond The Grave was published. In his translator’s introduction, Alex Andriesse comments that:

'While the French are satisfied by a well-told tale, we Anglophones can’t help but fact-check. Given a choice between beauty and truth, we prefer the truth, ideally unvarnished. Just consider the colourless titles the Mémoires have been given over the years by English publishers and translators … : in doing so they belie the very thing that distinguishes Chateaubriand’s scribbling from the hundreds of other memoirs composed by his contemporaries: its artfulness, its architecture, its phrasal flair and seduction of style.

'Unvarnished ‘truth’ in literature is of course only relative to the position of the speaker, often used as a bludgeoning tool which is limited to a locale, a sense of national recognition and belonging. In writing, one is continually contorting and distorting it. This has always been my motivation for writing: to write in a state of contradiction, paradox or revision in order to challenge the dominion of plain-speaking, which like fake news, appears to map truth in the bluntest terms. These so-called ‘facts’, employed together with biographical resumés, have always acted as an exercise to neatly box in complexity, multilingualism and non-identitarian literatures. Another term for it is ‘provincial empiricism’.' (Introduction)