wretched-of-the-earth-frantz-fanon

#'iF.#~y250 ON RETRANSLATING I'ANON, RETRIEVING A LOST VOICESo this has been.my fourth encounter with Fanon, and perthemost intimate. The other three were encounters withthe others, the colonized, the colonial subjects. This time I hadcome face-to-face with the man himself and had to take on theextraordinary task of gaining access to the author's voice andmeaning, and initiating communication with the target audience.The very fact that I had lived in Africa, France, and theFrench Caribbean helped enormously in understanding thesociety and culture that had shaped and influenced Fanon. ButI no longer had the good fortune to be able to pop into the nextroom and ask him what exactly he meant in such and such a paragraphas I can when translating Maryse Conde. I had accompaniedhim on his life's journey, but the closest I could to theman himself was being in the company of Bertene Juminer, AssiaOjebar, Roland Thesauros, Edouard Glissant, Mme ChristianeDiop of Presence Africaine, and Aime Cesaire, all of whom hadcrossed his path. You might think that translating the dead givesyou a whole lot of freedom-there's nobody there looking overyour shoulder or making rude comments. But in fact there arecrowds of people looking over your shoulder-from the readersof the original translation to the postcolonial scholars who havestaked their reputation on Fanon's ideas. Translating a dead manmeans stepping warily through a minefield littered with thedebris of another time and another translation. But the very factof looking back was a driving force to modernize the text andahead. In Fanon's case, translating the dead was a case oftranslating life itself. I felt I had to bring a dead translation backto life. To quote John Felstiner on Celan, he hoped that in translatingCelan's poems he felt something akin to what Celan feltwriting them. Retranslating Fanon, rewriting Fanon almost givesme the same kick. As if I am the one writing down his thoughtsEnglish for the first time.And then there is that secret feeling that married to a writerfrom Guadeloupe, from the French Caribbean, I have alwaysON RETRANSLATING I'ANON, RETRIEVING A LOST VOICE 251known Fanon and understood his dilemma and ambition as aMartinican. No one sums up this personality of the FrenchCaribbean better than Aime Cesaire in "Hommages a FrantzFanon" published in Presence Africaine in 1962:Perhaps Fanon reached such heights and his vision was so broadbecause he was a French Caribbean, in other words he had started offso far down and from such a narrow Perhaps only aibbean, in other words one so destitute, so depersonalized could haveset off with such determination to conquer himself and plenitude; onlyCaribbean, in other words one so mystified to start off with,manage to dismantle with such skill the most elusive mechanismsof mystification; only a French Caribbean, finally, could want so desperatelyto escape powerlessness through action and solitude throughfraternity.- Richard Philcox