Translational Determinants in the Source and Target Fields: The Case of the Detective Novel Translated from American into French for the Série Noire after 1945
The relationship between Comparative Literature and Translation Studies has been delicate of late, and this article proposes to clarify somewhat what distinguishes the disciplines by analyzing the case of the American detective novel translated into the French culture from 1945 onwards for the Série Noire (Gallimard). The trend of hard-boiled detective novels by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler was launched by the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1922. A brief history of pulp magazines shows that the narrative stories printed on cheap paper had to meet strict requirements. After examining the habitus of Hammett and Chandler, we analyze how Marcel Duhamel introduced American hard-boiled authors to the Série Noire and how the translated texts were conditioned by the French detective novel field. It appears that direct competition between the Série Noire and the series Un Mystère (published by Les Presses de la Cité) is also among the major determinants of the translation of hard-boiled novels, as documents contained in the Série Noire archives show. The translated detective novel illustrates how translation is omnipresent in the transfer process in both the source and target fields and that the translation paradigm is essential to the analysis of cross-cultural literary contact.