Translating Fatima Gallaire's Les co-épouses as House of wives: Lessons from a francophone text

This retrospective account of the process of translating Algerian playwright Fatima Gallaire’s Les co-épouses (1990) from French into English problematizes the recent assimilation of Francophone literature into the French canon. Pointing to the ways in which translating revealed cultural lacuna in a French reading, I also explain how it challenged many assumptions about traditional approaches to translation. For instance, although we began translating with a predilection for the resistant translation advocated by Lawrence Venuti, we became progressively aware of areas of resistance in Gallaire’s text, that is, in the source text, even prior to translation. This resistance was the result of the Arab cultural fabric woven into the French text, as well as a layer of Arabic that modulated and disrupted the French in which the play is written. Ultimately, the experience of translating a text by a Francophone author led me to review assumptions regarding the accessibility or transparency of Francophone texts as they are increasingly adopted by a French literary canon in search of revitalization.