Introduction

Following Katherine Mansfield's death in 1923, critical reviews of her work started to appear in France, fuelling an interest which concentrated primarily on her life and personal writing, and only secondarily on her fiction. This thirst for biographical detail gave impetus to the translations of the Letters and Journal in 1931 and 1932 (which had first appeared in English in 1928 and 1927, respectively). Within the space of a few years, translations of various volumes of her stories were also published. In this essay, I shall highlight how the translations of her fiction have, for the most part, diluted her narrative technique. Furthermore, I shall examine the fundamental problems of translating writing such as Mansfield's and determine, via the use of in-depth analysis of the translated texts, whether Mansfield's narrative and personal ideologies, together with literary nuances, survive translation from English to French.

Theories abound as to the ‘correct’ way to translate, what rules should be followed, what ideologies adhered to:

For Susan Petrilli, ‘To translate is neither to “decodify” nor to “recodify”. Such operations are doubtlessly part of the translative process, but they do not exhaust it. In the first place to translate is to interpret.’ Jeremy Munday considers that translation studies encompass the ‘central recurring theme of “word-for-word” and “sense-for-sense” translation’. For Munday, the work of a translator may be summed up as follows: ‘Translating is an intellectual process that consists in re-articulating a thought expressed in a context. Just as knowing how to write is not enough to make one a writer, knowing two languages is not enough to make one a translator.’