'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)
This essay was first presented as part of Provocations, a new public forum initiated by the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Culture at the University of Adelaide tackling controversies in the arts and humanities. The theme of the first series was ‘Who Shot the Albatross?: Gate-keeping in Australian culture’.