6 - Marie Curie and Parody
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 April 2017
Summary
Lydia Davis’ story ‘Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman’ problematises the border between translation and other forms of intertextual writing, especially parody, and therefore also the border between author and translator in Davis’ oeuvre. As we saw, this border was already questioned by Davis’ use of extracts from her translation of Proust in one of her stories (Chapter 4) and by her use of translations from Flaubert's letters as her stories from Flaubert (Chapter 5). ‘Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman’ (Davis 2001: 99–119) goes one step further. Davis’ story is constructed through translation but at the same time is not a translation. This chapter explores how it plays with and disrupts the boundaries between translation and other intertextual forms of writing, ultimately questioning the idea of representation inherent in these practices.
Intertextual writing and translation both produce a target text from a source text, taking material and manipulating it in order to create a new work. This similarity has been explored by several theorists in the past. However, other forms of intertextual creation do not have such a strong ‘relation norm’ (Chesterman 1997: 69–70) as translations, which can be considered to provide ‘full-scale representations’ (Hermans 1998: 17) of their source texts. This has been seen in preceding chapters where Davis’ translations are recognised as ‘full-scale representations’ of their source texts. These expectations of translation operate at the base of what Cecilia Alvstad (2014) calls the ‘translation pact’, where the implied author of the translation does not include the translator. There is more expectation that there will be alteration and manipulation in adaptation (Hutcheon 2006: 7) and indeed the adaptor will often be understood to have more of an authorial role.
This chapter begins by analysing how ‘Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman’ is presented as a text, drawing on its publication history and the introduction provided with its original magazine publication (Davis 2000a, 2000b) which highlights its intertextual nature. The story is then compared with other stories by Davis that are based on quotation from another writer's work, such as ‘Extracts from a Life’ (Davis 1986: 57–61) and ‘Lord Royston's Tour’ (Davis 1997a: 84–114).
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- Information
- The Many Voices of Lydia DavisTranslation, Rewriting, Intertextuality, pp. 110 - 125Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017