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A Missed Translation (?): Race, Power, and Reception in the Archives of Beatrice Stith Clark’s Translations of Mayotte Capécia

The more we know about the translator, the more we know about their choices and how they made them. And yet, how are we to learn about the translator if critics, the stewards responsible for maintaining the literary record, ignore translations and erase the translator and her work? What do these choices say about the critic, and how do we recover the missing translation and its translator? In this talk, I will revisit the reception history of Beatrice Stith Clark’s translations of two novels by Mayotte Capécia (née Lucette Combette) through the literary and archival record. When read side-by-side, these two archives reveal histories of segregation, exploitation, and exclusion. In this way, I argue that the translation archive of Beatrice Stith Clark, an African American woman, academic, and translator, rather than merely telling a story of a missed translation or missing translator, offers us pathways for decolonizing and desegregating the literary record.

Nathan H. Dize is Assistant Professor of French at Washington University in Saint Louis. He is working on two book projects, Handle with Care: The Legacies of Black Translators of Francophone Literature and Attending to the Dead: Haitian Literature and the Practice of Mourning. Nathan is also a translator of Haitian literature, including The Immortals and The Emperor by Makenzy Orcel, I Am Alive by Kettly Mars, Duels by Néhémy Dahomey, and Antoine of Gommiers by Lyonel Trouillot. He is also a founding member of Kwazman Vwa and the co-editor of “Global Black Writers in Translation” at Vanderbilt University Press.