Nation, Narration, Translation: Hybrid Forms in Lydie Salvayre's Pas pleurer

In 1939, following the Nationalist capture of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, a wave of over 450,000 refugees fled to southern France. Among them was Montserrat Monclus Arjona: the mother whose coming-of-age story Lydie Salvayre fictionalizes in her 2014 novel Pas pleurer . Salvayre pieces together her mother's experience of the war using numerous narrative voices—at times difficult to separate and identify—as well as a French-Spanish hybrid language she calls "fragnol." Though the narrative deals more with the war and its fragmented politics than with Montse's migration, the latter comes out constantly through these stylistic choices: indeed, Montse's one-way geographical border crossing gives way to, and is mirrored by, the continuous crossing of more fluid linguistic and narrative borders. This article uses the motif of translation, from its linguistic connotations to its looser application in the sociocultural sphere, to analyze Salvayre's representation of her main character's exile and its aftermath. With its ubiquitous multilingualism and polyphonic narrative structure, Pas pleurer is a text that embodies plurality and in-betweenness, providing salient parallels to conceptions of translation as an intermediary yet generative phenomenon, one that bridges supposedly fixed boundaries between languages and cultures to give way to new, hybrid ones. Drawing upon thinkers including Walter Benjamin, who speaks of the mutually constitutive, "pure" language stemming from translation, and Homi Bhabha, whose concept of "cultural translation" focuses on hybridity rather than a unilateral shift between poles, will help us to read Salvayre's characters' idiosyncratic language and narration as a translational process.