This article explores the relationship between trauma and translation in French‑Senegalese author David Diop’s novel At Night All Blood Is Black (2020) (originally published in 2018 as Frère d’âme). At Night All Blood Is Black is an intensely emotional account of First World War trench warfare, written from the perspective of a Senegalese colonial soldier. In this article, I consider the role of translation – broadly conceived in both the literal linguistic sense and metaphorically as the transference of historical trauma into a fictional narrative – in negotiating the ethical complexities inherent to this text’s consumption by a Global North readership. I argue that through translation, a process that both bridges and highlights distance, Diop’s narrative could evoke what historian Dominick LaCapra calls ‘empathic unsettlement’. For LaCapra, ‘empathic unsettlement’ is an ethical way of engaging with traumatic narratives, as it entails putting oneself in a victim’s position while maintaining awareness that the position is not one’s own. In At Night All Blood Is Black, translation simultaneously draws the reader closer to the protagonist’s interiority to evoke empathy and highlights the distance between self and other to recognise the impossibility of fully understanding another’s pain.
René Esterhuyse (Wed,) studied this question.