The Excreta of the Babel Fish: Retranslating Polyphonic Multilingualism and Linguistic Hybridity in Vogon Poetry – From Radio to Page to Screen

Résumé En

This paper focuses on a comparative analysis of various medium-dependant translations (into French, Italian, German, Czech) of the Vogon poetry scene in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, across its numerous adaptations (novelisation, vinyl LP, stage shows, video game, TV series, comic books, film, etc.) since its original composition as a radio drama in 1978. This scene of multimodal literary torture exemplifies, amongst other things, the intervention of the ‘Babel Fish’: Adams’ famous parody of what Meyers (1980:11) calls the 'magic decoder' in Science Fiction. It has been chosen for its encapsulation of many of the challenges faced by translators dealing with source texts that employ interactional effects of simultaneous multilingual performance in trans-media adaptation contexts. In particular, the analysis highlights many of the problems related to the linguistic concept of ‘double articulation’ posed by the translation (especially for performance) of multilingual texts in which sonic effects, in the patterning of ‘non-meaningful’ language units, occur within a linguistic polyphony. It also allows for discussion of how to translate multilingual hybridity, a creative effect that is not confined to ‘genre literature’, given that it is the compositional principle of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Besides the texts already mentioned, the paper refers, in passing, to various other sources, including: Edwin Morgan’s “The First Men on Mercury”; Eliot’s “The Waste Land”; the nonsense poetry of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear; Futurist Sound Poetry; the Tim Burton film Mars Attacks!; the China Miéville novel Embassytown; Antoine Berman’s ‘tendances déformantes’; Clive Scott’s ‘overwritten translations’; and Frédéric Landagrin’s Comment parler à un alien. The paper inherits from this last work the premise that portrayals of extraterrestrial multilingualism in science fiction should be taken seriously as an illustrative corpus when examining cultural concepts of the interactions between human languages. However, it also suggests that Landagrin’s thesis (of la linguistique-fiction, after Meyers) suffers significantly from the absence of any informed translatological dimension. It therefore seeks to encourage this avenue of research.