By Karen Fleetwood (Need bio) & Laëtitia Saint-Loubert
Contemporary Reunionese literature remains significantly underrepresented in the English-speaking literary world.[1] This observation informed our decision to translate Nathalie Hermine’s ‘Le verbe se fit chair,’ from her collection Ma plus grande douleur sera de ne pouvoir te secourir (Saint-Denis de La Réunion: Éditions Poisson Rouge, 2021), for the present special issue, as part of a broader translation dynamic that seeks to contribute to the greater visibility and circulation of Reunionese writing beyond its original linguistic and geographical contexts.[2] This project follows two other recent collaborative translations of Reunionese novels – the translation, for the Irish and UK markets, of Gaëlle Bélem’s first two novels, There’s a Monster Behind the Door (Sligo: Bullaun Press, 2024) and The Rarest Fruit (Sligo: Bullaun Press, 2025) – which similarly aimed to participate in expanding the reach of these works and fostering new encounters between Reunionese literature and international readers.[3] In this respect, the translation of this short story speaks directly to the concerns of this special issue on ‘archipelagic Francophonies,’ particularly the question of literary circulation: how texts produced within island and peripheral contexts travel, gain recognition, and contribute to the reshaping of Francophone Studies and literary networks beyond traditional centers of production.
‘Le verbe se fit chair’ opens with its protagonist, Tahina Bellon, delivering a talk at the musée du quai Branly in Paris on May 11, 2012, on the archaeology of colonial slavery. During her talk, she recounts how Cyclone Gamede struck La Réunion on February 25, 2007, devastating the landscape and tearing through the marine cemetery at Saint-Paul, where the storm unearthed the long-buried remains of enslaved people, bringing the material traces of the island’s colonial history of slavery into stark and unsettling view. Throughout the short story, the excavation process is depicted in detail, requiring us, as translators who have no specialized knowledge of the field of archaeology, to cross-check terminology and conduct further research into excavation practices and measurement methods.[4] But beyond archaeology as a profession, it was the process of uncovering, recovering and bringing to light the various voices that can be heard in the recesses of Nathalie Hermine’s text, together with its covert, if not latent, aspects, that proved particularly interesting. Excavation therefore emerged as more than a specialized field for us: translation itself became an excavation site that required a careful uncovering of meaning and of the often-overlooked margins of the text. To illustrate this, we will look in detail at a footnote and glossary entry, as they appeared in the French text.
The footnote we are referring to accompanies a paragraph written entirely in Creole in the source text, for which the author provides a French translation. As Anny-Dominique Curtius has observed, however, this French version is not a straightforward translation but involves a degree of ‘departure from the Creole, especially toward the end of the skeleton’s words, thus providing the readers with two texts that complement each other and stand as a manifestation of Hermine’s praxis of memory.’[5] In our translation, we have retained the Creole paragraph in the main text and, following the structure of the original, provided an English translation in a footnote based on the author’s French rendering (see translation 1 in the table below).
To draw attention to the textual layers that risk remaining invisible unless the reader compares the Creole passage with the accompanying footnote, we also offer a second English translation below, this time translated directly from the Creole and adhering more closely to its lexical and stylistic features (see translation 2 below). This additional translation makes visible some translational negotiations that the author’s French footnote partially concealed. Rather than functioning as a traditional explanatory gloss, this second translation emerges as (and within) a liminal space – the translators’ note – in which translation and excavation intersect. Our note thus aims to function as an excavation site in which the layered nature of the source text is exposed and some of its remains are laid bare before the English-speaking reader.
Zot l’a trouve à nous, astèr écoute à nous. Oublie pas nous, oublie pas chemin. Magine à nous, pioche dans nout’ main, i faut nous obéit la cloche. La houle l’a tire à nous dan’ sab’, l’a mêt’ à nous en l’air. Nous-même le sab’, mais laisse à nous artourne dans la mer. A nous-mêmes de moune debout comme filaos. (original text)
Now that you’ve found our bodies, you can listen to our voices. Remember us, you who tread this shore. Imagine us, armed with a pickaxe and subject to the orders of the bell. The swell has exposed us. You feel our humility, but we merely want to return to the ocean. It is our own way of being human. (translation 1)
Now you’ve found us, listen to us. Don’t forget us, don’t forget this path. Imagine us with pickaxes in our hands, being forced to obey the bell. The swell has carried us into the sand, uncovered us. We are the sand, but let us return to the sea. It is our way of standing straight like filao trees. (translation 2)
Similarly, towards the end of the short story, the term ‘soubique,’ which comes from the Malagasy ‘sobika,’ appears as Tahina is delivering her talk:
He wanted to carry the skeleton in a soubique, for a funerary rite. But would he have been able to piece it back together before burying it?
A hand went up.
‘What is a soubique? Could you explain?’
This is then followed by a conversation between the characters in which the term is explained, but the reader is not privy to this direct exchange. Contrary to two other Creole expressions used early in the story which were flagged as footnotes and for which French equivalents were provided, ‘soubique’ is explained in a glossary entry provided at the end of the short-story collection, though no reference is provided to the glossary at this point. It is said to be ‘a big basket without a handle’ (p. 188). We decided to reveal this information in the present, separate translators’ note rather than as a footnote, as we felt the term appeared in a context that provided sufficient clues for readers unfamiliar with ‘soubique’ to understand it as some sort of container. But in addition, the idea is for the margins of the text to function as a site where remains are brought to the surface, while simultaneously drawing attention to the text’s peripheral spaces and to the possibilities they open up within the translation process. We also aimed to respect the source text’s mode of functioning by not flagging elements that were not indicated in the original, nor uncovering information that was not available within the text itself. In this way, we felt that Nathalie Hermine’s story manifests what Glissant has called ‘the right to opacity.’[6] Read through a Glissantian framework, translation as excavation therefore does not amount to a process of disclosure – let alone ‘discovery’ – but to one of careful exposure. It becomes a site where the various layers of a text are made tangible for the reader, but also where the text’s afterlife can be traced back to its (opaque) origins. It can also be a site where remains speak for themselves.
Karen Fleetwood translated into English Jules Verne’s Le Rayon vert (2009) and Les Forceurs de blocus (2011), both published by Luath Press, Scotland. Together with Laëtitia Saint-Loubert, she translated Reunionese author Gaëlle Bélem’s first two novels, There’s a Monster Behind the Door (2024) and The Rarest Fruit (2025), both published by Bullaun Press, Ireland. There’s a Monster Behind the Door (2024) was longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, shortlisted for the 2025 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize and won the 2025 UK/Ireland Republic of Consciousness Prize.
Laëtitia Saint-Loubert is a literary translator specializing in Caribbean and Indian Ocean literature and a teaching fellow in Translation and Translation Studies at Nantes University, France. She holds a PhD in Caribbean Studies from the University of Warwick and was an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin prior to joining Nantes University. Her first monograph, The Caribbean in Translation. Remapping Thresholds of Dislocation (Peter Lang, 2020), won the 2018 Peter Lang Young Scholars Award in Comparative Literature.
[1] Within the Francophone literary world itself, Reunionese literature has also received limited attention. See Laëtitia Saint-Loubert, ‘The Problematic Location of Reunionese Literature within Francophone Studies,’ in The Routledge Handbook of Francophone Africa, Tony Chafer and Margaret Majumdar, eds (London and New York: Routledge, 2023), p. 361–377, which examines the position of (contemporary) Reunionese literature within Francophone Studies and analyses the uneven processes of recognition and circulation that have shaped its reception. The article also explores minor translation flows in the 1990s, focusing on the translation of Axel Gauvin’s works into Dutch and German, highlighting alternative trajectories of circulation beyond the Anglospheres.
[2] We wish to express our gratitude to Nathalie Hermine and her publisher, Éditions Poisson Rouge, for granting permission to access the original French for readers wishing to read the source text alongside our English translation of the short story in this special issue of Reading in Translation: https://www.editionspoissonrouge.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/MaplusgrandedouleurEPR9791090588301-pages-111-128.pdf
[3] Kaiama L. Glover’s translation of Françoise Vergès’s The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020) should be mentioned, as it has played an important role in bringing a major Reunionese text of feminist and decolonial scholarship to U.S. readers.
[4] We also consulted both the author and an archaeologist, Dr Gemma Cruickshanks, Post-Excavation Officer at National Museums Scotland, whose generous guidance proved invaluable, and to whom we wish to express our sincere gratitude for their assistance.
[5] See Anny-Dominique Curtius, ‘Tidalectical Bodies. Reclaiming Skeletons, Liana~Hips, and Feet with Nathalie Hermine, Suzanne Césaire, and Kamau Brathwaite,’ in Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities. Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings, Jacqueline Couti and Anny-Dominique Curtius, eds. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2025), p. 187–205 (p. 196).
[6] Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2010).