ENG - Ataúd Ed Johnson y Sepulturero Jones

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Ataúd Ed Johnson (Ataúd = coffin) and Sepulturero Jones (Sepulturero = grave digger) are the names of the two inspectors in the Spanish translations of Himes’ crime novels or his Harlem domestic novels as he used to call them.

If we look at the Spanish titles of these novels, we can see they have been translated very faithfully from the titles in the American editions. They therefore do not take up the puns of the original French editions in the Série noire collection.

Original Himes' title	Title in the Série noire	Title of the subsequent American edition	Title of the Spanish edition
The Five Cornered Square	La reine des pommes	1. For Love of Imabelle (1957).  2. A Rage in Harlem (1965)	Por amor a Imabelle
If Trouble Was Money	Il pleut des coups durs	The Real Cool Killers	La banda de los musulmanes
A Jealous Man Can’t Win	Couché dans le pain	The Crazy Kill	El loco asesinato
The Big Gold Dream	Tout pour plaire	The Big Gold Dream	El gran sueño de oro
Don’t Play With Death	Imbroglio négro	All Shot up	Todos muertos
Be Calm	Ne nous énervons pas	The Heat’s On	Empieza el calor
Back to Africa	Retour en Afrique	Cotton Comes to Harlem	Algodón en Harlem

Translating Himes is never easy. For the blog Mis detectives favoritos, "it is a

challenge to translate the language of Harlem into Spanish. Some translators keep the original nicknames of the inspectors, others translate them. The translation of Bruguera (Por Amor a Imabelle, 1980) has not aged very well because it used the slang of the time (and slang, which evolves more quickly than the common language, always ages worse) ".

The blog Cuaderno de trabajo presents Himes as follows: "Chester Himes is a North American writer who was very well known in his time and who is now a bit out of fashion and little present in journalistic references." We can but subscribe to this comment.

We saw in the article Cidade escaldante; What can be learned from a Portuguese edition of Himes’ The Heat’s On? that Himes, in his position of author working on commission for the Série noire collection (with a 220 page imposed format, for example) had also accepted – or anticipated – the formulation of titles conforming to the line or the style of the collection: the example of Ne nous fâchons pas (Be Calm), later renamed The Heat's On, is the most striking. Between the French title and the title of the subsequent American edition, we are dealing with two types of puns and humor (traditional French vs hardboiled American). The difference also tells us about the distance between the language of Himes and that of his translations.

 Unlike the titles of the Série noire, the titles of the Spanish editions do not take the risk of the pun: a pity because The Five-Cornered Square – the  title given by Himes to the manuscript of the novel later titled For Love of Imabelle or A Rage in Harlem – with its pun on “square” (naïve), had given in French a very good La reine des pommes.

See the blogs

El blogo de Juan Carlos

Cuaderno de trabajo

Mis detectives favoritos 

ENG - Himes in the Penguin Modern Classics collection

The first three Chester Himes' Harlem domestic novels, with the exception of Run Man Run (which, despite its great quality, is less known, presumably because it did not have the two detectives for heroes) have been published by the great British publisher Penguin, in the Modern Classics collection, alongside, for example, James Joyce's Ulysses.

In the Penguin edition, the first one, La reine des pommes, is titled A Rage in Harlem. Michel Fabre, Robert E. Skinner and Lester Sullivan* have identified the successive titles of the novel. The original title, that of Himes' English manuscript (1957), is The Five Cornered Square, which in a literal reading. means a square with five sides, but also contains a play on words, “square” also having the meaning of naive, gullible, or simple. It obviously refers to Jackson, compared to Goldy, his twin brother, so much more intelligent and creative. 

Let us give back to the Série noire where the novel was originally published the credit it deserves: La reine des pommes is a clever equivalent of the original title, pomme being close to square in its naive sense. Still the text was never published in English under the original title. The Anglo-Saxon editions have had for titles either A Rage in Harlem or For Love of Imabelle.

In his introduction to the Penguin edition, Luc Sante explains why A Rage in Harlem imposed itself, at the expense of the title wanted by Himes "not because it is descriptive or even especially appropriate, but because it combined two nouns guaranteed to act as flint and steel in the mind of the average 1950s American drugstore paperback browser. Harlem (...) was more myth than place to most white Americans of the period."**

* Chester Himes, An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Compiled by Michel Fabre, Robert E. Skinner and Lester Sullivan. Greenwood Press, 1992.

** A Rage in Harlem. Introduction by Luc Sante. Penguin Modern Classics, 2011.

About the titles of the Harlem Cycle novels, see on this blog Cidade escaldante: What can be learned from a Portuguese edition of Himes' The Heat's On?.

ENG - Translating Chester Himes

One of the labels in this blog is Translation. It may be surprising for the English-speaking readers who are not familiar with the translations of Chester Himes in French, Spanish, Portuguese, or other languages, nor aware there might be a problem about these translations.

For the French, it is of crucial importance. Himes' novels were read in France and in French through the mediation of a team of translators, who though they sometimes were not professional translators (or more accurately because they were not professional translators) had be chosen by Marcel Duhamel. Duhamel himself, the director of the famous Série Noire, the Gallimard collection, was a well-known translator without an academic education.

The situation of Himes in relation to the Série Noire is particular: Himes' novels were not translated into French after being published in English. They were written for the Série Noire and Himes worked - in a certain way - on commission. Thus there were less cuts in Himes' novels than in some other authors' works. In his introduction to the English edition of the first three novels of the Harlem domestic novels, Melvin Van Peebles shows Himes' work method: "He pointed to the two neat piles on either side of the typewriter and explained that before he started one of his 'detective stories' or 'action novels' as he insisted on calling them, he would count out 220 pieces of carbon paper and 440 pieces of typing paper. He would then place a sheet of carbon paper between every two sheets of typing paper so that way he would have an original and a copy of each page that he completed. He would then put the untouched pile on the right hand side of his typewriter and begin to bang away. After he finished typing a page he would put it down on the pile at his left. (…) 'When the pile on the right hand side begins to get low I know it's time to start winding the story up."[1]

Still Himes wrote in English and had to be translated. The language the Série Noire translators produced, meant to be an equivalent of Himes' language, highly contributed to the success of his novels in France. It draws upon the Parisian slang (argot). In the issue of 813 dedicated to Chester Himes, the French translator Pierre Bondil acknowledges that Himes is not easy to translate but reports the over-use of Parisian argot to render the black vernacular, and numerous treasons of the style and rhythm of Himes' language.[2]

It is no use criticizing these translations. They belong to a general cultural era (ignorance of the American culture and particularly of the African American culture;  distrust regarding America in the cold war period). They also belong to a certain cultural and economical context of the Série Noire itself.

Gallimard revised these translations in 2007 (Quarto collection). Still a totally new version, with different fundamental choices is something to dream about.

Portuguese and Spanish translations of the titles of several novels have been reviewed in this blog. As one can see with the different versions of The Heat's On, unlike the French version they were translated from the titles Himes chose for the later American publication of his books.

[1] Chester Himes, The Harlem Cycle, volume 1, Edinbourgh, Cannongate Books, 1996.
[2] Special issue of 813 dedicated to Himes.

ENG - Cidade Escaldante: What can be learned from a Portuguese edition of Himes’ The Heat’s On? 1 – The titles.

Found in the Lisbon flea market (Feira da Ladra in the popular borough of Alfama) Cidade escaldante (The Heat’s on) by Chester Himes, translated into Portuguese in 2000 by Clarisse Tavares.

The translation of the title is quite interesting. Cidade escaldante means The Hot/Burning/Boiling City. As in the Spanish translation of the same novel (Empieza el calor – The Heat Begins), it is related to the title of the 1^st American edition of the book, The Heat’s On, and thus quite different from the original French title in the Série Noire, Ne nous énervons pas. Of course, the polysemy of Heat, which refers at the same time to firearms, to the police and to one of the heat waves that affect New York in the summer and have exaggerated consequences on human behaviour is not precisely rendered but this concentration of diverse meanings cannot be translated accurately in French.

When Himes’ publisher was given the manuscript, it was written (as always) in English and its title was Be Calm, the French translation of which, Ne nous énervons pas, is a good approximation. This French title is not very different from other titles by Himes, such as Il pleut des coups durs or Tout pour plaire. The book was later published in the United States, successively as The Heat’s On (1966) and Come Back Charleston Blue (1972).

Original title of the manuscript in English	Série Noire title	Title in the later American edition
The Five Cornered Square	La reine des pommes	A Rage in Harlem
If Trouble Was Money	Il pleut des coups durs	The Real Cool Killers
A Jealous Man Can’t Win	Couché dans le pain	The Crazy Kill
The Big Gold Dream	Tout pour plaire	The Big Gold Dream
Don’t Play With Death	Imbroglio négro	All Shot up
Be Calm	Ne nous énervons pas	The Heat’s On
Back to Africa	Retour en Afrique	Cotton Comes to Harlem

In the Série Noire catalogue, Ne nous énervons pas (Be Calm), n° 640, is situated between two Carter Brown novels, On se tape la tête[1], n° 638, and Y'a du tirage[2] (n° 642), and it partakes the Parisian slang inspiration of both titles. As far as I know, Himes never gave any clue about the choice and the translation of his titles, still his original English titles corresponded to what he knew or understood of the Série noire titles policy and of the explicit expectations of his publisher.

La reine des pommes is quite a good approximation of The Five Cornered Square, although it doesn’t convey the polysemic pun on square: the geometric figure – in this occurrence a very extraordinary figure – and a naïve, even a stupid individual. The Série Noire titles of four of the Harlem domestic novels Il pleut des coups durs, Tout pour plaire, Imbroglio négro et Ne nous énervons pas[3] are quite interchangeable whereas the novels are so different! Couché dans le pain only refers to a short part in one of the 1^st chapters of the novel. Retour en Afrique, which is a much better title, corresponds to the original title in English and highlights the general meaning of the novel.

Unlike the Série Noire titles and even those of Himes’ English manuscripts, the titles of the 1^st American edition of the books enhance the singularity of Himes in relation to Carter Brown or other authors, and the originality of each novel amongst the novels that make up the Harlem cycle.

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[1] Original American title: The Savage Salome.

[2] Original American title:  The Dream is Deadly.

[3] The Real Cool Killers, The Big Gold Dream, All Shot Up and The Heat’s On.