Translation as Overcoming? Trauma and (Re)writing in Laura Alcoba’s Le bleu des abeilles

Abstract

In Le bleu des abeilles (2013), Laura Alcoba evokes her exile in the suburbs of Paris in 1979 and the following correspondence with her father who remained imprisoned in Argentina. Soon the act of translating becomes indispensable in order to maintain an affective relationship with him, as they communicate in Spanish about books she reads in French. Thus, translation opens a shared mental space between Argentina and France. This article sheds light on how the conscious acquisition of French, at the cost of Spanish, initiates the elaboration of (unconscious) trauma which Cathy Caruth, based upon Freud, defines as the external which became interiorized without any mediation. Nevertheless, Alcoba’s trauma never dissolves completely and the author ends up having an ambiguous attitude towards both languages.