The Translingual Turn and French Literary Prize-winners: Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (2021)

Abstract

This article explores the complex relationship between the translingual turn and French literary prize-winners by focusing on a recent Goncourt laureate, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, and his plurivocal poetics of translingualism in La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (2021). Through an examination of the text and its contexts, intertexts and paratexts, it demonstrates how the author draws on past, present and future representations of translingual lives and works to denounce the French literary system and undermine its monolingual perspectives and editorial judgements, such as plagiarism. It shows how the interconnected network of references to other Black and/or African literary prize-winners functions as a support for the author’s translingual poetics, with various voices emerging through biographèmes, letters, messages and journal entries in the text. In conclusion, it confirms the connections between the translingual turn and French literary prize-winners, tracing how translingualism was introduced in the early twentieth century, firmly established around the turn of the millennium, then reinforced and renewed by Mbougar Sarr’s writing and experiences in 2021 and beyond.

Keywords:

• Translingualism
• translingual lives
• French literary prizes
• Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
• plurivocal poetics
• plagiarism
• biographèmes

Notes

1 Two other transnational and translingual writers were actually the youngest ever to win these prizes: the Goncourt went to 26-year-old Russian-French Henri Troyat (Lev Aslanovitch Tarassoff) for L’Araigne in 1938 and the Renaudot to 23-year-old French-Mauritian JMG Le Clézio for Le Procès-verbal in 1963.

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Notes on contributors

Jacqueline Dutton

Jacqueline Dutton is Professor of French Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has published widely on French language literatures, as well as food, wine, travel, and utopia as intercultural products of regional, national and international geopolitics. Her books include a monograph entitled Le Chercheur d’or et d’ailleurs: L’Utopie de JMG Le Clézio (2003) and coedited volumes Wine, Terroir, Utopia: Making New Worlds (2020) and The Routledge Handbook of Wine and Culture (2022), which won the Organisation Internationale du Vin Prize.