Claire Jeantils and Sara Wasson reflect on the experience of translating Wasson’s article “Before Narrative” into French, exploring the challenges and opportunities the process revealed for the field of medical humanities.
Sara Wasson’s article “Before Narrative: Episodic Reading and Representations of Chronic Pain” (2018) explores the challenges of representing chronic pain, particularly within cultural contexts that privilege certain kinds of narrative coherence and closure. Claire Jeantils, a French medical humanities scholar, found the article useful for her own research. Despite the article’s value and the growing translational medical humanities (see Engebretsen et al. 2020), the article had yet to be translated. Claire worked on its translation into French alongside Sara (to be published in Soin, Sens et Santé).
Claire first read this paper as part of her doctoral research on epilepsy narratives (Jeantils 2023a). It enabled her to analyse the temporalities of these narratives—particularly those of epileptic seizures and of the retelling of a seizure. While the substantial portions she had already translated for her dissertation might alone have warranted a full translation, it was ultimately the scientific urgency of introducing these new concepts into the French language that drove the project forward. In what follows, we reflect on the translation process, and the pedagogical, academic, and political stakes translation represents for the field of medical humanities.
Writing pain and its strange temporalities
Finding effective language to talk about chronic pain matters, not least because numerous people living with pain report feeling profoundly invisible and marginalised (de Ruddere et al. 2012; Ellis et al. 2021; Waugh et al. 2014). A key part of this vulnerability stems from the ways in which the telling of pain experience may not meet cultural expectations for temporalities of illness narration. The struggle to witness pain arguably stems less from any intrinsic unrepresentability and more from the ways that pain representation may not be legible, and that legibility is a function of cultural expectations of illness stories (Wasson 2023a). Chronic pain can resist any straightforward attempt to “tell time”: the origins can be murky, the endings can be elusive, and states can repeat or loop in strange impasse. As such, pain can require a richer vocabulary of temporality (Wasson 2017).
In response to these challenges, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project Translating Chronic Pain explored how short-form writing may be particularly useful in representing some of the most elusive aspects of pain experience. The project responded to the AHRC’s themes of “Translating Cultures” and “Science in Culture,” taking translation in its broadest sense by exploring the ways that literature can communicate the experience of chronic pain sufferers, as well as bridging divides between sufferers’ worlds and biomedical culture. Chronic pain poses exceptional challenges to such “translation,” not least in the ways pain science is not widely understood and the experience of people living with pain can resist medicalisation.
The project generated an anthology of flash writing about chronic pain. Definitions of “flash writing” vary significantly (Masih 2009), but in this instance we used it to denote micro-works of prose, poetry, or sequential art, 5–150 words in length. The article “Before Narrative” emerged from this project, exploring “the strained, equivocal labour of incoherence, of inhabiting a cryptic present moment” (Wasson 2018, 108). The article draws on affect theory to consider the emergent present as “veined with lines of force somatic, emotional, and social” (108), and suggests a practice of “episodic reading,” reading by attending less to the narrative trajectory as a whole, and instead to the specific moments and episodes. Such a stance can centre fragments and silence, and help us pause with the difficult, embodied work of enduring unresolved moments.
The new flourishing of French and Francophone medical humanities
We are currently witnessing a growing interest in the intersection of French studies and medical humanities (Elsner and Wilson 2024). However, most commentary on the constitution of French and Francophone medical humanities as a field comes from anglophone scholarship in French studies (to which Claire’s research also contributes). While it is important for Anglophone research to engage with other languages, this translation project arose in response to the specific needs of French-speaking contexts within humanités médicales. These contexts require both scientific and linguistic autonomy in relation to key medical humanities concepts in order to address the particularities of Francophone experiences of health and care, including “the country’s colonial past and its links with the history of medicine, as well as its consequences on today’s healthcare disparities” (Jeantils 2023b). The translation specifically seeks to address limitations in the French language around vocabulary related to temporality—and, most crucially, chronicity. For this reason, Claire chose to translate the article’s key expressions literally, hoping this would further help anchor the vocabulary in Francophone research contexts.
Open the canon!
Sara’s article emphasises chronicity as heterogenous, varying with experience and situated in sociopolitical and affective contexts. Claire found that the concept of a “temporality of thwarted connections” had been sorely lacking in a Francophone analytical literary repertoire until now. Consequently, the tools offered by this article could contribute to a renewal of the texts studied in French literary studies as a whole. This would be a fruitful consequence of the overflow work from the medical humanities. In the context of French literature teaching at undergraduate level in France, the corpus of texts studied is limited, more often than not, to a canon that exemplifies the main theories and figures of speech targeted in class. New tools for analysing temporality, especially in texts discussing illness, disability and or chronicity, mean new possibilities of texts to study. Nuancing thinking in this way has the potential to help teachers broaden their horizons and engage in discussions about intricate temporalities with students, as well as enhancing the depth of classroom discussion, and its ability to respond to complex experience.
Translation challenges and political value
It is also precisely because she is not a professional translator—but rather a researcher in medical humanities—that Claire deliberately chose (in agreement with Sara) a certain irregularity in how she approached this translation, at times favouring fluidity of phrasing, and at other times opting for a transparent rendering of the original syntax. In the original version, the accumulation of extra information in one sentence (subordinates) reflects the coexistence of multiple tensions in the lived experience of people living with chronic pain. Translating this stylistic discomfort was important also to allow the reader of Sara’s text to likewise “stay with the trouble,” as Haraway (2016) puts it. Thus, the translation highlights the political potential of academic writing, as well as its poetic power.
To make room for the different ways chronic pain is experienced, Claire translated the expressions referring to affected individuals as “personnes vivant avec des douleurs chroniques” [people living with chronic pain]. This plural is not used in English. The translation process enriched the language of pain by emphasising its inevitable pluralities, multiplicity of pains, varied whether due to locations or evolving over time. Conversely, Claire chose to retain the singular when referring to the biological phenomenon or diagnosis, thereby underlining the fundamental difference between the diagnostic label and the fluid experience of illness.
The plurality of the translation meshes with the recognition that pain experience is exceptionally diverse and cannot be generalised, inflected as it is by variable chronicities, individual positions, healthcare inequalities and systemic cultural violence. Black people, and particularly Black women, are at particular risk of unequal care (Geronimus 2023; Goyal et al. 2015; Hoffman et al. 2016). Health inequalities are also more likely to be experienced by women, both cis and trans, as well as by transgender men and people who are nonbinary, genderfluid or intersex (Hoffman et al. 2022; Samulowitz et al. 2018; Mnatzaganian et al. 2020; Gibson and Bauer 2017; Fish and Karban 2015; Mahoney 2019). The heterogeneity of pain experience makes it all the more important to multiply our language for pain—and even in English, to reach more often for the plural (Wasson 2023a).
The language of “labour” also raised translation challenges. In the context of the article, labour refers both to the physical effort found in childbirth, for example, and to the less visible effort of mourning work—a concept captured in the German term Trauerarbeit. Translating all of this simply as “labeur” in French is insufficient. Therefore, in agreement with Sara, the labour that constitutes the experience of the emergent present has been translated into French as “l’effort de la charge” [load effort], which conveys both the physical and emotional dimensions of responsibility and the weight inherent in the experience of chronic pain. Sara deeply valued the way this translation choice allowed us to surface the article’s core argument about honouring the pain experience and bearing witness to it.
The process of translation offered the opportunity to observe the intricacy and complexity of the original text, qualities that are closely tied to the article’s engagement with chronic temporalities. Through this translation, we argue that translational medical humanities offers a valuable lens for reflecting on the challenges of writing pain, honouring its strange temporalities and uncanny rhythms. The practice of translation, along with the conversations it sparked, allowed us to explore the liminal space between languages, opening new avenues for a more nuanced attunement to the lived experience the medical humanities seek to illuminate.
Invitation to readers
The Translating Pain online anthology of flash writing continues to accept submissions: more are welcome! Please visit https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/translatingpain/anthology.
Acknowledgements
Sara Wasson gratefully acknowledges that this work was supported by funding from the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council, as part of Translating Chronic Pain [Grant number AH/P015085/1]. Claire Jeantils gratefully acknowledges that the translation was supported by the Yves Hervouet Research Fellowship at Lancaster University.
About the authors
Claire Jeantils is an Honorary Fellow at the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University. She holds a PhD in French and comparative literature from Sorbonne Nouvelle University. Her postdoctoral research focuses on translational medical humanities and critical approaches to narrative practices in medicine, using epilepsy and chronic illnesses as a case study. Claire is the network lead of the International Narrative Neurology Network and the host of the Raconter l’épilepsie podcast. She is on LinkedIn: Claire Jeantils.
Sara Wasson is Reader in English Literature at Lancaster University, and researches literature, medicine and narrative. She led the UK AHRC-funded interdisciplinary project Translating Chronic Pain and has published widely in the critical medical humanities, and recent publications include Transplantation Gothic: Literature, Film and Medicine (Manchester UP) and a guest edited special issue of the journal Literature and Medicine on “Pain and Narrative.” You can follow her @SaraWasson_1 on X and @sara.wasson.words on Instagram.
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