Lost in Translation?

Jeanne Bouvier created a counter-archive of women’s international movement. Among the two boxes of her correspondence (Boîte 17/1-2) there is a special Dossier (3) on her epistolary communication with international syndicalists, including letters from the US, the UK, Canada, Argentina, Chile, China, Austria, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Boîte 18 on La Travail a Domicile additionally includes letters from Poland, while Boîte 23/Dossier 2 includes all the proceedings and reports from the 1919 Washington conference and the International Federation for Working Women (IFWW) that was subsequently established. Apart from their importance as an archive of international activism in gendered labour relations, these boxes carry rare traces of being and acting in translation without getting lost in it. Bouvier has carefully kept French and English versions of the letters she received mostly from her American comrades who had the resources to have their letters to and from Mademoiselle Bouvier translated. The English were more practical and often wrote their letters in French directly; the Latin American connections would also communicate in French, while sending documents and newspapers from their movement in Spanish. The Italians would just write in their language. There were cases when English and French would co-exist in the same document in a line by line translationLetters from the international labour movement

Jeanne Bouvier's fonds, kind permission

Bibliothèque Historique De la Ville de Paris