Journal articles on the topic 'Translations from Breton'

Increasing importance has been placed on Samuel Beckett's work as a translator in recent years. Here I look at his translation of the French surrealists into English in the Surrealist Issue of the avant-garde journal This Quarter, and develop the argument made in Pascale Sardin and Karine Germoni's excellent 2011 study, ‘Scarcely Disfigured: Beckett's Surrealist Translations’, from which I take many cues. In what follows, I propose a theory of Beckett's translation: that literary atavism, models of arrested development and recursive strategies were central to the Irish writer's work, and that he developed these in his translations, in the ways that he preserved the past in his surreal translations, learning to become what André Breton called ‘the silent receptacle of many echoes’.

Translation is usually deemed to help bridge gaps but seldom thought of as a means of strengthening or, at least, highlighting borders. The present article uses the example of translations involving the Breton language in order to show that translation may favour negotiation by both helping negotiators to understand each other and having them recognise the social border that makes them different. The article explains firstly the author’s understanding of borders and negotiation. Secondly, the case of translation from and into Breton is examined. And finally, the discussion is extended to the European institutions, where European language policy also illustrates the dual function of translation in negotiation. The example of Breton evidences that translation fosters social distinction, language development and cooperation. At the EU level, the same roles are assumed by translation services and they contribute moreover to the legitimacy of the institutions and to the exercise of democracy. Such a conclusion invites to consider translation as an adequate means to manage language and cultural differences, even compared to language learning. It may be used, then, to deal with pressing issues such as the current migration flows to Europe.

The Breton Lays in Middle English is an enigmatic label customarily used to designate eight or nine brief narratives: Sir Orfeo, Sir Degaré, Lay le Freine, “The Franklin's Tale,” Sir Launfal, The Earl of Toulouse, Emaré, and Sir Gowther. The label is awkward because it may seem to suggest that the poems are consistently derived from or inspired by Breton or Old French sources and thus are a sort of stepchildren, little more than translations or, worse, misunderstandings of a multi-media heritage. Most scholars have seen the grouping as traditional and artificial, passed along in uncritical reception, not resting on substantial generic similarities that distinguish the poems from other literary forms. John Finlayson, for instance, concludes, “In fact, considered coldly, shortness and adventure or ordeal would seem to be the only things that can really be isolated as universal characteristics.” Some scholars have accounted for the poems as a set. The distinctions they discuss commonly include the lays' close relation to the conventions of the folk-tale, relationship to provincial audiences, and a growing sophistication of the craft of fiction.

Abstract This article surveys some of the main contributions of female scholars to the study of Arthurian literature in the Celtic languages from the nineteenth century to the present day. Scholarship by women has been integral to the study of Celtic Arthurian literature since the translations of native Welsh texts by Lady Charlotte Guest. Since then, women’s contributions have been foundational to the field, influencing theories of transmission, analysis and the standard editions of much Arthurian material in Welsh, Irish, Gaelic and Breton. They remain vital to the life of Arthurian scholarship, and the final section addresses contributions by younger scholars whose lasting influence remains to be seen.

The twelfth-century Anglo-Norman poet Marie de France undertook to preserve for posterity the adventures and romances embodied in a vanishing genre, the old Breton lais as she had heard them recounted by minstrels. That she succeeded is evidenced by the popularity of these lais for more than eight hundred years; that she perhaps succeeded too well is suggested by the fact that, within a century of her lifetime, the Breton lais had become exclusively a French form of literature, and whatever might have been the original form, linguistic structure and cultural content in Breton has been relegated to the realm of hypothesis. This raises questions about the relationship between translation and cultural autonomy. Marie’s purported memorial to the Bretons became instead an institution of French language and culture. Had the Breton features been totally effaced, this could be called assimilation; had they been preserved intact, it would have been literal translation. In fact, Marie’s work can be reduced to no such simple binary. Nor can her aims be analyzed through any single lens, whether political, religious, cultural or artistic. Rather, I argue that her unsettling and robust positioning of contradictory elements—sorcery, sensuality, feudality, religion—results from her strategy of adopting the memory of the Bretons: neither glossing over its strangeness nor highlighting it as foreign, but making its distant and exotic characteristics part of her own invented heritage. I conclude that her translation project is more effectively analyzed as an ethical process of incorporation and restitution (Steiner) than as a placement along the spectrum of foreignization versus domestication (Venuti).

Arguing that the concept of littérature-monde conceals unequal relations between literary cultures, this article examines the socio-economic contexts of literary translation from and into Breton from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century. The value of translation across the corpus of 1025 texts lies primarily in creating intercultural relationships and promoting cultural diversity. Translation into Breton represents a vital defence of a language with dwindling speaker numbers: in the late 1970s it increases dramatically, with littérature de jeunesse spearheading a change in state policy allowing regional languages to be taught in schools. Yet translation can also reinforce an existing power imbalance, highlighting the central role played by French in the linguistic and literary construction of Breton society. Poetry, songs and contes translated from Breton often perpetuate stereotypes of a bardic, oral culture, while nationalist writers reject self-translation into French as capitulation before the dominant culture. Since the 1980s, many have chosen to bypass French by translating into languages such as Welsh, Scottish, Irish or Catalan, creating a network of minority literatures. Since the market for Breton translation is so small, however, such texts serve as valuable identity markers, a symbolic, affective force articulating a quest for socio-political legitimacy via literature.

AbstractOn the verso of the last leaf of a twelfth-century manuscript containing the poetry of Hilarius, a student of Abelard, appears a faux charter purporting to have been issued by Arthur, king of the Britons, in the hundredth year of his immortality. In the act, Arthur thanks the descendants of his British subjects for their fidelity and grants them an exclusive franchise to fish in secret rivulets. The privilege contains two prohibitions: one prohibiting Britons from wearing shoes and the other prohibiting them from owning cats. This article provides a diplomatic edition, English translation and analysis of King Arthur’s Charter. It identifies the strange stipulations of the charter as tropes of anti-Breton satire, attested also in the Privilège aux Bretons (c. 1240), an Old French song that mocks the customs and occupations of impoverished Breton immigrants to thirteenth-century France.

In this study we use a translation corpus of English novels translated into two closely related Celtic languages, Welsh and Breton, as one way of shedding light on the extent to which languages can influence each other over time: Welsh has a long history of contact with English, and Breton with French. Ever since the work of Leonard Talmy (1991, 2000 etc.), linguists have recognized that languages fall into a small number of types with respect to how they prefer to talk about motion events. English is a good exemplar of the satellite-framed type, whereas French exemplifies the verb-framed type. Translation scholars have observed that translating between languages of two different types raises interesting questions (Slobin 2005; Cappelle 2012), and the topic is also of interest from the perspective of language contact: is it possible for a language of one type, in a situation of prolonged and intense bilingualism with a language of another type, to be influenced or perhaps even to change its own rhetorical preferences? The translation corpus provides a body of data which holds constant the starting point – the cue in each case was an English motion event in the source text. We do indeed find that Welsh and Breton have diverged in important ways in terms of their preferences for encoding motion events: Breton is revealed to have moved significantly in the direction of French with respect to these preferences.

In the past decade a flurry of interest has appeared in the Surrealist Art and Liberty Group working in 1930s Egypt. Discussions of the circulation of Arabic literature have usually highlighted the important position of translation as cultural mediator. Thinking of modern Arabic literature as world literature obliges us to consider, however, that (colonial) languages such as French and English are in some ways creolized within, or inherent to, modern Arabic literature. The Surrealist practice of fluidity, that is, mixing artistic genres like literature and art, pushes interesting questions about the role of translation and bilingualism in Arabic world literature (or world literature written by Arabophone writers), and the need for language itself in world culture. For which national cultural sphere do we claim the work of the Egyptian Surrealists, and what kind of analytical mediator do we use to connect these works to others when translation is not available?

After presenting the key role played by translation in strengthening the literary canon of minoritized languages, this paper goes on to provide a detailed overview and analysis of the past twenty years of Breton literary translation since the turn of the millennium, covering a variety of aspects ranging from the overall evolution over time, target publics, the genres and the authors selected for translation, the range of source languages and the translators themselves, integrating a gender-based outlook whenever necessary. Taken as an integral part of the publishing sector, comparisons are drawn throughout regarding originals published in Breton for the same period. Particular emphasis is also laid on gauging the initial of the Literary Translation Program as a means of determining and potentially redirecting theoverall strategy for literary translation going forwards.

AbstractWe show that the bicategory of (representable) orbifolds and good maps is equivalent to the bicategory of orbifold translation groupoids and generalized equivariant maps, giving a mechanism for transferring results from equivariant homotopy theory to the orbifold category. As an application, we use this result to define orbifold versions of a couple of equivariant cohomology theories: K-theory and Bredon cohomology for certain coefficient diagrams.

In the southeastern Cape Breton Highlands Neoproterozoic plutonic and metamorphic rocks outcrop in upland areas whereas Carboniferous sedimentary rocks are found in the river valleys and coastal lowlands. Detailed analysis of the contacts between these two groups of rocks including mapping, geometric constructions of the contact relations, structural geological investigations, petrographic analysis and geophysical map interpretations show that the basement rocks were emplaced by a thrust fault that extends at least from the Baddeck River valley to North River, and possibly includes klippen south and east of the highlands. The thrust fault transported a slab of rock with minimum thickness of 200 m a distance of at least 8 km over Horton and Windsor group rocks. East-directed translation of the thrust block likely occurred during the Alleghanian orogeny, and appears to mirror movement previously identified in the northern and western Cape Breton Highlands, implying that much of the upland geology is allochthonous, but likely rooted in the central highlands as positive flower structure.

Abstract In 1929, the father of surrealism André Breton and his friends published a “world map in the time of the surrealists,” which placed the Pacific in the center with a disappearing Europe and a nonexistent USA, and showing oversized islands from New Guinea to Ireland. During the 1930s, surrealist ideas and practices were creatively transformed beyond recognition by marginal writers who had emigrated to and/or excommunicated surrealists living in Paris. Looking beyond Casanova’s and Moretti’s centers and (semi)peripheries that organize the world system, I argue that by thinking instead of cultural centers like Paris as inhabited simultaneously both by central but also by (semi)peripheral writers we may get new and more nuanced insights into the circulation and transformation of ideas beyond the traditional story of surrealism told by literary histories. Using the example of the French translation of Joyce’s “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” I uncover the hidden story of the transformation of Joyce’s text into a surrealist cognate from the peripheries of surrealism itself.

AbstractThe lexeme σχο νοsigma 'reed, rush' in the LXX denotes a 'pen' once and translates twice the name 'Shittim'. Although some explanation is needed for these instances, they are explicable translations. In Jer. xviii 15, however, the glosses 'reed' or 'measure' do not make sense in the context, and 'way' is probably to be preferred. This would be a metaphorical application of the meaning 'measure', popular in Hellenistic geographers. The same meaning also makes sense of the context of LXX Ps. cxxxviii 3, where 'bed' is the normal gloss suggested. The meaning 'bed' is derived from Schleusner and Brenton, and, although it is not attested elsewhere in Greek, has been adopted by the Supplements to LSJ and even incorrectly categorized there under a gloss with a different denotation. The interpretation of σχο νοsigma as 'way' is supported by similar metaphorical uses in the LXX for words from the semantic field of 'way'.

This round-table discussion, edited by Eva Urban and Lisa FitzGerald, took place on 5 July 2019 as part of the conference ‘New Romantics: Performing Ireland and Cosmopolitanism on the Anniversary of Human Rights’ organized by the editors at the Brian Friel Theatre, Queen’s University Belfast. Lisa FitzGerald is a theatre historian and ecocritic who completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique (CRBC), Université Rennes 2 and the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She is the author of Re-Place: Irish Theatre Environments (Peter Lang, 2017) and Digital Vision and the Ecological Aesthetic (forthcoming, Bloomsbury, 2020). Eva Urban is a Senior Research Fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice, Queen’s University Belfast, and an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Irish Studies, QUB. She is the author of Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2011) and La Philosophie des Lumières dans le Théâtre Breton: Tradition et Influences (Université de Rennes, 2019). Rosemary Jenkinson is a Belfast playwright and writer of five short story collections. Her plays include The Bonefire (Rough Magic), Planet Belfast (Tinderbox), White Star of the North, Here Comes the Night (Lyric), Lives in Translation (Kabosh Theatre Company), and Michelle and Arlene (Accidental Theatre). Her writing for radio includes Castlereagh to Kandahar (BBC Radio 3) and The Blackthorn Tree (BBC Radio 4). She has received a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to write a memoir. Tom Maguire is Head of the School of Arts and Humanities at Ulster University and has published widely on Irish and Scottish theatre and in the areas of Theatre for Young Audiences and Storytelling Performance. His heritage research projects include the collection Heritage after Conflict: Northern Ireland (Routledge, 2018, co-edited with Elizabeth Crooke). David Grant is a former Programme Director of the Dublin Theatre Festival and was Artistic Director of the Lyric Theatre in Belfast. He has worked extensively as a theatre director throughout Ireland and is co-investigator of an AHRC-funded research project into Arts for Reconciliation. He lectures in drama at Queen’s University Belfast.

Cookbooks can be interpreted as sites of exchange and transformation. This is not only due to their practical use as written instructions that assist in turning ingredients into dishes, but also to their significance as interconnecting mediums between teacher and student, perceiver and perceived, past and present. Hinging on inescapable notions of apprenticeship, occasion, and the passing of time—and being at once familiar and unfamiliar to both the reader and the writer—the recipe “as text” renders a specific brand of culinary uncanny. In outlining the function of cookbooks as chronicles of the everyday, Janet Theophano points out that they “are one of a variety of written forms, such as diaries and journals, that [people] have adapted to recount and enrich their lives […] blending raw ingredients into a new configuration” (122). The cookbook unveils the peculiar ability of the ephemeral “text” to find permanence and materiality through the embodied framework action and repetition. In view of its propensity to be read, evaluated, and reconfigured, the cookbook can be read as a manifestation of voice, a site of interpretation and communication between writer and reader which is defined not by static assessment, but by dynamic and often incongruous exchanges of emotions, mysteries, and riddles. Taking the in-between status of the cookbook as point of departure, this paper analyses the cookbook as a “living dead” entity, a revenant text bridging the gap between the ephemerality of the word and the tangibility of the physical action. Using Joanne Harris’s fictional treatment of the trans-generational cookbook in Five Quarters of the Orange (2001) as an evocative example, the cookbook is read as a site of “memory, mourning and melancholia” which is also inevitably connected—in its aesthetic, political and intellectual contexts—to the concept of “return.” The “dead” voice in the cookbook is resurrected through practice. Re-enacting instructions brings with it a sense of transformative exchange that, in both its conceptual and factual dimensions, recalls those uncanny structural principles that are the definitive characteristic of the Gothic. These find particular resonance, at least as far as cookbooks are concerned, in “a sense of the unspeakable” and a “correspondence between dreams, language, writing” (Castricano 13). Understanding the cookbook as a “Gothic text” unveils one of the most intriguing aspects of the recipe as a vault of knowledge and memory that, in an appropriately mysterious twist, can be connected to the literary framework of the uncanny through the theme of “live burial.” As an example of the written word, a cookbook is a text that “calls” to the reader; that call is not only sited in interpretation—as it can be arguably claimed for the majority of written texts—but it is also strongly linked to a sense of lived experience on the writer’s part. This connection between “presences” is particularly evident in examples of cookbooks belonging to what is known as “autobiographical cookbooks”, a specific genre of culinary writing where “recipes play an integral part in the revelation of the personal history” (Kelly 258). Known examples from this category include Alice B. Toklas’s famous Cook Book (1954) and, more recently, Nigel Slater’s Toast (2003). In the autobiographical cookbook, the food recipes are fully intertwined with the writer’s memories and experiences, so that the two things, as Kelly suggests, “could not be separated” (258). The writer of this type of cookbook is, one might venture to argue, always present, always “alive”, indistinguishable and indivisible from the experience of any recipe that is read and re-enacted. The culinary phantom—understood here as the “voice” of the writer and how it re-lives through the re-enacted recipe—functions as a literary revenant through the culturally prescribed readability of the recipes as a “transtextual” (Rashkin 45) piece. The term, put forward by Esther Rashkin, suggests a close relationship between written and “lived” narratives that is reliant on encrypted messages of haunting, memory, and spectrality (45). This fundamental concept—essential to grasp the status of cookbooks as a haunted text—helps us to understand the writer and instructor of recipes as “being there” without necessarily being present. The writers of cookbooks are phantomised in that their presence—recalling the materiality of action and motion—is buried alive in the pages of the cookbook. It remains tacit and unheard until it is resurrected through reading and recreating the recipe. Although this idea of “coming alive” finds resonance in virtually all forms of textual exchange, the phantomatic nature of the relationship between writer and reader finds its most tangible expression in the cookbook precisely because of the practical and “lived in” nature of the text itself. While all texts, Jacques Derrida suggests, call to us to inherit their knowledge through “secrecy” and choice, cookbooks are specifically bound to a dynamic injunction of response, where the reader transforms the written word into action, and, in so doing, revives the embodied nature of the recipe as much as it resurrects the ghostly presence of its writer (Spectres of Marx 158). As a textual medium housing kitchen phantoms, cookbooks designate “a place” that, as Derrida puts it, draws attention to the culinary manuscript’s ability to communicate a legacy that, although not “natural, transparent and univocal”, still calls for an “interpretation” whose textual choices form the basis of enigma, inhabitation, and haunting (Spectres of Marx 16). It is this mystery that animates the interaction between memory, ghostly figures and recipes in Five Quarters of the Orange. Whilst evoking Derrida’s understanding of the written texts as a site of secrecy, exchange and (one may argue) haunting, Harris simultaneously illustrates Kelly’s contention that the cookbook breaks the barriers between the seemingly common everyday and personal narratives. In the story, Framboise Dartigen—a mysterious woman in her sixties—returns to the village of her childhood in the Loire region of France. Here she rescues the old family farm from fifty years of abandonment and under the acquired identity of the veuve Simone, opens a local crêperie, serving simple, traditional dishes. Harris stresses how, upon her return to the village, Framboise brings with her resentment, shameful family secrets and, most importantly, her mother Mirabelle’s “album”: a strange hybrid of recipe book and diary, written during the German occupation of the Loire region in World War II. The recipe album was left to Framboise as an inheritance after her mother’s death: “She gave me the album, valueless, then, except for the thoughts and insights jotted in the margins alongside recipes and newspaper cuttings and herbal cures. Not a diary, precisely; there are no dates in the album, no precise order” (Harris 14). It soon becomes clear that Mirabelle had an extraordinary relationship with her recipe album, keeping it as a life transcript in which food preparation figures as a main focus of attention: “My mother marked the events in her life with recipes, dishes of her own invention or interpretations of old favourites. Food was her nostalgia, her celebration, its nurture and preparation the sole outlet for her creativity” (14). The album is described by Framboise as her mother’s only confidant, its pages the sole means of expression of events, thoughts and preoccupations. In this sense, the recipes contain knowledge of the past and, at the same time, come to represent a trans-temporal coordinate from which to begin understanding Mirabelle’s life and the social situations she experienced while writing the album. As the cookery album acts as a medium of self-representation for Mirabelle, Harris also gestures towards the idea that recipes offer an insight into a person that history may have otherwise forgotten. The culinary album in Five Quarters of the Orange establishes itself as a bonding element and a trans-temporal gateway through which an exchange ensues between mother and daughter. The etymological origin of the word “recipe” offers a further insight into the nature of the exchange. The word finds its root in the Latin word reciperere, meaning simultaneously “to give and to receive” (Floyd and Forster 6). Mirabelle’s recipes are not only the textual representation of the patterns and behaviours on which her life was based but, most importantly, position themselves in a process of an uncanny exchange. Acting as the surrogate of the long-passed Mirabelle, the album’s existence as a haunted culinary document ushers in the possibility of secrets and revelations, contradictions, and concealment. On numerous occasions, Framboise confesses that the translation of the recipe book was a task with which she did not want to engage. Forcing herself, she describes the reading as a personal “struggle” (276). Fearing what the book could reveal—literally, the recipes of a lifetime—she suspects that the album will demand a deep involvement with her mother’s existence: “I had avoided looking at the album, feeling absurdly at fault, a voyeuse, as if my mother might come in at any time and see me reading her strange secrets. Truth is, I didn’t want to know her secrets” (30). On the one hand, Framboise’s fear could be interpreted as apprehension at the prospect of unveiling unpleasant truths. On the other, she is reluctant to re-live her mother’s emotions, passions and anxieties, feeling they may actually be “sublimated into her recipes” (270). Framboise’s initial resistance to the secrets of the recipe book is quickly followed by an almost obsessive quest to “translate” the text: “I read through the album little by little during those lengthening nights. I deciphered the code [and] wrote down and cross-referenced everything by means of small cards, trying to put everything in sequence” (225). As Harris exposes Framboise’s personal struggle in unravelling Mirabelle’s individual history, the daughter’s hermeneutic excavation into the past is problematised by her mother’s strange style: “The language […] in which much of the album was written was alien to me, and after a few abortive attempts to decipher it, I abandoned the idea […] the mad scrawlings, poems, drawings and accounts […] were written with no apparent logic, no order that I could discover” (31). Only after a period of careful interpretation does Framboise understand the confused organisation of her mother’s culinary thoughts. Once the daughter has decoded the recipes, she is able to use them: “I began to make cakes [...] the brioche and pain d’épices of the region, as well as some [...] Breton specialties, packets of crêpes dentelle, fruit tarts and packs de sablés, biscuits, nutbread, cinnamon snaps [...] I used my mother’s old recipes” (22). As Framboise engages with her mother’s album, Mirabelle’s memory is celebrated in the act of reading, deciphering, and recreating the recipes. As a metaphorically buried collection waiting to be interpreted, the cookbook is the catalyst through which the memory of Mirabelle can be passed to her daughter and live on. Discussing the haunted nature of texts, Derrida suggests that once one interprets a text written by another, that text “comes back” and “lives on” (‘Roundtable on Translation’ 158). In this framework of return and exchange, the replication of the Mirabelle’s recipes, by her daughter Framboise, is the tangible expression of the mother’s life. As the collective history of wartime France and the memory of Mirabelle’s life are reaffirmed in the cookbook, the recipes allow Framboise to understand what is “staring [her] in the face”, and finally see “the reason for her [mother’s] actions and the terrible repercussions on [her] own” life (268). As the process of culinary translating takes place, it becomes clear that her deceased mother’s album conceals a legacy that goes beyond material possessions. Mirabelle “returns” through the cookbook and that return, in Jodey Castricano’s words, “acts as inheritance.” In the hauntingly autobiographical context of the culinary album, the mother’s phantom and the recipes become “inseparable” (29). Within the resistant and at times contradictory framework of the Gothic text, legacy is always passed on through a process of haunting which must be accepted in order to understand and decode the writing. This exchange becomes even more significant when cookbooks are concerned, since the intended engagement with the recipes is one of acceptance and response. When the cookbook “calls”, the reader is asked “to respond to an injunction” (Castricano 17). In this framework, Mirabelle’s album in Five Quarters of the Orange becomes the haunted channel through which the reader can communicate with her “ghost” or, to be more specific, her “spectral signature.” In these terms, the cookbook is a vector for reincarnation and haunting, while recipes themselves function as the vehicle for the parallel consciousness of culinary phantoms to find a status of reincarnated identification through their connection to a series of repeated gestures. The concept of “phantom” here is particularly useful in the understanding put forward by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok—and later developed by Derrida and Castricano—as “the buried speech of another”, the shadow of perception and experience that returns through the subject’s text (Castricano 11). In the framework of the culinary, the phantom returns in the cookbook through an interaction between the explicit or implied “I” of the recipe’s instructions, and the physical and psychological dimension of the “you” that finds lodging in the reader as re-enactor. In the cookbook, the intertextual relationship between the reader’s present and the writer’s past can be identified, as Rashkin claims, “in narratives organised by phantoms” (45). Indeed, as Framboise’s relationship with the recipe book is troubled by her mother’s spectral presence, it becomes apparent that even the writing of the text was a mysterious process. Mirabelle’s album, in places, offers “cryptic references” (14): moments that are impenetrable, indecipherable, enigmatic. This is a text written “with ghosts”: “the first page is given to my father’s death—the ribbon of his Légion d’Honneur pasted thickly to the paper beneath a blurry photograph and a neat recipe for buck-wheat pancakes—and carries a kind of gruesome humour. Under the picture my mother has pencilled 'Remember—dig up Jerusalem artichokes. Ha! Ha! Ha!'” (14). The writing of the recipe book is initiated by the death of Mirabelle’s husband, Yannick, and his passing is marked by her wish to eradicate from the garden the Jerusalem artichokes which, as it is revealed later, were his favourite food. According to culinary folklore, Jerusalem artichokes are meant to be highly “spermatogenic”, so their consumption can make men fertile (Amato 3). Their uprooting from Mirabelle’s garden, after the husband’s death, signifies the loss of male presence and reproductive function, as if Mirabelle herself were rejecting the symbol of Yannick’s control of the house. Her bittersweet, mocking comments at this disappearance—the insensitive “Ha! Ha! Ha!”—are indicative of Mirabelle’s desire to detach herself from the restraints of married life. Considering women’s traditional function as family cooks, her happiness at the lack of marital duties extends to the kitchen as much as to the bedroom. The destruction of Yannick’s artichokes is juxtaposed with a recipe for black-wheat pancakes which the family then “ate with everything” (15). It is at this point that Framboise recalls suddenly and with a sense of shock that her mother never mentioned her father after his death. It is as if a mixture of grief and trauma animate Mirabelle’s feeling towards her deceased husband. The only confirmation of Yannick’s existence persists in the pages of the cookbook through Mirabelle’s occasional use of the undecipherable “bilini-enverlini”, a language of “inverted syllables, reversed words, nonsense prefixes and suffices”: “Ini tnawini inoti plainexini [...] Minini toni nierus niohwbi inoti” (42). The cryptic language was, we are told, “invented” by Yannick, who used to “speak it all the time” (42). Yannick’s presence thus is inscribed in the album, which is thereby transformed into an evocative historical document. Although he disappears from his wife’s everyday life, Yannick’s ghost—to which the recipe book is almost dedicated on the initial page—remains and haunts the pages. The cryptic cookbook is thus also a “crypt.” In their recent, quasi-Gothic revision of classical psychoanalysis, Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok write about the trauma of loss in relation to psychic crypts. In mourning a loved one, they argue, the individual can slip into melancholia by erecting what they call an “inner crypt.” In the psychological crypt, the dead—or, more precisely, the memory of the dead—can be hidden or introjectively “devoured”, metaphorically speaking, as a way of denying its demise. This form of introjection—understood here in clear connection to the Freudian concept of literally “consuming” one’s enemy—is interpreted as the “normal” progression through which the subject accepts the death of a loved one and slowly removes its memory from consciousness. However, when this process of detachment encounters resistance, a “crypt” is formed. The crypt maps, as Abraham and Torok claim, the psychological topography of “the untold and unsayable secret, the feeling unfelt, the pain denied” (21). In its locus of mystery and concealment, the crypt is haunted by the memory of the dead which, paradoxically, inhabits it as a “living-dead.” Through the crypt, the dead can “return” to disturb consciousness. In Five Quarters of the Orange, the encoded nature of Mirabelle’s recipes—emerging as such on multiple levels of interpretation—enables the memory of Yannick to “return” within the writing itself. In his preface to Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf-Man’s Magic Word, Derrida argues that the psychological crypt houses “the ghost that comes haunting out the Unconscious of the other” (‘Fors’ xxi). Mirabelle’s cookbook might therefore be read as an encrypted reincarnation of her husband’s ghostly memory. The recipe book functions as the encrypted passageway through which the dead re-join the living in a responsive cycle of exchange and experience. Writing, in this sense, re-creates the subject through the culinary framework and transforms the cookbook into a revenant text colonised by the living-dead. Abraham and Torok suggest that “reconstituted from the memories of words, scenes and affects, the objective correlative of loss is buried alive in the crypt” (130). With this idea in mind, it is possible to suggest that, among Mirabelle’s recipes, the Gothicised Yannick inhabits a culinary crypt. It is through his associations with both the written and the practical dimension food that he remains, to borrow Derrida’s words, a haunting presence that Mirabelle is “perfectly willing to keep alive” within the bounds of the culinary vault (‘Fors’ xxi). As far as the mourning crypt is concerned, the exchange of consciousness that is embedded in the text takes place by producing a level of experiential concealment, based on the overarching effect of Gothicised interiority. Derrida remarks that “the crypt from which the ghost comes back belongs to someone else” (‘Fors’ 119). This suggestion throws into sharp relief the ability of the cookbook as a haunted text to draw the reader into a process of consciousness transmission and reception that is always and necessarily a form of “living-dead” exchange. In these terms, the recipe itself—especially in its embodiment as instructed actions—needs to be understood as a vector for establishing the uncanny barriers of signification erected by the bounds of the cookbook itself as a haunted site of death, enchantment, and revenant signs. In this way, eating, a vital and animated activity, is “disturbingly blended with death, decomposition and the corpse” (Piatti-Farnell 146). And far from simply providing nourishment for the living, Mirabelle’s encrypted recipes continue to feed the dead through cycles of mourning and melancholia. Mirabelle’s cookbook, therefore, becomes a textual example of “cryptomimeses”, a writing practice that, echoing the convention of the Gothic framework, generates its ghostly effects through embodying the structures of remembrance and the dynamics of autobiographic deconstructive writing (Castricano 8). As heimliche and unheimliche collide in practices of culinary reading and writing, the cookbook acts as quasi-mystical, haunted space through which the uncanny frameworks of language and experience can become actualised. ReferencesAbraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Amato, Joseph. The Great Jerusalem Artichoke Circus. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Castricano, Jodey. Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing. London: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2003. Derrida, Jacques. “Fors: the Anglish words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.” Eds. Nicholas Abraham, and Maria Torok. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Pr, 1986. xi–xlviii ---. “Roundtable on Translation.” The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. London: U of Nebraska P, 1985. 91–161. Floyd, Janet, and Laurel Foster. The Recipe Reader: Narratives–Contexts–Traditions. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Harris, Joanne. Five Quarters of the Orange. Maidenhead: Black Swan, 2002. Kelly, Traci Marie. “‘If I Were a Voodoo Priestess’: Women’s Culinary Autobiographies.” Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender and Race. Ed. Sherrie A. Inness. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001. 251–70. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2011. Rashkin, Esther. Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Slater, Nigel. Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger. London: Harper Perennial, 2004. Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through The Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Toklas, Alice B. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. New York: Perennial,1984.

The variable “actors” records individuals or collectives, who appear as a source for assertions of facts and evaluations and whose actions, interests or demands are addressed in an article (Hillebrand, 2005). In the case of media self-coverage, and especially when dealing with media policy issues, media organizations themselves might be affected by them. Hence, media organizations may strategically use their privileged access to the public to promote their own interests, for example by selecting actors and positions that will be publicly heard. Several studies have found a predominance of “opportune actors” and experts representing a position that supports media organization’s own interests (Kemner, Scherer, & Weinacht, 2008; Lichtenstein, 2011; Maier & Dogruel, 2016). Field of application/theoretical foundation The variable serves to identify the actors involved in specific media discourses and can serve as an indicator for attempted influence by media organizations through biased selection. Example study Pedrazzi. 2020 Information on Pedrazzi, 2020 Research interest: Pedrazzi (2020) investigates Swiss media coverage of media policy, public service in general and the Swiss public service organization SRG SSR in the context of the referendum on the revision of the Federal Act on Radio and Television (RTVA) in 2015 and the No-Billag initiative in 2018. Object of analysis: Representative samples of articles covering each the revision of the RTVA and the No-Billag initiative in twelve regional and national Swiss German print and online publications with different ownership. Time frame of analysis: January 1, 2010 to March 4, 2018 Information about variable Level of analysis: article Operationalization/Coding instructions: “The main actor and the two most important secondary actors mentioned in the article and who speak directly or indirectly on media policy issues, i.e. either on one of the proposals (revision of RTVA and/or No-Billag initiative) and its consequences, on the subject of public service, on Swiss public service organization SRG SSR or on the media market, are recorded. However, if an actor is only mentioned - without an explanation of his/her views - he/she is not coded. The main actor is the one who is presented as central in the title, subtitle and/or lead. The title, subtitle (if available) and lead are the first criteria for the assignment. If several actors appear in the same text subunit, the order is decisive. If no clear assignment can be made due to title/subtitle/lead, the entire contribution is used. The main actor is then the most extensively presented actor in terms of volume. The most important secondary actor is determined according to the same criteria as the main actor (if the main actor is not taken into account). The second most important secondary actor is determined according to the same criteria as the main actor (if the main actor and the most important secondary actor are not considered). The journalist can also be coded as an actor if he/she reveals his/her opinion. In the case of commentaries/columns, the author counts as the main actor. In the case of interviews, the interviewee counts as the main actor, but not the journalist.” Values: Pedrazzi (2020) Government, administration, parliament or courts as a body or institution and/or individual representatives of the executive, legislative or judiciary system (however, not individual politicians speaking for themselves or their party) Federal Council Federal Council as a whole or individual members Federal departments, authorities and commissions Departments (e.g. DETEC), federal offices (e.g. OFCOM) authorities and commissions (e.g. ComCom) and their representatives National Council and Council of States Parliament or commissions, including commission presidents or spokespersons when acting in this capacity. Note: Individual parliamentarians must be coded as members of their parties. Cantonal government Cantonal Government as a whole or individual members acting in this capacity Cantonal administration Cantonal administration and their representatives Cantonal parliament Cantonal parliaments Municipalities Members of the municipal council, administration, etc.) Courts Federal court / cantonal court / district court etc. as well as judges acting in their function Other bodies or institutions of the government, administration, parliament or justice Parties and party representatives (incl. party subsections) BDP, Bürgerlich-Demokratische Partei Junge BDP CVP, Christlich-demokratische Volkspartei (inkl. CSP) Junge CVP EVP, Evangelische Volkspartei Junge EVP FDP, die Liberalen (inkl. LPS/Liberale Partei der Schweiz) Jungfreisinnige GLP, Grünliberale Partei Junge Grünliberale GPS, Grüne Partei der Schweiz Junge Grüne SP, Sozialdemokratische Partei JUSO SVP, Schweizerische Volkspartei Junge SVP Lega dei Ticinesi Mouvement Citoyens Romand Independents Other parties Initiative, referendum and counter committees Referendum Committee against the revision of the RTVG Committee "Ja zum RTVG" Committee "Nein zur neuen Billag-Mediensteuer" Initiative Committee No Billag incl. Olivier Kessler Committee "NEIN zu No-Billag" Committee "Nein zum Sendeschluss" Other initiative, referendum and counter committees Media, telecommunications and advertising companies and their representatives (incl. owners, editors) SRG SSR incl. SRF, RTS, RSI, RTR NZZ Mediengruppe incl. Radio FM1, TVO, Tele 1, Radio Pilatus, etc. Tamedia Ringier incl. Radio NRJ AZ Medien incl. Radio Argovia, Radio 24, Radio 32, Tele M1, Tele Züri, Tele Bärn, etc. Somedia incl. Radio Südostschweiz, Tele Südostschweiz, etc. Basler Zeitung Medien 3+ Gruppe ProSieben Sat.1 Gruppe RTL Gruppe Teleclub/Swisscom UPC Cablecom Sunrise Orange/Salt Publisuisse Goldbach Medien Other private media companies Media associations and their representatives Verband Schweizer Medien – Médias Suisses – Stampa Svizzera VSP - Verband Schweizer Privatradios RRR - Radio Régionales Romandes Unikom – Union nicht-kommerzorientierter Lokalradios Telesuisse - Verband der Schweizer Regionalsender impressum – Schweizer JournalistInnen Syndicom SSM – Schweizer Syndikat Medienschaffender Swisscable asut Schweizer Werbung – Publicité Suisse – Publicità Svizzera Other media associations Other associations (economic, cultural, civil society, etc.) economiesuisse Schweizerischer Gewerbeverband Schweizerischer Arbeitgeberverband avenir suisse Schweizerischer Gewerkschaftsbund Kaufmännischer Verband KV Schweiz Travail Suisse Stiftung für Konsumentenschutz Konsumentenforum Fédération romande des consommateurs Associazione consumatrici della Svizzera italiana Think tanks Cultural associations Incl. film and music professionals Sports associations Civil society organizations and associations Other associations Other economic or socio-cultural actors Industry experts Companies not operating in the media, telecommunications or advertising industry Science, research Celebrities From sports, culture, show business, etc. Members of the audience (viewers, readers, users) or simple citizens (without representative function) Author (in case of op-ed articles) Other actors Intercoder reliability: Intercoder reliability (Krippendorff’s Alpha) coefficient of .77 across categories (9 coders) Codebook available at (last accessed on 09.12.2020): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4312912 Information on Hillebrand, 2005 Research interest: Hillebrand (2005) examines how print media outlets report on television (which content, actors, concerns and ways of addressing issues dominate in the coverage and to what extent it includes criticism).Object of analysis: Purposive sample (four times two weeks around media-relevant events) of articles containing a reference to television in six national daily newspapers, two national weekly newspapers, three television magazines and two media trade journals from Germany. Time frame of analysis: August 1, 2002 to July 31, 2003 Information about variable Level of analysis: article Operationalization/Coding instructions: Hillebrand (2005, Anhang A, own translation):“Coding is intended to record the actors, sources and witnesses appearing in the article. A main actor and a secondary actor (if applicable) are coded.Main actor: Who is at the center of the article? Whose actions or statements, interests or preferences are at the core of the article? Who takes up the most space? Whose actions or statements form the reference point to which others then react? Who appears as the ‘source’ for statements of facts or for evaluations?The author(s) of an article are not considered as actors! This also applies in cases where TV celebrities such as Kalkofe (TV-Spielfilm) or Beckmann (Zeit) have permanent columns. As actor is recorded the person or collective, who is reported on, whose actions are commented on, etc.Secondary actor: Who else is it about? Same codes to be used as for the main actor.” Values: Hillebrand (2005) Members of the audience (viewers, readers, users), participants, simple citizens (without representative function) Media companies, media executives, journalists, celebrities of the media industry Politicians and all members of the executive and judiciary system Companies (outside the media industry) Interest groups (of companies or professions outside the media industry, e.g. from the environmental sector, etc.), churches, etc. Interest groups (of companies or professions outside the media industry, e.g. from the environmental sector, etc.), churches, etc. Science, experts, interpreters (writers etc.) - from research and scientific institutions or as self-employed, formally independent from companies, political parties and interest groups Others No secondary actor/not decidable Intercoder reliability: Intercoder reliability coefficient of .84 across categories (4 coders), not specified for individual categoryCodebook available at (last accessed on 09.12.2020): https://www.hans-bredow-institut.de/uploads/media/Publikationen/cms/media/d666beb1d9130d241ec01915684342eb582b3d42.pdf.ReferencesHillebrand, C. (2005). Das Fernsehen im Spiegel der Printmedien – Konturen der Berichterstattung. In R. Weiß (Ed.), Zur Kritik der Medienkritik. Wie Zeitungen das Fernsehen beobachten (pp. 33-81). Berlin: Vistas.Kemner, B., Scherer, H., & Weinacht, S. (2008). Unter der Tarnkappe. Publizistik, 53(1), 65-84. doi:10.1007/s11616-008-0006-9Lichtenstein, D. (2011). Kommerzialisierung des Medienjournalismus? Eine empirische Untersuchung zum „Fall Berliner Zeitung“. M&K Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft, 59(2), 216-234. doi:10.5771/1615-634x-2011-2-216Maier, D., & Dogruel, L. (2016). Akteursbeziehungen in der Zeitungsberichterstattung über die Online-Aktivitäten des öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunks. Publizistik, 61(2), 145-166. doi:10.1007/s11616-016-0258-8 Pedrazzi, S. (2020). Codebuch zur Studie «Eigeninteressen in der Berichterstattung über medienpolitische Vorlagen und den Service public in der Schweiz». Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.4312912