Gertrude Stein, Pétain, and the Politics of Translation


Gertrude Stein, Pétain, and the Politics of Translation 
Rachel Galvin

ELH, Volume 83, Number 1, Spring 2016, pp. 259-292 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
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259ELH 83 (2016) 259–292 © 2016 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

gerTrUde sTein, PéTain, and THe PoliTics of 
TranslaTion

by racHel galvin

Was gertrude stein a fascist, as some are now asserting? Her deci-
sion to remain in france during World War ii and translate speeches 
delivered by Maréchal Philippe Pétain, the vichy chief of state, has 
led critics to state as much. When france and england declared war 
on germany on 3 september 1939, stein was in her mid-sixties and 
had been living in france for more than three decades.1 she and 
her partner alice b. Toklas had summered in the village of bilignin 
for 15 years and decided to stay there during the war.2 They trav-
eled briefly to Paris on a two-day pass to collect some of their things 
from their apartment at rue christine, taking only two paintings with 
them—Pablo Picasso’s portrait of stein and Paul cézanne’s portrait 
of Madame cézanne—leaving behind stein’s remarkable collection 
of modern art. When gestapo agents entered their apartment on 19 
July 1944, Picasso alerted stein’s long-time friend, vichy collaborator 
bernard faÿ, who deterred the agents from removing anything but 
some linen, some silver, and a footstool that Toklas had embroidered 
after a watercolor by Picasso.3

Much of the artwork that remained in stein and Toklas’s Paris 
apartment during the war was displayed in a 2012 exhibition titled 
“The steins collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian avant-garde,” 
which toured the grand Palais in Paris, the san francisco Museum 
of Modern art, and the Metropolitan Museum of art in new york.4 
a controversy erupted around the exhibition when critics complained 
that the wall labels did not specify that stein’s remarkable collection 
had most likely survived the war thanks to the aid of a vichy collabo-
rator.5 The exhibition happened to coincide with the publication of 
barbara Will’s monograph, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, 
Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma, which asserts that stein acted 
as a “vichy propagandist” because she drafted a translation of a book of 
speeches delivered by Pétain, Paroles aux Français. Messages et écrits 
(1934–1941).6 The popular media reported on the controversy, from 
the Washington Post to the Huffington Post and from the Los Angeles 
Review of Books to the New York Review of Books, leading to headlines 



260 The Politics of Translation

in spring 2012 such as “When great artists do bad Things” and 
“gertrude stein, fascist?”7 in response, a group of scholars including 
Marjorie Perloff, Joan retallack, ed burns, and others published a 
dossier of studies in Jacket 2 for the purpose of “setting the record 
straight,” as charles bernstein’s piece is titled.8

The dossier touches briefly on stein’s translations of Pétain’s 
speeches.9 stein may have undertaken the project at the suggestion of 
faÿ, but with the evidence currently at hand, we can only speculate. 
did she wish to garner american support for her adopted country and 
its new leader, as she wrote in her introduction to the speeches? did 
she carry out the translation because of her admiration for Pétain? 
as a move to ingratiate herself with the vichy administration, given 
the precarious status she and alice had as Jewish lesbians? as an 
opportunity to make money at a juncture when she was low on funds? 
To help faÿ, who felt that arranging for this translation would aid 
his career?10 all of the above? faÿ may have proposed that she take 
on the project to help “ensure her safety in wartime france,” some 
scholars suggest (A, 405).11

between december 1941 and January 1942, stein began trans-
lating Paroles aux Français. Messages et écrits (1934–1941). The book 
had been published in september 1941, at a moment when Pétain’s 
popularity was dipping in the free zone.12 she appears to have signed 
a contract for the translation, and wrote an introduction for the volume 
(which shows that she was interested in bolstering his reputation), but 
it was never published. in January 1943, a neighbor in bilignin, in addi-
tion to the sub-prefect of her town, “supposedly prevailed upon her to 
abandon the [translation] project because it drew excessive attention to 
her in an already risky situation under the occupation” (A, 410).13 she 
had translated more than half of the volume and was in the process 
of translating Pétain’s new year speech of 1941 when, according to 
her manuscripts, she suddenly stopped in mid sentence.14 This was 
highly unusual, for she insisted on completing projects and frequently 
“wrote into given spaces,” allowing the parameters to determine the 
length of her composition—for example, making sure to complete a 
story when she arrived at the end of a notebook.15

drafts of 29 speeches, two of which are incomplete, are held among 
the gertrude stein and alice b. Toklas Papers at yale University’s 
beinecke rare books library. The speeches present the official 
ideology of the new french state and cover topics such as national 
recovery, foreign policy, and the alsace-lorraine refugees.16 stein’s 
translation generally follows the order of the speeches collected in 



261Rachel Galvin

the 1941 volume. The time that she devoted to the translation (one 
year) and the intensity with which she corrected her drafts show her 
intellectual commitment to the project. she was engaged in a reflective 
translation process, in which each word was weighed and debated with 
her companion, alice b. Toklas, whose corrections were made in red. 
The outcome is a text that is thoroughly hers: Pétain’s speeches were 
steined. (However, i want to note that “steining” a text necessarily 
implies the participation of Toklas, who was a textual collaborator in 
all of stein’s work.)

in the present essay, i suggest that stein’s unpublished translation 
of Pétain’s speeches, which has yet to be studied in depth, ought to be 
included in considerations of Modernist literary experiments of reac-
tionary nature.17 The translation reveals a carefully crafted poetics that 
fits within the general idiosyncratic style, or steinese, of her published 
work. one of my goals is to demonstrate this similarity and in so doing 
to unsettle prevalent readings that depict stein as intellectually and 
creatively subservient to Pétain. such readings flatten the complexities 
of artistic production under occupation, and are underpinned by biases 
concerning the creativity and originality inherent in translation. They 
perpetuate the gendered logic by which translation is understood as 
a secondary and derivative activity (reproductive rather than produc-
tive). stein’s translation constituted a creative practice through which 
she produced a new text. she took ownership of Pétain’s text and 
placed her own stamp on it; it is structured by her hallmark sonic play 
and repetitions. as i’ll demonstrate through genetic and comparative 
linguistic analysis, there are clear resemblances between the syntax, 
parallel structures, repetitions, and driving rhymes in stein’s Pétain 
translation and her published work. stein brought Pétain’s language 
into her own idiolect, rendering it in the same english-french inter-
language (a variety “intermediate between the speaker’s native language 
and the target language”) that characterized much of her writing of 
this period.18 on a broader level, stein’s translation reveals her abiding 
conviction in the autonomy of the text, and the importance of pursuing 
her “own interest” even when working on a translation project.19

stein’s wartime writing has been criticized for insufficiently 
responding to its moment and for a hermetic style that evades political 
engagement. yet her translation can be considered one way she sought 
to bridge her relative distance from the events of the war and to 
involve herself in politics. The aesthetics of collaboration is interest-
ingly double-voiced in this case: her translation expresses an agency 
that at once corroborates and generates the language of vichy. it is 



262 The Politics of Translation

therefore complicit with the aims of the regime. Her contribution to 
politics remained within the covers of her handwritten notebook, but 
had the translation been published, stein would have very likely been 
considered a collaborator. Thus, while currently circulating claims 
that stein “signed up” to become a “vichy propagandist” are factually 
incorrect, archival evidence demonstrates that in 1942 she wished to 
help introduce Pétain’s ideas to americans.20

The work of translation was filtered through stein’s experience of 
the war. it contains a “domestic remainder,” as lawrence venuti calls 
it, or “an inscription of values, beliefs, and representations linked to 
historical moments and social positions in the receiving culture.”21 
The translation sheds light on stein’s views during key years of World 
War ii, when she, like many middle-class inhabitants of her village, 
first welcomed Pétain as a savior—based on his 1916 triumph at the 
battle of verdun—before becoming disenchanted with him. in the 
introduction she drafted, stein glorifies Pétain, citing the opinions of 
her french neighbors to suggest that he has once again become the 
country’s much-needed hero, comparing him to the american founding 
fathers.22 but in in Wars I Have Seen, from 1943 onward, she repeat-
edly expresses fervent support for the maquis, the resistance fighters, 
whom she likens to robin Hood, and worries about her neighbors, 
“firm reactionaries who are convinced that all maquis are terrorists.”23 
in october 1943 she writes that Pétain is “an old man a very old man 
and mostly nowadays everybody has forgotten all about him” (W, 92). 
in august 1944 she describes vichy as an “oligarchy and dictatorship,” 
and adolf Hitler as a “monster” (W, 228, 231).

an incident concerning a long-delayed letter illustrates stein’s own 
sense of her shifting views. in an undated letter from early 1942, stein 
wrote to random House editor bennett cerf that she had begun 
translating Pétain’s book of speeches, noting that her opinion of him 
had already seen fluctuations in 1941: “i found the book convincing 
and moving to an extraordinary degree and my idea was to write an 
introduction telling how my feelings have changed about him, i have 
had strong ups and downs and i think it would all do a lot of good, we 
all now over here can begin to understand that life with its reverses, 
are not what they were when all went alright” (A, 413). This letter went 
astray during the war and did not reach cerf until 1946, reappearing 
unexpectedly, somewhat like a time capsule. When cerf responded 
with outrage, stein sent him a telegram: “KeeP yoUr sHirT on 
benneT dear leTTer re PeTain Was WriTTen in 1941” 
(A, 413).



263Rachel Galvin

on 10 May 1943, stein was placed on the “liste otto,” a list of 
blacklisted Jewish authors who wrote in french (“Juedische autoren, 
écrivains Juifs”).24 However, she continued to publish in resistance 
publications such as Confluences, Fontaine, and L’Arbalète.25 an essay 
recounting her experience returning to Paris with Toklas after the war 
ended was published in Fontaine in april 1945, in the same issue as texts 
from Paul éluard, vercors (author of the resistance novel The Silence 
of the Sea), Pierre emmanuel (on Jean-Paul sartre), g. e. clancier 
(on poetry and resistance), françois Mauriac (an excerpt from his 
occupation journal), and federico garcía lorca. The editors’ decision 
to feature her work in such company indicates that they viewed her 
as supportive of the resistance. Thus, given the scope of her writings 
during the war and the fluctuation of her views, stein’s translation of 
1942 preserves traces of a particularly reactionary moment. examining 
the draft uncovers her thinking and her understanding of the war as it 
took place, and demonstrates the complexities of living under occupation.

since the late 1990s, scholars have begun to pay closer attention to 
stein’s wartime writing, and her friendship with faÿ has been regularly 
noted.26 but the 2012 debate, in its mediatization and presentation as 
a long-obscured truth coming to light, resembles exposés of Martin 
Heidegger, Paul de Man, and louis-ferdinand céline—or controver-
sies around the reactionary politics held by T. s. eliot, Wyndham lewis, 
W. b. yeats, and ezra Pound. Pound, for one, maintained views that 
led him to outright fascism commitment, a stint as radio propagandist 
for benito Mussolini, and eventually, a trial for treason in the United 
states.27 There is far more significant detail about these histories than 
can be discussed here, but suffice it to say that in analyzing stein’s 
reactionary politics, there is at least one major difference that needs 
to be taken into account, and which i keep in mind throughout this 
essay: none of the preceding writers shared stein’s precarious status 
as a Jew and a lesbian living in nazi-occupied territory.

While there is no historical or literary evidence that stein was a 
fascist, she was most certainly a political conservative. she disliked 
communism and supported the general francisco franco-led 
nationalists during the spanish civil War (A, 413). one of her corre-
spondents, Will rogers, wrote that she had the mentality of a “rentier”:

Without her fixed income we might never have heard of the rue de 
fleurus, but with it we should not be surprised to find her disapproving 
of roosevelt and the new deal, believing in rugged individualism, 
favoring a gold basis for the dollar, regarding a man out of work as lazy 
or incompetent, thinking every american could take care of himself.28



264 The Politics of Translation

she has been described as a patrician, and during the war she main-
tained friendships with upper-class women who were members of the 
Croix de Feu, a pro-vichy organization (see A, 414–16). Unlike her 
contemporaries who poured their efforts into the resistance (éluard, 
louis aragon, robert desnos, and rené char, to name just a few), 
stein must be grouped with those who made compromises and focused 
their energies on making art. she continued to write while german 
troops were quartered in her home, just as Henri Matisse continued to 
paint when they were lodged in his, and as Picasso persevered with his 
painting despite harassment and regular visits from german officers. 
“Those who stayed . . . exchanged overt freedom for inner exile or in 
some cases collaboration,” writes cultural historian frederic spotts: 
“They believed it was necessary to work in familiar surroundings and 
that their work was more important than the circumambient ideological 
environment of occupation.”29

assessment of cultural production under the vichy regime is an 
ongoing process, and the case of stein’s wartime writing is an example 
of the challenges that persist. one of the many after-effects of the 
postwar purge (épuration) of collaborators has been a glorification of 
the resistance in french culture, and a disinclination to explore the 
myriad modes of compromise and outright collaboration among artists, 
intellectuals, and average citizens alike.30 Monographs devoted to the 
question of “how artists and intellectuals survived the nazi occupation,” 
as spott’s study The Shameful Peace is subtitled, have been few and 
slow to appear.31 but the rhetoric involved in the recent debate about 
stein—and the slippage between the concepts of fascism, nazism, and 
Pétainism in the articles on stein mentioned above—is directly related 
to the knowledge gaps in this still evolving field of inquiry.

i. THe ProbleM of sTeinian sTyle

in the recent debate about stein’s views on Pétain, her distinctive 
poetics are at issue.32 rabbi Michael lerner, the editor of Tikkun, a 
leftist-progressive magazine of Jewish culture and politics, writes in an 
editorial dated 4 June 2012, “[a]rtists, writers, poets, and intellectuals 
are not exempt from the moral obligation to fight against the rise of 
evil.”33 His argument is consonant with those of public intellectuals 
in the west who, at least since émile Zola, have called for writers and 
artists to provide counter-discourse and aid social change. lerner links 
moral behavior to the choice of subject matter, criticizing those artists 
and intellectuals who may have “received protection from nazis and 
may arguably have even unintentionally helped fascist regime[s],” 



265Rachel Galvin

writing that they had a “moral obligation to use their creativity and 
smarts to alert those who listened to them or read their poems, articles, 
or books to inform people about what was evil about fascism, and why 
it should be resisted with all one’s energies.”34 He goes on to expand 
his argument to a writer’s choice of style:

nor is it an excuse to say, as some have, that gertrude stein or others 
like her who benefited from the protection of nazi collaborators had no 
obligation to do this [“to speak out clearly and unambiguously”] since 
their form of writing and communication was not that of discursive 
sentences or positions. one’s form of communication is itself an ethical 
choice, and cannot be given a blanket permission in the face of mass 
murder happening around oneself. if you choose to be ambiguous in 
the face of evil, you become one of its collaborators, empowerers, or 
enablers.35

it is true that stein did not speak out to denounce vichy or the nazis, 
as many of her peers did. lerner characterizes this in religious terms 
as a “sin of silence,” and numerous other scholars, although avoiding 
moral judgment, have considered her silence as a form of complicity.36 
archival records do not show with any clarity what she knew or did 
not know about vichy, the deportations from france, or the camps, 
but rabbi lerner makes an important argument.

The idea that stylistic ambiguity is equivalent to moral and political 
ambiguity is articulated in several other essays from 2011–13 that 
criticize stein’s wartime activities. but are one’s poetics necessarily 
coextensive with one’s ethics and politics? Poetry scholars such as 
Mutlu Konuk blasing, James longenbach, and david caplan have 
argued that form cannot be understood as possessing trans-historical 
political value (free verse is not inherently liberating, for example).37 
The fact that the same poetic form can convey contradictory political 
meanings leads longenbach to caution against the “easy confluence 
of formal and social vision,” caplan to argue for attention to form’s 
changing, contextually dependent political and aesthetic implications, 
and blasing to assert the ultimate neutrality of form.38 These scholars 
would agree that a sonnet is not fascist per se, as William carlos 
Williams had claimed it was in 1938.39 yet difficult texts—whether 
they are called hermetic, opaque, indeterminate, obscurantist, or 
ambiguous—continue to be read as willfully elitist and, as in stein’s 
case, reactionary in their retreat from explicit political statement.

This raises the question of what stein was writing and publishing 
between 1939 and 1945, and whether those texts display her signature 



266 The Politics of Translation

poetics. despite being blacklisted on the liste otto, stein continued 
to write about the war while it was taking place, in In Savoy; or, Yes Is 
for a Very Young Man, A Play of the Resistance in France; Brewsie & 
Willie (1945); and the autobiographical Wars I Have Seen, which was 
written from 1943 through 1945. as complex as her wartime writing 
is, much of it, including Wars I Have Seen, Paris France (1940), and 
Brewsie & Willie, is much clearer, discursively, than her earlier work—
and arguably may be considered part of her “audience writing,” as she 
called her works that include, most famously, The Autobiography of 
Alice B. Toklas (1933).40 The jacket copy of the first edition of Wars 
I Have Seen, signed by random House editor bennett cerf, boasts 
that “when she wants to, [stein] can write straightforward english that 
any average high-school student can understand. Wars I Have Seen, 
with a very few minor aberrations, is another such book.” random 
House marketed Wars I Have Seen as a “noteworthy” book about the 
war, in the company of richard Tregaskis’s Guadalcanal Diary, cecil 
brown’s Suez to Singapore, and captain Ted W. lawson and robert 
considine’s Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, all of which are listed on the 
back inside jacket. The first edition includes a red banner across the 
cover with a description in all capitals: “a firsT-Hand rePorT 
of foUr years of naZi rUle in france and THe Joy 
of liberaTion in 1944.” (figure 1).

in the jacket copy, cerf describes Wars I Have Seen as an eyewitness 
account of the french experience of occupation that was smuggled 
out like an urgent message.

bear in mind that this entire book was written in longhand under 
the very noses of the nazis. after they were driven out of france, 
alice Toklas typed the manuscript and frank gervasi, who moved in 
with general Patch’s seventh U.s. army, brought it back with him 
to america. Wars I Have Seen is the on-the-spot story of what the 
common people of france endured from 1940 to september, 1944.

not quite reportage, and not quite memoir, Wars I Have Seen is set 
to the war in real time.41 stein always includes the dates on which 
she wrote, explaining that she intends to end the book only when 
the first american soldier came to culoz. archival evidence shows 
that she considered the book an autobiography. she tried out a series 
of titles on the cover of the first notebook of drafts: “an emotional 
autobiography,” “gertrude stein’s autobiography,” and “i am really 
writing my autobiography,” as well as “civil domestic and foreign 
Wars.”42 in the middle figures a large “i” with squiggles radiating 



267Rachel Galvin

figure 1. front cover of first edition of Wars I Have Seen, 1945. au-
thor’s copy.

from it. The book may be about the many wars she lived through, 
from the spanish-american War, the russo-Japanese War, the boer 
War, the chinese-Japanese War, two balkan wars, World War i, the 
abyssinian War, and the spanish civil War, through World War ii, but 
stein herself is always at the center of it (figure 2). Her title indicates 
that the book’s point of view is “at once relative and self-emphasizing, 
at once involved and detached.”43 The fact that stein made writing 
a daily practice, and did not correct the book with hindsight, makes 
Wars I Have Seen a useful document of the time. it offers a nuanced 
portrait of village life in the bugey region and expresses stein and her 
fellow villagers’ increasingly vigorous support for the resistance. in this 



268 The Politics of Translation

figure 2. cover of notebook draft of Wars I Have Seen. courtesy of the gertrude 
stein estate. gertrude stein and alice b. Toklas Papers, yale collection of american 
literature, beinecke rare book and Manuscript library, yale University.

way it charts the circulation of ideologies in france between 1939 and 
1944 and the “belated rise of the antifascist opposition in france.”44

The language of Wars I Have Seen may not be as limpid as that of 
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but it is closer to that end of 
the spectrum of her work. However, the idea that stein espoused a 
poetics of ambiguity and indeterminacy remains predominant among 
scholars. depending on the critic, her “indeterminacy,” a synonym 
for the undecidability of poetic associations, signals that her work 
is either politically subversive or reactionary.45 The frequently cited 
hallmarks of her opacity, difficulty, or indeterminacy include her lexical 



269Rachel Galvin

repetitions, recursive structures, and highly abstract texts, such as the 
cubist poetry of Tender Buttons (1914); the apparent simplicity of 
some of her syntax, which has been read as puerile; and conversely, 
the sheer volume of lengthy, run-on sentences. This is not surprising, 
given that since she began publishing, her poetics has been met with 
bewilderment and, at times, ridicule. in 1929, Max eastman memorably 
identified stein with “the cult of unintelligibility,” later calling her its 
“high priestess,” a phrase that has been widely repeated.46 Her more 
accessible “audience writing” is overlooked in such assessments, and 
in particular, the relative clarity of her wartime writing, which often 
features straight-ahead, discursive sentences.

While the majority of scholars of twentieth-century poetry have 
focused on the indeterminacy of stein’s language, a few have shown that 
her style and mode of composition do anything but invite indeterminacy, 
and that stein in fact eschews it in her search for exactitude, mastery, 
authorial control, and textual autonomy.47 in this line of thinking, her 
modernism is “absolutely devoted to the name and the determinacy 
it entails,” as Jennifer ashton has observed; stein is committed to the 
integrity of the text, which, if it is to be a “masterpiece,” can never be 
an open text.48 The reader’s experience is irrelevant to the meaning 
of the poem that she, the author, creates and which will “force itself” 
upon the reader (PG, 321).49 The complications that she invents, as 
she writes in “Poetry and grammar,” “make eventually for simplicity”: 
“Why if you want the pleasure of concentrating on the final simplicity 
of excessive complication would you want any artificial aid to bring 
about that simplicity” (PG, 321). stein’s writing is anything but inde-
terminate, given the tight control she wielded over her texts and her 
desire to bend language to her “own interest” (PG, 320). in the next 
section i expand on this claim to show that the same is true of stein’s 
translation, and that her draft demonstrates a level of authorial control 
that is similar to that of her original compositions. Her manipulation of 
the speeches contradicts the notion that she ceded aesthetic control. 
Quite to the contrary, she embellished the original. stein appears to 
have been committed to a sense-for-sense translation, casting herself 
as a generator of text, an orator who would trumpet Pétain’s texts to 
americans.

stein’s style is deliberately crafted to maintain total control over 
the text and its reception. she is interested in “exactitude of abstract 
thought . . . creating sense by intensity of exactness.”50 it is up to the 
audience to follow along. The same is true of her translational disobedi-
ence and her “steining” of Pétain’s speeches. close examination of her 



270 The Politics of Translation

archive unsettles readings that depict her as intellectually and creatively 
subordinate to Pétain as a figure of authority. Her creativity remained 
apart and sovereign, despite the fact that her political ideas were 
marked by allegiance to Pétain. she insisted on translating according 
to her own poetics, and indeed it seems she thought she could improve 
Pétain’s style (which has been called “dry and didactic”) (M, 79n1).51 
she believed that she had a role to play in disseminating information 
about Pétain to her fellow americans. This is consonant with the self-
aggrandizement visible both in her published and unpublished work 
(vividly figured by the “i” on the cover of the notebook in which she 
wrote Wars I Have Seen).

ii. sTein’s “oWn inTeresT” in THe PéTain TranslaTions

some have claimed that stein’s version is conspicuously maladroit. 
one scholar calls it an “exercise in shallowness and ambiguity” that 
makes Pétain sound “foolish, childish, or inept,” and another writes 
that stein makes the language “unreadable” in her “word-by-word 
translation that must be a joke.”52 a third, barbara Will, describes it 
as “‘almost stupefyingly literal,’” suggesting that stein translated “word 
by word” and “completely ignores questions of idiom or style.”53 Will 
claims that based on the translation’s linguistic ineptitude, stein was 
“in thrall to the aura of a great man”; for her, the translation shows a 
“compositional submissiveness” and “the attempt to render the french 
original into english through a one-to-one correspondence between 
signs seems to be conceding authority, interpretation, and interrogation 
to the voice of Pétain.”54 This account implies that stein viewed Pétain’s 
speeches as something like a sacred text, and followed a pietistic theory 
of translation resembling that advocated by early christian commenta-
tors, who urged equivalence between original and target texts.55 This 
interpretation would have stein relinquish her aesthetic principles and 
set aside her hallmark, aggressively self-asserting poetics when she 
translated. but these complaints ignore stein’s very particular sense of 
style and her command of french. any translation decision she made 
must be taken as deliberate. she had lived in france since 1902, had 
translated georges Hugnet’s Enfances (1933) and gustave flaubert’s 
Trois Contes (1877), and had written her own works in french (as 
Will notes). The above interpretation of her translation poetics as 
puerile also fails to account for the resemblances between the style 
of her translations and her wartime writing.56 it does not make sense 
given the mix of phono-semantic matching and interlanguage that 
characterizes the translation.



271Rachel Galvin

To read stein’s translation as “submissive” rehearses an old canard 
about the secondary nature of translation. Translation, as activity and 
text, has long been gendered as derivative and female, according to 
what lori chamberlain calls the “politics of originality and its logic 
of violence.”57 Tropes used to characterize translation often imply 
sexual domination, as in the work of george steiner, who describes 
translation as an “act of appropriative penetration” in After Babel, 
or Jerome, who writes of the translator “[carrying] the sense captive 
into his own language.”58 These tropes have been thoroughly analyzed 
by feminist critics such as chamberlain, who notes that “the reason 
translation is so overcoded, so overregulated, is that it threatens to 
erase the difference between production and reproduction which is 
essential to the establishment of power.”59 stein produced a new text 
that corresponded to the text by Pétain and yet at the same time was 
indelibly her own. Her translation is subversive—not politically, to 
be sure, since it is complicit with the aims of vichy—but linguisti-
cally subversive, as it aims to take control of the text. Ultimately, this 
intensifies her responsibility for the project.

stein develops her credo of authorial control in the essay “Poetry 
and grammar,” an essay that extensively analyzes parts of speech and 
the “inner life of sentences and paragraphs” (PG, 321). she explains 
that certain types of punctuation undermine her independence and 
precision, and therefore casts them out of her republic:

as i say commas are servile and they have no life of their own, and 
their use is not a use, it is a way of replacing one’s own interest and 
i do decidedly like to like my own interest my own interest in what i 
am doing. a comma by helping you along holding your coat for you 
and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively 
as you should lead it and to me for many years and i still do feel that 
way about it only now i do not pay as much attention to them, the use 
of them was positively degrading. (PG, 321)

stein chafes against the idea of being a passive writer, and argues that 
commas undercut the writer’s mastery of the sentence as well as the 
reader’s experience of it. This is a motif of control that runs through 
all of her work. steinian sentences are carefully designed to “force” 
themselves upon the reader. (in Tender Buttons stein had written 
“secure the steady rights and translate more than translate the authority, 
show the choice and make no more mistakes than yesterday.”)60 This 
aesthetic principle applies to her translation poetics in several ways.



272 The Politics of Translation

in the translation, stein neither systematically dilates nor condenses 
the sentences. at times, she makes them more declarative and direct, 
stripping them down to their basic components, while at others, she 
echoes the latinate structure of french syntax for a foreignizing 
effect, as translation theorists from friedrich schleiermacher to 
antoine berman have called it. schleiermacher defines “a feeling of 
the foreign” as the sense a translator imparts to her readers that they 
are encountering a foreign tongue even when reading a translation 
in their own language.61 Her english is a steinese version of english, 
however. (i use the term steinese even though critics have tended to 
employ it pejoratively ever since stein began first published. i want 
to recuperate the term to indicate her characteristic style, cadence, 
word play, and sound play.)62 i’ll mention three features of steinese 
that are salient in the translation: 1) the omission of punctuation; 2) a 
tendency toward parallel structures and repetitions on all levels (allit-
eration, lexical repetition, syntactical parallels); and 3) the cultivation of 
a narrative logic according to which sound leads sense (often marked 
by word play and calque).

conventional punctuation is often absent from the translation. 
Question marks, for example, are consistently replaced by periods. 
“Pourquoi faut-il que les heureuses dispositions, tirées de nos malheurs, 
se soient estompées dans la prospérité?” becomes “Why must it be that 
the excellent qualities created by our distresses are stamped out by our 
prosperity.” similarly, “où en sommes-nous en 1938?” becomes “Where 
are we in 1938.”63 This translation decision is in keeping with stein’s 
composition method as she sets it out in “Poetry and grammar,” where 
she explains that she does not consider questions marks “interesting.”

The question mark is aright when it is all alone when it i used as a 
brand on cattle or when it could be used in decoration but connected 
with writing it is completely entirely completely uninteresting. it is 
evident that if you ask a question you ask a question but anybody who 
can read at all knows when a question is a question as it is written in 
writing. Therefore i ask you therefore wherefore should one use it the 
question mark. . . . a question is a question, anybody can know that 
a question is a question and so why add to it the question mark when 
it is already there when the question is already there in the writing. 
Therefore i never could bring myself to use a question mark, i always 
found it positively revolting, and now very few do use it. (PG, 316–17)

additionally, as in typical steinian syntax, which can unfurl like kudzu, 
clauses in the translation that would be normally set off by commas 
are not, as in “Those which remain to us considerable though they are 



273Rachel Galvin

constitute only a mangled victory” [ce qui nous en reste [des clauses 
des traités de 1919], si appréciable que ce soit, ne constitue plus qu’une 
victoire mutilée] (S; P, 19). stein is vociferous on the topic of commas 
and how they “enfeeble” sentences (PG, 319). commas undercut the 
writer’s mastery of the sentence as well as the reader’s experience of 
its definitude. a comma is “at most a poor period that it lets you stop 
and take a breath but if you want to take a breath you ought to know 
yourself that you want to take a breath” (PG, 320–21). Writing lengthy 
sentences, which string together “long dependent adverbial clauses,” 
thus becomes “a passion” for her:

complications make eventually for simplicity. . . . you can see how 
loving the intensity of complication of these things that commas would 
be degrading. Why if you want the pleasure of concentrating on the 
final simplicity of excessive complication would you want any artificial 
aid to bring about that simplicity. do you see now why i feel about 
the commas i did and as i do.
 Think about anything you really like to do and you will see what 
i mean.
 When it gets really difficult you want to disentangle rather than to 
cut the knot, at least so anybody feels who is working with any thread, 
so anybody feels who is working with any tool so anybody feels who is 
writing any sentence or reading it after it has been written. . . . a long 
complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make you know 
yourself knowing it[.] (PG, 321)

in this crucial essay, stein sets out a philosophy of composition char-
acterized by control and exactitude. its fruits are equally visible in her 
own texts of the time and those that she translated and made her own. 
The distinct “pleasure of concentrating on the final simplicity of exces-
sive complication” is clearly a far cry from championing indeterminacy.

stein also makes robust use of parallel structures and repetitions, 
even when they do not appear in Pétain’s original. for example, in the 
following excerpt, where Pétain employs two different verbs (relever, 
redresser), stein uses just one, “reestablish,” and carries it forward 
through the text as a key term: “The same way as we reestablished 
ourselves in 1871 after our defeat, germany beaten in 1918 reestab-
lished itself as soon as we prematurely quit the banks of the rhine” 
[nous nous sommes relevés en 1871 . . . de même l’allemagne . . . s’est 
redressé dès que nous avons quitté prématurément les bords du rhin.] 
(S; P, 19). on the following page, when Pétain refers to redressement, 
or recovery, stein tries out several possibilities: “our destiny is still 
in our hands, the conditions way of possibilities of pulling ourselves 



274 The Politics of Translation

together reestablishing ourselves are easy to state explain tell” [notre 
destin reste dans nos mains: les conditions du redressement sont faciles 
à énoncer] (S; P, 20). Here, we see that stein ultimately maintains the 
slightly strange “reestablish” as a translation for redresser, as she did 
earlier. in her version, redresser is not just “recovery” or improvement, 
nor its alternate denotation, the physical gesture of straightening up, 
but instead becomes a national movement of self-assertion, both in the 
case of germany and france. alliteration is often a guiding principle 
of word selection; stein offers “nothing nevertheless is lost,” for “rien 
cependant n’est perdu,” rejecting Toklas’s suggestion of translating 
cependant as “however” (S). a similar logic explains her translation of 
“le combat reste le même” as “the struggle continues the same” (S). 
she considers “fight” and “combat” “remains the same,” “continues the 
same,” and “is the same,” but ultimately chooses a slightly odd formula-
tion. it may sound unconventional, but it follows an alliterative logic.

The drafts are also particularly marked with instances of calque, 
such as translating discours as “discourse” instead of “speech.” Will 
cites this particular calque of “discourse” as prime evidence for stein’s 
“incongruous, even inept” translation: “arguably, this is the work of 
a writer with little or no real familiarity toward the foreign language 
being translated.”64 However, stein’s translation of “discourse” occurs 
near the end of the third notebook held in the archive; in the first two 
notebooks, constituting more than two hundred pages of handwritten 
drafts, she systematically translates discours correctly as “an address.” 
This indicates that deviations such as the choice of “discourse” are 
either unconscious slips or deliberate translation decisions, and as i 
will discuss below, they are instances of stein’s interlanguage between 
french and english.

The following example from the 1938 “Pour l’union des français” 
demonstrates stein’s lexical choices that create word play. she links 
“remembrances” and “dismembered country,” yoking together memory 
and the body, suggesting that it is the work of memory to reconstitute 
the country torn apart like osiris’s body:

in spite of the understanding never to speak of it, all our remembrance 
was faithful to it and our emotions turned toward the blue line of the 
vosges which marked henceforward the boundary of our dismembered 
country. (S)

[Malgré les consignes de n’en parler jamais, toutes les mémoires 
restèrent fidèles et les esprits tournés vers la ligne bleue des vosges, qui 
marquait désormais à l’est les frontières de la Patrie mutilée.] (P, 14)



275Rachel Galvin

it seems fair to conclude that stein employed different translations of 
mutilée based on the context of the sentence and the rhetorical effect 
she was after. she is likely to have chosen “dismembered country” for 
“Patrie mutilée” in the passage above because of the suggestive sonic 
and semantic links between “dismembered” and “remembrance.” This 
is especially probable given that in the instance cited earlier, in which 
she rendered “une victoire mutilée” as “a mangled victory,” neither 
she nor Toklas made any edits to the line, indicating that they were 
in accord about the translation’s accuracy. The translation of Patrie, 
or homeland, as “country” is also notable, as it seems to undo Pétain’s 
tripartite slogan Travail, Famille, Patrie (Work, family, fatherland), 
which had replaced the republican motto Liberté, Egalité, Fraterntié. 
but as in characteristic steinese, sound leads the way. “country” paired 
with “boundary” is more euphonious, and perhaps more generalizable 
for her american readership. How different the translation would have 
been, and potentially more alienating for the american reader, had 
stein opted for “the borders of our mutilated fatherland” rather than 
“the boundary of our dismembered country.”

To delve more deeply into the ways that sound leads sense in these 
drafts, i will take a closer look at another text, Pétain’s notorious 
speech, “appel du 17 juin 1940,” in which he took the helm of the 
vichy government. in it he portrays himself as france’s savior, expresses 
compassion for his people’s suffering, and announces the end of hostili-
ties. The next day, charles de gaulle broadcast a response in london 
that is commonly considered the origin of the resistance movement, 
the infamous “appel du 18 juin 1940” rejecting Pétain’s call. shortly 
thereafter, on 22 June 1940, the armistice was signed at rethondes in 
a symbolically charged location: the same train car where the reich 
had accepted defeat in 1918. The number and intensity of corrections 
to stein’s translation indicate her sense of the momentousness of this 
particular speech, and it is clear that she invested particular energy 
into translating it (figure 3).



276 The Politics of Translation

The officially sanctioned version of Pétain’s speech was a 1940 transla-
tion by emile Pons, a professor at strasbourg, which was published 
(along with a spanish translation) in a pamphlet by the Fédération 
des associations françaises pour le développement des relations avec 
l’étranger and the Comité France-Amérique, titled L’armistice du 25 
Juin 1940 and edited by gabriel louis-Jaray. louis-Jaray later edited 
the 1942 volume of Pétain’s Messages et écrits from which stein 
translated; and he was the editor who offered stein the contract for 
this translation:

french People
 at the request of the President of the republic i assume from 
to-day the direction of the government of france. convinced of the 
devotion of our admirable army which is fighting with a heroism worthy 
of its long military tradition against an enemy superior in numbers 
and in arms, convinced by its magnificent resistance it has fulfilled its 
obligations to our allies, convinced of the support of the veterans whom 
i have pride in having commanded, convinced of the confidence of all 
the people i dedicate all of myself to france to appease its agony.

figure 3. Manuscript page of Wars I Have Seen. courtesy of the gertrude stein estate. 
gertrude stein and alice b. Toklas Papers, yale collection of american literature, 
beinecke rare book and Manuscript library, yale University.



277Rachel Galvin

 in these melancholy days i think of the unhappy fugitives who 
suffering every extremity of privation cover our roads. i convey to 
them my compassion and my solicitude. it is with a heavy heart that 
i say to you to-day that it is necessary to attempt to stop fighting.
 This night, i have sent to our opponent to ask him if he is ready to 
consider with us as between soldiers and after battle and in all honor 
the means of putting an end to hostilities.
 That all the french will gather to the government over which 
i preside during this time of difficulty and stress, and quiet their 
anxieties in order to be conscious only of their faith in the destiny of 
their country. (S)
[Maréchal Pétain, 17 June 1940
français!
à l’appel de M. le président de la République, j’assume à partir 
d’aujourd’hui la direction du gouvernement de la France. Sûr de 
l’affection de notre admirable armée, qui lutte avec un héroïsme digne de 
ses longues traditions militaires contre un ennemi supérieur en nombre 
et en armes, sûr que par sa magnifique résistance elle a rempli son devoir 
vis-à-vis de nos alliés, sûr de l’appui des anciens combattants que j’ai 
eu la fierté de commander, sûr de la confiance du peuple tout entier, 
je fais à la France le don de ma personne pour atténuer son malheur.
 en ces heures douloureuses, je pense aux malheureux réfugiés, 
qui, dans un dénuement extrême, sillonnent nos routes. Je leur exprime 
ma compassion et ma sollicitude. c’est le cœur serré que je vous dis 
aujourd’hui qu’il faut cesser le combat.
 Je me suis adressé cette nuit à l’adversaire pour lui demander s’il 
est prêt à rechercher avec nous, entre soldats, après la lutte et dans 
l’honneur, les moyens de mettre un terme aux hostilités.
 Que tous les français se groupent autour du gouvernement que 
je préside pendant ces dures épreuves et fassent taire leur angoisse 
pour n’écouter que leur foi dans le destin de la patrie.]65

as in her own compositions, here stein carefully crafts the language of 
the translated speech according to her “own interest.” This is visible in 
her calculated acceptance of some of Toklas’s editorial suggestions and 
rejection of others. in comparison with other, much less marked-up 
pages, stein’s draft of the opening passages of this speech is particularly 
revised. The second version in slanting script on the left-hand page 
is unusual for her notebooks (figure 3). stein appears to have tried 
out the loaded word “armistice” in the title at the top of the second 
version of the translation, and then crossed it out. “armistice” would 
have been her addition, since the word does not appear in Pétain’s 
speech. in 1940, it had been a much-discussed, contested term, offered 
as a more dignified alternative to “capitulation” (M, 65). by the time 
stein was carrying out the translation in 1942, however, the idea that 



278 The Politics of Translation

an armistice would bring peace had been shown to be a false hope. it 
is possible that, as she prepared the draft with her american audience 
in mind, she had considered calling it an armistice and then thought 
better of it because of this shift.

sound leads sense in the translated passage above. stein reaches for 
alliteration in oratorical phrases such as “convinced of the confidence” 
and “to appease its agony.” “convinced of” is a strange translation for 
“sûr de,” implying the process of persuasion, unlike its near synonyms 
“certain of” or “sure of.” but the alliteration of the hard c in “convinced 
of the confidence” lends a ring to the phrase. in the last crucial line of 
the first paragraph, Pétain infamously casts himself as a christ figure, 
sacrificing himself for his people: “je fais à la france le don de ma 
personne pour atténuer son malheur.” This resounding phrase, which 
articulated Pétain’s posture toward his direction of the vichy govern-
ment, reflected a popular french belief, political scientist and World 
War ii specialist Philippe burrin writes:

He himself encouraged people generally to identify themselves with 
him, appealing to both their republican and their christian sentiments. 
The former element went with the image of the hero of the great War 
and also with that of educator and teacher, in this instance of national 
rehabilitation; the latter emphasized the father of the family, the good 
shepherd, the christ-like figure. . . . This savior, at once glorious, 
paternal and suffering, called forth a wave of devotion fuelled by the 
most archaic sources of personal power: here at last was a public figure 
who could be loved. it was a many-sided popularity that gave Pétain 
a long-lasting appeal that he did much to foster by presenting himself 
as the best possible option in the face of the occupier, a guardian of 
peace in the midst of raging war.66

because of his prestige, patriotism, track record as a winner, and 
reputation for common sense and disinterestedness, Pétain was viewed 
as a point fixe (fixed point), a protector from the internal as well as 
external demons of the french nation.67 as one song had it in 1940,

Marshal, here we are
before you, france’s savior,
We, your fellows, swear
To serve and follow you.
[Maréchal, nous voilà!
devant toi, le sauveur de la france
nous jurons, nous tes gars
de servir et de suivre tes pas.]

    (M, 79)



279Rachel Galvin

but stein makes a subtle, crucial change in the valence of Pétain’s 
famous declaration offering himself up as sacrifice and savior. instead 
of “i make the gift of my person [myself],” stein has “i dedicate all 
of myself,” which subtracts the religious resonance. it also reduces 
the grandeur of Pétain’s phrase. “i did not like his way of saying i 
Philippe Pétain, that bothered me,” she wrote in Wars I Have Seen in 
september 1943, indicating that she resisted his self-aggrandizement, 
despite the admiration she had for him (W, 87).

The phrase “atténuer son malheur” in the 17 June address, meaning 
to mitigate or relieve its distress, becomes “to appease its agony.” This 
term “appease” simply could not be used lightly in 1941 when stein 
began the translations, since it had entered the popular lexicon as a 
tarnished phrase associated with the Munich Pact. signed by france, 
the United Kingdom, italy, and germany, the 30 september 1938 
agreement had permitted germany to annex czechoslovakia. but 
the “policy of appeasement,” as it was known, failed to stall Hitler’s 
aggression. To create an alliteration with “appease,” stein insisted on 
keeping “agony” as the last word, instead of “misery” or “woe” as alice 
suggested, which would have been closer to the french term “malheur.” 
she translates as an orator, not an interpreter; and she translates the 
text into steinese. given the range of rhetorical structures that her 
translation employs, and in this sentence in particular (“convinced of 
the support of the veterans whom i have pride in having commanded, 
convinced of the confidence of all the people i dedicate all of myself 
to france to appease its agony”), it is likely that she opted for allit-
eration as a way to add polish and persuasiveness to the speech. The 
strange substitution of “convinced” for “certain,” (“sûr de”) reinforces 
this interpretation. The term implies the process of persuasion, unlike 
its near synonym “certain,” “sure,” or “confident.” compared with the 
Comité France-Amérique’s sanctioned translation, which renders this 
phrase as “in the hope that it may allay the calamity befallen her,” the 
idiosyncrasies of stein’s version are apparent (P, 69). Her rendition is 
more direct, more poetic, and more memorable. in its relative clarity, 
her translation is of a piece with her wartime books Wars I Have Seen, 
Paris France, and Brewsie & Willie.

This translation is an improvement on the original, in that Pétain’s 
speech does not contain a marked sensitivity to sound or oratorical 
structures other than the refrain (“sûr de”). The fact that in translating 
other speeches stein renders malheur as “misery” (“la france est en 
proie au malheur veritable” becomes “france is the victim of real 
misery”) is further evidence that she expressly translates it as “agony” 



280 The Politics of Translation

here (P, 69). other translation decisions show stein dissipating the 
force of Pétain’s original declaration. “en ces heures douloureuses,” 
or “in these painful hours,” becomes in the sanctioned translation the 
less urgent and immediate “in these melancholy days,” which reduces 
the element of Pétain’s expression of compassion for the difficult times 
that the french people were living through.68

Most significantly, the key sentence that represents Pétain’s 
damaging legacy, “c’est le coeur serré que je vous dis aujourd’hui 
qu’il faut cesser le combat” (or, as the sanctioned translation has it, 
“it is with a broken heart that i am telling you to-day: we must cease 
fighting”) becomes in stein’s translation “it is with a heavy heart that 
i say to you to-day that it is necessary to attempt to stop fighting.”69 
neither she nor Toklas marked any doubts about or revisions to the 
addition of “attempt,” which hedges the assertion and potentially 
casts doubt upon Pétain’s announcement of the cessation of hostili-
ties. This choice changes the meaning of the sentence, mitigating 
the illocutionary force of the declaration. stein’s version is strikingly 
less direct than the sanctioned translation, “we must cease fighting.” 
but there is a probable historical source for this modification. it is 
very likely that stein would have heard on the radio or read in the 
newspapers the modified version of the speech, disseminated after 
the first caused confusion—some claimed it was fraudulent, created 
by the enemy—as fighting continued throughout the country (such as 
in the loire valley and near lyon) (see M, 64). The second version 
of Pétain’s statement was amended to “we must try to cease fighting” 
[il faut tenter de cesser le combat].70

since the printed volume stein was working with only includes the 
first version of the speech, this slight change in wording demonstrates 
one of the ways in which stein’s translation was filtered through her 
experiences. stein’s treatment of polemical terms and phrases reveals 
her position on key events such as the armistice and the consolidation 
of the vichy government. The translation is much more than a rote, 
literal transference of Pétain’s language. it holds within its folds signs 
and signals of stein’s own experiences of the war, and her inescapably 
contemporary gaze in 1942 as she looked back to speeches spanning 
from the late 1930s to the current year. The translation is a palimpsest 
which, when closely examined, shows fractures and fossils from this 
year of crisis.



281Rachel Galvin

iii. THe arMisTice: frencH vicTory in defeaT?

The archive also offers an important clue to understanding one of 
stein’s recurrent phrases that has drawn critical heat. “The winner 
loses,” a conceptual reversal suggesting that the germans were the 
actual losers in signing the armistice, not the french, has been inter-
preted as an indication of stein’s desire to write “propaganda” for 
vichy. iterations of the phrase appear throughout her wartime writing, 
and she titled a november 1940 essay in the Atlantic Monthly “The 
Winner loses: a Picture of occupied france.” some critics argue that 
this notion represents a deluded wish on stein’s part to bury her head, 
ostrich-like, in a sandpit of rhetoric and torque france’s capitulation 
into a victory. but this reading ignores the rhetoric of national renova-
tion circulating at the time, as i will explain in a moment.

it is an exaggeration to call the essay a “notorious instance” of 
the “propaganda pieces” that stein wrote “for vichy.”71 “The Winner 
loses” was neither commissioned nor approved by the vichy regime, 
as far as can be ascertained; and stein later folded it into her diaristic 
Wars I Have Seen. stein made repeated use of this provocative verbal 
paradox, structured by a chiasmus, like a verbal talisman promising 
france’s resurgence.72 it evokes her understanding of the french 
national character, current events, and her hopes for her adopted 
country. Historically situating stein’s writing offers context for her 
choice to use such a seemingly strange phrase. Primarily, it bears a 
strong connection to contemporary ideas circulating in france on the 
benefits of the armistice, and to a broader rhetoric of expiation and 
phoenix-like renewal through suffering (see OF, 224–29). based on 
french historians’ accounts of the year 1940, intertextual evidence, and 
archival traces (particularly in her translation of Pétain’s 1938 speech to 
the anciens combattants), it is clear that her text channels a widespread 
idea, or meme, and feeds it into the mill of her composition process.

The phrase “la victoire des vaincus” (the victory of the vanquished) 
is the title of a book by andré fribourg that appeared in 1938, which 
Pétain presented to the Académie des Sciences morales et politique 
on 14 May of that year.73 fribourg’s book warned against the return of 
germany (“the vanquished”), condemning france’s tolerant position 
toward its longtime enemy in the post-World War i period. Twelve 
days later, in his address to World War i veterans (le congrès des 
anciens combattants), Pétain elaborates on this notion, considering 
whether germany, having been defeated in 1918, was now rising to 
power once again: “one has even been able to speak of the victory of 
the vanquished. What is there to say. Will victory have changed sides 



282 The Politics of Translation

camps” [on a même pu parler de la victoire des vaincus. Qu’est-ce 
à dire? la victoire aurait-elle change de camp?] (S; P, 19). Pétain 
identifies germany as a growing threat and appeals to the assembled 
veterans to once again adopt a soldier’s mentality and help france 
become more unified, so that “[u]nited and awakened they will 
defend with arms the fortune of their country and will prevent the 
victory of the vanquished developing until it becomes the defeat of 
the conquerors” [unis et eclairés, les français defendront avec success 
la fortune de leur pays et empecheront que la victoire des vaincus, en 
s’accentuant, ne devienne la defaite des vainqueurs] (S; P, 21). Pétain 
emphatically refers to germany as “the vanquished” and france as 
“the conqueror” in 1938, 20 years after the conclusion of World War 
i. Two years later, after the armistice, Pétain revivified this idea in 
another speech, announcing that french honor had been “saved” and 
national sovereignty preserved. “from abject defeat, the new regime 
in embryo extracted its own putative victory,” writes historian James 
shields; “soon the term ‘occupation,’ with its connotations of defeat 
and passivity, would give way to a quite different term suggesting that 
france could remain at the helm of its own destiny.”74 The idea seems 
to have been provocative for stein, as she rewrote these sentences in 
english in 1941. committed as she was to a cyclical idea of history, 
it would have been logical to her that war caused first the germans 
and now the french to pull themselves back up by their bootstraps.

as stein composed her Atlantic Monthly essay in 1940, the idea 
would have rung with new significance for her. it indicated the possi-
bility that the french would be strengthened by hardship and had only 
to strive to come out on top once again. she sets out a rationale for 
the armistice in her essay, arguing that france will emerge triumphant 
from its capitulation: “The french do naturally not like that life is too 
easy, they like, like the phoenix, to rise from the ashes. They really 
do believe that those that win lose.”75 she argues that young french 
people are taking an optimistic view, expressing excitement about 
meeting the challenge of improving and strengthening their country, 
which they see as bracing for the national character:

They say now . . . that if they had had an easy victory the vices would 
have been weaker and more of them, and now well, now there is really 
something to do they have to make france itself again and there is 
a future; . . . they are looking forward. . . . in short, they feel alive 
and like it.76



283Rachel Galvin

The rhetoric of autonomy and national renovation was current at the 
time, and it went hand in hand with self-reproach for the current state 
of affairs. Military commanders such as general Maxime Weygand and 
Pétain blamed the french post-World War i cultivation of ease and 
pleasure rather than a national “spirit of sacrifice” (OF, 225). bishop 
Jules saliège of Toulouse, who was recognized after the war for being 
a friend of the resistance and one of the Just, wrote in La Croix on 
28 June 1940,

lord, we ask you forgiveness.
What use have we made of the victory in 1918?
What use would we have made of an easy victory in 1940?

         (OF, 227)

This meditation came to be used as a prayer in the Toulouse region. 
from newspaper editorials in La Dépêche to statements by intellectuals 
such as andré gide and Julien benda (who wrote of the obligation 
to “consent to sacrifice”), self-flagellation and the discussion of the 
benefits of not achieving an easy victory were prevalent (OF, 232).77 
as laborie notes, in the summer of 1940, france was psychologically 
ready for the aid of a redeemer (see OF, 228). Just so, stein writes 
in her essay that the signing of the armistice signified that france was 
“saved” and “everything was over,” yet, she adds, “but it wasn’t, not at 
all it was just beginning for us.”78

The importance of this loaded phrase, “the winner loses,” also 
illuminates Toklas’s vigorous interchange in the notebook surrounding 
Pétain’s affirmation in his 1938 address to the veterans: “c’est un fait 
reconnu que la défaite réveille toujours les français” (P, 14). in her 
first draft, stein leaves out this one-sentence paragraph, only to include 
it on the following page of her notebook. Toklas marks the gap on 
the first page with a red star and translates the sentence herself on 
the left-hand page in red: “it is a recognized fact that a defeat always 
awakens the french people.” stein crosses this out vigorously. Her 
first attempt at the statement about french perseverance in the face 
of defeat runs like so, including the phrases she considered: “it is a 
recognized [a well known] fact that it is in defeat always that the real 
quality of the french shows itself. quickens the french people” (S). 
after the changes, the line reads, “it is a recognized fact that defeat 
always quickens the french people.” on the facing page, where stein 
and Toklas have the habit of marking their corrections and possible 
substitutions—their many exchanges revealing how intimately they 



284 The Politics of Translation

collaborated on the translation—Toklas writes again in red, with a small 
variation, “it is a recognized fact that defeat always rouses / awakens 
the french people” (S). stein crosses this out with her black pen. 
This debate between Toklas and stein shows stein considering how 
to frame this statement about the french character in light of current 
events. it has oratorical qualities; it is a grand phrase with the ring of 
aphorism. rather than Toklas’s suggestion of “awakens” or “rouses” for 
the key verb, she chooses the more active “quickens,” which implies 
an imminent leap into action. she crosses out her earlier, less direct 
syntactical structure, which would have more closely mirrored french 
syntax (“it is in defeat that”), opting for the more direct “defeat always 
quickens.” Whereas Toklas first offers “a defeat ” stein makes it more 
generalizable by leaving out the article. The statement not only hear-
kens back to World War i (as Pétain would have it in 1938), but it is 
also generalized to anticipate the armistice of 1940. Translating this 
statement in 1942 as the war intensified around her, stein was reliving 
the speeches and events of just a few years previously. Her transla-
tion is crafted out of a layered awareness of history, and reveals how 
the act of translation may make history continuous with the present.

iv. conclUsion

by 1941, french and english had become mixed for stein in a kind 
of interlanguage. “interlanguage” is a sociolinguistic term that describes 
a variety of language that is idiosyncratic to the speaker, and is

intermediate between the speaker’s native language and the target 
language, since the target language will be subject to interference 
or admixture from the learner’s native language. crucially, though, 
the interlanguage will also contain elements which are not present in 
either the native language or the target language. The interlanguage 
will develop and change as the learner progresses, but may also be 
subject to fossilisation.79

interlanguage is found in stein’s compositions in english as well as 
her translations. in Paris France, which is arguably an example of 
her “audience writing,” stein does not capitalize “french,” just as it 
wouldn’t be capitalized in french; and instead of writing “neighbor-
hood,” she employs phono-semantic matching and uses “quarters” for 
quartier. Phono-semantic matching camouflages a borrowed foreign 
word because it matches a target-language word phonetically and 
semantically (like “chase lounge” for chaise-longue).80 in Paris France 



285Rachel Galvin

she writes, “not to know the well known in Paris does not argue yourself 
unknown, because nobody knows anybody whom they do not know.”81 
The phrase “argue yourself” phono-semantically matches the french 
argumenter, in the sense of “to prove”—a more idiomatic sentence 
would be, “not to know the well-known in Paris does not prove that 
you yourself are unknown.” The frequency of interlanguage in stein’s 
later work indicates that it is important to take into account her nearly 
43 years of living in france and how it influenced both her political 
beliefs and her language use. one of my points is that stein was less 
of an american writer and more of an international writer poised 
between languages.

near the end of Wars I Have Seen, when the americans have liber-
ated france, stein notes the differences between british english and 
american english, in a comment that would serve well as a gloss on 
her own french-english interlanguage:

so the only way the americans could change their language was by 
choosing words which they liked better than other words, by putting 
words next to each other in a different way than the english way, by 
shoving the language around until at last now the job is done, we 
use the same words as the english do but the words say an entirely 
different thing. (W, 171)

stein indeed chose the words she liked best and shoved the language 
around until the job was done—not only in Wars I Have Seen, Paris 
France, and other wartime texts, but in her unpublished translations 
of Pétain as well. The translation follows a poetics that values euphony, 
sonorous repetition, parallel structures, and other rhetorical flourishes. 
Her manipulation of the speeches contradicts the notion that she ceded 
aesthetic control. Quite to the contrary, she embellished the original. 
she falls within the tradition of translators and translation theorists 
ranging from cicero to Jorge luis borges to venuti who have argued 
for the translator’s visibility. she demonstrates a commitment to a 
sense-for-sense translation, which, as cicero once wrote, makes the 
translator not a mere “interpreter” but an “orator.”82 stein sought to 
become the generator of text, an orator who re-voiced Pétain’s texts 
so as to publicize them to americans.

it is of course impossible to locate stein’s intentions in these transla-
tions. There are lacunae in the story of how the translations came to be, 
why stein abruptly stopped translating, and why the drafts remained 
within her notebooks rather than seeing publication. it is not simple 
to read a writer’s politics into her half-made gesture of an unpublished 



286 The Politics of Translation

translation. However, what i hope to have made clear is that the 
translation is a startling departure from the original and shows stein’s 
own distinct signature. for this reason i maintain that it is fruitful to 
read the translation as part of her oeuvre, and to place it within the 
context and the stylistic spectrum of her other writing. Her project is 
worth bringing out of the archive and reading as one of the literary 
artifacts of modernist reactionism. exploring it illuminates some of the 
complexities of cultural production under the occupation. i have also 
aimed to show that thinking about translation can bring much to socio-
historical, political, and aesthetic questions in the study of modernism. 
Translation was famously central to many modernist poetic projects, 
such as Pound’s translations from the chinese, or eliot’s translations 
of Jules laforgue.83 but the influence courses in the other direction, 
too. stein’s poetics significantly informed how she translated, even 
when working with a utilitarian text such as a political speech. familiar 
steinian elements are prevalent in the text’s poetics, undermining the 
claim that the project was a departure for her; it indubitably reflects 
her idiosyncratic poetics. in recent debates about her wartime activity, 
the assumption that translation is a secondary and derivative activity 
persists. However, translation is a primary production of text, and this 
is what makes stein’s translation double-voiced. Ultimately, it indicates 
that she was even more responsible for her aspiration to complicity 
than her critics would have it.

University of Chicago

noTes

i would like to thank the curators at the beinecke rare books and Manuscript 
library at yale University for their help. i am also grateful to Joshua Kotin, liesl olson, 
lindsay reckson, and the members of the spring 2013 andrew W. Mellon seminar at 
Johns Hopkins for the generous responses to this essay.

1 for narration of this period, see linda Wagner-Martin, Favored Strangers: Gertrude 
Stein and Her Family (new brunswick: rutgers Univ. Press, 1995) and W. g. rogers, 
When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person (new york: reinhart, 
1948), 191.

2 Matisse traveled to nice; James Joyce and his family went to a village near vichy. 
for an overview of prominent artists and intellectuals’ locations when war was declared 
and at the armistice, see frederic spotts, The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and 
Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation (new Haven: yale Univ. Press, 2008), 8–13.

3 see edward burns, “gertrude stein: a complex itinerary, 1940–1944,” Jacket 
2 (9 May 2012), https://jacket2.org/article/gertrude-stein-complex-itinerary-
1940%e2%80%931944; and faÿ, Les Précieux (Paris: librairie académique Perrain, 
1966), 160–63.



287Rachel Galvin

4 This criticism built on similar protests that had been expressed the previous 
year in reaction to the 2011 “seeing gertrude stein: five stories” exhibition, which 
toured the contemporary Jewish Museum of san francisco and the national Portrait 
gallery in Washington, dc. Those protests aimed to reveal stein’s “dark side”; as one 
reporter wrote, “[t]he faÿ controversy is increasingly dogging the stein legacy” (Philip 
Kennicott, “gertrude stein in full form at Portrait gallery,” The Washington Post [21 
october 2011], http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-10-21/lifestyle/35276647_1_art-
collector-matisse-and-picasso-leo-stein). even earlier, information about stein’s politics 
was framed as a scandalous revelation in scott Heller’s article, “a study shows That 
gertrude stein backed the vichy government during World War ii” (Chronicle of 
Higher Education, 18 october 1996: a14, a16). The study Heller’s title refers to is 
Wanda van dusen’s essay in Modernism/modernity analzying stein’s translations of 
Pétain; see “Portrait of a national fetish: gertrude stein’s ‘introduction to the speeches 
of Maréchal Pétain’ (1942),” Modernism/modernity 3.3 (1996): 69–92.

5 not only scholars and exhibition-goers, but politicians, too, expressed their disgrun-
tlement, including Manhattan borough President scott stringer and new york state 
assemblyman dov Hikind, who published a press release on the issue (see “Hikind 
demands Metropolitan Museum of art Unmask gertrude stein’s nazi Past” [1 May 
2012], http://dovhikind.blogspot.com/2012/05/hikind-demands-metropolitan-museum-
of.html). The museum curators amended the wall labels and pointed out that the 
exhibition catalog refers several times to the intercession of faÿ on stein and Toklas’s 
behalf. see cécile debray, “gertrude stein and Painting: from Picasso to Picabia,” in 
The Steins Collect, ed. Janet bishop, debray, and rebecca rabinow (new Haven: san 
francisco Museum of Modern art and yale Univ. Press, 2011), 238; see also, in The 
Steins Collect, edward burns, 265; Kate Medillo, 329; and Hélène Klein, 244, 250n26.

6 barbara Will, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy 
Dilemma (new york: columbia Univ. Press, 2011), 140. see also barbara Will, “The 
strange Politics of gertrude stein” (Humanites Magazine [March/april 2012], www.
neh.gov/humanities/2012/marchapril/feature/the-strange-politics-gertrude-stein), where 
she writes: “and yet throughout her life stein hewed to the political right, even signing 
up to be a propagandist for an authoritarian, nazi-dominated political regime.” vaclav 
Paris calls the drafts the “corpus delicti of her collaboration with the vichy regime” 
(“gertrude stein’s Translations of speeches by Philippe Pétain,” Jacket 2 [6 May 
2013], http://jacket2.org/article/gertrude-steins-translations-speeches-philippe-petain).

7 see robin bates, “When great artists do bad Things,” Better Living through 
Beowulf (7 May 2012), http://www.betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/?p=13609. see 
also christopher benfey, “The alibi of ambiguity,” New Republic (28 June 2012), 
www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/103918/barbara-will-gertrude-
stein-christopher-benfey#; emily greenhouse, “Why Won’t the Met Tell the Whole 
Truth about gertrude stein?,” The New Yorker (8 June 2012), www.newyorker.
com/culture/culture-desk/why-wont-the-met-tell-the-whole-truth-about-gertrude-
stein; alan dershowitz, “suppressing Ugly Truth for beautiful art,” Huffington 
Post (1 May 2012), www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-dershowitz/met-gertrude-stein-
collaborator_b_1467174.html; and “gertrude stein: Why Her fascist Politics Matter,” 
The Jewish Week (24 april 2012), www.thejewishweek.com/blogs/well_versed/
gertrude_stein_why_her_fascist_politics_matter; and eitan Kensky, “gertrude stein, 
fascist?,” Jewish Ideas Daily (29 february 2012), http://www.jpost.com/opinion/
op-ed-contributors/Jewish-ideas-daily-gertrude-stein-fascist. for the suggestion 
that this furor had an impact on the White House’s correction to its 2012 Jewish 



288 The Politics of Translation

Heritage Month press release, see natasha Mozgovaya, “obama corrects controversial 
Jewish Heritage Month Proclamation” (3 May 2012), www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/
obama-corrects-controversial-jewish-heritage-month-proclamation-1.427880.

8 charles bernstein, “gertrude stein’s War years: setting the record straight,” Jacket 2 (9 
May 2012), https://jacket2.org/feature/gertrude-steins-war-years-setting-record-straight.

9 see Paris; and “appendix iX—gertrude stein: september 1942–september 1944,” 
in The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder, ed. edward burns and Ulla 
e. dydo (new Haven: yale Univ. Press, 1996), 401–21. Hereafter abbreviated A and 
cited parenthetically by page number.

10 faÿ was trained at the sorbonne and Harvard and was the first professor of american 
civilization at the collège de france. He became director of the bibliothèque nationale 
when the incumbent, Julien cain, was dismissed because he was Jewish. faÿ, who had 
known Pétain for twenty years, was tasked with aiding vichy in identifying freemasons 
and members of other secret societies, and cataloguing the archives and objects seized 
from Masonic lodges. after the liberation, faÿ was prosecuted for collaboration and 
sentenced to twenty years of forced labor. for a detailed narrative of his activities, see 
Will, “faÿ’s War,” in Unlikely Collaboration, 149–84.

11 burns and dydo do not provide a source for this suggestion. i have been unable 
to substantiate it elsewhere.

12 Pétain’s popularity rose again in January 1942. see Philippe burrin, France Under 
the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise (new york: norton, 1996), 181–82.

13 stein’s neighbor was named Paul genin, and the sous-préfet, Maurice sivan. genin 
had helped stein translate her introduction to Pétain’s speeches into french. see A, 410.

14 burns and dydo speculate that perhaps stein continued the translation in another 
notebook that has been lost. see A, 409. Paris suggests that rather than recognize the 
“political ramifications” of her project, stein may have stopped translating because 
her interest waned.

15 dydo, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, 1923–1934 (evanston: 
northwestern Univ. Press), 40.

16 see Jean-Pierre azéma, De Munich à La Libération, 1938–1944 ([Paris]: éditions 
du seuil, 1979), 78. Hereafter abbreviated M and cited parenthetically by page number.

17 The two scholars who have most closely examined the translations held in the stein 
archives are Will, whose arguments i discuss further on, and van dusen, who published 
stein’s draft introduction in Modernism/modernity (gertrude stein, “[introduction to 
the speeches of Maréchal Pétain],” ed. van dusen, Modernism/modernity 3.3 [1996], 
93–96). Her reading opened the way for Will’s interpretation. in “Portrait of a national 
fetish,” van dusen claims that stein’s introduction to Pétain’s speeches carries out a 
“redemptive fetishistic ritual” (71) with an “idolatrous dimension” (75) as she portrays 
Pétain as “national savior and benevolent father” (75). see also Paris; burns and dydo; 
Will, Unlikely Collaboration; Will, “The strange Politics of gertrude stein”; and Will, 
“gertrude stein, bernard faÿ, and the ruthless flowers of friendship,” Modernism/
modernity 15.4 (2008): 647–63.

18 Peter Trudgill, A Glossary of Sociolinguistics (oxford: oxford Univ. Press, 2003), 65.
19 gertrude stein, “Poetry and grammar,” in Stein: Writings 1932–1946, 2 vol. 

(new york: library of america, 1998), 2:320. Hereafter abbreviated PG and cited 
parenthetically by page number.

20 it is useful to contextualize stein’s translation project within the fluctuations of 
public opinion in france during the turning-point year of 1942. The difference between 
maréchalisme, or the admiration for or attachment to the person of Maréchal Pétain, 



289Rachel Galvin

and pétainisme, or support for the vichy government, is essential for understanding 
the history of the time period and situating stein’s translation (see M, 78).

21 lawrence venuti, “Translation, community, Utopia,” in The Translation Studies 
Reader (new york: routledge, 2000), 485.

22 stein writes in the introduction to the speeches she drafted, “about one thing they 
were all agreed and that is that he had achieved a miracle, without arms without any 
means of defense, he had succeeded in making the germans more or less keep their 
word with him” (stein, “[introduction],” 95).

23 stein, Wars I Have Seen (new york: random House, 1945), 206. Hereafter 
abbreviated W and cited parenthetically by page number. for stein’s assessment of the 
maquis, see W, 227. in Gertrude Stein, le Bugey, la guerre: d’août 1924 à décembre 1944 
(bourg-en-bresse: Musnier-gilbert éditions, 2009), dominique saint-Pierre states that 
the fact that stein does not mention the maquis until page 53 of Wars I Have Seen is 
not surprising, given that they had a very minimal presence in belley until June 1943.

24 burns, “gertrude stein.”
25 burns (“gertrude stein”) details the specifics surrounding her work’s appearance 

in these resistance publications.
26 Mention of stein’s friendship with faÿ had been made in memoirs, biographies, 

and critical studies as early as W. g. rogers’s 1948 When This You See Remember Me, 
robert bridgman’s Gertrude Stein in Pieces (new york: oxford Univ. Press, 1979), 
James Mellow’s Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (new york: Praeger, 
1974), and Wagner-Martin’s Favored Strangers. for discussion of stein’s wartime 
writing, see dydo and burns; Jean gallagher, The World Wars Through the Female 
Gaze (carbondale: southern illinois Univ. Press, 1998); Maria diedrich, “‘a book 
in Translation about eggs and butter’: gertrude stein’s World War ii” in Women 
and War: The Changing Status of American Women from the 1930s to the 1950s, ed. 
Maria diedrich and dorothea fischer-fornung (new york: berg, 1990), 87–106; van 
dusen; Marianne deKoven, Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism (Princeton: 
Princeton Univ. Press, 1991); Phoebe stein davis, “‘even cake gets to Have another 
Meaning’: History, narrative, and ‘daily living’ in gertrude stein’s World War ii 
Writings,” Modern Fiction Studies 44.3 (1998): 568–607; liesl olson, “gertrude stein, 
William James, and Habit in the shadow of War,” in Modernism and the Ordinary 
(oxford: oxford Univ. Press, 2009), 89–114; John Wittier-ferguson, “The liberation 
of gertrude stein: War and Writing,” Modernism/modernity 8.3 (2001): 405–28; and 
dana cairns Watson, Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens (nashville: 
vanderbilt Univ. Press, 2005).

27 a study based on archival research in Pound’s fbi files shows that the poet engaged 
in myriad “seditious actions on behalf of the fascist axis,” not just the radio broadcasts 
(Matthew feldman, “The ‘Pound case’ in Historical Perspective: an archival overview,” 
Journal of Modern Literature 35.2 [2012]: 92).

28 rogers, 219.
29 spotts, 15.
30 investigation of vichy only began in earnest in the early 1970s, prompted in large 

part by the work of american political scientist and historian robert o. Paxton’s Vichy 
France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (new york: alfred a. Knopf, 1972). 
see also dudley andrew and steven Ungar, Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of 
Culture (cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2008); denis Hollier, Absent Without Leave: 
French Literature under the Threat of War (cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997); 
and Zeev sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (berkeley: 
Univ. of california Press, 1986).



290 The Politics of Translation

31 a picture of what life was like has begun to emerge with spotts’s study and those 
of stéphanie corcy (La vie culturelle sous l’Occupation [Paris: Perrin, 2005]); laurence 
bertrand dorléac (L’art en guerre, France 1938–1947 [Paris: Paris Musées, 2012]); 
gilles and Jean robert ragache (La vie quotidienne des écrivains et des artistes sous 
l’Occupation: 1940–1944 [Paris: Hachette, 1988]); and Jean-Pierre rioux (La vie 
culturelle sous Vichy [brussels: éditions complexe, 1990]). The “shameful peace” was 
Jean cocteau’s term for the period.

32 among the multiple examples of this sort of critique published in 2011 and 2012, 
Philip Kennicott wrote in a particularly choleric article for The Washington Post that 
stein “wrote reams of gibberish, either in a singsong style . . . or in a hermetically 
sealed private language that she absurdly considered an analog of cubism” (Kennicott, 
“gertrude stein in full form”).

33 Michael lerner, “editor’s note on ‘Why the Witch-Hunt against gertrude stein?’ 
by renate stendhal,” Tikkun Magazine (4 June 2012), http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/
editors-note-on-why-the-witch-hunt-against-gertrude-stein-by-renate-stendhal.

34 lerner, “editor’s note.”
35 lerner’s argument centers on the moral obligation incumbent upon all artists, 

writers, and intellectuals “to fight against the rise of evil (as manifested in racism, sexism, 
homophobia, anti-semitism, anti-islam, anti-democracy, destruction of human rights, 
repression of free speech and freedom of assembly, destruction of the environment, 
militarism, torture, etc.)” (lerner, “editor’s note”).

36 lerner, “editor’s note.” see also Zofia lesinska, “gertrude stein’s War 
autobiographies: reception, History, and dialogue,” LIT 9 (1999): 313–42.

37 see david caplan, Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form 
(oxford: oxford Univ. Press, 2005), 14; Mutlu Konuk blasing, Politics and Form in 
Postmodern Poetry: O’Hara, Bishop, Ashbery, and Merrill (cambridge: cambridge 
Univ. Press, 1995); and lawrence s. rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites 
and Public Culture (new Haven: yale Univ. Press, 1998).

38 James longenbach, Modern Poetry after Modernism (oxford: oxford Univ. Press, 
1997), 6. caplan discusses both blasing and longenbach, differentiating his own method 
from both of theirs by specifying that he attends to historical contingency (see caplan, 
141n17). see also blasing, 16–17.

39 Williams writes: “To me the sonnet form is thoroughly banal because it is a word in 
itself whose meaning is definitely fascistic” (Something to Say: William Carlos Williams 
on Younger Poets [new york: new directions Publishing, 1985], 88).

40 for a discussion of stein’s concept of “audience writing,” see dydo, Gertrude Stein.
41 in Poetry and the Press in Wartime (1936–1945), forthcoming from oxford Univ. 

Press, i argue that stein composed Wars I Have Seen to record what was happening in 
bilignin in the near absence of daily newspapers. she creates lyric outbursts within the 
prose that encode and dwell on moments of fear and danger, even as they inscribe an 
authorial presence above and against the norms of war reportage. These lyric outbursts, 
which i call “reverse epiphanies,” work to contain disturbing incidents and rein in the 
felt perception of threat, instead of signaling a sudden revelation as epipanies usually 
do. reverse epiphanies are lyric eruptions within the continuity of the prose that assert 
the author’s presence.

42 stein, Wars I Have Seen, gertrude stein and alice b. Toklas Papers, yale collection 
of american literature, beinecke rare book and Manuscript library, Mss 76, box 80.

43 Peter nicholls, “Wars i Have seen,” in A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century 
American Poetry, ed. stephen fredman (Malden: Wiley-blackwell, 2005), 16.

44 lesinska, 314.



291Rachel Galvin

45 Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (evanston: 
northwestern Univ. Press, 1999), 18.

46 Max eastman, “The cult of Unintelligibility,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 158 
(1929): 632–39; eastman, “non-communicative art,” The Freeman 4.16 (3 May 
1954): 571.

47 see Jennifer ashton, From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and 
Theory in the Twentieth Century (cambridge: cambridge Univ. Press, 2005); annalisa 
Zox-Weaver, Women Modernists and Fascism (cambridge: cambridge Univ. Press, 
2011); and lisa ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (ithaca: cornell 
Univ. Press, 1991).

48 ashton, 68. “Masterpiece” is a term that stein used throughout her work; see, for 
instance, “What are Master-pieces and Why are There so few of Them,” in gertrude 
stein, Writings, 1932–1946 (new york: The library of america, 1998), 353–364. This 
argument has been made persuasively by ashton and by lisa siraganian, who argues 
that stein’s work is not in fact “indeterminate,” as scholars ranging from Perloff to 
Juliana spahr have maintained (“out of air: Theorizing the art object in gertrude 
stein and Wyndham lewis,” Modernism/modernity 10.4 [2003]: 669).

49 see also siraganian, 661–66.
50 in a letter dated 1932, stein writes of the “exactitude of abstract thought and poetry 

as created by exactness and as far as possible disembodiedment if one may use such 
a word, creating sense by intensity of exactness” (cited in dydo, Gertrude Stein, 25).

51 Pétain’s own composition method was simply to revise the draft provided by his 
assistants.

52 benfey; renate stendhal, “Why the Witch-Hunt against gertrude 
stein?,” Tikkun Magazine (4 June 2012), http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/
why-the-witch-hunt-against-gertrude-stein.

53 Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 139.
54 Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 140.
55 saint augustine, for one, argued that word-for-word translation of the Hebrew 

bible into greek preserved its divinely inspired message. see augustine, On Christian 
Doctrine, trans. d. W. robertson, Jr. (indianapolis: bobbs-Merrill, 1958).

56 John Whittier-ferguson observes that since the 1930s, it has been a commonplace 
of criticism to describe stein as childish and incapable of sophisticated analysis, from 
Wyndham lewis’s negative assessment in Time and Western Man to ben ray redman’s 
positive evaluation in The Saturday Review. see “The liberation of gertrude stein: 
War and Writing,” Modernism/modernity 8.3 [2001]: 405–28.

57 lori chamberlain, “gender and the Metaphorics of Translation,” in The Translation 
Studies Reader, 314.

58 george steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (oxford: oxford 
Univ. Press, 1998), 314; Jerome, “letter to Pammachius,” trans. Kathleen davis, in 
The Translation Studies Reader, 25. steiner continues, “There is a also a sadness after 
success, the augustinian tristitia which follows on the cognate acts of erotic and of 
intellection possession” (steiner, 314).

59 chamberlain, 314.
60 stein, Tender Buttons, in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. carl van vechten 

(new york: random House, 1946), 508.
61 friedrich schleiermacher, “on the different Methods of Translating,” in The 

Translation Studies Reader, 53.



292 The Politics of Translation

62 steinese is an alternative is “steinish,” which was used in the newspapers during 
stein’s lifetime. see olson, 339.

63 Philippe Pétain and gabriel louis-Jaray, Paroles aux Français. Messages et écrits, 
1934–1941 (lyon: H. lardanchet, 1941), 16, 19 (hereafter abbreviated P and cited 
parenthetically by page number); gertrude stein, “The speeches of Maréchal Pétain,” 
gertrude stein and alice b. Toklas Papers, yale collection of american literature, 
beinecke rare book and Manuscript library, Mss 76, box 64, folders 1140–42 (here-
after abbreviated S and cited parenthetically).

64 Will, “lost in Translation: stein’s vichy collaboration,” Modernism/modernity 
11.4 (2004): 653.

65 Philippe Pétain, ferdinand bouyssy, gabriel louis Jaray, and émile Pons, 
L’Armistice du 25 juin 1940: appels aux Français (royat: fédération des associations 
françaises pour le développement des relations avec l’étranger et comité france-
amérique, 1940), 41–42.

66 burrin, 70.
67 see Pierre laborie, L’opinion française sous Vichy (Paris: seuil, 1990), 229–30. 

Hereafter abbreviated OF and cited parenthetically by page number.
68 for discussion of the emotional tone of this speech, see burrin, 10.
69 Pétain, L’armistice; P, 69.
70 andré Kaspi. La deuxième guerre mondiale: chronologie commentée (Paris: éditions 

complexe, 1995), 98. My translation.
71 Will, Unlikely Collaboration, 103.
72 stein uses similar language in the first scene of her 1944 play in savoy; or Yes 

Is for a Very Young Man, which is set in June 1940 (stein, In Savoy: Or, Yes Is for a 
Very Young Man [alexandria: alexander street Press, 2005]).

73 see Jacques le groignec, Pétain et les Allemands (Paris: nouvelles editions 
latines, 1997), 206.

74 James shields, The Extreme Right in France: From Pétain to Le Pen (london: 
routledge, 2007), 16.

75 stein, “The Winner loses: a Picture of occupied france,” in Selected Writings 
of Gertrude Stein, 560.

76 stein, “The Winner loses,” 566.
77 see OF, 225–28.
78 stein, “The Winner loses,” 553.
79 Trudgill, 65.
80 see ghil’ad Zuckermann, Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli 

Hebrew (london: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
81 stein, Paris France, 14.
82 Marcus Tullius cicero, De inventione, De Optimo genere oratorum, Topica, trans. 

H. M. Hubbell (cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press: 1976), 356.
83 H. d., W. b. yeats, James Joyce, and many other modernists maintained an active 

translation practice. see stephen yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism: 
Gender, Politics, Language (new york: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) for analysis of how 
modernist poets pursued a program of cultural renewal through translation. see also 
yao, “Translation studies and Modernism,” in A Handbook of Modernism Studies, ed. 
Jean-Michel rabaté (chicester, West sussex: Wiley-blackwell, 2013), 209–20.