Vladimir Volkoff,The Torturer

Abstract

Vladimir Volkoff (1932—2005) was a prolific writer in French. He was the son of White Russian émigrés and was educated at the University of Liège, according to information on the back of the translation. His last novel, entitled in French Le Tortionnaire, has been translated into English by John Dunaway, a retired professor of French at Mercer University. The story concerns the career of Lt. Robert Lavilhaud, a young intelligence officer serving in the French army during the civil war in Algeria in the 1960s. The novel may be in part biographical since Volkoff also served in a like capacity in his younger years. The novel deals with the actions and reactions of French military personnel in Algeria during the armed insurrection in that troubled country.

Professor Dunaway set himself a challenging task when he undertook to translate the original French novel into English. By and large, he has succeeded admirably, and this in spite of the extensive use of slang and highly colloquial language. Here is a good example of how a few lines of the original novel in French are translated into good English:

Lavilhaud trouvait choquant de bâfrer ainsi dans un pays où tout le monde ne devait pas manger à sa faim, mais cela ne gênait pas Jullien, qui avait une doctrine: “Il ne faut pas se laisser abattre. D’ailleurs rien ne se perd: le patron a des cochons qui terminent tout.” (Le Tortionnaire, 13)

Here is Professor Dunaway’s translation of the lines above:

Lavilhaud found it shocking to pig out this way in a country where everyone undoubtedly wasn’t able to eat when hungry, but it didn’t bother Jullien, whose doctrine was: “Don’t get down on yourself. Besides, nothing’s wasted. The owner has pigs that finish everything off. (The Torturer, 5)

It is obvious that Prof. Dunaway has found a real sympathy for this novel by Volkoff. And here, in this novel that possesses some real autobiographical elements, the translator gets into, as it were, the essence of the novel. One of the novel’s main questions is the morality of the use of torture to gain information that could, in some instances, save the lives of innocent people: this same question is as important now as it was at the time in which the novel is set. In a conversation about torture with a subordinate, Lavilhaud says:

It’s not doing someone harm that disgusts me, it’s making him [the torture victim] do evil. If you were tortured, M. Gonarelle, and you denounced your buddies, so that they were tortured and denounced their buddies … would you be proud of yourself? (The Torturer, 83)

In other words, Volkoff seems to be saying, one act of evil begets another act of evil, and so on. Where does it all end? In summary, the question of the morality or immorality of torture is one of the main issues raised by this novel. In a real sense, the climactic chapter is the tenth. In this chapter, a prisoner, rightly suspected of transporting money from the FLN in France to a contact in Algeria, is pressured and finally tortured (by waterboarding) to make him give the necessary information. During this whole painful episode, Lavilhaud undergoes a transformation—from being some one who abhors torture to some one who uses it to gain information that will save the lives of French soldiers. On pages 204 and 205 appear these words:

Something had changed in the limpid eyes of Lavilhaud. Not only was he on the point of discarding the mask of understanding, but above all he was becoming another man. [204]

But suddenly there came spontaneously to his mouth a flow of filth he didn’t realize he knew, while he shook the prisoner and banged his head against the wood. He felt himself foaming at the mouth and the sensation was not unpleasant to him. … He didn’t ask himself what God might think of what he was doing. He just knew that he couldn’t do anything else. [205]

These passages, written by Volkoff and translated into English by John Dunaway, are part of the testimony to the transformation that this experience is causing the protagonist to undergo. Practicing torture on a fellow human being—even one whose silence puts others’ lives at risk—can have psychological effects on those who practice the torture. The French word râtelier that comes up more than once in this chapter is correctly translated as “rack.” But in the first full paragraph on page 200 in the English translation it is incorrectly given as “rake.” This is probably a typo.

All in all, John Dunaway has done an excellent job in translating the novel by Volkoff from French to English. The protagonist is a sympathetic young man whose misfortune it is to have to resort to violent means in order to obtain information that could potentially save French and Algerian lives. The tragedy undergone by Frenchmen in Algeria is a part of the larger tragedy of political power in the twentieth century. Because of John Dunaway’s excellent translation of the novel into English, it is to be hoped that a worthwhile novel by Volkoff will be able to gain a wider audience.