Resumen de Empty Sydney or Sydney emptied:: Peter Corris’s national allegory translated
This article examines national allegory and its translation in the work of Peter Corris, with a focus on The Empty Beach (1983), in two ways. The most obvious approach, which examines what happens to Corris’s novel, and in particular to the ways in which it articulates Australianness and the key place of Sydney within that signifying system, when it is translated, is deemed, if not less important then certainly secondary. What is considered fundamental here is the novel’s original predisposition towards translation. Corris’s empty beach is therefore a site of evacuation – evacuation of any number of things, including of course its crimes and criminal plots, but especially, in the framework of this special issue, of indicators of national specificity. The extant French translation tests this translatability in interesting ways; notably, the French word for ‘beach’, la plage, is itself a broader term, which refers to a flat surface. In this sense, the novel’s translated title is doubly suggestive of emptiness and thus intensifies the failure of the original novel to ground itself in its setting. This analysis will therefore be counterintuitive but will also, hopefully, like the translation process on which it is focused, suggest new lenses for reading Peter Corris, for getting him out of his Sydney mould, which are nonetheless, once sun protection is provided against the glaring Bondi sun, in full view in his work.
