War is a work that followed a truly extraordinary path before reaching today’s readers. Believed to have been written around 1932, the manuscript was among the group of drafts Louis-Ferdinand CÉLINE left behind in his Montmartre home when he went into exile in 1944, after which their whereabouts remained unknown. The details are given in my translator’s afterword, but suffice it to say that, after a series of twists and turns worthy of this author, whose life itself seems to condense the shadow side of twentieth-century history, the news of its discovery was reported on August 5th, 2021, in a four-page scoop in Le Monde.
What makes this work particularly remarkable is that not even CÉLINE scholars or devoted readers knew of its existence. When it was published in France in 2022, it became one of the rare great bestsellers for a classic author and caused a considerable stir. Based on CÉLINE’s own experiences on the front and in a field hospital during the First World War, the narrative is, unusually for him, very clearly structured and compact. Yet the musicality spun from his characteristic slang, vulgarity, and obscenity remains intact, making it an ideal first read for those new to CÉLINE. A sequel of sorts, London, also from the trove of newly discovered manuscripts, is due to be published soon.
I myself come from the theater world, far from academia, and first encountered CÉLINE when I staged his work. That experience left me utterly possessed, and I continued over the years to make my own translations for performance. The translation of this book likewise began from a sense of urgency, the fear that this “discovery of the century” might never be published in Japanese, with no prospect of a publisher at the outset. The days of translation under the impatience of not finding a publisher perhaps harmonized all the more with the fevered prose in which CÉLINE experimented with a new style in this work.
As I noted in the afterword, the first difficulty in translating CÉLINE into Japanese lies in the wealth of colorful slang, vulgarity, and abuse, which do not fit neatly into Japanese. These features, which make his style unmistakable, cannot simply be replaced on the level of vocabulary alone. Each sentence had to be weighed for its overall effect and rendered into Japanese by making the fullest use of the expressive capacities of the “ji” (functional words) in Tokieda’s grammar. Whether I have managed to capture the fierce musicality of the original is something I cannot say with confidence, but I would be delighted if this translation allowed readers to encounter a fresh side of an author who, more than sixty years after his death, remains scandalous.