Translating Georges Simenon from the archives to the museum. The challenges of visibility and accessibility of literary and translation heritage in the digital age

Building on Ketelaar’s call for a shift in focus “from the archive as a product to the archive as a process” (2006:187), this paper will highlight the main challenges of the ULiège-based project SImenon en TRADuction (SITRAD), which aims to map and analyze Georges Simenon’s translation flows and to make his translation archives visible and accessible to a broader audience, including researchers. Understanding translation archives “both as a source of research objects and as an object of research” (Cordingley & Hersant 2021:9), this paper offers three contributions. On the one hand, by presenting the SITRAD translation database, we will explore how digital tools can instrumentalize translation archives to sharpen our understanding of the international circulation of the third most translated French-speaking author of all time. Special attention will be devoted to the diversity of players involved (e.g., literary agents, publishers, authors of fore or afterwords, translators, collection directors, etc.). On the other hand, we will elaborate on the archives as past and present mediators of Simenon’s oeuvre and as a “lieu de mémoire” (Nora 1996:14). We will assess the complex transnational human network of political, academic, cultural, and private actors involved in the preservation and dissemination of Simenon’s legacy, and especially, on their difficulties translating each other’s interests and, as such, gathering and showcasing Simenon's archives in the form of a museum. Finally, building on the objectives and challenges of the SITRAD project, we shall reflect on the possible interventions of researchers to facilitate the visibility and valorization of translation in society and to contribute to a finer understanding of literary internationalization and literary success. To do so, this contribution will cross insights from translation sociology (Callon 2006), the sociology of translation (Heilbron 2010, Roig Sanz & Fólica 2021), and critical approaches to digital humanities and digitized cultural heritage (Berry and Fagerjord, 2017).