#  The Bilingual Confessions of Jack Kerouac: Translation and the Making of a “Big American Writer”: A Talk by Jean-Christophe Cloutier 

 



    ![French MS page Sur le Chemin](/sites/g/files/omnuum1611/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/2024-10/Translated%20from%20the%20French%20MS%20page%20Sur%20Le%20Chemin.JPG?itok=V5QQokOa) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **October 29, 2024** 

 05:00PM - 06:30PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Thompson Room, Barker Center**  

 [12 Quincy St.  
Cambridge, MA 02125  
United States



 ](<https://www.google.com/maps?q=US MA Cambridge 02125 12 Quincy St.>) 



 

 



 

Building on years of archival excavation, textual reconstruction, and translation, this talk repositions Kerouac in his actual geopolitical and cultural-linguistic reality as a bilingual, first-generation immigrant Franco-American author. It will address how his recently published French manuscripts—including *Sur le chemin*, released by Gallimard in 2023—reveal a wholly-different Kerouac, one who secretly relied on self-translation to negotiate his lifelong dualism between French and English, and who willfully adopted what he called “the tone of a big American writer” to find literary success in the United States.   
  
**Jean-Christophe Cloutier** is Associate Professor of English &amp; Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.



 

 



 

 

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