A long-forgotten memoir of Bern by its first Black American resident finally appears in French
Vincent O. Carter's The Bern Book, an account of settling in the Swiss capital after the Second World War, has been translated by Monique Koutangni as Depuis que je vis dans la ville de Berne, according to Le Courrier.
Vincent O. Carter was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1924 and died in 1983. He landed in Normandy as a soldier in 1944 and took part in the liberation of Paris, according to Le Courrier. Back in the United States, he enrolled at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania to study literature, but soon left again, returning to France and then to the Netherlands before eventually settling in Bern.
It was in the Swiss capital that Carter wrote The Bern Book, an account the paper describes as an attempt to put into words the particular attachment felt by the first African American to make his home there. The book has now been translated into French under the title Depuis que je vis dans la ville de Berne.
A translator's note on rendering violence
In a companion piece published by Le Courrier, translator Monique Koutangni describes the project as a genuine challenge, saying that words are never simple when it comes to translating violence, which takes many different forms in Carter's text. The paper does not specify a publisher or publication date for the French edition, nor does it give further detail on the book's contents beyond this description.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
