Abstract: The Interpreter’s Portrait as Represented by Shumona Sinha between « cogito tacite » and « cogito parlé ». This work aims to analyse the relation between cogito tacite and cogito parlé in Assomons les pauvres! by Shumona Sinha. It is possible to understand the particularities of a disarticulated speech which has meaning only when there is barely any sonority left? Or the effort required to incorporate the self during exile, when there is no access to a language of one’s own? In her book, Shumona Sinha successfully exposes the deceptive reality of political asylum requests, using corporality and language as her main tools. Furtherly, the novel focuses on how the future colonists were forced to leave behind their original bodies, politically insignificant, through a mechanism of depersonalisation. Their only purpose became to forge stories and colonize people who will never be their own, nor will belong to them, but will offer, though shortly, an ontological narrative. Hence, the colonists soon transformed into puppets always in a vain existential search.

Keywords: cogito, body, (performative) language, interpreter, Shumona Sinha