Literature: What Drives Us to Retranslate the Classics?

[Un article de The Conversation écrit par Enrico Monti – Professeur associé d’anglais et de traductologie, Université de Haute-Alsace (UHA)]

In a well-stocked library or bookstore, you might find up to seven different translations of the Metamorphoses or The Great Gatsby. We are not talking here about different editions, but rather about different texts, different words. Moreover we think – and we claim – to have read Kafka or Fitzgerald, while very often those we have read are the words of Vialatte, Lortholary, Lefebvre, Llona, ​​Wolkenstein, Jaworski, to name only a few translators of these two masterpieces of world literature.

Which translation to choose, then? Most of us will let ourselves be guided by the same criteria that determine our choice of a French-speaking classic: affection for a publishing house or a collection, the paratexts, the price, the cover… Quite rarely by the reputation of these invisible to translated literature that are the translators, silent actors of an interpretation that we imagine to be impersonal and objective, and above all not crucial.

And besides, why are all these translators panicking over one and the same text? Legitimate question, given the countless texts still awaiting translation. If the primary goal of translation is to make a text intelligible to a public who does not master the language in which it was written, retranslations are clearly operations of very little utility. And yet, very few French people today approach Dante, Cervantes or Shakespeare in a French translation that is even 100 years old, while Italians, Spanish and English continue to read their authors beacons in a language that is several centuries old (not without the help of a plethora of explanatory notes).

Why do we keep bringing foreign classics up to date? Because a classic is a text that we never stop retranslating, one could say, reversing the terms of the question. The phenomenon of retranslation is both paradoxical and inherent to all cultures. A historian of translation, Michel Ballard, even saw it as one of the constants in the history of translation, of all periods.

Censorship, inaccuracies and aging of translations

The reasons are obviously multiple. Most often, the driving force is a sense of dissatisfaction with existing translations, which may have different origins. Forms of censorship, for example, ideological or moral, which deprived readers of certain aspects of a text. No need for dictatorships to see the text stripped of certain references or expunged of part of the culture that produced it. In other cases, dissatisfaction can be linked to the presence of mistakes and inaccuracies, due to human weakness or limited lexicographic resources: just think of the enormous gap between the working conditions of pre-translators. The Internet and us, who are just a click away from a verification that could require days of research only thirty years ago.

Let's take one of the most famous supposed “mistakes” in the history of translation, namely the horns on the head of Michelangelo's Moses (1515). The sculptor relies on the Latin translation of the Bible made by Saint-Jérôme some 1,100 years earlier (undoubtedly unrivaled longevity for a translation). However, Hebrew, a consonant language, does without the indication of vowels generating in the passage in question an ambiguity between keren (horned) and karan (radiant). If Jerome interprets “horned”, and with him a large part of the Christian iconography of the centuries to come, all contemporary translations of the Bible give Moses a “radiant” face when he receives the tables of the law. To restore the text's possible ambiguity, we will have to wait for Chagall's “intersemiotic” translation, which finds in another system of signs – painting – the possibility of attributing real horns of light to Moses.

One of the most often cited reasons for retranslating is that translations are getting old. What about the originals? They age too, but differently, we will be told. They gain charm, while the aging of the translations often turns grotesque. The difference is essentially to be found in the respective statuses of original and translation: a derived text, the translation cannot exist without the primary text from which it emanates and this secondary status deprives it of the authority of a true literary text.

There is also perhaps the fact, demonstrated by corpus linguistics, that translations tend to be more conservative from a stylistic point of view and therefore to load the language less with that meaning which makes a masterpiece rich. literary work. The impression of aging can also come from a better knowledge of the target culture, particularly in relation to certain cultural elements (realia) have become commonplace: a footnote to explain what popcorn is, which can still be found in certain post-war translations, would not only be useless, but decidedly comical today.

Sometimes retranslations lead to macroscopic changes, at the level of titles, character names or certain concepts, arousing, rightly or wrongly, exacerbated, because destabilizing, reactions. If the transformation of Newspeak into neo-speak in the retranslation of 1984 has got readers and critics talking, certain divine temptations can be much more destabilizing, as shown by the reactions sparked by the reform of the Our Father prayer in 2013.

Retranslation can cause scandal, due to the relativism it introduces into the interpretation of an original that we consider immutable. In reality, sometimes it is the very text that we believed to be “original” which turns out to be derivative: this is how the retranslation of Kafka for La Pléiade recovers a new version of the German text, which is not the one inherited from Max Brod to whom history has accustomed us.

In a few cases still, retranslation is simply determined by commercial or editorial reasons, because it is sometimes easier, cheaper and more lucrative (or even all three at the same time) to offer a new translation than to recover an old one. .

Can we predict the trajectory of a translated and retranslated text?

A hypothesis was put forward, in the wake of the reflections of Antoine Berman (1990), a pioneering translation specialist in this issue, according to which the first translation would be a translation-introduction, which would tend to acclimatize the foreign text to the public's horizon. target and successive retranslations would be more and more inclined to get closer to the original and display its multiple facets. Such a vision of a progressive approach to the ideal translation is certainly fascinating but unrealistic, because it does not take into account the multiple reasons behind a retranslation.

If we find in the XX^e century certain retranslations which follow this pattern, the counter-examples are legion: most of the most ethnocentric translations in the history of literature – the adaptations of Greek and Latin classics to the taste of the 17th^e and XVIII^e century, in the era known as “belles infidels” – were for the most part retranslations and therefore supposed to be closer to the original language-culture.

Is it possible to anticipate when and how often to expect the retranslation of a classic? Several hypotheses have been put forward: every century, every generation, every 20 years… However, the series of translations and retranslations of a classic are rarely regular and display gaps, jumps and fairly unpredictable accelerations. Several case studies exist, but no exhaustive studies capable of giving us statistics for a given period, genre or country. The only prediction that can be made is the presence of a peak in retranslations when a classic author enters the public domain, namely 70 years after his death in Europe. Because this systematically opens the race to monopolize the classics of world literature. Thus, in 2015 Turkish readers will find no less than thirty versions of the Little Princewhen the work falls into the public domain in Europe (except in France, where the status of “death for France” earns Saint-Exupéry a 30-year extension of copyright).

Isabelle Collombat, professor at Sorbonne-Nouvelle University, predicted, in 1994, that the XXI^e century would be the age of retranslation. Time and future studies will tell us if this is the case. One thing is certain, retranslation has a bright future ahead of it. It is the perfect antidote to the idea of ​​the unique translation and reminds us that behind every translation there is a writing, an interpretation, original and singular. And that the plurality of readings is not only possible, but a real source of vitality for literature and above all – to use the words of Charles Fontaine, to whom we owe the first reflection on retranslation in 1552 – of pleasure for the reader.