Les deux corps du traducteur littéraire

Abstract

The literary translator is not a simple bilingual. It aims to be a smuggler among its languages and between its discordant bodies. But how do we translate between two bodies? The act of translation can be represented as a construction of the bridge joining two sociocultural spaces naturally disjoint, let alone two bodies of the translator, allowing the mind to go over reconciling them. However, keeping a clear separation between the languages seems best rendered by the image of the door, which maintains separate what it connects: one language joins and enriches the other without interfering. The “closed” door separates the two languages by refusing the easy matches, the translation as a simple copy or automatism. Indeed, a good translator fully assumes the hermetic resistance of the text-source. In order to pass into the other language, a translator “opens the door” of the target language by rendering a conflict and a tension inherent to the original text, a tension actually lived between his or her own bodies – between one’s own and foreign, immediate and distant.

Keywords

• literary translator
• translation
• bilingualism
• body