Raymond Queneau : exercices de traduction

Abstract

When someone does not read a novel by Raymond Queneau in its original French version, there comes a huge question about the matter of the translation: the weird, complex language of one of Oulipo’s creators can be the same in Italian, English or other languages different from the original? Queneau’s voice is full of neologisms, noble and lewd words, phonetic writings, wordplays and constraints : it is the experimental and ironic world of the author. But it could not be the same world for a not-French reader, usually accustomed to read in his own language, so accustomed to the semiosphere in which his culture creates and absorbs sense in every moment. Every not-French reader intentioned to explore the world of Raymond Queneau has therefore to cross a sort of bridge which connects languages, cultures, in other words senses. But the translation, despite its accuracy and precision, produces always another text, different from the original one, a problem that becames more and more wide with Queneau. The author plays with French, he tests the power of language both on its surface—the manifestation as it appears to our senses—and on its contents, meanings and senses we use to think about. He creates news senses and relations inside the language, he plays with constraints which are at the same time linguistic and related to the contents and which have, as a consequence, a remarkable power inside the narration and its meanings. Reflecting with a semiotic approach on this kind of language and on the further constraints involved in its translations is the aim of this paper, which will analyze, to reach the purpose, some Italian solutions—exercises in translation—adopted for Queneau’s best known books : Exercices de style, Les Fleurs bleues, Zazie dans le métro.

Keywords

• translation
• literary theory