Traductions en langues minoritaires : le cas de Maria Chapdelaine de Louis Hémon

Abstract

Studies about the reception of Louis Hémon’s famous novel, Maria Chapdelaine (1916), focus usually on the countries with which the novel has obvious ties : France, the author’s home country, and Canada. Hémon emigrated there in 1911 and went to Péribonka, on the shores of Lac‑Saint-Jean, north of Québec, to meet the « peasants-pioneers » who came from France a few centuries before. He lived for six month among them and wrote Maria Chapdelaine, a polymorphic novel : all at once a romance, a travel story and a myth of Quebec’s origins. In my PhD thesis about Hémon’s literary fortune, I investigate the international reception of the novel which was translated in over twenty languages. The existence of translations in minority languages – Welsh, Gaelic, Albanian, Flemish, and also Scandinavian languages – makes us wonder about the novel’s reception in these countries : was it equivalent to the French reception, or did it open new perspectives ?

Keywords

• Hémon (Louis)
• literary translation
• minority language
• reception studies
• literature