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Article Dans Une Revue Dickens Quarterly Année : 2009

Terror foreign or familiar—pleasure on the edge: translating A Tale of Two Cities into French

Résumé

How can the French readers of the French translation of A Tale of Two Cities perceive the characters and facts presented in the novel? There certainly is an aesthetics of suffering quite differently apprehended by the two cultures represented in the novel since the nature of the social and political system the French Revolution imposed on France more than two centuries ago is quite unconsciously integrated into today's society. The horrors of the Terror, which are crudely and inhumanely described in the original have a rather different flavour in translation—maybe because “elegant translators” have “brought something to (their) work besides mere dictionary knowledge”. Let's us take the following example: “Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh” / “Le long des rues de Paris, les tombereaux funèbres roulent avec fracas” ; in the French version, several lexical markers and several phonological markers (death-carts, rumble, hollow/harsh) are alleviated and more prosaic, the crudeness and frightening tone of the original takes on a more familiar and poetic dimension—the second part of the French sentence can be read as an alexandrine, a distance is created. The novel was first translated in 1861, soon after its English publication, reprinted in the 1870s and 1880s and mostly retranslated and republished one century later in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. As shown in the above quotation, translation cannot be regarded as a mere linguistic mechanism: it owes much of its results to the manipulative art of the translator. The study of some stylistic elements involving rhythm, metaphors and the organization of discourse will help shed light on the diverging perception which English-speaking or French-speaking readers may have of the text, especially as the receptive background of horror as fearsome otherness or horror as an integrated historical fact of the past may influence reading.
Comment accéder en traduction à l'esthétique de la souffrance dans des traductions marquées par la culture et les influences sociaux politiques traitant d'un thème historique tel que la Révolution française, et notamment l'épisode de la Terreur ? Les mécanismes purement linguistiques sont souvent rejetés au second plan afin de laisser la place à des manipulations qui vont affecter l'organisation du discours et ses figures.
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Dates et versions

halshs-00550116 , version 1 (23-12-2010)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-00550116 , version 1

Citer

Christine Raguet. Terror foreign or familiar—pleasure on the edge: translating A Tale of Two Cities into French. Dickens Quarterly, 2009, 26 (3), pp.172-183. ⟨halshs-00550116⟩
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