Autour de la retraduction: perspectives littéraires européennes by Enrico Monti et Peter Schnyder (review)

This substantial volume contains twenty-seven papers from a conference held at the Université de Haute-Alsace, Mulhouse, in late 2009. The focus is on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary retranslation in a European context, with the aim of understanding the historical, linguistic, and sociological drivers behind this under-researched but widespread practice. The tutelary spirit presiding over the enterprise is the late Antoine Berman, whose 1990 essay ‘La Retraduction comme espace de la traduction’ (Palimpsestes, 4, pp. 1–7) — absent from the useful concluding bibliography — first argued for the inevitable vieillissement of translations. Berman’s claim that the first translation of any work tends to be domesticating and assimilationist, with later translators revisiting the source text in a more foreignizing mode, is contested and nuanced in important theoretical essays by Jean-René Ladmiral and Yves Gambier, but appears widely accepted by other contributors, which opens up an interesting disjunction between theory and description. André Hurst concludes the opening section with a look at the ‘translation’ of ancient literature from oral to written form and into the modern era. The second section is devoted to reflections by four current translators involved in reworking into different languages canonical texts by Charlotte Brontë (Véronique Béghain), Joyce (Bernard Hœpffner), Flaubert (Ida Porfido), and Beckett (Chiara Montini). The third section comprises fifteen case studies on retranslations of canonical works in different combinations of languages. The ‘Prose’ division opens with a study by Tania Collani of twentieth-century translations of Beckford’s Vathek, then Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère compares Angela Carter’s translation of Perrault’s Cendrillon with a Grub Street version of 1729. Polish translations of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu are examined by Joanna Górnikiewicz, and of Duras’s L’Amant by Joanna Jakubowska-Cichoń, while Felipe Aparicio Nevado looks at French translations of El camino by Miguel Delibes. Cristina Vignali-De Poli considers French translations of Dino Buzzati, Rotraud von Kulesa examines French and German versions of Sibilla Aleramo’s feminist novel Una donna (1906), and Françoise Wuilmart compares three different French versions of Fontane’s Effi Briest. The ‘Poésie et théâtre’ division includes pieces on Trakl in French (Peter Schnyder), Baudelaire in Polish (Jerzy Brzozowski), and Apollinaire in Italian (Franca Bruera), along with studies of two poet-translators: Philippe Jaccottet (Ariane Lüthi) and André Weckmann (Peter André Bloch). Justyna Łukaszewicz looks at Ubu roi in Polish, and Fabio Regattin at Cyrano in Italian. The final section concerns sociological and economic aspects of retranslation. Maryla Laurent examines why the important works of so-called ‘minor’ literatures are so infrequently retranslated, while Elż bieta Skibińska examines the inhibiting effect on new translations into Polish of the ubiquitous work of Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński. Natalia Paprocka traces the fate of Le Petit Prince in the Polish publishing market, and finally Ana Pano Alamán examines a century of French translations of Don Quixote. The two opening essays are essential reading for anyone looking for the latest theories of retranslation, while the wide-ranging papers on specific authors and cultures will be of most interest to specialists, but will also provide researchers working in other languages with a wealth of comparative insights.