Histoire Naturelle de la Traduction

What is translation? Charles Le Blanc’s answer to this fundamental question is: its history. And in order to “tell the story” of translation as it evolved through the ages, he relies on five well-known tales and stories. He uses The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Andersen’s The Snow Queen, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Goethe, Perrault’s Blue Beard, and Hansel and Gretel by the Brothers Grimm to describe translation’s five key characteristics, as well as the five stages of the art of translation, from antiquity to the Romantic era.Like Dorian Gray’s portrait, translations age, while the original texts remain forever young. As with the pieces of the broken magic mirror in Andersen’s tale, it is the reader-translator’s perception of the text that reconstructs its meaning. As in Goethe’s ballad, the proliferation of translations brings to mind that of the brooms released by the sorcerer’s apprentice, who is the translator. Yet the latter must acknowledge, when all is said and done, that the author remains the sole master. As in Perrault’s tale, a literary work is a castle whose set of keys the author, like Blue Beard, hands to the reader; what the text will become, once translated, largely depends on which key the translator will use. Lastly, every translator first seeks to decipher the meaning of the work, and, like Hansel and Gretel by the Brothers Grimm, certainly hopes to return to the paternal home; i.e., to the original. Yet if he should happen to err, he may still unearth unsuspected riches, like the two children discovering the gingerbread house.It is the reader’s role that is highlighted for the very first time in Histoire naturelle de la traduction. As a reading exercise, translation, like thought, is above all a journey. It is a maieutic of meaning, and a practice rooted in History, which this masterful essay imparts.Charles Le Blanc, born in 1965, holds a PhD in Philosophy. A Germanist scholar and translator, he is notably the author of Le Complexe d’Hermès (2009), a critical work addressing the foundations of traductology that has received worldwide acclaim. He specializes in Lichtenberg, Kierkegaard, and German Romanticism, and teaches at Ottawa University.