Louches entremetteurs. De la destruction en traduction

Abstract

What guides the policy behind a translation of Freud? What can be said about the purposive ideas of translators when they stamp their mark on a translated text, whether in the name of scientificity, authenticity or the strange opacity of familiar language? How does the transference function between the translator who is excited by the original and the reader who, in spite of everything, is eager to read the text? The resistance of the original text, the inevitable loss of polysemies, the impossibility of exporting the syntactic rhythm, and the lexicographical reductions that the translator necessarily effects require considerable modesty. And yet this modesty clashes with the ambiguous power of these go-betweens between languages, who refer to very disparate aims and legacies. In examining a number of translations in English and in French, the author reveals the radical heterogeneity of diverse projects and looks at the vicissitudes of the role of destructiveness inherent in the act of translation.