Configuration traducteur–auteur: jeu sur deux lignes. Sur la Vengeance du traducteur de Brice Matthieussent

Résumé

Translator–author configuration: the game on two lines. On Brice Mathieusent’s Vengeance du traducteur

The main subject of Brice Matthieussent’s novel Vengeance du traducteur [The Translator’s Revenge] is the relations between the translator and the author of the original. These relations are hierarchical and are illustrated with valuating elements depending on the place within a vertical structure, where the bottom — symbolic translator’s area — is perceived negatively, while the top, “belonging” to the author, is perceived positively. The present article contains an analysis of those aspects of the novel typographic, stylistic and plot-related that are involved in the construction of the picture of “spatial,” axiologically-marked relations between the translator and the author. Through this we want to demonstrate that the stereotypical approach to the translator as a figure subordinated to the author is just a starting point for showing a dynamic figure, full of contradictions, under constant tension between depression and elation, re-creator and at the same time creator of the translation.