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La Retraduction en littérature de jeunesse / Retranslating Children’s Literature

de Virginie Douglas (Éditeur de volume) Florence Cabaret (Éditeur de volume)
©2014 Monographies 351 Pages

Résumé

Cet ouvrage se situe à la croisée des études en littérature de jeunesse et en traductologie, emprunte à la stylistique et à la sociologie et interroge un phénomène qui prend toute son ampleur au cours du XXe siècle et en ce début de XXIe siècle, celui de la retraduction des livres destinés à un jeune public. À partir d’un corpus qui va des contes de Perrault jusqu’à Shrek !, en passant par Alice au Pays des merveilles, Poil de Carotte ou encore les Moumines de Tove Jansson, les auteurs de ce recueil montrent combien la retraduction participe à la canonisation d’un bon nombre d’œuvres nationales, au-delà du monde anglophone, du Brésil jusqu’à la Suède. La retraduction pose ainsi la question des changements de représentations de l’enfant-lecteur et du rapport adulte/enfant, de l’évolution des exigences de traduction de l’oralité et de la musicalité de textes souvent lus à voix haute, de l’influence des contextes culturels, économiques et politiques des pays où l’on y a recours, des modifications des liens entre texte et illustrations.
This volume stands at the intersection of children’s literature studies and translation studies. Borrowing from stylistics and sociology, it engages with a phenomenon which has reached its full scope over the 20th century and into the 21st century, that of the retranslation of books intended for children. Basing their essays on a body of texts including Perrault’s tales, Alice in Wonderland, Jules Renard’s Poil de Carotte, Tove Jansson’s Moomins or Shrek!, the authors of this collection show that retranslation has contributed to the canonization of a number of national works beyond the English-speaking world (from Brazilian to Swedish literature). Retranslation thus addresses the changes in representation of the child-reader and adult/child relationship, the evolution of translational norms as regards orality and musicality in the case of texts that are often read aloud, the impact of cultural, economic and political contexts in countries where translations are in demand, and the way retranslation can even affect the relationship between the text and its illustrations.

Table des matières

  • Couverture
  • Titre
  • Copyright
  • Sur l’auteur
  • À propos du livre
  • Pour référencer cet eBook
  • Table des matières / Table of Contents
  • Introduction
  • Partie I: Il était une fois… les contes et la retraduction
  • Part I: Once Upon a Time… Fairy Tales Retranslated
  • La retraduction des contes français en roumain et leur changement de statut
  • Nibble, nibble like a mouse/Who is nibbling at the source text’s house. Retranslating fairy tales: Untangling the web of causation
  • Les retraductions des contes de Perrault en Italie au XXIe siècle. Entre quête de légitimation et adaptation au(x) destinataire(s)
  • Partie II: Retraduire l’oralité et la musicalité, entre création et retour à l’œuvre
  • Part II: Retranslating Orality and Musicality: Between creation and Return to the Original Text
  • Le Livre de la jungle en français : quand la survie d’une traduction pose la question de l’accès à l’œuvre
  • Comment on retraduisit les Just So Stories de Rudyard Kipling
  • Faut-il retraduire Tolkien ?
  • Partie III: Destins éditoriaux : lorsqu’un pays s’empare d’une œuvre
  • Part III: Publishing Destinies: National Appropriations of Children’s Books
  • The Swedish translations of Alice in Wonderland
  • Traduire et retraduire en français Cuore d’Edmondo De Amicis
  • Sans famille en roumain : retraductions et rééditions
  • La retraduction : miroir magique, boîte catoptrique ou kaléidoscope. Poil de Carotte et les sept versions roumaines
  • The strange case of Kubuś Puchatek and Fredzia Phi-Phi Polish translations of Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh
  • Anne of Green Gables – Towards the ideal or mass production of translations?
  • Partie IV: Retraduction et fluctuations du statut ou du destinataire de l’œuvre
  • Part IV: Retranslation and Variations in the Book’s Status and Audience
  • Machado de Assis retraduit pour les enfants
  • The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe : un roman et trois générations de lecteurs
  • Retranslation in Afrikaans children’s literature
  • “And they lived horribly ever after” Translating, rewriting and retranslating the story of Shrek
  • Partie V: Retraduire l’album
  • Part V: Picture Books Retranslated
  • New paths in the wood: Retranslating Tove Jansson’s Hur gick det sen?
  • Rétrographisme : les albums retraduits sont-ils formellement réactionnaires ?
  • Tomi Ungerer : la traduction palimpseste
  • Conclusion
  • Les auteurs / Contributors
  • Abstracts

Introduction

Florence CABARET

University of Rouen, France

This volume about “Retranslating Children’s Literature” stems from an increasing combined academic interest in the field of Children’s literature and the field of Translation studies, as underlined in an upcoming publication dedicated to contemporary trends and characteristics as regards translation in literature intended for children.1 In her well-documented introduction, Virginie Douglas thus traces the origins of this interest back to the landmark Third Symposium of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature held at Södertälje on August 26th-29th in 1976 up to the 2008 posthumous publication of Göte Klingberg’s essays and articles, which consecrated the Swedish scholar’s comparative approaches to children’s literature.2 As Björn Sundmark notes in his review of the latter book: “Klingberg was deeply interested in the unbounded dynamics of translation and international networks that underpin the production of children’s literature in different countries and languages.”3 Obviously, acknowledging the central role played by children’s literature in contemporary Western culture is inextricably linked to the awareness that translation is widely contributing to the building of a field that is both strongly national and growingly transnational. But the specificity of the readership of children’s books may also account for the simultaneous development of the two field studies, as the child is often described as ← 11 | 12 → “being the epitome of the reader who is not capable of reading a foreign text in its original form”4 – and therefore rekindles stylistic, ideological and ethical questions that have always been at the core of translation studies.

The present contribution aims at enhancing scholars’ already acute sense that children are particular recipients of a translated text by focusing our attention on a diachronic translation phenomenon, i.e. the successive retranslations of a single source text into the same target language. It appears indeed that the metalinguistic dimension of the retranslation process casts relevant light on what is at work when one (re)translates a text for children. Retranslation itself has gained academic prominence over the past fifteen years as it is perceived as magnifying linguistic and ideological issues which acquire greater visibility thanks to the test of contrastiveness. In 1990, for instance, the French academic journal dedicated to translation Palimpsestes published a first small volume of five articles about retranslation, in which Paul Bensimon made a synthetic presentation of the both fruitful and debatable “retranslation hypothesis” initially outlined by Antoine Berman.5 Describing the evolution from original text to first translation and to later retranslations, Bensimon draws a comparison between a first translation that introduces the source text to the foreign culture and favours its domestication, and retranslations which tend to return to the exoticism of the source text and privilege its foreign nature. Since then, many researchers working on retranslation have appropriated this theoretical definition, delineating a movement from domestication to indigenisation, from the reader-oriented first translation to the text-oriented retranslations by confronting it to proper case studies.

Fourteen years later, Palimpsestes tackled the issue of retranslation again with a denser volume of twelve articles mainly discussing examples of precise literary texts, confirming that the field of French retranslation studies had clearly expanded and showing clear signs that children’s books deserve to be integrated as worthy objects of study alongside Milton, Flaubert, Joyce and Camus. In one article, Michel Morel explicitly addresses the question of the staging of utterance in the re/translations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and challenges the 1990 domestication/foreignisation ← 12 | 13 → hypothesis.6 In another article about Dickens’s orality in the retranslations of Great Expectations, Sylvine Muller eventually hints at the first translator Charles-Bernard Derosne’s “plan, which was to bring to French readers a children’s book recalling David Copperfield”.7 But she also admits that she has not delved into the subject and only uses the idea of the constraints children’s literature imposes on translators to potentially justify the normative translation of dialogues undertaken by Charles-Bernard Derosne in 1869. As to Noël Mauberret, who was then supervising the re-publication of Jack London’s work at Éditions Phébus, he also briefly points out original tendencies to tame the wildness of some of London’s stories and underlines the fact that, between the two world wars, “Louis Postif also had to take into account the youth of his readers since Jack London was published in adolescent-oriented collections such as the « Bibliothèque verte ».”8

Similar asides testifying to the emerging presence of children’s literature in retranslation studies may also be noted in the 2012 volume on European literary retranslations edited by Enrico Monti and Peter Schnyder. Thus, in his state of the art introduction, Enrico Monti identifies a certain number of characteristics which may help us answer the question “why should we retranslate?” that is also dealt with in the present book. Typical explanations run along two recurring lines – the excessive unfaithfulness of the first translation, or the widening gap with contemporary generations:

Interestingly enough, Monti refers to a specific case of retranslation, i.e. the adaptation of a text to another recipient, which he illustrates with the example of the adaptation meant for a younger audience.9 Again, the sense that (re)translations for children bear some specificity that has no equivalent in (re)translations for adults crops up in a peripheral remark. However, in 2000, Riitta Oittinen had already highlighted the uniqueness of children as target readers by commenting on the difference between translating children’s books and translating for children.10 Taking up the idea that moral, social and linguistic norms are much more binding when one is translating for children, Roberta Pederzoli recently identified two tendencies between which children’s books are torn, in a way that adults’ books are not, i.e. educational publication or literary publication.11 Going back to the 19th century, this tension is described by Isabelle Nières-Chevrel as an intrinsic component of the founding of a Europe of children’s novels and tales, essentially feeding on translations and retranslations, and oscillating between a didactic and an artistic approach of those translations.12 In this impressive historical overview of translations into French,13 Nières-Chevrel’s chapter stands prominently in the eighth position and delivers a subdued history of ← 14 | 15 → retranslation as part and parcel of the history of children’s literature. The impression that retranslation gradually imposes itself as a cornerstone of children’s literature also transpires in Emer O’Sullivan’s 2005 book about comparative children’s literature.14 If the notion does not appear as such either in the table of contents or in the index, she nonetheless discusses the two interesting examples of the re/translations into German of John Burningham’s Granpa and A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh in the course of two chapters more generally devoted to “Children’s literature in translation” (chap. 4) and to “The implied translator and the implied reader in translated children’s literature” (chap. 5). She thus compares the way the retranslations of these two picture books make up for faulty representations of the reading child. Indeed, in Granpa, he appears as being in need of extra text lines lest he should not grasp the implicit meaning of the final silence whereas, in Winnie-the-Pooh, it looks as if he did not need to have access to the witty innuendoes of the original text as they had been totally erased from the first translation.15 Last, in 2006, the Reader edited by Gillian Lathey about the translation of children’s literature16 also reinforces the retrospective impression that the academic interest in the retranslation of children’s books is in the making as once again it appears in a sideway manner, in an article which does not even mention the word (“Translating Children’s Literature: Theoretical Approaches and Empirical Studies”) but which actually confronts two Finnish translations of The Wizard of Oz.17

One may be tempted to claim that, ironically, it is in Rouen that the two fields happened to converge. First with the 2010 publication by Robert Khan and Catriona Seth of a collective volume on retranslation, in which philosophical essays, plays, novels dominate the corpus – even in the article about Cinderella in Tibet, where Bénédicte Vilgrain makes no mention whatsoever of a young readership.18 More to the point for us, the forthcoming book État des lieux de la traduction pour la jeunesse devotes the whole of chapter 2 to retranslation in children’s literature. Claire Verdier compares omissions in the re/translations of works by Captain Mayne Reid, Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson while, ← 15 | 16 → in her analysis of the re/translation of T.S. Eliot’s poetry book for children Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, Audrey Coussy asks whether the poems should deserve serious translations given that Eliot was mainly known as an author of adult literature. As for Véronique Médard, she reappraises the historical evolution of France’s perception of Germany before and after WWII and its impact on the re/translation of Hans Peter Richter’s Damals war es Friedrich.19 The conference on retranslating children’s literature that was organised in February 2013 at the University of Rouen is itself a spin-off of the one-day seminar set up by Virginie Douglas at that very same university two years before, in May 2011. The number of paper proposals dealing with retranslation also led us to take in the full meaning of what Isabelle Collombat says when she describes the 21st century as the golden age of retranslation.20

Beyond the immediate scientific prospect that opened before us, we found it interesting to look further into the idea that, over a relatively short span of two hundred years, the numerous retranslations of children’s books both participated in the canonisation of children’s literature and exacerbated the transient, historical nature not only of translated versions, but also of the original texts. This seemingly paradoxical conclusion had already triggered Yves Chevrel, Lieven D’hulst and Christine Lombez’s colossal enterprise about the history of translation into French: “a translation is, by essence, a historical object. Like the « original » work, but even more than the original work, it is located in time. The chronological succession of translations of a single book builds a history that is worth writing about: a new translation does not replace the former translation – it adds up to it.”21 Quite tellingly, the translation ← 16 | 17 → of this quotation draws our attention to the fact that the authors mention “a new translation” and not a retranslation, the latter word being more rarely used, even by scholars. Enrico Monti underscores the publishers’ preference for the phrase “new translation” when they advertise a retranslated text, “laying the emphasis on the novelty of the operation rather than on the repetition which is implicit in the act” of re-publication/re-translation.22 This tension between recapitulation/repetition of the past and actualisation of the present, which is also a projection of newness into the future, is particularly crucial when the privileged addressee of the retranslation is a child.

As the incarnation of a “new generation” in an age where youth is one of the most profitable values, the child strengthens our awareness of the temporal and ephemeral dimension of a text’s interpretation. What is more, being a highly hybrid and fantasised figure, the “child image” is essentially invested by adults. It stands at the crossroads of adults’ memories of their own reading of a particular children’s book, of adults’ representations of the contemporary children they translate for, of a society’s changing conceptions of linguistic models for children, but also of social and moral values to be transmitted to the supposedly malleable younger generation. Because the “child image” conflates different ages in a century where online instantaneity coexists with longer human life-time, questions pertaining to the double destination of some texts, or to the change of destination as time goes by are given greater importance thanks to the study of retranslated texts. Besides, the superimposition of translation’s own history with that of the representation of the centrality of the child’s position in contemporary Western cultures sparks renewed ← 17 | 18 → interest for the different linguistic choices that are made in re/translation for children. Somehow, as with the translation of drama, because children’s books are often meant to be read and spoken out loud, the rhythm of the text, the musicality of the sentence and the modernity of the lexis are all the more remarkable when heard than when read in silence. Retranslations enable a variety of options and experiences as far as orality is concerned, especially with picture books which may also resort to typography, colours and layout to visually guide readers in their reading and (re)interpretation of a text. Speaking of the interaction between texts and images, the thriving appropriation of children’s tales and novels by the film industry clearly contributes to the deployment of the source text onto other media, which usually prompts a new form of curiosity for the original story and consolidates its canonicity thanks to new visual adaptations and textual retranslations. Yet, the generalization of such a transmedial process across geographical borders has not erased national differences, nor has it smoothed over the differences between publishing houses’ policies. Even though multiculturalism may seem to be spreading fast in the field of fiction, the linguistic foundation stone of retranslation remains language, so that the political and economical context of each nation can hardly been ignored, especially when it comes to the education of potential citizens whose imaginative capacities, mental frames, knowledge of foreign cultures and linguistic skills will command the fate of their native country as well as their future worldview.

The contributions presented in this volume broach these diverse yet converging issues, borrowing from a dense corpus where, quite expectedly, English is the dominant source language, with French coming second, the two of them providing varied interactions with Italian, Polish, Romanian or Swedish but also beyond the limits of Europe with Brazilian and Afrikaans. The approaches adopted by the authors of the articles also reflect the wide range of influences on a field that has perfectly integrated both traditional and recent ways of examining a text, opting alternately for close-reading and stylistic analyses of passages from a single book, or for the sociological and historical study of one novel in one country over a century and more. Part I provides three generic studies of the fairy tale (tales by Perrault, Grimm and Andersen) regarded as the emblem of the plasticity of children’s literature and its double address as exemplified by retranslation. Part II prolongs the study of the fairy tale by concentrating on Kipling’s more recent etiological stories and the question of dual address with The Hobbit, all focusing on the predominance of orality and musicality as set into relief in comparative analyses of these retranslated texts. In Part III, the influence of national ideological and economic contexts on the history of the retranslation of one single text is illustrated by the cases of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in Sweden, of Cuore ← 18 | 19 → in France, and possible comparisons between Sans famille and Poil de Carotte in Romania, as well as between Winnie-the-Pooh and Anne of Green Gables in Poland. As for Part IV, it mainly deals with the various transformative roles played by retranslation as it may reorient the status of the addressee (from adult to child and vice versa), but also of the text which evolves from a minority position to consecration through canonisation, transmedial appropriation or reassessment of the value of a culture that was previously held in defiance (as in the case of the former colonisers’ culture in a now independent country). In this section, examples range from Brazil to South Africa, from Great Britain to the USA, and illustrate genres as different as the novel, the nursery-rhyme, the novella and the picture book. Part V takes into consideration the impact of illustrations on the process of retranslation (from The Moomins or Baba Yaga to Tomi Ungerer’s picture books) and wonders how far they are themselves re-translated by a new text or by a new visual staging on the page of the book. ← 19 | 20 →

← 20 | 21 →

                                                   

  1.  Douglas, Virginie (dir.), État des lieux de la traduction pour la jeunesse, Rouen and Le Havre, Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2014.

  2.  The two publications show how over a period of 30 years translation studies and children’s literature have drawn closer and fruitful links. See Klingberg, Göte, Ørvig, Mary, Amor, Stuart (eds.), Children’s Books in Translation: The Situation and the Problems, Proceedings of the Third Symposium of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (held at Södertälje, August 26-29, 1976), Almqvist & Wiksell, 1978. See also Klingberg, Göte, Facets of Children’s Literature Research: Collected and Revised Writings, Stockholm, Swedish Institute for Children’s Books, 2008.

  3.  Cf. Review by Björn Sundmark on the site of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature, http://www.irscl.com/review_facets_of_childrens_lit.html [last access: February 17th, 2014].

  4.  « L’enfant étant par excellence le lecteur incapable de lire un texte étranger dans sa langue d’origine » (p. 107, my translation – all translations in this introduction are mine): Douglas, Virginie, « Une traduction spécifique ? Approches théoriques et pratiques de la traduction des livres pour la jeunesse », in Diament, Nic, Gibello, Corinne, Kiefé, Laurence (dir.), Traduire les livres pour la jeunesse : enjeux et spécificités, Paris, BNF and Hachette, 2008, p. 107-116.

  5.  Bensimon, Paul, « Présentation », in Palimpsestes, n° 4, « Retraduire », Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1990, p. IX-XIII.

  6.  Morel, Michel, « Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland de traduction en retraduction : la scène énonciative mise à nu », in Palimpsestes, n° 15, « Pourquoi donc retraduire ? », Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2004, p. 99-108.

  7.  « On peut se demander […] si son projet n’était pas d’offrir au public français une livre pour la jeunesse comme pouvait l’être David Copperfield. » (p. 89), in Muller, Sylvine, « L’Oralité dickensienne dans les retraductions de Great Expectations », in Palimpsestes, n° 15, op. cit., p. 69-92.

  8.  « Louis Postif devait également tenir compte de son public jeune, puisque London était publié dans des éditions comme la “Bibliothèque verte”. » (p. 123), in Mauberret, Noël, « Retraduire Jack London aujourd’hui », in Palimpsestes, n° 15, op. cit., p. 121-128.

  9.  Monti, Enrico, « La Retraduction, un état des lieux », p. 17, in Monti, Enrico, Schnyder, Peter (dir.), Autour de la retraduction. Perspectives littéraires européennes, Paris, Orizons, coll. « Universités », 2012, p. 9-25.

10.  Oittinen, Riitta, Translating for Children, New York, Garland, 2000.

11.  Pederzoli, Roberta, introduction to “Writing and translating for children”, in Di Giovanni, Elena, Elefante, Chiara, Pederzoli, Roberta (dir.), Writing and Translating for Children, Bruxelles, P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2010, p. 128.

12.  Nières-Chevrel, Isabelle, « La littérature d’enfance et de jeunesse », chapter 8, in Chevrel, Yves, D’hulst, Lieven, Lombez, Christine (dir.), Histoire des traductions en langue française. Dix-neuvième siècle (1815-1914), Paris, Verdier, 2012, p. 665-726. The next volume, about 20th century translation into French, will also include a chapter about children’s books: Lévêque, Mathilde, « Littérature d’enfance et de jeunesse », in Banoun, Bernard, Masson, Jean-Yves, Poulin, Isabelle (dir.), Histoire des traductions en langue française. Vingtième siècle, Paris/Lagrasse, Verdier, to be published in 2015.
See also: Nières-Chevrel, Isabelle, Livres d’enfants en Europe, Rennes, COBB, 1992; Nières-Chevrel, Isabelle, « Récriture : traductions, adaptations », in Nières-Chevrel, Isabelle, Introduction à la littérature de jeunesse, Paris, Didier Jeunesse, 2009, p. 187-209.

Résumé des informations

Pages
351
Année
2014
ISBN (PDF)
9783035264661
ISBN (ePUB)
9783035295993
ISBN (MOBI)
9783035295986
ISBN (Broché)
9782875741615
DOI
10.3726/978-3-0352-6466-1
Langue
français
Date de parution
2014 (Octobre)
Mots clés
Jeune public Stylistique ¿uvre nationale Illustration Sociologie
Published
Bruxelles, Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2014. 351 p., 12 ill., 11 tabl.

Notes biographiques

Virginie Douglas (Éditeur de volume) Florence Cabaret (Éditeur de volume)

Virginie Douglas et Florence Cabaret sont Maîtres de conférences à l’Université de Rouen. Secrétaire de l’Institut International Charles Perrault, Virginie Douglas est spécialiste de littérature britannique pour la jeunesse et des questions liées à la théorie, à la narration et à la traduction des livres pour enfants. Spécialiste du roman indien de langue anglaise, Florence Cabaret a commencé à s’intéresser à la littérature de jeunesse par le biais du roman de Salman Rushdie, Haroun et la mer des histoires (1990). Traductrice d’Hanif Kureishi et de Chloe Hooper, elle travaille également sur la retraduction en sciences humaines.

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Titre: La Retraduction en littérature de jeunesse / Retranslating Children’s Literature
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364 pages