Pour une critique des traductions : John Donne

by Antoine Berman

in-8 (225 x 140 mm), broché, 275 pp., index, bibliographie. Une petite tache sur la tranche, sans atteinte à l'intérieur. Très bon état général.

Genres: Nonfiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 3, 1995

Reviews

[Suzanne]

Allez ziak Antoine Berman dans la Seine

[Camille]

Lecture pour mémoire. Pas de note pcq même si l'ouvrage est très intéressant, je ne peux pas m'empêcher de trouver l'écriture pompeuse.

[David Areyzaga · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, this is a funny, beautiful and unintentionally ironic criticism (or analysis, supposedly) on criticism. Those traits alone make the book worthwhile.

Antoine Berman loves John Donne. He loves the translation into Spanish by Octavio Paz. He hates pretty much every translation into French, especially the ones made by Jean Fuzier and Yves Denis. But Berman isn’t a simple man. To prove that French critics were wrong to praise Denis and Fuzier, he wrote an entire book in his deathbed. Hilarity, depth, and uncensored honesty ensues.

You gotta love Berman for the level of craftsmanship that went into this slap in the face of French translation criticism. He begins by pointing out the negativity in Henri Meschonnic’s school of criticism, and the many benefits of paying attention instead to the descriptive school of Tel Aviv, led by Gideon Toury. After describing both outlooks, Berman goes on to propose a true analysis of the translations of John Donne that he was able to read—and I emphasize the word analysis, for it is, at least for Berman, the true and essential replacement of criticism.

Berman proposes a wonderful methodology for this purpose. First you read the translation as an isolated text. Then, you reread it and let intuition guide you towards areas that call your attention based on their beauty or oddness (that they stand out in some way) and keep them in mind while reading and analyzing the overall structure and spirit of the original. Once that’s done, you begin to pay attention to who did the translation and his/her project with it. For Berman, the project is the essential orientation of the task, either toward the author or the audience. This is followed by a hermeneutic review that attempts to understand and recreate the translation process to truly assess whether the project was ultimately achieved or not. An observance of other translations and the overall reception of the work is also essential.

This recipe sounds wonderful. It is wonderful. Berman offers a true reflection of the translation activity. Then he offers his own example by analyzing the translations of Donne’s ‘Going to Bed’. He follows every single one of his steps, and it is a wonderful path down a slippery slope that turns Berman into Meschonnic himself. Berman despises the French translations so much (and he insults everyone who dared to praise them in the process), that the closing lines of this book are so damn critical, not neutral at all, and full of spite that you can’t help but laugh. He is happy that the translations have been forgotten. However, his translator into English, Françoise Massardier Kenney, quickly points out in a footnote that the translation has been recently rereleased. It’s so damn beautiful and sad at the same time, that it almost feels like a watching a Korean vengeance film by Park Chan-Wook.

And don’t get me wrong, I don’t look down on Berman. In fact, I admire him. His contribution to translation criticism is important, and we should strive to achieve his ideals of analysis. Plus, I agree with him as to which translation is better (Octavio Paz knocked it out of the park), but you also can’t ignore that Denis and Fuzier achieved their project, and they were a result of their time, so Berman betrays his principles in his overly-complicated, and poorly-disguised attack toward them. His anger is so palpable that you have to be amazed at the fact that this book exists in an academic world that punishes this type of writing nowadays. Berman even insults Georges Steiner! Anyone attempting to reach the same levels of confrontation nowadays would be dismissed as childish.

But this book reveals two unavoidable truths about translation criticism: (1) it shapes our view for better or worse (so we must fight to make critics truly appreciate what translation involves), and (2) it is a childish (by which I mean passionate and unencumbered by fear of hurting others) thing, no matter how hard we try to present our “analyses” as objective and fair.

And awareness is always a dark and funny trait.

[Rafaela Vianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

É muito bom ler autores com um pensamento teórico robusto mas legíveis. Obrigada por tudo, Berman.
Notas de pesquisa:
- tentar fazer com Les vrilles de la vigne o que ele faz com “Going to bed”: encontrar uma rede de tradução, buscando (tanto na forma quanto no conteúdo) chaves de leitura para o texto — e para o horizonte de tradução— fora do texto. um exercício de erudição que preciso trabalhar bastante: ler os (e principalmente as) contemporâneas de Colette, passear pelos gêneros de Les vrilles no século XIX (crônica, poema em prosa, conto, retrato…)
- voltar na parte sobre prosa e poesia (“La prose est l’autre de la poésie”, p.198) para pensar o gênero poema em prosa e, principalmente, o embate prosaico x poético que marca a bipartição de Colette e a dupla herança da autora (erudito x popular, romanesco x poético…)

Livros e textos mencionados que quero ler:

A tradução e a letra - Berman
Palimpsestes - Gérard Genette
Sous l’invocation de Saint Jérôme - Larbaud
Les belles infidèles - Mounin
Traducción: literatura y literalidad - Octavio Paz
Lecture et contemplation - Octavio Paz
Après Babel - Steiner
Pour une poétique de la traduction - Meschonnic

[Reader]

Who can share the pdf of Antoine Berman’s Towards a Translation Criticism? I would appreciate it if you could share it with me.