Few writers who specialized in translation are still remembered, and the genre occupies only a small place in most histories of literature. Yet many major French writers have also translated, and translation is a vital element in the national literature. Together with various forms of imitation and adaptation, it has allowed the culture of other nations to shape French writing; the principal foreign influences are traced here in separate entries [see British, Irish, and American Influences, etc.]. In addition, at certain periods, translation has been a workshop in which a national prose style has been developed.
I. Medieval and Renaissance
For most of the medieval period non-French writings, mainly in classical or contemporary Latin, were made French by a process which is best described as adaptation or transposition. The notion of translatio studii implies that the achievements of ancient or foreign culture can find their equivalent in modern times, as for instance in the romans d'antiquité. Until the 13th c. it was normal to translate even prose works into the verse of vernacular literature [see Anglo-Norman Literature, 6, 7]. The Bible was rendered into both prose and verse, but prose translation began to come into its own in the 14th c., with such work as Jean de Meun's version of Boethius; it flourished in the following century at the court of Burgundy. Almost always, medieval translation was done with a view to transmitting content rather than re-creating style, but the Rhétoriqueurs at the end of the 15th c. used their translations to create a more latinate French, and the humanist scholars of the 16th c. were to follow their example.
The Renaissance period saw a great increase in translating activity, still mainly from Latin, but sometimes from Greek, and the appearance of writers who were primarily translators. As in the Middle Ages, many writers were bilingual, and there was a good deal of self-translation: Du Bellay published Latin and French versions of the same poems; Dolet, author of La Manière de bien traduire (1540), translated his own neo-Latin poetry; and Calvin reissued his Institutio in French. Some translations were meant to be useful to students (e.g. the work of Aneau and Cordier), others (e.g. the many produced by Michel de Tours) were strongly latinate, but the main thrust was towards a good vernacular French which would be a worthy equivalent of the original; Dolet advises his reader: ‘Il ne faut pas s'asservir jusques à là que l' on rende mot pour mot.’
Of the classical authors translated at this time, alongside Cicero, Ovid was perhaps the most popular [see Classical Influences]. Most of the major Renaissance poets and prose writers did some translation (Montaigne's rendering of Raymond Sebond led to one of his greatest essays). Blaise de Vigenère's contribution, including his penitential Psalms, was important, but the most significant work in terms of both quality and long-term literary influence was Amyot's Plutarch (Amyot also translated the very popular Greek novels of Heliodorus and Longus). At the same time the Evangelical movement and the Reformation produced many translations of sacred texts; the example of Lefèvre d'Étaples's translation of the Bible was followed by many others. The Psalms in particular, translated by Marot and Bèze, became rallying cries for Protestants during the Wars of Religion.
A noteworthy 16th-c. development was the growing number of translations from modern languages, in particular Italian and Spanish. In addition to translations of such major figures as Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Castiglione [see Italian Influences] or Guevara [see Spanish Influences], one can cite the influential rendering of Bandello's Novelle as Histoires tragiques by Belleforest and Boaistuau, Des Essarts's version of Amadis de Gaule, and the many pastoral novels and plays of Italy and Spain. Don Quixote, like many Spanish classics of the Golden Age, was translated (by Oudin) in the early 17th c.
2. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
While learned men continued to be bilingual in the 17th c., literary culture was increasingly dominated by a courtly or urban audience whose knowledge of ancient languages could not be taken for granted [see Honnêteté]. They demanded works written in elegant, unpedantic French, and translations helped to satisfy this demand. Indeed, translation was an ideal means of forging a modern prose style. Such was the ambition of many writers associated with the
Apart from Perrot's work, the two most important literary translations of the 17th c. are probably Boileau's Traité du sublime, based on Longinus, and La Bruyère's version of Theophrastus, the starting-point for his own Caractères. More broadly significant were the versions of Descartes's Méditations and Principes, and above all the translating work of Port-Royal. The key figure here was Lemaître de Sacy, who was not only largely responsible for the Port-Royal Bible, but also translated the Imitation of Christ and (for pedagogical purposes) Terence and Phaedrus. At the same time Huet wrote a treatise on translation, De optimo genere interpretandi (1661).
18th-c. translators looked increasingly to sources other than Greek, Latin, Italian, and Spanish. At the very beginning of the century appeared one of the most influential translations in French literature, Galland's Les Mille et une Nuits, translated from the Arabic; exotic in a different way were the translations of ancient Scandinavian poetry published in the 1750s by abbé Mallet. But the most striking development was the flood of works translated from the English. These included Pope, Richardson, ‘Ossian’, and Shakespeare; some famous authors contributed, including Voltaire and Diderot, but the most important translators from English were Prévost, whose vast output included a free version of Clarissa, and Le Tourneur, responsible above all for Ossian and for a complete Shakespeare in prose.
One feature worth noting in 18th-c. literary translation was in fact the tendency to translate verse by prose. In many cases (e.g. Pope) competing verse and prose versions were available, or else, as in the case of Shakespeare, verse translations (Ducis) were made on the basis of prose ones. This practice gave rise to an ongoing debate, in which Voltaire in particular fought on behalf of verse translation. In later centuries Chateaubriand and Gide were respectively to translate Miltonic and Shakespearian verse by prose, but generally speaking poetry has been rendered in verse (free or otherwise) in the last 200 years.
3. Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Since 1800 ever broader areas of world literature have been brought into French culture by translation, so much so that by 1990 translation occupied a place almost equal to French and francophone literature in bookshops and literary journals. The most important new sources are Germanic, Russian, and American (both North and South). In the same period there has been a growth in the discussion of problems of translation, both by practitioners (e.g. Larbaud, Valéry) and by theorists (e.g. Georges Mounin's Les Problèmes théoriques de la traduction, 1963, and Henri Meschonnic's Pour la poétique II, 1973). Generally, the tendency has been towards a greater respect for the specificity of the original, as implied by Romantic notions of cultural difference. Chateaubriand, in his prose Paradise Lost (1836), deliberately adopted an odd French style, close to Milton's own usage. Going even further, Littré published in 1879 a translation of Dante's Inferno in Old French.
It is perhaps unjust that over this period, when so many excellent translations have been published, no translators have established a name for themselves comparable to that of Amyot (or of Scott-Moncrieff, the British translator of Proust). Of writers specializing in translation, one might pick out Pierre Leyris for his versions of writers as different as Dickens, Hopkins, Eliot, and Shakespeare. The most celebrated modern translations, however, are famous largely because they are the work of authors known for their original writings: Nerval's Faust; Baudelaire's versions of Poe; Proust's Ruskin; Larbaud's Butler, Joyce, and Coleridge; Bonnefoy's Yeats and Shakespeare; Jaccottet's Hölderlin, Rilke, and Musil.
[Peter France]
Bibliography
- R. Zuber, Les ‘Belles Infidèles’, et la formation du goût classique (1968)
- G. Steiner, After Babel (1975)
- V. Worth, Practising Translation in Renaissance France (1988)
