L'oeuvre au service de la traduction : l'écriture vianesque, une invitation à la traduction créative
Stanley Chapman is not a well known translator or writer. The sum of his original works, which are difficult – when not impossible – to find, and of his translations is modest. He would probably have gone completely unnoticed by the literary establishment – beyond the literary circle of the Collège de ’Pataphysique, the Oulipo and the Outrapo – had he not translated two of the French writer Boris Vian's most famous novels : L'Écume des jours (Froth on the Daydream) and L’Arrache-coeur (Heartsnatcher). Has Vian's singular prose incited Chapman to the act of writing, an activity which springs from, and unfolds in, the act of translating ? Moreover, could the intellectual affinities Vian and Chapman shared have also been a factor in this translating experience ? According to Henri Meschonnic and Antoine Berman, a translation criticism reveals the close interaction of thought, writing and translating. Using Meschonnic's « poetics of translation » and Berman's « translation analysis », this memoir will endeavour to determine how Heartsnatcher, the English translation of L’Arrache-coeur, can be considered an act of « translating-writing ». Taking into account such concepts as rhythm and significance (signifiance), our criticism will identify the crucial strategies that arise from this act of creation that is translation, and in so doing, will reveal the particular manner in which Stanley Chapman translated L’Arrache-coeur.
Boris Vian L’Arrache-coeur Stanley Chapman Heartsnatcher Translating-writing Poetics of translation