The Little Prince

• Which version of the Metamorphosis or Crime and Punishment should you choose?
• Because in a particularly well-stocked library or bookshop, you could find more than ten different English translations of these two literary classics.

The art of choosing a translation

• And yet, very few English speakers today read Dante, Cervantes or Rabelais in a century-old English translation, not to say older.
• Because a classic is a text that we never stop retranslating, one might say, reversing the terms of the question.
• The phenomenon of retranslation is both paradoxical and inherent in every culture, to the point that an historian of translation, Michel Ballard, has identified it as one of the few constant features in the history of translation.

Censorship, inaccuracies and ageing

• Because of some forms of ideological or moral censorship, for instance, which may have deprived its readers of certain aspects of the book.
• In other cases, the sense of dissatisfaction may be due to errors or inaccuracies, originated by human fallibility or limited resources.
• Take one of the most famous so-called “errors” in the history of translation, the horns on the head of Michelangelo’s Moses (1515).

• They age too, of course, but not quite in the same way.
• They seem to ripen with age, whereas translations often turn grotesque.
• Divine temptations, however, proved much more controversial and destabilising, as shown by the reactions stirred by the reform of the Lord’s prayer.
• Retranslations can be disturbing because they introduce relativism into an interpretation which we thought of as definitive and unique.

Can we anticipate the path of a translation series?

• Can we anticipate when and how often a classic will be retranslated?
• Several case studies exist, but still no exhaustive studies providing reliable, large-scale statistics for a given period, genre or country.
• In 1994, Isabelle Collombat, professor at the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, predicted that the 21st century would be the age of retranslation.
• It is the perfect antidote to the idea of a unique translation, and it reminds us that every single translation relies on a peculiar process of interpreting and rewriting.

Enrico Monti ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.