Histoire(s) des traductions et des retraductions du Popol Vuh

The Popol Vuh is a literary work with mythological and historical dimensions that comes from the Mayan-Quichean culture of Guatemala. Written around 1550 in the Quichean language using the Latin alphabet according to Spanish phonetics, the text has been translated and retranslated many times since the beginning of the 18th century. These versions differ in many ways: bilingual or unilingual edition, composition of the paratext, title, division into chapters, precision of the transfer, literary style, strategy for translating character names and toponyms, etc. Moreover, the paratext of these different versions suggests the existence of an emulating transhistorical dialogue between their successive translators, particularly into Span-ish, French and English. In order to better understand these phenomena, this dissertation intends to describe the history of translations and retranslations of the Popol Vuh into Spanish, French and English and to offer an explanation of the characteristics of this history. To do so, we have adopted a Ber-manian theoretical framework (Berman, 1990, 1995) and a methodology adapted to the field of study of the history of translation and to our object of study (Berman, 1995; Lépinette, 1997; Pym, 1998). We began by compiling a catalog of translations and retranslations of the Popol Vuh into Spanish, French, and English as a starting point for tracing, through their par-atext, the main lines of the transhistorical dialogue between the authors of the different ver-sions of the Popol Vuh in these languages. Once the main interlocutors were identified, we proceeded to a descriptive and comparative analysis of the approaches taken by the translators of the versions identified as the most relevant in the history of translations and retranslations of the Popol Vuh, namely the versions by Ximénez (c. 1703), Brasseur (1861), Raynaud (1925), Recinos (1947), Edmonson (1971), Chávez (1978), Tedlock (1985) and Sam Colop (2008). This analysis includes for each version the study of its paratext and a translation sam-ple, in this case the episode of Vucub-Caquix's death. The methodology we have adopted, which takes into account the profile, horizon and translat-ing position of the translating subject, and which sheds light on the analysis of the translated text thanks to its paratext, enables us to put forward explanations of the characteristics ob-served for each version of our corpus. Thus our dissertation reveals that the versions of the Popol Vuh vary with their context in the broadest sense, but above all with the vision of the Quichean text specific to the circle in which each translator evolves, just as they vary accord-ing to each translator's intention. We have also confirmed that the approach adopted by the translators of the Popol Vuh seems to be increasingly source-oriented, even if they are careful, particularly in the paratext, to continue to help the target readers in their discovery of a literary work that is the fruit of a universe that is foreign to them, the accessibility of the work remain-ing a priority in the various translation projects analyzed. Our dissertation is a case study whose methodology could be tested for the study of the cycle of retranslations of other ancient Native American texts. Furthermore, it also invites us to ques-tion the role of translation in the literary journey of these texts.

Keyphrases: Popol Vuh, history, translation, retranslation, paratext