Magda Jeanrenaud, *La Traduction, là où tout est pareil et rien n'est semblable, Préface de Claude Hagège, Bucarest, EST-Samuel Tastet Editeur, 2012, 346 p.*

Ana-Maria Minuț*

Faculty of Letters, "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University, Bd. Carol I 11, 700506 Iași, Romania

Engaged in demonstrating an evaluation and critique of translation, Magda Jeanrenaud's erudition allows the corroboration of different elements from several theories of translation (the functional type, represented by Hans Vermeer and Katharina Reiss, the linguistic type, having Roman Jakobson, J.P. Vinay, J. Darbelnet, Georges Mounin, J.C. Catford, Bertrand Richet as representatives, the interpretative type, illustrated by Marianne Lederer and Danica Selskovitch, the philosophical type, practised by Antoine Berman, Paul Ricoeur or Jacques Derrida, and the sociolinguistic type of Maurice Pernnier) inspiringly applied to several case studies. There are, in fact, not one but several demonstrations, as the author considers five cases of translation or self-translation (Vasile Alecsandri, I.L. Caragiale, Panait Istrati, Mihail Sebastian and Emil Cioran). In addition to these five foreground assessments, there are numerous other collateral assessments—starting already in the *Avant-propos* section, located after the prestigious foreword by Claude Hagège—brought about, amongst other things, by the inevitable references to the principle of faithfulness in translation, to the “threat” of the untranslatable, or to intertextual references; they relate to various specific cases, represented either by the translative solutions proposed in the Romanian versions for some titles, phrases, and words from the works of Tzvetan Todorov or Amélie Nothomb, or by the issues raised by the translation from French into German (or Romanian) of a sports caricature whose original version relies heavily on the polysemy of *but*.

The chapter *Traducteur – auteur: une relation décalée* starts from the consequences of denying or minimizing—in the structuralist studies of the literary theory from the 70s of the last century—the authorial intent and supremacy. If the reader is given the freedom to interpret the text irrespective of the

author's intention, it is obvious that the translator (“le Lecteur par excellence”), free from the canon of unqualified submission to the writer's intention, also enjoys this freedom.

Even though, as important studies of literary theory have demonstrated, intentionality proved impossible to expel, for the *consistency criterion*—essential for the adequacy and value of an interpretation—cannot be conceived without recourse to the premise or the likelihood of an intention (p. 35), many theoretical and practical benefits of approaches focussed on the empowerment of the act of translation are brought forward. On the theoretical side, the author mentions the diversification of perspectives on translation, with examples such as interpretative or communicational perspectives. Among the theories that have relativized the role of the author's intention in the act of translation, a special attention is paid, on the one hand, to Gideon Toury's so-called *polysystem theory* (instrumental in the work's thrift, as it anticipates some issues addressed in the following chapters), who grants the same status to both translation and the original work; on the other hand, the theory developed by H.J. Vermeer and Katharina Reiss (the so-called *Skopostheorie*) shifts the emphasis on the text status, which becomes critical in the choice of the method and strategy of translation. As for the practical advantages, the author highlights those of exceeding sterile outputs of contrastive type, obstinately preoccupied by identifying the deviations and differences (often of “expressivity”) between the target-text and the source-text.

As knowledge of the cultural varieties underlying the text is paramount to the translation act, which cannot ignore the sociocultural context and the relationship between a culture and its language, the book holds a consistent section, called *Francophonie*,

<footnote>*Email address: a_minut@hotmail.com.</footnote>
*bilinguisme et traduction*, that deals with the French influences exerted (at first indirectly, through Greek and Russian influences, then directly) within the Romanian cultural environment and their ways of manifestation. Given that French is rightly granted the most important role in modernizing the culture and Romanian language, the author provides, predominantly relying on the well-known work of Pompiliu Eliade (released in a time when French influence was in full swing)—*De l'influence française sur l'esprit public en Roumanie. Les origines. Étude sur l'état de la société roumaine à l'époque des règnes phanariotes*, Ernst Leroux, Libraire-Éditeur, Paris, 1898—a description of the most important moments in the history of French-Romanian relations, which led to a decisive shift of *Weltanschauung* and, in linguistic terms, to a massive and extremely beneficial modernization of the Romanian lexis.

If—to quote Paul Zarifopol’s phrase—the “rudeness movement” started with France (*Pentru arta literară*, II, edited by Al. Sândulescu, Editura Minerva, București, 1971), Alecsandri’s character Chirița certainly illustrates the first step of this process. Her ridiculous idiolect is analysed from the perspective of the “technical” procedures of translation described by Vinay and Darbelnet, of the three types of translation identified by J.-C. Catford, and by using the concept of *transcoding* as Maurice Pernnier defined it (in regard to the transposition of idioms). According to Werner Koller (*Einführung in die Übersetzungswissenschaft*, UTB, Stuttgart, 2011), emancipation is a form of cultural criticism with a linguistic dimension, and the imitative and translative frenzy is the contribution to “emancipation” brought by the type of smatterer mocked by Alecsandri.

Concerning the transposition of Caragiale's works into French, after addressing several important issues of the evaluation of translation (the translators' profile—Eugène Ionesco and Monica Lovinescu, the limits between the translation and adaptation of a dramatic text, the status of the Romanian language in the first half of the nineteenth century), the focus turns to some particular issues related to the translation of Didascalia, of repetitions and clichés, of cultural references, of proper names (including nicknames) and affectionate forms of address, of interjections and punctuation. The main problems are identified, on the one hand, in the way of playing with the French words of the original text, and on the

other hand, in the normalization, organization, and rationalization of what—in the speech of Caragiale’s characters—betrays, on the contrary, confusion, clutter, drift, derision, or expansiveness.

In the case of Panait Istrati’s texts, the translative practices recalled are those whose frequency offers them the status of hints for the intention of self-translation from French to Romanian; such procedures fall mainly into the “oblique” category in Vinay and Dabelnet’s terminology, with the effect of deeply reshaping the meaning of the source-text. Examples drawn from the Romanian versions of such works as *Oncle Anghel, La Maison Thüringer*, and *Tsatsa Minnka* prove an explicitness and an obvious nuancing of the descriptions, a change of narratological perspective (the narrator’s voice becomes more powerful), a reorganization of the original text—including a redistribution of paragraphs—, as well as a transformation of the original standard and neutral register into the oral, familiar, dialectal or emotional register.

Alain Paruit’s French version of Mihail Sebastian’s novel *The Accident* is the subject of a careful evaluation in terms of “universals” (standardization, homogenization, rationalization, clarification, explanation, “elevation”) that manifest themselves in the act of translation. The effects consist in the considerable restructuring of some paragraphs, the change in the usage of quotation marks (most commonly by removing them, when they mark the intervention of a secondary discourse within the primary discourse), the removal of some “unnecessary” details, the “ stylization” of some passages, the avoidance of repetitions (even when they are symbolic, as in the case of the recurrence of the word *fog*, which in French became either *brume* or *brouillard*), the disambiguation of what is deliberately vague, etc. The progressive and deliberate turn of the translator to the realistic pattern is explained, according to the author, by the desire (especially on the publishers’ part) to avoid the reception of *The Accident* in Proustian key by a French public overwhelmed by Marcel Proust’s epigones.

Regarding the French version of Cioran’s Romanian works, the major changes (consisting especially of omissions) to the source-text are considered the result of certain ideological and æsthetic reluctancees (of the author himself, the translator, or the editor). Thanks to these suppresions, Cioran’s estab-
lished image is being protected from the youth's ideo-
logical drifts or stylistic deviations.

Many of the theoretical explanations dissemin-
ated throughout the chapters justify the inspired
choice of the subtitle *là où tout est pareil et rien
n'est semblable*, borrowed from one of the works of
the philosopher and essayist André Glucksmann (*Le
Bien et le Mal. Lettres immorales d'Allemagne et de
France*, Hachette, Paris, 1997), circumscribed to an
entirely different field. Several factors are included
in the interplay between *tout est pareil* and *rien n'est
semblable*: discrepancies (of internalizing the au-

thor's intent, of expectations, etc.) existing in the au-
thor – translator relationship, the interpreter's cour-
age to resort—when the mere transposition from one
language to another no longer seems sufficient—to
“a third language of translation” (able to recover the
losses and transmit the alterity to the foreign text),
or the dosage of the so-called “universals” of transla-
tion.

Erudite and subtle, based on a rich experience as
a translator, Magda Jeanrenaud's book is an entirely
convincing plea for the need for translation to reflect
on itself.