The Coindreau Archives: A Translator at Work
Patrick Hersant2021, « Genetic Translation Studies », ed. Ariadne Nunes and Joana Moura
Though it is not entirely new, interest in genetic criticism is still too recent within translation studies to have inspired more than specialized and fragmentary work. The field is almost entirely devoted to poetry translation, and, if the rough drafts of poettranslators like Saint-John Perse, Paul Celan or Philippe Jaccottet have recently been the subject of critical studies, these primarily undertake a comparison between the translator's process and the poet's work. 1 Only in 2014 did a special issue of the journal GENESIS allow us to celebrate the marriage of genetic criticism and translation studies without restrictions or exclusions, and in a way that involved translators who are not poets and even translators who are not writers -non-literary translators, whose drafts the journal reproduced in number, and in colour. Even more recently, the journal Transalpina dedicated an issue to the genesis of translations in the field of Italian literature (Agostini-Ouafi and Lavieri 2015), and the journal Linguistica Antverpiensia sketched the outline of 'genetic translation studies' (Cordingley and Montini 2015: 1-18). In theory, this new subject seems inexhaustible to a scholar of translation studies; in practice, alas, translators' drafts remain rare and limited, for the most part, to the twentieth century. In fact, we can lament with Fabienne Durand-Bogaert that most translators 'do not bother to preserve the traces of different angles of approach that led them to adopt a particular lexical or syntactic choice' (Durand-Bogaert 2014: 8). Certain specialized archives nonetheless offer researchers a vast terrain to explore -the Lilly Library at Indiana University, the Literary Translation Archive at the University of East Anglia, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas at Austin and the Institut mémoires de l' édition contemporaine (Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives [IMEC]) near Caen, which has collected an archive of translators' manuscripts over the years. The addition of this kind of material to the scattered archives of poet-translators immediately proves its value, even in the sheer abundance of manuscripts. Instead of (or in addition to) examining and commenting on the hazards of poetry translation, which are fascinating but highly specific, we can observe a long-distance effort, following the translator at work through dozens of years and comparing his methods with those of his contemporaries. On the topic of English to French literary translation, the dossiers archived at IMEC are at once copious and disappointing; their contents are often limited to press packets, 11
