Les problèmes traductologiques ou «trahison créatrice» à la lumière de la traduction de la poésie géorgienne en français
Abstract
In the preface to the French translation of the collection of Nikoloz Baratashvili’s poems Fate of Georgia, Sergi Tsuladze, the Georgian translator of Shota Rustaveli’s poem The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, notes: “Nikoloz Baratashvili belongs to the category of poets who sing out the feelings deeply anchored in the human hearts, so that time and language barrier are powerless to diminish its scope”.
The same citation can refer to another great Georgian poet and an eminent representative of Symbolist poetry Galaktion Tabidze, whose abundant work greatly attracts readers, however, unfortunately has been very little translated into French.
The main aim of our article is to study the translation problems faced by Sergi Tsuladze, the translator of the poem Merani by Nikoloz Baratachvili, and Gaston Buachidze , the translator of the poem Blue Horses by Galaktion Tabidze.
In some translation theories, poetry ranks among untranslatable texts in reference to the issue of translatability / untransliability of literary works. However, all the texts and poems translated from Homer to the present day in a wide range of languages prove the contrary.
According to Antoine Berman, “A poem is perhaps the only form of writing that has a voice”, a pure resonance of essential writing, – “the voice of writing”. Therefore, when the voice is discovered by a translator at the level of comprehending the text to be translated; when its interpretation is intelligible, only then the translator benefits to transmit the soul and spirit of the original text into the target language through his own linguistic means.
We share Françoise Wuilmart’s reflection that “Translation is ‘accomplishing the miracle’ through the discourse which recreates in its breath ‘the soul’ of the text and its spirit, to a certain extent, to the detriment of the certain isolated lexical ‘fidelity’”.
We will try to denote how efficiently the adapters and the translators manage to keep “the voice of writing” in their translation pieces along with the soul and spirit of Georgian poems; how they commit a creative betrayal of the original work (Antoine Berman), that makes the real challenges of literary translation.
