Traduire l’Europe

Europe, however it is defined – whether in terms of geography, culture or politics – is multilingual. Grappling with a question such as “translating Europe” necessarily involves a multitude of languages, none of which can claim to be the sole source language for all the others.In the first part the author suggests that “translating Europe” is perhaps first of all an attempt to assert one’s European identity through translation. Using a passage from Franz Kafka’s diaries, in turn relayed by Milan Kundera, he shows that it is by placing themselves in a broader European context that the literatures of “smaller nations” find the best opportunity to assert their identity and to make themselves better known.But the implication of wanting to make oneself known and to assert one’s European identity through translation – this is the second point – is that one also wishes to know how other Europeans translate themselves, and how they represent their own vision of Europe. The author gives the example here of a singular publishing project: a textbook of the History of Europe and of the World since 1945 written by a joint team of French and German historians and published in two distinct versions in 2006 – one French and one German – with identical type-setting and material. Can this experiment be replicated and extended to other periods? The period known in Slovenia as the preseljevanje narodov and in German as the Völkerwanderung [“migration of the peoples” in both cases] is in French historiography known as period of the “invasions barbares” (“barbarian invasions”)…. There is no common European model for the history of Europe!The last part of the paper concerns the reading of literary works in translation, which the author would like to rehabilitate. Taking as his starting point remarks made by Wilhelm von Humboldt at the beginning of the 19th century (contrasting das Fremde and die Fremdheit), he compares in two cases how a single work has been translated into different languages, which enables us to understand better the different approaches used. These are: (1) the two different titles of Ivo Andric’s novel Na Drini ćuprija (Most na Drini in Slovene) in French translation: Il est un pont sur la Drina (“There was once a bridge over the river Drina”) and Le Pont sur la Drina (“The Bridge over the River Drina”); and (2) the different translations of the title of the parable of the prodigal son, which appear in the Slovene translation of the Return of the Prodigal Son by André Gide: Vrnitev izguljenega sina (“The Return of the Lost Son”). The section concludes with two references to Albert Camus and to Virginia Woolf, which highlight the richness of the European literary heritage.Europe thinks in many languages and Europe is a land of translation. Translation is a means of transmitting culture, a means of making it available to others and an invitation to share. It is a cement which binds Europe together