La traduction chez Schwob

Abstract

Although Marcel Schwob produced works of great beauty, his facet as a translator is virtually unknown. He is aware that all literary work loses certain qualities in translation and seeks to replace these losses by using his talent as a writer and by applying the method he called the “analogy of languages and literatures at identical stages of formation”. According to this theory languages share similar stages of development and any one language will present analogies with another language of the same period. The translator must therefore revert to the language used when the original text was written. Schwob put this principle into practice with great success in his translations of Shakespeare and Defoe.