Manqué pour le style: Balzac’s Problematic Style and the Spanish Translation of Two Stylemes

Abstract

The paper firstly surveys the historical controversy over Balzac’s style, praised and rejected by critics throughout time, while underlining hyperbole as a relevant figure behind some of Balzac’s stylistic choices. In a second section, the article deals with the impact of such controversy on the Spanish translation of Balzac’s style with examples of adjectives and neologisms taken from the so called “Vautrin cycle”, consisting of Le père Goriot, Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, highly representative novels of the whole of La Comédie humaine. The paper ultimately aims at considering translatology as a necessary perspective, though still undeveloped in Balzac’s studies, for the production of more accurate translations of Balzac’s original stylistic intentions