Translating Beyond Frontiers

Louis Jolicoeur
Full professor - Translation Program
Assistant Dean - Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Université Laval Québec (Québec)

The art of literary translation is not only a question of writing. It involves social and anthropological issues, as well as philosophical aspects linked to the fields of aesthetics and ethics. The objective of the literary translator is thus not only to respect a work of art (with its beauty, its ambiguity, its effect), and through it an author (with a culture, a history, an intention), but also to create links between cultures. In fact, when dealing with cultural differences, the literary translator should try to see, beyond the exotic appeal, the potential for a rapprochement between peripheries, be they geographical, social, literary or imaginary, that is : the periphery of reality, most important in the Latin American context in particular. In my paper I will try to look into these issues with a view to analyze, along the lines of what Lawrence Venuti and others have sketched, the difficulty for smaller cultures, in particular in the context of the Americas – I will draw a few examples from Quebec -, to be diffused to a broader public.