Contenu du sommaire : Traduire l'Amérique.

E. E. Cummings defines poetry as "whatever cannot be translated". And, indeed, E. E. Cummings 's poetic idiom is complex and reluctant to all forms of mediations. The poem seems to be written in a foreign language that needs to be deciphered. Some particular poems even mix English with foreign syntagms and syntax. As a consequence, a question arises : how do foreign readers, and more specifically French readers, comprehend a highly transgressive poem, both spatially and linguistically ? This paper examines how singular our reading is.

This paper is a study of Jacques Roubaud's reading of American free verse practices, as expressed in his theoretical writings, translations, and in the poems Roubaud published in Dors (1981), which he claims are patterned after the «short measures » of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky. The article attempts to show how Roubaud uses a short line in Dors to develop specific prosodie and semantic effects in French, which paradoxically put into question the principle trait which Roubaud associates with «American free verse», the inseparability of the written and the spoken.

This paper aims at assessing popular images of Niagara Falls, through the analysis of a corpus of postcards sent from 1900 on. It begins with an overview of classic descriptions of the site, which registered early on the dilemma of the sublime-seeker in the midst of popular culture. Then, an examination of the postcards shows how publishers have sought both to maintain a body of standard «views » and to compensate for banalization by renewing the « effects ». Finally, it is shown that the written messages, though highly coded, tend to reconstitute and to communicate the awe of Niagara as a private experience.

Noir fiction embodies the myth of a pure, indigenous and autonomous American language. In order to show the most obvious aspects of this myth, I have chosen to deal with three types of eccentric texts : the translations of the Série noire (which played a great part in the definition of the genre as a whole), the French «fake translations » of American crime fiction in the late 40 's (these were in fact original novels written by French writers using American pseudonyms), and the «Americanized » novels of the British writer Peter Cheyney, which are striking for their incoherent and hyperbolic brand of pseudo-American slang. These texts highlight a form of linguistic romance, projection the vision of a mythical American language. My contention is that such a vision is also an essential element of indigenous American crime fiction, one which links the genre as a whole to the important tradition of American linguistic nationalism running from the foundation of the United States to the present day.

A commemorative monument is the translation of a historical event into a work of art. Such is the Shaw Memorial on the Boston Common, a high-relief by Augustus Saint-Gaudens which celebrates the valor of the first African-American regiment in the Civil War. This monument later became the inspiration of a musical piece by Charles Ives, and a poem by Robert Lowell. Our aim is to analyse the latter as translations of the original into different artistic media. These tributes to the work of a former master are also attempts at renewing the expression of civic memory, and to judge the present in the light of a heroic past.

Stephen Wright's latest novel, Going Native, explores the avatars of a hyper-metaphoric text often saturated with (visual) quotations from television series, movies and videos of all kinds. While the French reviewers praised his depiction of his contemporaries' addiction to cinematic artefacts, they generally failed to see the poetic dimension of his work, which is particularly present in moments of empathy devoid of irony, if not of humor, when his writing reaches an immediacy of vision unfiltered by his prolific use of metaphors.

Although translation as such never was a favorite activity with Henry James, the question of translation seems to have thoroughly informed the writing of Henry James's story of 1874 « The Last of the Valerii ». This article tackles such issues as influences from foreign sources, intertextuality and ethnocentrism, all of them relevant questions in the field of literary translation studies today

Far from being a traditional success story, Eva Hoffman's autobiography focuses on a painful interior itinerary in which identity and its textual transcription are constantly called into question. As she tries to draw meaning from her experience, the author explores what she calls « the Babel of American voices » in order to forge an idiom for herself and delineate a space which she may inhabit on the new continent. This leads her to subvert the Utopian grammar of the New World and to elaborate an alternative cultural scenario.