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Translating Poeticity: A Case Study of the Tirukkural Translations into French

2018; Linguagem: Inglês

10.46623/tt/2018.12.1.ar5

0972-8740

Pugazhendhi Kumarasamy,

Linguistic and Sociocultural Studies

If translating prose is a challenging task, translating poetic text is a greater challenge and even considered impossible by many scholar-translators who made honest attempts to do the same.To render as equally as possible the form and the content of the original work into the target language remains the eternal concern of literary translators.Although it is desirable to keep both, the aesthetic value and the message intact in translation, most of the times, translators succeed in rendering one of them and scarify the other.Tirukkural, the monumental poetic work of Tamil literature, has been translated into numerous languages across the world including French.After the first translation into French in 1767, Kural has been translated several times again into the same language by several scholars.Among the available translations in French, the one done by Lamairesse in 1868 and another one done by Gnanou Diagou in 1942 are particularly remarkable as the former is a native French speaker and the latter is a Francophone of Tamil origin.This paper presents the differences and similarities between the two aforementioned translations and thereby attempts to investigate the possibility of translating the masterpiece of the philosopher Tiruvalluvar into a foreign language.