Isabelle Poulin

The figure of the infidel. Fiction and translation in Don Quixote and À la Recherche du temps perdu

Drawing on two major works in the history of the modern Western novel, Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Proust’s Recherche, we propose a reflection on one of the major figures of translation: the “infidel.” Present at every level of reality in fiction (from stories about “intermittences of the heart” to narratives arising from linguistic “intermittences”), this figure can shed light on the very workings of the narrative genre, in its close connection to the act of translation. Considering Proust’s Recherche as the crucible for the invention of narratology, we propose a return to the narrative figure, to the movement, that is, once known as “romantic transport” and its profound, ethical connection with the proliferation and diversity of languages.

Keywords: desire to translate, infidelity, novelistic genre

Biography

Isabelle Poulin is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne and Associate Director of the École doctorale Montaigne Humanités. She holds an HDR (habilitation in research supervision) and a PhD in Comparative Literature (focusing on the bilingual work of Vladimir Nabokov), and she has also completed studies in Modern Languages and Literature. She oversees the collection “Translations, Pensées et pratiques de la traduction” published by the Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, and, as part of the research team TELEM (Textes et littératures : écritures et modèles), she directs the “Traductions littéraires et politique de la mémoire” program.