Traductions de traductions : Dante entre France et Belgique

Translating Dante into French is part of a very long retraductive history, in which the new translator's dialogue with previous translators often obscures the relationship with the original text. Such was the case with Pierre Poirier, a Belgian jurist and man of letters, who in 1945 published an anthology of Dante's texts in which he readapted or rewrote passages from existing translations of the “Commedia”, in this case Louise Espinasse-Mongenet's 1912 translation. The relationship between the two texts will be the focus of this essay, which also draws on statistical analyses of a computer corpus of 52 French translations of the Inferno, as well as on ecdotic methodologies specific to authorial philology.