Nicolas Muller, passeur inattendu de Dante en Belgique. Étude et édition génétique du manuscrit AML 14673/9 (Par., XXXIII)

The reception of Dante's Paradise in French-speaking Belgium is the story of an absence. Belgian translators seem to favour above all the darker shades of the Inferno (de Laminne, Vivier, Poirier, Delcourt, Desonay, Yourcenar, Cliff and, more recently, Jean-Pierre Pisetta and Jean-Philippe Toussaint); the Third Cantica remains largely ignored or visited only occasionally, fragmentarily or anthologically. This article aims to question this absence, taking as a case study one presence: the unpublished translation of Canto XXXIII of the Paradiso, produced (probably around 1964) by Nicolas-Joseph Muller (1903-1978), whose manuscripts are kept in the Archives et Musées de la Littérature in Brussels. After outlining a brief epitome of the reception of Dante in French-speaking Belgium, we will attempt an initial reading of ms. AML 14673/9/002 from both a genetic and an ecdotal perspective. The edition that will be found at the end of this article is intended not as the goal but as the premise of an in-depth analysis of the cognitive processes underlying this translating experience, useful for investigating - in the "selva oscura" of erasures, repentances and rewritings - the intellectual and human journey of an unexpected passer-by of Dante in Belgium.