Dante au Québec. Lecture critico-génétique de l’ «Enfer mis en vulgaire parlure» d’Antoine Brea

Antoine Brea, a Parisian novelist and jurist born in 1975, chose Québec as the ideal publishing context for his bold translation of Dante’s Inferno, L’Enfer de Dante mis en vulgaire parlure (Le Quartanier, 2021). As the first French version published out- side Europe, this work represents a radical departure in the Francophone reception of Dante. An expression of the “surconscience linguistique” typical of Québec, Brea’s version seems to speak to a literary culture attuned to the expressive tensions of Francophone identity. But what defines this “American Francophone Dante”? To answer this, we trace the genesis of the project, which unfolded in two phases: from 2005 to 2012, a pho- netic translation centered on the sound of the original—at times parodic but always reverent; and from 2013 to 2021, a complete rewriting in search of an ideal language that aesthetically legitimizes argot and non-standard registers. Through an analysis of transla- tion drafts and using tools from genetic criticism and linguistic statistics, the study retraces the path of a French speaking globalized Dante.