Deep rivers
| ,Translator’s note
Texte intégral
1These articles are as much works of literature as of scholarship. The author’s very inventive style which manages to be always unexpected and often unorthodox, whilst at the same time exemplifying the grand tradition of erudite writing so rarely encountered today, is so precisely constructed that it is able to go wherever it likes leaving the translator hard pressed. While weaving back into the text all the wide-ranging allusion and layered nuance and arriving at a result that seemed to reflect the original and maintain at least some of its richness, I would often discover I had fallen into a trap, missed a play on words or a sudden twist in the continuity so that an entire sequence of sentences would have to be reconsidered. As the author says in these pages, translation is a quest for substance and style: there was always the risk here that these elements might drift away from each other however seamlessly integrated in the French.
2All things being equal, it is a translator’s dream to work closely with the author and this time, in addition to the author’s multilingual direction throughout, M. Kannan was there with consistently sage advice and essential information.
© Institut Français de Pondichéry, 2009