André Markowicz: réécrire l’impossible

Abstract

André Markowicz is famous for having translated all of Dostoyevsky’s novels and many Russian writers’ novels. He defines the act of translation as a way of sharing knowledge. Through the translation he offers a chance to enrich the “impossible” of French literary expression, in order to introduce new forms of expression, since he is particularly interested in how spoken voices are written. Moreover for Markowicz moving from one language to another requires a perfect knowledge not only of the two systems and vocabularies, but also of the two cultures and the different values these cultures refer to, because this knowledge allows to understand the author’s thought that is is being translated. Therefore, a good translator is a writer, and, for this reason, he can be considered a great linguistic and cultural mediator of classical Russian literature towards the French-speaking world. According to these considerations, our study underlines the novelty of André Markowicz’s translation practice through the translation of the novel Eugene Onegin by the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin. This choice is motivated by the fact that some critics of translation have taken his work as an attempt to achieve the “impossible”. As a consequence we will delve deeper into the linguistic stakes of his unusual and innovative practice.