Un rythe, un souffle (in)fidèles? La vocalité de Proust entre les langues

[Autom. eng. transl.] According to phonostylistics, the vocal "is all that phonation can produce when we have deduced the verbal" (P. Léon). The human voice, a singular amalgamation of the body, speech and psychological features of the speaker, is often evoked by words written in an imperfect way, often by the indirect route (periphrases). However, if the inscription of the vocal in the linguistic orchestration of the literary text is already a first form of translation - unfaithful because necessarily defective, capable nevertheless of activating the whole inventio of the writer - it turns out that certain passages of Proust's Research attaches fundamental importance to the features of the human voice, indeed inscribing a primordial and ancestral rhythm in writing. This is what we call the maternal vocality, from a famous passage: the nocturnal reading of François le Champi (in "Combray"), which is also a real initiation to literature for the young hero from his mother. Translating the vital rhythm, in sentences which are characterized by a clearly recognizable breakdown, by using, moreover, all the ranges of the polysemy of terms like "accent" or "breath", the maternal voice then becomes a stylistic paragon for the writer, extending to several characters and on several levels in Proust's work. In our communication we will come back to some emblematic passages (for example "Watch her sleep" in La Prisonnière) in order to show how Proust's writing also feeds on this vocal model through a lexical and syntactic architecture allowing anchor the breath of the voice in the page. After having shown how the "vocal" is able to structure certain selected passages, we propose to study the fidelity or the infidelity of some translations of Proust (in English and Italian) of these same passages, through the prism the sensitivity (or indifference) of translators to this original and originating breath. A bad translation would indeed be, in our opinion, that which distorts the vital rhythm of the Proustian page, in other words a translation which would not be respectful of the vocality emerging from the meshes of Research. In our conclusion, we will come back to the idea that if any good translation is indeed a hermeneutics of the literary work, it is because it reveals its originality through a well-recognizable "song tune" , as Proust writes in a page of literary criticism: in the case of Research, "equivalence without identity" of translation (P. Ricœur) cannot do without fidelity to the vocal.