Ecrivains — Traducteurs Du sentiment de culpabilité à la gratitude

This paper entitled "Writers and Translators: from guilt to gratitude" attempts to switch the emphasis from concept and percept on affect in translation studies. It aims at replacing the translator in all his indissociated roles — reader, critic, interpreter, translator and writer — right within the hazardous responsibility for sense and signification input. It is based on the confessions of some renowned French writers — Jean Anouilh, Gérard de Nerval and André Gide — who described the unspoken hardships, loneliness, feelings of guilt and gratitude while translating the very specially inspired giants of universal literature, respectively Shakespeare, Goethe and Rabindranath Tagore. The main idea developed here is that it is certainly more straining, overwhelming and challenging to be the translators of such fabulous masterpieces than being mere writers. For what is at stake for these translators is less equating or overpassing the linguistic means of expression in the original works than meeting the processes of human mind through the exploration of the authors' conscience. In other words, no aesthetic purpose or emotional beauty in translation can be efficiently rendered without the translators peeping into the authors' personal and secret mythology in order to find out the very principles of the creative work's genesis. Translation is also shown as an interactive author-translator's mutual appreciation, both moral and intellectual, the everlasting intellectual balance residing in a fair play between objectivity and subjectivity.