Hugo Claus’ “dialect” in French Translation

Smeyers, Elies [UCL]

Hugo Claus was one of the most important Dutch-language authors of the twentieth century. In many of his novels and plays, Claus opted for a language characterised by West Flemish regional influences. This “deviant” language surpasses a mimetic function and forms an intrinsic stylistic feature of the author’s work. Surprisingly, Claus’ “small”, regionally influenced language and local setting do not seem to have been a hindrance to his successful reception in French. In the Francophone paratexts surrounding Claus’ texts, much attention is paid to the exotic Flemish cultural-specific elements and the characteristic “clausian” language. The appreciative reception and discussion of the French translations of Claus’ work in Francophone critique seems to imply that the Francophone translators somehow succeeded in transposing Claus’ language in a convincing way. By looking at both the paratextual framework and the textual choices of the translators, we will investigate how the French translations of some of his most distinctively Flemish theatre plays attempted to preserve, or rather reconstruct, the author’s “Flemishness”. The hybrid status of Claus’ Francophone-Belgian translators appears to have constituted one of the factors that positively influenced the recreation of Claus’ heteroglossia in a way that transcends essentialist dichotomies of foreign versus domestic. As we will illustrate, the French translations of Hugo Claus’ texts invite us to reconsider and nuance our perspective on the translation of dialectal language in literature, the possibilities and difficulties of preserving the cultural Other, and the impact of cultural stereotypes in translation.