Translating Diderot Today

Translating Diderot TodayStarting from a reflection on traductology in Diderot, this article attempts to situate his ‘poetics’, closely linked to his ideas on translation, studied not as purely original and personal but in the context of the French classical tradition. Notions like ‘accessory ideas’ and syllogisms did not originate with him but are part of a philosophical and grammatical tradition dating from the Port-Royal Logic, which was the basis for the study of rhetoric and style, for Diderot as well as for the ‘philosophical grammarians’ like Dumarsais, Beauze, Batteux or Condillac. The Enlightened grammarians’ ‘prosism’ is obvious when they try to apply the Port Royal theory to the pedagogical field of translation. The article explains the line by line method of translation defended as a didactic tool by Dumarsais and Beauzee. Diderot, however, based his poetics on a fundamental sensorial and emotional experience linked to a materialistic cosmology in which all natural phenomena, both necessary and contingent, gravitate around the syllogism. Accessory ideas, no longer part of the linguistic or conceptual order, are linked to the cosmic and universal. He followed the Jansenist model in keeping the concept of ‘confused idea’, ‘double mes sage’ or ‘accessory idea’, but he developed his philosophical and stylistic autonomy. The end of the article reflects on the many insoluble problems faced by all the Japanese translators of Diderot’s works, namely how to render faithfully Diderot’s polyplike style in flowing Japanese