The author who translates: Chateaubriand and Paradise Lost by John Milton

Abstract

This article is the result of a research of Historiography of Translation that aims to present some historiographical notes on the publication and reception of the French translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost by François-René de Chateaubriand in 1836. He proposed to carry out a literal translation, “word for word, like a dictionary”, which would delimit, in Chateaubriand’s view, a “revolution in the way of translating”. The translation scholar George Mounin considers this work one of the milestones of the transformation in the French way of translating. Antoine Berman, though, evokes it in his defense of a literal translation in the contemporaneity. From the descriptive historical model of Historiography of Translation by Brigitte Lépinette, we sought to understand the implicit notions of author and translator in the speeches of Chateaubriand and his critics in referring to the work he translated.