Barcelone : écrire la marge, traduire en marge

Abstract

Barcelona was chosen as the key geographic centre of interest in this paper not for its own sake but because its social, architectural and mythical topography exemplifies perfectly the ambiguous or even paradoxical position of translation in relation to the "original" text and the "source" language: is its location marginal (commentary, digression or appendix) or is it "central" in the sense that it reveals the core or matrix of the text translated? Barcelona, with its obscure Raval (suburb) at its centre, as the Id in Freudian psychic topography, translates itself outwards in successive layers of repression and return of the repressed. Both Mandiargues and Mendoza show this very well in their respective novels. But also the linguistic dualities of Barcelona exhibit a particular in-betweenness of discourse regimes and status (prose and poetry, for example), similar to that of translation.