L'insularisation de la littérature traduite: Une étude des paratextes de la littérature francophone subsaharienne en traduction danoise (2000 – 2023)

Based on an analysis of the paratexts of Danish translations of eleven francophone Sub-Saharan literary works, the article investigates how geographical, exotic, universal, and aesthetic considerations are combined in the discourses of presentation and reception. We consider these texts as “facts of the target culture” circulating without their immediate context. This context is the French literary field, where they are recognised as much for their otherness as for their literariness. We ask whether, in the new context, these texts are more easily read as literary works than in the original context, or whether the strategy of cultural stereotyping often used to facilitate a translation’s entry into a new literary field sends them back to a rather exoticist approach. Our analyses show that when entering the Danish context, sub-Saharan francophone texts gain in literariness, but that this comes at the price of a certain “insularisation”. On the one hand, by overlooking any kind of literary historical framework, whether French, Franco-African, Indian Ocean, Francophone or global, the paratexts create a kind of intertextual vacuum around these texts in the Danish literary landscape. On the other hand, the literary prizes, the number of translations and the sales figures mentioned in the paratexts to attest to the value of the text do not have the same persuasive force for a Danish reader as for a French one, just as the prestige associated with being published by a major Parisian publisher is not transferred to the new context either.