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Thesis

French

ID: <

10670/1.yjmwja

>

Where these data come from
Of one language the other: C.F. Ramuz’s writing through the prism of his German-speaking reception

Abstract

Résumé de thèseC.F. Ramuz (1878-1947) is one of the most translated authors in Switzerland in the twentieth century. His novels, news, poems and trials circulated around the world in about 30 languages, totalling more than 300 translated documents. Despite this very wide dissemination, no detailed study has so far made it possible to present the issues involved in receiving it outside the French-speaking area. This research aims to partially fill this gap, focusing on the analysis of the German-speaking Ramuz reception. As it focuses mainly on a space for production, circulation and algal discussion, this work also looks at a history of literary exchanges in Switzerland. The aspects developed in this work make it possible to identify the factors which gave Ramuz, in the specifically Swiss context, the stature of a national writer. It was in 1921 that the first German translations in volume, under the aegis of the construction translator Albert Baur, appeared. Werner Johannes Guggenheim, a theatre man who is very committed to Swiss cultural life, took the lead and became Ramuz’s appointed translator from 1927. Between 1927 and 1945, it signs twenty-one translations which will be subject to numerous reeditions. During this wide period, the reading of Ramuz’s texts is under the seal of spiritual defence and the work of the translator helps to strengthen the country’s founding values, beyond linguistic barriers. But Ramuz’s texts also lend the side to another kind of ideological reading: the author’s attachment to the soil from which he was born provides a breeding ground for the views of the Third Reich and several German academic works investigate Ramuz’s peasant mystic to link him to the canon of the Blut-und-Boden literature. It was necessary to wait until the 1970s for a major editorial project to embark on a re-evaluation of the ramuzian work: between 1972 and 1978, Huber Verlag House in Frauenfeld gave different translators the task of translating the great novels and Ramuz’s main trials under the title Werke in Sechs Bänden. The modern writing, rhythm and polyphonic narration are reflected in these retranslations. At the same time, Ramuz’s German-speaking reception was moderated in the late 1970s by a series of Bernois dialect translations by Hans Ulrich Schwaar. Since the early 1980s Ramuz’s work has always been in the catalogue of German-speaking publishers, but mainly in republishing. Pastorale, a collection of news translated by Peter Sidler in 1994 at Limmat Verlag, is, however, an exception and seems to revive in the German-speaking area the discussion around Ramuz.The research thus highlights the particular dynamics that influenced the transfer of Ramuz’s texts into German. It shows how translations can be the mirror of the different cultural policies that have governed literary exchanges within Switzerland throughout the last century. This study also makes it possible to explore the way in which the Swiss literary authorities negotiated the changeover to Germany, in particular under the Nazi regime. Finally, from a literary point of view, the analysis of the translated texts calls for a rereading of the stylistic explorations of the Roman writer: the transversal view of translators shed a different light on the debates that animate the reception of Ramuz in French, at the same time as providing new and sometimes unexpected answers.

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