29(2) - 2017

Avatars contemporains de Darwin : traductions françaises de The Origin of Species (XXe-XXIe siècles)

Fabio Regattin

Title

Contemporary images of Darwin: The French “translation” of The Origin of Species (XX-XXI centuries)

Abstract

In this article, we will analyse some French retranslations of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), which occurred in the second half of the twentieth and in the twenty-first century. Darwin’s work can be considered as a monument of modern scientific thought. At the time of its publication, it opened an entirely new field of study in biology; today, although the Darwinian theory is no longer under discussion, Darwin’s key text continues to be read, published and translated. In our contribution, we shall first summarize the French history of The Origin; we will then focus on the history of the text from the post-war period, at a time when French biology was catching up international research by integrating with the “neodarwinian synthesis”. We will finally focus on three versions of the text, published in 1992 by Flammarion, in 2009 by Champion and Slatkine, and in 2013 by Seuil, analyzing them at the textual and paratextual level.

Keywords

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, retranslation, scientific translation, translation reception

DOI 10.17462/para.2017.02.05

October 26, 2017
  29(2) - 2017