Berman, Unfaithful to Himself?
This article is an attemp to illustrate the exact nature of the gap between the translator’s practice and the translation scholar’s epistemological discourse. Numerous passages in the first part of Berman’s French translation of Augusto Roa Bastos’s novel, Yo el Supremo, are analysed particularly with regards to translation principles that Berman himself put forward in two essays published in the 80’s. In these essays, Berman opposes the “polyfacetism” of the Latino novel with the “anti-vernacular tendencies” that characterise French prose and that complicate the task of translating into French from a language where orality, dialogism, and the vernacular are dominant. We describe 9 out of the 12 of Berman’s suggested tendencies, and demonstrate with extracts from Moi le Suprême, the translated novel, that “Berman the translator” did not seem to be able to put into practice principles of which “Berman the translation scholar” was very aware of.