From Translation to Rewriting at Marguerite Yourcenar for a Poetic Palimpsest of Creation

Abstract

Marguerite Yourcenar is the first woman to sit at the French Academy. His writings are prolific and polymorphous, offering very rich material for analysis. Critics were unanimous that his work is complex; a complexity likely to be justified by the journey of a learned intellectual who has crisscrossed the centuries through the practice of reading, translating and also rewriting. translation is a real passion for him, another way of writing.

Rewriting is the result of the act of translating. In the case of Yourcenar it is recasting, literary exercise and hermeneutics which offers him the opportunity on the one hand, to question his ideas and the ideas of others, on the other hand to self-analyze, to affirm his freedom and to reinvent his life, in short to translate himself. To rewrite is also to re-construct a character, a destiny, a History, it is also to re-construct oneself, to overcome one’s shortcomings, to remake what is wrong and to authenticate one’s emotions. The translation-re-writing bi-polarity is at this stage an aesthetic that allows the writer to complete her Great Work and rediscover the unity of her method. This is the problematic that we will try to deepen through some examples that we consider relevant from the work of Marguerite Yourcenar while relying on studies of modern poetics and comparative literature which are interested in this interaction. between the two instances; works (first writing) to translation (second writing).