Living in today's multi-speed world is so exasperatingly in-tense
for so many people that a great majority of them find solace in
routine and automatism. The clich has become not only a conscious
strategy to conform, but a response to anxiety and despair. Humans
are therefore increasingly losing their individual voice and
adopting ready-made, stale, worn-out and often inaccurate clich?'s
that trivialize noble ideas and the power of one. In fact, with the
advent of "smart" technology, free speech, memory and intelligence
are becoming endangered species. Ironically, the last several
decades of "contact" and social networking have nurtured the sport
of clich ping-ponging. It is in such circumstances that I have
translated Gustave Flaubert's Dictionnaire des id es re ues, a
brilliant questioning of conventional wisdom and a subtle
representation of the transformation of Man by the machinery of
capitalism.
Since Dictionnaire des id es recues is a microcosm of Flaubert's
world, its translation was anything but simple. The task was not
only to jump from clich to clich while carrying the color and
context of the original text, but to contemporize it so that the
historical narrative fits into a more modern context. The first
dilemma was to decide whether the definitions should be translated
identically throughout, or whether a factually different equivalent
should be chosen. Such was the case of fungi/fungus as the
translation of the French shakos/chacal. Another rather constant
difficulty was whether to say "you" or "one" for the French pronoun
"on," the indefinite subject par excellence. Finally, I have given
myself the freedom to use quotation marks in order to stress a word
within the pre-constructed thought.
May this new interpretation serve as an introduction to
Flaubert's work and entice new readers to want to learn more. And
may those who already know the author believe that I have done all
that I could.
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