Les belles et fidèles

ongoing

"""Les belles et fidèles"" Literary translation has always oscillated between fidelity and creativity. In 17th-century France, the expression ""belles infidèles"" - ""beautiful infidels"" emerged, designating translations that favored elegance over the letter. While these ""belles infidèles"" once shone, today's translators walk a tightrope, working to preserve the essence of the original text while respecting the requirements of the target language. Thanks to their efforts, this expression transforms into ""belles et fidèles"" - ""beautiful and faithful"" demonstrating a subtle balance between fidelity and fluidity and ensuring the aesthetic unity of the translation. This evolution is facilitated by the circulation of both authors and translators, who exchange directly in the language in question, often in the other's country. But at a time when artificial intelligence is taking over the field of literary translation, translators are here to defend yet another aspect of their profession: the human side of their expertise. They bring their cultural sensitivity, nuanced understanding of context, and ability to juggle with subtleties. In the face of AI, they remain the guardians of the texts' soul, knowing when to sacrifice the letter to preserve the spirit, when to improvise to do justice to the author. Thus, their translations are not only ""belles infidèles"", but also human, conceived without recourse to AI. In this perspective, through books translated from less common languages, including Ukrainian, Romanian, Lithuanian, Bulgarian, Slovak, and Czech, this project aims to highlight the fidelity and performance of contemporary literary translations, but also and above all, the human aspect of those who create them: they know that perfection is an ideal, but that beauty lies in mastered imperfection."