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To translate is to put a literary theory into practice. When Jacques Roubaud translates, he is sensitive to the source text's formal qualities, which makes Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark especially attractive. Carroll is one of Roubaud's "masters," a literary figure he emulates. Both authors are poet-mathematicians and both use writing to refine, explain and implement theorems and paradoxes. When contrasting Roubaud's translation of Carroll to other French translations, what is at stake both historically and theoretically when translating constrained literature shows its relevance.
There are numerous translations into French of The Hunting of the Snark, beginning chronologically with Louis Aragon who translated this nonsensical English ballad in 1929. Henri Parisot revised his own translation of the Snark ten times between 1940 and 1976.1 These two are the most well-known translators of The Hunting of the Snark. Other translators include Florence Gilliam and Guy Levis Mano (1948), Roubaud (1981), Bernard Hoepffner (1996), Fabrice Eberhard (1997), François Naudin (1998), Gérard Gâcon (1999), and Matthieu Vertut (2008). Carroll's work attracted the Surrealist revolutionary in Aragon; it appears in the hyperconscious performance art of Antonin Artaud- who in fact accuses Carroll of anticipated plagiarism (Delaune)-and in the formulations of Gilles Deleuze's philosophical treatise Logique du sens. What is it in the making of nonsense that attracts Roubaud and so many others, and what is it that links Roubaud's interest in the text's formal qualities to both the orality and the nonsense of Carroll's ballad?
Author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Jabberwocky, and Through the Looking Glass, Carroll divides his ballad The Hunting of the Snark into eight "fits." First published in 1876, it has been viewed as a parody of, or inspired by, Samuel Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan" (Gâcon, Le Lait de paradis 95). Who hunts for, and what is, a Snark? In Carroll's long poem, Snark hunters are various characters, nine in all, whose names start with the letter B: a Bellman, a Bonnet Maker, a Barrister, a Broker, a Billiard-Marker, a Banker, a Butcher, a Baker, and a Beaver. They embarked on a ship whose captain was a Bellman who navigated by tinkling his bell. In the preface, Carroll informs the reader that a "snark" is a portmanteau...