Jouer sur / avec les mots. Expérience de traduction : Chez le docteur d’Eugène Ionesco

Abstract

In his French Conversation and Diction Exercises for American Students (1964), Eugène Ionesco
plays on/with culture-specific idioms in order to help non-native students better understand the gist of Voltaire’s
language. The playwright produces skits that pose significant problems in translation. Chez le docteur (At the
Doctor’s) is an excellent example of manipulation of French-specific body-part idioms that refer to diseases and
defects and, at the same time, a challenge to the Romanian translator. The paper aims at reconsidering the
translation of this well-known “exercise in style”, providing an analysis and comments upon it, as well as
alternative translation variants where the choices initially made seem rather inappropriate. The argumentation
is essentially based on the ethical principles underpinning literary translation (faithfulness to the source text, re-creating the playfulness of the original in the target language), but it does not exclude a more tolerant approach to translation either