When “To Cook Dog” Becomes “Ragoût de Chien” – Reclaiming the Language of Recipes in the French

Translation of Jonathan Grimwood’s The Last Banquet

Abstract

The translation of cooking recipes is always a challenge irrespective of the source and target
language. However, this becomes even more challenging when the source text is set against the
backdrop of the Enlightenment, Versailles, and the French Revolution. Jonathan Grimwood’s
The Last Banquet proves to be an epic story of one man’s quest to know the world through its
many and marvelous flavors. So, although the source language is English, the setting is French
and since the book is replete with all sorts of sometimes mouthwatering, sometimes macabre
dishes (“Three Snake Bouillabaisse” or “Pickled Wolf’s Heart”), the French translator is faced
with the difficult challenge of French food that has to be translated from English. The present
article is, consequently, going to look into the translation of this book into French, and argue
that the French translator opted for a re-domestication or perhaps a reclaiming of food
terminology. The translator’s choice here is to reclaim the French food culture, obviously
“superior” to the Anglo-Saxon one, by enriching and re-appropriating the food-related language
of the English source text. To show that this is strictly the translator’s choice for French, the
corpus will extend to the Spanish translation of the novel, which turns out to be more loyal to
the source text.