Marcher, traduire – New York dans l’œuvre de Paul Auster

• Main Author: Nathalie Cochoy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires du Mirail 2016-11-01
• Series: Sciences de la Société
• Subjects: walking; city; New York; American literature; Auster (Paul); translation
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/sds/3970

In American literature, walking in the city appears as a new form of experience, based on a rediscovery of the minute elements of everyday life. When renouncing panoramic descriptions in order to explore the city at street level, novelists create some kind of co-incidence between the rambling movement of their words and the elusive, metamorphic, incommensurable environment of the city. They succeed in revealing the value of the most common forms of existence. In Paul Auster’s work in particular, walking in New York reveals the art of translation that leads his writing to constantly admit its failure while ceaselessly renewing itself. Taking different forms in the Babel-like metropolis, the act of walking shows how the work of translation makes vision and imagination coalesce and favors a movement towards otherness. When becoming a dance, walking incarnates the involvement of words in the diversity of the world, in its most ordinary dimension.