The French are finally ditching Big Brother for Le Grand Frère
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Seventy years after George Orwell’s death, France’s most prestigious publisher has finally decided his dystopian classic, 1984, deserves a French translation for Big Brother.
From now on, the French are warned, le Grand Frère is watching you.
At least, that is the view of La Bibliotèque de la Pléiade, publisher Gallimard’s highly prestigious editorial collection normally of the complete works of classic authors, which released a new translation of 1984 on Thursday.
Successive translations of Mil Neuf Cent Quatre-Ving-Quatre, as the French call Orwell’s nightmarish 1949 vision of one man’s struggle against the totalitarian superstate, have come up with a string of creative Gallic equivalents for the book’s many catchphrases and neologisms.
But when it came to Big Brother, the term used for the state’s all-seeing leader, they have always stuck with the English.
However, Philippe Jaworski, who coordinated the new collection, which also includes a new translation of Animal Farm, said: “It’s very simple: I’m a translator, so I translate. I had a look at the other languages and none of them kept (Big Brother) as it is.”
“With Big Brother, there is a sort of slogan that gets in the way of the rapprochement between Grand Frère and Fraternité (an anonymous resistance group called The Brotherhood in the original English version),” he told AFP. “It has to make its mark in the reader’s consciousness.”
The latest French edition of 1984 does away with Big Brother
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Mr Jaworski, who also coordinated la Pléiade’s collections of American authors Philip Roth and F Scott Fitzgerald, said he had a tough time with Newspeak, Orwell’s term for a dumbed-down language "designed to diminish the range of thought”.
For the first Gallimard edition in 1950, translator Amélie Audiberti came up with novlangue, an ingenious Gallicism that has entered the French language. That was changed to néoparler in a 2018 version by Josée Kamoun.
Mr Jarowski plumped for néoparle. “Newspeak is a monster, where speak is neither a verb nor a common noun.”
“There is no substantive in néoparle, it’s an absolutely barbaric language,” he argued.
In her 2018 version, Josée Kamoun received high praise from critics for daring to ditch the passé simple, France’s literary simple past tense — which she dismissed as too “rigid” and “pompous” — for the more colloquial and immediate present.
“The sentences gain in rhythm, the characters take on life and voice, the people and the decors are there,” said Jean-Jacques Rosaton literary website En attendant Nadeau.
The 2020 version, however, reverts to the past tense.
The 2018 version came up with a new French term for Thought Police: Mentopolice (a mixture of lies and police). The new version reverts to the more classic Police de la pensée.
Doublethink, a brainwashing technique in which the subject accepts a clearly false statement as the truth, becomes double-pense in 2020, after successive translations double-pensée and doublepenser.
As for the novel’s notorious totalitarian slogan Big Brother is watching you, the French are now warned: Le Grand Frère vous surveille.
1984 made a surprise return to the bestseller list in 2017 in the wake of incorrect or unprovable statements made by President Donald Trump and some White House aides.
The sales bump came after the administration’s assertions that Mr Trump’s inauguration had record attendance and his unfounded allegation that millions of illegal votes were cast against.
Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to Mr Trump, coined an instant catchphrase when she called Mr Trump’s claims about crowd size "alternative facts," bringing instants comparisons to Newspeak.
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