The 1966 French translation of the book was published as Le Désert des miroirs […], a title that, at first glance, seems to be meant as an echo to the “mirroring” theme of the novel, with its interplay of identities, at least one explicit mirror scene (when Gantenbein actually tries out clothes in a shop), and an experiment with mirroring names in an Oriental tale made up by Gantenbein for Lila, with characters named Ali and Alil. […] The complexity of The Waste Land, with its mixture of languages – at a time when translation itself, with the development of early machine translation, came to be understood as a branch of cryptography – and its interweaving of quotations, would make the poem look particularly suspicious, one imagines, to the eyes of someone trained in the spotting and decoding of Cold War double-entendre. It is striking that the chosen title for the French version of Gantenbein, Le Désert des miroirs, while literally based on the English translation, is not so much evocative of Eliot to a French reader, as of Dino Buzzati’s 1940 Le Désert des tartares (Tartar Steppe in English, both literal translations of the Italian Il Deserto dei Tartari), whose 1949 French edition, in Michel Arnaud’s translation, was a long-lasting success but bears no obvious connection to Frisch’s novel.
Author: languagehat
Published at: 2026-01-10 20:04:14
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