Le traducteur et les italiques. Omniscience et redressement dans Madame Bovary

This paper focuses on how Flaubert’s use of italics is rendered in some translated texts of Madame Bovary (English, Spanish and Catalan translations). As an emphatic device, the italics contribute to the sentence structure, just like grandiloquence does, from a rhetorical or a syntactical point of view. The large number of passages in italics in Flaubert’s novel has been discussed for a long time. Flaubert’s italics have been regularly considered as a means of pointing out the social discourse or the famous “received idea”. However, a comprehensive analysis of the occurrences shows that the function of the italics does not differ from the basic role traditionally related to this typography in the Latin alphabet languages: an invitation to read the sequence differently and, therefore, to interpret it differently too. The use of italics cannot be reduced to a specific connotative signal. Flaubert’s innovation has to be found in the collaboration required from the reader, rather than in the idea of the transformation of a graphic code. The way translators deal with the italics is, in this respect, significant. Most of them do not faithfully respect Flaubert’s choices. Within a same text, translators frequently adopt more than one solution (conservation, substitution by quotation marks or unmarking). Some passages are also rectified (in all the meanings of the word, including the etymological one) by almost every translator. As shown by J.-C. Chevalier & M.-F. Delport, such typographic variations between the original text and the translated ones, be it fortuitous or wilful, prove how powerful is what the above-mentioned scholars call “orthonymie”, i. e. the pressure of the most conventional modes of naming on the rephrasing work. In this respect, one of the characteristics of the flaubertian style, which would be the call to the reader’s contribution, is truly revealed by contrasting translations of Flaubert’s text