French Archives - Ponying the Slovos

Posted on May 14, 2021December 12, 2021 by Benet Vincent · 4 Comments

Three versions of Nadsat: English, French & Spanish

Most of us are accustomed to thinking of Nadsat in one way only. After all, most of us only read the novel in one language, whether Burgess’s original, or else in one of the more than fifty extant translations. But of course, each of those translations represents a variant of Nadsat. Some languages have hosted multiple Nadsats, sometimes even by the same translator, as our colleague Patrick Corness has noted in relation to Robert Stiller’s multiple Polish-Nadsats.

Posted on January 5, 2020January 26, 2022 by admin

Bon, alors ça sera quoi, hein?

Cette traduction surprendra peut-être d’abord le lecteur par certaines curiosités du vocabulaire.

This translation will perhaps at first surprise the reader due to certain oddities of vocabulary

You have to love the understatement with which Georges Belmont and Hortense Chabrier start their translators’ note which prefaces the French translation of A Clockwork Orange (our translation).

The Belmont/Chabrier translation is an astonishing piece of writing, and the fact that it has remained in print since first publication almost fifty years ago bears evidence to that. We have looked closely at what they have achieved, and how their “French-Nadsat” compares with Burgess’s original, in a new peer-reviewed article in Meta journal, volume 65 (3).