L’homoérotisme en autotraduction : Le cas de Sud / South de Julien Green
As a translingual American writer, Julien Green (1900-1998) wrote a wide variety of novels, plays, short stories, and essays, as well as one of the longest recorded journals of the twentieth century. Among his bilingual texts Green published an important homoerotic play, Sud (1953), which he later translated into English as South (1959) in collaboration with his sister, Anne Green. Although the homoerotic nature of the characters of Green’s novels has been examined in certain critical texts, the evolution of this homoeroticism in Green’s self-translated play, Sud / South, has not yet been studied in detail. This article will, therefore, show how Green radically transformed the drama of homosexual love from his first play, Sud (1953), in his self-translation, South (1959), and the effects of these linguistic changes on the reader. More specifically, this critical analysis will demonstrate how Green used a translative approach of the moins-dit in order to conceal a substantial portion of his original French play’s central intrigue. Because of multiple omissions, revisions, and additions in self-translation, Ian Wiczewski’s love for the young Erik Mac Clure, as well as Édouard Broderick’s homosexual orientation, are less visible in South than in Sud. Consequently, Sud and South appear as two very disparate versions of the same text.