Bakhtin’s Philosophical Anthropology in Translation: Rhetoric Devices and Text Cohesion

Abstract

The concepts developed by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, a Russian theoretiсian of the 20th century, have had an important impact on the evolution of paradigms in humanities. However, his later works on literary theory continue to be far better known than his early essays on philosophical anthropology despite their key role in shaping Bakhtin’s thought. Published achronologically and imbued with innovative terms, Bakhtin’s works were sometimes translated by those who were unfamiliar with his concepts. The purpose of this study is to examine one of the earliest Bakhtin’s essays, Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity , through a comparative perspective. The analysis is based on its French (1984) and English (1990) translations. It aims at revealing how the mechanisms of text cohesion and rhetoric are rendered in translation in order to convey the author’s ideas. The analysis has shown that the strategies chosen by the translators into French and English do not coincide and vary from ellipsis in French to amplification in English. The choice of coreferential models turns out to play a crucial role in structuring ideas in the target texts.