French translations of Indian literature

From circulation to translation

While Indian tales and story collections had circulated across Europe since the Middle Ages via Persian versions, this literature – the product of successive translations – had never been truly identified as Indian. Gilbert Gaulmin and Persian David Sahid, the translators of Livre des lumières ou La Conduite des Roys, composé par le sage Pilpay, indien ("Book of Lights or the Manner of Kings. Composed by the Sage Pilpay, the Indian") (1644), were aware that the original of the Persian text they produced was Indian, yet they knew neither its name nor the 'Indian language'.The first texts to be translated in the proper sense of the word were stanzas of the Bhartṛhari, adapted from the Sanskrit into Portuguese by an Indian Brahmin and inserted into the work of Dutch missionary Abraham Rogerius, De Open-Deure tot het verborgen Heydendom (1651), retranslated into French by Thomas La Grue under the title of Le théâtre de l'idolâtrie. La porte ouverte pour parvenir à la connaissance du paganisme caché ("The Theatre of Idolatry; or, The Open Door to arrive at the cognition of the hidden Paganism") (1670). The 17^th century indeed saw missionaries grow more familiar with a number of Indian languages, including Sanskrit – Costantino Beschi translated the Tirukkuṟaḷ from Tamil to Latin in 1730 – but it was not until the late 18^th century that Indian literature, starting with Sanskrit literature, began to be widely translated into modern European languages. The translations published at the time varied: the age when British orientalism was flourishing by focusing on Sanskrit happened to coincide with the emergence of translations credited to soldiers or travellers, often produced based on alternative versions of the texts, with the help of unacknowledged Indian intermediaries: Bagavadam ou Doctrine divine, Ouvrage Indien, Canonique (Paris, 1788) by naturalist Charles Foucher d'Obsonville was thus the first European translation, based on a Tamil version, of the BhāgavataPurāṇa, by a Pondicherrian convert, Maridas Poullé, who is not named.

19thcentury translations from Sanskrit

The first translation to be completed by a Frenchman for scholarly purposes was that of the Upaniṣads by Anquetil-Duperron : Oupnek'hat, id est, Secretum tegendum…, in 1801-1802. But it was in Latin – a language the orientalist reverted to after several attempts at translating into French from 1786 to 1787 – and was based on a Persian version. Anquetil-Duperron does, however, highlight the rupture caused by switching from traveller insights to insights enabling an appreciation and knowledge of languages: 'The only way to know the truth is to learn the languages so well, to translate oneself the fundamental works, and to confer subsequently with the scholars of the country on the subject-matters treated therein, the books in hand.'»

Anquetil-Duperron's approach had indeed already been adopted by British colonial civil servants for some fifteen years: having learned Sanskrit to enable them to administer the Raj, they began translating the literature into English on a large scale. Thus, it was through English that the first translation of a Sanskrit text, the Bhagavad-Gītā*, appeared in French, entitled Bhaguat-Geeta, ou Dialogues de Kreeshna et d'Arjoon (1787)  – an oeuvre by abbot J.-P. Parraud that came out three years after Charles Wilkins' English translation. But it would not be until 1803 that a French translation of William Jones' famous English translation of Śakuntalā, released in 1789  , would be published, and another eleven years until Antoine-Léonard Chézy would, in 1814, pen the first French translation directly from Sanskrit Yadjnadatta-badha, ou La mort d'Yadjanadatta, extrait du Ramayana, before his own translation of Kālidāsa's play was released sixteen years later under the title of La Reconnaissance de Sacountala.

Compared with what was happening in England, and even in Germany, where Jones' Śakuntalā had been translated by Georg Forster as early as 1791 and had enjoyed great success, the emergence of Sanskrit literature in French was therefore slow and tardy – a delay generally attributed to the rather unfavourable context of the French Revolution and Empire. The years around 1830, however, marked the start of a period that saw a proliferation of translations. It was sparked by the founding of the Société Asiatique in 1822, whose publication, the Journal asiatique, played a key role in boosting the circulation of early translations from Sanskrit, produced by Chézy, Alexandre Langlois and the young Eugène Burnouf. The preferred texts at the time were short poetic pieces, lyrical plays, fables or tales, and episodes of epic poems, which were read and appreciated beyond merely scholarly circles. But as knowledge of India became institutionalised, this reception by the general public waned. Chézy, the first chair of Sanskrit literature and language to be established at the Collège de France in 1814, was attacked and labelled a 'fleuriste' (a name given to French orientalists who studied texts with what was considered a more aesthetical approach, in ironic reference to Fleurs de l'Inde by Guerrier de Dumast (1796-1883)) by the younger, more skilled and more meticulous generation of Sanskritists, who had trained in the new brand of philology that had arrived from Germany (including a certain Eugène Burnouf), who no longer believed in translating via English, and who were particularly focusing their energies on religious texts, namely the Vedas, which had hardly been translated.

So the state of play at the end of the 19^th century was somewhat of a paradox. The same texts were translated and retranslated, primarily Sanskrit and Prakrit dramas, with the author of choice being Kālidāsa. The only vernacular literature known in France at the time was classic Tamil literature, on account of the French establishments in southern India, and Hindustani literature, thanks to Garcin de Tassy; modern Indian literature, in a state of evolution through its interactions with European literature, remained under the radar.  Yet this very limited reception was the order of the day throughout the entire 19^th century, both in and outside of France: Śakuntalā inspired an array of different writers from Gautier, Hugo and Michelet to Leconte de Lisle, Lahor and Apollinaire, as well as artists such as sculptor Camille Claudel. The second half of the century saw Sanskrit dramas translated for stage performances: in 1850, Nerval and Méry adapted Śūdraka's The Little Clay Cart for the Odéon Theatre in Paris under the title of Le Chariot d'enfant; and in 1895, Lugné-Poe very successfully put on L'Anneau de Çakuntalâ as a prose translation by André-Ferdinand Hérold.

Diversification in the 20th-21st centuries and its limits

The 20^th century saw a transformation in the field of translated literature. Classical Indian literature no longer sparked the same level of enthusiasm; indeed the Émile-Sénart collection published by Les Belles Lettres in the 1930s only comprised a handful of titles. It was not until the turn of the 21^st century that three Indian volumes appeared in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade: Océan des rivières de contes (The Ocean of Story) (1997), the great work by Somadeva that had remained unpublished in French, a new translation of Valmiki's Rāmāyaṇa (1999) and an anthology of plays in Théâtre de l'Inde ancienne (2006), updating and expanding on the translations from the 19^th century. Conversely, religious texts – Buddhist texts, particularly those building on the works from the second half of the 20^th century, but also tantric and Jain texts – were regularly published in mainstream collections centred on spirituality.

But it was primarily Indian vernacular literature that was starting to be translated. The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Tagore in 1913 for a collection self-translated into English – and retranslated into French by André Gide – played a key role here, though this prize, awarded to a non-Western author for the first time, initially did not attract attention so much to contemporary Indian works as it did to medieval devotional literature, for which Tagore, seeking to pick up the baton here, provided translations that were then retranslated into French (Poèmes de Kabir). The 'Connaissance de l'Orient' collection created by Étiemble in 1956 as part of the UNESCO collection of 'representative works' played a pivotal role in this broadening of horizons, encompassing modern literature – Tagore translated directly from Bengali, Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Jainendra Kumar – as well as ancient and medieval literature, in Sanskrit (Pañcatantra), Tamil (Le Roman de l'anneau), Braj (Sūrdās) and Persian (Le Livre d'Humâyûn). The 1980s and '90s marked the start of a new wave of enthusiasm for Indian literature, prompted by the success of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which brought a significant boost to global Anglophone literature that was swiftly translated into French to keep pace with trade-show and book-fair schedules. French-language Indian literature in the 20^th century was thus more diverse, but no less focused, than in the 19^th century: While the publication of scholarly works has facilitated the – limited – circulation of a variety of translations (from Old Hindi, Gujarati, Telugu etc.), contemporary literature finally available in translation (primarily from English, Bengali, Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam, depending on the translators' skills, and often on their initiative), is very often reduced, both in its circulation and stature, to its Anglophone – and diasporic – versions, which largely identifies with what is referred to as global literature.

Published in january 2023