Translating Céline’s Medieval Language: Archaism and Rhythm in La Volonté du Roi Krogold

Abstract

The article proposes a reflection on the translation of the legend La Volonté du Roi Krogold (1939/40), an unfinished and posthumous manuscript by Louis-Ferdinand Céline published by Gallimard in 2023, in which the medieval is reinvented through archaisms, syntactic fragmentation, and lexical experimentation. Situated within the modern tradition that reworks the medieval imaginary, the legend presents translational challenges that call for solutions capable of preserving archaizing vocabulary as well as the distinctive rhythm of the writing, marked by metrified passages, abrupt cuts, alliteration, and assonance. The translation mobilizes archaisms attested in medieval Portuguese, as well as barbarisms and neologisms that reproduce the instability of the original. It thus refuses to normalize Céline’s deviations, treating them instead as structuring procedures of meaning. On the rhythmic level, priority is given to maintaining parallelisms, meter, and paratactic sequences, preserving the violent and discontinuous pulsation of Céline’s prose. Drawing on the work of Henri Meschonnic (1999), the article ultimately discusses translation as formal re-creation, understanding rhythm as an essential dimension of meaning, inseparable from the historicity of language and the organization of voice in discourse. Translating Céline’s medieval thus entails both the restitution of a linguistic past of Portuguese and the activation of a rhythm capable of producing a strangeness akin to that of the original.