When Hermes handed over to Apollo his finest invention, the lyre, in exchange for promotion to the status of messenger of the gods, he relinquished the creativity that gave life to his words.

The trade-off proved frustrating: Hermes chafed under the obligation to deliver the ideas and words of others and resorted to all manner of ruses in order to assert his presence in the messages he transmitted. His theorizing descendants, too, allow their pretentions to creatorship to interfere with the actual business of reinventing originals in another language.

Just as the Hermes of old delighted in leading the traveller astray, so his descendants lead their acolytes, through thickets of jargon, into labyrinths of eloquence without substance.

Charles Le Blanc possesses the philosophical tools to dismantle this empty eloquence: he exposes the inconsistencies, internal contradictions, misreadings, and misunderstandings rife in so much of the current academic discourse en translation, and traces the failings of this discourse back to its roots in the anguish of having traded authentic creativity for mere status.
Ce livre est publié en anglais.

Charles Le Blanc est professeur agrégé à l'École de traduction et d'interprétation de l'Université d'Ottawa. Traducteur professionnel et littéraire, il enseigne la traduction pragmatique de l'anglais au français au niveau universitaire depuis 2003. Il est l'auteur du livre Le Complexe d'Hermès, traité de traduction couronné en 2010 par l'Académie des lettres du Québec (catégorie Essai) et finaliste au Prix du Gouverneur général du Canada. Ce livre a également été traduit en anglais et en coréen. Il est également directeur de l'ouvrage Laïcité et humanisme (PUO, 2015).

Charles Le Blanc's profile page

Barbara Folkart studied medieval linguistics, literature and philology at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Sorbonne) and the Université de Montréal. Her hands-on experience in working with medieval manuscripts, establishing manuscript genealogies and preparing scientific critical editions of medieval texts has given her a strong sense of how texts get corrupted when they are transcribed and transmitted, and has very definitely influenced her views on the transmission of information and esthetic values during the process of translation.

Barbara Folkart's profile page

A rich and provocative book, and one that brings great rewards to the reader. The Hermes Complex features interesting and challenging ideas about translation theory, and it advances a practical approach to thinking about translation that should be of interest to philosophers and translators alike.

Translation and Literature. Volume 23, Page 155-159 DOI 10.3366/tal.2014.0145, ISSN 0968-1361, Available Online.

Volume 23, Page 155-159