Vai viegli tulkot Sagānu?

Françoise Sagan’s (1935–2004) work is popular in France and Latvia for two reasons: the world of her characters that draws the reader into a vortex of life cravings and love surprises, and her writing which is classic, clear and seemingly light, but saturated with cultural references and quotes. If the plot and characters appear to be self-sufficient, the translator has a problem with the titles of Sagan’s novels. When comparing the original to a translation, the writer’s style setting (for example, “Bonjour tristesse” in the Latvian translation “Esiet sveicinātas, skumjas”) or symbolism (for example, “La laisse” in the Latvian translation “Akordi”) is often lost. Sagan’s novels include references to literature, cinema, art, popular in the French society of her time, that make up the intertextuality of the literary works and give an additional dimension and, at the same time, economises on means of artistic expression. A transfer into a cultural environment risks losing some multicoloured layers of the source text. Sagan’s language’s relatively rare findings also lose their originality in translation, turning them into standard phrases. Thus, it should be concluded that the apparently well-formed, seemingly easily-written works of the French author remain within the so-called “women’s literature” or “French novel” without any indication of the sharpness with which Sagan has seen the brilliance and misery of her environment.