Translator attached from the Czechian writer from “laughed love” (1970), he also translated several works from the American writer Cormac McCarthy. He died on October 12, at the age of 95.
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François Hirsch, which was in particular the French translator of the Czechian writer Milan Kundera and the American Cormac McCarthy, died in Carcassonne (Aude), Tuesday, October 12. Born December 13, 1925, he was 95 years old.
It is thanks to François Hirsch – from his name Francois Kérel pen, until he decides to return to Hirsch, in the 1980s – that readers were able to discover in French the “true prose” Milan Kundera. At least until the author of the unsustainable lightness of the Being (Gallimard, 1984) decides to make French, and no more from Czech, his language of writing. From risible loves (Gallimard, 1970), François Hirsch becomes “the translator attached to the great writer. For his greatest happiness, that of his work and readers.
It was not the first book translated from Kundera, he had been preceded by the joke (Gallimard, 1968). This novel had made it known to the French public, but in a terribly unfaithful translation, as the writer Alain Finkielkraut later revealed it to Kundera. The previous translator – that of the joke, so – had almost rewritten his novel! A simple “blue sky” had become “a heaven of Pervenche” where “October hoisted his glitzy bowl”. In short, the joke had become a row of flowery metaphors: the opposite of Kunderian writing. We dare to imagine the distorted perception that we would have had this prose – wonderfully sober, limpid, deep, precise and cutting as a blade – if François Hirsch did not get seized.
poet
In all his translations, François Hirsch knew how to combine sharpness and elegance. From a simple and discreet natural, he was born in an easy and assimilated Jewish family. But born with a visual impairment which, for having disabled all his life, perhaps explained, according to his daughter Catherine Hirsch, “his imagination and his singularity”.
When, in 1942, his father, arrested and sent to Drancy, is deported and gasped in Auschwitz, the young Francis, his mother and aunt take refuge in Chambon-sur-Lignon, this village of just, in high- Loire, where the pastor trocmé and his entourage saved so many lives. Nevertheless, arrested by a Gestapist at Puy-en-Velay, Francois Hirsch is miraculously released. He escapes a thread to death.
having could not, because of his sight problems, participate in the resistance, he is committed to communism, to whom he remains faithful until the early 1960s. Translator but also a poet, he Friendship Relations with Louis Aragon, Elsa Triolet, Henri Souult … After studies of aborted law, he embarks on those of languages. In Alco, he continues his learning from Russian and Czech.
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