« Ce que j’ai fait de votre tragédie » : Et les chiens se taisaient entre écriture, réécriture et traduction

Abstract

Und die Hunde schwiegen is the German version of Aimé Césaire’s first play, Et les chiens se taisaient, first published in the poetry collection Les Armes miraculeuses. Césaire reworked the text several times, especially through his collaboration with Janheinz Jahn, a German translator who played a fundamental role in the reception of Francophone African and Caribbean literature in post-war Germany. In this article, the collaboration between Césaire and his translator, which resulted in a parallel version of the text in German, will be analysed. The paths of writing and rewriting of the tragedy between French and German, thus, give us the opportunity to study the collaboration between Césaire and Jahn, as well as the proximity between rewriting and translation.