Poe writes, “At length my eyes, in going the circuit of the room, fell upon a trumpery filigree card-rack of pasteboard, that hung dangling by a dirty blue ribbon, from a little brass knob just beneath the middle of the mantelpiece.” This last sentence Baudelaire renders “suspendu par un ruban bleu crasseux à un petit bouton de cuivre au-dessus du manteau de la cheminée 2.” The error consists of the tiniest of slips: “au-dessus du manteau” means above the mantelpiece when it should read “au dessous du manteau,” meaning beneath or below the mantelpiece. The error occurs when the detective Dupin, looking through his green spectacles, describes the specific location of the missing letter in the apartment of Minister D_. Mots-clés : Poe, psychanalyse, traductionġIn the middle of Barbara Johnson’s exegesis of “The Purloined Letter” debate between Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, she mentions an error in Charles Baudelaire’s seminal (that is, for French readers) translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s tale 1. Rather than seeing the letter as a symbol of an absent or deferred signifier, the paper argues that the letter function as a marked card in a closed or rigged system of signification. Revisiting the readings of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” by Bonaparte, Lacan, Derrida, Johnson, and Irwin, this paper argues that a minor error in Baudelaire’s translation can help to reframe the critical context for the tale as a model of signification. Lost in Translation: Poe, Baudelaire and “The Purloined Letter”. Plutôt que voir la lettre comme un symbole d'une signification absente ou différée, nous partons du principe que la lettre fonctionne comme une carte marquée dans un système de signification clos ou truqué.

En revisitant les lectures de “The Purloined Letter” d'Edgar Allan Poe par Bonaparte, Lacan, Derrida, Johnson et Irwin, cet article soutient qu'une erreur mineure dans la traduction de Baudelaire peut aider à recadrer le contexte critique pour l'histoire comme un modèle de signification.

Poe the purloined letter