Les sœurs (dis)semblables : les Élégies de Duino d’Armel Guerne et de Lorand Gaspar

Paul de Man, literary theorist and scholar, presents two different versions of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies in his edition of Rilke’s Œuvres 2 : Poesie (Seuil, 1972), both by poet-translators: Armel Guerne and Lorand Gaspar. A look into private archives covering the genesis of Œuvres 2 reveals that this highly unusual, even unique coexistence of two translations of the same text, which De Man describes as a hermeneutic experiment in his foreword, resulted from an editorial embarrassment. The article sheds light on the circumstances that led to the strange coexistence of these two dis-similar texts and explores the fortuitous but fruitful confrontation, competition and complementarity that was born out of an editorial conflict.