Année universitaire 2016-2017

MEEF 1/CAPES -- UE 11

Préparation à l’épreuve de version

Enseignante : Hélène Palma (helene.palma@univ-amu.fr).

 BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Ouvrages nécessaires :
1. Hélène CHUQUET, Michel PAILLARD, Approche linguistique des problèmes de la
traduction, Ophrys.
2. Le mot et l’idée 2, Ophrys 1991.

Autres manuels de vocabulaire :

- Word Routes. Lexique thématique de l’anglais courant. Cambridge. – Disponible en
bibliothèque :
BU Aix : 428.1 CAM (salle langues étrangères) ; BU St Charles : 428.1 CAM (salle de
lecture).
- Vocabulaire anglais et américain, Robert et Collins.
- P. LARREYA, et al., Mémento grammatical anglais (Nathan).
- Florent GUSDORF, Words Universités, Ellipses.
- M. SKOPAN, Word Watch, Lexique anglo-américain, Ophrys 2000.

Pour compléter ces manuels :

- DUMONG, KNOTT, Le Vocabulaire anglais du supérieur (Ellipses) – expressions
idiomatiques et formules.
- P. RAFROIDI, M. PLAISANT, D. SHOTT, Le nouveau manuel de l’angliciste : vocabulaire
du thème, de la version et de la rédaction, Ophrys, 1986 – une partie sur les procédés de
traduction, vocabulaire mis en contexte dans de courtes phrases et paragraphes.
- C. BOUSCAREN, C. RIVIERE, L’anglais après le bac : mise à niveau, Ophrys, 1994 – bon
ouvrage.
- Florent GUSDORF, A. PAQUETTE, More Words, Ellipses – exercices.

Problèmes, exercices de traduction :

- Françoise GRELLET, In So Many Words, Hachette Supérieur – exercices pour maîtriser
le vocabulaire et les structures lexicales.

In the early morning of September 26, in a hard rain, with a driver, two Sherpas,
and all expedition gear, we packed ourselves into the Land Rover that would carry us as
far as Pokhara; two more Sherpas and five Tamang porters were to come next day by
bus, in time for departure from Pokhara on the twenty-eighth. But all arrivals and
departures were in doubt; it had rained without relent for thirty hours. In the calamitous
weather, the journey was losing all reality, and the warm smile of a pretty tourist at the
hotel desk unsettled me; where did I imagine I was going, where and why?
From Kathmandu there is a road through Gorkha Country to Pokhara, in the
central foothills; farther west, no roads exist at all. The road winds through steep gorges
of the Trisuli River, now in torrent; dirty white caps filled the rapids, and the brown
flood was thickened every little while by thunderous rockslides down the walls of the
ravine. Repeatedly the rocks fell on the road; the driver would wait for the slide to ease,
then snake his way through the debris, while all heads peered at the boulders poised
overhead. In raining mountains, a group of shrouded figures passed, bearing a corpse,
and the sight aroused a dim, restless foreboding.
After midday, the rain eased, and the Land Rover rode into Pokhara on a shaft of
storm light. Next day there was humid sun and shifting southern skies, but to the north a
deep tumult of swirling grays was all that could be seen of the Himalaya. At dusk, white
egrets flapped across the sunken clouds, now black with rain; on earth, the dark had
come. Then, four miles above these mud streets of the lowlands, at a point so high as to
seem overhead, a luminous whiteness shone – the light of snows.

312 words
Peter MATTHIESSEN, The Snow Leopard (1978)

Marya was a blonde girl, not very tall, slender-waisted. Her face was short, high cheek-
boned, full-lipped; her long eyes slanted upwards towards the temples and were gentle
and oddly remote in expression. Often on the Boulevards St Michel and Montparnasse
shabby youths would glide up to her and address her hopefully in unknown and spitting
tongues. When they were very shabby she would smile in a distant manner and answer
in English:
‘I’m very sorry; I don’t understand what you are saying.’
She crossed the boulevard and turned down the Rue de Rennes. As she walked along she
was thinking: ‘This street is very like the Tottenham Court Road.’
The idea depressed her, and to distract herself she stopped to look at a red felt hat in a
shop window. Someone behind her said:
‘Hello, Madame Zelli, what are you doing in this part of the world?’
Miss Esther De Solla, tall, gaunt, broad-shouldered, stood looking downwards at her with
a protective expression. When Marya answered: ‘Hello! Nothing. I was feeling
melancholy, to tell you the truth,’ she proposed: ‘Come along to my studio for a bit.’
Miss De Solla, who was a painter and ascetic to the point of fanaticism, lived in a street at
the back of the Lion de Belfort. Her studio was hidden behind a grim building where the
housewives of the neighbourhood came to wash their clothes. It was a peaceful place,
white-walled, smelling strongly of decayed vegetables. The artist explained that a
greengrocer kept her stock in the courtyard, and that as the woman was the concierge’s
sister-in-law, complaints were useless.
‘Though the smell’s pretty awful sometimes. Sit near the stove. It’s cold today.’
She opened a massive cupboard and produced a bottle of gin, another of vermouth, two
glasses and a cardboard case containing drawings.
‘I bought these this morning. What do you think of them?’
313 words
 Jean Rhys, Quartet, 1928

His emaciated regiment bustled forth with undiminished fierceness when its time came.
When assaulted again by bullets, the men burst out in a barbaric cry of rage and pain.
They bent their heads in aims of intent hatred behind the projected hammer of their
guns. Their ramrods clanged loud with fury as their eager arms pounded the cartridges
into the rifle barrels. The front of the regiment was a smoke-wall penetrated by the
flashing points of yellow and red.
Wallowing in the fight, they were in an astonishingly short time resmudged. They
surpassed in stain and dirt all their previous appearances. Moving to and fro with
strained exertion, jabbering the while, they were, with their swaying bodies, black faces,
and glowing eyes, like strange and ugly fiends jigging heavily in the smoke.
The lieutenant, returning from a tour after a bandage, produced from a hidden
receptacle of his mind new and portentous oaths suited to the emergency. Strings of
expletives he swung lashlike over the backs of his men, and it was evident that his
previous efforts had in nowise impaired his resources.
183 words
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage,
1895, New York : Norton, 1994, 90.

London was misty, with a golden sun-pierced mist in which buildings hung as
insubstantial soaring presences. The beautiful dear city, muted and softened, half
concealed in floating and slightly shifting clouds, seemed a city in the air, outlined in
blurred dashes of grey and brown. I walked, inevitably, by the river. As I turned on to
Victoria Embankment I saw that the tide was in, and upon the surface of the fast flowing
water itself there played a warm light, turning its muddy hue to an old gilt, as if some
pure part of the sunlight had escaped to play here under the great vault of the mist. The
strange light suited my mood and as I sauntered slowly along beneath the shadowy cliff
of New Scotland Yard I began to feel, if not relieved of pain, at least a little more able to
collect my wits.
It was too cold to sit down, but I paused every now and then to lean on the
parapet, and as I passed each damp dolphin-entwined lamp-post I felt a little nearer to
something. Yet I did not seem to be making any famous progress with my troubles. I felt
on the whole a thorough nausea about recent events. […]
I was beginning to feel rather sick again. I walked on under Waterloo Bridge and
saw through the tilting, slightly lifting, mist the long gracious pillared façade of Somerset
House. Receding, swaying, variously browned and greyed, it seemed like a piece of stage
scenery. Below it, upon the river, clear yet infinitely soft and simple as in a Chinese print,
two swans sailed against a background of watery grey light, swept steadily downstream
in the company of a dipping branch of some unidentified foliage. They receded, turning a
little, and disappeared. I walked on, and then paused by the parapet looking out to
where in the much-curtained distance the great form of St Paul’s must be.

323 words.
Iris MURDOCH, A Severed Head (1961)

What was particularly maddening was that I knew so little about Sandra
Pickering, no fact which might corroborate – or blessedly falsify – my suspicion. Then I
thought to myself : files. There must be a file on her in the School of English Office with
some personal information in it. I went out into the almost deserted campus. It was like
a graveyard or a ghost town. Everybody had left for the weekend except foreign students
who had nowhere else to go, or had been unprepared for the sudden exodus. They
looked baffled and despondent, as if wondering what was supposed to be good about
this Friday, that had emptied the campus like a rumour of plague. A cold wind was
blowing across the flat acres of grass and ruffling the grey waters of the artificial lake.
There were hardly any signs of spring, except for the occasional scattering of daffodils
and crocuses shivering in the wind. I met the Japanese couple from the end house on my
terrace, in tightly buttoned topcoats, evidently taking a walk. They smiled and bowed
their heads, and looked as if for once they actually wanted to chat, but I was in no mood
for socializing – I forced a smile and made noises and gestures suggestive of an urgent
errand and pushed on to the Humanities Tower.
There I encountered an obstacle. The main doors were locked, and I had no key. I
hurried over to the Security Centre near the main gate and asked if someone would let
me into the building. The men on duty, who belong to some private security firm, were
polite but uncooperative. Did I have a pass authorizing me to enter the building outside
normal hours ? No, I did not, I wasn’t aware that I needed one. Then they were afraid
they couldn’t help me. I raged and expostulated, and they grew less polite and even less
cooperative. In the end I stormed out of the office, threatening wildly and futilely to
make a complaint. I went back to the maisonette, made myself some lunch, clumsily,
boiling the soup and burning the toast, forced down the food without tasting anything,
tried to read – hopeless.

366 words.
David LODGE, Thinks… (2001)

6
 Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble
your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an
instinctive reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the
expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. And it was exactly at this
moment that the significant thing happened –if, indeed, it did happen.
Momentarily he caught O'Brien's eye. O'Brien had stood up. He had taken off his
spectacles and was in the act of resettling them on his nose with his characteristic
gesture. But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it
took to happen Winston knew –yes, he knew! – that O'Brien was thinking the same
thing as himself. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though their two minds
had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes. 'I
am with you,' O'Brien seemed to be saying to him. 'I know precisely what you are feeling.
I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust. But don't worry, I am on your
side!' And then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O'Brien's face was as inscrutable
as everybody else's.
That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had happened. Such incidents
never had any sequel. All that they did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that
others besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps the rumours of vast
underground conspiracies were true after all – perhaps the Brotherhood really existed!
It was impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to be
sure that the Brotherhood was not simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some
days not. There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might mean anything or
nothing: snatches of overheard conversation, faint scribbles on lavatory walls – once,
even, when two strangers met, a small movement of the hand which had looked as
though it might be a signal of recognition. It was all guesswork: very likely he had
imagined everything.

363 words
1984, George Orwell
(1948)

As far as I knew, my father hadn't so much as cracked a smile in twenty-five years, not
counting laughing at someone else's misfortune.
"'Babe'?" I asked. "What do you mean, 'babe'?"
"Some creature in her late sixties. Same age as Carl's mother. A lot better-looking,
too, but don't ever say I told you. Frightening hairdo, though. Cotton-candy-in-a-tornado
look. Very in, in the 'burbs." [...]
Vance put his panama hat back on his head and cleared out a space on the table in
front of him. He pulled a handful of sugar packets out of their container and started to
arrange them on the starched white tablecloth. "Here's the booth Carl's mother and I
were in. Here's the booth with your father and the babe. Here's the waiters' station. I
could see the Boston scrod on their plates. I thought about going over and introducing
myself, just to bug your old man, but Carl's mother hates it when I leave her alone, even
to go to the bathroom. They were having a little party. Your father ordered champagne
and they were toasting the son. Your father had his arm around the son's shoulder. More
than that I can't tell you. What's the big deal?"
"The big deal," I said, beginning to think that maybe there was some truth to what
he was saying, "is that he's supposed to be dying. And broke, too. So what's a penniless
dying widower doing out with a babe and her son? Ordering champagne? "
"What was I doing out with a horror like Carl's mother, poor dear? What are you
doing out with me? Oh Clyde, find me a nice boy. I'm so lonely. No, no, no, never mind. It
wouldn't work out. I've got to start that diet tomorrow. Don't they give any courses in
bulimia at The Learning Place?"
"Not that I am aware of. Though I am sure they've considered it."
"Do something else with your life, will you, Clyde? Oh Christ, here she comes
again, the zombie parade. Order some dessert or something, anything to boost the bill a
little."

350 words.
Stephen Mc CAULEY, The Man in the House, (1997)

“Please show me the volume you are holding, Mr Stevens,” Miss Kenton said, continuing
her advance, “and I will leave you to the pleasure of your reading. What on earth can it
be you are so anxious to hide?”
[…]
I believe it was around this point that I decided there was no need to tolerate any
more. I cannot recall precisely what I said, but I remember showing Miss Kenton out of
my pantry and the episode was thus brought to a close.
I suppose I should add a few words here concerning the matter of the actual
volume around which this small episode revolved. The book was, true enough, what
might be described as a “sentimental romance” – one of a number kept in the library and
also in several of the guest bedrooms, for the entertainment of lady visitors. There was a
simple reason for having taken to perusing such works: it was an extremely efficient
way to maintain and develop one’s command of the English language. It is my view – I do
not know if you will agree – that in so far as our generation is concerned, there has been
too much stress placed on the professional desirability of good accent and command of
language; that is to say, these elements have been stressed sometimes at the cost of
more important professional qualities. For all that, it has never been my position that
good accent and command of language are not attractive attributes, and I always
considered it my duty to develop them as best I could. One straightforward means of
going about this is simply to read a few pages of a well-written book during odd spare
moments one may have. This had been my own policy for some years, and I often tended
to choose the sort of volume Miss Kenton had found me reading that evening simply
because such works tend to be written in good English, with plenty of elegant dialogue
of much practical value to me.
 334 words.

Kazuo ISHIGURO, The Remains of the Day (1989).

9

The author had reached this point in his story, which he was writing seated at an
umbrella-shaded table on the terrace overlooking the hotel pool, using a fountain pen
and ruled foolscap, as was his wont, and having accumulated many cancelled and
rewritten pages, as was also his wont, when without warning a powerful wind arose. It
made the pine trees in the hotel grounds shiver and hiss, raise wavelets on the surface of
the pool, knocked over several umbrellas, and whirled the leaves of the author’s
manuscript into the air. Some of these floated back on to the terrace, or the margins of
the pool, or into the pool itself, but many were funnelled with astonishing speed high
into the air, above the trees, by the hot breath of the wind. The author staggered to his
feet and gaped unbelievingly at the leaves of foolscap rising higher and higher, like
escaped kites, twisting and turning in the sun, white against the azure sky. It was like the
visitation of some god or daemon, a pentecost in reverse, drawing words away instead
of imparting them. The author felt raped. The female sunbathers around the pool, as if
similarly conscious, covered their naked breasts as they stood and watched the whirling
leaves of paper recede into the distance. […] Bidden by the sharp voice of their mother,
the English twins scurried around the pool’s edge collecting up loose sheets, and
brought them with doggy eagerness back to their owner. The German, who had been in
the pool at the time of the wind, came up with two sodden pages, covered with weeping
longhand, held between finger and thumb, and laid them carefully on the author’s table
to dry. Pierre, the waiter, presented another sheet on his tray. […] The author thanked
them mechanically, his eyes still on the airborne pages, now mere specks in the distance,
sinking slowly down into the pine woods.

322 words.

David LODGE, ‘Hotel des Boobs’, from Cosmopolitan (1986).

10

The pavement glittered under the frosty moon. Lily’s face, upturned towards the sky,
was white and featureless as blotting-paper under the seeping light. The narrow,
winding streets down which the cold-moon beams flickered had for her all the beauty of
a summer night on the river. There was a shiver of joy in the air and she wanted,
incredibly, to pick up a battered top that lay in the shining gutter and spin it. She
stopped and looked round guiltily. A few old women hurrying back from the church, a
couple sitting close together in a parked car: there was nobody else about. She stood for
a few moments looking down at the top, turning the broken toy over gently with the toe
of her shoe, a shoe which gleamed white in the cold light. Then with a sudden resolution,
a faint regret which only added to the keen sense of present joy which she felt, she
walked quickly on.
 On past pubs with rows of ghostly grey bottles in the windows; past the huge
ivory church; across the grey-green bridge over the silver river; on through the almost
empty town whose dusty doors and jumbled roofs had suddenly been touched for her
with a glowing and miraculous radiance […]
At this time of night, the town was almost empty. The picture crowd had herded
into the cinema; the old women were making their last vigils in the church; the bridge
clubs were in session. She began to think of all the people in the town she used to know,
some of them dead, some still there. Old kind faces… Old voices… Old echoes that
followed her through the empty streets like the tap-tap-tap of her high heels.

288 words.

John BRODERICK, The Fugitives (1962).

11

I wondered if he was willing any longer to recall the sickbed vulnerability that had
made certain inevitabilities as real for him as the exterior of his family's life, to
remember the shadow that had insinuated itself like a virulent icing between the layers
and layers of contentment. Yet he'd showed up for our dinner date. Did that mean the
unendurable wasn't blotted out, the safeguards weren't back in place, the emergency
wasn't yet over? Or was showing up and going blithely on about everything that was
endurable his way of purging the last of his fears? The more I thought about this simple-
seeming soul sitting across from me eating zabaglione and exuding sincerity, the farther
from him my thinking carried me. The man within the man was scarcely perceptible to
me. I could not make sense of him. I couldn't imagine him at ail, having come down with
my own strain of the Swede's disorder: the inability to draw conclusions about anything
but exteriors. Rooting around trying to figure this guy out is ridiculous, I told myself.
This is the jar you cannot open. This guy cannot be cracked by thinking. That's the
mystery of his mystery. It's like trying to get something out of Michelangelo's David.
I'd given him my number in my letter—why hadn't he called to break the date if he was
no longer deformed by the prospect of death? Once it was all back to how it had always
been, once he'd recovered that special luminosity that had never failed to win whatever
he wanted, what use did he have for me? No, his letter, I thought, cannot be the whole
story—if it were, he wouldn't have come. Something remains of the rash urge to change
things. Something that overtook him in the hospital is still there. An unexamined
existence no longer serves his needs. He wants something recorded. That's why he's
turned to me: to record what might otherwise be forgotten. Omitted and forgotten. What
could it be?

336 words.

Philip ROTH, American Pastoral (1997).

12
 Nancy and her protegee, Jolene Katz, were also satisfied with their morning's work;
indeed, the latter, a thin thirteen-year-old, was a gog with pride. For the longest while
she stared at the blue-ribbon winner, the oven-hot cherries simmering under the crisp
lattice crust, and then she was overcome, and hugging Nancy, asked, "Honest, did I really
make it myself?" Nancy laughed, returned the embrace, and assured her that she had -
with a little help. Jolene urged that they sample the pie at once – no nonsense about
leaving it to cool. "Please, let's both have a piece. And you, too," she said to Mrs. Clutter,
who had come into the kitchen. Mrs. Clutter smiled - attempted to; her head ached - and
said thank you, but she hadn't the appetite. As for Nancy, she hadn't the time; Roxie Lee
Smith, and Roxie Lee's trumpet solo, awaited her, and afterward those errands for her
mother, one of which concerned a bridal shower that some Garden City girls were
organizing for Beverly, and another the Thanksgiving gala.
"You go, dear, I'll keep Jolene company until her mother comes for her," Mrs. Clutter
said, and then, addressing the child with unconquerable timidity, added, "If Jolene
doesn't mind keeping me company." As a girl she had won an elocution prize; maturity,
it seemed, had reduced her voice to a single tone, that of topology, and her personality to
a series of gestures blurred by the fear that she might give offense, in some way
displease. "I hope you understand," she continued after her daughter's departure. "I
hope you won't think Nancy rude?"
"Goodness, no. I just love her to death. Well, everybody does. There isn't anybody
like Nancy. Do you know what Mrs. Stringer says?" said Jolene, naming her home-
economics teacher.
297 words.
Truman CAPOTE, In Cold Blood (1966).

13

Walking slowly and as soundlessly as possible, Eric tried to read the inscriptions and
names on the stones under his feet. Many of them bore the same name [...]. He bent to
peer at one and as he wiped the dust from it to see better, he became aware of someone
seated in the front pew, sprawled as if drunk or exhausted after a long ride. He did not
appear to be one of the villagers crowding the cemetery; none of them would have sat in
this fashion in church, it would have been beyond them to do other than bow their heads
and crouch. Sliding into a pew on the other side of the aisle, the flowers across his knees,
Eric studied him as unobtrusively as possible. His first impression, that this was a visitor
from elsewhere, was borne out by a closer inspection, for the figure was dressed in
expensive and finely tailored clothes, including a vest and a silk necktie around his neck.
His legs were sprawled out and Eric saw the quality of his leather boots, polished to a
high shine; how had he maintained that if he had walked up the dusty road with the
others? In spite of his casual attitude, he did not seem comfortable, twitching frequently,
crossing and recrossing his legs and fingering first his necktie and then his trousers;
probably they were too tight. The man must have become aware that he was being
scrutinized because eventually he turned to Eric with a sigh, and now Eric could see his
swarthy, heavy-jowled face, the eyebrows growing like an animal’s fur across his
forehead, and the mouth down-turned in what was unmistakably a belligerent scowl.

 282 words.
 Anita DESAI, The Zigzag Way (2004).

14

The Swede. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a
magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed
from the city's old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be
bowled over by the prowess of a high school athlete. The name was magical; so was the
anomalous face. Of the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly
Jewish public high school, none possessed anything remotely like the steep-jawed,
insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving
Levov.
The Swede starred as end in football, center in basketball, and first baseman in
baseball. Only the basketball team was ever any good—twice winning the city
championship while he was its leading scorer—but as long as the Swede excelled, the
fate of our sports teams didn't matter much to a student body whose elders, largely
undereducated and overburdened, venerated academic achievement above all else.
Physical aggression, even camouflaged by athletic uniforms and official rules and
intended to do no harm to Jews, was not a traditional source of pleasure in our
community— advanced degrees were. Nonetheless, through the Swede, the
neighborhood entered into a fantasy about itself and about the world, the fantasy of
sports fans everywhere: almost like Gentiles (as they imagined Gentiles), our families
could forget the way things actually work and make an athletic performance the
repository of all their hopes. Primarily, they could forget the war.
The elevation of Swede Levov into the Household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews
can be best explained, I think, by the war against the Germans and the Japanese and the
fears that it fostered. With the Swede indomitable on the playing field, the meaningless
surface of life provided a bizarre, delusionary kind of sustenance, the happy release into
a Swedian innocence, for those who lived in dread of never seeing their sons or their
brothers or their husbands again.

331 words.
Philip ROTH, American Pastoral (1997)
15