Abstract

J. M. G. Le Clézio was the recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature. His Histoire du pied et autres fantaisies was published in 2011. It is a breathtaking collection of short stories which paints the portraits of women determined to fight off the difficulties they encounter. These tales have yet to be officially translated into English. The aim of this thesis was threefold—while being a translation into English of Histoire du pied, it set out to provide a better understanding of the subject of stylistics in relation to literary translation. It also posited that due to stylistic “constraints” (Boase-Beier 2006: 54), literary translators leave inevitable “fingerprints” (Baker 2000: 244) and resort to “textual deformation” (Berman 2000: 286), partly naturalizing the target text in the process. I focused on the stylistic issues—namely issues pertaining to sentence structure and syntax, diction and figurative language, encountered during my translation. My stylistic choices left traces in the target text, inevitably combining authorial and translational style.