Interdiction d’avoir trop d’esprit ? Les secrétaires-traducteurs de l’Ancien Régime

When faced with the word secrétaire, it is difficult to imagine any affinity between this servile work and the profession of the literary translator. The latter, who transposes texts into a language structured differently from their original language, needs a great deal of creative imagination. The translator must have a talent for forging words and be capable of making lexical borrowings understandable, of inventing new turns of phrase and metaphors, and even, in the case of texts in verse, new rhymes.