Translation channels: A primer on politicized literary transfer

Focusing on a comparative analysis of the translations in French of literary works from four Eastern European countries (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania) during the communist period, this article examines the political stakes of the international circulation of literary texts. More precisely, it proposes a model for describing the different modalities of international circulation — referred to here as translation channels — based on the statistical analysis of a relevant set of variables. These channels allow us to present a gradation of the degree of politicization and institutionalization of the literary transfer, and to go well beyond an analysis in terms of the undifferentiated flow of imported books or the simple opposition of authorized vs. unauthorized translations or submissive vs. dissenting writers.