A case of “cultural castration”?: Paul de Man’s translation of De Soldaat Johan by Filip de Pillecyn

In his Belgian period, around the time of the Second World War, the famous literary scholar Paul de Man not only wrote his much discussed articles in the national socialist press, he also worked as a literary translator. As opposed to Paul de Man’s other writings, his work as a translator has received little scholarly attention. In this article I focus on De Man’s translation activity in the context of the complex cultural-political situation in Belgium during World War II. I analyse the link between poetics and politics in his French translation of the Dutch novel De soldaat Johan by the Belgian author Filip de Pillecyn (1939). The article undertakes both a contextualisation of De Man’s position and a textual analysis of his translation.