Abstract

This article studies the reinterpretation and appropriation of exoticism in French translations-adaptations of imaginary voyages from the eighteenth century, particularly those of Desfontaines (Les Voyages du Capitaine Lemuel Gulliver), Berault-Bercastel (Voyages récréatifs du chevalier de Quevedo), and Louis de Mailly (The Three Princes of Serendip). The translators wanted to adapt the original work to the “taste of France”: they were confronted with a double exoticism, the one described in the journey and the one intrinsic to the work. Their adaptation work is based on the search for cultural equivalences, on the suppression of subversive passages and on the preservation of an agreed representation of the elsewhere and the fantastic. Some translators rewrote a large part of these works so that the literary genre fit the voyage.