Classics are commonly viewed as illustrious cultural artefacts expressing a national spirit. They stake out a nation's cultural identity and patrimony and contribute to build up the “imagined community” whereby Benedict Anderson defines a nation.1 In the United States, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in particular has long been considered as the expression par excellence of American culture, if not the prototype of American literature. In the later 1940s, a process that Jonathan Arac labeled academic “hypercanonization” allowed the novel to reach the highest rank within the canon of American classics and be valued in U.S. culture at large as “a masterpiece of world literature” and the “highest image of America.”2 In France, however, in spite of a few editorial attempts to elevate it as a classic, the novel remained mostly catalogued as juvenile literature until the early-twenty-first century, when its reception was radically modified by three new translations published by Bernard Hoepffner (Tristram edition, 2008), Freddy Michalski (L’Œil d'or, 2009) and Philippe Jaworski (La Pléiade, 2015)3—the entry into the illustrious Pléiade edition being the climax of literary recognition in the French cultural sphere. While previous versions had domesticated the narrative voice, thus wiping out much of the book's linguistic significance, these retranslations share a common endeavor to convey the simultaneously subversive and creative potential of Mark Twain's vernacular language, thereby allowing the novel to be recognized as a proper classic. Focusing on the canonizing process that took place in the French cultural sphere, this essay envisages it as stemming from a new ethics of translation as defined by Antoine Berman, Lawrence Venuti, and Henri Meschonnic.4 It considers how the shift from a “domesticating” approach of translation to a “foreignizing” one,5 along with the cultural positioning of the 2008, 2009 and 2015 translations, allowed the novel not only to become popular among an adult readership but to take part in the open-ended remapping of high literature across national borders.From its first French translation in 1886 through the early-twenty-first century, the reception of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in France was impaired by a process of domestication occulting the linguistic significance of the novel. Mark Twain failed to achieve proper literary recognition among the French readership in that period, contrary to most nineteenth-century American writers whose works had been valued as foreign classics by French readers and critics, whether for their literary qualities or their historical significance. By the end of the nineteenth century, translations (and retranslations) of American works flourished, disproving Ferdinand Brunetière's scornful dismissal in the prestigious Revue des Deux Mondes on 1 December 1900—“Is there just such a thing as an American literature?”6 Translations of the works of Washington Irving, Poe (famously translated by Baudelaire in 1852–1855 and Mallarmé in 1875), Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Whitman had contributed to the recognition of American literature among French readers. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in particular enjoyed considerable popularity in France, passing through eleven translations in 1852–1853.7The initial French reception of Huckleberry Finn as a book for children largely resulted from the domesticating process of translation—both a taming of the narrator's un-“sivilized” ethos and an assimilation to the aesthetic and moral values of French culture. Building up on Berman's concept of a “translation ethics” based on the relationship between the domestic and foreign cultures that is embodied in the translated text, Venuti conceded in The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference that “domestication” is an unavoidable dimension of the translating process, which “constructs a domestic representation for a foreign text and culture” and thereby produces “a domestic subject, a position of intelligibility that is also an ideological position, informed by codes and canons, interests and agendas of certain domestic social groups.” Yet translation practices “dehistoricize” foreign texts, according to Venuti, when they are “rewritten to conform to styles and themes that currently prevail in domestic literatures,” and lead to their “misrecognition” when the “domestic inscription is taken for the foreign text” itself.8Huckleberry Finn came to be misrecognized as a consequence of domesticating translation practices. As scholars have demonstrated,9 William-Little Hughes’ version, issued in 1886 and which remained the sole French translation until 1948, created a cultural misunderstanding of the novel which subsequent translations by Suzanne Nétillard (1948), René and Yolande Surleau (1950), and André Bay (1960) only partially mended.10 In various degrees, these translations normalized the narrator's non-standard language and elevated its register, thereby obliterating much of the linguistic disruptiveness and creativity of the text and hence much of its literary, ethical, and political significance.Far from the authorized translation it claims to be, Hughes’ initial version is a free adaptation of the novel meant to serve the educational ideology of the Third French Republic and to provide reading material for children.11 It abides by a pre-conceived, normative vision of juvenile literature excluding any form of linguistic, moral, and cultural disruption. It purges the novel from non-standard linguistic forms (though Jim addresses Huck as “Massa,” a marker of his status as a slave) and allows Huck to master a formal register: he uses the passé simple (“J'eus beau chercher... je n'y pus réussir”) and even the subjunctive past (“Ma première idée fut d’écrire à Miss Watson afin qu'elle le réclamât”), literary tenses antithetical to the orality of the original text, as well as inversions of subject and verb which are specific to a literary style, as in interrogative forms (including Jim's agrammatical “Who is you? Whar is you?” translated as “Qui êtes-vous? Où êtes-vous?”), in clauses framing direct speech (“m’écriai-je”) or following “aussi” when expressing a consequence (“Aussi fus-je”).12 Hughes also radically altered the plot, inserting apocryphal elements and cutting off disruptive passages to the effect of modifying the characterization of both Huck and Jim. For instance, he added a dialogue stating that Huck's mother had taught him how to write, making him consequently a literate and educated character—in coherence with the formal language he is here endowed with—and, as Claire Maniez points out, “intellectualizes” his perspective as a narrator.13 He also invented passages making Jim a servile character, as when he claims that he would gladly have remained a slave at Miss Watson's place had not a trader come around or when he offers to carry both the wounded Tom and Huck on his back for a whole day. Meanwhile, Hughes downplayed Jim's insight and humanity, cutting off passages where he criticizes white characters or stands watch for Huck in chapters 20 and 23.14 In Lavoie's term, this version “aseptizes” the novel and reverses the ideological stance of the text by reinforcing conventions and stereotypes instead of destabilizing them.15 The normalizing process enacted here exemplifies the “ethnocentric” attitude which Berman describes in The Experience of the Foreign as “a negative ethics” of translation—a practice which, “generally under the guise of transmissibility, carries out a systematic negation of the strangeness of the foreign work.”16Nétillard's 1948 translation pursued opposite aims. Written during the Cold War, it was prefaced by Jean Kanapa, a Marxist intellectual who celebrated Twain for his anti-imperialist commitment and stated that the collection wherein the new translation was published aimed at promoting forgotten or overlooked “classics” of the “universal progressist patrimony.”17 Nétillard's translation was praised for restoring a complete version of the plot and for the aesthetic and ethical positioning of the text: it emphasizes the novel's polyphony, creates a specific idiom to translate the African American dialect, and includes elements of orality and linguistic faultiness in dialogues, such as lexical deformation and elisions (“ézistence” for existence, “p'têt’” for peut-être, “et pis” for et puis, “y a” for il y a).18 The narrative language includes some colloquial turns (“ça,” “Bah!”) yet Nétillard remained reluctant to resort to faulty grammatical structures and abided by stylistic norms through the use of the passé simple (more often than the more colloquial passé composé) and the subjunctive past (“J'aurais bien voulu que la veuve le sût,” for “I wished the widow knowed about it”).19 The orality of the narrative language thus remained too partial to destabilize linguistic standards and fully convey the aesthetic significance of the text.20 Besides, the reception of the text seems to have been impaired by the heavy ideological frame in which the preface was set. While originally meant for an adult readership, this version was republished in 1960 as juvenile literature and was quickly overshadowed by new translations which shifted back to a more conservative approach.21 René and Yolande Surleau's 1950 version in the juvenile collection of the Bibliothèque Verte, for instance, shares some of Hughes’ normalizing it purges the plot from of its disruptive elements Huck's and with his in as a to the of the and the narrator's language, the passé simple and the subjunctive past que je the had been in the previous 1960 translation part of it within a the linguistic and literary that Twain had with his novel. Yet he to have remained as of French as in his translation—a which the text of much of its literary significance. He some of orality in the narrative yet remained reluctant to He a for Huck's of which a to and his at the original of the in a Huck's language was thus considered as a to be or version was republished in in a literary collection of translated world classics at the and with a by an literary of the text its literary significance and of linguistic with a of the of Huck's of Yet the to standards of linguistic the literary recognition of the book and its aesthetic significance among the few readers who had direct of the original text and in where the text was recognized as part of the American literary of Huck's language by these translations the whereby the being by the came to a new and American literary As Huckleberry Finn was celebrated in the United as the American novel for the which had it to be by the literary Besides, even it was at with literary standards from when the novel came out, the creativity of Huck's language on a of linguistic which is of the American In the nineteenth century, new by the and new to While the of the original text by be the of such linguistic creativity out a “domesticating” practice of translation which the text and from the foreign literary where “foreignizing” practice of Venuti instead the linguistic and cultural of the foreign to Huck's language be to the cultural and moral standards of juvenile but also to the of the French language to such linguistic the of the a linguistic take place in French literature in the of and up new in the of the free use of as well as lexical and on the narrative the of much of its to literature. of literary also contributed to linguistic standards into in the literary authorized and a more disruptive and creative of language in the of which in the of Huckleberry Finn took place with and translations of the novel published in and 2009 which share a common endeavor to the creative and subversive potential of its versions the of in as the of which from the of Berman's in by as and the of the and works in the They a “foreignizing” approach of translation which Venuti, Berman's ethics of defines as “a translation practice from norms to an reading as to domesticating practices which the foreign text to the linguistic and cultural norms of the to the book from the that in the early-twenty-first century, Twain's image in France was that of a juvenile than a and that only a of French readers had Huckleberry He meant to his readers a of how Twain had the vernacular language into making the novel the first of American literature which as to his works out of the of juvenile literature had been for and he and also be for The for children had to be into of Hoepffner with the editorial of the to and edition, its to its of a French translation of and as an of up literary edition in that literary and cultural For of the edition, the new translation of Huckleberry Finn was to to the novel which the of an in American was consequently to a of the cultural that the text originally within U.S. culture. edition, issued by the d'or, in is also and an edition with a of new for As a Michalski by the and creativity of the American language and that the United has had not to a who defined the of the French language in the their editorial the translations new on the to previous translations which to standards of lexical and grammatical at in the narrative these out for the narrator's vernacular As out in a the and in the which Twain with this novel was to use language in the narrative had speech in to particular with characters with but had it up through the whole of a the of a text by a Hoepffner and Michalski a new idiom the simultaneously disruptive and creative of the vernacular The here is not to an of the linguistic at in these translations, which in has been but to how a new ethics of translation allowed the novel to out its aesthetic translations with Henri in his Ethics and of that it is a text to language that is at stake in the of translating than just the of The French and that the of translation is to a of the the text and creativity in this particular Hoepffner that his as a of Huckleberry Finn had been to the French language from just as Twain had with the to previous Hoepffner and Michalski an of orality based on non-standard and grammatical Michalski linguistic to a than Hoepffner Huck's as and Michalski as to They both resort to as a to in the narrative language just as in for instance, for for and in for and for Michalski to in a more systematic or as in “y y or “y “y or linguistic norms in such a as to a new also the dimension of the vernacular in both of of American the of a American translate Huck's a of and Hoepffner created the and Michalski both and Bay had with is by Hoepffner as and by Michalski as of and Bay had a with Hoepffner and Michalski also based on Huck's such as or for the the for Hoepffner and Michalski and where Bay had a for such as they also in Huck's in where the original text uses for in text or for des in here to literary or both and a form of a with the linguistic material to their common endeavor to convey Huck's subversive and creative of language, these translations the French language to be modified by the original The process exemplifies Berman's of the of translation as a practice a a a of the domestic language and culture, the of the original text and the In the of Berman's Venuti that translations are in their a form of to the of translation and with the original than a of the French language, the process at on the lexical a dialogue between the American and French there is by for Huck's Hoepffner some of his from French literature. his style, he and who both the use of orality in and it into a new literary language (though not in the as Hoepffner of from le which he to translate and and is in with que que in that the the translated novel within a French literary Hoepffner also for Jim's “Who in Michalski a form with a his from and well as of and a of the he had well as from Twain's use of and to Hoepffner based on the of or on the of While Bay translated the with the et Hoepffner a of and to which is fully in with the of practice of translation thus a linguistic and literary dialogue which Twain a of French if not their when the French text their approach of the text also on which at the of his on the ethics and of a of cultural he for a approach of translation based on the that through their of expression than just their of language, not the of He that a of expression on its not in its of and but as the of based on as well as or of speech is a of characterization in Twain's works of and first and in Huckleberry back at the of his he that his characters from their and a in. of the about to this and and that these of the have into and have for a They are not they just out of the was the Tom Huck Finn and characters came to the novel's polyphony, Huck's language defines a specific a of being as well as a specific to the It the of his vision and into a subject who is in with but also in his to be a vision which defines as a to with to previous and his have an in his to in The vernacular also has a expressing the that to its and whose in seems to have been by his reading of to the novel's of and more to the use of which had not been in previous that the use of the is more in this novel than in any text in the language for the translation of the he a specific to convey this as as not in a systematic the French language offers more to than the he the original text in a to become to its specific of speech and quickly a first He that this practice of translation him to the specific of speech and allowed him to use more than with a more in the novel a of and which is fully in with the ethics of a simple in It often in passages where Huck describes his from as in “I into and and was free and where Hoepffner et et et Michalski also the use of a to translate this but to a with an et je à et Michalski on the of a text, which he as the of its and has Huck's a that as he his It a particular ethos and in passages on the as in the following or of a would a along in the and and would a whole world of up out of and they would in the and would a and would out and off and the and by and by would to a long was and the a and that for how or translation of the here the of Michalski the in some it with a and just thereby to a In translation had Huck's long into the of the original to Huck's voice, and vision and by the dimension of the novel's linguistic and translations allowed the novel to be and among a They up a of in Twain's among French as be from the subsequent of cultural and on his and or on Huckleberry France the national cultural a of Twain's and in both and It was with an of France in his to the of their and Huckleberry and a adaptation of the edition by a and a in of the novel also in the period, a Huckleberry le at the la in In of Twain's of a as that to have and to Hoepffner and Michalski the recognition of the novel as a editorial in France in 2015 with the of a of Mark Twain's works by Philippe Jaworski with the of at the la translations of Adventures of Huckleberry The Adventures of Tom on the and The of Twain's into the and the recognition in and 2009 with and Pléiade is a edition of world by its on with on the In cultural the is a literary a form of as well as an high literature and as It is an of and and of yet its is much about making literature in an as it about making it and For Huckleberry Finn to be in such a of literature is a of on the In the the book its literary in with its from the as a linguistic and moral for the book was also by the for its and Twain's had been to the of the not as a but as an to its which into in the as he In the by the literary with Twain's positioning as a the of a in who and and just a was literary more to the vernacular as than to high In spite of the literary of the Huck as a but for literary and linguistic as by his to on a as a it but a on it and such a text into the of the a Twain's entry into the is well in with its editorial The of that the to on the of the French which was the vernacular language as to Besides, the Pléiade to a vision of literary and to writers who the standards of such an editorial the Pléiade edition readers to Huckleberry Finn as part of the open-ended literary dialogue that defines the canon across national and to on the text to the of literature. In the to the Jaworski the strangeness for French readers of Twain's in and Huckleberry Finn in particular and for a new of the novel's of the for the to language, he about the linguistic and aesthetic that systematic or linguistic Huck's linguistic he on on the it the of the translation colloquial but only or or The novel's of Jaworski points out, not in the of language, but in the of a vision that in the of the as in and the up off of the and the and the and out a in the of the on the on of the. the and from and and to on of the and the but not that around and and they and the and in the and the just of Huckleberry his to the translation of the Jaworski that Huck's of orality as it here from the and the of the whereby Huck creates his its its free following the of the the the and of the thus from the of which, to to is to the of a By an to this the Pléiade edition the novel's orality as a language whose disruptive is only to the of a his on the Pléiade in et la and published in André that it is by a process of into the the reading of works and high The classics in are works that in and in their dialogue the to their and to the its entry into the Pléiade, Huckleberry Finn contributed to such a The novel's through French that it has been considered as to the even when it domestic domesticating translations had its aesthetic significance and its language and plot, the process at in the translations up a new dimension in its dialogue with French culture. It allowed the novel to the of the French language, the on Huck's language, and a dialogue between American and French literary works in the culture at which place first and within the translated text through the or with the translated text, as well as through the Hoepffner thus Twain to and Jaworski him from and whose works juvenile in a Huckleberry Finn a is also this as a to come back to in a cultural and to with in the of its on their culture in their