El compromiso social de Jean-Claude Izzo en Le Soleil des mourants

Jean-Claude Izzo, an author committed to reality, recreates in his work Le Soleil des mourants the life of an indigent condemned to exclusion and loneliness. His critique also extends to contemporary society, both urban and dehumanized, and to the institutions and organisms that govern it, incapable of coping with social stigmas. This paper aims to disentangle, through a semantic-stylistic analysis, the homeless figure who stands as the cornerstone around which the story revolves. This paper also tries to identify the textual, linguistic, and cultural singularities that, from a translation studies approach, are regarded as specific translation challenges in this novel. This study puts forth a proposal for the Spanish translation of a selection of passages that support our arguments. The translation decisions are made according to the concept of communicative equivalence (Wotjak 2015) and to the taxonomy of techniques compiled by Hurtado Albir (2008, 269–271). The paper concludes that the concept of communicative equivalence has become a relevant methodology for the translation of Le Soleil des mourants, as it enables the translator to render the denotative elements of the message, the connotative and expressive use of the language, and the author’s communicative intention.