Translation as Multi-Layered Performance: The Case of “Le Feu au cœur,” Bertrand Belin’s French Cover of Bob Dylan’s “Ain’t Talkin’”

Ten years before being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (October 2016), Bob Dylan released the album Modern Times (2006). The album’s closing song, entitled “Ain’t Talkin’,” is an epic, dark and enigmatic eight-minute piece featuring a first-person narrator, more specifically a dis­il­lu­sioned ‘lone pilgrim’ figure that travels through defamiliarised, post-apoc­a­lyptic landscapes. On the second edition of his sixth album Persona (Oc­to­ber 2019), French singer-songwriter Bertrand Belin published “Le Feu au cœur,” which, to this day, is the only existing French version of “Ain’t Talk­in’.” This cover can arguably be considered a performance on at least two counts. Firstly, Dylan’s lyrics were translated by Belin, who is also an ac­claimed writer and stylist. As he performed the act of translating Dylan’s words, Belin made them entirely his own, thus moving away from literalism and static structures of equivalence and producing, instead, a unique and high­ly personal text. Secondly, this translation was self-used by Belin, who also performed it as a studio recording and on stage, so that various electric and acoustic renditions of the French cover are now available. In this article, I propose to analyse how Belin, as a translator-performer, goes beyond trans­posing “Ain’t Talkin’” as a purely literary text. As we will see, he never loses sight of the need to make “Le Feu au cœur” singable in French. Indeed, the oralised and embodied dimensions involved in the musical performing of the French lyrics determine most of his translational choices, not least those concerning the adaptation of rhyme schemes, which undoubtedly contributes to shaping the performed material and to turning his French trans­lation of Dylan’s song into a thoroughly transformative work – a re-creation in its own right.