Simon Bertrand Retranscription de la Bible – Nouvelle traduction, since 2009.
Photo : Guy L’Heureux, courtesy of the artist

Retranscription of Foundational Texts in Simon Bertrand’s Work

Sylvette Babin

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By definition, the collective imagination can only travel through time along with those writings which have never ceased to be read and re-read, copied and re-copied because of the inexhaustible richness of meaning that transforms each reading into a new experience, not to say a new writing.¹ 1 - [Thierry Hentsch, Truth or Death: The Quest for Immortality in the Western Narrative Tradition (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2004), 14.
— Thierry Hentsch

What would a library be without its books? At worst, an empty shell; at best, an architectural masterpiece. From its etymology to its function, the library inevitably leads us back to the book and, by extension, to the text, that vehicle of human thought and the earliest receptacle of knowledge by which the narratives of humanity have been transmitted to us. Many of these stories continue to feed the contemporary imagination. “Each of them, in its own way, seeks answers from humanity in its most fundamental aspect: in its relationship with reality and with death,”² 2 - Ibid., 15. Thierry Hentsch emphasizes in a rereading of the great narratives of the West. The Bible, whose corpus of texts forms its own library (hence its name), is the prime example of this, along with the Homeric texts.