Ecrire dans les airs et dire sans mots : traduction et rencontre dans Das Versprechen de Friedrich Dürrenmatt

This article studies Friedrich Dürrenmatt's detective novel The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel (Das Versprechen. Requiem auf den Kriminalroman) as fictional translation. Indeed the narrator of the novel does not just tell the story of a failed police investigation  – thus questioning the genre of the detective novel itself – he also states that he is translating it. So far, his status as a narrator-translator has been disregarded by the critics. Yet this status produces a strange relationship between the fictional events and the text we read, which adds up to the protagonists' confusion in the readers' eyes. Moreover, analyzing this novel – which stages the disappearance of the sources of the investigation as well as the disappearance of the original in the fictional translation – provides new avenues for an aesthetic of translation.