That Mad Ache & Translator

by Françoise Sagan

  If anyone had asked me, during my transcription-translation period, why I was spending so much time in this activity, I would have replied, “It’s very simple — out of love.” And if they had further pressed me as to whether I would like to have my version published, I would have said, “I guess so, but publication isn’t my purpose. I just want to do this because I was so touched by this lyrical and poetic novel.”

  Robert Westhoff: Lover, Translator

  SAD TO say, l’amour, although it may make the world turn ’round, is seldom the raison de traduire a novel from one language to another. Most of the time, a publisher in language B hires a respected A-B translator to translate a particular novel out of language A, and since money talks in any language, the job gets done. The translator may or may not fall in love with the novel, but that’s hardly the point, and love is seldom the spark or the outcome. In my case, though, it was just a personal choice coming from a powerful inner flame. I did it only for myself. But since many of my friends were curious if I was intending to publish my translation, I wound up devoting some thought to the question, and soon decided that it would be very desirable. I had found the book truly rewarding, so it was only natural that I would hope to afford a similar pleasure to other people.

  This led to the natural question of whether La Chamade had ever been translated before. In this day of the Web and Google (that’s not the name of a pub!), answering such questions is a piece of cake, and I quickly found out that indeed, an English translation by one Robert Westhoff had been published in 1966. I also found out that it was long out of print. What did that imply? I knew that several translations of a single novel could coexist (as was the case for Ivan Denisovich), but I didn’t how common it was for a publisher to give the green light to two or more rival translations, or to a new one when an old one was out of print. All these things seemed blurry to me, so eventually I contacted the original Parisian publisher of La Chamade, and the people there were very friendly and said a second translation was fine with them, as long as I could find an American publisher.

  These were all bureaucratic matters and held little interest for me, but what did intrigue me was who this Robert Westhoff was, and what his translation was like. Actually, although part of me was very curious to see his translation, another part of me didn’t want me to read even a single sentence of it, out of fear that my own translation might possibly be contaminated by someone else’s style. In any case, I was driven by curiosity to explore this fellow a bit more.

  A little Web sleuthing revealed that Robert Westhoff was an American who was not just Sagan’s translator but had been married to her for a year or two and was the father of her only child, Denis Westhoff. It seemed as if translation and love had indeed gone hand-in-hand, at least in the case of this novel! Despite divorcing, Sagan and Westhoff remained close friends for their entire lives, and he translated a couple of her early novels. And a little more sleuthing revealed the sad fact that Bob Westhoff had died rather young — in 1990, roughly at age sixty.

  It was obvious to me that it would be foolish not to obtain a copy of Westhoff ’s translation, because certainly one day, sooner or later, when mine was done, I would want to look at it and see how his and my versions compared. So, through a used-book dealer on the Web, I was able to track a copy down and I had it sent to me. I remember how, the day it arrived in the mail, I tore open the package and pulled out the hardback volume, which, as it turned out, had once belonged to the Public Library in the small burg of Richland, Washington, of all places — a town whose fifteen minutes of fame are due, in part, to the fact that its elevators and doors, its kisses and cars, its giggles and its cigarettes are all subtly different from their Cajarc counterparts.

  I did my very best not to read one single sentence, but in the end I yielded to the tiny temptation of reading what Mister Westhoff had done with the novel’s first sentence, “Elle ouvrit les yeux.” He had written “She opened her eyes.” Well, what do you know — so had I! And so, having obtained that amusing but almost totally uninformative clue as to Westhoff ’s style, I quickly slammed the book shut and said to myself, “No more peeking until you are all done, my friend!” And I adhered religiously to this edict except in one tiny but crucial fashion, and that, for obvious reasons, was the matter of the title that Westhoff gave to his ex-wife’s novel in English.

  Translating the Novel’s Title

  WHAT do the words la chamade mean? One might hope to get a clue from the title of Westhoff ’s translation, but he, or perhaps it was his publisher, chose the easy way out — they left the title in French. That sort of begs the question, doesn’t it?

  If I look up chamade in my huge Collins-Robert unabridged French-English dictionary, I find this indication: “NF ⇒ battre”. Frankly, this kind of thing drives me batty. Now I have to go look up battre instead, and since it’s a very high-frequency word, I’ll have to scan down dozens and dozens of randomly-ordered phrases in several long columns of very fine print in order to find battre la chamade. Most frustrating.

  But all right. If one is sufficiently patient, one will eventually find, way down in the entry for battre, the sentence “son cœur battait la chamade”, and its translation is given as “his heart was pounding/beating wildly”. And so it turns out that chamade is a feminine noun (“NF”) that is used in only one phrase in the French language (battre la chamade), and it basically suggests a wildly beating heart, a powerful throbbing of the heart, caused by intense emotions such as fear or anticipation or thrill.

  Given this, why didn’t Bob Westhoff call his translation “Heart Throb”? Well, I guess it’s obvious — someone’s latest heart throb is their latest flame, and that isn’t at all what was meant by the French title. Then why not “Heartbeat” or “Wild Heartbeat”? Or then again, why not “Pounding Away”, or perhaps “The Throb”? Well, your guess is as good as mine. All we know is that somehow, the decision was made to leave the title in French, perhaps because it sounds more enticing that way. Remember that Françoise Sagan was very well known in America in the sixties, so her name alone was already quite a draw. Perhaps “La Chamade” sounded mysterious and sexy to an American public. And of course, the title “Bonjour tristesse” had been left in French, so this was just extending a precedent.

  I’m not saying it was a bad decision to leave the title of La Chamade in French, but it isn’t what I myself would have chosen. In fact, as you know, I took another pathway. One day, I was just looking at the word chamade and, as often happens when my mind is idling, I started juggling the letters around a little bit, and what popped out but “mad ache”. This felt a bit eerie. After all, the whole story is about the mad ache in the hearts of several different people, all of whom are desperately searching for love or think they have found it. Something about this felt very right to me, and at that moment it occurred to me that this would be a delicious way to translate Sagan’s title “La Chamade”. It took a bit more thought about whether to say “A Mad Ache” or “The Mad Ache” or “That Mad Ache” or even just plain “Mad Ache”, but in the end I settled on “That Mad Ache”.

  An amusing footnote to this is that my friend Daniel Kiechle (about whom more below), on hearing about my proposed title, started searching for English anagrams involving all nine letters in “La Chamade”, and he came up with “A Calm Head”, which, though a nice phrase, is pretty nearly the diametric opposite of the meaning of the original title. What a curious coincidence! Needless to say, I didn’t go for Daniel’s anagram, ingenious though it was.

  What should one think about such a brazenly redone title as “That Mad Ache”? Is it reasonable? In particular, what does the playful game of anagrams have to do with this novel or with Françoise Sagan’s style? Admittedly, nothing at all. But even so, I think there is something charming about tipping one’s hat to one’s author by making the translated title through nothing more than a rearrangement of the very same “raw materials” that constituted the original title. But then I’m biased.


  In any case, the most common thing in the world is for books, plays, and films to have their titles radically redone in other languages. An example that springs to my mind is the French-language title that was given to Khaled Hosseini’s above-mentioned novel The Kite Runner — namely, “Les Cerfs-volants de Kaboul”, which means “The Kites of Kabul”. Salinger’s title “The Catcher in the Rye” was rendered as “L’attrape-cœurs” (“The Heart-catcher”), and Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row” as “Rue de la Sardine” (“Sardine Street”) — and so on. And going in the other direction, Proust’s title “À la Recherche du temps perdu” became “Remembrance of Things Past” (instead of “In Search of Lost Time”). Hundreds of examples could be adduced, but the point is clear — titles are up for grabs.

  But if it is generally accepted that titles can be radically modified in their passage from one culture to another, does this not suggest that any aspect of a piece of literature can be modified with pretty much the same degree of freedom? Why should a novel’s title, certainly among the most carefully considered choices in the whole book, be more tamperable-with than the sentences inside the book? Indeed, why isn’t the title sacred — absolutely sacred and untouchable? And if the title isn’t sacred, then what is? Or to be more specific, how much liberty does a translator have to play around with the various elements on all the different scales inside a novel — words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, sections, and chapters?

  Let me make this question a little more pointed, since here we are coming to the crux of the matter: Not only how much liberty may a translator take, but how much liberty must a translator take, in order to do a good job? This pair of questions haunted me all through the process of translation of La Chamade, and I will make a stab at answering them in what follows, though there are never any final answers.

  Translator as Dog-on-a-Leash

  IT’S my suspicion that we translators of novels are all would-be novelists ourselves; it’s just that most of us lack the wonderful imagination to come up with deep and fascinating characters, strange intrigues that intertwine the characters’ lives plausibly but ever surprisingly, and occasional glimpses into their hearts’ secrets, all carried out in an artistic fashion featuring a natural and graceful rhythm in which events, meditations, and descriptions all meld together harmoniously and pleasingly. Architecture on that grand a scale is, sad to say, just too much to ask of most of us — but we still love admiring it and we wish to savor its magic as intimately as possible, and so if life grants us the chance, we select some favorite book and we then take its small-scale local components — sentences, images, thoughts — and one by one we recast them, using our love for our native language’s special ways of phrasing things, into our own personal mold.

  Whenever I am translating something that someone else carefully wrote, I feel like an unleashed dog taking a walk with its master through a forest or a huge park. It’s a marvelously joyous feeling, a subtle blend of freedom and security. I run around on my own, but despite all my seeming freedom, I am in truth always invisibly tethered to my master and to the unpredictable pathways that my master chooses to take. Locally, I am captain of my own fate, but on a larger scale, I am slaved to my master’s whims. It’s a comfortable thing, a comfort zone, giving a sense of security. And fortunately, even if we translators are doomed to serve our novelist masters, some of us have chosen those masters for their benevolence — in fact, we’ve chosen them precisely because of the wonderful strolls they take through parks we know and enjoy. So between translator and author the partnership is a happy one, as hopefully it is between dog and master as well.

  Living Vicariously in the Novel

  AND now, in order to bring us down to earth from these airy metaphors, here is a short excerpt from Chapter 12 of this book, first in the original and then in my rendition. It is not by any means an example of virtuosic translation intended to show off clever tricks — I don’t think there’s anything clever here at all. It is just a passage that came to mind when I thought about how I put myself into the scene whenever I translate.

  Le gravier crissait sous le pied des garçons, des chauves-souris rôdaient autour des lampes sur la terrasse et un couple congestionné avalait sans dire un mot une omelette flambée à la table voisine. Ils étaient à quinze kilomètres de Paris, il faisait un peu frais et la patronne avait posé un châle sur les épaules de Lucile. C’était une de ces mille petites auberges qui offrent une chance plus ou moins sûre de discrétion et de bon air aux Parisiens adultères ou fatigués. Antoine était décoiffé par le vent, il riait. Lucile lui racontait son enfance, une enfance heureuse… Il sourit, il tendit la main à travers la table, serra celle de Lucile.

  The gravel was crunching under the waiters’ feet, some bats were swooping around the lights on the terrace, and at the next table, a couple with very pink faces was wordlessly gulping down an omelette flambée. They were fifteen kilometers outside of Paris, it was a bit chilly, and the lady who ran the place had solicitously wrapped a shawl around Lucile’s shoulders. This was one of a thousand similar small inns that offer adulterous or simply weary Parisians an almost failsafe privacy as well as fresh country air. The wind had done a good job of messing up Antoine’s hair, and he was laughing. Lucile was telling him about her childhood, a happy childhood… He smiled, reached out across the table, and squeezed Lucile’s hand.

  As I read, transcribed in pen, and finally translated this passage, I felt transported to another place and time. It was I who was sitting in the little garden terrace of the restaurant located fifteen kilometers outside of Paris, and it was I who, firstly as Lucile, felt the cool night air, heard the crunching gravel, saw the pink-faced couple, watched those bats and their flitting shadows — and then it was I who, now Antoine, reached out and touched and squeezed Lucile’s hand — although what the name “Lucile” denoted in my mind was a subtle, nebulous, tenuous, ephemeral amalgam of a hundred different people I have known (mostly women, but not all of them) — and much the same could be said for that restaurant, for those bat-swoops, that gravel-crunch, those pink faces, that omelette flambée, those waiters, and that night air. They were all made of raw materials drawn from my life, but freshly rearranged in a new fashion catalyzed by Françoise Sagan’s artfully chosen words.

  Trusting Memories over Words

  NOW I’d like to give an example of the Don’t-Trust-the-Text Paradox by focusing in on a tiny part of the above passage — just one word. The verb Sagan chose to describe the bats’ flight is rôder, which my big heavy Collins-Robert renders as “roam, wander, loiter, lurk, prowl”. Well, I suppose I could have used any of those English verbs in my translation, but on what basis would I have selected just one of the five? Which one would you choose to describe what the bats were doing near the lights?

  Luckily, I don’t have just a dictionary in my head; I have a lifetime of memories in there as well. In it, there are memories of seeing bats on many occasions, and to my mind, none of those five verbs does a good job of capturing what bats actually do. The first two suggest to me someone walking about rather idly and aimlessly, and the last three suggest someone hanging around suspiciously or sneaking around under cover, probably with criminal intent. (Of course, there’s far more to each verb than that; this is just a crude, quick take for our purposes here.) By contrast, the visual image that came to me, especially in the context of outdoor lights surrounded by small swarms of insects (who ever mentioned insects? not Sagan — but we all see them swarming there anyway, don’t we?), was that of crazy flittings and zigzaggings in the air, and that led to a completely different set of candidate verbs, including “flit”, “flutter”, “zigzag”, “swoop”, and so on. Eventually I settled on “swoop”.

  By the way, so did Robert Westhoff (I just checked), and I find our agreement quite fascinating. Why did he, too, trust himself over all the English words in the authoritative dictionary, and over the French word on the novel’s “author-itative” page? By trusting ourselves ove
r these authorities, did Westhoff and I thereby betray Françoise Sagan? I don’t think so; we simply trusted our personal images, which had been evoked by the words on her page, over the literal word rôder. In fact, I would go further and assert that for me, to have trusted Sagan’s word over my own images would have been to betray her.

  Poetic Lie-Sense

  IN MY Translator’s Preface to my “novel versification” of Eugene Onegin, I wrote a passage that I think is key in this context, but few of this essay’s readers are likely to have seen that work, so here I’ll take the liberty of quoting it in part. It said this:The truth of the matter is that the name of the game is paraphrasing. But I would propose an alternate name for the art of compromise in poetry translation — I would say that poetry translation is the art of “poetic lie-sense”. Yes, one is always lying, for to translate is to lie. But even to speak is to lie, no less. No word is perfect, no sentence captures all the truth and only the truth. All we do is make do, and in poetry, hopefully do so gracefully.

  To be sure, this was written about poetry translation, but to me, La Chamade is definitely a kind of poetry, as are most novels. And I see no way around the fact that expressing ideas is always some kind of distortion, for words are only crude approximations and simplifications, and re-expressing someone else’s ideas is also always some kind of distortion, but the second layer of distortion need not be less faithful than the first layer.