That Mad Ache & Translator

by Françoise Sagan

  I do, by the way, think that there are many jazz artists — in fact, almost all of today’s jazz musicians — who knowingly replace the composer’s voice by their own when they improvise on a tune not of their own invention. By the time one is but a minute or two into the piece, the composer’s voice has been completely drowned out, as has all trace of the original melody. Ironically, however, this kind of liberty is not looked down upon by music critics — instead, it is warmly saluted as exhibiting creativity at the highest level. If it works that way in music, then why not in literature as well?

  Distinct Voices inside the Novel

  WHILE we’re on the topic of voices, I feel it is important to point out that in any novel there is more than one voice. There are the voices of the individual characters. Thus in a scene where Claire, Diane, and Johnny all speak, hopefully one will be able to tell them apart easily and one won’t simply say, “Oh, this sounds like Françoise Sagan speaking once again.” Just as J. D. Salinger’s characters in, say, The Catcher in the Rye should not all sound like just one person (especially not J. D. Salinger himself ), so should any novelist’s cast of characters sound like separate, truly distinct individuals.

  But what are the elusive signs that would serve as signatures of a particular person in a novel? If the author doesn’t resort to simplistic gimmicks (a lisp, a stammer, dialectal usages, frequent repetition of a particular pet word, constant use of very short or very long sentences, and so forth), the crux of the answer has to be that it is mostly the flavor of the thoughts that the person comes out with, and not so much the surface-level qualities of their syntax or word choice. Most native speakers of any language use words in a fairly similar fashion, though some people have pet words that give them away (a couple of mine are “jolly” and “droll”, for instance, but you won’t find them riddled throughout everything that I write).

  My belief is that most of the telltale signs that distinguish one person’s written “voice” from another’s, whether we are talking about a novelist’s voice or the voices of characters inside a novel, reside on a level that is far higher than the rather low levels at which I, as a leashless translator-dog, feel free to manipulate the text I am translating.

  If I am right, then the liberties that I have taken in this novel and described in this essay have not destroyed the authenticity of the various voices in it. If, however, I am fooling myself — if Sagan-ness is truly gone from my translation and if I am unaware of this fact — then that means I have produced a poor translation, which would certainly be a shame, but unfortunately there’s nothing I can do about it at this late date.

  The Translator’s Voice, Every So Often

  THAT having been said, I do not feel that I must religiously suppress in every last instance the kinds of linguistic touches and turns of phrase that might allow someone to recognize my voice peeking through every now and then. Just as Ella Fitzgerald can make distinctly Ella-like gestures without taking away much if any Coleness from a lovely Cole Porter melody, so I allow myself to indulge in some of my own characteristic gestures every once in a while, although I make sure to keep this high-temperature “here’s me!” tendency down to a very low volume.

  For instance, there is a spot in Chapter 9 where Sagan describes Lucile’s first, unexpected sense of Antoine as a genuine stranger to herself:Pour la première fois surtout, elle pensa qu’Antoine était un « autre », et que tout ce qu’elle savait de ses mains, de sa bouche, de ses yeux, de son corps n’en faisait pas forcément son indissoluble complice.

  The word autre, meaning “other”, is the key word here, as one sees from Sagan’s having placed it in quote marks. Well, when I translated this sentence, I happened to notice a curious coincidence involving the English words “an other”, and so I exhibited it to my readers explicitly, as follows:And most of all, for the first time it hit her that Antoine was not like her, but was another — an other, a not her — and that all her intimacy with his hands, his mouth, his eyes, his body, did not mean he was her irrevocable soulmate.

  There is no wordplay in Sagan’s French, and so this little interpolation is me, not her. It may mar the translation if all one wants is a very obedient dog heeling constantly, suppressing its own nature at every moment, but I like to think that it adds a little touch of interest. Think of an Ella grace note.

  And then, in Chapter 18, Lucile smiles at an old woman to whom she has just relievedly given away her bus ticket, and Sagan writes, “Lucile lui renvoya un sourire incertain” (“Lucile re-sent her an uncertain smile”). Perhaps, being so immersed in Sagan’s writing at the time, I was unusually sensitized, but in any case, I could not help seeing in the final three words an allusion to the title of Sagan’s second novel (dating from 1956) Un certain sourire, which means “A Certain Smile”, and so one part of me was strongly tempted to keep those literal words “uncertain smile”, but there were several other pressures, and in the end I wound up spurning this choice and opting instead for “Lucile flashed a shaky smile back at her.” It saddened me a bit, but it just worked better overall.

  However, I unexpectedly made up for this lost opportunity a few pages later. In particular, in the next chapter Sagan writes about Antoine, “il tourna vers elle un visage souriant, indécis” (“he flipped towards her a smiling, indecisive face”), and I thought a good way to render this was “he turned towards her with a sweet, uncertain smile”, thus managing, after all, to squeeze in my little allusion to Un certain sourire, albeit at a few pages’ remove from the more obvious spot in which to do so. Sticking this small and nearly invisible wink at one Sagan novel inside another one certainly made me smile.

  My final sin of translator’s self-indulgence involves a passage in Chapter 12 where, as I was translating it, I noticed that two or three English words that begin with “fl” happened to appear, by pure chance, near each other. All these words were subjective, artistic choices on my part — another translator might not have used a single one of them (indeed, Robert Westhoff didn’t use any of them). But be that as it may, I had used a few and I noticed that I could easily extend this pattern over the rest of the sentence, giving me in the end a total of seven such words (out of 37 in the whole sentence). I was pleased with the alliterative quality that this gave to the sentence, but once again, a critical reader might say, “What are you doing here?! There is no such playful pattern in the original French sentence! You are just arbitrarily sticking Hofstadter-ness into this Sagan novel, where it doesn’t belong at all! You are a traitor!”

  My first line of defense would be the same old Ella-sings-Cole line that I have trotted out above (her trills and grace notes add terrific Ella-ness but don’t diminish Cole-ness by one whit), but almost surely that wouldn’t satisfy the hypothetical critic.

  In this case, however, I happen, by sheer luck, to have a second possible line of defense. At the very end of Chapter 17, the following sentence occurs (in an inner monologue of Antoine’s): “Il savait bien que l’été était fini et que ç’avait été le plus bel été de leur vie” — which, translated word for word, means this: “He knew well that the summer was over and that it’d been the most beautiful summer of their life.” I have italicized four words in the French sentence and four in its literal anglicization. Although only two of the English words sound alike (being identical!), all four of these French words sound alike, except that était ends with a slightly different vowel. The point, though, is that there is a clearly audible phonetic pattern here. Now whether Sagan intended to make a sound pattern here, or even noticed that she had done so inadvertently, is another matter, admittedly. We will never know, now that she is gone, but the existence of one undeniable phonetic pattern somewhere in her novel could be said to provide at least a plausible pretext for a translator’s inserting an audible phonetic pattern somewhere or other in their translation. If you can’t do it in the last sentence of Chapter 17, then why not do it somewhere in the middle of Chapter 12? And so I would say that this shows very clearly that I
am not a traitor; I’m just a trader.

  Translating the Translator

  I HAVE just listed all three of the passages in That Mad Ache where I deliberately inserted a little taste of my own personal style. I don’t think that, by indulging myself in these very few tiny ways, I let overly much of the Wrong Style creep in.

  Nonetheless, at this point, a skeptic might well ask me, “How would you like it if somebody translated you in such a free-and-easy fashion, putting words in your mouth that you never said?” To this my unhesitating answer would be, “Why not? Turnabout is fair play!” As a matter of fact, right after each of my first two books came out, I wrote long, detailed cover letters to the then-unknown future translators of these books, and I requested them — indeed, ordered them! — to take precisely these kinds of liberties, over and over again, to the max. As long as my ideas are not betrayed, changing my language radically is fine with me.

  The skeptic might well reply, “Well, that’s very inconsistent of you! Your letters to your future translators gave a carte blanche invitation to radically transculturate your books in exactly the fashion that you so deplored in the case of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. How can you possibly justify such inconsistency?”

  Well, all right. I can see how my letters could seem, at first, like the height of hypocrisy on my part, but I think I can explain. My books, unlike Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s or Françoise Sagan’s, are not novels — stories that by definition are deeply rooted in a particular place and time. My books are, rather, nonfiction, meaning that there is no story being told and no set of characters rooted in a specific location or culture. My books consist primarily of essays that explore ideas, such as sexist language, quantum mechanics, meaning in music, the nature of consciousness, and even translation. There is no suspension of disbelief required in the case of such essays. For that reason, one doesn’t need to worry very much about the Wrong-Place Paradox.

  If a nonfiction essay becomes more vivid when the translator replaces an idiom in language A (say, “To have your cake and eat it too”) by its counterpart in language B (here, “Avoir le beurre et l’argent du beurre”, which literally means “To have the butter and the money for the butter”), the translator has not betrayed the rootedness of the essay in culture A, because the message of the essay was not a local one to begin with. The essay wasn’t ever intended to be rooted in culture A as opposed to culture B; its message was more objective and universal to begin with. In a word, when one is translating a novel, transculturation is one’s most insidious and worrisome enemy; by contrast, when one is translating a work of nonfiction, that is seldom the case.

  Of course there are all sorts of twists and complexities that I am ignoring here (such as the fact that the line between fiction and nonfiction is anything but sharp), but this essay is not the place to go into all that. I do, however, talk about these things in quite some detail in Chapter 6 of my book Le Ton beau de Marot, entitled “The Subtle Art of Transculturation”.

  Transculturation? Yes! (Occasionally)

  ABOVE, I gave a few examples where I put into French-speaking mouths American idiomatic phrases like “This baby’ll knock ’em dead!” and “If that doesn’t take the cake!” It was in those spots that I most worried that I might be crossing a subtle line and (at least locally) transculturating La Chamade. Though aware of such dangers, I was willing to take the risk. There are a few other cases like this that fall into a little family that I find particularly fascinating, so I will now discuss them all in one fell swoop. They have to do with numerical measurements or units, and the words with which they are described.

  In Chapter 20, Antoine blurts out angrily to Lucile, “Il ne t’ont pas payé un centime” — literally, “They didn’t pay you a centime.” Robert Westhoff rendered this as “They haven’t given you a penny”, whereas I converted it into “And they never paid you one red cent.” My concern here is the degree of blatant un-Frenchness lurking in the phrase “red cent”, but since one could ask a similar question about “penny”, let’s consider that first.

  What is a penny? It could be a British coin or it could be an American coin, but it is certainly not (and never was) a French coin. And thus it would seem that by this little word we are being carried, if not across the Atlantic, then at least across the Channel. Or are we? Could it be that the word “penny” slips completely undetected below an average anglophonic reader’s transculturation radar? Hard to say. In any case, the analogous question also has to be posed for my “red cent”. I have no way of knowing how red a flag will be set waving in an average reader’s mind by the word “penny”, let alone by the phrase “red cent”, but I decided to stick my neck out with this familiar idiom, intuiting (or at least hoping) that it would not trigger any loud alarm bells.

  Scott Buresh reacted to this choice of mine by saying that he would prefer to have the original word simply remain in place — thus, “They didn’t pay you a centime”, perhaps with “centime” in italics to emphasize its Frenchness. Scott, who speaks no French, explained that this would give him the chance to do at least a tiny bit of the translation into English himself. In his mind, he could substitute “penny”, “red cent”, “blasted centime”, or whatever he wanted when he encountered the raw word centime on the page. He would prefer this open-endedness to having the characters’ dialogue being predigested and spoonfed to him in too-smooth, too-idiomatic English. Basically, in the context of a translated novel, Scott says he would savor an occasional sense of floating in fog or mist — a kind of impressionistic haze — because, he says, this would give him the sensation of reading an alien language rather than his native language.

  Well, all I can say is that I genuinely understand Scott’s feeling, and part of me genuinely sympathizes. Perhaps that’s the difference between being a reader and being a translator. As a translator, you want to carry things as far as possible out of language A and into language B, but as a reader, you resist this kind of push, at least once in a while. Something in you instinctively combats the overzealousness of a translator who overdoes things. The question is, how much translation is too much, and how little is too little?

  In Chapter 16, Johnny is giving Antoine his impression of a mood Lucile was in a while earlier, and he says, “cela se voyait à vingt pas, sans la connaître” — “it was visible at twenty paces, without knowing her.” Here, a bit bumpily, Robert Westhoff has Johnny say, “it could be seen from twenty feet, even if one didn’t already know.” Now I had to scratch my head when I first saw this. Why had “twenty paces” become “twenty feet”? To me, a pace is about two-and-a-half feet, so twenty paces would be more like fifty feet. Not that I think the distance in this metaphor should be taken au pied de la lettre (that is, literally), but why bother to convert “twenty paces” at all? Why not simply leave it as is? Everyone can relate to a pace. Moreover, having Johnny say “twenty feet” moves him out of the metric system and into the Anglo-Saxon measurement system, which is a dead giveaway that he is not speaking French. Or is it? Once again, does the English-speaking ear necessarily detect this transgression, or could it be that “twenty feet” sounds so familiar to us that it slips entirely unnoticed right under our radar?

  Now if you thought Robert Westhoff sinned here, well, my translation of Johnny’s view of Lucile’s mood should shock you considerably more. I have him say, “anyone could see it a mile off, even without knowing her.” Wouldn’t you agree that my use of the “m”-word here is, at least on the surface, even more risqué than Westhoff ’s use of the “f ”-word? What could be more Anglo-Saxon than a mile? The French haven’t talked about such things for hundreds of years! And yet in the end, I decided to leave “see it a mile off ” in Johnny’s francophone mouth because I decided it was probably a sufficiently dead metaphor that its key word, “mile”, doesn’t really make native English speakers think of the literal meaning at all. It was a close call, but that’s how I decided to go.

  In Chapter 18, Sagan mentions a Paris bus
that would bring Lucile to within 300 meters of Antoine’s place, and Westhoff converted this distance to 300 yards, whereas I, in this context, wouldn’t touch a yard with a ten-foot pole; my move was to leave the distance intact, at 300 meters. Now why on earth should I act so skittish of yards when I was perfectly willing to embrace a mile? The answer is that “see it a mile off ” is just a metaphor for “pick up on it very easily”, and no physical distance is involved, whereas the gap from bus stop to apartment is a genuine distance. Although a yard is so nearly a meter that the trade might seem almost irresistible, the concomitant shift into the Anglo-Saxon measuring system struck me as a subtle but nontrivial slide down the slippery transculturation slope, so I resisted it.

  As this little contrast makes clear, each translation question, whether large or small, sets up a unique and unpredictable combination of mental pressures, so that simple, hard-and-fast rules seldom yield insightful answers. This is why I feel very uncomfortable with attempts to develop a scientific or precise or rigorous “theory of translation”. In my opinion, translation is a subtle, subjective, esthetic art, not a precise science or set of rigid rules. To the contrary, it involves thinking and judging without ever any letup. And the final example in this little family will, I think, bring this out very nicely.