The Heptameron
Page 3
4. TRANSLATIONS
The first work of Marguerite of Navarre to attract the attention of an English translator was not the Heptaméron but a long religious poem called Le Miroir de I’ame pécheresse (The Mirror of the Sinful Soul), first published in 1531. It appeared in England in 1548 and again in 1570 with the title A Godly Meditation of the Christian Soul. There are two reasons why it is worth mentioning. One is that it had been condemned by the Sorbonne because it was alleged to contain heretical elements. The other is that the translator, according to the title page, was none other than the eleven-year-old daughter of Henry VIII, Elizabeth, the future queen and head of the English church.
It was during Elizabeth’s reign that the Heptaméron itself was first translated, with the title The Queen of Navarre’s Tales Containing Verie pleasant Discourses of fortunate lovers. Seventeen tales only were included: the first nine from the first day, stories 2, 4, 5 and 6 from the second day, stories 9 and 10 from the third day and two tales that do not appear to belong to the French corpus at all. The discussion passages linking the stories were omitted altogether. The title suggests that Boaistuau’s edition was the basis of the translation, but unlike Boaistuau’s version it clearly attributes the collection to Marguerite. Indeed the writer of the preface (who admits that he has not even read the book!) regards Marguerite’s name on the title page as sufficient recommendation to English readers, and so feels confident in offering to them ‘pleasure and recreation… contained within the limits both of wit and modesty’.
The first complete translation appeared during Cromwell’s Commonwealth, and was by Robert Codrington, who also translated a number of theological and devotional works. He followed the Gruget text (although his title partly follows Boaistuau’s), with the exception of the verse passages, which he left out. In his ‘To the Reader’, Codrington gives a glimpse of the way the Heptaméron was interpreted. Marguerite was still associated primarily with reformed religion and the Heptaméron is presented as above all an edifying text. Though slightly uncertain of Marguerite’s exact theological orientation (‘For the Divinity of this great Lady in many places here inferred, it is left to your Candor to interpret of it’), he thinks the moral and philosophical content indubitable:
… for the Philosophy you shall undoubtedly find, that most wisely she hath sorted her discourse, in fit persons, to the four Complexions of the Natural Body. Besides, you shall everywhere read most excellent Precepts of Moral Philosophy…
Moreover, he regards the Heptaméron as aimed at ecclesiastical authority, Catholic theologians and the religious orders: the ‘Canonists’, the ‘Casuists’ and the ‘Friers and Religious Men’. Indeed, according to Codrington it was the ‘Friers and Religious Men’ who had deliberately suppressed the last three days of tales, and Gruget’s preface was essentially a complaint about such interference. As well as appealing to the religious content of the work, Codrington found it necessary to appease the puritanical spirit by apologizing for anything that might appear ‘too light’. He begs the reader to balance it with ‘that which shall be found more solid’, and to attribute lapses of taste to the ‘simplicity of those times, and to the condition of that Court, where Mars and Venus were for a long time the two culminating Planets’.
An attempt to produce a popular English version was made around 1750 in a collaborative translation: Novels, Tales and Stories. Written Originally in French, by Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navar. There were only eight tales (the first six, the eighth and ninth), no Prologue, and none of the discussion passages. The anonymous translators gave no indication of the text they used. It could have been a stylistically updated edition which first appeared in France in 1698, and which became the standard eighteenth-century version.
Codrington’s translation remained the only serious attempt until Victorian scholar’s got to work on Le Roux de Lincy’s new French edition of 1853–4, apparently as much in search of the erotic as in a desire for scholarly accuracy. Walter Keating Kelly came to the Heptaméron after translating Boccaccio’s Decameron (1864), and after editing and translating two volumes entitled Erotica (1848). His Heptameron of Margaret, Queen of Navarre proclaims the authenticity of Le Roux de Lincy’s text, on which the translation is supposed to be based. It also includes the three alternative stories of dubious authenticity found only in Gruget’s edition. But the verse passages (stories 13, 19, 26 and 64), which are an intrinsic part of the French versions, are either completely omitted or briefly summarized in prose. Kelly’s translation proved fairly successful. There were re-issues incorporating the engraved illustrations of Leopold Flameng, which had been used in a French edition of 1870-72 by Paul Lacroix, and there were others using the engravings of S. Freudenberger and B. A. Dunker found in French editions of the eighteenth century. Like all the Victorian and early-twentieth-century translators of the Heptaméron Kelly is anxious about its content. Whereas Codrington had been able to emphasize uplifting philosophy, Kelly can only worry about ‘the questionable morality’ and the ‘free language’. Inexplicably, he believes that the Heptaméron’s first editors (‘those manifold offenders’) were responsible for what he calls ‘grossly obscene passages’. The attitude still persists in a selection from Kelly’s version published in 1927, which suppresses what are described as ‘such discussions as are… of a tiresomely waggish turn’ and modifies ‘an occasional phrase that seemed unnecessarily crude’. The Kelly translation itself is frequently inaccurate, and, with its literary archaisms embedded in nineteenth-century literary syntax, largely indigestible.
Arthur Machen, a translator of Casanova’s Mémoires and a prolific editor and essayist, took up the cudgels against his predecessors in the preface to his own, new and (so he claimed) complete, accurate and stylistically appropriate translation, which was privately printed in 1885. Codrington’s translation he thought ‘careless and hasty’, Kelly’s marred by ‘phenomenal ignorance and portentous blundering’. True, Kelly omits some passages, mistranslates others and misunderstands sixteenth-century customs. But Machen’s own attempts to ‘give the work a thoroughly English dress’ are not altogether happy, either. He, too, misunderstands sixteenth-century social institutions. A significant example is marriage by ‘paroles de présent’(‘words in the present’), which, stretching syntax and vocabulary beyond credibility, is translated as ‘word and gift’. However, Machen’s great pride is his style. He feels impelled, he declares, to choose an older form of English: ‘The work is calculated to remind readers rather of Walton than Macaulay.’ No attention was given apparently to the stylistic variation within the text, which distinguishes speakers and types of discourse. The result, when it is not some species of mistranslation, constitutes a serious stylistic obstacle for a twentieth-century reader. For example, the apothecary’s servant in story 52, which is essentially a scatological farce, picks up some frozen excrement. ‘Straightway,’ goes the translation, ‘he wrapped it in a brave white paper.’ Archaisms like ‘much folk’ (Prologue), ‘arrant knave’ and ‘fain to try to make a child’ (story 41) can only be read ironically in current English. Machen’s version has one merit, however, and that is its relative completeness: Le Roux’s text with the alternative Gruget tales for 44 and 46 (the alternative for 11 is omitted without comment), and translations of the original verse passages into English verse.
The handsomest and most scholarly of the nineteenth-century translations was by John Smith Chartres, a lawyer, and a translator of Flaubert’s Salammbô. Published in 1894 in five volumes for the Society of English Bibliophilists, it had an introduction by George Saintsbury, was extensively annotated on the Le Roux model and carried the Freudenberg and Dunker engravings. The text is complete and the verse passages rendered in verse. The translation is predominantly accurate, though a few problems (‘paroles de présent’, again) persist. The style does not suffer from imposed archaisms. The greatest disadvantage of this version is that like its source, the Le Roux edition, it does not make use of the de Thou manuscript.
The last in the line of Victorian translations is stamped Unexpurgated. It was claimed to be a totally new rendering by ‘W – that is, W. M. Thomson, who was responsible for translations of an astonishingly wide variety: the Song of Songs, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Renan, Schopenhauer and Tolstoy. This ‘unexpurgated’ translation of the Heptaméron is actually the most coy of all. Without comment it suppresses the story of the lady in the latrines (story 11) and the story of the frozen faeces (story 52), and makes many verbal modifications. Without stating his source text W. M. Thomson appears to be using Le Roux selectively, with an admixture of an earlier edition by Lacroix. He follows Kelly in glossing over the verse passages.
It is worth repeating that there exists no definitive critical edition of the Heptaméron. What we have from Marguerite’s day are the seventeen variant manuscripts and the two conflicting printed editions. Codrington’s translation represents the most complete of these two early editions, that of Gruget. The Victorian translators represent an attempt to establish a translation on the basis of the manuscript sources. Since then there have been improvements (though not as many as one might wish) in our knowledge of these sources. It is on the most up-to-date accessible edition of the manuscript source – that of Michel François – that the present translation is based. In addition, however, and for the first time in an English translation, it utilizes the de Thou manuscript of 1553. Though clearly heavily edited by de Thou, this manuscript is linguistically the most coherent in the corpus, and offers a sixteenth-century reader’s clarification of the difficulties found in the other manuscripts. But the present translation does not pretend to be a critical edition, so the de Thou variants are not quoted systematically, but incorporated in the text according to two criteria. They are used (a) if they make better sense contextually than the François version and (b) if they offer a bolder or more illuminating reading from a historical point of view. All readings from de Thou are indicated by [ ]. Variants from Gruget’s edition have not been used, and this includes his three alternative tales, which at the present time are still difficult to attribute. The summaries of the tales are based on de Thou.
5. TRANSLATABILITY
The most obvious of the problems any translator of the Heptaméron faces is the confused condition of numerous passages in his source. Fortunately, where the sense is contradictory or obscure, or where narrative sequence is awkward, it is possible to make plausible deductions from the surrounding context, as would any French reader of the original. The guiding principle has been to reproduce in English a meaningful reading of the original, not a mechanical transcription of words on a page. There are, however, more serious and more interesting problems, and they are of three kinds.
The problem of the first kind is that of’accessing’ a world that is at once familiar yet not familiar. Translation is only possible to the extent that the cultures (in the broadest sense) on which the two languages depend overlap. There is sufficient cultural difference in the case of the Heptaméron to make the task of translation interesting and revealing, but sufficient cultural overlap for translation to be relatively direct. Nonetheless this leaves a large area of meaning where the sets of words encoding social institutions, relationships, moral categories and the like do not coincide exactly with those of modern English (or those of modern French, for that matter). This kind of problem is closely linked to the second and third. The second kind of problem results from the unique peculiarities of the source language. Two or more different words or parts of words may be phonologically similar in the language of the original, but their available translation equivalents may be dissimilar. In other words, puns, ambiguities and verbal associations cannot always be transposed, which means that important aspects of the original mental world may be lost. The third kind of problem has to do with personal style of speech and with ‘register’, that is, with variation in style depending on who is speaking on which topic in which circumstances. This is a delicate matter in translation, since it has to do with highly variable and rapidly changing social expectations of one kind or another. With these three perennial translation problems in mind the most a translator can do is indicate his own practice and point out the areas where there appear to be inherent blockages in transmission.
Certain of the social institutions in the Heptaméron seem to be best dealt with by using loan-words – that is, by keeping French originals, many of which may already be familiar to English speakers. Thus terms like gouvernante, maître des requêtes, etc., seem to be culturally specific enough, yet intelligible enough, to warrant their retention in a number of instances. The same is true of terms of address like Monsieur, Madame, which are also used in circumstances (such as conversation between spouses) where their rough equivalents would sound distinctly odd to modern readers. Important words and concepts such as gentilhomme(‘noble-man’) and serviteur (a servant – who could be a lesser noble serving a superior, but also a nobleman chivalrously ‘serving’ a lady) are sufficiently remote as to require varying treatment to bring out relevant meanings in specific contexts. Such terms often cover a semantic space that is now subdivided and covered by several specialized words in modern English. This is particularly true of vocabulary denoting moral categories and emotional reactions. The word honnête is one of the most crucial in the whole Heptaméron. Its semantic space is covered by many different modern English words, from ‘aristocratic’ to ‘chaste’. The conflation of categories of this kind is thematically important in a number of stories – for instance, the storytellers’ surprise that a low-born working woman (story 5) or a bourgeoise (story 42) could have ‘noble’ principles, where ‘noble’ merges social with moral categories. While the English word ‘noble’ does in fact in this case cover something of the appropriate area of meaning, it is not always a feasible translation for a specific context. Faced with this situation, translators have various courses. They can opt for loan translation, that is, consistently use some such word as ‘honest’ or ‘honourable’, and extend the normal boundaries of its English meaning and use, at the cost of linguistic awkwardness. Or they can vary the translation depending on context, possibly disturbing the original conceptual world. In other words, although it might be consistent to use, say, ‘honest’ to translate honnête, ‘honest’ may not ‘sound right’ in all those instances where consistency would require it. For the sake of naturalness and fluency, I have generally chosen to vary the translations according to English context.
Amongst other things the Heptaméron is concerned with language itself, with the expression, disguise and distortion of meaning, and with the sensuous substance of speech. There is thus in the original a whole stratum of meaning which derives from the particular shapes and sounds of the French used, and which is manifested in numerous kinds of repetition, multiple meaning and word-play. When it is purely a matter of rhetorical repetition of words or phrases, this can usually be matched in English, and similar effects reproduced, though where it seems likely to appear so heavy-handed as to impede reading, I have taken the liberty of reducing it. But there are many instances where the structure of English simply does not permit one to suggest the same associations and categorizations as the original. The term Cordelier is a significant example. One possible translation is ‘Cordelier’, but this would not be widely understood, and I have preferred to use the more intelligible ‘Franciscan’ or simply ‘friar’. In so doing I have lost some of the semantic possibilities of Cordelier, which incorporates the’word ‘cord’, but many others would have been lost in any case. Only just beneath the surface of the Heptaméron there are some surprisingly relevant ramifications of the French word Cordelier. Corde (‘cord’) may be obvious; lier (‘bind’, ‘tie’) is less so; délier (‘unbind’, ‘untie’) even less so. But there is a constant harping on the theme of bonds, obligations, ties and relationships, and the various ways in which they can be made, maintained or undone. Moreover, this gives sense to an otherwise obscure exchange between Oisille and Nomerfide after sto
ry 5, where a pun on the word nouer(‘to tie’, but also ‘to swim’) carries both a sexual connotation (derived from the tying knots meaning) and an allusion to the Cordeliers (tiers of knots). In fact, one of the storytellers explicitly defines the Franciscans as those who both bind and unbind bonds – in this instance, the bonds of marriage. There are many other such examples. Here are a few. The contrast between ordre and ordure is one that can be carried into English, and one which is thematically important, since the Heptaméron is concerned with order, with purity in its various senses, and hence with disorder and impurity. The word mystère (in story 61, for instance) means both ‘sacred mystery’ and .’play-acting’. Oraison (story 58) means both ‘speech’ (in its two senses) and ‘prayer’. The laboureur in story 29 cannot be translated ‘labourer’, since the term actually denotes a well-off peasant farmer, but the point of the story thereby becomes obscured, because the erotic connotation of ‘labouring’ or ‘working’, which recurs throughout the book, is excluded. Play on words is most prominent, as one would expect, in the verse passages, some of which in fact explicitly refer to their own use of language. A typical example is the pun on the word diamant(‘diamond’) in the verse epistle in story 13. From diamant is extracted the two words dy (a sixteenth-century form of the imperative ‘say’) and amant(‘[male] lover’). It may be no coincidence that this tale is told by Parlamente, whose very name contains the words parle amante(‘speak [female] lover’). The Heptaméron probably contains more such covert meanings than is generally realized; many of them are untranslatable, and the reader of any translation should bear this in mind.
Some critics have found the style of the Heptaméron flat, others have thought it marked by a lively variety of tone. In my view the second assessment is the correct one, and it is important to try to convey this in an English translation. It is a feature that the earlier translations tended to mask with their uniformly archaic style. Discrepancy or inconsistency of style needs to be sharply distinguished from stylistic variation related to subject matter, communicative intention, speaker’s personality and so on. It is certainly true that there appear to be discrepancies and inconsistencies in parts of the original. These are probably due to the unfinished or unpolished state of the manuscripts, and they are found particularly in tales where distinct episodes amounting to sub-stories seem to have been cobbled together. The changing narrative style in story 15 is a case in point, and there are others too (stories 21, 22, 23, 26, 42). Even these examples, however, can, if one so decides, be regarded as part and parcel of the spontaneous story-telling in which the narrators are supposed to be engaged.