by Kate Briggs
Is that right? It is such a powerful, pervasive idea: that out ahead, on the horizon of approaching history there is, there will be, coming, the right translator, the one always meant to be more congruously paired with this writer, this work, who will, this time, once and for all, handle it appropriately. It is the thought – or the hope – animating the review that says: this is disappointing, this unlikely match; this one is regrettable. This one, as David Luke maintained, writing to the TLS in support of Timothy Buck’s devastating review, is ‘debased’ and ‘a continuing scandal’.
But no. I don’t think so. Books don’t come with designated translators; they don’t have built-in protocols, accepted codes of behaviour which can be followed (success) or ignored (failure). Our manners of translating have to be each time improvised and invented in new response to the book in hand. Like meeting someone late at night at a party. Then bumping into them again the morning after and taking measure of the small charge in the air between the two of us; registering, in all the little ways, how things were last night, how different they might be today. Tact, Barthes tells us, requires the punctilious elimination of repetition: tact is scared, it is hurt by repetition. And so, as a principle, it is, in principle, unexpected and so unsystematizable, unparadigmatizable. This time a slender monk with his soft-haired brush, the next a plumper one, and the time after that – why not? – a handsome middle-class maiden in full costume.
‘Dear and beloved, it is so sweet for me to think that I know you so well and so secretly,’ wrote Bussy to Gide in a letter dated 1 October 1930: ‘Nobody could possibly imagine our incongruous friendship.’
Yes, but. Hold on: with this principle of tact, is Barthes not speaking very generally, is he not in the process of devising some new all-purpose classification for a behaviour, for a manner of being, that he is also saying is not generalizable and, more precisely, would fail, if it were codifiable, predictable? Yes, says Barthes. You’re right, in a telegrammatic note which, in Krauss and Hollier’s translation, reads: ‘I did it because there is a residue: residue = nothing more to say than the fact itself: that which one can posit, state, say, tell: we enter the discourse of anecdote.’ We can offset the rush to the general with the slower, finer phrasing of the facts themselves, possibly; with ‘the salient features of one’s particular situation’. Let me tell you something that happened to me. Let me tell you a little bit about how things are, how they have been, for me. A table by the window; boys leaping, sometimes, from wall-top to wall-top outside. A book on the table that was never meant to be a book. Notes for a sequence of lectures that were intended to be delivered – to pass, to go by, and then fade: Le cours c’est comme une fleur, vous permettez, mais qui va passer. A lecture course is what will pass, it is what will fade, notes Barthes. But of course it didn’t: the project of translation was to make another book, a further book on the basis of what was never written to become a book. In the translation of this preoccupying sentence, there are norms and codes that apply – general behaviours that might work for this situation, and that I could use again elsewhere, or teach. There’s also something unrepeatable.
‘I am to see Madame Knopf this afternoon at 4,’ wrote Gide on 18 November 1929. He and Bussy shared an American publisher with Thomas Mann, but whereas the Knopfs worked hard to secure Lowe-Porter’s position as Mann’s translator, with Bussy it was different. ‘Tea is enough,’ Gide went on, ‘I shrank from the prospect of dinner. I dare her to prove to me that your translations are bad; the various reviews of you I receive from America are on the contrary so laudatory of you that I doubt she will risk a fresh attack.’ In a footnote, editor Richard Tedeschi narrates how, from the beginning, ‘the Knopf company and its agents had maintained that D. B.’s translations were poor, and had encouraged Gide to entrust his work to other translators.’
Following that early miserable translation class, my first self-directed effort at French to English translating was the first chapter of Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925). The book had been set reading on a course I took in my last undergraduate year; I knew very little about Paris, was learning a bit about French culture, and this is impossible, I remember thinking: the particular location of the jardin du Luxembourg, where it is and what it means; the fontaine Médicis where the young lycéens would gather to talk art, philosophie, sports, politique et littérature; what their kind of lycée was, in Paris’s fifth arrondissement, what it meant and what it still means; the way they wouldn’t talk, actually, they causaient – they would chat, or something like it; the way so much of this opening section unfolds in the curious ongoing repeated everyday action of the imparfait; the way they’d shake each other’s hands just like that, casually; an everyday greeting among adolescent boys which struck me, then, still close enough to my own teenage years, as wholly unimaginable; the way one of the boys sits on a bench, reading Action française – a wooden bench painted dark green, probably, contrasting with movable metal chairs that now also furnish the jardin du Luxembourg, their distinctive – beautiful, I think – soft pale green, how cold they can be (when were the metal chairs introduced I wonder? What is the precise cultural significance of the Action française? I’d have to find out); the way Lucien, who writes poetry, is shy, but will venture to tell a distracted Olivier about his project for a novel nevertheless: what I would like, he says, is to tell a story, not from the point of view of a character, but of a place – tiens, he says, familiarly, because he is confiding in his friend – tiens, par exemple, a place like this one; it would be the story of an allée de jardin, like this one, and would narrate what happens there, or here (ce qui s’y passe: what goes on, what goes by, what passes, perhaps, gaining and slowly losing its lustre, its colour fading out) from morning till night. The way Gide’s sentences unfold at the rhythm of a young man thinking, precise clauses held together so delicately by just a comma; the use of repetition, of idiom: Il y viendrait d’abord des bonnes d’enfants, des nourrices, avec des rubans… Non, non… d’abord des gens tout gris, sans sexe ni âge, pour balayer l’allée, arroser l’herbe, changer les fleurs, enfin la scène et le décor avant l’ouverture des grilles, tu comprends? What to do with this, how possibly to render all this?
But then I began; I think I must have begun, amateurishly. The project of it – at once contained, constrained, and open to me. Open, as well, to the future, since it’s all to come: nothing has yet been decided. With translation, you begin: at the risk of getting it all wrong and with the original pages next to you as you write (to go back to, to keep repeatedly going back to), you set out, you begin to test out possible solutions to the questions and problems that the project of translating (translating, setting down language, using and working its materials) causes to emerge, and something happens. Some new thing starts to get made in the frame of againness; something that is of the original, yes, but that will extend beyond the reach of it, the purview of it, since it is being made by someone else, by me now, and will be read, perhaps, by some or many others, all of them to come and for the moment elsewhere. Dorothy Bussy’s translation, The Counterfeiters, was published in 1931 (the American edition was retitled The Coiners – a decision made by her publishers that in her letters she calls ‘a sore point in [her] professional career’). The jardin du Luxembourg is translated as ‘The Luxembourg Gardens’ – an indication of how accepted standards for translation practice change (a translator would be likely to retain the French appellation now); there is a note explaining the term bachot (‘schoolboy’s slang for the baccalauréat examination’), which Bernard had stayed at home to cram for, reminding us, here on the very first page of the novel, even as we receive it in English, that everything is to be imagined as if it were narrated in French; the allées of the park (is it a park or are they formal gardens?) are paths. Reading the translation against the original I could enumerate all the further differences. Look, here is difference, I could say, and look! Look! Here is more difference – and this, too, could have been done differently (as every t
ranslation could). Meanwhile,
‘“What I should like,”’ said Lucien,
in Bussy’s 1931 translation,
‘“would be to tell the story – no, not of a person, but of a place – well, for instance, of a garden path, like this – just tell what happens in it from morning to evening. First of all, come the children’s nurses and the children, and the babies’ nurses with ribbons in their caps … No, no, … first of all, people who are grey all over and ageless and sexless and who come to sweep the path, and water the grass, and change the flowers – in fact, to set the stage and get ready the scenery before the opening of the gates. D’you see?”’
Barthes lived very close to those gates, of course. Walking up to the jardin du Luxembourg from the rue Servandoni he would have come into the park on the side of the shady fountain, the place where the boys meet and chat. I think again of the woman he describes glimpsed from his window in the lecture notes on How to Live Together: the mother (or was it one of those nurses or nannies? – there are still so many of them working in the jardin du Luxembourg) walking with her child, with her charge, in all likelihood on their way to or home from the park, pushing the empty buggy out in front of her, while holding the little boy by the hand, while walking at her own pace, too fast for the small boy. The woman – in his editor’s introduction, Claude Coste calls her ‘the bad mother’ – seen to be keeping, implacably, to her own walking rhythm, not noticing that she’s dragging the child along, seemingly unaware that she is forcing him to run to keep up. ‘And she’s his mother!’ Barthes assumes and exclaims. An image briefly described, but one that Barthes insists is central – crystallizing – for all that he would come to think and say about rhythm and power, about the effects of imposing one rhythm on – overwriting – another.
A translation should be redone every twenty-five years. It’s something I often hear people say – it is something that Barthes says in his lectures on the haiku. And I’m sure he’s right: standards change, languages change, our manner of doing things, our interests and our energies change. In a chapter on the English-language translations of Barthes’s work published in the early 1980s, Elisabeth W. Bruss shows how the timings of those translations imposed a new rhythm of reading and reception. How translation, with its necessary lags, its inevitable out-of-sync-ness, enacts exactly the kind of rhythmic incompatibility that Barthes observes from his window – arguably all the time. The first two translations to appear were ‘Criticism as Language’ in 1963, commissioned for publication in English, and On Racine, translated by Richard Howard in 1964, coming just a year after its publication in French.
Then there was a gap of three years.
Then, a second flurry of translation: this phase, says Bruss, ‘stretched roughly between 1967 (which saw the British appearance of the combined edition of Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology co-translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith – books that in French had been published a decade apart) and 1972 (when the American edition of Critical Essays appeared in Howard’s translation, along with the joint Anglo-American publication of Annette Lavers’s selections from Mythologies)’.
Another gap.
Then, from 1975 on, ‘another series of translations was issued in America and the UK at the rate of one or two a year’: S/Z, translated by Richard Miller in 1975 (it had appeared in French five years earlier), Image/Music/Text, translated by Stephen Heath in 1977, and the last sequence of books: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes in 1977 and A Lover’s Discourse in 1978, Camera Lucida in 1980, all in Richard Howard’s translations.
These timings, as Bruss shows on a chart comparing the sequence of publishing in France to the UK and America, had far more to do with the rise and fall of our Anglo-American interests than Barthes’s ‘own productive rhythms’. But they were not without their effects (the imposition of one rhythm on another, as notes Barthes in reference to the walking woman, so profoundly out of step with her charge, is never without its effects). They served to produce new relationships between the works, enabling those first written further apart to be read together, and those originally written the one after the other to be read much further apart. The outcome of this redistribution, Bruss argues, ‘was to define Barthes’s structuralist writings as the core of all that came before and after them’. To create a neat three-part narrative – beginning; high structuralist middle; late, personal, fragmented, novelistic end – which then formed the basis of a whole variety of different and competing stories about Barthes’s development as a writer, theorist and critic.
There were some commentators, for example, who saw this arc as the tale of ‘an upstart intruder’ declining into ‘an aging and outmoded writer’.
Or ‘(in another version) a writer who grew embarrassed and unsure and in the late works began to betray his own best work’.
Or ‘(in another version still)’ a writer who matured ‘to the point where he could finally disdain the changing whims of fashion and write solely for himself’.
The translations – the approaches of the individual translators, their local decisions – clearly played their part in this, too. As Bruss describes, different translators saw and valued different aspects of Barthes’s work, and she reads ‘what each took to be essential to Barthes’s prose – the conceptual machinery, the social subversions, or the cadences’ as a clue to their own preferred story. She considers, for example, Stephen Heath’s Barthes: ‘a deliberately “difficult” writer’ in Image/Music/Text ‘whose language is kept from merging too easily with entrenched, and idiomatic, English.’ And compares with the ‘fluidity and grace’ of Howard’s translations of the later works; a change in translator and in manner which would reinforce the impression – not entirely mistaken – of the late ‘emergence of a more accessible, more “readable” Barthes’.
The recent English-language translations of Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes in 2005, 2011 and 2013, together with the posthumously published Mourning Diary, which appeared in Richard Howard’s translation in 2010, a new translation of Incidents by Teresa Lavender Fagan the same year, and the five volumes of essays and interviews currently appearing in translations by Chris Turner, could be said to form a fourth wave of translation activity, making a different gathering of apparently new works, and writing a further chapter in the story of Barthes’s work in English. What is this doing to our sense of his work? The lectures that feel only recently published were of course originally produced – drafted and publicly delivered, with no view to publication – contemporaneously with the books published in the late 1970s. For me, in the translations I claim to have written myself, my preference has been for warmth. For the warmth I feel in Barthes’s mode of address. Its reach: the way it seemed to include me. And, in amongst its admissions of grief, the sharp pain of recent loss, the phrasing and pushing at the vital questions – ‘How does one organize one’s sense of being in the world?’ is how Lucy O’Meara so beautifully summarizes them; and then, ‘How could the negative aspects of that world be imagined otherwise?’ – its humour (there are jokes in the lectures: really, quite a number of jokes).
By Barthes’s every-twenty-five years calculation, it is now time for some of the books to be translated again.
Will they be, I wonder? And what might this do to our sense of the books, to the teaching notes, to the stories we’ll tell about the relations between them, to our understanding of the body of work as a whole?
What would it be like, for instance, to read a book called The Light Room (maybe? why not? Perhaps there is a reason why, but I have never really been able to think why not). A book this time subtitled: Note on Photography. And to read it now, having read the lectures, and so not as an ending, no longer as the ultimate last work, which is how I have so often read it described, but as part of a future-orientated interest in the practice of notation, of which photography would be just one particular instance among others (ideas that Barthes works out in one of the lectures); in other words, to think of that boo
k as part of the inquiry into how to pass from the shortest form, the smallest note, to the long form, how to make something more extended and stretched and continuous out of these intense capturings, these slivers of lived experience; to think of that book as having been written somewhere on the path towards the novel-to-come.
And what would it be like, I wonder, to read – to newly reread – Roland Barthes? Or a book this time titled Fragments of a lover’s (of a loving?) discourse?
The love letter is ‘a special dialectic’; at once coded and expressive. ‘Charged’, as Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse, ‘with the longing to signify desire’.
One special feature of the Gide-Bussy correspondence is its bilingualism: with very few exceptions, across so many years of writing to each other, Bussy would write to Gide in English, and Gide would reply in French. Hence Gide’s request in a very early letter: ‘Allow me to write in French, because I have precise things to tell you and am afraid of not being clear enough.’ But, as the citation shows, the bilingualism wasn’t preserved in the English translation (how could it have been?). Here the italics do the work of indicating when Gide was really writing in English. They ask us to imagine it. In his introduction to the French edition, Jean Lambert expresses regret that Bussy’s letters could not be presented in their original form. But he’s also intrigued as to why Bussy should have kept choosing to write in English in the first place. Unlike Gide, her competence in her second language, he notes, was exemplary. What’s more, the correspondence was to go on for more than thirty years, so it can’t just have been a matter of continuing her role as Gide’s English instructor. Perhaps it had to do, Lambert suggests, with a similar feeling of ease in her own language, and her own concern for precision. Lambert picks up especially on the way Bussy alternately exploits and gets exasperated by the English distinction between ‘to like’ and ‘to love’ (aimer in French) in her letters. To the point where one day she decides all of a sudden to write:
