Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International)

by Julian Barnes

  Within the novel, the filial hatred is just an inexplicable given. However, book chat (not always to be despised) turns up an interview Houellebecq gave to Lire magazine a few years ago. The novelist’s parents abandoned him when he was five, leaving him in the care of a grandmother. ‘My father’, says Houellebecq, ‘developed early on a sense of excessive guilt. He once told me the strangest thing: that he devoted himself to intense physical activity so much because it stopped him thinking. He was a mountain guide.’

  No reason why this strange confession shouldn’t be used by a fiction writer; but if it is to work, it needs to be supported fictionally. In Platform the slippage between ‘Michel R’ and Michel H is more serious than this little bit of autobiographical leaching might suggest. There are problems with the narrative, officially a first-person account by Michel R, but one which dodges into the third person if it needs to tell us what only Michel H can know. (There is even an incompetent moment when Michel R gives us his judgement on a character he hasn’t yet met.) Within Michel himself, there is also some curious slippage. Thus he sets off on holiday with ‘two American best-sellers that I’d bought pretty much at random at the airport’ (this despite feeling de haut en bas about Forsyth and Grisham); he also has the Guide du Routard. Fair enough for a sex tourist, you might think. Later, a bit surprisingly, he panics at the thought of having nothing to read. Later still, when back home, he turns out to be an assiduous reader of Auguste Comte and Milan Kundera; he also quotes confidently from Kant, Schopenhauer and social theoreticians. Is this credibly the same character, or someone shifting to meet the needs of the moment?

  This sense of Houellebecq being a clever man who is a less than clever novelist obtrudes most in the novel’s dealings with Islam. Structurally, the function of what Michel calls ‘the absurd religion’ appears to be to deliver, at the end, an extreme and murderous disapproval of the happy sex tourists. Its running presence, however, consists in a trio of outbursts. First from Aïcha, who launches unasked into a denunciation of her Mecca-stupefied father and her useless brothers: ‘They get blind drunk on pastis and all the while they strut around like the guardians of the one true faith, and they treat me like a slut because I prefer to go out and work rather than marry some stupid bastard like them.’ Next there is the Egyptian once encountered by Michel in the Valley of the Kings, an immensely cultivated and intelligent genetic engineer, for whom Muslims are ‘the losers of the Sahara’ and Islam a religion born among ‘filthy Bedouins’ who did nothing but ‘bugger their camels’. Then there is the Jordanian banker met in Bangkok, who in the course of general denunciation points out that the sexual paradise promised to Islamic martyrs is much more cheaply obtainable in any hotel massage parlour. Extraordinary that three casual meetings on three different continents should turn up three vociferous Arab Islam-despisers who disappear from the narrative immediately after their work is done. This isn’t so much an author with his thumb on the scales as one clambering into the weighing pan and doing a tap dance. (Book-chat parenthesis: Houellebecq told Lire magazine that his mother had become a Muslim, adding, ‘I can’t bear Islam.’)

  Before I started reading this novel, a French friend gave me an unexpected warning: ‘There’s a scene where the narrator and his girlfriend and another woman have a threesome in the hammam at the thalassotherapy centre in Dinard. Well, I’ve been there,’ he went on, his tone hardening, ‘and it’s just not possible.’ He is not a pedantic man, and his attitude surprised me. But now I quite understand it. Fictional insolence is a high-risk venture: it must, as Atomised did, take you by the ear and brain and frog-march you, convince you with the force of its rhetoric and the rigour of its despair. It should allow no time for reactions like, Hang on, that’s not true; or, Surely people aren’t that bad; or even, Actually, I’d like to think this one over. Platform, fuelled more by opinions and riffs and moments of provocation than by thorough narrative, allows such questionings to enter the reader’s head far too often. Is sex like this? Is love like this? Are Muslims like this? Is humanity like this? Is Michel depressed, or is the world depressing? Camus, who began by creating in Meursault one of the most disaffected characters in post-war fiction, ended by writing The First Man, in which ordinary lives are depicted with the richest observation and sympathy. It seems less likely that Houellebecq will ever succeed in purging the sin of despair.

  TRANSLATING MADAME BOVARY

  IF YOU GO to the web page of the restaurant L’Huîtrière (3 rue des Chats Bossus, Lille) and click on ‘translate’, the zealous automaton you have stirred up will instantly render everything into English, including the address. And it comes out as ‘3 street cats humped’. Translation is clearly too important a task to be left to machines. But what sort of human should it be given to?

  Imagine that you are about to read a great French novel for the first time, and can only do so in your native English. The book itself is over 150 years old. What would – should – do – you want? The impossible, of course. But what sort of impossible? For a start, you would probably want it not to read like ‘a translation’. You want it to read as if it had originally been written in English – even if, necessarily, by an author deeply knowledgeable about France. You would want it not to clank and whirr as it dutifully renders every single nuance, turning the text into an exposition of the novel rather than the novel itself. You would want it to provoke in you most of the same reactions as it would provoke in a French reader (though you would want some sense of distance, and the pleasure of exploring a different world). But what sort of French reader? One from the late 1850s, or the early 2010s? Would you want the novel to have its original effect, or an effect coloured by the later history of French fiction, including the consequences of this very novel’s existence? Ideally, you would want to understand every period reference – for instance, to Trafalgar pudding, or Ignorantine friars, or Mathieu Laensberg – without needing to flick downwards or onwards to footnotes. Finally, if you want the book in ‘English’, what sort of English do you choose? Put simply, on the novel’s first page, do you want the schoolboy Charles Bovary’s trousers to be held up by braces, or do you want his pants to be held up by suspenders? The decisions, and the coloration, are irrevocable.

  So we might fantasise the translator of our dreams: someone, naturally, who admires the novel and its author, and who sympathises with its heroine; a woman, perhaps, to help us better navigate the sexual politics of the time; someone with excellent French and better English, perhaps with a little experience of translating in the opposite direction as well. Then we make a key decision: should this translator be ancient or modern? Flaubert’s contemporary, or ours? After a little thought, we might plump for an Englishwoman of Flaubert’s time, whose prose would inevitably be free of anachronism or other style-jarringness. And if she was of the time, then might we not reasonably imagine the author helping her? Let’s push it further: the translator not only knows the author, but lives in his house, able to observe his spoken as well as his written French. They might work side by side on the text for as long as it takes. And now let’s push it to the limit: the female English translator might become the Frenchman’s lover – they always say that the best way to learn a language is through pillow talk.

  As it happens, this dream was once a reality. The first known translation of Madame Bovary was undertaken from a fair copy of the manuscript by Juliet Herbert, governess to Flaubert’s niece Caroline, in 1856–7. Quite possibly, she was Gustave’s lover; certainly, she gave him English lessons. ‘In six months, I will read Shakespeare like an open book,’ he boasted; and together they translated Byron’s ‘Prisoner of Chillon’ into French. (Back in 1844, Flaubert claimed to his friend Louis de Cormenin that he had translated Candide into English.) In May 1857, Flaubert wrote to Michel Lévy, the Parisian publisher of Madame Bovary, that ‘An English translation which fully satisfies me is being made under my eyes. If one is going to appear in England, I want it to be this one and not any other one.’ Five years lat
er, he was to call Juliet Herbert’s work ‘a masterpiece’. But by this time it – and she – were beginning to disappear from literary history. Though Flaubert had asked Lévy to fix Juliet up with an English publisher, and believed he had written to Richard Bentley & Sons about the matter, no such letter from Paris survives in the Bentley archives (perhaps because Lévy secretly objected to the idea and declined to act on it). The manuscript was lost, and so – more or less – was Juliet Herbert, until her resurrection in 1980 by Hermia Oliver’s Flaubert and an English Governess.

  So the British reader had to wait another three decades – until 1886, six years after the author’s death – for the first published translation of Madame Bovary. It too was made by a woman, Eleanor Marx-Aveling (Marx’s daughter – a quiet irony, given Flaubert’s caustic views on the Commune), as is the very latest, by the American short-story writer – and Proust translator – Lydia Davis. In between, most of the nineteen or so versions have been made by men. The best-known of them are Francis Steegmuller and Gerard Hopkins; and though Steegmuller did write some fiction – including mysteries under the name of David Keith – it’s a fair bet that Davis is the best fiction writer ever to translate the novel. Which suggests a further question to the opening list: would you rather have your great novel translated by a good writer or a less good one? This is not as idle a question as it seems. That perfect translator must be a writer able to subsume him- or herself into the greater writer’s text and identity. Writer-translators with their own style and world view might become fretful at the necessary self-abnegation; on the other hand, disguising oneself as another writer is an act of the imagination, and perhaps easier for the better writer. So if Rick Moody tells us that Lydia Davis is ‘the best prose stylist in America’, and Jonathan Franzen that ‘Few writers now working make the words on the page matter more’, does this make her better or worse equipped to render the best prose stylist of nineteenth-century France into twenty-first-century American English? Davis’s stories, typically from two or three lines to two or three pages, are decidedly un-Flaubertian in scope and extent; they vary from the wry episode and rapt reverie to the slightly arch two-liner; and if there is French influence around it is from a later date (thus Davis’s ‘The Race of the Patient Motorcyclists’ seems to owe a debt to Jarry). Her own life is clearly the basis for some of the stories, whereas Flaubert’s aesthetic was famously based on self-exclusion. On the other hand, Davis’s work shares the Flaubertian virtues of compression, irony and an extreme sense of control. And if Flaubert in his monasticism and exemplary pertinacity is a writer’s writer, Davis was described to me recently by an American novelist as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’. That her translation of Madame Bovary was deemed worthy of serialisation by Playboy magazine – which puffed it as ‘The most scandalous novel of all time’ on the cover – is a noisier irony of which Flaubert might well have approved. The publicity sheet for the Viking (US) edition calls Emma ‘the original desperate housewife’, which, cheesy though it sounds, isn’t far off the mark. Madame Bovary is many things – a perfect piece of fictional machinery, the pinnacle of realism, the slaughterer of Romanticism, a complex study of failure – but it is also the first great shopping-and-fucking novel.

  At least none of those nineteen or so translators has needed to recast its title; problems start, rather, with the subtitle, ‘Moeurs de province’. You can have ‘Provincial Manners’ (Marx-Aveling), ‘Life in a Country Town’ (Hopkins, 1948), ‘A Tale of Provincial Life’ (Alan Russell, 1950), ‘Provincial Lives’ (Geoffrey Wall, 1992), or ‘Provincial Ways’ (Lydia Davis). No one, as far as I can see, has adopted the cousinly subtitle of Middlemarch: ‘A Study of Provincial Life’. Several versions – including, rather surprisingly, that of Francis Steegmuller (1957) – simply delete it. Subtitles can seem fussy and old-fashioned (thus the current Penguin Middlemarch dispenses with Eliot’s five subsidiary words), but omission seems a little perverse. Many translators (or publishers) also omit the next words in the novel – the dedication to Maître Sénard, who got Flaubert off the charge of outraging morality and religion when the novel, still in serial form, was prosecuted. Lydia Davis, an impressive completist, includes both this and the other, and more important, dedicatory page of the first edition, to Flaubert’s partner-in-literature Louis Bouilhet. Though even here the translator enters a world of micro-pedantry, because there is a choice of order: authenticity might favour the first edition, which begins with the Bouilhet dedication (in fact, a printer’s misleaving), while sense will prefer the corrected edition of 1873, which opens with the Sénard tribute.

  But then translation involves micro-pedantry as much as the full yet controlled use of the linguistic imagination. The plainest sentence is full of hazard; often the choices available seem to be between different percentages of loss. It’s no surprise that Lydia Davis took three years to translate Madame Bovary – some translations need as long as the book itself took to write, a few even longer. John Rutherford’s magisterial version of Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta – a kind of Spanish Bovary – used up, according to his calculation, five times as much of his life as it had of the original author’s. ‘Translation is a strange business,’ he noted in his introduction, ‘which sensible people no doubt avoid.’ Take a simple detail from the first pages of Flaubert’s novel. In his early years, Charles Bovary is allowed by his parents to run wild. He follows the ploughmen, throwing clods of earth at the crows; he minds turkeys and does a little bell-ringing. Flaubert awards such activities a paragraph, and then summarises the consequences of this pre-adolescent life in two short sentences which he pointedly sets out as a separate paragraph:

  Aussi poussa-t-il comme un chêne. Il acquit de fortes mains, de belles couleurs.

  The meaning is quite clear; there are no hidden traps or false friends. If you want to try putting this into English yourself first, then look away now. Here are six attempts from the last 125 years to translate yet not traduce:

  1) Meanwhile he grew like an oak; he was strong of hand, fresh of colour.

  2) And so he grew like an oak-tree, and acquired a strong pair of hands and a fresh colour.

  3) He grew like a young oak-tree. He acquired strong hands and a good colour.

  4) He throve like an oak. His hands grew strong and his complexion ruddy.

  5) And so he grew up like an oak. He had strong hands, a good colour.

  6) And so he grew like an oak. He acquired strong hands, good colour.

  All contain the same information, but only the words ‘he’, ‘like’ and ‘strong’ are consistent to all six. Some of the matters these translators would have considered (on a scale from pertinent reflection to gut feel) would include:

  • Whether to lay the paragraph out as two sentences or one; if the latter, then whether the break should be marked by a comma or a semicolon.

  • Whether, indeed, to lay it out as a separate paragraph anyway: thus 1) chooses to run it on at the end of the previous paragraph, which makes its summarising effect less pointed.

  • Whether pousser implies more vigour than the English ‘grow’: hence 4)’s ‘throve’ and 5)’s addition of the intensifying ‘up’.

  • Whether acquit is best rendered by a neutral word like ‘had’ or ‘was’; or whether it is a verb indicating a kind of action, intended to parallel poussa. Hence ‘acquired’ or ‘grew’ – though if you have ‘grew’ here, you need a different verb in the first sentence: hence ‘throve’.

  • Whether you need to – or can – keep the balance of de fortes mains, de belles couleurs. Only 1) does this by putting them both in the singular; the rest introduce an imbalance of number.

  • What to do about belles couleurs. All six translators agree that there is no way of preserving the plural form. But a) do you need to unpack this a little, and indicate that the young lad is acquiring a ‘fresh’ or ‘ruddy’ colour, or indeed ‘complexion’ (which decides that couleurs is limited to the face – though reference has already been made,
on the novel’s first page, to his ‘red wrists’); or b) is it self-evident where the lad is, and what is happening to his skin, so a non-specific ‘good’ echoes a non-specific belles?

  All these six versions – given in chronological order – have their virtues; none is obviously superior. 1) is Marx-Aveling, a version which, as Davis notes in her introduction, caused Nabokov ‘much indignation in his marginal notations but to which he resorted in teaching the novel’; 2) is Russell; 3) Hopkins; 4), which even on this short evidence looks freer than the others, is Steegmuller; 5) is Wall; and 6) Davis. Wall and Davis are the two who stick closest to the original sentence structure and are least ‘interpretative’.

  There is a slightly pretentious term in wine tasting and wine writing called ‘mouthfeel’. (It is also slightly baffling – where else might you feel wine if not in your mouth? On your foot?) The Oxford Companion to Wine calls it a ‘nonspecific tasting term, used particularly for red wines, to indicate those textural attributes, such as smoothness, that produce tactile sensations on the surface of the oral cavity’. There is similar mouthfeel about translation. The general trend of translation over the last century and more has been away from smoothness and towards authenticity, away from a reorganising interpretativeness which aims for the flow of English prose, towards a close-reading fidelity – enjoy those tannins! – which seeks to echo the original language. We no longer use the verb ‘to English’ – it sounds proprietorial, even imperialist – but when Flaubert was first being translated it was still in use: thus the first London and New York edition of Salammbô – published in 1886, the same year as Marx-Aveling’s Madame Bovary – is described on its title page as having been ‘Englished’ by (wait for it) ‘M. French Sheldon’. This progress away from ‘Englishing’ can be seen in the six versions of Charles’s growing (up) quoted above. Similarly, in Chekhov translation, Constance Garnett has been succeeded by Ronald Hingley. Succeeded, and yet not supplanted: some of us continue to read the Garnett translations. Mainly because they do the time-travelling work instantly, and give a better illusion of being a reader back then, rather than a reader now inspecting a text from long ago through precision optical instruments. It may be, however, that something different, or additional, is going on: a kind of imprinting. The first translation we read of a classic novel, like the first recording we hear of a piece of classical music, ‘is’ and remains that novel, that symphony. Subsequent interpreters may have a better grasp of the language, or play the piece on period instruments, but that initial version always takes some shifting.