Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story

by Julian Barnes

  The authentic rendering of every last nuance of meaning cannot be the sole purpose of translation. Because if it becomes so, then it leads to the act of eccentric defiance that is Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin. In his 1955 poem ‘On Translating Eugene Onegin’, Nabokov, addressing Pushkin, writes of turning ‘Your stanza patterned on a sonnet, / Into my honest roadside prose – / All thorn, but cousin to your rose.’ When Nabokov’s version of the poem came out in 1964, it was prose laid out in stanza form, and more woody stalk than thorn. Readers of the poem in English are best advised to have the two volumes of Nabokov’s headmasterly commentary to hand while apprehending the poem’s dance and flow through, say, Charles Johnston’s version. An even weirder example of fidelity leading to perversity is Dillwyn Knox’s 1929 translation of Herodas for the Loeb Classical Library. Knox’s brilliant niece Penelope Fitzgerald describes the outcome in The Knox Brothers with a kind of sympathetic glee:

  The language of the Mimes is precious, with unpleasant affected archaisms, and an honest translation, it seemed to Dilly, must be the same. Cloistered in his study … Dilly worked out his English equivalent to Herodas. ‘La no reke hath she of what I say, but standeth goggling at me more agape than a crab’ is a typical sentence, while ‘Why can’t you tell me what they cost?’ comes out as ‘Why mumblest ne freetongued descryest the price?’ Satisfied, Dilly corrected the proofs; he read the reviews, all of which praised the accuracy of the text but considered the translation a complete failure, with indifference. ‘If I am unintelligible,’ he wrote, ‘it is because Herodas was.’

  Davis, in her introduction, notes that Gerard Hopkins’s version has ‘added material in almost every sentence’; while Steegmuller produced a ‘nicely written, engaging version, smoother than Flaubert’s, with regular restructuring of the sentences and judicious omissions and additions’. Does this sound a trifle patronising to America’s greatest Flaubertian? Here is a typical addition (or rather, substitution) which will act as a good test of the reader’s reaction. When Léon goes to meet Emma inside Rouen Cathedral, he first has to get past a verger standing in the left-hand doorway beneath a statue which Flaubert refers to as ‘Marianne dansant’. This was the popular nickname for a carving of Salome dancing on her hands before Herod. What do you do about this? Almost all translators render it as ‘Marianne Dancing’ or ‘The Dancing Marianne’. If you leave these words unannotated, readers will naturally imagine some cheery folkloric image. If you annotate them, then you divert the reader away for a guidebook moment – as elbow-tugging as the intrusive verger will prove to be to Léon and Emma. (You can half solve it, as Davis does, by having notes at the back but without indication in the text of their existence; so readers may find the solution, but perhaps not at the right time.) Or, as Steegmuller alone does, in his unannotated version, you can cut to the chase and write: ‘The verger was just then standing in the left doorway, under the figure of the dancing Salome.’ This is instantly comprehensible, and has the additional virtue of pointing up this image of lasciviousness beneath which Léon passes on his way to the tryst. (Inside the cathedral, this theme is continued: when the verger reaches the tomb of the Comte de Brézé, he solemnly points out Diane de Poitiers as a grieving widow, while the rest of us know her as a king’s mistress – also, as Emma is soon to be, the lover of a younger man.) Given that there is probably no one in Rouen who still refers to the statue as ‘Marianne dansant’, there is much to be said for Steegmuller’s solution. But some would find it overly interventionist.

  The root feature of Davis’s translation is a close attention to Flaubert’s grammar and sentence structure, and an attempt to mirror it in English. For instance, observance of the ‘comma splice’ – where two main clauses are connected by a comma rather than an ‘and’ – or of subtle tense changes imperceptible to others (and sometimes imperceptible in English). In the earlier example (Il acquit de fortes mains, de belles couleurs), she writes ‘the boy had good colour’ where Wall has ‘the boy had a good colour’: dropping the article retains the original plain adjective-noun balance. In her introduction, Davis castigates some of her predecessors for wanting ‘simply to tell this engrossing story in their own preferred manner’. Interviewed by The Times, she expanded on this: ‘I’ve found that the ones that are written with some flair and some life to them are not all that close to the original; the ones that are more faithful may be kind of clunky.’ This is the paradox and bind of translation. If to be ‘faithful’ is to be ‘clunky’, then it is also to be unfaithful, because Flaubert was not a ‘clunky’ writer. He moves between registers; he cuts into the lyric with the prosaic; but this is language whose every sentence, word, syllable has been tested aloud again and again. Flaubert said that a line of prose should be as rhythmical, sonorous and unchangeable as a line of poetry. He said that he aimed only at beauty, and wrote Madame Bovary because he hated realism (an exasperated, self-deluding claim, but still). He said that prose is like hair: it shines with combing. He combed all the time. As for those imprecise translators who nevertheless bring ‘flair’ and ‘life’ to the novel: where does that flair and life usually come from, if not the novel itself? Davis concludes: ‘So what I’m trying to do is what I think hasn’t been done, which is to create a well-written translation that’s also very close, very faithful to the French.’ This is a high claim; though I doubt any of those previous translators would have thought they were trying to do anything very different.

  Davis’s quest to be ‘very close, very faithful’ to the French works best when the Flaubertian sentence is plain and declaratory. Take that great moment of delinquent self-awareness: ‘Emma retrouvait dans l’adultère toutes les platitudes du mariage.’ Davis’s ‘Emma was rediscovering in adultery all the platitudes of marriage’ exactly reproduces the French, and has exactly the same effect. You might think hers is the obvious translation until you compare other versions. Both Steegmuller and Hopkins diminish the line by recasting it, and even Wall, who is closest to Davis, misses out the necessary, intensifying ‘all’. On the other hand, a page or two later there is this equally key sentence: ‘Tout et elle-même lui étaient insupportables.’ This is an unusual sentence. A usual sentence might be ‘Tout lui était insupportable; elle-même comprise’ or ‘y compris elle-même’. Flaubert specifically links the Tout et elle-même and it is a mistake to decouple them, as Davis does, into ‘Everything seemed unbearable to her, even herself’ (which adds the clunk of a repeated ‘her’). Wall also goes awry here: ‘It was quite unbearable, beginning with herself.’ Hopkins unpacks it perhaps too much: ‘She hated everything and everyone, including herself.’ Steegmuller is best, with: ‘She loathed everything, including herself.’ But even this doesn’t convey the full effect of that simple et – which is to indicate a separation of self from the world which will culminate in the deed which finally does separate Emma’s self from the world.

  So Davis’s division of previous translators into flair-bringers and clunkheads doesn’t really hold; nor does her claim to offer the best of both worlds. Two further examples:

  1) After Emma’s seduction by Rodolphe, there is a paragraph describing her post-coital, semi-pantheistic experience of the nature surrounding her, and with which she is for the moment in harmony. But with the last sentence, Flaubert cuts this mood brutally: ‘Rodolphe, le cigare aux dents, raccommodait avec son canif une des deux brides cassée.’ This great anti-romantic moment has Rodolphe turning both to another physical pleasure (as Gurov is to do with his watermelon in Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’), and to masculine, practical matters. All the versions cited here begin, unsurprisingly, with ‘Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth …’ Wall goes on:

  was mending one of the two broken reins with his little knife.

  Steegmuller:

  was mending a broken bridle with his penknife.

  Hopkins:

  was busy with his knife, mending a break in one of the bridles.

  Davis:

  was mending with his
penknife one of the bridles, which had broken.

  Rein or bridle? Knife, little knife, or penknife? The difference is slight; all the versions contain the same information. Flaubert’s sentence does its business by not drawing attention to itself; its very downbeatness is the point, after the more rhapsodic prose that has preceded it. Wall, Steegmuller and Hopkins all get this. Davis doesn’t. Instead, she ‘faithfully’ sticks to Flaubert’s sentence structure. But English grammar is not French grammar, and so the quiet ‘cassée’ (which for all its quietness also hints at Rodolphe’s ‘breaking’ of Emma) has to be unpacked into a ‘which had broken’ – a phrase which now seems pretty redundant, as what would he mend that wasn’t broken? The sentence has a clunkiness which is imported, rather than faithfully transmitted, and quite un-Flaubertian.

  2) During Charles and Emma’s visit to the opera in Rouen – that greatest of the three great antiphonally constructed scenes in the novel – Emma’s inner emotional life, her hopes and memories, are played off against the extravagantly exteriorised emotions of Lucia di Lammermoor. As her thoughts and feelings swirl, Emma at one point comes to recognise that both art and life are inadequate in their different ways. This is a key sentence in the novel: ‘Elle connaissait à présent la petitesse des passions que l’art exagérait.’ It is a calm, balanced sentence, in three parts, with a triple alliteration, the part containing the second and third p making up the central phrase. The choice for petitesse lies normally between ‘paltriness’ and ‘pettiness’, neither of which is perfect, as they have a slightly more disapproving tinge than petitesse. Wall’s version has the weight and progress of the original:

  For now she knew the pettiness of the passions that art exaggerates.

  Hopkins takes the alliteration elsewhere:

  She knew now the triviality of those passions which art paints so much larger than life.

  Steegmuller retains the triple alliteration:

  Now she well knew the true paltriness of the passions that art painted so large.

  Davis has:

  She knew, now, how paltry were the passions exaggerated by art.

  She needlessly turns the first major noun into an adjective, then reverses the grammar of the final phrase. But the main failing of the sentence is those first three words: ‘knew, now, how’ – both a wail of assonance and a stuttering of rhythm far from the original.

  A translation can’t be read before the period in which it is written: this is both obvious, and a kind of brute annoyance. And it can’t – or at least, shouldn’t – be written in a pastiche of the original work’s period. It must be written for the contemporary reader, yet give that reader the same, or a similar, ease or difficulty as an original reader would have had. And just as there can be delinquent looseness, so there can be misguided over-accuracy. It is very difficult to suggest (except in footnotes and introduction) the general literary context in which a book is written, which is central to the writer. Books are often written against – against romanticism, against authorial ego and intervention, against the notion that some themes are ‘higher’ than others. There is a linguistic context too: thus Michael Hofmann, introducing his translation of Metamorphosis, quotes Klaus Wagenbach to the effect that ‘the characteristic purity of Kafka, the sober construction of his sentences and the paucity of his vocabulary are not understandable without his background in Prague German’. Further, no two languages’ grammars match, and their vocabularies diverge (English having many more words and choices than French). Even punctuations have different weights: thus the English exclamation mark is shoutier than the French, so some of Flaubert’s have to be excised; Wall cuts more than Davis, who, at times, adds extra ones. Nor do languages develop over time at the same rate. So, in the case of Madame Bovary, you are having to juggle the French writer then, the French reader then and now, the English translator now, the English reader then and now.

  Nowadays, at least, books are generally translated with less of a time lag (La Regenta was first published in 1884–5, and not rendered into English until 1984). Translators can quiz writers about what they mean, by email, or even in person: Don Delillo had a London conference for his European translators of Underworld, whose problems began as the novel does: with a sixty-page baseball game. But translation is not always, or necessarily, about managing loss. When my novel Flaubert’s Parrot was being translated into German, my editor in Zurich modestly suggested some additional flourishes: for instance, a pun on Flaubert as a ‘flea-bear’, and a German slang phrase for masturbation which literally means ‘to shake from the palm tree’. Since Flaubert, at this point of my novel, was being masturbated in Egypt, this felt like a happy improvement on the English text. Adding something extra for German readers seemed a kind of fair-trade translation. But this advantage encloses a new danger: that of the writer anticipating this amiable to-and-fro with translator or foreign editor. I remember hearing one British novelist admit in a radio interview that he had paused at one point in his writing, thought of the pain he might be inflicting on his Scandinavian translators, and decided to make things easier for them. Apart from this being a denial of your own language, it can easily lead to the sort of international prose that is like an airline meal: it feeds all, doesn’t actually poison anyone, but isn’t noticeably nutritious.

  To compare several different versions of Madame Bovary is not to observe a process of accumulation, some gradual but inevitable progress towards certainty and authority (except in the occasional discarding of error); rather, it is to gaze at a sequence of approximations, a set of deliquescences. How could it be otherwise when almost every word of the French can be rendered in several different ways? Consider the moment when Emma, Charles and Léon are eating ice cream in a café by the harbour, having walked out before the final scene of Lucia. Charles naively suggests that his wife stay on in the city to catch the next performance – an action which is to precipitate her affair with Léon. Charles addresses his wife (the banality of phrase contrasting with the recent extravagances of Donizetti) as ‘mon petit chat’. Marx-Aveling has ‘pussy’, Mildred Marmur (1964) ‘my kitten’, Wall ‘my pussy-cat’, Hopkins ‘darling’, Steegmuller ‘sweetheart’, Russell and Davis ‘my pet’. Marx-Aveling’s endearment would work then but sadly not now; Marmur’s is good; Wall’s brings in the slightly unwanted flavour of a bad Dean Martin movie; Steegmuller and Hopkins deliberately duck the felinity (you could argue that the French is already drained of it anyway); while Russell and Davis, mixing banality and distant animality, have found the best solution. Probably. At least, for the moment. You can understand why Rutherford called translation a ‘strange business’ which ‘sensible people’ should best avoid.

  Davis’s Madame Bovary is a linguistically careful version, in the modern style, rendered into an unobtrusively American English. At its best, it conveys the precision – which some think dryness – of Flaubert’s prose in this novel, while its syntactical mirroring of the French sometimes brings us closer to Flaubert. At its worst, it takes us too far away from English, and makes us less aware of Flaubert’s prose than of Davis being aware of Flaubert’s prose. And such defects may come from something ordinary but surprising: a lack of sufficient love for the work being translated. In her Times interview, Lydia Davis explained:

  I was asked to do the Flaubert, and it was hard to say no to another great book – so-called. I didn’t actually like Madame Bovary. I find what he does with the language really interesting; but I wouldn’t say that I warm to it as a book … And I like a heroine who thinks and feels … well, I don’t find Emma Bovary admirable or likeable – but Flaubert didn’t either. I do a lot of things that people don’t think a translator does. They think: ‘She loves Madame Bovary, she’s read it three times in French, she’s always wanted to translate it and she’s urging publishers to do another translation, and she’s done all the background reading …’ but none of that is true.

  Perhaps some of this is the translator’s equivalent of being demob-happy – t
hree years slogging across occupied France, it’s no wonder she throws her cap in the air at having come out alive. Though what does Lydia Davis mean by saying that Emma Bovary doesn’t ‘think’ or ‘feel’? The novel is all about the perils of (wrong) thinking and (false, or unwisely directed) feeling. Perhaps she means ‘doesn’t think or feel in a way that I approve’. As for complaining that Emma isn’t ‘admirable or likeable’ – this sounds like the most basic book-group objection. Davis’s Madame Bovary shows that it’s possible to produce a more than acceptable version of a book with which you are comparatively out of sympathy. In that sense, it confirms that translation requires an act of the imagination as well as a technician’s proficiency. If you want a freer translation, Steegmuller is best; for a tighter one, go to Wall. And perhaps one day Juliet Herbert’s lost ‘masterpiece’ will turn up, and we shall be able to compare it to its successors – and see a new way of necessarily falling short.