The Charterhouse of Parma (73 page)

40
Almaviva:
Count Almaviva and his servant the barber Figaro, characters in Stendhal’s favorite operas, Mozart’s
Marriage of Figaro
and Rossini’s
Barber of Seville
, both based on plays by Beaumarchais (1732–1799).

41
Armida:
An enchantress in Tasso’s
Gerusalemme liberata
.

42
aquetta di Perugia
:
A poison consisting of arsenic, lead, and antimony.

43
Vanvitelli
(1700–1773): A famous Neapolitan architect.

44
Alessandro Farnese
(1545–1592): appointed Governer of the Netherlands by Philip II of Spain, and sent to assist the French Catholics in their struggle with Henri IV.

45
Alfieri:
Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803), a leading Italian poet and dramatist of the Romantic period.

46
Charlotte Corday:
Charlotte Corday d’Armont (1768–1793) came to Paris and stabbed Marat, a Revolutionary leader, to death in his bath on July 13, 1793, and was guillotined four days later.

47
Pallagi:
Pallagio Pallagi (1775–1860), a Bolognese painter.

48
The Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund:
Sigismund came to Parma in the fifteenth century, not the twelfth. Stendhal is probably confusing him with the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1122–1190).

49
Reina:
Francesco Reina (1770–1826) of Milan.

50
Fokelberg, Tenerani, Marchesi, Hayez:
Artists living in Italy at the time of the novel.

51
Marie de Médicis:
Mother of Louis XIII; she lost her influence to Cardinal Richelieu, the King’s principal minister after 1624.

52
Saint Bartholemew’s Massacre:
The massacre of Huguenots in the major cities of France on Saint Bartholomew’s
Eve (August 23, 1572), said to have been instigated by Catherine de Médicis, mother of Charles IX.

53
the Fontanas and the Duvoisins:
Churchmen renowned for their learning during the Napoleonic era.

54
Signora P——:
Probably Giuditta Pasta (1798–1865), a great opera singer of her day who had sung this aria (“Those gentle eyes”) in Paris in 1823.

55
Petrarch:
Actually four lines by the poet Metastasio (1698–1782), also quoted in Rousseau’s
Nouvelle Héloïse
(1761).

56
Tu l’as voulu, Georges Dandin!:
An allusion to Molière’s comedy
Georges Dandin
: “You asked for it, Georges Dandin!” (and it serves you right).

57
Gonzo:
In Italian, a
gonzo
is a fool or clown.

58
Registration Edict:
A measure introduced to facilitate the raising of war taxes.

59
the Charterhouse of Parma:
This charterhouse actually existed, not in the forest of Sacca but northeast of Parma. The monks having been expelled from their monastery in the middle of the eighteenth century, the edifice was empty when the French armies were billeted there, along with a supply depot. It was subsequently utilized as a cigar factory, and today serves as a reformatory.

60
To the Happy Few:
Readers of Stendhal will recognize this phrase at the conclusion of at least three of his major works, including
The Red and the Black
. Its source is in part Shakespearean
(Henry V
, IV, iii: “We few, we happy few”), but more probably a recollection of a phrase in Goldsmith’s
Vicar of Wakefield
, the first chapters of which Stendhal had learned by heart to familiarize himself with the English language.

English-speaking readers invariably characterize Stendhal’s works, and especially
The Charterhouse of Parma
, by the words
gusto, brio, élan, verve, panache
. These are, of course, all foreign terms, never translated, though so necessary that they have been readily naturalized. It will be the translator’s aim, indeed the translator’s responsibility, so to characterize any future translation of Stendhal, who wrote his last completed novel in fifty-two days, a miracle of gusto, brio, élan, verve, panache.

Like miracles generally, the novel is mysterious, beginning with its title: the Carthusian Monastery of Parma, the Charterhouse, appears only on the last page of the book, three paragraphs from the end. To this sequestration Fabrizio del Dongo retires, lives there a year, dies there (he is twenty-seven years old—the age of the oldest French generals in Napoleon’s army entering Milan in Chapter One). Stendhal had initially wanted to call his novel
The Black Charterhouse
, a clue: in the prison from which Fabrizio so spectacularly escapes, there is indeed a
black chapel
. Fabrizio’s
nine months’ imprisonment
in the Farnese Tower—more than one critic has observed—is analogous to the Carthusian monks’ discipline in their monastery: by this means he is reborn, he achieves freedom, happiness, and love.

Throughout the novel, incidents and details recur, repeat themselves, recall some earlier instance. Certain verbal echoes may keep the reader conscious of the pattern: Fabrizio’s first imprisonment and his night with the jailer’s wife will “become” Fabrizio in the Farnese Tower, loving Clélia; the del Dongo castle at Grianta towering above Lake Como “becomes” the Citadel of Parma; the astronomy lessons on the platform of one of the castle’s gothic towers “become” Abbé Blanès’s observatory on top of the town bell tower, then the platform of the citadel on which the Farnese Tower is erected. Towers, platforms, windows; height, imprisonment, flight; divination, hiding, vision: these images and themes weave the novel together. The same words are used in widely separated situations: the translator must make sure they recur in his version.…

Nothing fixed. “The man,” Nietzsche said, “was a human question-mark.” And he suggested the tone, the reason for it and the consequence of it: “Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.”

Consider Gina’s two husbands: Count Pietranera, who prefers living in poverty to political compromise, and Count Mosca, for whom politics is a game and any conviction a liability. All political life is marked by incoherence. As Professor Talbot puts it, conservatives become liberals when out of power, and liberals become conservatives when in power.

Consider, again, Fabrizio’s roles; in the first third of the novel he claims to be a barometer merchant, a captain of the Fourth Regiment of hussars, a young bourgeois in love with that captain’s wife, Teulier, Boulot, Cavi, Ascanio Pietranera, and an unnamed peasant. Further, he will assume a disguise to visit Marietta’s apartment, will use Giletti’s name and passport to go through customs, assume another disguise as a rich country bourgeois; then claim to be Ludovic’s brother, then Joseph Bossi, a theology student. With Fausta, he passes himself off as the valet of an English lord; in the duel with Count M—— he calls himself Bombace. And under all this, his conviction that he is a del Dongo. Nor is he even that—he is the son of a French lieutenant named Robert billeted in the del Dongo palace in Milan during the French occupation; therefore Gina is not his aunt, though on one occasion
early in the novel she passes Fabrizio off as her
son! …
Evading the love of a woman he believes to be his aunt, Fabrizio ends in a prison originally built to house a crown prince guilty of incest.

Nothing fixed: Fabrizio is not a soldier, though he may have fought at Waterloo; not for a moment do we believe he is a cleric, though he is made archbishop of Parma; he is pure becoming, and the language he uses must show him to us in that form, that formlessness.…

Translate this book to exorcise the fetishism of the Work conceived as an hermetic object, finished, absolute … (Beyle, the anti-Flaubert). Nothing in this novel, “complete” though it may be, is quite closed over itself, autonomous in its genesis, and its signification. Hence Balzac’s suggestion to erase Parma altogether and call the book something like “Adventures of a typical Italian youth.…” Remember that the novel opens as the story of the Duchess Sanseverina. And ends with the “throttled” disappearance (Beyle’s phrase, in protest against the publisher’s insistence that the book fit in two volumes) of everyone but Mosca, “immensely rich.” Such vacillation is never satisfied. More than
Vanity Fair
, this is a Novel Without a Hero, without a Heroine, a novel without …

Realism, but no reality. The first text by him I ever translated, for Ben Sonnenberg’s
Grand Street
, was that extraordinary list of twenty-three articles headed
Les Privilèges
. That ought to have done it: God would exist and Beyle would believe in Him if he never had to suffer a serious illness, only three days’ indisposition a year.… If his penis would be allowed to grow erect at will, be two inches longer, and give him pleasure twice a week … If he could change into any animal he chose … If he would no longer be plagued by fleas, mosquitoes, and mice … etc., etc.

Then I translated one of the dozens of unfinished books “by” one of dozens of pseudonyms (as many as Kierkegaard, as many as Pessoa!), texts abandoned after no more than a torso had been molded, the armature of inspiration forsworn once the rapture waned
(The Pink and the Green)
.

The invitation in both these texts, preposterous and unfinished alike, to enter (and for the translator, it is virtually a welcome) into the banausics of the affair … A kind of painful tension under the disguise
of the driest, or the wettest, style. What Valéry calls the restlessness of a superior mind; in any case an ineloquent one. You could “place” Stendhal by saying he is utterly alien to eloquence (Hugo, who had no use for him, said he lacked “style”; Stendhal delighted in the compliment, as in this scribbled note: “A young woman murdered right next to me—she is lying in the middle of the street and beside her head a puddle of blood about a foot across. This is what M. Victor Hugo calls being bathed in one’s own blood”). An author who must be continually
reread
, for he never repeats, and as Alain observes, never
develops
.

It’s not style he lacks, but rhythm: Stendhal never sweeps you away—he doesn’t want to sweep you away: that would be against his principles. He engages your complicity, and for that you must be all attention. Follow him down the page, in the sentence, across the synapses of the amazing clauses, and the sense, the wit, the
literature
occurs in the gaps between the statements, very abruptly juxtaposed:

Grasshopper prose, and there is no pleasure to be taken in it if it is not attended to by
presence of mind
. As the reference to Talleyrand suggests, we are being taken into the author’s confidence, entrusted with the supposition of intellect—what other author flatters us to this degree?

A translator observes that the scansion of the Stendhal phrase is almost always dependent on that tendency of the French language to accent its abstract nouns on the final syllable:
la logique, le bonheur, l’esprit
(the Beylist trinity). This gives a certain determination to the run of the words, a certain
frappe
, as if the words were minted by a very sure mind. In a language so disposed, may the translator find means to afford evidences of an analogous
mentality
, a power which separates, which suspends, which excludes.

Reading aloud the chapters of
The Chartreuse
to Ben Sonnenberg as
I translated them, week by week (fifty-two days to write, twenty-eight weeks to translate), I reveled with him in Beyle’s strange elevation of bastardy, the rejection of the Father, the return, with Italy always, to the Mothers. Silly often, goofy even, but always
on
. Adored by Proust, envied by Gide (“He is the cuttlebone on which I sharpen my beak—what I envy in him is that he doesn’t have to put on his track shoes before he starts running”), Stendhal withstands translation yet again, a stage in his continued life.

Maya Angelou
•
Daniel J. Boorstin
•
A. S. Byatt
•
Caleb Carr
•
Christopher Cerf
•
Ron Chernow
•
Shelby Foote
•
Stephen Jay Gould
•
Vartan Gregorian
•
Charles Johnson
•
Jon Krakauer
•
Edmund Morris
•
Elaine Pagels
•
John Richardson
•
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
•
Carolyn See
•
William Styron
•
Gore Vidal

A N
OTE ON THE
T
YPE