The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (36 page)

SENSUM EXPRIMERE DE SENSO

The errors committed of the order of “
verbum e verbo
” are venial and easily spotted. But in the domain of “
sensum exprimere de senso
,” all errors are fatal. Mistakes of meaning can be made, and inevitably are, but what are unpardonable are mistakes of judgement and tone. The way in which a translator chooses to convey the
title
of a work he is translating clearly indicates this, with Coindreau again supplying interesting examples. The title of William Styron’s novel,
Set This House on Fire
(which, with its biblical resonance, offers a challenge which Coindreau rises to magnificently with
La Proie des flammes
), were it to be translated by
Fous le feu à la baraque
, would instantly become the title of a cheap thriller. Steinbeck’s title
The Grapes of Wrath
is awkwardly rendered by
Les Raisins de la colère
, a title belonging to a pirate Belgian edition of the novel which gained notoriety during the Second World War, obliging Coindreau to let go of the brilliant solution he had envisaged:
Le Ciel en sa fureur
. In English,
grapes
possesses a solemn biblical ring, where the classic allusion to La Fontaine’s verse gives in the end the best possible equivalent, whereas the French connotation of “grapes” (think of “
vignes du Seigneur
”) evokes rather a Bacchic and Rabelaisian universe.
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë became, in the translation by F. Delebecque,
Les Hauts de Hurlevent—
a masterstroke. Coindreau explains why he translated
God’s Little Acre
(by E. Caldwell) as
Le Petit arpent du bon Dieu
: “
Le Petit arpent de Dieu
” sounded bad, he says, like some sort of Canadian swearword! “
Bon
Dieu” corresponds to the way in which one imagines
the protagonist, an old peasant, smutty and sly, might naturally express himself. As for me, when it came to the narrative by Dana,
Two Years Before the Mast
, the expression “before the mast” would literally turn into “
devant le mât
” or “
en avant du mât
,” neither of which means much in French. In English, sailing “before the mast” means sailing as an ordinary seaman, since on tall ships the crew’s quarters were in the forecastle, and the sailors, unless on duty, were strictly confined to the space “before the fore mast” (the aft section of the ship being reserved for the exclusive use of officers and passengers). To translate the title as “
Deux ans de la vie d’un matelot
” would have been too explicit, where what was required was an echo of the nautical jargon which Dana employs to such superb effect. As what was required was, moreover, avoidance of the infelicitous assonance of “deux
ans
”—“gaillard
d’avant
,” what I finally opted for was
Deux années sur le gaillard d’avant.

THE TEST OF THE TRANSLATION

It is possible to be creative in a language that one knows only imperfectly: Conrad was still far from mastering English at the time he wrote
Almayer’s Folly
. It is
impossible
to translate into a language which one knows only imperfectly. No other literary activity demands so total a mastery of the language in which one is working; one must possess every register, one must be capable of playing in every key and on every scale. When one is composing, if one comes up against an obstacle, one has at one’s disposal numerous sidesteps: one can always tackle the subject from another angle, or if it comes to it one can even invent something else. When translating, by contrast, problems are immutable, and there is no question of avoiding or side-stepping them; they must all be confronted and resolved, one by one, wherever they present themselves. Translation not only deploys every resource of writing, it is also
the supreme form of reading
. In order to appreciate a text, re-reading is better than reading, learning by heart is better than re-reading; but one
possesses
only what one translates. First, translating implies total comprehension. When we’ve read a
text with interest, with pleasure, with emotion, we naturally presume that we’ve entirely understood it . . . until the moment comes when we try to translate it. Then, what we usually discover is that rather than understanding, what we’ve been left with is the imprint of the text’s movement on our imagination and sensibility; sufficient to sustain a reader’s attention—but the translator, for his part, requires firmer foundations on which to base his work. Certainly, vague passages must be rendered in a vague manner; obscure passages must be rendered obscurely. But in order to produce an adequate obscurity and vagueness, the translator must previously have penetrated the fog to capture whatever is hiding behind it.

Paradoxically, the translator must know more about the work than the author knows himself, for the author, carried by inspiration, can sometimes yield to the intoxication of words. Such transports are forbidden to the translator, who must forever remain sober and lucid. A cunning writer may bluff his readers, but he can never deceive his translator. The work of translation reveals pitilessly: it turns the work inside out, unpicks its lining, exposes its stitching. Translation is the severest test to which a book can be submitted. In discursive prose, nothing that has a meaning is untranslatable; the corollary being that untranslatable passages generally are found to be meaningless. Translation is an implacable detective of pretentious nonsense, a sonar for measuring false depths. A work may have pleased us on a first read, but if its seduction is not wholesome, it will not withstand the test of translation. To translate a book means living in intimacy with it for months and years, and this when frequenting books can turn out to be much like frequenting people: intimacy is capable of increasing love and respect, just as it is capable of producing disaffection and contempt.

TRANSLATABLE AND UNTRANSLATABLE

Some writers are easy to translate: Simenon, Graham Greene, and in general all novelists whose plots can be disentangled from their language. Some are hard to translate: Chardonne, Evelyn Waugh, and in general any novelist whose narrative is indissociable from its language.
It so happens that I read Simenon in English and Greene in French. Some of their novels stay with me after even twenty-five or thirty years, and yet I am curiously unable to tell which I read in the original and which in translation. In the first case, language is a mere instrument of creation; in the second, it constitutes the very stuff of the work. The closer a work approaches the poetic mode, the less it is translatable. The “idea” of a poem is present only as it takes form in words; a poem doesn’t exist outside its verbal incarnation, any more than an individual exists outside his skin. Degas said to Mallarmé that he had heaps of ideas for poems and was dismayed not to be able to write them. Mallarmé responded: “But Degas, it’s not with ideas that we make poetry, it’s with words.” While it isn’t entirely absurd to recount a Tolstoy novel, it would be inconceivable to recount a Baudelaire poem. Hence poetry is by definition untranslatable (whence derives Goethe’s recommendation that verse be translated in prose, to forestall any readerly illusions). However, it does happen that a poem in one language can inspire
another poem
in another language. Such miracles do happen! But the existence of miracles does not cancel the existence of natural laws; rather it confirms it.

TRANSLATIONS WHICH ARE SUPERIOR TO THEIR ORIGINALS

I believe it was Gide who remarked of a writer he did not care for, “He is much improved by translation.” This happy gibe raises the curious issue of translators who improve on their originals. Examples abound here. Gabriel García Márquez has said that Gregory Rabassa’s translation of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is much superior to its original Spanish version. I have spoken above of Lin Shu; not only does
La Dame aux camélias
gain from being read in Chinese, but—if Arthur Waley is to be believed—the same might be said of Dickens’s novels. But the most noteworthy case is probably that of Baudelaire as translator of Edgar Allan Poe. Anglo-Saxon connoisseurs who read French are practically unanimous in preferring Baudelaire’s translations to Poe’s originals, generally judging Poe to be “boring, vulgar and
lacking a good ear”; while the way in which, following Baudelaire, great French poets such as Mallarmé, Claudel and Valéry could worship him and take seriously his indigestible mishmash of pseudoscience and metaphysical fantasy remains for English and American critics a source of infinite perplexity. The fact is that it is often mediocre writers who lend themselves best to the glorious misunderstandings of translation and exportation, whereas writers of genius resist the efforts of translators. Du Fu, the greatest and most perfect of all the Chinese classic poets, becomes grey and arid in translation, whereas his contemporary Hanshan, whose work is flat and vulgar and was, quite rightly, largely ignored in China, enjoyed a huge success in colourful poetic reincarnations in Japan, in America and in France . . . Translation may serve as a perverse screen serving to occlude instances of true beauty, while conferring a sudden freshness upon worn-out clichés. The poetry of Mao Zedong, for example, owed its fortune not only to the pounding of propaganda and the political myths of a certain era, but also to the fact that it clearly belongs to that category of works which are “improved by translation,” the translation succeeding in concealing their original vulgarity. In that ferociously funny novel
Pictures from an Institution
, Randall Jarrell says of one of his characters: “He would not like German half so well if he should learn it.
There is no such happiness as not to know an idiom from a masterstroke
.” And in
The Catcher in the Rye
the young hero completely muddles up the meaning of a line of Robert Burns (which gives Salinger the title of his novel): this marvellous mistake becoming the source for him of a much purer and deeper poetic delight than would have been drawn from a correct reading of the poem in question . . . A “homage to the mistake” remains to be written.

A
S YOU
may perhaps remember, some time ago the English actor Hugh Grant was arrested by the police in Los Angeles: he was performing a rather private activity in a public place with a lady of the night. For less famous mortals, such a mishap would have been merely embarrassing; but for such a famous film star, the incident proved quite shattering. For a while, it looked as if his professional career might sink—not to mention the damage inflicted upon his personal life. In this distressing circumstance, he was interviewed by an American journalist, who asked him a very American question: “Are you receiving any therapy or counselling?” Grant replied, “No. In England, we read novels.”

Half a century earlier, the great psychologist Carl Gustav Jung developed the other side of this same observation. He phrased it in more technical terms: “Man’s estrangement from the mythical realm and the subsequent shrinking of his existence to the mere factual—that is the major cause of mental illness.” In other words, people who do not read fiction or poetry are in permanent danger of crashing against facts and being crushed by reality. And then, in turn, it is left to Dr. Jung and his colleagues to rush to the rescue and attempt to mend the broken pieces.

Do psychotherapists multiply when novelists and poets become scarce? There may well be a connection between the development of clinical psychology on the one hand and the withering of the inspired imagination on the other—at least, this was the belief of some eminent practitioners. Rainer Maria Rilke once begged Lou Andreas-
Salomé to psychoanalyse him. She refused; she explained to him, “If the analysis is successful, you may never write poetry again.” (And just imagine: had a skilful shrink cured Kafka of his existential anxieties, our age—and modern man’s condition—could have been deprived of its most perceptive interpreter.)

Many strong and well-adjusted people seem to experience little need for the imaginative life. Thus, for instance, saints do not write novels, as Cardinal Newman observed (and he ought to have known, since he came quite close to being a saint, and he wrote a couple of novels
†
).

Especially, practical-minded people and men of action are often inclined to disapprove of literary fiction. They consider reading creative literature as a frivolous and debilitating activity. In this respect, it is quite revealing that, for example (as I have already pointed out in an earlier essay), the great polar explorer Mawson—one of our national heroes—gave to his children the stern advice not to waste their time reading novels; instead, he instructed them to read only works of history and biography in order to grow into healthy individuals.

Allow me to dwell a short moment on this particular advice, for it reflects two very common fallacies. The first fallacy consists in failing to see that, by its very definition, all literature is in fact imaginative literature. Distinctions between genres—novels and history, poetry and prose, fiction and essay, etc.—are essentially artificial; these conventional classifications are of practical use mostly for booksellers and librarians who have to compile catalogues or arrange books on crowded shelves; otherwise, above a certain level of literary quality, they present little relevance. For the perceptive reader, indeed, Proust’s great novel is in fact a philosophical essay; Montaigne’s essays are more diverse and surprising than any novel; Gibbon’s and Michelet’s histories remain alive first and foremost as great literature; and, of course it would be ludicrous to reduce a polymorphous giant such as Shakespeare to the absurdly minor and narrow craft of playwrighting. As to the art of fiction, we have already learned that its aim is nothing less than “to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe,”[
1
]
whereas the mission of the historian is to imagine the past—since history is believed only when a talented writer has invented it well. Novelists are the historians of the present; historians are the novelists of the past.
§