by C. F. Ramuz
“Ramuz wrote, many years ago, some thirty works, of which Jean-Luc [Persecuted] is perhaps one of the best … a writer who breaks all molds.” —Juan Rulfo
The wind had picked up again, warmer, the wind called the snow-eater; the dark layers widened; the pond blackened, cracked: one day the water was liberated. And so the dead frogs floated back up from the bottom, and the murders of crows flew in circles around them. The shadows arrived; there was the forest’s darkness, a blue-black on the mountain, a sky that remained burdened, and some scattered islands of light. Again, she called him. But he answered her: “Never.”
“With the grim logic of a classical tragedy, terrible things begin to happen … a painful tale of isolation and woe that resembles nothing so much as Frankenstein save that Mary Shelley’s monster had a richer vocabulary. Plainly, even matter-of-factly written, the story is a downer but an affecting one that leaves readers wishing that Jean-Luc had had better luck.” —Kirkus Reviews
AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH BY C.F. RAMUZ:
Beauty on Earth
Derborence: Where the Devils Came Down
The End of All Men
Farinet’s Gold
The Reign of the Evil One
Riversong of the Rhône
The Secret Child
The Soldier’s Tale
Terror on the Mountain
What if the Sun …
When the Mountain Fell
The Young Man from Savoy
CHARLES-FERDINAND RAMUZ
Jean-Luc Persecuted
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY
OLIVIA BAES
DEEP VELLUM PUBLISHING
DALLAS, TEXAS
Deep Vellum Publishing
3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226
deepvellum.org · @deepvellum
Deep Vellum is a 501c3 nonprofit literary arts organization
founded in 2013 with the mission to bring
the world into conversation through literature.
Originally published in the French language in 1908 by Librairie académique Didier,
Perrin et Cie in Paris, France. This translation based on the 1995 Les Cahiers Rouges
edition published by Grasset in Paris.
English translation copyright © 2020 by Olivia Baes
First edition, 2020
All rights reserved.
Support for this publication has been provided in part by grants from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, the City of Dallas Office
of Arts and Culture’s ArtsActivate program, and the Moody Fund for the Arts:
This publication has been made possible with financial support from the Swiss Arts
Council Pro Helvetia
ISBNs: 978-1-64605-016-1 (paperback) | 978-1-64605-017-8 (ebook)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Ramuz, C. F. (Charles Ferdinand), 1878-1947, author. | Baes, Olivia, translator.
Title: Jean-Luc persecuted / Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz ; translated from the French by Olivia Baes.
Other titles: Jean-Luc persécuté. English
Description: First edition. | Dallas, Texas : Deep Vellum Publishing, 2020. | Originally published in the French language in 1908 by Librairie académique
Didier, Perrin et Cie in Paris, France. This translation based on the 1995 Les
Cahiers Rouges edition published by Grasset in Paris.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020018713 (print) | LCCN 2020018714 (ebook) | ISBN 9781646050161 (paperback) | ISBN 9781646050178 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PQ2635.A35 J413 2020 (print) | LCC PQ2635.A35 (ebook) | DDC 843/.914--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018713
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018714
Cover art by Chad Felix | chadfelix.com
Interior layout and typesetting by Kirby Gann
Text set in Bembo, a typeface modeled on typefaces cut by Francesco Griffo for Aldo
Manuzio’s printing of De Aetna in 1495 in Venice.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
Vaud Damned: A Note on the Translation
by Olivia Baes
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
XIII.
Vaud Damned: A Note on the Translation
One man’s madness in the face of Vaud, its valleys, its ridges, its snow—piling up only to melt, be forgotten, with the many flowers that rise every Easter, then collapse and rise once again—with the village that stirs, and the echoes of women, their laughter, and the men with their axes and carts, calls for a special kind of momentum—one that Franco-Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz obsessively referred to as his élan in his journal. This momentum, as he wrote in an entry dated May 1909, came and went as it pleased, “simply carried him.”1
For me, Ramuz’s momentum always summons the wind. It was the natural force that propelled his inspiration and the way he used language, a force hailing directly from a Swiss region called the Canton of Vaud. And though his language was technically French, from a very young age, Ramuz knew this French to be quite different from the language in his school books. His was a French he believed had not yet been written down, a language spurred on by his authentic experience of that small and secluded region he called home.2
In his famous 1924 letter to his editor Bernard Grasset, Ramuz—responding to claims by some of his contemporaries that he “wrote badly on purpose”—expanded on his relationship to French. To him, “correct” French—or “classic” French, as he dubbed it himself—was nothing but an academic language sequestered from experience, one that he did not feel was valid for him, who had grown up in another country, one that was divided from France by a literal border. But what upset him most in that statement was the popular belief that he wrote badly “on purpose”:
Need I tell you that this accusation is by far the most serious of all for me, the only one that actually affects me? It runs precisely in the opposite direction to all my tendencies, to all my research; it affects me right at the center,—as on the contrary I have always tried to be truthful and “wrote badly” precisely only out of a need to be more truthful or, if you will, more authentic, to be as true, as authentic as possible.3
This was not the first time Ramuz sought to defend what many considered to be his incorrect use of French. In 1914, back in Switzerland after more than a decade in Paris, he wrote a manifesto entitled Raison d’être, in which he explored his Vaudois roots and what they had come to mean to him as a writer. In the text, he revealed the uncomfortable feeling he had of living in France’s capital. There, he felt totally out of place, which, ironically, was emphasized by the fact that, unlike the British or Spanish tourists, he spoke the language—but very differently than the French themselves. His rhythm, so out of step with theirs, embarrassed him at every turn, shining a bright light on his difference. In Raison d’être, Ramuz contrasts the two languages at length:
Of what use are these “qualities” to me given as such in manuals estranged from the object—for example a certain elegance (for I care deeply about the other), lightness, speed—if the line of a hill before me takes so long to reach its summit, if such a mass of abrupt faces holds beauty only in its heaviness, if the labored appearance of a gesture, the furrowing of a forehead on which expression takes shape only little by little, oppose themselves to this boasted elegance? What does ease matter to me if I have to render clumsiness, what does a fixed order matter to me if I wan
t to give the impression of disorder, what to do with the much-too-airy when I’m in the presence of the compact and cluttered? We need to have made our rhetoric on the spot, down to our grammar, our syntax.4
In 1907, Ramuz was commissioned to write Le petit village dans la montagne by Lausanne editor Edouard Payot. Acutely aware of his linguistic difference, he left Paris in order to live between the two small Franco-Swiss villages of Chandolin and Lens. The book’s purpose was to document the village and its customs, legends, inhabitants, and natural surroundings. Like a fly on the wall, for months, the somewhat timid Ramuz recorded everything he saw and heard in these villages. It is no wonder then that Jean-Luc persécuté directly followed Le petit village dans la montagne; its intention feels remarkably similar: to somehow capture a place’s rhythm—that organic connection between the villagers and their surroundings—in writing. On April 5, 1908, while writing Jean-Luc persécuté, Ramuz had a break-through entry: “My style must have the gait of my characters.”5 Démarche, the French word for gait, can also mean approach and process. This novel would become a prime example of his very important artistic realization.
Translating Jean-Luc persécuté, one must keep Ramuz’s firm stance of authenticity in mind. The author did not mean for his French to sound “correct.” Just as Jean-Luc persécuté did not read as fluent to the average French reader in 1908, Jean-Luc Persecuted is not meant to enter English fluidly over a century later. As Ramuz put it himself, again in his letter to Grasset: “The man who truly expresses himself does not translate. He allows the movement to form within him until its completion, allowing this same movement to group words in its own way.”6 Ramuz’s idiosyncratic and varying punctuation moves us through Jean-Luc’s journey with emotion as catalyst. Sentences organize themselves according to sight and feeling.
Perhaps this is why Ramuz thought his writing—one he insisted was grounded in what he called “gesture-language”—was closest to cinema.7 As his translator, I chose to follow this cinematic momentum, picking rhythm and emotion over the grammatical and syntactical rules we are told are “correct” and cannot be broken. In the novel, which itself begins in movement, Jean-Luc’s rhythm moves us immediately. As he returns home to find his wife Christine missing, we are sent on an anxious walk to retrieve her, following her footsteps in the snow through the woods, the trail, and the mountains, where fleeting observations of nature intermingle with Jean-Luc’s own anguished guesses about where his wife might be:
He had set off again, he began to walk faster, he quickly arrived at the crest; there, you enter a comb, the trail goes off down the middle. Larches the color of honey, their trunks gray, gray in certain branches already skinned, looked to be arranged all around; up ahead, from a gash in the green sky, a faraway summit appeared, pink. There was a little pink too, almost blond rather, in the light, on the snow, while various dips and ridges, in this velvet, sparkled like gold, like so on a bush, the tip of a tree, a rift in the terrain.
The opening paragraphs of the book allow us into the real-time collision of Jean-Luc’s inner and outer worlds. Grammatically speaking, more semicolons should figure throughout, but I chose to forgo them all, as the commas are a perfect reminder that we are on the move with Jean-Luc, right there along with him, seeing the crest, the comb, and the trail the moment they pop up.
It was with this same emotive rhythm in mind that I chose to keep the novel’s frequent use of repetition. In most cases, what could be regarded as bad and awkward writing is telling, which is the case when Christine, who has just admitted her affair to Jean-Luc, hovers near the front stoop, waiting to see what her crestfallen husband will do next:
Meanwhile there was movement in the kitchen, the footsteps moved away, a door creaked, the footsteps were in the bedroom, the footsteps returned. Suddenly they came closer, she turned around; at that very moment he passed by her. He had on his hat, the child on one arm, under the other a bag; he walked down the stairs. She said: “What are you doing?” She repeated: “Jean-Luc what are you doing?” but it was too late. He was already off in the distance. He walked toward the village.
Here, the tension between Christine’s rising anxiety and Jean-Luc’s cold resolve defines this crucial narrative moment in which he decides to leave her. Ramuz’s use of calm repetition mimics Jean-Luc’s determined footsteps as he goes, the incredulous Christine looking on, somewhat hoping he will turn back, herself caught between the repetition of her own question, one she seems to be asking to convince herself he is not really leaving. In translation, the tempo of this moment, which is established by the use of repetition and the emotive order of the action, is crucial, and I felt it was important to keep it as is.
The novel is equally brilliant in its navigation of Jean-Luc’s tumultuous and changing emotional terrain and the village’s own contrasting seasons: from the slow and harsh winter—with its thudded footsteps, whispers behind the inn’s door, and long stares into the cracks of the wooden ceiling—to its more chipper summer—with its lovers in meadows, idle gossip under the linden tree, and drunken chatter in the cellar. Guiding us through both these landscapes is the French pronoun on. An all-seeing pronoun that allows us to experience Jean-Luc’s journey from every eye and ear in the village, only increasing our protagonist’s paranoia, while also heightening the overall claustrophobic feel of the story, which, nestled in between the village and its high mountains, seems only to lead to one thing: Jean-Luc’s demise.
On is always difficult to translate in English, but here, in order to maintain its full effect and really draw the reader into the story, I often opted for “you,” which, as it accrues, seems to carry us through Jean-Luc’s misadventures, placing us directly in his wake. A good example of this also hails from the first walk we take alongside Jean-Luc as he searches for the missing Christine:
But the heart is sad, and all was in silence. A chough in flight passed now and again in the sky, where it occupied a space, then no longer occupied it; sounds came from very far off, like strangers to the land: you heard the village bell ring, you didn’t know from where, maybe in the prairie, soon it hushed; a gunshot blasted, a poacher’s, in a gorge all the way over there, which dragged out for a long time, jarred into echoes.
Here, we hear the village bell ring, we don’t know from where, soon it stops ringing. A gunshot blasts, and we hear that, too, in a gorge, all the way over there. We hear it drag on for a time. I thought it was important to have the reader become a part of the story so that when the heart is sad, just before, ours is too, in the silence set to reveal that Christine, Jean-Luc’s wife, is laughing somewhere in a wood with her lover, Augustin. Something about using the “you” just felt right for this story—perhaps even its cinematic feel as it guides us along, allowing us to empathize further with a man whose destiny, like an avalanche, begins to tumble toward us the moment we start reading.
Though Ramuz wrote in a French that stemmed from a specific part of the world, his stories are universal in the human suffering they explore. Jean-Luc persécuté is a prime example. It may recount the story of a peasant very much born and raised in the Canton of Vaud, but Jean-Luc’s despair—linked as it may be to the foreign land he moves through—is recognizably human. Even if his tale is extraordinary—with entire chapters in which he believes his child to be alive though he has recently drowned—the emotions that catalyze his unusual madness are ones we can most likely all relate to on some level. In order for us to empathize with Jean-Luc and experience the total misery that is his life, Ramuz takes us down a literal and linguistic path we may not be accustomed to or comfortable with, but one that will jar us into echoes of feeling.
As I translated Jean-Luc persécuté, I chose to stay true to Ramuz’s artistic purpose, refusing to tame my own writing for a more fluid reading experience in English, which I believed would greatly harm the story and the particular suspense that arises from its singular rhythm. In another one of his 1908 journal entries, Ramuz calls the effect of this rhythm, the “ton
e,” “a way of seeing and feeling things that, once achieved, becomes the tone and to which everything must be sacrificed.” As Ramuz’s translator, I also chose to sacrifice everything to this unique way of seeing and feeling things, and only in doing so was able to arrive at Jean-Luc’s persecution—his own sacrifice—which though universal in resonance, begins as an echo in the Canton of Vaud, and should remain there, resounding from there, in all of its translations, whatever their language may be.
Olivia Baes
September 2019
Cabanelles, Catalunya, Spain
1. C.F. Ramuz, “Journal, notes et brouillons,” Tome 2, 1904-1920, Slatkine, entry dated May 10, 1909.
2. “O accent, you are in our words, and you are the indication, but you are not yet in our written language. You are in the gesture, you are in the allure, all the way to the very languid step of the one who comes back from mowing down his meadow or trimming his vineyard: consider this gait and the fact that our phrases don’t have it.” Raison d’être: Par C.F. Ramuz, 1914, Lausanne C. Tarin, Cahier Vaudois 1, ebook, https://archive.org/details/raisondtreparc00ramuuoft/page/n10 (English translation by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan).
3. “Ai-je besoin de vous dire que cette accusation est de beaucoup pour moi la plus grave de toutes, la seule à vrai dire qui me touche? Elle va très exactement en sens inverse de toutes mes tendances, de toutes mes recherches; elle me touche au point central, – ayant toujours tâché au contraire d’être véridique et ne m’étant mis à « mal écrire » que précisément par souci d’être plus vrai ou, si on veut, plus authentique, d’être aussi vrai, d’être aussi authentique que possible.” Lettre à Bernard Grasset, page 14, https://ebooks-bnr.com/ebooks/pdf4/ramuz_lettre_a_bernard_grasset.pdf, bibliothèque numérique romande d’après C. F. Ramuz, Œuvres complètes 11, Lettre à Grasset, Salutation paysanne, Passage du Poète, Autre lettre, Cézanne, Lausanne, H. L. Mermod, s.d. [1941].