by Lore Segal
You still don’t see it? What we choose to perceive is a decision made in that region of ourselves where we become Democrats or Republicans, prefer Bach to Beethoven, a “plain dish” to “a ragout”—hardly on sober judgment. Our intuitions move in and we bring up our intellectual reserves (or our noisemakers) to defend the position and prove ourselves in the right.
TRANSLATING THE OLDEN TIMES
In the early seventies when Farrar Straus asked me to translate some Grimm fairy tales, I felt like the Frog King, who lived in a time when wishing still helped. The stories I had been reading to my American children disappointed and irritated me. The English was not old so much as old-fashioned. I went back to the German that had been read to me in my Austrian childhood. The classic fairy-tale language deduced or invented by Wilhelm Grimm moved plainly, sweetly, and naturally. I had been wishing to make an English version move like this. Maurice Sendak, it turned out, had been wishing to illustrate Grimm. Each of us took the complete two hundred and ten tales away for the summer, marked them with a star system of one to five, and met, together with our editor. I like to remember that concert of different minds bent on a labor of singular, intellectual love: we marveled at our agreements, we marveled at our disagreements. We talked until we had our twenty-seven stories. The late Randall Jarrell had translated four of the best-known ones and these were included and became a sort of model.
Take it as a given that I began with the translator’s first vow to render every nuance into perfect English and that, a decade later, I continue to be troubled by small ghosts of this or that difficulty imperfectly resolved. Here, I want to discuss only a couple of problems peculiar to the translation of fairy tales.
What must the translator do whose text is not only from another language but from another era? I am presently at work on the seventeenth-century text of a Silesian folk saga of the mountain giant Rübezahl. Would the ideal translator render it into the English of the King James Bible, of John Skelton’s Don Quixote? In a world of speculation only, the Grimm tales, first published in 1812/15, should be translated into the precisely contemporaneous English of Mansfield Park. (To demonstrate the difference, I once had students in my translation workshop turn a Jane Austen paragraph into current English. They moaned, they grieved.)
“In olden times,” begins the English Frog-King in the Random House (1952) edition of Tales of Grimm and Andersen, which has an introduction by W. H. Auden. The older generation of translators—all of them ladies—are identified in tiny print, just above the copyright paragraph, as “Lucy Crane, Marian Edwardes, Mrs. E. V., Mrs. H. B. Paull, and Margaret Hunt.” It says that the tales had been “thoroughly revised and modernized,” but not by whom. The text of the Pantheon (1944) edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and the stories included in Stith Thompson’s and Andrew Lang’s books, were based on one or another of these subsequently “corrected” translations. They were, all of them, committed to sounding olden.
Fairytalese, a subdialect of Translatorese, is a language (like Freshmancomposition) that does not exist in the world outside itself. It’s a construction out of occasional more or less obsolete words or usages, and of common words in fancy dress: girls are “maidens,” would like is “would fain,” what’s the matter? is “what ails you?” There are a lot of “lests,” “perchances,” and “betakes.” There’s “wondrous.” And there is that word order peculiar to bad translation, a phantom of the half-digested original.
I could argue (against my own practice) that in English, fairy tales have always sounded and should, for that reason alone, go on sounding just like this. Though there’s not a single fairy in all of Grimms Märchen, I shall go on calling them “fairy tales” because, I think, when God brought them to Adam to see what he would call them, he said, “In English, they are fairy tales.” In myth and tale, tradition may be its own reason. I regret the loss of the characteristic flavor as I regret the lost dimness of cleaned old paintings—that is to say, not very much. I rejoice in the end of the old pretense that wrong word order is old word order—is really fairy tale syntax: “I will go down below and bring you your golden ball up again,” the Pantheon-edition frog promises the princess. (I translated, “I will climb down and bring back your golden ball.”) The king in the “Auden” edition says, “That which you have promised must you perform.” (I translated, “If you made a promise you must keep it.”)
The revisers, correctors, and modernizers left these never-never formulations—perhaps their ears were attuned to them, perhaps they didn’t have an ear, probably because it’s the hard part of the translator’s art to make English sound English—then they stuck in the little modern bits: “At this she was terribly angry” (Pantheon). “Never mind. Do not weep” (Auden) is a hybrid; so is “Be quiet and don’t weep” (Stith Thompson) which ought to read either “Be quiet and don’t cry” or “Be still and don’t weep.” (I translated, “What’s the matter? Well, don’t cry any more.”)
New translations like Jarrell’s, my own, and Ralph Manheim’s complete new volume (I mention them in the order of their publication) follow the modern desire for natural, current English. They chose not to sound antique, nor to draw attention to their modernity, and to avoid jazzy new terms even where a current expression gets most truly and quickly to the heart of the meaning. (We don’t have James’s option to use the slang in quotes.) I further learned, not on principle but in practice, to avoid the word that “feels” Latin, even if the alternative is a longer way around. Those passages in Stith Thompson’s edition where the princess looks in the “direction” of the frog’s voice, or the frog “receives” the princess’s promise, or the prince is “enchanted” and subsequently “disenchanted,” feel ever so mildly wrong. My princess “followed with her eyes”; my frog “obtained” her promise (which still feels wrong, one of the littlest of my ghosts). My prince was “changed into a frog” and “freed,” an example of paying with a lack of precision for the rightness of the tone.
There was one other task I proposed for myself. It has struck me how the best translations of prose often give a sense that it’s through a glass, however brightly, that one is seeing an original which still has about it a movement of the air stirred by thought in process. In the fairy tales it was the feel of telling I wanted to retain.
Why did the grand old men of fairy tales, why did Auden, suffer foolish translations? The truth rather diminishes the role of the translator: It’s that a shabby translation, a worse retelling, the most mindless bowdlerization, hardly affects the essential power of the Grimm tale. Perhaps the structuralists are right after all. The story is the message. The goodliness and cleanliness of language is its own delight.
TABLE TALK: “NICE”
“Table” was the word which the poet Howard Nemerov invited his audience of Bennington students and faculty to marvel at: table, a flat surface raised off the ground by, for instance, four legs. (This was in 1972.)
Once you start marveling, it begins to seem wonderful that there should be a word for what “flat” means, or “surface,” “ground,” “leg.” Wait till you get to wonder about “a,” “off,” “for,” and “the.” The philosopher-novelist William Gass has an essay celebrating the variety of the uses of “and.”
When the mind of a certain stamp asks what “mean” means, it is asking a question of semantics. The imagination of a different stamp means by means of stories. I remember a story whose protagonist wakes one morning thinking, If a table were not called a “table” but, say, “rabbit,” the word for rabbit might be “skillet” and a skillet could be a “window” and…
The feigned world in which objects are called something different from what you call them is not very different from the one in which my Viennese-born mother woke the morning she started her job as a cook in the south of England. My mother learned to speak excellent English. She was a reader—we were Jane Austen addicts together—but she never learned to produce the sound that the English “w” makes when it is followed by th
e “o” sound in “word” or “world.” I used to like hearing her say “worm” with the German “w” (it is made by touching the top teeth to the inside of the lower lip) and she always obliged.
And there was the word that she repeatedly asked me to define for her: “Tell me again, what does ‘fastidious’ mean?” It wasn’t that my mother did not understand the meaning but that the word refused to attach in her mind. I imagine a process analogous to the body’s rejection of a foreign element.
A single mouse-click to my iPad’s “reference tool” shows that “fastidious” (from the Latin “fastidium”) means demanding, fussy, finicky, picky, choosy, persnickety, particular, difficult, exacting, meticulous, thorough, refined, delicate, squeamish, and hard to please. At an earlier period, this list of definitions would have had to include “nice.”
I reminded my mother of the passage in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey where the innocent heroine, Catherine Morland, asks her two new friends, “Now really, do you not think Udolpho is the nicest book in the world?” The clever Henry Tilney replies that it would depend upon the neatness of the binding.
“You are very impertinent,” Miss Tilney admonishes her brother, and then tells Catherine that “He is treating you exactly as he does his sister. He is forever finding fault with me for some incorrectness of language and now he is taking the same liberty with you.”
“But it is a nice book…,” Catherine responds, “and why should not I call it so?”
“Very true,” said Henry, “and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy or refinement. People were nice in their dress, in their sentiment or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word.”
* * *
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Northanger Abbey was published in 1817, when “nice” was in the process of changing or had largely changed to roughly the meaning it has for us today. Henry Tilney and all the tribe of language purists (of which I am a hapless member) become troubled and cross over the loss of any particularity of meaning. What is more, Henry deplores that lazy “nice” which relieves the speaker of the need to define not only the object but the quality for which the object is to be commended. Here is yet another proof, the tribe believes, that the world is going to the dogs.
We are probably mistaken. The world has never not been at the dogs. That Henry Tilney is also mistaken in believing that nice “originally” meant fastidious can be demonstrated by a romp through my precomputerized, micrographically reproduced old two-volume Compact Oxford English Dictionary, which came with its own little magnifying glass in a little drawer. We find nice in its original or first citation in 1330, where it turns out to be a noun and to mean “A stupid or simple person; a fool.” In definition number 2 it is an adjective meaning “Wanton, lascivious,” with a quotation from Chaucer (1366). By 1525, definition 3 reads “Strange, rare, uncommon.” 4a is “Slothful, lazy, indolent” and 4b—are we creeping up on Henry’s meaning?—“Effeminate, unmanly.” In definition 7 (More’s Utopia, 1551), “nice” has arrived at meaning “difficult to please” and (at last!) “fastidious.”
This is where Henry Tilney would like it to just stop, but words have a life of their own. Nice is already on the move toward definition 15: “Agreeable; what one derives pleasure or satisfaction from,” poor Catherine’s usage and our own and, for that matter, Jane’s, for in a letter in 1837 she writes: “You scold me so much in the nice long letter which I have received from you.”
Let us praise nice. We mourn the loss of the “original” meaning of words like dreadful, awesome, terrible, and marvelous, not to speak of the ubiquitous great, for lack of an adjective that just means plain wow! And we have need of a way to express a generalized, more moderate approval—a word, in other words, like “nice.”
But to return to Howard Nemerov’s invitation to marvel at the word “table.” Can we imagine a world before words, a time when we had yet to cross over from the bark, the howl, the grunt, or the universal baby’s coo and gurgle, to the sounds that speak languages?
“In the beginning was the word,” says the Gospel of St. John, but the story in Genesis supposes that the object had to exist before there could be a word referring to it. “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them and whatever Adam called every living creature that was the name thereof.”
How might the table have got its name? Would not human ingenuity have had to devise the flat surface raised by some means off the ground before the first human could have spoken of it to a second human? How, if the object which in today’s English we call “table,” happened to have been moved into the other cave, or the cave was dark, or human number two happened to be standing with her back to what it then became necessary or convenient to refer to by a name?
By analogy, must there not have been a first time for the use of the word that means what we mean by “fastidious”? Was there a time when the quality it connotes had not yet occurred, or not been noticed or identified, so that there could have been no occasion for there to be a word for it?
And returning to my mother (a “Mutti” for the first ten years of my life in Vienna, a “mummy” during the years we lived in England), I propose that the reason she failed to possess herself of the word “fastidious” was that she was “nice” in the modern sense, neither demanding nor fussy, finicky, or choosy, never persnickety nor particularly particular, exacting, or difficult, and not at all hard to please.
PLOTS AND MANIPULATIONS
One argument in the modern forests of criticism says that no text happens unless a reader stands underneath for it to fall on. As a Bible reader sans scholarship, Greek or Hebrew, I am grateful for what I take to be permission—taking care to keep in mind that I’m missing what I’m missing—to understand what I understand: The Bible stories happen to me, and writers wrote them. Because writers wrote those lives lived and politics plotted in the alien Middle East at the remove of two millennia, they fall within the imagination of this modern reader. The two Books of Samuel have the scope of a novel. I propose to read them as if they were a novel and to do it guiltily.
When I first came to America I used to listen to a radio program called “Invitation to Learning.” A group of scholars and writers would sit in the studio and talk about books. I remember the time they talked about the Bible; Mark Van Doren said that if you treat the Bible as literature you lose the Bible. I thought then, and think now, that that’s probably true. As an unbeliever, the only way I can treat the Bible is as literature, and as a writer, the only way I can treat literature is as “writing”—the thing I do too. I want to nod to my ancient colleagues: I can tell some of the things that they are up to, how they plot their plots and how they manipulate us to understand them.
It overstates my case to say that the two Books of Samuel are “about” plotting. They are the story of the prophet Samuel whom God employed to pick Saul as the first and David as the second Hebrew king. The mandate of these first rulers was to root the children of Israel in the promised land of Canaan where, after four hundred years of Egyptian slavery and forty years of desert wandering, the Lord at last planted them. Their job was to rout the inhabitant Ishmaelites, Amalekites, Ammonites, and Moabites, to keep the Children of Israel from falling for their many godlets, and to become a nation under the one and only God.
In this quasi novel, David plays more roles, in more situations, than any modern protagonist: He is boy hero, musician with healing powers, and poet laureate. He becomes the favorite at King Saul’s court where, on three occasions, the crazed old king tries to kill him. David goes into exile and becomes the leader of a band of malcontents who maraud and massacre Canaanite cities. After Saul’s death David becomes king, the founder of a dyna
sty, the ancestor of Jesus; he is monarch, general, diplomat, a natural at public relations, a public man with a private life—a careful son, an irritating younger brother, a loving and faithful friend, the husband of a harem, the father of children, who make him howl with grief; an adulterer, a murderer, a penitent, a frequent mourner, an old man at last, who meets a new Goliath and can’t do anything about it, can’t make love, can’t keep himself warm.
The plotting out-thickens any Dickens. Look at the thread of the story about the rape of Tamar and its consequences.
Absalom had a beautiful sister called Tamar. By another of his wives David had a son called Amnon, and Amnon fell in love with Tamar and was sick with longing because she was his sister; because she was a virgin, it seemed impossible to Amnon that there was anything he could do to her.
But Amnon had a friend, his cousin Jonadab, a clever man, who said: Every day you are looking worse, my prince. Won’t you tell me what’s troubling you?
Amnon said: I am in love with Tamar, my brother Absalom’s sister!
Jonadab said, Lie down in your bed, as if you were ill. When your father comes to see you, you must say: Let my sister Tamar come and cook some dish that will be good for me, here, so that I can watch her, and she can serve me.