Here’s another example. In Chapter 12, Antoine and Lucile are having a very pleasant conversation, but all at once he twists an innocent question of hers around and starts grilling her about the importance of money to her. Although she answers him twice without getting angry, she’s feeling besieged and she asks him, “Pourquoi toutes ces questions?” — literally, “Why all of these questions?” Those five English words are the exact line that Westhoff has Lucile say to Antoine, but once again, I find them to be much too bland for the context.
When I translated this passage, temporarily becoming Lucile myself, I felt far more upset than that and I gave myself several possible things to say to Antoine, three of which were: “What’s the inquisition all about?” “Why the sudden Spanish Inquisition?” “Why this third degree out of the blue?” However, even though I couldn’t put my finger on why, the first two struck me as going just a little too far out on a limb — too high a temperature — and so I threw them out, although with some regret, because I liked their flair, I liked their punch. After a while I didn’t like “out of the blue” very well either, so I borrowed “sudden” from one of my rejected phrases, and in the end I settled on “Why the sudden third degree?” I admit that this sentence’s temperature may be as “hot” as 80°, but then again, why not? After all, some like it hot.
A good question, however, is why I felt compelled to stray so far from a literal translation (“Why all these questions?”) when, as I said, Westhoff was perfectly satisfied with one. Couldn’t one argue that if Sagan had wanted Lucile to use an idiom expressing great outrage, she would have had her do so, and therefore that Lucile’s non-use of an idiom in the original suggests that she isn’t quite that outraged, after all? Not having Lucile use an idiom was Sagan’s choice — and doesn’t Françoise Sagan know Lucile Saint-Léger better than Douglas Hofstadter does? Yes or no?
I admit that this is a crucially important objection to what I did, but I can’t help it if I believe that this is how Lucile is really feeling — and given my firm belief on that score, then I really have no choice but to have her express herself as I did.
Could it be that, though not intentionally, I am actually slightly modifying Lucile and Antoine (and others) a very small amount, by twiddling the knobs that determine their personalities? I admit that this is conceivable, although I’d like to think that it’s not the case. Perhaps by making them use more idioms in English than they use in French, I am making them just a tad bit “bigger than life” — blowing them up by, say, 1 percent. I don’t know, but for the sake of argument, let’s suppose that this is the case. Consider, then, my versions of these characters as contrasted with their cinematic versions, for indeed, in 1968 a film was made of La Chamade, with Catherine Deneuve as Lucile and Roger van Hool as Antoine. Since I have not seen it (that’s an intentional choice), I can’t say too much about it, but one thing I can say for sure is this. The cover of the paperback edition of La Chamade shows a still shot from the movie, and one sees that Antoine’s hair and eyes are jet-black; by contrast, in the book, Antoine’s extremely fair blond hair and his unforgettable “yellow eyes” are described over and over again, mostly because Lucile is extremely taken with these physical traits of his. Now isn’t the movie’s blatant rejection of these salient traits a far more radical betrayal than my simply giving Sagan’s characters a few more idioms in English than she gives them in French? And yet Sagan, in her 1998 memoir Derrière l’épaule, recalls how she herself worked very hard on the movie, and she warmly praises it. One thus gets the impression that she permits, even encourages, considerable twiddling-about with the knobs that determine the identity of her characters. That’s food for thought.
Reined in by the Leash
ONE last example of this kind of thing. In Chapter 13, Lucile is replying with indignation to a question Antoine has asked her. She thinks the answer is self-evident, and where Sagan has her say, “Bien entendu” (meaning literally “of course”), Westhoff has her say, “Of course.” That’s fair enough. My first inclination, however, was to go much further than this — namely, “Well, what do you think — is the Pope Catholic?” Once again, though, some little voice inside me protested, for two reasons. One is that what Lucile actually said in French was much shorter and simpler than this sarcastic retort, and the other is that the rhetorical question “Is the Pope Catholic?” might sound too American. I don’t quite know why that would be, since popes and Catholics are hardly limited to America, but perhaps there’s a down-home American sense of humor lurking inside that remark, and perhaps it’s that hidden flavor that sounds a bit un-French. In any case, none of my friends who read this phrase thought it belonged in Lucile’s mouth, and so I threw it out and settled for just, “Well, what do you think?”, and as I did so, my translation temperature fell from 100° to 75°.
Throwing out that idiom bothered me, but I bowed to the combination of pressures. Still, I couldn’t help wondering what would be so very wrong about putting it in Lucile’s mouth. So what that Sagan had her say just “Bien entendu”? Is Lucile exclusively Françoise Sagan’s character? Isn’t she at least a little bit my character? After all, who has been choosing her words for the past hundred pages or so? Me, that’s who! So why can’t I choose her words in my own way this time? How long a leash am I on, anyway? What is the exact nature of this leash, this bond, this intangible thread, linking me to Françoise Sagan?
Missed My Chance
INDEED, the whole time I was translating La Chamade, I felt there was some kind of special link between me and Françoise Sagan, partly because I loved this novel so much and was so painstakingly and meticulously trying to reconstruct it in English, and partly because my parents had, through some weird fluke, chanced to have dinner with her some thirty or more years earlier. I nourished high hopes of showing her my translation and getting her reaction to it, and I assumed that this was bound to happen one way or another. It seemed that an encounter between us was somehow fated.
I didn’t actually have any direct contacts to Sagan, however, Serge Gorodetzky being the only one I could think of, and he had died a few years earlier. In the spring of 2004, I sent some emails to various friends in France to see if, by some coincidence, any of them had a direct avenue to Sagan, but I made white cabbage — that is, j’ai fait chou blanc — which is to say, I struck out. This didn’t particularly bother me, though, because I wasn’t in a big hurry; I wanted to wait until my translation was completely ready before showing it to the author herself.
A couple of months later, when my mother had her stroke, many new pressures swarmed down on me, and for a few months, La Chamade was placed on the back burner. When fall arrived, I returned to Bloomington, classes started up again at Indiana University, and my work routine more or less resumed. I was hoping to get back to my translation and to put the finishing touches on it, which would allow me to send it to Sagan. One day in late September, though, quite out of the blue, I got a sad, terse little email message from my sister Laura out in California, telling me that Françoise Sagan had died. That was a sad blow for me. I felt as if I had lost a potential friend, and as if Sagan, too, had lost a potential friend in me. I guess my intuition had been wrong; it was fated not to happen.
Translator as Copy-editor
WHEN I was growing up, my mother subscribed to The New Yorker, and in my late teens I greatly enjoyed flipping through each issue of that august journal, looking for cartoons and other amusing tidbits, one of which was the sporadic feature called “Our Forgetful Authors”. Here one would find two passages gleefully quoted that directly contradicted each other, both taken from the same book, with the page numbers cited, invariably followed by some wry comment at the hapless author’s expense. I always savored these little jabs that were pointed at various writers the world around, some very well known.
I suppose that all authors make blunders of this sort — errare humanum est. Even though I knew this, I was a little surprised to find a couple of glaring errors in La Cha
made. One of them had to do with Diane’s last name. In Chapter 3 she is called “Diane Merbel”, but in Chapter 15 she is called “Diane Mirbec”. Those are the only two places where her last name is given. I wasn’t sure what to do with this. I certainly didn’t want to have two different last names appear in my translation, even if that had happened in the original. It would make both Sagan and me look stupid, at least to those readers who happened to catch the inconsistency. So unless I was going to fall into the Literality Trap, I would have to override my author. But should I choose “Merbel” or “Mirbec”? I was stymied until it occurred to me that I could blend them, making either “Merbec” or “Mirbel”. I liked the sound of the latter more, and so I opted for that. I later asked Google how many occurrences of each of these it could find on the Web, and it reported back to me 783 for “Merbel”, 31 for “Mirbec”, 38,100 for “Mirbel”, and 77 for “Merbec”. I was pleased with my intuition, and stuck with my choice.
In Chapter 9, Lucile is thinking to herself that it’s ten in the evening and that she’ll see Antoine in seventeen hours. Well, that would mean three o’clock in the afternoon. However, one page later, she continues her musing and says to herself that she’ll see him at five o’clock in the afternoon. Who made the mistake — Lucile or Françoise? I don’t know, but once again, I saw no reason to leave this kind of slip-up in my translation, so I changed “seventeen” to “nineteen”, figuring that of the three figures, the one gotten by subtraction was by far the most likely one to be wrong. It seems to me that carrying out this patch was not only a permissible liberty I took, but the kind of liberty any dutiful translator must take (this is the old Don’t-Trust-the-Text Paradox again). Sagan wouldn’t wish a careless arithmetical goof-up to mar her book (or rather, our joint book).
A similar arithmetical goof-up involves ages. At one point, Diane is described as being 45 years old, and at another point she is said to be ten years older than Lucile is, while at two points, Lucile is said to be 30 years old. This just doesn’t add up! Since, once again, I put more stock in Sagan’s use of absolute numbers than in her subtraction, I changed the ten-year age difference to a fifteen-year age difference. This kind of repair work is just part and parcel of a respectful translator’s duty.
A somewhat different type of error occurs where Sagan is describing how a remark by Lucile suddenly relieves Antoine’s tension. She writes, “Et, comme un reflux, la tranquillité envahit l’esprit d’Antoine…” Now the word reflux means “ebb tide” — that is, a tide flowing out, not in — but Sagan tells us that this ebb tide of tranquillity is invading Antoine’s soul, which does not compute. At this juncture, Robert Westhoff, liberating himself elegantly from his ex-wife’s words, wrote, “And like an ebbing tide, apprehension left Antoine…”, making a semantic double flip that I find rather clever and charming. I, too, felt compelled to free myself from Sagan’s erroneous word-choice, but my maneuver was quite different. I wrote, “And the sense of relief that came flooding into his soul was so powerful that…”, replacing the dangerous ebb-tide metaphor with the less risky metaphor of a flood, which poses no directional problems.
A very different type of author error (if “error” is even the word) occurred in Chapter 14, where on one page Sagan writes:elle le subissait avec un mélange d’ironie et de désespoir
and just three pages later she writes:elle le subissait avec un mélange de bonheur et de désespoir.
Whether you know any French or not, you can see that these two long phrases, both describing Lucile but in very different circumstances, differ in just one word. This nearly verbatim repetition jumped out at me one morning as I was transcribing those pages into my notebooks, and I made a note to myself to be sure to avoid using nearly-identical phrasing in these two spots. I felt that leaving the two phrases almost identical would make Françoise Sagan sound like she was in a rut.
Some people might fault me for this choice, saying that since Sagan re-used (nearly) the same phrase, I should have slavishly done the same thing — but speaking as a dog free to trot about, I would adamantly disagree. It was my desire that Sagan should sound always fresh and never rut-stuck, so in the first spot I wrote that Lucile “had just accepted its frenzy with a mélange of irony and despair”, and in the second spot that she “would submit to it in a weird blur of joy and desperation”. As for Westhoff, in the first spot he wrote, “she had supported it with a mixture of irony and despair”, and in the second one, “she bore it with a mixture of happiness and despair”. This is all right, but it only slightly diminishes the sense of repetition.
It was my intention with my modification to try to do Sagan a small favor. It’s not as if La Chamade were a poem in which near-echoes had been deliberately inserted from time to time a few pages apart, intended as subtle artistic touches. Rather, this repetition was just a bit of careless writing, and I, acting as Sagan’s anglophone proxy and solicitous copy-editor, felt it was my job to fix things up so that no one would have grounds for chuckling at her obliviousness. To leave the repetition would have been to fall timidly into the Literality Trap; to get rid of it was to welcome and to savor the Don’t-Trust-the-Text Paradox.
Clarity, Vividness, and Logic
HERE’S another tiny error that I patched up without any qualms. We’re in Chapter 24, and one autumn morning Lucile has turned up at Antoine’s apartment at daybreak. Facing her, Antoine, filled with complex emotions and in a swirl of intense memories, reviews in his mind the summer that they just spent together, particularly its final month. In the French, however, it says “il revit le mois d’été”, which means “he resaw the summer month”. This singular doesn’t make sense, since summers have three months, and they spent nearly the whole summer together. In fact, in the following clause Sagan has Antoine zeroing in on one particular month — August. I would guess the use of le mois rather than les mois was a typo rather than an author error, but whatever it was, I felt compelled to fix it. The first clause should have said, “il revit les mois d’été” — “he resaw the summer months”; then Antoine’s thought would have flowed logically.
FS: Il faillit lui dire que son geste n’avait aucune importance, qu’elle l’avait toujours trompé de toute façon, avec Charles, avec sa vie, avec sa propre nature. Mais il revit le mois d’été, il se rappela le goût de ses larmes ce dernier mois d’août sur son épaule, et il ne dit rien.
RW: He almost told her that her act was of no importance, that in any case she had always deceived him, with Charles, with life, with her own nature. But he relived that summer month, he remembered the taste of the tears she shed on his shoulder that August, and he said nothing.
DH: He nearly blurted out that her concern for him made no difference to him, that she’d always been cheating on him with Charles, with life, with her entire soul. But then he remembered those summer months, he recalled the taste of her tears on his shoulder that last month of August, and he bit his tongue.
We’re not done with this passage yet; there are more issues of logical flow in it that I wish to discuss. The last few words — “et il ne dit rien” — tell us that the power of Antoine’s memories has made him refrain from saying something harsh to Lucile. Westhoff copies these words very literally, writing “and he said nothing”. I, by contrast, stray a little bit further from Sagan, and write “and he bit his tongue”. Now French has the same stock metaphor (se mordre la langue), but Sagan didn’t use it. So why did I, then? Because biting his tongue is clearly what Antoine did, and because using that very common metaphor makes it just a little bit clearer and more vivid. But do I, a mere translator, have the right to turn up the clarity and vividness knobs?
Well, the fact is that I’m naturally inclined to turn these knobs up high no matter what I’m writing, because clarity and vividness are, in some sense, my religion. I would be betraying myself if I didn’t allow myself to be as clear and as vivid as possible when I translate. Indeed, were I told that I had to adopt the principle of such rigid “faithfulness”
to the author, then I would just give up translating, for it wouldn’t allow me to use my own mind. It would turn me into a dull automaton, and it would remove all joy from the act. And why would I wish to translate anything if doing so was emotionless from start to finish, or worse yet — and far more likely — if it was painful from start to finish, as I constantly and slavishly suppressed one after another of my carefully considered judgments?
Some critics might say that I shouldn’t allow myself (or be allowed) to use my own style — the Wrong Style — no matter how much I personally revere clarity and vividness; I simply have to “copy” what the author did. That is, after all, the translator’s sacred duty. Well, I would retort that “copying” one’s author is anything but a mechanical act. For example, look at how Robert Westhoff — Mister Low Temperature himself — “copied” Sagan’s phrase “le goût de ses larmes” (literally, “the taste of her tears”): he refers to “the taste of the tears she shed”. But Sagan has no such clause as “she shed” in her original sentence. Does this turn Westhoff into a traitor to his ex-wife? Absolutely not. I would vehemently defend his right to play around at this level. He felt that adding those two words made it flow better in English. That was his artistic judgment, and using one’s artistic judgment is what a good translator has to do. The fact is, we make such judgment calls in every single sentence we translate, often doing so many times in a single sentence, and in many cases entirely unconsciously, just taking the winning phrase that bubbles up from the roiling, boiling murk in the cauldron of our mind.
That Mad Ache & Translator Page 22