That Mad Ache & Translator

by Françoise Sagan

  In the book’s last chapter, Lucile and Antoine find themselves seated near each other at a party. Sagan writes, “Antoine et Lucile étaient à un mètre l’un de l’autre” — literally, “Antoine and Lucile were a meter away from each other.” As one might expect, Westhoff writes, “Antoine and Lucile were only a yard from each other.” Once again, he crosses the Atlantic (or at least the Channel) in order to give us a distance measurement, even though any literate English speaker knows roughly how big one meter is. This time, however, I didn’t stick with the metric system but made a more radical shift: “Antoine and Lucile were only an arm’s length from each other.” Not only does this avoid the quagmire of meters versus yards, it also sounds less scientific and more poetic. It’s a trade I thought was very much in my favor. Just think, though — I blew my chance to say, “Antoine and Lucile were only 39.37 inches from each other”! But somehow, I don’t think that’s what Sagan would have wanted this trader to say, even though it is an impeccable literal translation.

  Imitate or Clarify Emotional Blur?

  FOR ME, one of the harder sentences in La Chamade comes inside a long inner monologue of Lucile’s in Chapter 14. She is in profound emotional turmoil and feels as if she is being crucified, but by spears that are poking through her heart instead of through her hands or feet. The next fragment of her thought, as reported by Sagan, goes like this:Elle s’étonnait alors de sentir son cœur se retourner, se vider sous le choc, devenir à la fois vide et affreusement encombrant.

  Literally rendered, this sentence would give something like this:And it amazed her then to feel her heart turn over, emptied by the shock, emptied and yet horribly cumbersome.

  Actually, I cheated a little — I gave you Westhoff ’s rendition of this sentence — but it will do pretty well as a literal translation. The problem is that it still strikes me as very hard to understand. Or maybe this isn’t a problem at all — maybe that’s what Scott Buresh meant when he said that he likes to have some fog, some mist. Could Sagan’s fog here be desirable to some readers? If so, fine — but I personally rebel at the idea of outputting a verbal fog that I don’t understand simply because I gave up too early, didn’t think hard enough about the input sentence. I wouldn’t be content with just making a literal translation on the basis of image-free words, in the manner of Google’s translation engine.

  Instead, I felt compelled at least to try to reach behind the words and to fathom the actual feelings. What could it mean for one’s heart to turn over and empty itself ? What could it mean for one’s heart to be both empty and cumbersome at the same time? Is there anything tangible here, or is it all metaphorical?

  Since I felt blocked, I turned to Caroline for her perspective, and after we had talked it over, I felt pretty sure that she had put her finger on Lucile’s pulse, and so, borrowing her imagery, I rendered Sagan’s sentence in English as follows:At such times, reeling in shock, she was astounded to feel her heart tip over and her emotions drain out, leaving it empty yet still unbearably heavy.

  The sentence is still not totally clear, but I think it’s about as clear as it can get. We are, after all, dealing with the eternal mysteries of the human heart, and the prospect of translating such mysteries precisely into words in any language is well-nigh hopeless.

  The question I would raise here is whether I have done Francoise Sagan a service or a disservice in trying to “decode” and spell out, at least roughly, what she had said in a cryptic and elusive, although undeniably poetic, manner. Or perhaps the question is whether I have done readers a service or disservice in doing this. To my mind, though, there is no question. I had to do it, and I am happy to have done it. That’s how I see my duty to Sagan and to our readers.

  Some people may prefer the more literal approach, which would result in an ambiguously swirling verbal fog, and that’s fine with me. There’s plenty of room for more than one singer of a lovely song, and plenty of room for more than one translator of a lovely book. Or as they used to chant back in Mao’s day (and perhaps they still do), “Let a hundred flowers bloom!” But I admit, they probably didn’t chant it in English…

  What on Earth did She Mean?

  SOME of the more ambiguous spots in La Chamade use French phrases that I couldn’t make head or tail of, and after tearing my hair out, I found out, to my relief (and also frustration), that both Caroline and Daniel were as baffled as I. One of these spots, found in Chapter 6, refers to Lucile’s half-hearted attempts, in questioning Charles, to get to the bottom of a mystery.

  FS: Elle n’aurait pas insisté : ses quêtes de vérité, « ses moments russes » n’allaient jamais très loin.

  RW: She would not have been insistent: her search for truth never went very far.

  DH: She wouldn’t have asked for more clarity; her quests for truth, her moments russes, were never terribly long-lived.

  The French original uses “ses moments russes” as an appositive phrase to “ses quêtes de vérité”, but what Lucile’s “Russian moments” might be I had no idea. Do Russians have some unique mode of truth-seeking (or do French people suppose that they do?)? Do Russians go into a Dostoevskian or Tolstoyan trance of some obscure sort? Was this some profound, if cryptic, literary reference? Neither of my native French-speaking friends was sure what Sagan meant, and so my solution was not terribly brilliant — I just kept this elusive French phrase intact, leaving it to each reader’s imagination to decide whatever it might mean (if the reader had any desire to do so). To my surprise, however, Westhoff, who had direct access to the passage’s author, dropped it like a hot potato. I wonder why he didn’t simply ask her!

  Almost exactly the same scenario re-enacted itself in Chapter 8, where Antoine is musing about a certain “après-midi rouge et noir” — that is, a “red and black afternoon”. At first I had no idea what this was about, but eventually I recalled that Antoine’s room was always very dark (noir) and he always lit it up with a red lamp (rouge). Then it hit me that Sagan was perhaps alluding to the colors of Antoine’s room by quoting the title of Stendhal’s famous novel Le Rouge et le Noir, thus killing two birds with one stone. I wasn’t sure of this, but it seemed a Sagan-like move, and since neither Daniel nor Caroline seemed to have any clearer ideas than I did, I just wrote “the whole Rouge et Noir afternoon”, with the capitals suggesting a literary allusion. Westhoff, in case anyone is interested, sashayed around the issue, writing “yesterday afternoon”. Why didn’t he just phone up his ex-wife?

  Laisser des mots français dans le texte ?

  THESE two examples show that I occasionally leave French words in my English text. In fact, I do so quite often, and for the obvious reason, which is that having French words scattered throughout the text can only intensify the ambiance of Frenchness.

  In Chapter 9, for instance, I leave an occurrence of Je t’aime intact, assuming that nearly all readers will have run across the French for “I love you” somewhere before and will thus be able to handle it effortlessly. Similarly, toward the end of Chapter 15, at a particularly wrenching moment, I leave the words Au revoir in their original language in order to emphasize the drama of the parting. It’s unimaginable to me that any reader of this book would be thrown by this phrase, and to me that is sufficient justification for keeping it, especially in this poignant spot. And one other salient use of French terms is the names of the five major parts of the novel, which I left in French, presuming that they are pretty transparent to educated readers of English.

  You may recall the omelette flambée devoured with gusto by the pink-faced couple. Well, there are dozens of other French terms sprinkled throughout the English text, including these:adieu, adroit, apéritif, aplomb, autoroute, bagatelle, banquette, brasserie, cabaret, café, camaraderie, carafe, chaise longue, chauffeur, confidant, coquette, coterie, dossier, douceur, élan, ennui, entourage, entrée, façade, faux pas, frisson, joie de vivre, liaison, maître d’hôtel, mélange, négligée, pique, première, protégée, rendezvous, rêverie, rive gauche, savant, s
oirée, tête-à-tête, voilà.

  Our language is well known for its willingness to gulp down foreign words whole, and as this list shows, many of the words I have called “French” are by now perfectly normal English.

  “Tu” and “Vous” in English?

  ONE OF the most fundamental ways in which English differs from French is that it has only one second-person singular pronoun — “you”. French, like most European languages, has both an intimate or informal “you” and a respectful or formal “you”. Among adults, the informal “you” — tu — is generally used within families, between close friends, between lovers, and so forth, whereas the formal “you” — vous — is used between people who don’t know each other well, or who wish to maintain a cautious or respectful distance from each other.

  These pronouns’ usages have drifted a bit over the centuries, but in 1965, when this novel was written, they were much the same as they are today. Whereas some European countries have drifted or are drifting towards a universal tutoiement, France has definitely not gone that route. In any case, back in the sixties, much as today, French lovers virtually never said vous to each other; to do so would have sounded bizarrely chivalrous, vaguely aristocratic (or hankering to be so), and it would have evoked the flavor of an era long gone.

  And yet, in this novel, vouvoiement between lovers occurs frequently, and is thus a very striking feature to any French-speaking reader. Indeed, the contrast between the couples that say tu to each other and those that remain at the vous level is almost the plot of this novel, boiled down to its essence. And so, for a translator merely to dismiss it and say, “We don’t have this distinction in contemporary English — so too bad!” would be a serious betrayal of the fabric of this novel. On the other hand, I certainly wasn’t about to turn back the clock a couple of hundred years and stuff the antique Anglo-Saxon pronoun “thou” into the mouths of chic contemporary Parisians! Talk about betrayal — that would have turned my translation into a laughingstock.

  What to do, then? Was there any escape hatch at all? I ruminated on this quandary for quite a while, eventually hitting on an unorthodox idea that pleased me. I decided that since this is a work of written English rather than oral English — it’s not a play that one hears spoken aloud but a novel that one reads with one’s eyes — I could exploit this fact and invent an inaudible but visible English counterpart to the vous/tu distinction. Thus was born, at least for the duration of this novel, the “You”/“you” distinction. When capitalized, “You” would represent a formal, respectful, second-person singular form of address, wheras “you” written with lowercase “y” would represent an informal, intimate second-person singular form of address — the tu that is expected among lovers. And that’s the convention I follow throughout my translation. (Note: I always use the lowercase “you” when two or more people are being addressed, since French makes no formal/informal distinction in the plural, and since it’s always very clear in the novel when a plural “you” is being used.)

  Needless to say, the capitalized word “You” coming in the middle of a sentence may look somewhat jolting, perhaps a bit stuffy and pompous, to English-speaking readers — but that’s not a bad thing at all; indeed, it’s just the effect I want, because in La Chamade the use of vous between lovers will strike French-speaking readers as precious and affected. Actually, it’s a little subtler than that; there is also a kind of touching quality in this extra degree of respect for one’s romantic companion — a kind of quaint, old-fashioned reserve, even gallantry, that contrasts with the easy, almost mindless shift to tu. A couple that resists this natural slide will only do so very consciously, and I think that the capital “Y” somehow may also convey this elusive flavor, at least a bit.

  In retrospect, I would say that of all the risks that I took in creating That Mad Ache out of La Chamade, introducing this curious “You”/“you” distinction was among the greatest, but I took this risk very happily because I felt it was a major help in conveying accurately the flavor of this novel as experienced by a reader of French.

  Immense Care Taken with Tone

  FOR ME, one of the most touching sentences in the book was the following extremely short remark (I won’t reveal here who said it to whom, nor when nor where): “Vous êtes très en beauté.” I must have gone back and forth dozens and dozens of times in trying to figure out how best to render, in English, the subtle feel of this very tender, intense, yet offhand remark. Among the candidates were the following sentences, with “You are” and “You’re” always vying for primacy, and with the word “today” always an optional add-on at the end: “You’re very beautiful”; “You’re very radiant”; “You’re looking so radiant”, “You’re truly radiant”; “You’re really in bloom”; and so forth and so on. There are at least a hundred ways of taking the elements listed above and making plausible versions from them.

  To some people, such nitpicky details as the microscopic difference in flavor between “You’re” and “You are” wouldn’t matter in the least; they’d say it was six of one and half a dozen of the other (which in French becomes “Bonnet blanc ou blanc bonnet”, to translate which literally into sensible, acceptable English poses a mean challenge!). Well, such nonchalance is fine if you feel that way, but to me such fine-tuning choices matter enormously. After all, when I first read the book, this remark had been among the most telling moments in the whole story — a hingepoint, I would call it — and so I desperately wanted to get it just right, and of course I had only one try at it, since all the rival versions would necessarily remain forever invisible and silent in the wings, never to be seen or heard by anyone but me.

  It’s quite probable, I admit, that when Françoise Sagan came up with this sentence, she just tossed it off spontaneously without trying out a hundred close variations on the theme and picking the best of them. It would never have occurred to her to do any such complex, cerebral exercise. That’s because she, in the manner of most novelists, was living intensely inside the heads (and hearts) of her characters, and of course this particular character just came out with this remark, just like that, without a lot of prior calculation. But I am not the original writer (let alone the character in her novel), and the only way I know to seek the best counterpart in English is to come up with a fair number of alternatives and to weigh them against each other. And I think it’s a good challenge for anyone who’s interested in translation. So, reader, given just one chance at it, how would you render this tender, touching, hingepoint sentence?

  Breaks and Breath-marks

  I HAD no idea, when I started translating this novel that I so love, that I would wind up asking myself over and over again whether or not I have the right to impose my personal sense of where breaks and pauses — metaphorical breath-marks — belong in the book. In other words, would I be overstepping my bounds if here and there I were to add, delete, or shift various markers that delineate the boundaries of all sorts of structural units of Sagan’s elegant prose?

  At a very microscopic structural level, for instance, dare I insert commas where Sagan has none (or dare I remove commas where she has them)? Well, of course I do — insertion or removal of commas here and there is hardly a great sin; I’d put it on the same level of sinfulness as swiping a paper clip from a friend’s desk.

  On a slightly higher level, dare I break some of Sagan’s longer sentences into two or more pieces, or vice versa? Once again, yes, although I try not to do this too often. Perhaps this is the analogue of sneaking a popsicle from one’s friend’s freezer.

  Jumping to a higher structural level, dare I break Sagan’s paragraphs, some of which are unbelievably long, into more bite-sized chunks that have their own logic? To be concrete, in several chapters there are paragraphs two full pages long, and in Chapter 14 there is a paragraph nearly three pages long. As I transcribed such paragraphs, they felt mighty bloated to me, and I felt each of them crying out to me to split it up into more digestable pieces. Thus once again I wound up being lenie
nt toward myself — and indeed, I took pity on all of these giant paragraphs and broke them into three, four, or five smaller ones, inserting breaks wherever my sense of esthetics and logic felt they belonged. Doing this was perhaps presumptuous on my part, but I felt it was needed. Perhaps this sin was on the same order as filching a few roses from one’s friend’s garden?

  But we are not done; as in any novel, there are higher levels of structure than just paragraphs. Sagan explicitly breaks her chapters into what I will call “sections” (signaled by blank lines in the original French, and in my translation by lines with three centered bullets), and of course there are the chapters themselves, which have numbers but no names.

  In general, I was very hesitant to insert (or delete) section breaks inside chapters, but in Chapter 4 there was one spot, right after Antoine and Lucile make a break from one of Claire’s soirées and head out into Paris, “dark, glowing, and seductive”, which strongly suggested that there should be a parallel break in the narration, and so I went right ahead and inserted it. And I admit that there are two or three other spots in the book where I had the gall to introduce my own section breaks, but I did so only after much pondering. Here, maybe we’re talking about “borrowing” a detective novel from our friend’s bookshelf.

  It would have taken even more effrontery for me to tamper with Sagan’s chapter boundaries — chopping one chapter into two pieces, fusing two chapters into one, or other types of amputations and graftings. Maybe such an act of revision would be comparable to stealthily walking out of one’s friend’s house with a Françoise Sagan novel hidden under one’s coat. And precisely because I thought it was just too brazen, I didn’t dare do that anywhere in this book; however, had I been Sagan’s editor in French, I would have suggested to her that she consider doing so in a couple of cases. To my eye, the logic of the novel could have been slightly improved by such adjustments.