Bookish Thoughts: Translating genius

Kit Whitfield‘s excellent series of deconstructions / analyses of the first sentences of famous and notable books has fostered in me the habit of thinking of “first sentences” as I reshelve my books. So, earlier today I noticed my copies of Eugénie Grandet as I filed some of my Austens away, and pulled them out to consider whether I should nominate the first sentence of that book for analysis. But which first sentence I wondered, the English or the French. The English first sentence didn’t completely evoke the French book that I remembered. So I sat down and read the first several pages in French and then in the English of more than one translation. All of which made me think about the problem of translations. We talk about reading The Iliad or The Aeneid or The Bible or Beowulf but few of us are actually reading the words originally written. We are experiencing these works of genius through the eyes and minds of translators. So we do not really have, as readers, an opinion about any of those works–we have an opinion of those works as mediated by those who translated them.

Look, for example, at the first several hundred words of Eugénie Grandet:

One of the challenges of the reader who wishes to read a book written in a language they themselves cannot read is to select the best translation. Readers may fall back on the advice of reviewers or use the literary reputation of a proxy, for example an editor or series such as “Penguin Classics.”Of course the choice challenge presupposes that the reader has access to more than one translation. It also suggests that there is a single “best” translation for all readers. In many cases neither is true.

Note #1: for those who don’t read French–just skim down to the English translations. The point I am making in this piece does not require knowledge of that language.

Note #2: in French there are several more sentences before the first paragraph ends. The different font colours indicate the places in the text translators added paragraph breaks.

This is how Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet begins:

Il se trouve dans certaines provinces des maisons dont la vue inspire une mélancolie égale à celle que provoquent les cloîtres les plus sombres, les landes les plus ternes ou les ruines les plus tristes. Peut-être y a-t-il à la fois dans ces maisons et le silence du cloître et l’aridité des landes et les ossements des ruines. La vie et le mouvement y sont si tranquilles qu’un étranger les croirait inhabitées, s’il ne rencontrait tout à coup le regard pâle et froid d’une personne immobile dont la figure à demi monastique dépasse l’appui de la croisée, au bruit d’un pas inconnu. Ces principes de mélancolie existent dans la physionomie d’un logis situé à Saumur, au bout de la rue montueuse qui mène au château, par le haut de la ville. Cette rue, maintenant peu fréquentée, chaude en été, froide en hiver, obscure en quelques endroits, est remarquable par la sonorité de son petit pavé caillouteux, toujours propre et sec, par l’étroitesse de sa voie tortueuse, par la paix de ses maisons qui appartiennent à la vieille ville, et que dominent les remparts. Des habitations trois fois séculaires y sont encore solides quoique construites en bois, et leurs divers aspects contribuent à l’originalité qui recommande cette partie de Saumur à l’attention des antiquaires et des artistes. Il est difficile de passer devant ces maisons, sans admirer les énormes madriers dont les bouts sont taillés en figures bizarres et qui couronnent d’un bas-relief noir le rez-de-chaussée de la plupart d’entre elles. Ici, des pièces de bois transversales sont couvertes en ardoises et dessinent des lignes bleues sur les frêles murailles d’un logis terminé par un toit en colombage que les ans ont fait plier, dont les bardeaux pourris ont été tordus par l’action alternative de la pluie et du soleil. Là se présentent des appuis de fenêtre usés, noircis, dont les délicates sculptures se voient à peine, et qui semblent trop légers pour le pot d’argile brune d’où s’élancent les oeillets ou les rosiers d’une pauvre ouvrière. Plus loin, c’est des portes garnies de clous énormes où le génie de nos ancêtres a tracé des hiéroglyphes domestiques dont le sens ne se retrouvera jamais. Tantôt un protestant y a signé sa foi, tantôt un ligueur y a maudit Henri IV.^[1]

Here are the first two paragraphs of Marion Ayton Crawford’s Penguin Classic translation^[2] of the same book:

In some country towns there exist houses whose appearance weights as heavily upon the spirits as the gloomiest cloister, the most dismal ruin, or the dreariest stretch of barren land. These houses may combine the cloister’s silence with the arid desolation of the waste and the sepulchral melancholy of ruins. Life makes so little stir in them that a stranger believes them to be uninhabited until he suddenly meets the cold listless gaze of some motionless human being, who face, austere as a monk’s, peers from above the window-sill at the sound of a stranger’s footfall.
One particular house front in Saumur possesses all these gloomy characteristics. It stands at the end of the hilly street leading to the castle, in the upper part of the town. This street, which is little used nowadays, is hot in the summer, cold in winter, and in some places dark and overshadowed. One’s footsteps ring curiously loudly on its flinty cobble-stones, which are always clean and dry; and its narrowness and crookedness and the silence of its houses, which form part of the old town and are looked down upon by the ramparts, make an unusual impression on the mind. There are houses there which were built three hundred years ago, and built of wood, yet are still sound. Each has a character of its own, and their diversity contributes to the essential strangess of the place, which attracts antiquaries and artists to this quarter of Saumur.

Here is how Katharine Prescott Wormeley’s translation^[3] begins:

There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step.
Such elements of sadness formed the physiognomy, as it were, of a dwelling-house in Saumur which stands at the end of the steep street leading to the chateau in the upper part of the town. This street—now little frequented, hot in summer, cold in winter, dark in certain sections—is remarkable for the resonance of its little pebbly pavement, always clean and dry, for the narrowness of its tortuous road-way, for the peaceful stillness of its houses, which belong to the Old town and are over-topped by the ramparts. Houses three centuries old are still solid, though built of wood, and their divers aspects add to the originality which commends this portion of Saumur to the attention of artists and antiquaries.

In each case the translator was faced with the same task. They needed not to translate Balzac’s original word for word but meaning for meaning and theme for theme. They needed to use words to paint the picture that Balzac wanted his readers to have of that town and that house. Balzac’s style was inextricable from his themes. Yet the translator is also faced with the task of translating the original book so that it is accessible and understandable to readers who come from a different literary tradition. Such a reader might respond quite differently to the paragraph and sentence structure of the original that would have someone from the original audience. The (French) opening of the book is an extended word picture of a time and place. The sound of the language carries part of the load of “setting the scene.” Reading the French out loud carries quite a different feeling than reading the English out loud.

Each translator chose to break up the original long, uninterrupted opening, into smaller paragraphs. I don’t know to what degree the existence of earlier translations affected the two quoted above, however both chose to insert paragraph breaks at the same points in the text. I have read other translations that inserted them at different points.

To get a sense of just how difficult it is to pick the “best” translation consider the following. I originally read Eugénie Grandet in French. I was looking for an English “version” more for annotations and footnotes than for a translation of the words since I was sure that I was missing some elements of the book that readers of Balzac’s time would have appreciated. I agree that for the modern reader, especially for the modern reader brought up within the styles dominant in the English reading world, stylistic changes may make the book more readable. However, in my opinion, none of the translators quite nails that opening sentence. None of them are able to translate Balzac’s opening into one that would repay the type of attention Kit Whitfield brings to the opening sentences she has analyzed.

None of this should be taken as a criticism of translators in general or these translators in particular. Perhaps Balzac’s opening sentence could only be translated into English by Balzac himself–if he was fluent in the language. Perhaps the particular quality of that sentence cannot be duplicated in the English language. I don’t know. I do know that the more I grapple with that single sentence the greater my admiration and respect for translators.

Note #3: One of the wonderful bonuses of Kindle/Amazon ebooks is that one is usually offered the option to download a sample of the book, generally the first chapter. This allows readers the opportunity to browse books much as one would in a book store or library. One doesn’t need to own a Kindle to do this. The “Kindle for your computers” software is available for free. The sample chapter is downloaded to your computer and you can peruse it at your leisure. I looked for an number of translations of Balzac’s books before I wrote this piece and ended up buying my third copy of the book.

^[1] Eugénie Grandet is in the public domain. The French text in this article is from the version on the Gutenberg.org website. insert footnote

^[2] Balzac, H. Eugénie Grandet. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1955.

^[3] Also available on Project Gutenberg.

Book review: Diary of a Provincial Lady

Diary of a Provincial Lady by E M Delafield (1931)

Occasionally, upon reaching the end of a book, a reader may find hirself unsure as to exactly how to rate/categorize it. This is exactly how I felt when I reached the last line of Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady. The book is either a light, enjoyable and forgettable read or a masterpiece. It is either wittily mundane or relentlessly subversive.

Let me digress for a moment before getting to the heart of this review to explain that the way I “discovered” this book and my own experience of reading it play major roles in my reception of it.

How I experienced Delafield

This is one of those books which made me actually laugh out loud while reading it. Not small giggles or demure chuckles but resounding belly laughs that were loud enough to bring the spouse in from some other room to ask “what’s so funny?” Each time this happened I would read the passage in question out loud (often barely able to do so without breaking into laughter again) and each time the spouse would respond with at a polite smile. “Yes,” zie would say, “quite amusing but it probably misses quite a bit from being out taken out of context.”

And that, of course, was the point. Delafield is not an author who can appreciated in excerpt or digest form unless the reader is already familiar with her style and created universe.

How I “discovered” Delafield

Much as the sentences in the book can be better appreciated in the light of all of the other sentences in the book, the experience of reading the book is further enriched, and indeed may only be fully achieved, if the book was read in the context of the other books published at the same time.

I “discovered” Delafield because of references made to her work among reviews of Angela Thirkell’s books. I would never have read Thirkell had not someone who read my reviews of E. F. Benson suggested her to me. I would not have reviewed E. F. Benson in the same manner had I not carefully placed Benson into the context of his time.

For today’s reader E. F. Benson’s books might be understood/received differently if zie realizes that Benson set his stories in the same England (and to a large degree about the same types of people) as did Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and even, heaven forfend, H. C. Bailey. It is only when comparing the different ways in which these authors portrayed English society (given their varied backgrounds) that one can begin to see in full the larger story they were, probably unintentionally, telling.

The way in which Benson wrote about the gentry was informed by his own place within that class. Benson was the son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, the brother of prominent writers and thinkers and a very successful novelist and short story writer. Benson grew up, and lived, around people who were financially and socially secure. While Thirkell was technically part of that same class there were times in her life (especially when she was living in Australia) when she endured serious economic and physical hardships. She and Benson both made a living from their writing but Thirkell wrote to achieve a standard of living that Benson had always been able to maintain.

Thirkell’s books were, like Benson’s, often wonderfully light and yet if one looked carefully beneath the light and witty surfaces one detected uncomfortable undercurrents of con cern in the output of both authors. In Benson books the concerns often centred around how to maintain a particular place in life as well as how to fill the moments of one’s life when, as members of the gentry, individuals were as limited in number and nature of their hobbies and philanthropies as they were in choices of careers. In Thirkell’s books those concerns often focused around money and the future as members of a class once as secure in its financial as its social place see economic (and social) changes coming for which they were unprepared. The careers and activities which Benson’s shows members of that class indulging in will soon be neither within their financial reach nor capable of supporting them financially.

Diary of a Provincial Lady

Delafield, in Diary of a Provincial Lady, does more than just touch on these concerns, she makes them the central focus of the book. The titular Provincial Lady and her husband are of the gentry and so there are a limited number of ways in which they can fill their time. And their every hour is indeed filled and yet over the period of time covered by the book they seem, to the modern reader, to have been singularly unproductive. For example, we read little of what the Lady’s husband’s actual work entailed (that is, the work for which he was paid.) The work of the Provincial Lady herself appears to have been to maintain the appropriate outward signifiers that the family belonged to a particular class/social group. She does some writing that is intended for publication and she does much writing that is not. Like many of her class much of her time is spent writing reading letters from friends and acquaintances and writing letters to friends and acquaintances.

It strikes this modern reader that much of the letter reading/writing done by the characters in this and other books of the time differs little in content from the gossip exchanged by teenagers over the telephone (when I was growing up) and now by text, tweet and facebook post. So why was it not treated as simple time-wasting gossip and tittle-tattle? Two of the reasons are fairly obvious: first, it is members of society discussing the affairs of other members of society–thus it is by definition of value and in point of fact a requirement for any who wishes to negotiate the fairly complicated byways of society life at the time; and second, that which was written still carried with the rarefied patina of literacy. It is not that long since the time that comparatively few people in Britain were literate and the reading and writing of letters was a sign of being a member of gentry. Additionally, of course, the ability to afford cost of keeping up such written correspondences was a marker of class status just as was having a telephone, making “trunk calls” and owning a car.

And the Lady (who remains nameless throughout the book) certainly sees herself as being busy:

Query, mainly rhetorical: Why are nonprofessional women, if married and with children, so frequently referred to as “leisured”? Answer comes there none.)

And the modern day reader (or a reader contemporaneous to Delafield but with far less money) might note that most women did not have the luxury of extra rooms in which young children normally eat their dinner and play in the evening or staff to look after those children. Nor did most women of the time (or now) have other people to make the soup, set the table, wash the dishes, bathe the children or clean their rooms.

August 3rd.–Difference of opinion arises between Robin and his father as to the nature and venue of former’s evening meal, Robin making sweeping assertions to the effect that All Boys of his Age have Proper Late Dinner downstairs, and Robert replying curtly More Fools their Parents, which I privately think unsuitable language for use before children. Final and unsatisfactory compromise results in Robin’s coming nightly to the dining-room and partaking of soup, followed by interval, and ending with dessert, during the whole of which Robert maintains disapproving silence and I talk to both at once on entirely different subjects. (Life of a wife and mother sometimes very wearing.)

The response of this reader (and I imagine the response of most working class women in the 1930s) is to wonder at someone who is so acclimatized to absolute leisure that even the task of “listening to one’s child” become wearisome.

One of the major preoccupations of these “gentle” women in “financial distress” is the state of the kitchens and the quality of their “help.” Having servants to “do” for them is a vital marker of class. However changing financial (and social) times have made it harder to “get” good servants. Servants had taken to asking for larger wages and refusing to devote all the hours of the day and week to service. It was still at this time not uncommon to find people who forbade their servants to use the telephone, limited the hours they could socialize, limited who they could socialize with and even “renamed” servants who had what they considered to be unsuitable or difficult to pronounce names. With the rising levels of education and with more non-service jobs available to women people who wished to treat their servants as vassals or people who expected to receive top-class service for mediocre wages were finding it increasingly difficult to “get by”:

Cook says that unless help is provided in the kitchen they cannot possibly manage all the work. I think this unreasonable, and quite unnecessary expense. Am also aware that there is no help to be obtained at this time of the year. Am disgusted at hearing myself reply in hypocritically pleasant tone of voice that, Very well, I will see what can be done. Servants, in truth, make cowards of us all.

The author has a cook, a governess/nurse for the children, a gardener and at least two maids. Yet nothing seems ever to get done and her life (from her point of view) is abundantly full of chores.The cook is invariably bad and servants invariably inefficient, emotional and prone to turning in their notice. The titular Lady never asks herself if she and her husband would get a better cook if they were willing to pay better wages. They don’t ask themselves if the fault may lie with the employers rather than the employees. The Lady never considers how much more money she and husband would have if only she did the cooking and she looked after her children and he did more work around the house.

The answer, unfortunately, was that the Lady and her husband could NOT do those things and maintain their social place. One doubts that Robert would have kept his job. It is possible that their children would no longer be accepted at the schools which they would now be able to afford. So the Lady knows (whether or not she is aware that she knows it) that she and her family are caught in the trap of financially distressed gentility–that the most rational way in which to respond to the financial distress can only be carried out at the cost of the very thing the family was sacrificing so much to maintain: their status as members of the gentry.

So, is this book wittily mundane or relentlessly subversive? That depends on determining whether the reader is merely reading the subversiveness into the text or whether the author layered it carefully in between the seeming irrelevancies.

Delafield is clearly a technically proficient writer. For example, she captures that most mysterious and frustrating aspect of time—that it often seems to simply slip away from us. Even the most simple interactions can take an inordinate amount of time and so she (like us) looks back with wonderment at the fact that writing a few letters, running a few errands and do a few household chores can consume the better part of day and yet leave one with the feeling that nothing at all has been accomplished.

June 17th.–Entire household rises practically at dawn, in order to take part in active preparations for Garden Fete…..At ten o’clock our Vicar’s wife dashes in to ask what I think of the weather, and to say that she cannot stop a moment. At eleven she is still here

She is equally good at pinpointing the necessary hypocrisies of successful socializing as in here when the diarist discusses the end of “dinner out”:

Exchange customary graceful farewells with host and hostess, saying how much I have enjoyed coming.

(Query here suggests itself, as often before: Is it utterly impossible to combine the amenities of civilisation with even the minimum of honesty required to satisfy the voice of conscience? Answer still in abeyance at present.)

Structuring the book as a diary allowed Delafield to write things which would be considered astringent or cynical were they spoken out loud but come across as insightful whimsy when confided only with the page:

I notice that conversation has, mysteriously, switched on to the United States of America, about which we are all very emphatic. Americans, we say, undoubtedly hospitable–but what about the War Debt? What about Prohibition? What about Sinclair Lewis? Aimée MacPherson, and Co-education? By the time we have done with them, it transpires that none of us have ever been to America, but all hold definite views, which fortunately coincide with the views of everybody else.

(Query: Could not interesting little experiment be tried, by possessor of unusual amount of moral courage, in the shape of suddenly producing perfectly brand-new opinion: for example, to the effect that Americans have better manners than we have, or that their divorce laws are a great improvement upon our own? Should much like to see effect of these, or similar, psychological bombs, but should definitely wish Robert to be absent from the scene.)

This reader wonders (and one wonders if the author wondered) if other (or even all) of the people present at that scene) were thinking similar things?

Delafield returns frequently to scenes in which what is being said by a character is different from (and sometimes antithetical to) what that character is thinking. Similarly she repeatedly presents the reader with scenes in which was is being done is the opposite of what was planned to be done and what characters said they would do (or were doing.)

Did Delafield intentionally write Diary of a Provincial Lady to be both a whimsical and homourous examination of the quotidian concerns of the unexceptional provincial lady or as a slyly subversive examination of the futility and hypocrisy of those clinging to the social status of gentry in the face of the economic changes in English life? Repeated readings have not allowed this reader to answer that question but they have provided me with pleasure, entertainment and a greater understanding of challenges facing British provincial gentry in the 1930s.

Rating: 4-1/2 stars