ekleksographia wave two

Like the original poet, the translator is a Narcissus who . . . chooses to contemplate his own likeness not in the spring of nature but in the pool of art —Renato Poggioli

Why would one want to produce a cauliflower in wool? . . . The desire to reproduce one medium in terms of another . . . is a curious, wide-spread and deep-rooted human need. It may or may not be at the mysterious root of art —Margaret Drabble¹

I enjoy reading translations of books I love into one of the two languages I can read besides English: French and Italian, and I had the real delight this summer of reading Felix Fénéon's Catherine Morland, a fin-de-siecle translation of Austen's Northanger Abbey (first published 1818). It is one of a very few translations of Austen to be remembered as by another author and the only one I have seen described as excellent, as just about up to Austen's own.

As I began to read, I felt I should put Austen's English text aside, forget it insofar as I could, and read Fénéon for limpid, lapidary verve he was offering. Alas, I couldn't quite. I know and love Austen's novel too well, and would find myself aware that this phrase or that paragraph was omitted, and wanted to check Fénéon against Austen. Then as I came to the later gothic parts of Austen's book, the sparkling wand of delicate irony was lost for a while. So although by that time I had a copy of Austen's text under Fénéon's on my lap as I read, I picked up a third text, Pierre Arnaud's L'Abbaye de Northanger (Pléiade, 2000), and read that. Well, for the whole of Arnaud's I found a text consistently close to the original, one whose vocabulary and syntax imitated Austen's; if a little stilted or pedantic, Arnaud wrote with much more expansive or generous (longer) sentences than Fénéon's. These allowed Arnaud to keep the anguished and troubled tones in Austen's English female gothic too. Ought I to have read it apart from Austen's? Perhaps, but I didn't. I didn't have the urge and my pleasure was in seeing the English transposed to another systems of sounds and meaning as I went along, rather like the pleasures offered by closely faithful film adaptation (for example, Peter Bogdanovich's 1974 film Daisy Miller).

Fénéon's method is close to what Dryden termed paraphrase ("translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense") with very occasional and subtle forays into imitation ("assum[ing] a liberty not only to vary from words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion").² What Fénéon was doing was reliving the experience Austen had lived, and finding analogous words in French to convey this as he went along. He did not translate by conjuring up a new text word for word, but found the words that came naturally to him in his idiolect as he re-enacted, re-saw precisely Austen's imagined experience, all the while keeping his eye on the text's movement before him. So we have an older male outside looking in, touched and amused, but not himself feeling within the gut the intense importance of small things and sense of vulnerability the female Austen experiences. There is a kind of throbbing delight and anxiety in passages given Catherine by Austen; an acid and even quiet hatred for the outrages of common life, and resentment of certain kinds of stupidities in women and bullying in men, which Austen feels are overlooked as unimportant or, worse yet, rewarded. Fénéon is slightly but persistently more distant. He wrote Catherine Morland while he was in prison charged with anarchy and possibly murder (the question was, Did he engineer the bombing of a restaurant in Paris where people were hurt and killed?). He was allowed this text in his cell together with a dictionary because at the time Austen was seen as utterly apolitical, harmless, and it's her detachment and the sheer aesthetic playfulness of the picturesque he recreates.³

Pierre Arnaud's method veers between Dryden's metaphrase ("turning an author word by word, and line by line, from one language into another") and paraphrase, and he achieves a remarkable balance between gothicism and witty yet serious enough social and psychological realism. His sentences can be involuted, the feel pedantic, but he rarely loses a subtle implication — which Fénéon growing impatient, may well skip rather than lose his hold on a vital stream of intensely captured feeling. I tried Arnaud's translation against a third, Josette Salesse-Lavergne's Northanger Abbey (Christian Bourgeois, 1980), and found Salesse-Lavergne's is the weakest because she doesn't do the concentrated work metaphrase demands (her paraphrase is so weak that I found errors) and shows no evidence of even careful thought about the zeitgeist of the text (as Arnaud shows in his "Notice").

One swallow does not a summer make, so I tried three analogous Sense and Sensibility texts. First, Isabelle de Montolieu's Raison et Sensibilité; ou les deux manieres d'aimer (1815, just four years after the appearance of Austen's). Montolieu was more popular, better known than Austen; I had edited her first novel (which influenced Austen), and this translation had recently been republished (Archipoche, 1996).⁴ I had read castigations of Montolieu's text, and discovered that she translated so freely she often leaves the original story altogether, making up her own incidents, changing what's happening even radically, especially towards the end, reminding me of most film adaptations. Dry irony becomes trembling sensibility; truth to experience turns back into romance clichés. So, with my experience of Arnaud in mind and the Pléiade book to hand, I turned to Pierre Joubert's Le Coeur et La Raison for contrast, and found his adherence to a balance between metaphrase and paraphrase, a matter of a man carefully turning sentences from one medium (English) into another (French). Joubert is a persuasive essayist, and makes a good argument for changing Austen's title as the English heavily-connotative complex words have no equivalent terrains in French, and his book is sometimes very witty, but thoughtful linguistic expertise turned to rendering a book academically respected does not make for a living text. Again I switched, to Jean Privat's Raison et Sentiments (Christian Bourgeois, 1979), and was relieved and then absorbed by the directness, force, and clarity of a text genuinely rooted in contemporary spoken French which nonetheless kept to Austen's syntax and an Anglo-influenced vocabulary.

There is an argument (followed in a recent Russian translation of Austen's Pride and Prejudice) that a translator (like a modern screenplay writer) should attempt some combination of the language of the author's day with our own. Well, this older contemporary tone, connotation and syntax (even across languages), Montolieu offers. When she translates closely (and she performs metaphrase for long stretches), her tone becomes uncannily like Austen's, and yet like Fénéon, her text is imbued by a spirit of her own where she is either re-enacting or reacting instinctively against her source. I've read an (anonymous) 1808 translation into English of Germaine de Staël's 1807 Corinne, ou l'Italie, and this 1801 text has Montolieu's power to bring a modern English reader closer to the older French text than any modern translation, even Sylvia Raphael's Corinne, or Italy (Oxford 1998), a moving work of art out of Staël's: like Arnaud accurate, like Privat direct, and beyond that, like Fénéon (except, revealingly, for the female gothic) manifesting an unembarrassed understanding of, identification with Staël from beginning to end.

I have translated the poetry of two women poets, Vittoria Colonna (1492-1547) and Veronica Gambara (1485-1550), and written an essay on translation in general and my own methods.⁵ I believe great translations emerge when the new artist imaginatively re-enacts what she finds in the previous text in her modern idiolect: you must be true to your own inner spirit and be seeking to express it through choosing a deeply empathetic text which you try to experience as if you had written it; at the same time, you forget yourself, so absorbed are you in contemplation and re-enactment. Poggioli and Drabble would put it that a translator tries to "transpose" another "aesthetic personality" into "the key of their own" and "escapes from the self" through an attentive work in a medium they also love.⁶ What I enjoy in strong translation is its recreative and revelatory power.

¹ Renato Poggioli, "The Added Artificer," On Translation, ed. Reuben Brower (NY: Galaxy, 1959):139; Margaret Drabble, The Pattern in the Carpet, A Personal History with Jigsaws (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009): 290.

² John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy, ed. George Watson (NY: Everyman, 1964):1:268.

³ Joan Ungersma Halperin, Felix Fénéon, Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siecle Paris (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988), 169-70, 284, 307. It was begun 1894, published 1898. Fénéon reworked his text with the help of an English poet, John Gray.

⁴ See Isabelle de Montolieu.

⁵ On Translating Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara.

⁶ Poggioli, 239; Drabble, 253.