That Mad Ache & Translator

  Or perhaps I should say that being in love is a kind of lying, a wonderful kind of lying to oneself, and since, while I was translating them, I was deeply in love with both Eugene Onegin and La Chamade (and, in fact, still am), it was very important to me — it was crucial to me — that I lie as beautifully as I knew how in rendering them in my own way in my native tongue.

  What matters, as I see it, is that the compromises that emerge in the end — the final results of the trading process — should be sensible, should be comprehensible, should share the tone of the original, should evoke imagery close to that evoked by the original, and so on. That’s the meaning of my phrase “poetic lie-sense”, and it’s the credo of translation to which I subscribe.

  If Dogs Run Free,ThenWhy Not We?

  BACK to our short passage for a few last comments. In my rendition of it, I gratuitously injected the word “solicitously”, impudently rendered bon air by “fresh country air”, and even had the chutzpah to say that the wind had “done a good job” of messing up Antoine’s hair, instead of simply saying that his hair had been messed up by the wind, as the French says. Why did I do all of these nonmechanical, subjective things, like a free dog running far from its master? The answer is quite simple: “If dogs run free, then why not we, across the swooping plain?”

  Of course Bob Dylan’s sweet lyric is not the real answer to the question, but I couldn’t resist quoting it, once my friend Scott Buresh had pointed it out to me. The real answer is that I am not a translating machine but a human being filled with millions upon millions of dormant memories, and I felt that as a lover of this book, I had been assigned (by myself ) the task of writing this passage in English, partly under the influence of the literal words Sagan had chosen (and in the precise order that she had chosen them), but just as much (and probably a good deal more) under the influence of the enormously rich, partially conscious, mostly unconscious, set of images that her words and turns of phrase had collectively churned up in the vast sea of my memories. Caught in this complex crossfire of mental pressures, I tried to find a midway path that tipped its hat, and with deepest respect, to both sides of this extremely blurry competition.

  I think it’s interesting, in this connection, to cite a passage in La Chamade itself (or rather, in That Mad Ache). It’s in Chapter 14, and Charles has just proposed to Lucile that they take a trip together to southern France. One word has a striking effect inside her head:“The Riviera,” she repeated dreamily, “the Riviera…?” And behind her stubbornly closed eyelids, she could see the sea rushing up onto the beach, she could see the color of the sand in the evening when the sun abandons it.

  And I’m sure that you too, whether your eyes are closed or open, are now mentally seeing “exactly the same things” (in a manner of speaking) as Lucile did. There’s nothing complicated about what’s going on here; such sound-mind transactions are a dime a dozen. Words trigger thoughts, and thoughts trigger words. This little loop is really the most central facet of what makes us human beings. If you eliminate the thought part of the loop, though, and insist that in translation, words must trigger words without thoughts intervening, then you are denying what makes us human, and any translation based on such a philosophy will turn out arid and wooden at best, and absurd and incomprehensible at worst.

  If you want to see very concretely what I mean, let’s submit the original French passage — not a particularly elusive or subtle passage, I might add — to a quintessentially non-human translator — namely, Google’s translation engine (and since that venerable beast is a moving target, I’ll state that in this case I’m talking about its incarnation on the date of October 12, 2008). First the original French, then Google’s English:« Le Midi, reprit-elle, d’une voix rêveuse… le Midi ?… » Et sous ses paupières obstinément closes, elle vit se précipiter la mer sur la plage, elle vit la couleur du sable, le soir, lorsque le soleil l’abandonne.

  “The Midi,” she said, a dreamy voice… the south…” And its stubbornly closed eyelids, she lives is precipitate the sea on the beach, she saw the color of the sand in the evening when the sun abandons.

  Incidentally, in a subsequent version, the “same” engine changed the strange phrase “its stubbornly closed eyelids” to “his closed eyelids stubbornly”. I can’t say I think it’s much of an improvement! What this of course reveals is that there is not the least attempt at understanding — that is, the production of imagery or thoughts — going on here.

  M’amie

  ALL through the winter and spring of early 2004, I worked diligently and faithfully, transcribing and translating La Chamade at the rate of about two pages a day, and slowly but steadily turning it into That Mad Ache. As per my resolution, I never took the tiniest peek into Westhoff ’s translation, even though it was sitting around tempting me all the time.

  While I was engaged in this process, I savored countless evening reading sessions, over countless varieties of tea, with my friend Caroline Strobbe, who grew up in the city of Lille, a couple of hundred kilometers north of Paris. Our ritual was that Caroline (for whom one of my nicknames was “Fille belle Ca Stro”) would read aloud (from my handwritten transcript!) a few pages of the French original, and then I would go back and read “between the lines”, since that was where my translation had been penned. There were invariably discussions about just what such-and-such a phrase meant (in either language), or what a particular character must be thinking or feeling behind the scenes, and so forth. Some of these discussions were about passages in French that I found mysterious, but just as many were about the complex events and the people themselves, and how to think about them. Sometimes Caroline would tell me that in her opinion I had misinterpreted something Sagan had written, and once I’d heard and reflected on the alternative interpretation, I usually realized that she was probably right. These delicious evening tea-to-tea tête-à-têtes were crucial to the quality of my translation and to the quality of my life as a whole, and they are the loveliest memories of my La Chamade days.

  The next phase, after filling up all the notebooks with printed words in colored ink, was typing everything into my computer. On nearly every page of each of my nine notebooks, there were all sorts of alternative renderings of words and phrases, and I had assumed that in the typing-up phase, I would simply read the rival possibilities each time, ponder them a little, and then make a choice, thus producing a manuscript that was much closer to the final version. However, when I came to this stage, I found that making those choices was not nearly as easy as I had expected. Very often I was totally stymied, and so I actually wound up leaving most of the alternatives in my typed-up text, just putting them in boldface so they would jump out at my eyes.

  Mommy

  ONE awful day in the middle of May, 2004, my aging mother out in California suffered a serious stroke. Shortly after this happened, I flew out there to be with her for several weeks. She was physically greatly reduced, but luckily her mental faculties were as acute as ever, and since she was unable to hold books, she was delighted to have other people read to her. I asked her if she would like to hear my translation of La Chamade, which she had heard about over the phone, and to my gratification, she said she would love to. So during parts of June and July she heard the entirety of my text, which I read out loud to her straight off my computer screen.

  What about all those choice points? Well, whenever I could, I would make a rapid choice without missing a beat, and on the screen I’d quickly highlight my choice, in order to remember it later, figuring that most likely this instinctive snap decision was somehow right. But of course there were many very stubborn spots where I found myself completely torn between two or three or even four wildly different rival phrasings, and in such cases I would stop and read these rivals aloud to my mother, one by one, then ask her for her opinion. She invariably had one, and it was always interesting to hear the reasoning behind her choice. Often I would take her suggestion and choose that version, although sometimes I’d take another route.
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  In this fashion, the manuscript for That Mad Ache grew quite a bit leaner and meaner, but still it was far from totally polished. I wanted and needed more feedback, and at this point my friend Kellie Gutman in Boston volunteered to help. I shot my manuscript off to her by email, and after she’d read it through from beginning to end, she, too, gave me insightful comments on all of the difficult choice points, as well as on many other aspects.

  Well, as a result of incorporating (or respectfully disagreeing with!) the insights of three of my favorite people in the world — Caroline, my dear old Mom, and Kellie — I found myself slowly converging down on a final version… or so, at least, I thought.

  Out of the Blue

  THERE were still a number of extremely sticky points that I just couldn’t figure out — syntactic ambiguities in the French, mysterious phrases that I couldn’t make head or tail of, even passages in which I felt that Sagan (or one of her characters) was saying exactly the opposite of what she (or they) should mean. This was driving me crazy when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a calm head bubbling with ideas appeared on my screen, via email — Daniel Kiechle, born in Switzerland, a native speaker of French and German, a superb speaker of American English (he had lived in the U.S. for fifteen years, and he had married an American, to boot), and someone fascinated to the nth degree by languages and translation. Deus ex machina!

  From his home on the French Riviera (I could just picture it, with the sea rushing up onto the beach, and the color of the sand in the evening when the sun abandons it), Daniel had written me a very kind letter about my books Gödel, Escher, Bach and Le Ton beau de Marot, but he’d never expected his note to lead to much. However, there was an instantaneous resonance between the two of us, and even though we’d never met face to face, we found ourselves all of a sudden in an intense flurry of email exchanges about all sorts of fine points concerning La Chamade. Daniel went to a local library (well… to a bibliothèque), took out a copy of the original book, read it from cover to cover, and proceeded to give me detailed comments on all the points where I was stuck.

  The amusing thing is that in many cases, as a result of all this analysis, the fog remained or even grew thicker, rather than being dissipated. It seemed that some of the points I had found tricky were just as tricky to native speakers of French like Caroline and Daniel, and the more they thought about them the trickier they got. Concerning one of the most confusing points, Daniel and I were completely at odds with each other’s views, while Caroline saw it as I did, and so he resorted to the device of taking an electronic poll of his co-workers. They turned out to be split as well, which amused both Daniel and me, since each of us was convinced that this was a black-and-white matter that should have had total clarity.

  During our e-flurry, it came out that Daniel’s comfort zone for translation is a little more conservative than mine, or as Scott Buresh put it, if I lean toward the “hot”, Daniel leans towards the “cool”, which translates to the idea that if Daniel were a dog, he would opt for taking walks on a rather short leash. This does not mean, however, that his “translation temperature” is Everest-cold or that mine is Sahara-high. I would say that on a scale from 0 to 100, my style is a comfortable 70° Fahrenheit, but it fluctuates from passage to passage, once in a while dipping down momentarily to a chilly 50°, other times briefly soaring as high as a blistering 90°. Perhaps Daniel’s average temperature is closer to 60° — a bit spartan, but good for you (especially when you’re trotting briskly alongside your master).

  In any case, the meticulous concern that Daniel devoted to all my questions was incredibly gratifying to me, and I think it provided him with just as much stimulation, for as a matter of fact, all this intense involvement with the translation of a wonderful novel led him to the thought of translating one of his favorite novels, and over the course of the next few months, that’s exactly what he did: he translated Die Brücke, a famous novel about World War II by the German author Manfred Gregor, into English. How could I ever have guessed that my decision to translate La Chamade into English would one day catalyze someone else to translate a German novel into English?

  I Compare Notes with Mr.Westhoff

  SURELY, you must be thinking, my translation was coming in for a landing. So I thought, too. But one key factor has been left out of the equation — Robert Westhoff. This, after all, was a man who not only had translated the same novel but had once been married to the novel’s author! If anyone should be authoritative, it should be Mr. W!

  And so, now that just about all my i’s had been dotted and all my t’s crossed, I figured I could finally allow myself to peek inside Westhoff ’s version, not only in order to see what he had made of all the foggy passages (perhaps he had the key to them all!), but more generally to see how the whole book felt in someone else’s phrasing. And so one day I sat down at page 1 and started going through our two translations sentence by sentence, even word by word. It was an extremely arduous experience, one that I wouldn’t like to repeat. It took me many weeks, and as I did it, I was absolutely bowled over by the immense chasm that I discovered between our styles. It was like night and day.

  I hadn’t been expecting anything like the rift I encountered, and I documented it in a very detailed fashion. I won’t bore you with most of my findings, but a few examples will, I think, jazz up this discussion of translation in an entertaining fashion. But first I will need to describe, for the benefit of those who haven’t yet read the novel itself, its main characters, all of whom are very well educated but also all unmarried. So here’s the cast:Lucile, about 30 years old, unemployed, bright but flighty;

  Charles, exactly 50, in real estate and very well off, cool but warm;

  Claire, a bit over 50, a socialite, a maker and breaker of romances;

  Diane, around 45, unemployed, very rich but very needy;

  Antoine, 30 or so, employed in the publishing world, smart and intense;

  Johnny, probably around 50, no clear employment status, gay and droll.

  Lucile doesn’t need a job since she lives with Charles, who is rich from his business dealings. Diane is also very well off (she has a Rolls and a chauffeur, for instance), and Antoine, roughly fifteen years her junior, is her current romance, or as some would put it, her gigolo. Johnny is a rather jolly and generous friend of Claire’s who takes great interest in all the romantic goings-on around him. All of the characters wind up attending some of Claire’s slightly pretentious and highly exclusive Parisian soirées, and indeed those are where much of the action takes place.

  Letting the Dog off its Leash

  ONE OF Françoise Sagan’s most typical story-telling devices is that of slipping imperceptibly out of a purely “objective” third-person narrative into a passage that, although remaining in the third person, is actually a “recording” of the private thoughts of some character — and then gliding imperceptibly back out to pure narrative. Here is a snippet taken out of a long internal monologue of Diane’s in Chapter 8, where she’s reflecting on some of her fellow guests at a party of Claire’s. First we have the original French, then Westhoff ’s translation, and then mine.

  C’était agaçant, cette manie qu’avaient les gens richissimes de ne faire jamais, jamais que des affaires. D’avoir des réductions chez les couturiers, des prix chez Cartier et d’en être fier. Elle avait échappé à cela, Dieu merci, elle n’était pas de ces femmes qui cajolent leurs fournisseurs quand elles ont les moyens de faire tout autrement.

  It was irritating, this mania that the ultrarich had for always, always getting the better part of an affair. To have a rebate from the dressmaker, a discount at Cartier’s, and to be proud of it. She had escaped all that, thank Heaven; she was not one of the women of means who haggled with tradespeople.

  God, it was a drag, this obsession of the super-rich for doing nothing but swinging deal after deal. Wangling discounts from dressmakers, cousin prices at Cartier’s, and being pleased as punch with themselves for these trivial accomplishments.
At least she’d not fallen into this trap, thank the Lord — she wasn’t one of those coy rich dames who finagle each and every seller into giving them sweeter deals when they don’t in the least need to do so.

  I must emphasize that I selected a passage that highlights our stylistic differences as sharply as possible. In reading Westhoff, I often feel a pretty tight tether connecting him to Françoise Sagan. Sometimes he even seems to be choking on his leash, although here it’s not that bad. Or, to switch metaphors, I’d say that in this particular passage, Westhoff ’s translation temperature, though not freezing, is pretty nippy (say, 40°, give or take a few), while mine is about as high as I ever let it get (say, 90°).

  Such a super-high temperature means that in rendering this little snippet, I took unusually many liberties. For instance, I baldfacedly threw in the interjection “God”, and I used the quite-warm-to-very-hot expressions “a drag”, “swing a deal”, “wangle”, “cousin prices”, “pleased as punch”, “coy”, “finagle”, and perhaps others. What’s my defense? I’d like to quote Bob Dylan once again, but I’ll refrain. Instead, I once again plead guilty to being a human being and not a translating machine. I plead guilty to trying to get inside the head of Diane and trying to feel things as she feels them. I plead guilty to going beyond the words and to going behind the scenes. I plead guilty for saying things in the way that I think that somebody whose native language is American English would say them (or rather, would think them), and for not just slavishly copying the words and their order that Sagan used when expressing herself in French.