That Mad Ache & Translator

  In short, while doing this passage, I was an unleashed dog with its master strolling in the English Gardens, exploring them as a lively dog will, joyously dashing here and there but being sure never to stray out of hearing range of its master’s call. Or perhaps in this case I strayed a little too far. But as I said above, this passage is one of my “hottest” moments in the whole book.

  Rendering Sentences with Two Meanings

  ONE example gives but a first impression, so let’s go on and take a look at another, which will bring up some new issues. This time Sagan is in more of a pure-narrative mode, although to tell the truth, between her pure-narrative mode and her internal-monologue mode the line is often tremendously blurry. In any case, this passage, taken from Chapter 20, describes some of Lucile’s vaguely annoyed reactions to the inane bubblings of an overenthusiastic co-worker of hers at Le Réveil, a small Parisian newspaper where she has just started working:Elle travaillait avec une jeune femme nommée Marianne, enceinte de trois mois, très aimable, très efficace et qui parlait avec la même vigilance attendrie de l’avenir du journal et de celui de son rejeton. Et comme elle était persuadée que ce dernier serait du sexe mâle, il arrivait à Lucile quand Marianne proférait une de ces sentences optimistes telles que : « Il n’a pas fini de faire parler de lui » ou : « Il ira loin », de se demander un instant s’il s’agissait de Réveil ou du futur Jérôme.

  She worked with a young woman called Marianne; three months pregnant, very likable, very efficient, who spoke with the same moving vigilance of the future of the newspaper and the expected child. She referred to them both in the masculine gender, certain that the baby would be a boy, and it sometimes happened that Lucile, when Marianne proferred an optimistic remark, such as, “They won’t stop talking about him,” or, “He’ll go far,” wondered for a moment if she meant the Réveil or the future Jérôme.

  She worked together with a young woman named Marianne, who was three months pregnant, very likable and efficient, and who spoke in equally tender and concerned tones about the future of the newspaper she worked for and that of the child she was carrying. Indeed, Lucile often had to wonder, when her colleague would come out with some corny cliché like “Paris is going to go crazy over this one!” or “This baby will knock ’em dead!”, whether Marianne was speaking of the next issue of Le Réveil or of her imminent offspring Jérôme.

  In Sagan’s French, Marianne’s two sentences are intrinsically ambiguous, since the reader, like Lucile, cannot tell what their subject — the masculine pronoun il — refers to. Does it refer back to the inanimate (but masculine-gendered) newspaper Réveil ? Or contrariwise, does it refer to the animate embryo in Marianne’s womb, which she is convinced will turn out to be a male? To Lucile, this bivalence is a bit annoying, but to us readers, it’s rather humorous. What to do about this in English?

  I decided to go for an ambiguity not based on pronouns, because I didn’t want to have to explain two things — one, that Le Réveil would naturally be referred to as “he” in French, and two, that Marianne has decided that her unborn child will be a “he”. So after a while I came up with two English sentences that could easily be heard as applying to either entity but that sidestepped the use of pronouns.

  By contrast, Westhoff followed Sagan far more closely, but to do so he had to insert the explanatory remark that Marianne “referred to them both in the masculine gender” — and even with this advance warning, the two English sentences he gives don’t sound as if they could possibly apply to a newspaper. Why would anyone call a paper “he”? Probably most readers will realize this has to do with the existence of gendered inanimate nouns in French, but even so, it feels heavy to me to have to insert such an explanation and then to use two sentences that don’t sound appropriate in English. If there is going to be an amusing, even punlike, passage of this sort, I feel it’s best if it sounds normal and can be understood without any explanation.

  Knockin ’ ’ em Dead in Gay Paree

  I WAS reasonably pleased with my footnote-free, pronoun-less solution to this translation problem (which, obviously, is related to the much larger issue of the translatability of wordplay and of humor in general), but along another dimension, I can see that someone might well raise their eyebrows at the idea of a French woman exclaiming, “This baby will knock ’em dead!” The question is, what language is this woman speaking? What, in particular, is that humorous slangy phrase “knock ’em dead” doing inside a supposedly French sentence?

  It is, after all, a curious thing to read a novel about French people who are in theory speaking French to each other but where all their remarks are being reported in English, and in quotation marks to boot, suggesting that these are the exact words that they used. A reader must engage in a strange kind of suspension of disbelief here, a bit like the suspension of disbelief that takes place when one reads fables or comic books in which animals talk and dress just like people, or when one watches a musical in which, every so often, people spontaneously break out in song and dance and then stop all at once, as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place! We humans are amazingly capable of dealing with this kind of incoherence — we’ve grown up with it from childhood — but even so, it looks rather strange when one points a bright spotlight straight onto it. But the suspension of disbelief involving humans speaking in language B when they are in fact speaking language A is, I think, somewhat subtler.

  It’s relatively easy to accept the idea that Marianne is actually speaking French when she is reported by Westhoff as saying the words “He’ll go far”, because it doesn’t sound like any of those words per se really matters. We think only of the meaning behind her statement, not of her words. But “knock ’em dead” is a horse of another color.

  The question is, did Marianne use that idiom? Did she really say “ ’em”, dropping the initial “th” sound? How in the world could Marianne have done that, when speaking French? Well, of course we know that she didn’t say that, but rather, something French that was “essentially the same” (in the way that une autre paire de manches — “another pair of sleeves” — is essentially the same as “a horse of another color”), but on the other hand, we have been told that this is what she really said (after all, it’s in quotes), so we’re in a bit of a dilemma.

  With this dilemma, we have crashed headlong into the “Wrong-Place Paradox”. By giving Marianne a fairly American-sounding remark, I seem to have taken her out of France and replanted her in America — at least a little bit. I seem to have committed the same sort of sin as those brazen translocators, those shameless transculturators, who inserted so many American swear words into the mouths of Russian prisoners in the gulags in Siberia that they de-Russianized the prisoners and ruined the whole feel of Solzhenitsyn’s novel, at least for me. So why am I, of all people, committing the same sin?

  Well, my defense is that such alleged sins come in many shades, and the lighter shades are actually not sins at all. The question is, at what point does a phrase start to sound absurd in the mouth of someone whom one envisions as speaking a different language? If I had put into Marianne’s mouth the words “By cracky, this lil’ ol’ baby will blow them Parisians’ ever-lovin’ minds sky-high!”, then I think everyone would agree that this would have fallen well beyond the proverbial pale — a blood-red transculturation sin.

  Or I could instead have had her say, “Now I bet this one will make a hit!” This phrase still uses two American idioms, but I think most native speakers would say that they are not nearly as “far out”. There is a blurry collective sense of how far someone is pushing the limits, and this sentence is far safer in that regard. And so what shade of transculturation sin are we dealing with here — pink?

  Then again, what if I had had Marianne say, “This will probably appeal to many people”? I doubt anyone would accuse me of even the mildest transculturation sin here, but because it takes no risk at all, the phrase is as flat as a pancake (or a crêpe), as dull as dishwater, colorless. If one never
ventures out at all toward that risky pale of transculturation, if one always tries to stay on very safe territory, one thereby runs a different kind of risk — that one’s translation will come out sounding like pablum.

  Translation is a risky, paradox-grazing, sin-tinged business. A phrase-trader has to have an intuitive sense of where the pale is — what’s well within it, what’s well beyond it. But the pale is so ethereal, so elusive, so intangible, so impalpable — so pale — that no one can actually see it. The pale is something determined collectively by the masses that speak the language, and no one person can pinpoint it. When a phrase seems to scream out its land of origin (or its era, or its subculture), and when that does not match the land (or era or subculture) of the person allegedly uttering it, then one has clearly gone beyond the pale — but usually things aren’t that screamingly blatant; usually it’s not such a black-and-white matter; usually it’s a judgment call.

  One last point here. To render Marianne’s other ambiguous cliché, I wrote, “Paris is going to go crazy over this one!” What made me decide to transcribe it that way instead of as “Paris is gonna go crazy over this one!”? Well, that verb “transcribe” is the key to the answer. Whenever I see the word “gonna” in a piece of text, I understand it to be an attempt to capture the actual phonetics of the person speaking, verging on an attempt to capture the accent or even the voice of the speaker. If one puts “gonna” into the mouth of a French speaker, one is blatantly violating that convention, and that’s why I avoided it.

  But why, then, did I feel okay about putting “it will knock ’em dead” in Marianne’s mouth? Does this not also look like a phonetic transcription in which Marianne really drops the “th” of the word “them” (an image that is obviously nonsensical)? Yes, admittedly, it does look that way, but I thought that it was necessary because the tamer, blander version — “This baby will knock them dead” — doesn’t sound like something that anyone would say in English, or at least not like what I think Marianne would have said — if she had been speaking English.

  In a word, we are dealing with a counterfactual situation here — “What if Marianne had been speaking English?” — and that’s an incoherent notion to begin with, since she’s French and she’s speaking French with a French colleague about a French newspaper in the French capital. But we have to accept this incoherent counterfactual situation, because that’s what translation is in(co)herently all about, and as translators we have to do our best, in our individual ways, to deal elegantly with these elusive and ineffable would’s and would have’s. That’s the name of the game. Once again, it’s poetic lie-sense.

  Good Gravy — Americanisms Galore!

  WHILE I was struggling to put a final polish on my translation, I was simultaneously hard at work on this essay, and as a consequence of this temporal overlap, I became hypersensitive to the fact that quintessentially American words and turns of phrase could be found in large numbers on every single page of my translation. I started to panic about the Wrong-Place Paradox.

  At one point, I worriedly went through a hefty chunk of the printed manuscript with pen in hand and circled in green each phrase that seemed to me to be in some sense redolent of these shores and not of France. Of course, as I said above, the distinction between “guilty” and “innocent” lexical items was anything but crystal-clear, but since I was suddenly very concerned with getting some feel, no matter how vague, for how dense these potentially incriminating words and phrases were in my text, I just plunged ahead and green-circled madly.

  Well, the end result was that the number of Americanisms in That Mad Ache was on the order of twenty per page, and when I extrapolated this trend to the whole book, it came out at a few thousand Americanisms, at least. Part of me was horrified, because it seemed that, against my own will, I was turning into a perfect reincarnation of the translators who had ruined A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. How could I be doing this to myself ?

  To give you a sense of the kind of thing that troubled me, here is a sampling of some of the most worrisome phrases drawn from a dialogue spread over a couple of pages in Chapter 22 (there were many less worrisome phrases that I’ve skipped):I won’t have anything to do with it… some kind of pimp… make him foot the bill for my escapades… you’ve gone way too far this time… I have my limits… anything you damn well please… I won’t go along with you doing that… it’s beyond the pale… go get myself sliced up by a butcher… by your lights it would be moral… just as long as he’s left out of the picture… all alone, with nothing to your name… all that stupid charm of yours won’t do a thing for you any more… there won’t be a soul around… you’re every bit as cowardly as I am… what really gets you… overwhelmed by the daily grind… it’s our only hope… we’ll scrape by somehow… there are lots of students… it’s not all that hard… he’ll be our kid… we pulled the wool over their eyes… it’s part of our makeup… it’s under our skin… we’re spoiled rotten…

  To provide a reference point for readers, I have just gone to the same section in Westhoff ’s translation and excerpted all the parallel phrases, which I exhibit below:I don’t want it… a pimp… make him pay for my blunders… it’s far too much… there are limits… no matter what, just so long as it pleases you… I won’t have you doing that… it’s not possible… be mangled by a butcher… you think it moral… so long as it isn’t he… alone, with nothing… your damned charm won’t work any more… you’ll have no one… you’re as much of a coward as I am… what bothers you… exhausted by the wear and tear of time… it’s our only chance… we’ll get along somehow… there are plenty of students… it’s not so difficult… he will belong to us… we deceived them… it’s in our minds… it’s under our skin… we’re rotten…

  I think anyone would agree that there is a huge difference in tone here. However, my worry was not prompted by this kind of comparison between myself and Westhoff. It came solely from looking at my own handiwork in isolation and stewing over it. I kept on asking myself, “Could these kinds of phrases realistically belong to a dialogue taking place in Paris, France? Could a reader really imagine French people saying ‘these things’, in some blurry sense, to each other? Is suspension of disbelief possible in this case?”

  The strange phenomenon that I noticed was that when I flagged these phrases and read them out loud to myself one after another, the needle on my “transculturation meter” shot way up, yet when I went back and read them in context, things seemed to flow naturally and the transculturation meter’s reading sank back down to nearly zero, which left me wondering if I’d blown a molehill up into a mountain. The fact that my judgment could flip back and forth like this was in itself a paradox, and I’m not sure that I can explain it at all. Nonetheless, over time, I gradually came to the conclusion, hopefully not fooling myself, that despite all the green-circled “sinning” on a local level, the overall feel of That Mad Ache is perfectly consistent with a story taking place in France and with its characters speaking to each other in their native French.

  This conclusion came as a great relief to me, but of course it is not something that I, who here stand accused of being a phrase-traitor, can objectively judge, and I even worry that by drawing attention to this issue so explicitly in this essay, I am raising the chances that people who would otherwise never have given it a moment’s thought will suddenly sit up and fiercely declare me guilty of several hundred counts of Sagan-violating treachery. And then I will be sentenced to twenty years of literal translation at zero degrees (brrr!), with my leash pulled as tight as possible, choking my neck at all times. (Dante would approve!)

  If this essay were to provoke such a harsh backlash against its own author, that would be a pity and an irony, but I trust that my readers are more sympathetic than that. The point is, though, that honesty compelled me to bring up this issue, which involves both the Wrong-Place Paradox and the Wrong-Style Paradox, and to shine a bright spotlight thereupon, since in my view, these constant battles form th
e very core of translation.

  Doug on a Hot Long Leash

  I’LL try to give a richer perspective on this messy issue by discussing a few more examples. In Chapter 11, a somewhat bewildered-feeling Antoine concludes an outburst of internal monologue with “C’est le comble!” Very literally, this means, “That’s the peak!”, but on this occasion, it’s an idiom meaning “This is too much!” That’s almost exactly what Westhoff has him think to himself (“It’s really too much!”). However, if I had been Antoine in this context, my silent words would never have been that bland. I would have been thinking, “If that doesn’t take the cake!” And since that was by far the top contender among the possibilities in my mind, I stuck it right into Antoine’s francophone stream of consciousness. Unfortunately, though, some friends who I’ve asked about this phrase have been a bit skeptical, saying that I’m pushing things with it. How can a French person be using our American idiom “take the cake”? Maybe they’re right — maybe this is putting too American a mask on Antoine — but hopefully I do such things seldom enough that I don’t go beyond the pale. It’s a tug of war between ego-dog and superego-leash, where my ego’s drive to write with flair and punch is eternally at odds with my superego’s warnings that I must always be cautious and never go overboard.