Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (23 page)

Nowadays, at least, books are generally translated with less of a time lag (
La Regenta
was first published in 1884–5, and not rendered into English until 1984). Translators can quiz writers about what they mean, by email, or even in person: Don Delillo had a London conference for his European translators of
Underworld
, whose problems began as the novel does: with a sixty-page baseball game. But translation is not always, or necessarily, about managing loss. When my novel
Flaubert’s Parrot
was being translated into German, my editor in Zurich modestly suggested
some additional flourishes: for instance, a pun on Flaubert as a ‘flea-bear’, and a German slang phrase for masturbation which literally means ‘to shake from the palm tree’. Since Flaubert, at this point of my novel, was being masturbated in Egypt, this felt like a happy improvement on the English text. Adding something extra for German readers seemed a kind of fair-trade translation. But this advantage encloses a new danger: that of the writer anticipating this amiable to-and-fro with translator or foreign editor. I remember hearing one British novelist admit in a radio interview that he had paused at one point in his writing, thought of the pain he might be inflicting on his Scandinavian translators, and decided to make things easier for them. Apart from this being a denial of your own language, it can easily lead to the sort of international prose that is like an airline meal: it feeds all, doesn’t actually poison anyone, but isn’t noticeably nutritious.

To compare several different versions of
Madame Bovary
is not to observe a process of accumulation, some gradual but inevitable progress towards certainty and authority (except in the occasional discarding of error); rather, it is to gaze at a sequence of approximations, a set of deliquescences. How could it be otherwise when almost every word of the French can be rendered in several different ways? Consider the moment when Emma, Charles and Léon are eating ice cream in a café by the harbour, having walked out before the final scene of
Lucia
. Charles naively suggests that his wife stay on in the city to catch the next performance – an action which is to precipitate her affair with Léon. Charles addresses his wife (the banality of phrase contrasting with the recent extravagances of Donizetti) as ‘
mon petit chat
’. Marx-Aveling has ‘pussy’, Mildred Marmur (1964) ‘my kitten’, Wall ‘my pussy-cat’, Hopkins ‘darling’, Steegmuller ‘sweetheart’, Russell and Davis ‘my pet’. Marx-Aveling’s endearment would work then but sadly not now; Marmur’s is good; Wall’s brings in the slightly unwanted flavour of a bad Dean Martin movie; Steegmuller
and Hopkins deliberately duck the felinity (you could argue that the French is already drained of it anyway); while Russell and Davis, mixing banality and distant animality, have found the best solution. Probably. At least, for the moment. You can understand why Rutherford called translation a ‘strange business’ which ‘sensible people’ should best avoid.

Davis’s
Madame Bovary
is a linguistically careful version, in the modern style, rendered into an unobtrusively American English. At its best, it conveys the precision – which some think dryness – of Flaubert’s prose in this novel, while its syntactical mirroring of the French sometimes brings us closer to Flaubert. At its worst, it takes us too far away from English, and makes us less aware of Flaubert’s prose than of Davis being aware of Flaubert’s prose. And such defects may come from something ordinary but surprising: a lack of sufficient love for the work being translated. In her
Times
interview, Lydia Davis explained:

Perhaps some of this is the translator’s equivalent of being demob-happy – three years slogging across occupied France, it’s no wonder she throws her cap in the air at having come
out alive. Though what does Lydia Davis mean by saying that Emma Bovary doesn’t ‘think’ or ‘feel’? The novel is all about the perils of (wrong) thinking and (false, or unwisely directed) feeling. Perhaps she means ‘doesn’t think or feel in a way that I approve’. As for complaining that Emma isn’t ‘admirable or likeable’ – this sounds like the most basic book-group objection. Davis’s
Madame Bovary
shows that it’s possible to produce a more than acceptable version of a book with which you are comparatively out of sympathy. In that sense, it confirms that translation requires an act of the imagination as well as a technician’s proficiency. If you want a freer translation, Steegmuller is best; for a tighter one, go to Wall. And perhaps one day Juliet Herbert’s lost ‘masterpiece’ will turn up, and we shall be able to compare it to its successors – and see a new way of necessarily falling short.

N
OVELS CONSIST OF
words, evenly and democratically spaced; though some may acquire higher social rank by italicisation or capitalisation. In most novels, this democracy spreads wider: every word is as important as every other word. In better novels, certain words have higher specific gravity than other words. This is something the better novelist does not draw attention to, but lets the better reader discover.

There are many ways of preparing to read a novel. You might prefer to approach it in proper and delighted ignorance. You might like to know a few basics about the author (Wharton, 1862–1937), her social origins (New York, old money), literary company (Henry James), land of exile (France), financial, marital and sexual status (rich, distressing, largely unfulfilled), and so on. You might want information inclining you to read the novel in as autobiographical way as it is possible to do (in which case, you will have to go elsewhere). You might, less prejudicingly, prefer to have simple facts of literary chronology and positioning: thus
The Reef
was published in 1912, seven years after Wharton had made her name with
The House of Mirth
, and is definingly placed between her grimmest novel,
Ethan Frome
, and her greatest novel of Franco-American interrelationship,
The Custom of the Country
. You might like such information decorated with literary gossip which warmingly defines the author: in the year she published
The Reef
, Wharton, having previously campaigned unsuccessfully to get Henry James the Nobel Prize, performed an act of literary generosity rare in any times and hard to imagine
taking place today. She asked her publishers Scribner’s to divert $8,000 from her royalties and offer them as an advance to James for ‘an important American novel’. James was delighted at the largest advance he ever received, and never guessed the prompter of his publishers’ urgent generosity (he never completed the book,
The Ivory Tower
, either).

Or you might prefer to approach a novel like
The Reef
on the lookout for a few key words. Here are some of them:

Natural
. At the start of the novel George Darrow, an unmarried American diplomat of thirty-seven, ponders the contrasting appeals of Anna Leath, his early and now renewed love, and the passingly encountered Sophy Viner. Anna is widowed, rich and of good stock; Sophy is young, unattached, of unknown social origin but with bohemian connections. It appears to be a light-hearted contest (since Darrow knows his heart to be engaged in one direction only) between the charm of naturalness and the solider appeal of good manners. Sophy’s forwardness and vivacity make companionship easy and immediate, giving Darrow’s dealings with her a rare freshness; on the other hand, such naturalness has its drawbacks, notably a tendency to provoke embarrassment. Her initial and prime effect is to show up the world of Darrow and Anna in all its evasive formality; it makes him reflect on ‘the deadening process of forming a “lady” ’ in good society. Travelling to Paris on the train with Sophy, Darrow indicates the term which is the novel’s polar opposite to ‘naturalness’. Had he been in the same compartment and circumstances with Anna, he decides, she would not have been so restless and talkative; she would have behaved ‘better’ than Sophy, ‘but her adaptability, her appropriateness, would not have been nature but “tact” ’. Sophy strikes him as having the naturalness of ‘a dryad in a dew-drenched forest’; but – regrettably, or fortunately – we no longer live in forests, and ‘Darrow reflected that mankind would never have needed to invent tact if it had not first invented social complications’.

Sophy’s Parisian plan is to train for the stage, and her open, intelligent, frank, naive and unfettered approach to things – her naturalness – probably persuades the reader that this would be a fitting career. But Darrow is shrewder than the reader: in his experience the vivacity of an actress onstage is quite different from the vivacity of a person in life; the latter does not assist the former. To Darrow, Sophy seems ‘destined to work in life itself rather than any of its counterfeits’. Here he proves correct: he recognises that Sophy is unequal to either kind of counterfeiting – that of the actress, or that involved in ‘the deadening process of forming a “lady” ’.

At this stage of the novel, the viewpoint and the judgements are Darrow’s, the rivalry between ‘naturalness’ and ‘tact’ seen through his eyes. It is always clear, however, to which world Darrow – a diplomat by instinct as well as profession – belongs. Much later in the novel, Anna is trying to understand the earlier appeal of Sophy Viner to the man she loves, envying those who have ‘plunged’, trying to understand the ‘darkness’ of her own heart and to release her own sexuality. She is aware of Sophy’s advantage over her. In this condition she views Darrow’s handling of women with a disenchanted eye, and turns against him the word he had earlier used against (though also in praise of) her: ‘The idea that his tact was a kind of professional expertise filled her with repugnance, and insensibly she drew away from him.’

Veil
. What is the consequence of ‘tact’, of the dread process of ‘forming a lady’? It is to place a veil between the self and the emotions. One of the most powerfully compacted and ironic lines of the novel comes when Anna, musing on the social rules of the world in which she grew up, recollects that ‘people with emotions were not visited’. At that time, and during her subsequent marriage to Leath, the veil between herself and life ‘had been like the stage gauze which gives an illusive air of reality to the painted scene behind it, yet proves it, after all, to be no more than a painted scene’. This is a
cunning image: the veil is not just a barrier between herself and life, but something actively deceptive – behind it is not reality but a theatrical fake. To translate the metaphor: social training gives you the illusion that a stodgy dried-up snuffbox-collecting bore of a husband is a rightful object of romantic attachment. Anna’s story is about the rending of the veil between herself and life; the point about the veil being that, once rent, it cannot be unrent.

Life
. Hardly a word one might expect to be unimportant in a novel. But here it is especially charged: the word – the thing – focuses the struggle between tact and naturalness. Darrow, we are told early on, has a ‘healthy enjoyment of life’; Anna is ‘still afraid of life’; whereas Sophy has the word ‘often on her lips’ – even if, in Darrow’s view, when she speaks about ‘life’ she seems ‘like a child playing with a tiger’s cub; and he said to himself that some day the child would grow up – and so would the tiger’.

Darrow has an attitude to life; Sophy
is
an attitude to life. It is within Anna that the novel’s great psychological drama takes place: a struggle to understand what is, or could be, life, whether it is a wonderful or a terrible thing, and what the price of such understanding might be. She has been brought up in Old New York and transplanted to old provincial France: during her marriage she discovered that ‘real life’, that glib phrase, was for her ‘neither dead nor alive’. Later, in her widowhood, she supports her stepson Owen’s desire to marry an ‘unsuitable girl’, aware that his rebellion is also hers – even if it is a kind of retrospective rebellion, a refutation of her earlier timorousness and tact. During this first, proxy engagement in the cause of life she can afford to be dashing and freethinking. The real struggle lies ahead: with what Sophy represents in terms of womanhood, modernity and sexuality; with the responses such women provoke in Darrow and other men; with her own emotional and sexual repression. The choice – all the harder since she is not Sophy’s age – seems
to be between living a restricted existence with her head held high and eyes averted, and ‘looking at life’ with all its consequent agony. Even so, how can she be sure that the tormenting predicament into which she has been thrust is indeed ‘life’? Anna’s big question, asked at the end of Chapter 30, is whether ‘life’ is really ‘like that’ – i. e. ‘grotesque and mean and miserable’ – or whether her ‘adventure’ is a ‘hideous accident’.

Metaphors of sturdy usefulness accumulate around the word ‘life’ in
The Reef
. For Leath, life ‘was like a walk through a carefully classified museum’; for Anna, while married to him, ‘it was like groping about in a huge dark lumber-room where the exploring ray of curiosity lit up now some shape of breathing beauty and now a mummy’s grin’. When Darrow appears to be rescuing her, she tells him, ‘I want our life to be like a house with all the windows lit; I’d like to string lanterns from the roof and chimneys!’ Later, when the rescue has proved more life-threatening than anticipated, she employs a broader architectural metaphor: ‘She looked back with melancholy derision on her old conception of life, as a kind of well-lit and well-policed suburb to dark places one need never know about.’ But the truth of the novel does not support this town-planning notion of existence. Rather, it is on the side of Darrow’s comparison of life to a tiger’s cub which grows up. Life’s instincts are destructive, not constructive. Or as Darrow pompously explains it to Anna: