‘Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking…’ : Prefaces and the voice of the translator.

The preface is not something I had spent much time considering in my literary studies until now. In spite of a few notable exceptions (think Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads), prefaces to literary works tend to go relatively unnoticed. The important thing is ‘the words on the page’ – and pages prior to page 1 don’t count. “WE CANNOT KNOW THE AUTHOR’S INTENTIONS,” we shout, drowning out the author’s (timid or otherwise) declaration of “What I meant to say was this…”

It is true that authors do not have exclusive ownership of the meaning of their work, nor are they always best placed to comment on it. A magnificent novel might be preceded by a pretentious or less-than-insightful preface, like a once-aloof film star posting inanities on Twitter. Perhaps for good reason, then, prefaces to literary works are relatively rare today. However, there is a school of thought that says translations should be an exception to this rule.

Why, then, might a translator write a preface? It may be partly to do with the fact that we ask questions of translators that we don’t tend to ask of authors: why did you choose this text? Why doesn’t your translation of this poem rhyme? Translating poetry is impossible, isn’t it? A preface can be a way of pre-empting some of those questions; and it is hardly surprising if they sometimes come across as somewhat defensive.

We could also look at it in a more positive way: prefaces are a way for translators to explain their approach. They allow us a glimpse of the translation process. Most significantly, though, they make the translator visible. They remind the reader that the text is a translation – something which is all too easy to forget, particularly when reading fiction, where all efforts have usually been made to disguise the text’s translated nature.

Translators speak to the reader in the texts they translate, but it is only in a preface that they can speak entirely in their own voice. Prefaces can sometimes be political: for example, they have often been used by feminist translators to explain why a text by a woman writer has been neglected, or why they have adopted a ‘hijacking’ strategy, where a text that was not originally feminist is ‘appropriated’ in translation through alterations such as the introduction of gender-inclusive language.

Opponents of the translator’s preface argue that a translated text should ‘stand alone’, should speak for itself. However, this is not as straightforward as it sounds. No translation stands alone; it always bears the trace of its source. Any text is a palimpsest of influences and allusions, and is completed by a reader in a particular cultural context. It does not exist out of context. A non-translated text, however, is interpreted directly by the reader. In the case of a translation, the source text is interpreted by the translator, who then inevitably brings this interpretation to bear on his or her translation; reading translation is a more intertextual experience than reading a non-translated text.

Why, then, pretend that the need to explain is a weakness? We too often expect reading a translation to be like reading any other text; as a result, we do not want to hear the voice of the translator. Hearing that voice in a preface forces us to acknowledge the translator’s presence in the text itself; it reminds us that what we are reading is not a fixed, finite object, but is slippery, multi-layered, polyphonic.

This post first appeared on the Literary Translation at UEA blog on 19th December 2013.

What I do when I've got an essay to write...

...is write parodies in French, obviously. I have been reading quite a lot of Pierre Reverdy, a poet whom I admire but who is..well, there to be parodied. Sorry this isn't a very interesting post for non-Francophones, but I thought I'd share it with you anyway. With luck, I will eventually write something more useful on Reverdy which may appear here at some point...


Porte-malheur

Une porte qui s’ouvre

Une autre qui se ferme

                        Et encore une autre qui s’ouvre

Ça m’énerve

On ne dit rien

            Les vers sont trop courts pour écrire quelque chose de bien

Une lumière s’éteint

                        Le soir

Un pied qui se cogne contre le coin de l’armoire

                        Un cri de douleur

            Des pas boiteux au bout du couloir

Un départ

                        Encore une porte qui sort de nulle part

            On attend

            On lit solennellement pour faire croire que l’on comprend

Une image

                        Des objets banals sans fin qui s’étendent sur la page

Une maison dans le noir

                        On ne peut pas entrer

Sans clés

Sans espoir

                        Sérieux où sont mes clés

            On les a eues ce matin

            On ne les a plus

Il n’y a plus rien

                        L’ombre où l’on attend le serrurier

Nancy Huston, Cantique des plaines

I was halfway through Cantique des plaines before I discovered it had originally been written in English. Nancy Huston usually writes in French and translates her own works into English, but in this case it was the other way round – as perhaps I should have guessed from the title, in English the more felicitous Plainsong. This of course raises the interesting issue of self-translation: how does it differ from the usual situation, where author and translator are different people? The translator always knows (more or less) what the author meant, for a start. It often seems to mean s/he can throw off the shackles of terms such as ‘fidelity’; while it might be argued that the text, once finished, becomes an entity separate from the author, who does not have sole ownership of it, it would take some audacity to tell a translator that s/he had misrepresented a source text that was her or his own work.

Cantique des plaines is set in Alberta, Canada, which immediately thrust me into a region and a culture I know nothing about. The history of the province and its early settlers, and of the fate of its aboriginal people, forms a constant backdrop to the life story of Paddon, as told by his granddaughter Paula. Paddon, the son of an Irishman and an Englishwoman (part of a cohort of women brought over at the turn of the 20^th century to boost the population), struggles with his father’s violence and his mother’s stifling piety, goes away to university but soon finds himself back again, in a teaching job he doesn’t like, trying to feed his family during the years of the Great Depression.

The entire novel is narrated in the second person, Paula addressing her grandfather as tu. The reader gets used to this after a few pages and it isn’t as irritating, or as limiting to the narrative, as I thought at first it might be – although the sex scenes do read rather oddly. It is essentially effective in rendering the speculative nature of Paula’s undertaking – she is trying to reconstruct Paddon’s life from scraps he has left and from what other relatives have told her, but a large part of the story (it is never revealed quite how much) has been invented by her. The use of the second person tells us this is a private project, Paula’s attempt to understand her beloved and unhappy grandfather; she is at once talking to him, trying to establish his story, and telling it to the reader. At times, notably in the accounts of various forms of domestic violence, this achieves real poignancy: “une fois qu’il a commence à frapper le plaisir de frapper l’envahit et se met à vibrer dans ses flancs et il continue, la frappant encore et encore au ventre de la pointe de sa botte, l’as-tu vraiment vu Paddon?” The reader does not know whether this scene was seen by Paddon, imagined by him, or imagined by Paula. What we do see is history repeating, as Paddon takes out his frustration on his own children and devout, submissive wife.

One of the novel’s principal concerns is time: the great, unfinished project of Paddon’s life is to write a book about different conceptions of time, but he feels he is always prevented by more mundane concerns. The novel flickers backwards and forwards in time with each chapter; Paula states early on that “l’ordre dans lequel m’arrive ta vie est tout sauf chronologique, oui c’est par fulgurances que je te retrouve, te reconstruis”. Most of the time, it is quickly apparent which era we are in, but I did find myself frequently confused about the children’s ages, which war was being referred to, and so on. Overall, the technique works: Paddon’s story is freed from the unforgiving passage of time. Like the aboriginal peoples for whom time is cyclical, we are forever finding ourselves back at the beginning. 

David Foenkinos, Nos séparations

David Foenkinos, Nos séparations

Nos séparations (2008) is the seventh novel by David Foenkinos, who has since ascended to literary stardom in France with his 2009 bestseller La Délicatesse. These two novels have much in common: romantic relationships are centre stage; the narrator (and thus, we suppose, the author) has a penchant for quirky details and aphoristic statements; both novels dwell on the sadnesses of life while finding humour in every corner of it.

The narrator in this case is Fritz, whose name does not pass without comment, either from him or from the majority of the characters to whom he introduces himself. The story he tells, from a temporal perspective which is often ambiguous, is essentially his life story. It is, in the first instance, the title of the novel that encourages the reader to see the story as a series of separations between Fritz and Alice, his first love. The pair love each other, but cannot manage to stay together. Their first real separation is comic, brought about by a disastrous first visit to Alice’s parents. Their second is melodramatic; it is the third that strikes us as most realistic, poignant in its very banality: the unfaithful wife who, ultimately, will not leave her husband.

The reader might judge, though, that it is Fritz’s attitude to life that dooms him to see his own as a series of separations and failures. The novel opens with this reflection:

“J’ai l’impression que la mort est un regard qui me guette en permanence. Chacun de mes gestes est voué à être analysé par une force supérieure, cette force qui est mon futur d’homme décomposé.”

(I have an impression of death as a gaze that is permanently fixed on me. Every one of my actions is fated to be analysed by a higher force, the force that is my future as a decomposed body.)

Fritz is haunted not only by death, but by posterity. In his job at Larousse, working on the dictionary, he enjoys playing with obscure words, but is even more fascinated by the biographical entries he composes. In a characteristic touch, Foenkinos periodically breaks up the main narrative with one of these summarised lives. Almost all tell of a failure, or a career cut short in some way: the writer who jumped out of a window after deciding his work was mediocre; the deserting soldier; the sailor who died on a desert island. The word raté (failed, missed) occurs several times in the novel, particularly towards the end: Iris “savait très bien qu’elle avait tout raté”; Fritz and Alice entertain the thought that their children might make a success of “ce que nous avions raté”. Death and failure weigh heavily on the characters in the latter part of the novel, with three scenes taking place in a cemetery – though the last of these is predominantly hopeful.

These heavy themes, however, are treated with a light touch; Nos séparations made me laugh out loud on several occasions. Alice’s father, though a caricature, delights by his unpleasantness; and the tie-selling episode is a classic piece of Foenkinos eccentricity. The combination of the author’s eye for the particular (often relating to parts of the body or movements, as in Fritz’s first impression of Alice) and his feel for the universal creates a style that is touching, witty and memorable. The particular is the human attempt to live in the moment – often through sex, which is closely linked to the focus on parts of the body – while the universal reminds us that we cannot. Fritz tells us all this on page one, in fact: “Quand je m’éveille auprès d’une femme, je contemple son oreille, et j’essaye de photographier mentalement l’éclat de sa particularité. Je sais qu’un jour je serai allongé, immobile et face à la mort, et qu’il ne me restera plus que ces souvenirs de la sensualité passée.”

(When I wake up beside a woman, I gaze at her ear, and I try to mentally photograph the glow of her individualness. I know that one day I will be lying immobile, facing death, and nothing will be left to me but these memories of past pleasure.)

Fritz wants to classify and define everything, to put things in boxes. As Céline tells him bitterly, he wants to be "un jeune homme rangé". But things that are in boxes are dead. In the end, Fritz's gift to posterity is not the book on Schopenhauer that he dreams of writing, but his son, the not-so-subtly named Roman. Nos séparations ends with a meeting, and we realise that perhaps it has been as much about meetings as partings all along.