Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Translation is one of the least rewarding of literary trades: its practitioners are usually ill-paid, and even if masters of their profession seldom enjoy more than a dimly reflected glory. Yet how much, if we do not happen to be good linguists, we owe to them! But for their labours, many of us would never have read Kafka or Thomas Mann, Proust or Gide, let alone The Brothers Karamazoff or The Tale of Genji. True it is that most translators are hacks, content to churn out a reasonably accurate and intelligible version of the original text, without much regard for style; but the craft of translation, like most other crafts, throws up an occasional genius: one who, besides being himself a literary artist, is in such close sympathy with a particular writer that he is able to re-create his work in another language, thereby endowing it, so to speak, with a second nationality, so that one comes to think of it as being no less a part of English than of French or German literature. One could quote a number of examples: consider, for instance, the Morte d’Arthur, which Malory ‘did take out of certain books of French and reduced it into English’ (1). But who thinks of the Morte d’Arthur as a translation? And the same, I suppose, might be said of Don Quixote or Grimm’s fairy tales.

     In our own day, I don’t think there can be the least doubt that C. K. Scott Moncrieff towers above contemporary translators. It is owing to him — and to him alone — that Proust is so widely read and understood in this country; Remembrance of Things Past, no less than the Morte d’Arthur, has taken root, as it were, in our alien soil and become naturalized, so that we are almost justified in claiming Proust as an ‘English’ writer, just as the Germans used to speak of unser Shakespeare. Scott Moncrieff, in fact, possessed the two essential qualifications of the great translator: complete self-identification with his chosen author, and the ability to forge a style which reproduces, with an uncanny accuracy, the spirit of the original.

     Not long ago I re-read the whole of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, partly in English, partly in French, intermittently comparing the two texts. Once again I was struck by Scott Moncrieff’s amazing fidelity to the spirit of the original, and by the immense pains which he took to overcome what must seem, to the average reader with only a moderately good knowledge of French, almost insurmountable difficulties. It must be said at once that the translation is not strictly accurate in detail; it is extremely free, and might be better described, perhaps, as an adaptation (sometimes, indeed, Scott Moncrieff takes astonishing liberties with the text); yet one feels that only thus — by giving himself elbow-room — could he hope to transmit the feel and flavour of Proust’s great novel.

     The following passage from Swann’s Way may be taken as a fairly typical example of his method (2):

     But it was in vain that I lingered before the hawthorns, to breathe in, to marshal before my mind (which knew not what to make of it), to lose in order to rediscover their invisible and unchanging odour, to absorb myself in the rhythm which disposed their flowers here and there with the light-heartedness of youth, and at intervals as unexpected as certain intervals of music; they offered me an indefinite continuation of the same charm, in an inexhaustible profusion but without letting me delve into it any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play over a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer to their secret . . . My eyes followed up the slope which, outside the hedge, rose steeply to the fields, a poppy that had strayed and been lost by its fellows, or a few cornflowers that had fallen lazily behind, and decorated the ground here and there with their flowers like the border of a tapestry, in which may be seen at intervals hints of the rustic theme which appears triumphant in the panel itself; infrequent still, spaced apart as the scattered houses which warn us that we are approaching a village, they betokened to me the vast expanse of waving corn beneath the fleecy clouds, and the sight of a single poppy hoisting upon its slender rigging and holding against the breeze its scarlet ensign . . . made my heart beat as does a wayfarer’s when he perceives, upon some low-lying ground, an old and broken boat . . . and cries out, although he has not yet caught sight of it, ‘The Sea!’

     Now this is, surely, a pretty good piece of prose in its own right; but how does it compare with Proust? I think myself that it is about as good a rendering as possible of the original, but it is far from being a literal translation. In the first place, Scott Moncrieff has made slight alterations in the punctuation: thus, in the first sentence, the phrase ‘which knew not what to make of it’ is enclosed in brackets, whereas the French text (3) reads ‘. . . à porter devant ma pensée qui ne savait ce qu’elle devait en faire’, etc. In the same sentence a semi-colon replaces Proust’s comma (quite justifiably) after ‘certain intervals of music’ (‘comme certains intervalles musicaux, elles m’offraient’, etc.). There is also, at this point, a very slight shift of meaning: Scott Moncrieff writes ‘to lose in order to rediscover their invisible and unchanging odour’, whereas the text has ‘à perdre, à retrouver leur invisible et fixe odeur’. The phrase ‘quelque coquelicot perdu’ becomes ‘a poppy that had strayed and been lost by its fellows’ — a perfectly acceptable extension of the original, which is not literally translatable (though ‘a strayed poppy’ might have served at a pinch). Again, for ‘m’unir au rhythme qui jetait leurs fleurs’, we have ‘to absorb myself in the rhythm’, etc., which seems to me neither better nor worse than the literal ‘to unite myself with’. Farther on, Scott Moncrieff is reduced to writing ‘fleecy clouds’ in order to by-pass the untranslatable verb ‘moutonner’, and this entails a reorganization of the syntax. In the same sentence Proust writes ‘la vue d’un seul cocquelicot hissant au bout de son cordage et faisant cingler au vent sa flamme rouge’, which becomes ‘a single poppy hoisting upon its slender rigging and holding against the breeze its scarlet ensign’. Given the marine metaphor of the ‘rigging’ (and the subsequent reference to the boat and the sea) ‘scarlet ensign’ is surely an improvement upon ‘flamme rouge’.

     There are other passages in which Scott Moncrieff seems to me slightly to improve upon the original. Thus, when Marcel is speaking of the dead body of his grandmother he says: ‘Mais maintenant, au contraire, ils (his grandmother’s grey hairs) étaient seuls à imposer la couronne de la vieillesse sur le visage redevenu jeune d’où avaient disparu les rides, les contractions, les empâtements, les tensions, les fléchissements que, depuis tant d’années, lui avaient ajoutés la souffrance’. Scott Moncrieff’s version runs ‘. . . the wrinkles, the contractions, the swellings, the strains, the hollows which in the long course of years had been carved on it by suffering’. The word ‘carved’ is particularly apt, since in the next sentence Proust describes the body as transformed by the hand of Death, ‘comme un sculpteur du Moyen Age’, into the semblance of a young girl.

     Scott Moncnieff has been criticized for over-using certain ‘literary’ or archaic words, such as ‘albeit’; yet how else, one might well ask, could he have translated ‘bien que’? Sometimes he is careless — as when he attributes a remark of the Duchesse de Guermantes to the Duke (4). Nor does he seem to have been very well up in two subjects about which Proust himself took a great deal of trouble to be accurate: botany and medicine. Thus, in the passage describing the little lake in Swann’s garden at Tansonville, Scott Moncrieff renders ‘la grenouillette au pied mouillé’ as ‘watergrowing kingcups’; but ‘grenouillette’ should properly be water crowfoot, a quite different plant which grows partly submerged in water, which kingcups do not. A botanist, moreover, would have given ‘eupatoire’ not as agrimony but as hemp-agrimony (agrimony itself does not grow in damp places, and belongs to a different family). On the other hand, one can scarcely blame Scott Moncrieff for perpetuating an error which occurred in the original edition of the NRF: Lythrum salicoria for Lythrum salicaria (though the NRF — or Proust — at least gave the generic name a capital letter, which Scott Moncrieff does not) (5).

     A far worse howler occurs in the passage describing the grandmother’s last illness:

     Quand . . . ma grand’mère fut couchée, elle se rendit compte qu’elle parlait beaucoup plus facilement, le petit déchirement ou encombrement d’un vaisseau qu’avait produit l’urémie avait sans doute été très léger …. (6)

     Scott Moncrieff writes: ‘. . . the little rupture or obstruction of a blood-vessel which had produced the uraemia’, as though the text read ‘le petit . . . encombrement qui avait produit l’urémie’, etc. Fourth-form schoolboys have been beaten for less; the mistake, moreover, makes nonsense of the passage, for it was of course the uraemia which brought on the stroke, not vice versa.

     Such lapses are, however, extremely rare, and to appreciate the magnitude of Scott Moncrieff’s achievement one has only to compare him with his successor, Stephen Hudson, whose version of Le Temps Retrouvé can only be described as disastrous. Not only is the prose, by comparison, clumsy and unmusical, but the translation itself is either absurdly literal or downright inaccurate. Thus, ‘au bord de la mer’ becomes ‘at the side of the sea’, and ‘déjeuner’ is rendered as ‘breakfast’ (when in any case it is clear from the context that Proust means luncheon). Such minor blemishes may be put down to carelessness; but what is one to say about the following?

     Mlle Swann me jetait de l’autre côté de la haie d’épines roses, un regard dont j’avais dû d’ailleurs rétrospectivement retoucher la signification, etc. (7)

     Hudson’s version, believe it or not, runs:

     Mlle Swann throwing some thorny roses to me from the other side of the hedge, with a look I had retrospectively attributed, etc. (8)

     Even if one grants that the punctuation in the French text is slightly misleading (the comma after ‘d’épines roses’ is superfluous, or if it is to stand, requires another after ‘me jetait’), there is surely no excuse for this; one is tempted to suppose that Hudson simply didn’t know French.

     It can only be regretted that Scott Moncrieff did not live to complete the Herculean task to which he had devoted so many years of his life. Like Hudson, he too — as I have pointed out —  could occasionally be careless; but he was incapable of translating ‘d’épines roses’ as thorny roses. Quite apart from the question of accuracy, it seems to me that a really good translation requires qualities in the translator which Scott Moncrieff possessed in full measure, but which Hudson only too obviously lacked. Scott Moncrieff was not only able, as I have said, to identify himself closely with Proust, and to echo the subtle music of his prose; he was also, himself, a dedicated artist who — perhaps because he lacked any strongly creative impulse of his own — was willing to humble himself before his model, and to re-fashion Proust’s great novel into a work which can justly be regarded as an English prose masterpiece.