Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles by Lydia Davis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
For logophiles, linguaphiles, and francophiles. As someone who has tackled sections of The Plague and Les Miserables in the original, and dabbled in translating a couple of obscure French novels that have never been rendered (which is an apt verb for what I was probably doing, blood and tears and all) into English, I was utterly captivated by Davis’s essay in the New York Review of Books on the “Twenty One Pleasures of Translating.” So I pounced on this new collection (which opens with that essay), with trepidation, though, when I saw how THICK it was. But for the most part, I found it absorbing and fascinating. She addresses in detail many of the questions that occurred to me in my own dilettantish efforts: a philosophy of translation? Just how close are you trying to come to the original (her answer: very. Up to and including finding English synonyms for the French that begin and end with the same letter, or have the same number of syllables, or the same consonant / vowel sounds.) Is it okay to leave out words or phrases from the original – or add some? (Generally: no. Except when you really, really have to.) How to deal with idioms or slang from a different century or culture. Beyond the trenchwork of changing one word into another, she astutely demonstrates issues of sentence structure, alliteration, rhythms, voice, and tone that apply to writing across tongues.
Davis has translated from French, German, Dutch, Norwegian. She does not read the book before beginning to translate: she wants to come to the text fresh, and find out what happens as she goes, as a new reader would. She uses multiple dictionaries, from eras contemporaneous with the text; straight one-language dictionaries of the original text’s language for subtleties of usage; online dictionaries, even Google. When she wants to learn a new language, she finds a book and just starts to read it cold (it helps when you already know three or four other languages to compare word roots to) – which seems excessively laborious to me. But it’s kind of inspiring to know she learned Dutch by reading Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s classic Beck detective series, or Spanish by reading Tom Sawyer. She also discusses the complexities of reading versus understanding and speaking: she may be fluent and expert in the first, but is thrilled when she can parse out a friend asking for the bathroom in an Amsterdam restaurant.
This is a dense, long, deep dive into the world of translating, and as separately published essays or lectures, there is considerable repetition. I confess that the 100 pages of a Proust alphabet in progress was too much for me (though I thoroughly enjoyed the other Proust chapters, not just on his writing, but his life, and his cork-lined bedroom politely preserved as a conference room in a modern Parisian bank). Likewise, the Norwegian essays palled, as did the close analysis of Gascon “patois,” both of which I skimmed or skipped. The final Flaubert essay was dazzling, with a sharp-eyed look at some of the numerous previous translations and their presumed intentions, conventions, choices, and failings (would a fly crawl, walk, or climb up a glass? Davis, Nabokov, and I disagree.). Not quite sure why the rambling, fragmented travelogue of the city of Arles was stuck on the end of an already 500+-page tome, but hey, if it mentions Van Gogh and throws in a lion who ate a man’s hand, I’ll read it.
The first time I read Camus’s Plague in the Gilbert Stuart translation, I was so overwhelmed by it, I wondered aloud how I could have reached middle age before discovering it. Then, inspired to try it in French, I was outraged at what Stuart had done to the initial appearance of Dr. Rieux on his staircase that first terrible day – how DARE he ADD a phrase Camus had NOT written?! I threw away the Stuart copy and got Robin Buss’s instead (much better!). I now feel far better educated on the marvelous and intricate challenge of the art of translation (especially in a language I love), thanks to Ms. Davis.
View all my reviews