"He said that he aimed only at beauty." (Барнс о природе перевода)
Julian Barnes. Writer’s Writer and Writer’s Writer’s Writer [London Review of Books]
There is a slightly pretentious term in wine tasting and wine writing
called ‘mouthfeel’. (It is also slightly baffling: where else might
you feel wine if not in your mouth? On your foot?) The Oxford
Companion to Wine calls it a ‘non-specific tasting term, used
particularly for red wines, to indicate those textural attributes,
such as smoothness, that produce tactile sensations on the surface of
the oral cavity’. There is similar mouthfeel about translation.
***
Imagine that you are about to read a great French novel for the first
time, and can only do so in your native English. The book itself is
more than 150 years old. What would/should/do you want? The
impossible, of course. But what sort of impossible?..
***
So we might fantasise the translator of our dreams: someone,
naturally, who admires the novel and its author, and who sympathises
with its heroine; a woman, perhaps, to help us better navigate the
sexual politics of the time; someone with excellent French and better
English, perhaps with a little experience of translating in the
opposite direction as well. Then we make a key decision: should this
translator be ancient or modern? Flaubert’s contemporary, or ours?
After a little thought, we might plump for an Englishwoman of
Flaubert’s time, whose prose would inevitably be free of anachronism
or other style-jarringness. And if she was of the time, then might we
not reasonably imagine the author helping her? Let’s push it further:
the translator not only knows the author, but lives in his house, able
to observe his spoken as well as his written French. They might work
side by side on the text for as long as it takes. And now let’s push
it to the limit: the female English translator might become the
Frenchman’s lover - they always say that the best way to learn a
language is through pillow talk. <...> As it happens, this dream was
once a reality.
***
Flaubert awards such activities a paragraph, and then summarises the
consequences of this pre-adolescent life in two short sentences which
he pointedly sets out as a separate paragraph: ‘Aussi poussa-t-il
comme un chêne. Il acquit de fortes mains, de belles couleurs.’ The
meaning is quite clear; there are no hidden traps or false friends. If
you want to try putting this into English yourself first, look away
now. Here are six attempts from the last 125 years to translate yet
not traduce:
1) Meanwhile he grew like an oak; he was strong of hand, fresh of colour.
2) And so he grew like an oak-tree, and acquired a strong pair of
hands and a fresh colour.
3) He grew like a young oak-tree. He acquired strong hands and a good colour.
4) He throve like an oak. His hands grew strong and his complexion ruddy.
5) And so he grew up like an oak. He had strong hands, a good colour.
6) And so he grew like an oak. He acquired strong hands, good colour.
<...> All these six versions - given in chronological order - have
their virtues; none is obviously superior.
***
Dilly worked out his English equivalent to Herodas. <...> ‘Why can’t
you tell me what they cost?’ comes out as ‘Why mumblest ne freetongued
descryest the price?’
***
Davis castigates some of her predecessors for wanting ‘simply to tell
this engrossing story in their own preferred manner’. Interviewed by
the Times, she expanded on this: ‘I’ve found that the ones that are
written with some flair and some life to them are not all that close
to the original; the ones that are more faithful may be kind of
clunky.’ This is the paradox and bind of translation. If to be
‘faithful’ is to be ‘clunky’, then it is also to be unfaithful,
because Flaubert was not a ‘clunky’ writer. He moves between
registers; he cuts into the lyric with the prosaic; but this is French
prose whose every syllable has been tested aloud again and again.
Flaubert said that a line of prose should be as rhythmical, sonorous
and unchangeable as a line of poetry. He said that he aimed only at
beauty.