Lost in translation…

[silverwhistle]

One or 2 small translation glitches that I have noted in several editions of NDdP:

1. Agnès Guybertaut/Esméralda's date of birth is clearly stated as the feast of Saint Paula (26 January). This is close enough to the feasts of St Agnes (21 and 28 January) to explain why she could still be named Agnès, as mediæval people were commonly named for saints

Comments

[yukihino]

Regarding #2
Well, with all respect to Victor Hugo, I hardly believe that he meant that infection thing. Rather just choice of wording. Is he indeed a realistic writer who digged out all those medical things?

[silverwhistle]

I think he did mean it, because in his own time this was still a matter of life and death, and he chooses his words. There is a significant difference between a wound that has simply not yet started to heal (so is merely recent) and one which is healing "badly" (not so recent, and breaking down). You did not need to be a doctor to know that someone could become feverish and die of septicæmia, or die even more quickly if they got 'lockjaw' (tetanus). People used poultices to try to draw infections, but these did not always work. Life was precarious.

The one translation I have that gets it right about the wound is Jessie Haynes', although she doesn't get the 'St Paula' reference.

[yukihino]

Maybe. I just think it contradicts with the tradition and style of the Romantic movement to which Hugo belongs.

[aleksdesilesia]

Hugo used to bend many aspects of mainstream, introducing innovations in his regular movement choice. Hence he happens to be a proto-dostoyevskian author who's still representing a wide range of colors in the literature palette.

[aleksdesilesia]

I agree with you, Silverwhistle. When it comes to Claude's wounds/infection it's not only hinted with his general state of mind and apperance, but also his beloved Esmeralda has pointed his awful smell.
One more thing about meaning of names: Frollo actually can mean "weak", "faint", but also "bad, rotting meat". It's pretty much a massive clue from author that Claude might suffer from gangrene.

[silverwhistle]

Yes (although given his experiments and the fact his plain cassock doubles as his lab coat, I suspect he permanently smells of sulphur - like rotten eggs). But yes, I fear his chest is suppurating badly. (And damn it, I want to tend his wounds and nurse him back to health!)

With names, Hugo simply stole them from lists of property owners in Renaissance Paris, taken from a book published in 1639, Du Breul's Le Théâtre des Antiquitez [sic] de Paris. There was a real "Claude Frollo". though he was not an Archdeacon and nothing seems to be known about him, other than the properties he owned. There was also a "Jehan Frollo", but we don't know what relation he was to him.

Abbé Frilay

[silverwhistle]

Name-wise, there's also perhaps an influence from the real-life case of the Abbé Louis-Denis Frilay, a priest in Normandy who was charged with killing the husband of his long-term mistress, as reported in the press in 1830.
The Journal des débats politiques et littéraires (12 May 1830) covers it. It was a major scandal at the time and widely covered. Frilay (unlike Claude) was an experienced ladies' man with a number of illegitimate children.