Jacques Barzun
FOOD FOR THE N.R. F.
or "My God! What will you have?"
I pick up the half-galleys that the publisher has sent
me
and start to read. The book is the American edition of Roger Martin
du Gard's Notes on Andre Gide. They begin, you remember,
with
the first meeting between the two men at the offices of the
Nouvelle
Revue
Fran~aise
before the First World War. The translation seems
competent, the atmosphere of forty years ago is well rendered. But
what's this? "... On the counter a plateful of dry buns ..." Alas!
This must refer to
gateaux sees
in the original, and those are tea cakes,
not stale bakery stuff. Does it matter? Under the eye of eternity,
I
suppose not. But right here and now it does. For we are not a mag–
nanimous race, we twentieth centurions. We fasten on trifles, live on
hints, and form conclusions from signs, which we interpret way be–
yond the iota, all the way down to the id. So in a thousand minds,
the
N.R .F.
will be ticketed as a carefree bohemian place, where the
buns of the last monthly meeting recur until eroded by time; whereas
sustained by Gide's money, the magazine was actually a rather posh
establishment, punctilious in style and proud of its tea cakes.
I read on and strike other trifles of the same sort. On a com–
parative basis, I should stilI have to call the book well translated;
but drawn off by the act of comparison, my mind leaves the book and
dwells on the theory and practice of modern translation. I think of
the place that modern French literature occupies in our English–
speaking world, and out of thirty years' reading I conjure up the
accumulation of hidden error, of factual and emotional misconcep–
tion, which our awareness and admiration of that literature enshrines.
No doubt the educated American is hardened to the "Frenchy"
style of the nineteenth-century classics that one reads in
youth-The
T hree Musketeers
or
Les Miserables,
in which all colloquialisms of
the type
Que voulez-vous?
are given a word-for-word rendering. But
doesn't this, combined with the hundreds of unintelligible sentences,
