FOOD FOR THE
N.R.F.
661
lay the foundation for the curious beliefs of adults about France and
the French? In some, it is the conviction that life over there is less
drab than with us, by virtue of the many provocative turns of thought.
In others, it is a faith in the subtlety of every phrase, charged as it
obviously is with
hidden
meaning. The philistine, of course, wonders
how these foreigners manage to understand one another, and for
once he
is
the better judge, given the evidence presented. Open the
latest, "modernized"
rei~ue
of
Les Miserables
and you will find, in
every other paragraph, sentences such as this one about Napoleon:
"He had in his brains the cube of human faculties." Undoubtedly,
the routine discredit in which the novels of Victor Hugo now stand
owes much to the bald transliteration of a rhetoric which could be
out of fashion without seeming insane.
As
rendered in this same
version, Hugo's preface-which is a clear and simple social mani–
festo--can show only three phrases with a rational meaning. The
rest is translator's English.
Scanning the books of our own day, one might think that pub–
lishers had acquired a greater sense of responsibility and had recourse
for translation to genuine writers, in place of the old-time hack
whose livelihood depended on mass output, just as his linguistic knowl–
edge depended on the dictionary he happened to own. This apparent
improvement is on the surface only. Enough jokes have been made
about the obvious traps for everybody to avoid them. But the same
wrong principlei prevail as regards the moral and artistic obligations
of publisher and translator. It is still taken for granted that literary
facility, coupled with what is called a working knowledge of a for–
eign tongue, is enough to make a translator. Yet this combination
of talents, rare as it may be, does not begin to suffice-witness Have–
lock Ellis, whose version of
Germinal
is made unreadable by gibberish
like: "They don't gain enough to live"- meaning
earn
enough to
live
on.
One must go further and say that being an experienced translator
is no guarantee of competence in a particular effort, any more than
being a concert violinist is a guarantee of a good performance every
night. The late C.
K.
Scott-Moncrieff was perhaps the greatest trans–
lator of our century. He gave us a Proust and a Stendhal which,
though incomplete, are monuments of an art-triumphs of a type of
thought-that I hope to define more fully in a moment. Yet on at
