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PARTISAN REVIEW
least two important occasions he fell from his own high standard and
attached his name to the usual illegitimate product in which English
and French incestuously mingle. In
The Sweet Cheat Gone,
and no–
tably in the dialogue, one is reminded of the Hugo-Dumas school of
translators: "'Listen, first to me,' I replied, 'I don't know what it is,
but however astonishing it may be, it cannot be so astonishing as what
I have found in my letter. It is a marriage. It is Robert de St. Loup
who is marrying Gilberte Swann.' " And even in the narrative parts
of the book: "Well, this Albertine so necessary, of love for whom
my soul was now almost entirely composed,
if
Swann had not spoken
to me of Balbec, I should never have known her." This sentence
is
not Proust twisting the tail of syntax, but a common construction
that the translator had not only the right but the duty to make
readable.
Scott-Moncrieff's other dereliction affects Stendhal. On the title
page of the only available edition of
On Love,
our translator
is
credited with having "directed" the work. This is a solemn responsi–
bility, for the signature is a high guarantee. But the directing cannot
have been close or active, for the text abounds in errors and infelicities.
Besides gross blunders like "deduct" for "deduce," one meets ambi–
guities at every turn. According to the preface, for instance, the
book "is not a novel and contains none of the distractions of a novel."
What Stendhal actually says is that this book will not afford enter–
tainment like a novel. Typical of a still worse incompetence is the
rendering of one of the aphorisms at the end: "The majority of men
in this world only abandon themselves to their love for a woman
after intimacy with her." What the original states is that most
men
of the world
only
begin to love,
etc.
When one knows that fifteen years before this luckless attempt
upon Stendhal's work a first-rate version by Philip and Cecil N.
Sidney Woolf was published here and in England, one begins to
im–
agine an imp of the perverse at work to balk communication between
literatures. The truth is that translation is not and has never been
recognized as an art-except in the way of lip-service. Judges of the
art are naturally few, and among its practitioners little or nothing is
consciously known of its techniques. Perhaps the decline in classical
studies accounts for this deficiency, which should then be called a for–
getting of a once established discipline. I remember from my youth
a series of trots which were advertised as containing two parallel
