FOOD FOR THE
N.R.F.
663
translations, "the one literal, the other
correct."
Today the distinction
would probably puzzle many readers and not a few translators.
In any event, the present oblivion on the part of writers and
critics goes with a rooted faith in publishers that translation is a
mechanical job, hardly worth paying for, and merely incidental to
the finished book. Note how one firm after another will reissue–
sometimes at great expense, with illustrations and introductions by
good craftsmen-the same execrable translations dating from the
Flood. Thus, there is not, I believe, a single readable version of
Gautier's
Mademoiselle de Maupin.
When the work was being
brought out again in 1943, I offered, as the introducer, to go over
the old anonymous text that Tradition and Thrift alike recommended
to the publisher.
This
offer (gratuitous in both senses) was declined
with some surprise as surely not worth the time and trouble. My own
surprise was that a perfectionist in book production, who did not mean
to cheat anybody, should be quite content to palm off a mass of verbi–
age in the vein of: "His doublet and hose are concealed by aigulets,
his gloves smell better than Benjamin ... There has sprung up between
the planks of the St. Simonian stage a theory of little mushrooms...."
Little mushrooms indeed. Their poison is absorbed into the liter–
ary system, which it afflicts with insensitivity to meaning whenever
anything foreign-and especially anything French-is concerned. The
resulting misconceptions in turn produce conscious, large-scale misin–
terpretations. For instances of this we need not go much beyond
titles. To be sure, the false lead in a title usually causes but a passing
confusion; one example is Gide's
My Theatre
for a collection of
plays-as if "Shakespeare's Theatre" meant "Shakespeare's Plays";
another
is
Stendhal's
Souvenir of Egotism
for "Reminiscences of an
Egotist." But in at least one famous instance the established form of
a title
is
a literary disaster: we all speak of Flaubert's
Sentimental
Education.
We do not, it is true, attach quite the same meaning to
"sentimental" here as we do in Sterne's
Sentimental Journey,
yet
unless we are warned we may miss the fundamental point of the
entire work. The supposition of many an intelligent reader who knows
no French
is
that the education of Flaubert's hero was "sentimental"
in the sense of nurturing illusions, fostering "romantic emotions," and
that the novel records the consequences. Because he was badly brought
up, Frederic Moreau lacked the wits to see how "unrealistic" his
