668
PARTISAN
REVIEW
pound interest. He strives, that is, to bring his text into spiritual con–
formity with that of his author. To do this with any success is as
much the fruit of technique as of inspiration-the technique of writing
English no less than that of understanding French. For I posit that
a good translation is addressed to living readers and dare not be
an
exercise
in
archaism. At every point, then, the translator must gauge
the force and function of the elements before
him,
and make sure that
no force is lost, no function forgotten. The sums and products must
balance.
Force may be easy to weigh and hard to reproduce. In translat–
ing Diderot's
Rameau's Nephew,
I discovered that terms of contempt
or abuse are of a discouraging specificity: any given term implies so
much and no more, and its nearest English equivalent always
hits
above or below the mark. The dictionary meaning, therefore, hardly
enters into the equation. Rather, one is paralyzed by the very aptnes;
of the term. The problem is to recapture this felicity with the vocabu–
lary available now, a hundred and fifty years later: were there
"crooks" in the eighteenth century? Surely there are no "rogues"
now, and even "scoundrels" are on the wane. Dictionaries fail here
because language itself breaks down.
As
for the function of the given phrase, sentence, paragraph, it
can be fully understood and properly rendered only if one has
an
inkling of what the author could have written in its place had he
been so minded--other words and even other ideas. To know or
guess these possibilities calls for familiarity with the author and
his
tradition. It is not too much to say that to translate a work of any in–
tellectual and literary pretensions requires a sympathetic knowledge of
the whole canon. How far "the canon" extends is a matter to be
determined in each attempt.
For a good many years I had toyed with the idea of putting
Flaubert's
Dictionnaire des idees refues
into English, and in moments
of leisure I had filled a notebook with scraps of those terse and
baffling definitions. Sooner or later, I knew, a call to complete the
job would come, whether from on high or from a publisher. I dreaded
the day, for I knew the difficulties by heart, or more exactly, the
dilemmas. I had as many as three and four versions of the proble–
matic items and secretly hankered to give them all-escape per var–
iorum. Just a year ago the call came, at once from on high and from
