{"id":130227,"date":"2018-10-22T09:00:30","date_gmt":"2018-10-22T13:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=130227"},"modified":"2018-10-22T05:56:56","modified_gmt":"2018-10-22T09:56:56","slug":"simply-impossible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/22\/simply-impossible\/","title":{"rendered":"Simply Impossible"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Patrick Modiano<\/p><\/div>\n

Translation lore is rife with tales of linguistic derring-do in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Gilbert Adair\u2019s e<\/em>-less Englishing (or Nglishing) of Georges Perec\u2019s La Disparition<\/em> is one. So are James Joyce and co.\u2019s Italian and French permutations on Anna Livia Plurabelle<\/em>, and Henri Parisot\u2019s (and Antonin Artaud\u2019s) gallicizations of Lewis Carroll\u2019s \u201cJabberwocky.\u201d Less spectacular, but far more common, is a hurdle faced by nearly every practicing translator, across contexts and genres. It\u2019s the challenge of the seemingly unadorned sentence or expression that passes so naturally it seems to \u201cwrite itself.\u201d While the translation of these sentences can sometimes occur just as naturally, more often than not it requires vast amounts of hairpulling. Few things are as difficult as ease.<\/p>\n

As a translator, I\u2019ve been grappling (so to speak) with the apparently straightforward prose of Patrick Modiano for the better part of a decade. Having now worked on nine of his books\u2014his newest, Sleep of Memory<\/em>, was published by Yale University Press this month\u2014I\u2019ve come to appreciate both the economy of his French and the complexities of ushering that economy into English. The familiar rule of thumb, that English is more concise than French by about 15 percent, doesn\u2019t apply here: in my experience, Modiano is one of the rare French writers who can actually come out longer in English translation.<\/p>\n

Appropriately, the challenges begin at the beginning. Modiano\u2019s titles often have the peculiar quality of not seeming to strive for effect while still achieving it. The title of his novella Remise de peine<\/em>, for instance, carries the dual connotation of punishment commuted and sorrow deferred. Achieving this pairing in a single, familiar-sounding English phrase was not self-evident. But because the story also evokes the writer that the young narrator (a stand-in, as nearly always, for Modiano himself) would eventually become, I was able to shift the emphasis slightly and still produce the desired effect: the English title, Suspended Sentences<\/em>, conveys the sense of waiting and reprieve while playing off the double meaning of sentence<\/em>\u00a0as both utterance and sanction. The title of another piece in the same volume, Chien de printemps<\/em>, offers the literal but obscure image of a \u201cdog in springtime\u201d (such a canine does in fact make an appearance), as well as the phrase\u2019s more colloquial meaning, something like \u201cgoddamn spring.\u201d Since neither of these flew very high as an English title, or even made much sense, I instead looked toward the intertwined strands of photography and recollection that run throughout the novella and called it Afterimage<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In the case of the new novel, whose French title is Souvenirs dormants<\/em>, I wanted to retain both the lilting quality of the original\u2019s five-syllable rhythm and its sense of latency, of something from out of the past that can still cause harm. \u201cDormant Memories\u201d sounded too technical, and the word dormant<\/em> is stranger to anglophone ears than its cognate is to French. \u201cSleeping Memories\u201d seemed like something you should just let lie\u2014another dog. Sleep of Memory<\/em> offers the sense of past events about to reemerge, and the use of memory<\/em> in the singular makes the phenomenon more generalized, a faculty rather than simple instances. The title acts as prelude to a novel that skips among the narrator\u2019s recollections of transformative relationships with different women, and the words capture the fleeting, unstable process through which these fragments resurface, as if from a long slumber, before sinking again into oblivion.<\/p>\n

Delving deeper, the text itself harbored a number of other subtle traps, and one in particular can serve as a road map to the pitfalls of the whole. Again, it\u2019s from the beginning\u2014first page, first paragraph, third sentence: \u201c\u00c0 cette \u00e9poque, j\u2019avais souvent peur du vide<\/em>.\u201d Not an especially difficult sentence to understand, or even to translate, and yet \u2026 It could be rendered literally, as \u201cAt the time, I was often afraid of the void.\u201d But immediately the problems come forward. The word vide<\/em> in French can mean \u201cvoid\u201d or \u201cemptiness,\u201d but the phrase peur du vide<\/em>\u00a0is also \u201cfear of heights,\u201d and the next sentence picks up on the image: \u201cJe n\u2019e\u0301prouvais pas ce vertige quand j\u2019e\u0301tais seul<\/em> \u2026 \u201d (\u201cI never felt that vertigo when I was alone\u201d). The English void<\/em> does give the sense of standing above a great drop, but the word itself seems overdetermined, too literal: the narrator\u2019s fear is not of actual heights but of the dizziness provoked by being in the company of others, \u201ccertain individuals whom I had in fact just encountered.\u201d To preserve that sense of existential nausea, I called upon another Sartrean trope, \u201cnothingness.\u201d<\/p>\n

The sentence posed further challenges as well: its structure, with the introductory phrase (\u201cAt the time\u201d), repeated the rhythm of the two preceding sentences in a way that, in English, began to feel needlessly repetitive, which I addressed by transposing the phrase. For souvent<\/em>, rather than the more common translation, \u201coften,\u201d I chose the word \u201cprone,\u201d which stresses the narrator\u2019s sense of isolation and vulnerability by underscoring that his vertigo happens not only frequently, but frequently to him<\/em>. In addition, the slightly abstract quality of peur du vide<\/em>, while beautiful in French, seemed slightly jarring in English, a language that tends toward more concrete imagery. To soften this, I moved the mention of \u201cvertigo\u201d up from the following sentence, in a position of reinforcement. The final version reads: \u201cI was prone back then to a fear of nothingness, like a kind of vertigo.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such adaptations might strike readers as unpardonable liberties, and perhaps they are. But maintaining the simplicity, the ease, the flow of Modiano\u2019s sentences, in a way that wouldn\u2019t catch on the American reader\u2019s ear (just as the original doesn\u2019t catch on French ears), called for some discreet rearrangements, and some not-so-discreet reworking.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a claim that begs to be put to the test, so here\u2019s the first paragraph of the French original:<\/p>\n

Un jour, sur les quais, le titre d\u2019un livre a retenu mon attention, <\/em>Le Temps des rencontres. Pour moi aussi, il y a eu un temps des rencontres, dans un passe\u0301 lointain. A\u0300 cette e\u0301poque, j\u2019avais souvent peur du vide. Je n\u2019e\u0301prouvais pas ce vertige quand j\u2019e\u0301tais seul, mais avec certaines personnes dont justement je venais de faire la rencontre. Je me disais pour me rassurer: il se pre\u0301sentera bien une occasion de leur fausser compagnie. Quelques-unes de ces personnes, vous ne saviez pas jusqu\u2019ou\u0300 elles risquaient de vous entrai\u0302ner. La pente e\u0301tait glissante.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was an early draft:<\/p>\n

Once, on the quays, the title of a book caught my eye: The Time of Encounters<\/em>. For me, too, there had been a time of encounters, in a long-distant past. Back then, I was often afraid of the void. I never experienced that vertigo when I was alone, only with certain individuals whom I\u2019d in fact just encountered. I\u2019d reassure myself that, sooner or later, I could slip away unnoticed. With some of these individuals, you never knew where they might lead you. It was a slippery slope.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And this is the paragraph as it appears in the finished translation:<\/p>\n

Once, on the quays, the title of a book caught my eye: The Time of Encounters<\/em>. For me, too, there had been a time of encounters, in a long-distant past. I was prone back then to a fear of nothingness, like a kind of vertigo. I never felt it when alone, only with certain individuals whom I had in fact just encountered. I\u2019d reassure myself that, when the time was right, I could steal away unnoticed. You never knew where some of those people might lead you. It was a slippery slope.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In offering these two versions, I realize that some might find my first draft more accurate, more faithful to the French, and strictly in terms of word choice and sentence construction, they would be right. But fidelity in translation is a rather equivocal concept. Despite an increasingly sophisticated discourse around the art, many people still feel that the most \u201cfaithful\u201d renderings are direct transpositions, as if every word had its exact equivalent in other languages and that this equivalent would be the only appropriate option. In reality, the most successful translations\u2014successful as literature in their own right, I mean\u2014are to a large extent adaptations. They are convincing and representative by virtue of their understanding of how the original works. They have the ability to get under its skin and then to transmit that understanding via another grammar and syntax. As attentive as I was to sentence structure and vocabulary, I was equally concerned with preserving an economical directness that works slightly differently in English than in French. Real fidelity takes liberties. The translator\u2019s task, as I see it, consists not of crashing two linguistic systems together but of negotiating them as one would an entente cordiale, so that the target text might dance with the target reader just as the source text does with the source reader.<\/p>\n

Is there such a thing a text that is impossible to translate? I have my doubts. There are degrees of difficulty, of course, but I persist in believing that someone with the stubbornness, the wherewithal, and probably the lunacy to keep at it will eventually solve any linguistic quandary source authors can devise. What often makes translation seem impossible is the expectation that it must, or could, or should capture every nuance, every rhythm, every sound and cultural resonance embedded in the original. The idea that there is only one \u201ccorrect\u201d translation of a given text and, as a corollary, that a good translator will avoid the imprint of personal choice.<\/p>\n

In fact, translation is nothing but personal choices. It\u2019s rarely about finding the \u201cright answer,\u201d in the categorical, autocratic sense, because such answers in translation scarcely exist. My choices, in the passage quoted above, are tendered not as definitive solutions, but as the solutions that seemed right to me. There are always other choices that can be made. Possibility is plurality.<\/p>\n

This is true of the verbal pyrotechnics of avant-garde writing, but just as true\u2014perhaps even truer\u2014of humble, everyday, seemingly straightforward prose. The force and drama of Modiano\u2019s writing is conveyed with a simplicity that cuts straight to the hearts of readers of disparate backgrounds, age groups, and cultures. At the same time, that simplicity is itself an artifice, produced with a command of linguistic resources as complex and masterful as anything written by such paragons of ornateness as Marcel Proust, Henry James, or David Foster Wallace. And the translation of that simplicity requires as much thought, invention, and revision as the author put into the original.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mark Polizzotti is the translator of more than fifty books from the French and the author, most recently, of <\/em>Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto (MIT Press).\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Polizzotti on translating Patrick Modiano’s latest book: “Few things are as difficult as ease.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1626,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[4061,3671,39180,947,39179,834,39178,530,14674],"class_list":["post-130227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-antonin-artaud","tag-georges-perec","tag-henri-parisot","tag-james-joyce","tag-la-disparition","tag-patrick-modiano","tag-sleep-of-memory","tag-translation","tag-translators"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSimply Impossible<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Mark Polizzotti on translating Patrick Modiano's latest book: "Few things are as difficult as ease."\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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