Re: Two Reviews in One: Iphigénie by Racine, L’Écume des Jours by Vian - Edit 1
Before modification by DomA at 21/06/2012 06:23:28 PM
They are at opposite extremes of the literary spectrum in many ways – one is a play, the other prose, one is antiquated, the other surreal, one was written in the 17th Century, the other in the 20th – and yet both highlight the same problems of translation that led me to learn French in the first place.
I concur. Those are two of the barely translatable French authors. Rabelais is another, especially the original, unmodernized language. Rabelais in modern French loses way too much and it's especially irritating that translators constantly decided Rabelais didn't intend this or that, and "corrected him" (they even do stuff like turning a paragraph long sentence without punctuation into shorter sentences - that's criminal). I'm a bit baffled everytime I hear someone's reading Rabelais in foreign languages - 90% of the interest is his unique language, so what's the point?
I've been curious to look at a translation of Vian in English for a long time - I have a hard time figuring out how they do it and what's left of Vian in that - but bookstores don't have any in stock and buying it would be a waste of money. One day I'll come across one, I guess.
Vian has another aspect: he is a writer one must read. Vian read aloud, or adapted, most often doesn't work (which is why I'm very curious to see as well what Gondry is going to achieve with his movie adaptation - the previous two attempts to adapt L'Écume des Jours have failed miserably). That's true strictly of Vian's novels and novellas, however, as he adopted a subtly different style when he wrote plays, poems and songs.
I love L'Écume des Jours, though I rarely reread it nowadays. It used to be my favourite Vian novel when I was much younger, but these days I prefer the more ambitious and darker L'Automne à Pékin and L'Herbe Rouge.
As for Racine, what you said is all true. It's even more obvious Racine can't be translated when you hear his verses from the mouth of great actors. The modern way Racine is played (a return to an earlier fashion, actually), very fast and with most of the focus on the language and its music - and on the intensity - is awesome. That you're hearing the epitome of versified French drama (linguistically, at least) is really apparent then, and the quality of his language, as hard and sharp as a diamond, comes through far more (rather than the feeling it's very ornate and stilted which you get when reading his plays. A lot of non-anglophones have similar experiences with Shakespeare on the page vs. in the mouths of actors). The way Racine was still used to be played when I was a teenager, slowly and pompously, was extremely tedious.
L’Écume des Jours
The first thing that one notices about this novel, after the surrealism or absurdity or whatever one chooses to call it, is that the novel was written by a very young author.
The first thing that one notices about this novel, after the surrealism or absurdity or whatever one chooses to call it, is that the novel was written by a very young author.
Indeed. It's very hard to coin Vian's style (he was not very influenced by the surrealist movement which he found took itself too seriously for example) - which is why many French scholars often opt for "pataphysics". Vian himself claimed a filiation to British Nonsense and to Carroll. There's something very British in Vian - there's something there of the same sense of the whimsical that you find for instance in Harry Potter.
This love is very obviously mutual, but there is an adolescent sense of duty – a desire not to “betray a friend’s trust” – that grips Colin and so he refuses to act on his feelings. A novel written by an older person would almost certainly see the mutual attraction lead to either a secret affair or a broken friendship, but Vian does not follow those lines.
Not in L'Écume des Jours. It's closer to the way he deals with those themes in L'Automne à Pékin.
Instead, Colin’s refusal to betray his friend’s trust set in motion an entire series of tragic events that are punctuated by surreal events seemingly thrown into the novel as a means of youthful escapism, a way of blunting the impact of harsh truths about life, but which ultimately ends up doing nothing more than reinforce those harsh truths.
That owes a lot to the period. Vian's earlier novels were even more adolescent and absurd - they were above all farces - and didn't have the bitter-sweet aspect of L'Écume des Jours. All those novels owe a great deal to the occupation/early post-WWII mood of the "hip" youth, their almost surreal euphoria and the harsher and much greyer reality. It's escapism in that sense, and also escapism for Vian himself, who had a kind of double-life as engineer in a very conservative milieu by day and was like the ring master of St-Germain-des-Prés's parties by night. Vian was surrounded by younger people just too young to have fought the war (himself had a heart disease). He will move a bit from that "universe" after L'Écume des Jours, though the touches of adolescent humour never go completely away.
There is little, if any, attempt to make the characters believable enough as to be sympathetic
That again owes to the fact the characters are heavily inspired by the Zazous sub-culture - and in that novel, starting to move away from it to "real adult life". The Zazous are not "entirely believable" - not even to the people of their time. Hard to think they co-existed with and often gravitated around the same circles as the existentialists.
However, reading the “V” as a roman numeral in French, one gets the phrase “cinq ouille”, which is a reference to the Rabelaisian “Saint Couille” (and, for those totally unfamiliar with French obscenities, couille means ball or testicle in a very vulgar mode of expression).
Vulgar as in "from the people", but not in the sense it's obscene. You can use it safely in casual conversation without anyone raising an eyebrow, or without seeming vulgar (well, with all the crowd you can use expressions with "balls" in English anyway, which in France is pretty much everyone except in very formal occasions. We also have a series of colourful words from the same family, all of them pretty safe to use in conversation. eg: couillu which means having a lot of balls, literally (that's slightly more vulgar) or figuratively.
Definitely, though there are apparently very good translations of Vian in Eastern European languages (I go by what scholars say, I never read any myself).
A lot of Vian's style rely on having the reader stumble on his play-on-words at the turn of a sentence, such as giving a literal twist to expressions used strictly figuratively in the context. If the reader always has to go read a footnote to understand that where it's written "he left him there and turned around" Vian used the verb to plant (in the ground, like a flower) literally where you'd expect the figurative meaning "to leave someone suddenly", it must get very tedious, and feel very flat. And if you translate "he planted him there" with a footnote that in French it means something else figuratively, you get the joke but you don't get very close to the intended effect for someone reading this in French. And there's not all that much in Vian if you remove or undermine the dimension of fun with the language. He built whimsical universes almost strictly with language, that's where most of the interest in his work is. It's a bit like trying to read Carroll in anything but the original (though somewhat worse, I would say).
On L'Écume des Jours specifically, that novel has a lot more power of attraction for people 14-18 y.o. It's not all that easy to get into as an adult, at least without the nostalgia factoring in. Teenagers react very differently to it.
Vulgar as in "from the people", but not in the sense it's obscene. You can use it safely in casual conversation without anyone raising an eyebrow, or without seeming vulgar (well, with all the crowd you can use expressions with "balls" in English anyway, which in France is pretty much everyone except in very formal occasions. We also have a series of colourful words from the same family, all of them pretty safe to use in conversation. eg: couillu which means having a lot of balls, literally (that's slightly more vulgar) or figuratively.
As a result, I would recommend the novel for those who speak and/or read French, but probably not for those who would be tempted to pick up an English (or Russian, or German, or Swahili) translation.
Definitely, though there are apparently very good translations of Vian in Eastern European languages (I go by what scholars say, I never read any myself).
A lot of Vian's style rely on having the reader stumble on his play-on-words at the turn of a sentence, such as giving a literal twist to expressions used strictly figuratively in the context. If the reader always has to go read a footnote to understand that where it's written "he left him there and turned around" Vian used the verb to plant (in the ground, like a flower) literally where you'd expect the figurative meaning "to leave someone suddenly", it must get very tedious, and feel very flat. And if you translate "he planted him there" with a footnote that in French it means something else figuratively, you get the joke but you don't get very close to the intended effect for someone reading this in French. And there's not all that much in Vian if you remove or undermine the dimension of fun with the language. He built whimsical universes almost strictly with language, that's where most of the interest in his work is. It's a bit like trying to read Carroll in anything but the original (though somewhat worse, I would say).
On L'Écume des Jours specifically, that novel has a lot more power of attraction for people 14-18 y.o. It's not all that easy to get into as an adult, at least without the nostalgia factoring in. Teenagers react very differently to it.