As a matter of fact what the driver suggests is that the Narrator use a public service, and he proposes to take him to the coach station. Mail coaches also travelled at night, and at that time were the fastest service possible (twelve kilometres per hour). Certainly contemporaries of Nerval were in a position to understand Je vais vous conduire à la poste, but how does one make it clear to foreign readers of today? Even some modern French editions feel the necessity to put an explanatory footnote. In my translation the driver suggests taking the Narrator to the diligenza postale, that is, the mail coaches.
It is curious to note that while Sieburth correctly translates as I’ll drop you off at the coach station, and so, more or less, did Halévy, Aldington translated, unreasonably, as I’ll drive you to the police station.
Only by translating accurately can the true sense of the dialogue be expressed; the driver coldly informing his customer that a public coach will actually be faster than a private cab, shows how excited, anxious and eager to reach the village of his memories the Narrator was.
Adding and improving
It happens occasionally that, in order to avoid a possible loss, one says more than the original – and perhaps to say more means to say less, because the translator fails to keep an important and meaningful reticence or ambiguity.
In his notes to a recent Italian translation of Moby Dick 8 the translator, Bernardo Draghi, spends three pages apropos the famous opening line, Call me Ishmael. Previous Italian translators put, quite literally, Chiamatemi Ismaele. Draghi remarks that the original opening line suggests at least three readings: (i) ‘My real name is not Ishmael, but please call me so, and try to guess what my choice means (think of the fate of Ishmael son of Abraham and Agar)’; (ii) ‘My name is not important, I am only a witness of a great tragedy’; (iii) ‘Let us be on first-name terms, take me as a friend, trust my report.’
Now, let us assume that Melville really wanted to suggest one or more of those readings, and that there was a reason why he did not write My name is Ishmael (which in Italian would be, literally, ‘Mi chiamo Ismaele’). Draghi’s translation reads Diciamo che mi chiamo Ismaele, which could be roughly translated as Let us say that my name is Ishmael. Even though I appreciate the rest of this translation, I cannot but object that (apart from the fact that the Italian version is less concise than the original), with his choice Draghi has inevitably stressed interpretations (i) and (ii), but has eliminated the third one.
In any case he is warning the Italian reader that, in introducing the character, there is something to discover, while the English reader still remains free to decide whether or not to give particular importance to that expression. It seems to me that this translation says on one side less and on the other side more than the original. More, because it states which one of the possible readings of the original is to be selected, less because – if Melville wanted to remain ambiguous – Draghi eliminates part of the ambiguity.
Draghi’s was an addition made in order to stress or to reduce the ambiguity of the source text. Sometimes, however, efforts are made at stylistic improvement. One should never try to make the source text literarily ‘better’. Even bad style, clumsiness, careless repetitions must be respected. But let me now consider a borderline case in which the temptation to improve was very strong. Many years ago the publisher Einaudi started a new series of famous texts translated by writers (the same series in which I later translated Sylvie) and asked me to translate Dumas’s Le comte de Monte-Cristo. I had always considered this novel a masterpiece of narrative, but to say that a given work displays a great narrative force does not mean to say that it is a literary masterpiece. Usually we appreciate books like the ones by Dumas by saying that they are works of para-literature. One can admit that Souvestre and Allain were not great writers while recognising – as happened to the Surrealists – that characters like Fantomas display a sort of mythological force.
Certainly para-literature exists, and usually we use the term to describe a lot of ‘serial’ stuff, dime-novels, or other kinds of books that have the one, explicit purpose of entertaining their readers, without paying attention to problems of style or of original invention. (They are successful just insofar as they are repetitive, and shamelessly respect the narrative schemes that their readers expect and ask for.) Para-literature is respectable in its own right as much as chewing gum, which has its own functions, even in terms of dental care, but never shows up in the menus of the nouvelle cuisine. However, with an author like Dumas one is entitled to ask if – in spite of the fact that he wrote for money, being paid so much per line, in order to please his public – he can be banished to para-literature.
Monte-Cristo, with its celebration of the avenger, was written because of the enormous success of Sue’s Mystères de Paris.9 Sue’s novel aroused a sort of collective hysteria, provoking political and social reactions, and its readers identified themselves with the various characters; but if we reread it now we feel bored. On the other hand, Dumas’s The Three Musketeers is still a pleasurable book, agile and nippy as a jazz performance. One could say then that Dumas wrote better than Sue. But such indulgent acknowledgements do not hold for Monte-Cristo: it was very ‘badly’ written.
Unbearably redundant, it shamelessly repeats the same adjectives line after line, gets bogged down with syntactically indefensible sentences, stumbles over the consecutio temporum, is unable to avoid sentences twenty lines long; Dumas’s characters endlessly turn pale as a ghost, break into cold sweats, falter in a voice that is no longer human, and tell everybody what they have already told everybody a few pages before. It is enough to calculate how many times, in the first three chapters, Edmond tells the whole world that he is happy and wants to marry, to decide that fourteen years of prison are not enough to punish such a display of logorrhoea.
The charm of Monte-Cristo, then, is not due to its literary style. The problem is that literary virtues cannot only be identified by lexical elegance or syntactical fluency. They also depend on narrative rhythm, on a narrative wisdom that allows a story to transmigrate from para-literature to literature and produce mythical figures and situations which survive in the collective imagination. So it happens with many characters in fairy tales, where we usually ignore the original version and do not care how they were written – since they are equally charming even when told by one’s grandmother. Fairy tales are defined as ‘simple forms’ as well as myths: Oedipus existed before Sophocles, Ulysses existed before Homer and the same mythical model is instantiated by the tales of the Spanish picaros, by Gil Blas, Simplizissimus or Till Eulenspiegel. If, then, there are simple forms, why shouldn’t we accept the idea that ‘simplicity’ must not necessarily be identified with brevity, and that there are simple forms that are embodied in some four-hundred-or-more-page novels?
In this sense one could speak also of simple forms for works that, sometimes by chance, by carelessness and even by force of commercial speculation, contain throngs of archetypes, and produce for example cult movies like Casablanca.10 Monte-Cristo would then belong to this category of sludgy simple forms, if such an oxymoron is allowed.
Let us forget for a moment questions of language and style. Let us consider only story and plot. In Monte-Cristo we have an incredible series of events and coups de théâtre that embody a series of archetypal structures that dare to define ‘Christological’: the innocent betrayed by his friends, a terrible descent to the hell of the Chateau d’If, the salving meeting with the Father, the Abbé Faria. It is by wrapping himself in the paternal shroud that Edmond is resurrected from the depths of the sea and starts his ascension towards an incredible power which transforms him into a Lord of the Last Judgement, who comes to absolve or condemn the living and the dead. This Avenger Christ repeatedly suffers the temptations of despair, because he is the Son of Man and is not sure of having the right to judge all sinners.
Then there is the East of the Arabian Nights, the Mediterranean with its traitors and its brigands, the French society of early capitalism with all its plots and worldliness. Even though Dantès, pulled by mistake into his Bonapartist dream, does not have the complexity or the ambiguity of Julien Sorel or Fabrizio del Dongo, the fresco remains powerful. Monte-Cristo (helping the petty bourgeois and the proletarians – like him) is opposing three enemies who represent Finance, Magistrature and Army; he beats the banker by playing upon the fragility of the Stock Exchange, the magistrate by demonstrating that even judges can commit crimes, and the general by revealing a military disloyalty. Moreover, the novel offers its readers the vertigo of multiple recognitions, the fundamental spring of the old tragedy. Aristotle was satisfied with a single final revelation, while Dumas gives us a chain of uninterrupted ones. Monte-Cristo reveals himself to the world over and over again, and it is immaterial that every time the
