I decided that it was contextually relevant that the event took place during the night, while the original text stated that it was taking place during the evening. It is certainly difficult to tell the difference between night and evening, especially considering that at the time of Sylvie people in the countryside went to bed very early, so that what for us is still early evening for them was probably deep night. In any case I have taken a decision that violates the ‘referential duty’ of the translator. Let me elaborate a little more on this point.
In my book The Role of the Reader I analysed a short story by Alphonse Allais, Un drame bien parisien, and my friend Fredric Jameson translated it into English for me in the 1970s. In the second chapter the two protagonists Raoul and Marguerite, coming back from the theatre, return home in a coupé, and start quarrelling. Note that this quarrel is rather relevant for the further course of the story.
Jameson’s translation says that they returned home in a hansom cab. Is hansom cab a good translation for coupé ? Dictionaries say that a coupé is a ‘short four-wheeled closed carriage with an inside seat for two and an outside seat on the front for the driver’. As such a coupé is frequently confused with a brougham but broughams may have two or four wheels and two or four places, and undoubtedly have their driver’s seat at the rear. A hansom cab is more or less similar to a brougham: it has two wheels, it is closed and has the driver’s seat behind. Thus when one compares a coupé with a hansom, the position of the driver’s seat becomes diagnostic, just as the statement ‘single place for sitting’ is diagnostic, even indispensable, in order to tell the difference between an armchair and a sofa. A diagnostic difference could become crucial in certain contexts. Was it crucial in Un drame, and was Jameson’s translation an unfaithful one?
I do not know why Jameson did not use the word coupé, which is admitted by the English dictionary. Probably he thought that hansom was more comprehensible than coupé for the average English reader, especially as coupé today means a kind of motor car. If so, his choice was a convenient case of negotiation.
The translator ought at least to make evident that the two protagonists are going home in a horse-drawn vehicle, but the fact that they are quarrelling is particularly relevant, as is the fact that they, being a decent bourgeois couple, must solve their problems privately. What they needed was a closed bourgeois private carriage, not a popular omnibus. In such a situation the position of the driver’s seat is irrelevant. A coupé, a brougham or a hansom would have been equally good. As it was not essential for the reader to know the position of the driver, it could have been neglected.
However, the original text said that Raoul and Marguerite went home in a coupé and the translation says that they used a different kind of carriage. Let us try to visualise the scene. In the French text the couple travel in a carriage with the driver sitting in front; in the English version a competent reader would know that the driver was sitting behind. I have just said that, in this context, the difference is irrelevant, but from the point of view of a truth-conditional semantics the two texts stage two different scenes, or two different possible worlds where two individuals are in a different situation. If a newspaper said the Prime Minister arrived at the site of a disaster by helicopter, while in fact he arrived by car, many readers would find the difference relevant: was or was not the Prime Minister solicitous regarding the tragic event?
In my Foucault’s Pendulum the three protagonists (Casaubon, Belbo and Diotallevi) frequently indulge in literary quotations and seem incapable of seeing the world except through their literary recollections. In chapter 57 there is a description of a drive in the hills, and Casaubon reports:
. . . man mano che procedevamo, l’orizzonte si faceva vasto, benché a ogni curva aumentassero i picchi, su cui si arroccava qualche villaggio. Ma tra picco e picco si aprivano orizzonti interminati – al di là della siepe, come osservava Diotallevi . . .
This passage says that the characters drive through the hills and see beautiful landscapes, so that they have the impression of glimpsing boundless horizons al di là della siepe, which should be correctly and literally translated as beyond the hedge. Since that hedge is presented as the hedge, the reader might feel confused because no hedge was previously mentioned. However, I was sure that every Italian reader (in any case every reader interested in my novel) would recognise that hedge, which canonically comes from the intertextual milieu of Italian literature: the siepe, the hedge, is the one mentioned by Giacomo Leopardi in his L’infinito, perhap the most famous poem of Italian Romanticism, whose translation reads:
I always loved this solitary hill,
This hedge as well, which takes so large a share
Of the far-flung horizon from my view;
But seated here, in contemplation lost,
My thought discovers vaster space beyond
Supernal silence and unfathomed peace.
The Italian reader would understand that Diotallevi can enjoy the landscape only through the poetical experience of somebody else.
I told my various translators that neither the hedge nor the allusion to Leopardi were important but I insisted that a literary clue should be kept at all costs. I told them that the presence of a castle or a tree instead of a hedge made no difference to me, provided that the castle and the tree evoked a famous passage in their own national literature, in the context of the description of a magical landscape. This is how some translators solved the problem:
Mas entre un pic et l’autre s’ouvraient des horizons infinis-au dessus des étangs, au-dessus des vallées, comme observait Diotallevi . . . (Schifano)
Doch zwischen den Gipfeln taten sich endlose Horizon te auf-ienseits des Heckenzaunes, wie Diotallevi bemerkte . . . (Kroeber)
Pero entre pico y pico se abrían horizontes ilimitados: el sublime espacioso llano, como observaba Diotallevi . . . (Pochtar/Lozano)
Però entre pic i pic s’obrien horizonts interminables: tot era prop i lluny, i tot tenia com un resplendor d’eternitat, com ho observava Diotallevi . . . (Vicens)
Weaver simply translated, with an explicit reference to Keats, as:
. . . at every curve the peaks grew, some crowned by little villages; we glimpsed endless vista. Like Darién, Diotallevi remarked . . . (Weaver)
Similar solutions were adopted in analogous cases. In chapter 29 Casaubon says that:
La sera era dolce ma, come avrebbe scritto Belbo nei suoi files, esausto di letteratura, non spirava un alito di vento.
I reminded my translators that non spirava un alito di vento was a recognisable quotation from Manzoni’s The Betrothed, and that, as in the case of the hedge, they should find a recognisable literary quotation in their language. Some of the solutions follow:
It was a mild evening; as Belbo, exhausted with literature, might have put in one of his files, there was naught but a lovely sighing of the wind. (Weaver)
Le soir était doux mais, comme l’aurait écrit Belbo dans ses files, harassè de littérature, les souffles de la nuit ne flottaient pas sur Galgala. (Schifano)
Es war ein schöner Abend, aber, wie Belbo bekifft von Literatur in seinen files geschreiben hätte, kein Lufthauch regte sich, über alle Gipfeln war Ruh. (Kroeber)
I particularly like Kroeber’s solution: Kein Lufthauch regte sich means more or less that there was no wind, but uber alle Gipfeln war Ruh means on the top of the mountains there was silence – a beautiful quotation from Goethe. By adding those mountains which really have nothing to do with the context (the scene takes place in a hotel room at Bahia in Brazil) the ‘literariness’ of the remark becomes more blatant.
Let me quote another example from The Island of the Day Before. As I have said, this novel is essentially a parody of the Baroque style and includes many implicit quotations from poets and writers of the time. In chapter 32 Roberto de la Grive describes the coral in the Pacific Ocean as he saw it for the first time in his life. He could only use metaphors and similes based on plants and minerals he knew. The most vivid impression Roberto receives from the coral is that of a wide variety of colours and of several shades of the same colour. In fact this is the main impression everybody feels when seeing coral in the Southern Seas. My problem was to express such a visual variety verbally. My goal was to create, through a plurality of colour terms, the visual impression of a plurality of colours. Thus I employed all the colour terms provided by the Italian lexicon, including obsolete words from seventeenth-century literature. My stylistic purpose was obviously ‘never to use the same term twice’.
My translators were supposed to create the same linguistic effect in their own language, but I suspected that different languages might have different numbers of terms for the same colour.
For instance, Lozano faced a similar problem when trying to translate from chapter 22, where Father Caspar describes the mysterious Orange Dove and,
