In such cases we must ask the translator to pay attention to the verbal rhythm, which is crucial in this kind of stylistic device.
An interesting technique is that which I decided to define as fractalisation of space at an ant’s pace. This idea was suggested to me by Eliot, when in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ he writes:
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
In this case, whereas the human traveller would walk on too quickly to see what the London walls and street corners really look like, the reader is asked to imagine the speed at which fog moves. This involves slowing down the reading pace and passing by all wall recesses and window edges – just as would happen if we were asked to imagine how an ant walks through the tourniquets of a tiny space which we can cover, in an instant, with our feet.
In pondering about hypotyposis I felt the compulsion to write a novel in which the main characters were space and light. So I started to write The Island of the Day Before. My first idea was to put a shipwreck victim on a boat, in sight of an island that he was unable to reach. I wanted to tell a story of spaces (and light), and in order to keep my space untouched I want to write a story of an insuperable distance. That is why I decided that my main character had to be unable to swim.
To represent a character who cannot swim from here to there in a few strokes, but can only move through innumerable and unbearable efforts, was a way of demonstrating that fractalisation of space that I admired so much in Eliot. Thus my character, trying to swim, and only gaining a few feet at each attempt, always remained far from the island that, instead of approaching, shrank back at every effort. If in the course of this process one keeps describing the sea and the image of the coast, then one provides one’s readers with the experience of a continuously broadening space.
Even this technique does not give a translator great problems. The only difficulty is in describing many different things in the course of the continuous effort of the swimmer, and I examined that problem in one of my previous essays, apropos the variety of colours and coral that the translators were asked to render.
But what interests me today is a very peculiar technique, by means of which a visual situation is evoked through an appeal to the reader’s personal experiences. This technique asks the addressee to cooperate with the text by evoking some of his/her past experiences. It triggers not only pre-existing cognitive patterns but also pre-existing body experiences.
The difficulties for the translator are due to the fact that while a text can evoke a personal experience with a single word, this word does not have the same evocative impact every time, in every culture or country. I remember that once, in order to describe a poor and abandoned place in an underdeveloped country, I told my friends that it looked like Hiroshima in August 1945. My interlocutors understood what I meant perfectly because each of them vividly remembered many images of that event. I wonder if young people – not in a century, probably even today – can give a visual interpretation to my quotation.
There are two verses from the Prose du transsiberien by Blaise Cendrars that I like very much (it is a poem which, dealing with a very long journey, makes use of many different techniques for representing an unending space experienced over an unending time). At one point Cendrars recalls that:
Toutes les femmes que j’ai rencontrées se dressent aux horizons
Avec les gestes piteux et les regards tristes des sémaphores sous la pluie . . .
Those who are still familiar with old slow train journeys on foggy nights will be able to evoke these phantasmagorical shapes which slowly disappear and almost dissolve in the drizzle, in the gasping rhythm of the train. But I am afraid that a young reader accustomed to contemporary express trains with hermetically sealed windows cannot have had the experience of leaning out of the window to follow in the dark the vanishing of some ghostly signal. (Even the trilingual warning against leaning out has now disappeared from the cars.) How can one respond to a hypotyposis stirring the memory of something one has never seen? I think however that a text can frequently encourage its readers to imagine having seen something. The two verses by Cendrars appear in a context in which a train is described that travels for many days across vast terrains; the ‘gestures’ of these unknown semaphores are named, the horizons are mentioned, readers are asked to evoke situations in which imprecise forms loom in the dark or in the fog; even from a fast express train today one can still perceive some glimmer disappearing in the night . . . A good hypotyposis can also create the memory that it needs in order to occur.
The really puzzling problem arises in the Italian translation of these verses. One must translate the French semaphores as semafori in Italian – there is no other way to do it. Now in French a semaphore is, more or less as in English, an apparatus for signalling, sometimes by one or more movable arms, and in French it normally refers to systems of communication in the navy and more specifically along a railway. Thus one would not confuse semaphores with traffic lights. Now, in Italian semaforo has the double meaning of semaphore and traffic light, but it is more commonly used for traffic lights. Traffic lights are in a city and are luminous signals, while the gestes piteux mentioned by Cendrars seem to evoke the movement of the mechanical arms of the railway system. Moreover, the very notion of horizon changes if one thinks of city streets instead of an unlimited countryside landscape. I do not see any way to escape this difficulty and I would assume that in general Cendrars’ verses provoke in Italian a different visual effect from in French or in English. I must confess that, as a reader, for a long time I saw in these verses a flickering, a blinking of red eyes, more than the pitiful gestures of a desperate marionette.
In the course of my translation of Sylvie I found cases in which Nerval uses terms that must have been familiar to readers of his day, but may be obscure for modern readers, even modern French readers. In chapter 6, where Sylvie and the Narrator visit Sylvie’s old aunt at Othys, there is a kind of enchanted return to the preceding century: the aunt allows her niece to go into her bedroom and rummage among the mementos of her youth, at the time of her marriage to Sylvie’s uncle (by that time dead), and we have as it were an epiphany of late eighteenth-century pastoral-genteel kitsch. But in order to realise what Sylvie and her friend discover we need to understand some archaic terms, connected with the fashions of those far-off days, which Nerval’s contemporaries certainly still understood.
At this point the translator ought to behave as if he or she were a director who means to transpose the story into film. But the translator cannot use either images or detailed specifications, and must respect the rhythm of the story.
In an old portrait discovered in the room, Sylvie’s old aunt appears as a young girl élancée dans son corsage ouvert à échelle de rubans. Here are three English translations:
Halévy: . . . attractive and lissom in her open corsage crossed with ribbons . . .
Aldington: . . . slender in her open corset with its crossed ribbons . . .
Sieburth: . . . slender in her open bodice laced with ribbons . . .
The various Italian translators proposed corpetto aperto sul davanti a nastri incrociati; corpetto dai nastri a zig-zag; corpetto, aperto coi nastri incrociati sul davanti; camicetta aperta a scala di nastri; corpetto aperto a scala di nastri; corsetto aperto sotto la scala dei nastri; corsetto aperto a nastri scalati; corpetto aperto in volantini di nastri; corsetto aperto a scala di nastri; corpetto aperto ed allacciato dai nastri incrociati sul davanti. One can see that Italian translators tried bravely, but without success, to render échelle de rubans, while English translators gave up on ladders and staircases and mentioned only laced or crossed ribbons. But how open was that bodice or corset? Such a detail is rather relevant since the topic of that scene is the subtle and malicious charm of the aunt at the time of her glorious youth.
Now, a corsage à echelle de rubans is a bodice with
