In reading the new translation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Levi Stahl came across a really interesting translation issue. In “The Prisoner,” when Madame Verdurin suggests inviting Comtesse de Mole to a party, the Baron de Charlus insults her:
“Well, well, there’s no accounting for tastes,” M. de Charlus had replied, and if yours, dear lady, is to spend your time with Mrs Todgers, Sarah Gamp and Mrs Harris I have nothing to say, but please let it be on an evening when I am not here.”
Fans of Dickens will recognize these three women as characters from Martin Chuzzlewit—and their names, you can surely imagine, were quite a surprise coming out of the Baron’s mouth.
A note accompanying the line explains:
M. de Charlus’s reference in the original is to Mme Pipelet, Mme Gibout and Mme Joseph Prudhomme, minor creations of hte nineteenth-century writers Eugene Sue and Henri Monnier. They are chosen as examples of women utterly lacking in social distinction: Mme Pipelet, for example, is a concierge. Three comparable characters from Dickens have been substituted.
As Levi points out, this isn’t a huge issue, but it is sort of weird, since in either case—leaving the names as were, or using ones from Dickens—an explanatory note is necessary . . .
Comments
The question the Proust translation raises is where do you stop? Once you decide that one reference needs to be Anglicized, then should others? Should M. and Mme. become Mr. and Mrs.? I agree with carl that the Eco translation is strange, but that at least was done with Eco’s participation—a Proust translator is making these decisions alone.
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This reminds me of an anecdote of Umberto Eco’s in “Experiences in Translation” (U Toronto Press – a print version of some lectures he delivered at the univeristy in 2001 or so). Eco explains that he often collaborates intensively with his translators, and recalls one instance in particular in which he was working with William Weaver, the preeminent Italian-English literary translator, to make the minds of his main characters in Foucault’s Pendulum more accessible to readers of English; they were quite literary minds, being book publishers (a propos of this blog, I think). In one passage, one of these characters was walking through the countryside and a passage from (as I recall…) Manzoni sprang to his mind – a romantic exhalation about nature’s beauty/perfection/divinity. Eco simply instructed his translators to change the allusion to something more resonant with the readers of that language; Weaver chose Keats.
Personally, I find the implications of this kind of “meta” translation a little unsettling, but Eco seems to get a big charge out of it.