{"id":271626,"date":"2009-06-03T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-06-03T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/06\/03\/latest-review-that-mad-ache-by-francoise-sagan\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:10:07","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:10:07","slug":"latest-review-that-mad-ache-by-francoise-sagan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/06\/03\/latest-review-that-mad-ache-by-francoise-sagan\/","title":{"rendered":"Latest Review: That Mad Ache by Francoise Sagan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our latest review is Monica Carter’s piece on Francoise Sagan’s That Mad Ache<\/em>, recently published by Basic Books and translated from the French by Douglas Hofstadter. <\/p>\n

Monica — who works at Skylight Books<\/a> and runs the excellent Salonica<\/a> — isn’t especially keen on this novel, or, to be more specific, she’s not too keen on the 100-page essay by Hofstadter — “Translator, Trader” — that’s included in the volume (and although I remember loving Godel, Escher, Bach<\/em>, this is cringe-worthy):<\/p>\n

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The essay is divided into small sections with wink, wink headings like, \u201cPoetic Lie-Sense\u201d and \u201cGood Gravy-Americanisms Galore\u201d that cheapen the role of the translator and the reader. There is a distinct feeling that Hofstadter woefully underestimates the intelligence of the reader by delivering abstract ideas of translation and semiotics chopped into bite-size ideas veiled by poorly chosen puns and a cutesy font. Yes, even the font selection gets page time in this essay and after stating that Baskerville is \u201cpedestrian,\u201d the reader is forced to look at headings presented in a gaudy font. And why this essay is divided into so many sections becomes a mystery. Finding a segue between topics would lend much more credibility to the author as well as avoiding breaking the aesthetic flow with a cloyingly scripted heading.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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There is a distinct goal on Hofstadter\u2019s part throughout the essay to not be boring \u2013 in the writing of the essay, in his choices of translation, and yes, even the font. The reader is given several metaphors to better understand what type of translator Hofstadter is and why he makes the choices he does. The metaphor that Hofstadter relies on the most is \u201cTranslator as Dog-on-a-Leash\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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“Whenever I am translating something that someone else carefully wrote, I feel like an unleashed dog taking a walk with its master through a forest or a huge park. It\u2019s a marvelously joyous feeling, a subtle blend of freedom and security. I run around on my own, but despite all my seeming freedom, I am in truth always invisibly tethered to my master and the unpredictable pathways that my master chooses to take.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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He also uses the metaphor of temperature, that translator\u2019s styles fall somewhere on a tic of a thermometer between hot and cold. He considers himself a \u201chot\u201d translator, meaning that he likes to take quite a few liberties with the original text to make it more interesting. The problem this presents of course is that his idea of what is \u201chot\u201d is subjective and could be construed as not adhering to the authorial vision. For instance, he makes a comparison between his translation of a passage to Robert Westhoff\u2019s translation (Westhoff was Sagan\u2019s lover):<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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“In Chapter 13, Lucile is replying with indignation to a question Antoine has asked her. She thinks the answer is self-evident, and where Sagan has her say, \u201cBien entendu\u201d (meaning literally \u201cof course\u201d), Westhoff has her say, \u201cOf course.\u201d That\u2019s fair enough. My first inclination, however, was to go much further than this\u2014namely, \u201cWell, what do you think\u2014is the Pope Catholic?\u201d Once again, though, some little voice inside me protested, for two reasons. One is that what Lucile actually said in French was much shorter and simpler than this sarcastic retort, and the other is that the rhetorical question \u201cIs the Pope Catholic?\u201d might sound too American. I don\u2019t quite know why that would be, since popes and Catholics are hardly limited to America, but perhaps there\u2019s a down-home American sense of humor lurking inside that remark, and perhaps it\u2019s that hidden flavor that sounds a bit un-French. In any case, none of my friends who read this phrase thought it belonged in Lucile\u2019s mouth, and so I threw it out and settle for just, \u201cWell, what do you think?\u201d, and as I did so, my translation temperature fell from 100\u00b0 to 75\u00b0.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Click here<\/a> for the complete review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our latest review is Monica Carter’s piece on Francoise Sagan’s That Mad Ache, recently published by Basic Books and translated from the French by Douglas Hofstadter. Monica — who works at Skylight Books and runs the excellent Salonica — isn’t especially keen on this novel, or, to be more specific, she’s not too keen on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[1836,24526,8856,12936,1646,24566],"class_list":["post-271626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-cwp","tag-douglas-hofstadter","tag-francoise-sagan","tag-monica-carter","tag-review","tag-that-mad-ache"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271626"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":313376,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271626\/revisions\/313376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}