Vol. 13 No. 11 · 13 June 1991
pages 9-10 | 3802 words
Matrioshki
Craig Raine
- Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life by Richard Garnett
Sinclair-Stevenson, 402 pp, £20.00, March 1991, ISBN 1 85619 033 1
Matrioshki are those wooden, hollow, biologically improbable Russian dolls, sarcophagus-shaped and too rudimentary for much in the way of features or waists. In terms of beauty, they have all the allure of a thermos flask in national dress. What they lack in looks, however, they make up for in fecundity. Each holds several increasingly small replicas, one inside another. In their way, they are the perfect emblem for translation – for perfect translation, that is, where some diminishment is inevitable, but the model and the copy are otherwise identical. This depends, of course, on the given simplicity of the original. Anything too complicated – poetry, for instance – and, until quite recently, you might have found yourself looking for an entirely different image.
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Letters
Vol. 13 No. 13 · 11 July 1991
From John Lee
Much talk on translation is uninteresting because it is either too general or too specific. The subject only becomes fascinating when some intermediate course is found, such as comparing different versions – as it is by both Craig Raine and Donald Davie on successive pages of the London Review (13 June).
Some translations are long overdue: over the years, Henry James has come in for all sorts of treatment from umpteen Freneh translators, and his complete works are only just in sight The Sense of the Past, a novel which for various reasons took fifteen years to half-finish, took me, for reasons which are perhaps not so very different, six years to translate, from first putting pen to paper till publication, in two months’ time. Other translations are apparently premature: looking through the other end of the telescope, the British publisher of Georges Perec in 1987 rejected my completed version of Perec’s La Disparition in favour of some idealised alternative which probably won’t turn up ‘this century’ (I quote his American counterpart). Curiously enough, translating the James is far more constraining than translating the Perec, where stylistic freedom is the rule: Raine’s matrioshka effect is the inevitable result once one has stretched the possibilities of French syntax to meet the conflicting demands of semantic coherence and style. This involves a full palette, including such unlikely constructions as the imperfect subjunctive, which no one but President Mitterrand and the odd purist uses much any more. While James refused to call a spade a spade, Perec obliged himself to call it a digging tool, a fork, or something more interesting. Impoverished present-day usage, to the extent that it does indeed seem more at home with Hingley-type ‘four-square certainties’ than with Chekhovian ‘hints and guesses’, is ill-equipped to cope with either. The new challenge brought by La Disparition, however, is how to combine the conservative virtues of the ‘divine nobody’ with the more enterprising, and perhaps selfish, qualities required for full participation in the creative process.
John Lee
Neufchâtel-en-Saosnois, France
