their - The University of Texas at Dallas

Indeed, if you compare the oyster and the
snail, the one oceanic and the other
terrestrial, well then, the latter isn’t such a
mysterious animal, nor does it look so very
incomprehensible.
Haroldo and Augusto de Campos would approve
of Raymond Queneau. His writing in many ways
corresponds to their ideal of a translator. This
translator would view poetry as a technical craft and
approach it unemotionally. He would create
neologisms, stretch the boundaries of his language by
transposing foreign elements into it, and eschew dated
ways of writing, choosing instead to find a style that
belongs to his own time (Milton 126–128). Queneau
uses most of these strategies in his own writing,
frequently bending standard written French to admit
idioms, grammar, and spellings that normally belong
exclusively to spoken language, naturalizing German
and English words and expressions, and above all
constructing his novels and poems according to
complex mathematical, psychological, and scholarly
schemas.
Translating Queneau, then, poses a special
challenge. When all these strategies are present in the
original, any rendering of it into another language
must take them into account, either enfolding them in
another layer of similar strategies, translating them as
smoothly as possible without obliterating them, or just
conceivably ironing them out as if they had never
been. Sallis seems to have chosen the second way,
though he does translate into modern, informal
American in which academic language is not called
for: “this sticky little mess whose collective stupidity
clings to piers and boardwalks” is eminently
colloquial without being slangy.
Sallis translates Queneau with an impeccable
delicacy. He sticks as close to each sentence as the
American language will bear: “[j]e reviens à
l’insecte” becomes “I return to the insect,” “[e]lles
meurent même, bien atrocement!” “[t]hey even die —
horribly!” (Queneau 30, 31; Sallis 15). His prose is
fluid and clear. But as erudite and careful as his
translation is, and despite his obvious understanding
of Saint Glinglin’s inner workings, Queneau has not
translated the original’s vibrancy.
Whereas the oyster…a kind of catarrh, the
rude nature of its disinterest in the eksternal
[extérieur] world, its absolute isolation, its
malady: the pearl…if I give it much thought
at all, my terror starts up again. (Sallis 15)
“Catarrh” is a lovely word to have used, but it doesn’t
produce the visceral reaction that “crachat” does.
Perhaps this is a function of a knowledge gap; perhaps
there is a large proportion of the reading public that
experiences a tiny shudder when they read the word
catarrh, but I am not among them. Why not use
“gobbet” It easily turns the gray quivering of oyster
flesh to a stomach-turning dome of spat-out phlegm,
the double image that Queneau constructs with
“crachat.”
The plight of the poor oyster suffering from “its
malady: the pearl…” seems flat and uninteresting. But
“cette maladie: la perle…” has drama. It makes the
reader sit up and take notice: the pearl it is! “That
disease: the pearl” isn’t much better.
I do not know what strategy would have helped to
produce a similar sense of excitement in the American
text. “Playfulness” is woefully inadequate as a
practical instruction to translators, and deliberately
foreignizing the text as Venuti or the Campos brothers
would do, while bringing the fact of translative
transformation to the surface of the text, might or
might not inject liveliness into the tone of the prose.
Jakobson contends that “all cognitive experience … is
conveyable in any existing language,” but that poetic
art is fundamentally untranslatable because of its
reliance on phonemic and paronomasian features (234,
238). I don’t want to agree with him, but when I read
translations of Queneau, they don’t engage me the
way the originals do, and translations of his work that
I attempted to create fell equally flat. Queneau is
(usually) highly exciting in French, and his books are
(usually) rather arid in English. In order to convey
most of Queneau’s meaning, and such carefully
constructed books surely deserve this, the translator
must strive to create a text that is very close to the
original on the sentential level, and this is what Sallis
has done. But in these texts, the tonal spark that made
me want to share Queneau with anglophone friends in
the first place has gone missing. Through what avenue
did it escape How can one reconstitute the sound of
an individual authorial tone of voice in another
language, when every language has its own tonal
qualities built into its structure and vocabulary
Having accused Sallis (and Queneau’s other
translators) of the equivalent of failing to perfectly
69