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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
imitate a particular performance by a particular actor of Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing while standing in the middle of a stage currently being used for a performance of a Nōh drama, I must acknowledge that his translation is in fact pleasantly readable and multi-faceted. For Jakobson, translation and original are two equivalent messages in two different codes, and Sallis has achieved this equivalence handily. Roman Jakobson would have no trouble agreeing that a lively, humorous, layered book by a major contributor to letters is worth re-presenting in another code. Queneau in the original influenced James Sallis to the point that he aspires to emulate his literary life (Sallis xii). If Sallis’ translation were to inspire a few more writers to step back from realism, dull modernity, and shrilly political fiction to try out some more playful ways of transforming the world they inhabit into the worlds they create, it would be a literary success. But as far as I can tell, almost no one reads Queneau in English. I’m still and always looking for the translation or translator that can make him beloved of the anglophone world. Works Cited Cover of Saint Glinglin, translated by James Sallis. Amazon.com. (http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1564780279/r ef=sib_rdr_fc/104-9813707- 8126315%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S001#readerpage). Consulted 12/07/2004. Cover of Saint Glinglin, translated by James Sallis. Center for Book Culture.org. (http://www.centerforbookculture.org/media/cove rs/saintglinglin.jpg). Consulted 12/07/2004. Jakobson, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” On Translation. Ed. Reuben Arthur Bower. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966c, 1959. Milton, John. “Translation Theory in Brazil.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. Vol. LXXV, Number 1, Jan. 1998. University of Glasgow. Queneau, Raymond. Saint Glinglin. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. Queneau, Raymond. Saint Glinglin. Tr. James Sallis. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1993). Venuti, Lawrence. “Translator’s Invisibility.” Criticism. Spring, 1986, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986. 70
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Translation Review Number Sixty-Nin
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EDITORIAL: CHARTING THE FUTURE OF T
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Thus, we should consider the method
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distinctly, because it was Carol’
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hostility on us. A woman came up an
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RPM: So what do you do BB: Use my o
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RPM: But how many such people are t
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COMMENTARY ON A LINE BY ROBERT FAGE
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(second ellipsis mine) Fagels lays
Page 21 and 22: sediment of verbs. Is not this the
Page 23 and 24: combination. Incompatibles, when fu
Page 25 and 26: statement whose meaning we have no
Page 27 and 28: “What’s happened to me” he th
Page 30 and 31: THE TRANSLATION OF THE CONCEPT OF
Page 32 and 33: Chamisso prize. This prize was diff
Page 34 and 35: Sallasana, sallasana mendilini akş
Page 36 and 37: MULTIPLE RECREATIONS OF A GERMAN TE
Page 38 and 39: We will have achieved much for the
Page 40 and 41: etween a repetition and recast of t
Page 42 and 43: This would capture the meaning but
Page 44: understand Kaufman’s motive. Such
Page 47 and 48: translator must grasp the resulting
Page 49 and 50: imaginación de Roger Donal 9 (“T
Page 52 and 53: NOTES TOWARD A HISTORY OF LITERARY
Page 54 and 55: Among the deformations caused by th
Page 56: the volume. At present, such notes
Page 59 and 60: order and caesura, the frequency of
Page 61 and 62: Here, the word order accords well w
Page 63 and 64: she asks the Taoist, an envoy from
Page 65 and 66: Lu ch’ai 鹿柴 Mêng Hao-jan
Page 67 and 68: of the linguistic intricacies of It
Page 70 and 71: AN ANALYSIS OF JAMES SALLIS’ TRAN
Page 74 and 75: VOICES AND ECHOES: THE ENGLISH TRAN
Page 76 and 77: “Actually,” in a voice so low a
Page 78 and 79: stitching your silence over the str
Page 80: Notes on Contributors Philip Balma,
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