Learn French if you really want to read Mirbeau. Learn
Russian if you feel that strongly about The
Idiot. Translation is a miserable thing.
Then again, this injunction ignores the main problem with a
translation from the 19th century: time. The past is an unyieldingly exclusive set
of countries that the likes of you can never even visit, much less become fluent in the local parlance. My dear modern
Anglophone, can you even read Shakespeare and really get the shade of every
word? Ftt, I can’t. It’s hard enough for two brothers to tell each other how
they feel in the secret language they’ve known from the common den. How is a
modern person going to tell another modern person what a prodigy manipulating words
a hundred and fifteen years ago was trying to say without sounding like a crazy
old foreigner?
The first problem is to not make the translation sound like a
stilted, sexually frustrated Martian trying to speak Earth languages. In other
words you can’t translate things too literally; I’m trying to show you how good
Mirbeau was, ideally, not how well I know 19th-century French. (Good
thing, since that body of knowledge would fail to impress a speech-impeded
hamster.) Then again, wading too deep into the waters that make the translation
flow can easily fall into rewriting, and writing over the author. There are
some things you can say in perfectly natural French that you can barely
approximate using even the most contorted English; that’s the nature of the
beast; all languages are incomplete, otherwise painters, like the antihero
“Lucien” of the story that follows, would have no reason to put brush to canvas
(or whatever it is that visual artists do now). And so the translation monkey
must, once in a while, just let the translation sound weird.
But “language barrier”
is an incomplete term; it only covers the gap between two contemporaries. What
would you call the other gap I’m translating here? Time is the worst obstacle
to “good” (insofar as it can be) translation. It’s one thing to turn modern
French into modern English; they’re both stuffed with slang and obscenity, so
one fuck in the hand is worth three merdes in the bush; screw it. It’s another
to translate any previous time in history to the mass, lemminglike assumptions
that our global interhorde makes about narrative and dialogue. For example,
what do I do about the fact that Mirbeau’s characters keep on saying “oh!”
where we would merdefuck, or the fact that he writes paragraphs that are longer
than our attention span for the entire day?
Well, fuck it.
I let Mirbeau have his lack of unchained obscenity, except
where it seemed his relatively genteel nineteenth-century characters were so
broken down they lapsed into ancestral coarseness; once upon a time, if only
for a time, people could accept expression of deep feeling as being genuine
without any references to poop or genitals. And I let him have his long
paragraphs, with a few exceptions for the sake of dialogue. Mirbeau was a
journalist, but our modern semiautomatic rules of journalistic style weren’t
fixed yet, perhaps because page design, much less web page design, hadn’t been
fixed yet either, and people didn’t need to “break up long blocks of text” to
compete with pop-up ads. Deal with it. If your wee head needs a breather, go
get a beer. You may need a good deal of it for this book; it’s brilliant, but
it’s a killer. You can leave a trail of breadcrumbs to the place where you left
off if you really need to.
I even let Mirbeau keep his stacked narratives.
Switching topics to keep your attention for the moment, and
dropping the crotchety old man sarcasm gradually as I do so, let the translator
for a moment awkwardy assume the mantle of literary critic. An abused term,
these days denoting either a gushing blurb writer or a deconstructionist out to
destroy a canon; no, I just want to tell you a couple of things that might help
you enjoy a text with which I have become almost uncomfortably intimate.
I’ve said Mirbeau was a journalist. Back then journalism and
fiction weren’t quite such divergent paths as they seem to have become now, for
all but a few trust-fund-deficient and talented, money-hungry few; god damn it,
I was going to mention Neal Pollack, and his journalistic works, and his recent
absolutely brilliant book Jewball, and this sentence was just rammed into a
brick wall by the Jewish money stereotype diptardation. I should have said “men
who need to feed their hungry families,” that has a more neutral…[1]
Baaaaah, screw the present and all of its denizens except
bien syr you, dear reader of the pre-existentialists (because if anyone would
lay claim to that title, he must fight his way around Mirbeau). Let us
concentrate again on that stacked narrative, as I run in circles trying to
provide useful pre-criticism while avoiding spoilers; I can’t stand forewords
that assume you’ve already read the bloody book.
Let’s just say that the strangest thing about this book is
that the framing narrative parallels the main narrative in plot, but disagrees
with it logically on several key points. And since nearly every character in
the book accuses nearly every other of being insane at least once, one would
assume that every narrator within is more or less assumed to be unreliable by
the ensemble cast itself. But since so much of the text is so close to
Mirbeau’s journalistic and autobiographical writing, is any of it essentially
unreliable? Augh!
But I fear these mysteries of process may be leading me
further from the theme, while I… augh! No! These incongruencies are the theme! They fit perfectly! The
theme is the inability of art to grasp life, or for life to encompass art, or
the fine line that art walks when it tries to speak to living beings when it
speaks from a realm that’s slightly outside life. Or perhaps the real danger is
when it speaks from living beings,
when it is telling tales—“it” might call them “truths,” in its creepy
half-consciousway—that are slightly beyond life. The failure of the framed tale
to jive logically with the main story… would the author of Diary of a
Handmaiden have done something so random? No, I think the bizarre structure
here is no absinthe-sucking paint-eating accident; the mismatched structure
fits perfectly into the rotten underbelly of its heroes’ beautiful but
impossible attempts to escape from life. As the second-person hero of the
interior frame says: You can’t snub life, because life will have its revenge.
I tried to keep the footnotes to a dull roar, and in fact
managed to pare them down to one explanation of a character’s sarcastic
reference to a contemporary artistic fad. This lone footnote was roughly 85%
plagiarized from Dr Pierre Michel of Angers, the greatest Mirbeau scholar my
little existence will ever encounter, and the mastermind behind this
translation project for lo these many years it’s taken us to finally bring this
lost masterwork into the multilingual global economy at last. Mazel tov all
around…
Ann Sterzinger
[1] But speaking of Jews,
Google the Dreyfus Affair if you want to know what Mirbeau was really most
famous for; it happened long enough ago that I can sum it up as an injustice,
surprise, surprise. Second injustice: his contemporary writings about a
contemporary yet eternal human bullshit problem have tended, subsequently,
inasmuch as people remember him, to overshadow his fiction.
