Lydia Davis from An Alphabet of Proust Translation

from An Alphabet of Proust Translation Problems: Z
Lydia Davis
zut
The following passage from Du Côté de chez Swann, the first part of Marcel
Proust’s many-volume novel, A La Recherche du temps perdu, describes a moment of ecstasy on the part of the narrator when he is still a boy. He is taking a
walk by himself in the autumn after the death of his aunt Léonie.
Le vent qui soufflait tirait horizontalement les herbes folles qui
avaient poussé dans la paroi du mur, et les plumes de duvet de la poule,
qui, les unes et les autres, se laissaient filer au gré de son souffle jusqu’à
l’extrémité de leur longueur, avec l’abandon de choses inertes et légères.
Le toit de tuile faisait dans la mare, que le soleil rendait de nouveau réfléchissante, une marbrure rose, à laquelle je n’avais encore jamais fait
attention. Et voyant sur l’eau et à la face du mur un pâle sourire répondre
au sourire du ciel, je m’écriai dans tout mon enthousiasme en brandissant
mon parapluie refermé: “Zut, zut, zut, zut.” Mais en même temps je sentis que mon devoir eût été de ne pas m’en tenir à ces mots opaques et de
tâcher de voir plus clair dans mon ravissement.
In my English translation:
The wind that was blowing tugged at the wild grass growing in the
side of the wall and the downy plumage of the hen, the one and the other
streaming out at full length horizontally before its breath, with the abandon of things that are weightless and inert. In the pond, reflective again
under the sun, the tile roof made a pink marbling to which I had never
before given any attention. And seeing on the water and on the face of
the wall a pale smile answering the smile of the sky, I cried out to myself
in my enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella: “Damn, damn, damn,
damn.” But at the same time I felt I was in duty bound not to stop at these
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opaque words, but to try to see more clearly into my rapture.
At least three things about the content of the passage are interesting: the
mystery of how a simple object may seem to call out to us urgently; that the
young narrator is so responsive to the appeal of this simple object; and the form
his response takes, compared to his responses at similar moments later in the
novel. The narrator’s wonder at what he sees is expressed by him in this scene
with a brandished umbrella and this relatively inarticulate utterance—Zut, zut,
zut, zut; later, excited by the steeples of Martinville as viewed from a fast-moving
carriage, he will write something very articulate in response to his inspiration,
as he tries, in fact, “to see more clearly into [his] rapture.” And right after doing
so, he will burst into song. Proust seems to be offering us three forms of expressive reaction to the excitement of inspiration: an inarticulate utterance like zut;
a piece of articulate writing; and, most primitive, yet perhaps equally satisfying,
a burst of song. The boy himself, with his ambition to be a great writer, does not
yet foresee that his extraordinary responsiveness to ordinary objects will be the
source of his later “success.”
For me as translator, with my aim to stay as close as possible to Proust’s
original, there were a couple of challenges in this passage. At a certain point
in my work on the novel, I had observed and appreciated how sparing Proust
was with his punctuation. Where I had instinctively used commas in my translation, I saw, after a time, that he had dispensed with them. I went back over
my version to see whether I could dispense with them, too. I often could. For
instance, Proust could have used many more commas to punctuate the passage
above, particularly the sentence beginning “Et voyant sur l’eau et à la face du
mur un pâle sourire répondre au sourire du ciel...” which I translated, equally
comma-less, as “And seeing on the water and on the face of the wall a pale smile
answering the smile of the sky...”
The other challenge was more difficult: the word zut, which is an exclamation expressing any one of a variety of emotions including anger, annoyance,
surprise, amazement. I turned to the dictionaries, even resorting to the etymology of the word—something I often did when stumped.
Zut is apparently a euphemistic form of merde (“shit”); and it is said to be
onomatopoetic, though I’m not sure what sound it is imitating. I needed to find
an equivalent that expressed an adolescent boy’s enthusiasm or wonder—and,
compounding the problem, one that could be said four times in a row.
No solution seemed quite satisfactory. It was translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, the book’s first translator, as “Damn, damn, damn, damn.” This is a little
stronger than zut but is capable of expressing both anger and amazement. The
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word was changed by the first reviser of the translation, Terence Kilmartin—
unfortunately, I think—to : “Gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh.” The word is milder, but
can sound a little foolish and is difficult to speak four times in a row. The
only other translator to tackle this volume was the Irish-born Australian, James
Grieve, in 1982. His choice was: “Oh, dash it all! Dash it all! Dash it all!”
Again, unfortunate, I think—the expression is more local to certain segments of
British society in certain periods of history than “damn” and therefore sounds
odd coming from a young Frenchman. (And it reminds Americans, at least, of
that poem about Saint Nicholas.) So, after much earnest searching, I found,
in the end, that the first solution that had presented itself was the one I would
decide to keep—something that happened often enough in this translation: Scott
Moncrieff’s “damn” answered the requirement of an exclamation that could
express both anger and awe; it could be repeated; it was more universal in time
and place than “Dash it all!” And so, even though it was stronger than zut, it
was my choice too.
One afterthought, reading the passage in the original and in translation
now, is that I could have gotten away with being more literal in that last sentence: Mais en même temps je sentis que mon devoir eût été de ne pas m’en tenir
à ces mots opaques et de tâcher de voir plus clair dans mon ravissement. Instead
of the translation as it reads now, “But at the same time I felt I was in duty
bound not to stop at these opaque words, but to try to see more clearly into my
rapture,” I might have changed it to: “But at the same time I felt my duty should
have been not to stop at these opaque words and to try to see more clearly into
my rapture.” Then again, maybe not.
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Lydia Davis