Pere Goriot (5 page)

Is Balzac the artist who has recorded for our modern era the death of the soul? The death of all belief in something greater, grander, than the individual? The damning portrait of the boarders seems to suggest as much. So do other passages elsewhere in Balzac's enormous oeuvre: “With the monarchy we lost honor, with the religion of our fathers, Christian virtue, with our sterile governments, patriotism. These principles now only exist partially instead of animating the masses.... Now, shoring up society, we have no other support than egotism. Woe betide the country thus constituted. Instead of believers, we have interest” (Le
Medecin de
campagne [ The Country Doctor]; “interest” meaning both self-interested motivations for action and financial interest).

“He does not go in for deep psychology; he is not especially attached to the interior workings that make or unmake a soul,” wrote Lanson (in Vachon, p. 321). “I am not deep, but very thick”: The boarders in
Père Goriot
do not know the “interior workings,” the inner turmoil that forms the basis of the psychological novel and that marks some kind of attachment, however conflicted, to a greater ideal (of duty, faith, honor, etc.); they have known rather the strain of an exterior struggle that has worked over their bodies and left their faces “bleached by moral or physical suffering” (p. 20). Hence, Balzac claims himself to be “the inventor of the physiological novel,” a novel in which the characters, these “desolate souls” (“hapless beings” in this translation, p. 24) are moved not by pity or empathy, but by their stomachs. “‘Come, sit down to dinner, gentlemen, ”' says Madame Vauquer, when Bianchon announces the death of Goriot, “or the soup will be cold” (p. 288). And the noise of civilization—“the rattle of spoons and forks” (p. 289)—covers over the events of the day.

 

Among the upwards of 2,500 named fictional characters in La
Comédie humaine
there is, as far as I know, no translator. Had there been one, we would know everything about how translators lived and worked in the early nineteenth century; we would know in which quarter of the city they lived, what, where, and with whom they ate, where they bought their ink and quills and the price they paid for them, and a host of other details that, taken together, would make up a vivid portrait of a type, a complete sociology of the translator.

The absence of a translator is hardly surprising, of course: In Balzac's time the practice of translation did not amount to a self-sustaining profession (it does for only a few even today). In reading
Père Goriot
in English, one should remember that one is reading a translation, and it is perhaps worth giving a little attention here to the particular version we have before us, by Ellen Marriage, dating to 1901. Given what has been said about the disorderliness of Balzac's style, it might be assumed that any hack with a knowledge of French could do a fair job of bringing him into English. Marion Ayton Crawford, translator of the widely read Penguin edition of
Goriot,
comes close to just such a position in her introductory remarks: “The translator of Balzac need not mourn the loss of French lucidity and grace of style, for whereas force is of the essence of his writing, lucidity is often a minor consideration and grace of little importance to him” (“Introduction,” p. 23). In other words, we need not mourn the loss of the eighteenth century, nor must we try to restore to Balzac an eighteenth-century refinement of diction. A different perspective is provided by the English writer Wilkie Collins, although I think his theory of translation is in the end quite close to Crawford's. Collins was sensitive to the special challenges facing the translator of Balzac. After reflecting upon the popular success in England of Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Eugène Sue, he laments the lack of good translations of Balzac and the consequent neglect of this great author, who in Collins's estimation is “superior to all three”:

“Strong, harsh, solidly vigorous”: These are not the adjectives associated with French prose prior to Balzac, and they point to the originality of Balzac's style. The task of the translator lies in respecting the brutish nature of this prose; it lies in resisting the temptation to Frenchify it, to prettify it, or, to borrow a quaint expression from Ellen Marriage, to “titivate it up” (p. 256). (Does Collins believe the task calls for “a special man” because the work is not pretty? In point of fact, up until the second half of the twentieth century, nearly all translators of Balzac were women, among them Ellen Marriage, Clara Bell, and Katharine Prescott Wormeley.)

Comparing the different translations of
Goriot
is a kind of fascinating archaeological exercise. To get a feel for what the present translation offers, it might be useful to look at a sample from some of the others available. The idea is not to demonstrate the superiority of the current translation (although I believe it to be the equal of any published English version of
Gofiot),
but rather to see how translators at different moments in history have chosen to approach and interpret the task of translating Balzac. In the following sentence, Eugène has just returned, at two o'clock in the morning, from Madame de Beauséant's ball, and resolves to spend the night studying in order to make up for lost time.

The translations by Marriage, Crawford, and Krailsheimer were first published in 1901, 1951, and 1991, respectively. A number of slight but significant differences reveal divergent philosophies of translation over the course of one century. Most interesting, I think, is that while all three translators retain the word “splendor” (a key Balzacian term; see
Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes [A Harlot High and Low] ) ,
Marriage alone respects a crucial detail of the original when she writes “splendor of the world.” Crawford and Krailsheimer speak instead of “the splendors of society” and “social splendor,” which are slightly but significantly inaccurate. Certainly, Eugène is dazzled by the wealth and refinement of the society he encounters at the home of the Vicomtesse, but what he has beheld there, and is in thrall to, is the splendor of a world
(les splendeurs du monde) .
By the time Crawford and Krailsheimer set about translating
Père Goriot,
Balzac's name had become synonymous with the representation of social scenes and social struggles.

Their translations seem to want to push this vision of Balzac, as though they sought to bring out the authentically Balzacian in general (the preoccupation with the social) rather than the particularity of Rastignac's experience. Yet it is important to realize that from Rastignac's point of view the newly discovered home of Madame de Beauséant is a whole world, distinct in every respect from other worlds (such as that represented by the Maison Vauquer), sufficient unto itself, containing everything.

There are other interesting differences among the three versions. The “quarter” in which Ellen Marriage's Eugène lives remains a “quarter” in Crawford but with Krailsheimer in 1991 it has become a “neighborhood,” the word “quarter” apparently being by then a bit archaic or too foreign. (Yet we know little of the neighbors except that they are anything but neighborly : They are represented here by the lodging-house of the shadowy Buneaud.) Marriage breaks into two sentences what is only one in French; further, she alters the punctuation of the original, making a semicolon do a good deal of conceptual labor (something Balzac rarely does, shunning even commas). In this, she is perhaps guilty of prettifying what was not so pretty; in common with almost all translators of Balzac, she has taken some license with punctuation, and has broken up sentences and paragraphs into more manageable bites. She might also be judged harshly for the rather refined (if accurate) “factitious” for Balzac's rather plain “false”
(fausse)
to describe the energy that animates Eugène after the ball.

Marriage has a fine knowledge of things and of the words for them, which is vital for a translator of Balzac, whose books are filled with objects. She knows what a “tester” is (p. 138); she knows that Goriot possesses a “posset dish” (p. 26); she knows that Anastasie has a “mantuamaker” (p. 256). She uses expressions current in her time that seem now quaint or outmoded. She has an ear for dialogue. In
Goriot,
the speech of each character differs from the others according to sometimes minute degrees of social distinction. It is often through their language, through their use or misuse of grammar and choice of words, that the characters reveal themselves. Madame Vauquer‘s speech, for example, is at once direct, vulgar, and pretentious. Readers will appreciate the niceness of Marriage's renderings (“‘My angel,' said she to her dear friend, ‘you will make nothing of that man yonder”' [p. 29).

It is perhaps worth mentioning that English translations of
Goriot
up to the middle of the twentieth century came with few or no notes. In 1901 Ellen Marriage saw the need for only a single footnote—on p. 105 (p. 113), to explain the reference to the initials T.F., for
Travaux forces
(hard labor) branded onto the convict's skin. The Crawford translation of 1951 has no notes at all. With the passage of time, which has rendered some of the allusions and references obscure or obsolete, and with the increasing role of scholars and teachers in the preparation and translation of English editions, notes and prefatory materials have proliferated. The reader might wish to remember that generations of Anglophones have read
Père Goriot
without interventions from translator or editor. He or she might wish also to bear in mind the following word of caution from the pen of one of the most erudite of all Balzac scholars, the literary historian Pierre-Georges Castex: “Be wary of the erudition that swirls around texts, which can help approach them, but ... which does not get at what is essential, for what is essential is in the work and one must look there in order to discover it” (cited in Ambrière, “Hommage à Pierre-Georges Castex,” p. 9). The wonder of
Père Goriot
is in the work, in its details (“it is the author's firm belief that details alone shall constitute henceforth the merit of works improperly called novels,” as Balzac writes in his preface to
Scenes de la vie privée [Scenes of Private Life,
1830]),—for example, the character Goriot, the former vermicelli manufacturer and expert in flour, sniffing his bread before tasting it or, in the same vein, Madame Vauquer's vexed glance at students who consume too much bread. These details succeed not only on account of their astuteness and plausibility, which contribute to the effect of realism in this carefully observed novel. They succeed also because they allude, without clamor or insistence, to the highly Balzacian theme of the necessities of life, of the daily bread that society refuses to the hungry, of the bread that some earn, some steal, some swindle, etc.

 

Peter Connor
is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). He has translated Bataille's
The Tears of Eros
(City Lights Press, 1989), as well as many works in the area of contemporary French philosophy, including
The Inoperative Community,
by Jean-Luc Nancy (University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

1
These numbers are from A. G. Canfield, “Les Personnages reparaissants dans la
Comédie humaine,”
cited in Pierre-Georges Castex, ed.,
Le Père Goriot
(Paris: Editions Gamier, 1960), p. vi.

2
“One drank liberally under [Balzac's] roof, but this pleasure easily took on with him a romantic and literary form. Each bottle he brought up from his cellar had a story. This one had been around the world three times; this one dated from a fabulously distant epoch; this rum came from a cask that had bobbed for a hundred years on the seas” (André Billy, Balzac [Paris: Club des Editeurs, 1959], p. 78; translation by Peter Connor).

3
The judgments of Sainte-Beuve, Zola, and Proust are collected in the Norton Critical Edition of
Père Goriot,
edited by Peter Brooks and translated by Burton Raffel (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).