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Jan. 22nd, 2022 06:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI just got out of our book group conversation for Emmanuel Dongala's Bridgetower Sonata, a book I had purchased during one of my stress-relief-book-buying stints last year in a sudden powerful desire to discover a new-to-me Big Dense Dramatic Historical Fiction Epic a la Dunnett or Mantel.
This book is not that, though it is indeed stuffed full of historical detail. The focus of the story is George Bridgetower, a violin prodigy of African and Polish descent who had a brief but intense friendship with Beethoven and was the original dedicatee of his Violin Sonata No. 9.
However, the Bridgetower-Beethoven dynamic only comes into play in the last third or less of the book; for most of the story, George is nine and we're experiencing the world through the eyes of his father, John Frederick de Augustus Bridgetower, a freedman from Barbados posing as an African prince as he shepherds his baby prodigy son through European high society of 1789 in an attempt to make their fortunes. Lots of rich dramatic character and narrative potential here! The book is really not anywhere near as interested in that dramatic character and narrative potential as it is in introducing Frederick to every other relevant historical figure running around Paris on the eve of the French Revolution! For example, over the course of one night and sixty pages, Frederick meets the Chevalier de St. George, General Alex Dumas (Sr.), the Marquise de Montesson, Rodolphe Kreutzer, Louise-Francoise de Keralio, Etta Palm, Olympe de Gouges, General Lafayette, Thomas Jefferson, Camille Desmoulins, Madame Roland, Pierre Rode, Pierre Baillot, Antoine Lavoisier, and the Marquis de Condorcet -- and these are only the ones he has opinions about, I'm leaving out about a half-dozen other famous names.
None of these people are relevant to Frederick or George's later life in any way (with the possible and oblique exception of Kreutzer) but they are important for scene-setting the various complexities, contradictions, and hypocrisies of Enlightenment attitudes towards race and slavery, which is really the thing that Dongala is most interested in writing about. I respect the project! These are all really interesting people! I, too, would be absolutely unable to resist cameo-ing Alex Dumas in a novel if I had any opportunity to do so! However, I do think the reading experience of the novel would have been more satisfying to me if more of the focus was on Frederick and George as specific people with narrative arcs of their own, rather than as lenses through which to explore the period.
This does change a bit once George grows up -- he still doesn't have a ton of individuality in the final section, tbh, but the dynamic with Beethoven provides a solid thread on which to hang a narrative (as well as a shipping manifesto enthusiastically delivered by one book group member, who made a compelling argument by performing a dramatic reading of the various passages describing homoerotically-charged duets.) We also agreed that it would make a great film starring an actor who could infuse the mildly gormless George with personality through the power of facial acting. My personal pitch would be Alfie Enoch.
As a sidenote, this is a book in translation from French andgenarti has opinions about the translation choices, which are heavily foreignized to capture French Sentence Vibes and a bit distancing as a result.
This book is not that, though it is indeed stuffed full of historical detail. The focus of the story is George Bridgetower, a violin prodigy of African and Polish descent who had a brief but intense friendship with Beethoven and was the original dedicatee of his Violin Sonata No. 9.
However, the Bridgetower-Beethoven dynamic only comes into play in the last third or less of the book; for most of the story, George is nine and we're experiencing the world through the eyes of his father, John Frederick de Augustus Bridgetower, a freedman from Barbados posing as an African prince as he shepherds his baby prodigy son through European high society of 1789 in an attempt to make their fortunes. Lots of rich dramatic character and narrative potential here! The book is really not anywhere near as interested in that dramatic character and narrative potential as it is in introducing Frederick to every other relevant historical figure running around Paris on the eve of the French Revolution! For example, over the course of one night and sixty pages, Frederick meets the Chevalier de St. George, General Alex Dumas (Sr.), the Marquise de Montesson, Rodolphe Kreutzer, Louise-Francoise de Keralio, Etta Palm, Olympe de Gouges, General Lafayette, Thomas Jefferson, Camille Desmoulins, Madame Roland, Pierre Rode, Pierre Baillot, Antoine Lavoisier, and the Marquis de Condorcet -- and these are only the ones he has opinions about, I'm leaving out about a half-dozen other famous names.
None of these people are relevant to Frederick or George's later life in any way (with the possible and oblique exception of Kreutzer) but they are important for scene-setting the various complexities, contradictions, and hypocrisies of Enlightenment attitudes towards race and slavery, which is really the thing that Dongala is most interested in writing about. I respect the project! These are all really interesting people! I, too, would be absolutely unable to resist cameo-ing Alex Dumas in a novel if I had any opportunity to do so! However, I do think the reading experience of the novel would have been more satisfying to me if more of the focus was on Frederick and George as specific people with narrative arcs of their own, rather than as lenses through which to explore the period.
This does change a bit once George grows up -- he still doesn't have a ton of individuality in the final section, tbh, but the dynamic with Beethoven provides a solid thread on which to hang a narrative (as well as a shipping manifesto enthusiastically delivered by one book group member, who made a compelling argument by performing a dramatic reading of the various passages describing homoerotically-charged duets.) We also agreed that it would make a great film starring an actor who could infuse the mildly gormless George with personality through the power of facial acting. My personal pitch would be Alfie Enoch.
As a sidenote, this is a book in translation from French and
genarti has opinions about the translation choices, which are heavily foreignized to capture French Sentence Vibes and a bit distancing as a result.
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Date: 2022-01-23 12:57 am (UTC)Example? (Of translation choices or opinions, I'm not picky.)
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Date: 2022-01-23 01:03 am (UTC)(Also, I just googled this, and the Google blurb references a "cameo appearance" from the early feminist activist Camille Desmoulins, which is... not a phrase I expected to read.)
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Date: 2022-01-23 03:00 am (UTC)Like Sovay, I'd be interested to hear about translation choices.
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Date: 2022-01-23 02:54 pm (UTC)I see potential for a classical music equivalent of The Whale: A Love Story here.
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Date: 2022-01-23 04:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-23 09:56 pm (UTC)Yep, that tracks. And it seems like the cast list could've been cut down a LOT - Dumas and Jefferson make a lot of sense, and of course some others *is deeply ignorant about the period/place*. A film actually could help there as well, by forcing cuts to the cast of characters.
Homoerotically charged duets sounds awesome, though.
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Date: 2022-01-25 04:11 am (UTC)Beth has promised to come and provide a translator's report!
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Date: 2022-01-25 04:46 am (UTC)is this what we call a tl;dr?
Date: 2022-01-27 04:46 am (UTC)Disclaimers: I’m coming at this as a French-to-English translator, which is obviously a very specific standpoint to be coming from; being hyperaware of French sentence structure and gallicisms is literally my job, and thus also an occupational hazard. Also, this is the kind of thing that opinions vary wildly on, and this is just mine, etc etc.
So, one of the ongoing questions in literary translation is, how much do you try to make your translation sound like something that was written originally in English? (Or whatever target language you’re translating to.) And how much do you make it sound like it was originally written in a foreign language?
Obviously, domesticization vs foreignization is really a spectrum rather than a binary, and there are a lot of facets to it. (Do you translate titles? What about food names? Do you go for a sentence structure that’s less common or natural in English? Of course, some languages, like French, have a sentence structure that you can more or less replicate in English, and others much less so. Do you translate cultural terms? Do you footnote? Do you just decide that the audience can figure things out or google it?) There are no easy or one-size-fits-all answers! Well, okay, there are some things that are pretty clearly bad – the infamous Pokemon dub that turned onigiri into jelly doughnuts comes to mind -- but a lot will depend on the work, the audience, the languages, the context.
There’s a school of thought in literary translation these days that holds that a translator’s responsibility is to make sure the audience remembers every moment that they’re reading a translation – that this book comes not just from another culture, but specifically from another language. The reader shouldn’t be able to settle comfortably into the sentences; they should always remember that they’re not reading the original words, only an imperfect rendering given to them by the intermediary of a translator. The translation should be visible; the stamp of the original language should always be visible on the new sentences. I don’t fully agree with this school of thought, but it’s a significant one, and it’s a valid choice to make.
(Side note, I say literary translation specifically because, well, that’s not the kind of translation I mostly do! I do things like marketing copy and technical manuals and company memos about new policies and website copy and so on. And that’s relevant context, because my clients pretty much always want my translation to sound like natural English. If I deliver something that sounds awkward and gallicized, my clients are not going to talk about Venuti’s theory of foreignization, they’re going to think they paid for a mediocre translation. So that also affects my stance and my mental reflexes here.)
(Another side note: English being not just a colonial language but the current juggernaut, there are a whole lot of regional versions of English that are shaped by other languages’ syntax and patterns and so on. That’s not super relevant to The Bridgetower Sonata, and it’s not something I’m qualified to speak on in depth, but it felt weird to keep talking about English as if it were a single monolith. It’s super not! That’s another complex facet! I’m not really going to talk about that more but I wanted to gesture at it.)
ANYWAY. God, this is so long-winded, apologies. Anyway, I can only assume that Marjolijn de Jager belongs to that school of thought I mentioned above, because I could read the French structure under every single line of this book. Just about every sentence, I was like, “I would bet money that I could tell you what the French for this bit was, give or take some synonyms.” It was so consistent that it was clearly a deliberate choice!
For me, it was a very distracting one, because the result is English that’s... not wrong, but kinda weird? Kinda clunky? All these slightly odd turns of syntax! Any given one might have been just a slightly unusual turn of phrase, but it was sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph. And I don’t love that, because if I’m right about the underlying French, it’s not weird or clunky in French. It’s perfectly reasonable literary prose. But because French and English have slightly different preferences in what they consider to be fluid literary style, what flowed well in French makes for English that’s just a bit off, just a bit distracting, just a bit precious, just a bit distancing.
Now, as I said, it’s my literal day job to be attuned to this, so I was really interested to hear what the others in our book club thought about it. And I admit I was quietly gratified to hear that they all found the prose distancing too: subtly awkward and self-aware, just that extra bit remote, making it harder to get immersed in the book and care about the characters. (As Becca says, of course, there were other aspects adding to that – pushing past the prose might have been easier with less of a whirlwind laundry list of Notable Historical Figures Met Over Coffee, for instance.) And I’d be interested to hear if anybody else read it and didn’t have that reaction, or appreciated it! But yeah, my personal opinion is that this level of syntactical foreignization gets in the way of the story, and does a disservice to the book by putting an extra barrier between story and readers in a way the original presumably doesn’t.
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Date: 2022-01-27 05:19 am (UTC)For translation choices, here's an excerpt (picked by flipping through quickly):
One of the advantages of the hotel where they were staying was that breakfast was served in a room on the ground floor. Frederick de Augustus missed his einspänner, the typically Viennese coffee served with a generous amount of whipped cream that would perk him up in the morning before embarking on his arduous day, and now had to make do with café au lait and some bread and butter. The hostess told him that for the moment, unfortunately, she couldn't offer any white bread since there was none in Paris and, instead, she suggested some slices of brown bread with quince jam. George, on the other hand, was thrilled to find they did have hot chocolate. A young girl barely older than he brought them their order on a tray. She was wearing a dress with tightly fitted long sleeves under an apron of coarse cloth that went halfway around her waist. She probably worked for the proprietor. After she'd served them, Frederick de Augustus thanked her while George gave her a big smile, which she answered shyly before slipping away.
George's hot chocolate was excellent, just thick enough to be right. Frederick de Augustus watched him enviously as from the flowered porcelain pot he poured the velvety liquid with its exquisite aroma into a large cup before greedily savoring it.
Nothing here is bad or wrong -- it's not agrammatical, it's not using any cognates weirdly, it's not breaking any English rules. (Though there are other sentences in other sections that do use misplaced modifiers that work better in French: After providing him with their credentials, the guard's suspicion turned to deference rather than After they provided him, for instance.)
But it's all extremely French in style. French writing tends to be a lot more explicit about the order of events: he poured the hot cocoa into the cup before savoring it. Frederick thanked her while George smiled, and she answered with a smile before slipping away. We obviously do this some in (modern North American and British) English too! But as a trend, English writers would be more likely to use and or other markers of implicit order where French spells it out.
And all those long sentences full of commas -- again, English can do it! (God knows I love to write a long compound-complex sentence full of commas.) But the rhythm of these, the way the clauses stack and the way the commas are placed, sounds French to me. The order of prepositional phrases in the bit about the cocoa pouring -- from the teapot he poured the liquid with its aroma into a teapot -- is convoluted in English, but perfectly reasonable in French, where descriptions tend to follow the noun more often. The book is full of long sentences full of descriptive clauses that are long in the way French sentences are long, rather than the way English sentences are, if that makes sense?
It doesn't really show up in this excerpt, but French also tends to use linkage words between sentences a lot more than English. "He did A. And yet, on the contrary, he also did B. Therefore, C. Lastly, we must add, D." An writer working in North American or UK English might well throw in one or even two of these, but they wouldn't be likely to put in all of them. This book tends to put in all of them.
Anyway, as I said below, I'm hyper attuned to this because, well, it's my job to be! And it's so consistent that I assume it must have been a deliberate choice on de Jager's part, and I'm not saying that it's a bad or wrong choice, just a choice that didn't work for me. (I'll let Becca speak for herself about her reaction to it, but I think I was the only one in the book club going "oh wow that order of clauses is SO FRENCH" rather than "huh, there's something weird about this sentence, but I'm not sure what -- it's not grammatically wrong...?" But the others did generally agree that the prose didn't quite work for them.) So, you know, disclaimer disclaimer. But that was my reaction as the kind of translator and writer I am, anyhow!
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Date: 2022-01-27 05:20 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2022-01-27 06:10 am (UTC)Re: is this what we call a tl;dr?
Date: 2022-01-27 12:27 pm (UTC)And all those long sentences full of commas -- again, English can do it! (God knows I love to write a long compound-complex sentence full of commas.)
For fandom reasons, I read a lot of 18th century prose, which of course often has long complex sentences with lots of commas. But the text you quoted above doesn't feel at all like English 18th century prose. Not that a book set in the 18th century necessarily needs to have 18th century prose, but I just thought I'd note it.
Re: is this what we call a tl;dr?
Date: 2022-01-27 03:35 pm (UTC)Anyway, yeah! It's interesting, because for some of the other stuff, I can point to specific things as French. And then I'd start to say "and long complex sentences" and have to stop because, well, English does that! It's perfectly reasonable style to do that! I do that, and I enjoy a lot of 18th and 19th century books that really emphatically do that! But they're not quite the same type of long complex sentence, in a way I can't really articulate, other than gesturing and going "idk, the rhythm is wrong!"
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Date: 2022-01-27 04:17 pm (UTC)My usual goal is to make a poem that sounds as natural in English as the original did in Japanese or Chinese, as best I can judge. If the author's being deliberately poetic, I try to make the translation do that too, and if they're being plain-spoken, I go for that. I also try to reproduce terseness/prolixity and double-meanings. (I want to try to create analogues of poetic structures of the original, but for Chinese I've been utterly failing to recreate the rhymes.)
The passage you quoted above sounded very stilted in English, in a way it clearly wasn't in French. I can how a translator might want to make that choice, but strongly disagree with it both in my own practice and in my reading for pleasure.
Re: is this what we call a tl;dr?
Date: 2022-01-27 04:19 pm (UTC)Re: is this what we call a tl;dr?
Date: 2022-01-27 07:41 pm (UTC)Your thoughts were very interesting particularly because most of my thoughts on translation derive from Chinese or Japanese translations-- where the source language is structurally different enough that a consistent level of 'slightly unusual' is almost harder to maintain...
Re: is this what we call a tl;dr?
Date: 2022-01-28 09:57 pm (UTC)I hope you and Skygiants won't think I'm too strange, popping up out of nowhere to comment (I came here via Luzula!), but I just wanted to say (1) how fascinating this whole discussion is and (2) how incredibly French that extract you quoted feels. I can almost hear the original as I read it. George, cependant, fut ravi de découvrir...
I didn't know there was a school of thought that the translation should be visible to the reader. I think for me personally as a reader, that works less well than it would have a decade ago because it feels too similar to those sort of word-for-word translations from French to English produced by people who are obliged to write in English in a professional context but aren't very comfortable doing so and have relied heavily in Google Translate. Whereas a decade ago I would not have made that association.
Also, it's not uncommon for translators into French to include "note from the translator" footnotes in novels, and I've sometimes wondered why translators into English never seem to. I guess it's just a convention that English-speaking readers aren't accustomed to, and so translators just don't do it.
Re: is this what we call a tl;dr?
Date: 2022-02-01 05:04 am (UTC)Re: is this what we call a tl;dr?
Date: 2022-02-01 05:14 am (UTC)And yeah, to your point about Chinese and Japanese translations! I'm always really interested to hear about the experience of translators working from languages that are very different from English; I've studied a few such languages to varying degrees, enough to have an idea of the structure, but definitely not enough to have the kind of deep understanding you need for stuff like professional-level translation. Because French and English are so closely related, the danger is always sticking too closely to the French structure, and leaning too hard on cognates because they're what springs immediately to mind. Whereas with a lot of languages, you just can't do that -- there aren't many cognates, if any at all, and the structure is wildly different. It's a different set of challenges!
(And I do think all the scholars I've read talking about the virtue of keeping the foreign language present in the syntax, and not just in words and concepts and what goes unexplained, are ones working in Romance or Germanic languages -- but I don't know if that's just because those are the ones I happened to read in grad school. It's definitely possible.)
Re: is this what we call a tl;dr?
Date: 2022-02-01 05:42 am (UTC)That's a really interesting connection with the rise of Google Translate! It makes perfect sense. (Obviously, zero shade at all to anyone using whatever tools they have handy to communicate, and if I had to write an email in anything but English or French I'd be doing the same, but that's not the same thing as a professionally published translation.) I really don't know if it would have worked for me a decade ago better than it does now; I suspect not, but I'm definitely both way more attuned to it now and way more equipped to hold forth at length about it...
Anyway, this novel does actually have a few footnotes! They're mostly to explain things that really don't translate. For example, there's an anecdote about the violinist Giornovichi getting lost in London, unable to remember the name of the street he was staying on. "Not until he began whistling the tune of Malbrough s'en va-t-en guerre in despair were his friends finally able to direct the cab to Marlborough Street," says the novel, and a footnote explains that "Malbrough s'en va-t-en guerre is a traditional eighteenth-century French folksong." There's another footnote explaining what a louis d'or is. So there are those kind of things, but if there are any explaining translation choices, I didn't get that far. You do see them in English translations sometimes, but I think of them as more common in more scholarly works, or in literary classics. I'd love it if we got more in other genres too, personally! Now that you mention it, though, I am a little surprised there's no note from the translator as a foreword or afterword or something. That doesn't happen every time, but it does happen, and it would have been interesting to see what she said in one. I don't know if the lack of one was a decision by the translator or by the publisher or what.
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Date: 2022-02-01 05:56 am (UTC)I'm fascinated to hear you say that about Chinese, though! I had gotten the idea that Chinese was very much one of the languages where a translator has to basically strip the sentence down to meaning and build the English back up from there, because the structure was so different. My Chinese is nonexistent, though, unlike my Japanese (which was only ever intermediate at best and is now deeply rusty besides, but that's enough to have a general understanding of the language's structure). In any case, even with French -- which is one of the closest kin to English you can find, after all that Norman influence and all -- I find myself rearranging sentences a lot, because the French order of clauses will technically work in English but won't flow well. As, indeed, you can see in the passage above.
I agree with your usual goal, too! And appreciate the results -- I always really like your poem translations, and the thoughts on them you include.
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Date: 2022-02-01 04:16 pm (UTC)Standard Chinese sentences are closer to English in structure than, say, Japanese, but that's >ahem< a not a difficult achievement. I consider it comparable to modern German in difference. The big challenges are clauses involving temporal or causal relationships and certain standard idioms, and especially with the former I have to pause and untangle things because I'm really not all that fluent yet.
Classical Chinese is a weird amalgam of Middle and Old Chinese -- tending to use more features of Old Chinese in prose than in poetry, especially if it's trying to be scholarly. The prose in particular is dense and allusive, and I have to go word by painful word, supplying all sorts of connectives and guesses as to what part of speech a given character is acting as (there are no particles argh). The strictures of form actually make poetry easier to understand, because everything is end-stopped So Hard, making statements necessarily short. (That said, I'm working on Du Fu now, and he was an innovator in dislocating syntax in painfully confusing ways.) I still have to go word by word and rebuild an English statement from that, but that's more because compact imagism rather than syntax.
If that makes any sense.
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Date: 2022-03-08 12:32 am (UTC)