Day 81 of “Le Tour du numéro 7 de Saville-row en 80 traductions”
Harpold, Terry Alan
Dear fellow travelers,
We have come to the end of our voyage back to where we started in our Tour du numéro 7 de Saville-row en 80 traductions. Where have we traveled? What did we leave behind? What did we carry all the way home?
(See https://80traductions.blogspot.com/2022/10/prologue.html for an overview of the voyage’s rationale and method. See our earlier postings to the JVF on Days 40, 50, 60, and 70, for additional examples related to the observations below.)
We plan to develop in the coming weeks more detailed observations and commentary on the results of this diverting excursion, and what it might possibly tell us about Verne’s prose and the pleasures of textual détournements of this kind. For the moment, as we catch our breath, we offer a few scattered observations at the not-quite end of the journey.
- Garmt de Vries-Uiterweerd & Terry Harpold, Zeist & Gainesville, 21 December 2022
Compression
The original French version of Chapter 1 of Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours is 1597 words long. Our final French version, by way of 79 intermediate translations, is 781 words long, a little less than half the length of the original. The effects of compression are noticeable early in the journey: by Day 10 the intermediate French variant is already down to 1380 words, a 14% decrease from the start. Though the rate of compression between each intermediate French version varies a little, on average the text is compressed by about 6% every ten days.
The extent of the compression is shown in our 21 December 2022 “End of the Journey” entry in the blog, https://80traductions.blogspot.com, which positions the Day 1 and Day 80 French variants side-by-side.
At this point we can only speculate on the reasons for this. We suspect that small glitches in each intermediate translation tend to create syntactic and grammatical anomalies, for which the translation back into French requires some textual cleanup. Stray fragments of the previous source text can’t be easily rendered into correct French and are discarded. These effects may be stronger for translations involving languages that are highly agglutinative, or for languages whose writing systems are non-alphabetic.
But the compression feels also like a kind of distillation: what we get with each step is a concentration of the previous variant texts, which is especially in evidence if one compares, say, Day 10 to Day 20 or 30, and so on. Minor effects of compression accumulate and result from time to time in transformations burying significant details or, more evocatively, fusing them into new constellations of meaning. While grammatically and syntagmatically simpler, these also appear more referentially dense and metaphoric.
Fragmentation
As the journey continues, entropic effects of serial translation become more noticeable: translations back into the intermediate French iterations become less semantically and grammatically coherent, and often – this is especially noticeable in the last third or so of the chapter – produce short, somewhat disjointed sentences. (This is also evident in the 21 December 2022 “End of the Journey” blog entry.)
Day 1: “Quelle heure avez-vous ?” “Onze heures vingt-deux,” répondit Passepartout, en tirant des profondeurs de son gousset une énorme montre d’argent. “Vous retardez,” dit Mr. Fogg. “Que monsieur me pardonne, mais c’est impossible.”
Day 80: Il a sorti de l'argent de sa poche et en a gardé la moitié. “Dites à un étranger que vous avez un chien.” “Désolé, j'ai passé la nuit.”
Or…
Day 1 : Phileas Fogg se leva, prit son chapeau de la main gauche, le plaça sur sa tête avec un mouvement d’automate et disparut sans ajouter une parole. Passepartout entendit la porte de la rue se fermer une première fois : c’était son nouveau maître qui sortait ; puis une seconde fois : c’était son prédécesseur, James Forster, qui s’en allait à son tour. Passepartout demeura seul dans la maison de Saville-row.
Day 80 : Phyllis Fogg entra sans un mot et disparut avec les vêtements dans sa main droite. Il entendit la porte se refermer. Puis il vit Jacob debout devant Foster. Besparto vit seul dans un appartement de la rue Saville.
The effects of compression and fragmentation seem to work together. What comes out of the process is less a sketch or an outline or a Masterplots condensation of the original, than a strange sort of semantically oblique and dense analogue of the source text; it’s episodically Vernian in a familiar way, and then episodically and disruptively something else. Not quite badly-translated Verne – semantic and stylistic rudiments of the source text are largely preserved, such that many of them are still recognizable – but more a weirdly-translated Verne, with moments of Zaum-like (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaum ), rich nonsense.
Mutability
Translation, as the American theorist of translation Lawrence Venuti observes, changes everything. He argues that translation is not reducible to transferring semantically and stylistically-stable invariants between languages, dressed as it were in new clothing. Interpretation is, he insists, always a radically interpretive act that plays – the ludic sense of that verb applies especially here – across variable and always-unstable linguistic elements; these do not, fundamentally, mean the same things in cultural and historical situations of different languages. This more hermeneutic version of translation describes the 80 day journey in No. 7 Saville Row very well.
This, we believe, is one of the key lessons of the journey: if you set aside the expectation that translation means conveying the same message from one language to another, and entertain in its place the idea that translation is a process of rereading and rewriting the source text in ways that are not always self-evident from the start but can still be evocative and meaningful – if you worry less about the accuracy of translation and more about the generative play of translation – then the unapologetic wackiness of our serial, automated method is only an extreme version of what we do whenever we translate. We will have more to say about this later.
Our earlier postings in the JVF have remarked on the changeability of names in the source text – Phileas Fogg becomes Phyllis Fogg, Phyllis May, Filius Fogg, Philip Fogg, Filippo, Filios Fogg, etc., and Passepartout becomes Spiration, Yanis, and Besparto. Which is somewhat surprising, as we might expect proper nouns – famously untranslatable – to remain fairly stable. (Assuming of course that the translator recognizes them as proper nouns. The rendering of the Nebraska Badlands (les mauvaises terres du Nebraska) as “the disagreeable territories of Nebraska” in a Victorian translation of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers is an infamous example of one such misfire.)
Perhaps the variety of renderings of Fogg’s first name is due to the fact that it’s one of those odd not-quite-right Anglophone names of which Verne is very fond, and so it morphs more easily into other variants? (We’ve already speculated that repeating elements of water in the intermediate French versions are derived from misprisions of Fogg’s last name.) Passepartout is, of course, a common noun in French – though not usually a proper noun – and manages to remain relatively stable, apart from the off hiccups noted above, throughout the journey.
Our heroes are men of a thousand faces. And of unstable genders, or at least that’s the case for Fogg who decidedly leans female as the journey progresses and Phyllis becomes his most common identity. And he dresses the part: the hat with which the original Fogg famously departs in the antepenultimate paragraph of Verne’s text – “Phileas Fogg se leva, prit son chapeau de la main gauche, le plaça sur sa tête avec un mouvement d’automate et disparut sans ajouter une parole” – mutates into other articles of clothing, at times a beautiful Chinese dress and a suit, presumably fitted to either a man or a woman. Or neither.
As Verne might have put it: “Qu’avait-il rapporté de ce voyage ? Rien, dira-t-on ? Rien, soit, si ce n’est une charmante femme, qui – quelque invraisemblable que cela puisse paraître – le rendit le plus heureux des hommes ! En vérité, ne ferait-on pas, pour moins que cela, le Tour du monde ?”
Fixed expressions & other… fixations
At various points in the journey, novel elements and configurations emerge – substantially different from their originals – and thereafter remained largely unchanged through multiple retranslations and, in some cases, through to the end of the process.
The most obvious of these is the chapter’s title –
Day 1: DANS LEQUEL PHILEAS FOGG ET PASSEPARTOUT S’ACCEPTENT RÉCIPROQUEMENT L’UN COMME MAÎTRE, L’AUTRE COMME DOMESTIQUE
Day 80: Ce travail ne représente pas la connaissance de l'eau et de l'énergie
This oddly evocative commentary / summary of the first chapter, as somehow oblique in to the knowledge of water and energy – or is it a commentary on the whole of the novel, or on the whole of our experiment ? It seems like it could be both – was in place very early on, by about Day 35 or so, and then changed only a little through the remaining deformations of translations.
What characteristics of this phrase made it stable through passages through an additional fifty or so languages? So far as we can tell, it’s a true Hapax legomena – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapax_legomenon – it occurs nowhere else on the Internet. Its uniqueness and durability reinforces our sense that it should be read as a gnomic commentary on the whole of our circular journey.
Much of the fun of this voyage has been associated with the strange allusiveness of such fixed expressions, especially those that appear to indicate fixations in another sense: odd words or turns of phrase that suddenly emerged and then persisted for a time and seem thus to figure obsessive-compulsive elements of the translation engine.
Early on, Lord Byron, his facial hair – as we pointed out in the JVF entry on Day 40, in his best-known portrait by Thomas Sully, Byron is clean-shaven – and his fine legs and feet (the real Byron had a birth defect of the right foot, perhaps a clubfoot) – becomes one such site of, if you will, mutable persistence in the translations.
Day 1: On disait qu’il ressemblait à Byron — par la tête, car il était irréprochable quant aux pieds —, mais un Byron à moustaches et à favoris, un Byron impassible, qui aurait vécu mille ans sans vieillir.
Day 80: Le grand Byron était un homme rasé de près et barbu d'un millier d'années.
Most of Verne’s original comparison of Fogg to the famously-beautiful Byron disappears pretty quickly and is almost absent by the end by the end of the voyage. The oblique mention of the poet’s deformity goes away first. But the beard – initially only moustaches, which probably included also sideburns and belonging originally to Fogg – continues to wander, from Fogg to Byron, from Byron to Phyllis, and from below the chin to the face, and to the top of the head. Sometimes is it made up of butter and bees, and by the end, of a thousand years. Through all of that it remains, persistently, in some place in the text: a good example of how a small portion of the source text remains insistently present, though its parts shuffle around interesting ways and odd little distortions emerge, and finally feels like a crucial, even central node of meaning. “Clean-shaven and bearded with a thousand years” – it’s one of the loveliest moments of the entire trip.
Not quite as evocative but also memorable is the emergence, around Day 29, of the narrator’s approval of the most popular ice cream in America – “La crème glacée la plus populaire d'Amérique est délicieuse” – a highly compressed version of the original’s meditation on Fogg’s dining habits –
Day 1: S’il dînait ou déjeunait, c’étaient les cuisines, le garde-manger, l’office, la poissonnerie, la laiterie du club, qui fournissaient à sa table leurs succulentes réserves ; c’étaient les domestiques du club, graves personnages en habit noir, chaussés de souliers à semelles de molleton, qui le servaient dans une porcelaine spéciale et sur un admirable linge en toile de Saxe ; c’étaient les cristaux à moule perdu du club qui contenaient son sherry, son porto ou son claret mélangé de cannelle, de capillaire et de cinnamome ; c’était enfin la glace du club — glace venue à grands frais des lacs d’Amérique — qui entretenait ses boissons dans un satisfaisant état de fraîcheur.
Verne’s famously bulimic enthusiasm here is reduced by the end of the journey to the recommendation of a single dish – perhaps the most extreme compression of the entire trip – though a dish that Baskin-Robbins (substitute here your preferred purveyor of frozen desserts) would be proud of –
Day 80: China Baby Black Cinnamon Silver Cinnamon est la crème glacée la plus populaire et la plus délicieuse d'Amérique
In a few cases, such fixations appeared to have been misfires of translation and compression, which then devolved into persistent proper nouns. A nice example of this is “Hatzilla” –
Day 80: Aussi connu sous le nom de Hatzilla, Bulut n'est pas content, il se bat.
– which emerged on Day 59 (“Aussi connu sous le nom de Hatzilla, il est clair que le nuage n'est pas fait pour jouer, il s'est battu pour lui…”) The name is derived from a long chain of variants that includes Hitzela – Hitzella – Hitzla – Hetzela – Hetzelija – Hetzelza – Hetzerza – Hazratsa – Hazrat Sa – Hazrat – going all the way back to Day 8, in the translation from Azerbaijani to French. It seems to have emerged from the heart of this phrase in the original French –
“Mr. Fogg jouait évidemment pour jouer, non pour gagner. Le jeu était pour lui un combat, une lutte contre une difficulté”
– but how, precisely, is unclear.
The fact that, once in place, Hatzilla remains unchanged until the end feels like it should signify something. We can’t shake the impression that all of these variant names are sly cryptonyms for “Hetzel.”
The image of Verne’s publisher-editor-mentor-father figure-combatant, dressed in the latex suit of a great, hat-shaped kaijū, stomping around in No. 7 throughout this strange little journey, is certainly intriguing.
Works Cited
Venuti, Lawrence. Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice. Routledge, 2013.
…
Terry Harpold
Associate Professor of English
Director, Imagining Climate Change
https://people.clas.ufl.edu/tharpold/
https://imagining-climate.clas.ufl.edu
https://sciencefiction.group.ufl.edu
"Have you noticed my pink brains?
You can see 'em work."
Jan Rychlik
I am looking forward to the deeper analysis. I would just like to add some comments to this preliminary text:
The ratio of an unabridged Czech transaltion to the French original can be 3:4 as to the extent. I see that Czech is perhaps the most advanced of Slavic languages as to simlicity of sentence construction, still, if translated from Czech back to French, the text would naturally be shorter than the original French one. It will rather ressemble a basic or spoken language than a literary one. So I think that shortening of the original text in retranslations should not be attributed especially to the fact that incomprehensible parts of the retranslated text tend to be skipped.
The occurence of names of currently marketed products in the retranslated texts point me to a post to the old JV Forum indicating that the Google translator substituted Hardwig for Liddenbrock or even rendered the old English translation of JCE instead of a new - if automated - translation of the French original. Hatzilla seems to me a product of this feature of AI learning of automated translators.
Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year - as Vernian as possible, of course!
Jan
21. 12. 2022 v 16:10, Harpold, Terry Alan <thar...@ufl.edu>:
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Jules Verne Forum" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to jules-verne-fo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jules-verne-forum/8B939B73-E630-4EE8-94D9-01D3DEBFFFDC%40ufl.edu.