The Meaning of Recognition (51 page)

The amateurs had voices of their own with which to pay respect to the foreign voices they loved. In the decade after World War II, the well-connected bunch of translators who were grouped around
Roger Senhouse, a Francophile who raised dilettantism to the level of a profession, did a collective job of translating Colette that will brook no superseding, mainly because the collective job was
composed of individual spare-time efforts, each answering to a passion. Even more wonderful than her books about Chéri, Colette’s masterpiece
Julie de Carnheilan
will never
need translating again, because the job was done for keeps by the prodigiously gifted Patrick Leigh Fermor while he was cooling down from his wartime adventures. In the same fruitful few years of
recovery from the physical battle against barbarism, the petite nineteenth-century French novels that buttressed the achievement of
Madame Bovary
and sometimes even preceded it –
Benjamin Constant’s
Adolphe
, Maupassant’s
Bel Ami
, Alphonse Daudet’s
Sappho
– were translated by people who saw fidelity to them as a delightful
but temporary duty, not as part of a long slog to corner a market. Most of those translations showed up in the prettily handy post-war series from Hamish Hamilton called the Novel Library. Now long
defunct as a commercial proposition, the series is catnip for collectors in second-hand bookshops all over the planet. One of the Novel Library’s particular jewels was the 1948 translation of
Madame Bovary
by Gerard Hopkins, who had the elementary tact to render ‘
mille fois non
’ as ‘a thousand times no’. (I could as easily have used his
renderings as Russell’s in the task of measuring Mauldon’s, but the Penguin translation is the one most of us in the old British Empire grew up with, just as most Americans grew up with
Francis Steegmuller’s translation.)

The impulse behind the great wave of amateur translations – and this was especially true in the immediate aftermath of World War II – was a generous desire to bring foreign cultural
treasure within reach of ordinary people. It was the era when patricians, having seen civilization dragged to the brink of ruin, still thought it might be preserved if enlightenment could be spread
more equally. Book-lovers who knew that their multilingual education was a privilege wanted to share it with people less lucky. The work was aimed directly at the public, not at the academy.
Presumably Mauldon is looking to the public too, but her pages of notes at the end of this book are looking to Professor Bowie: they are proof of academic diligence. To put it bluntly, recent
translations tend to be busywork, and earlier ones tend to be the real tributes, even when inaccurate by scholarly standards.

No doubt this new translation of
Madame Bovary
is a labour of love. But affection and affectation don’t sit well together. In his introduction, Professor Bowie quotes his
protégée’s translation of the paragraph about Rodolphe that contains the most famous thing Flaubert ever wrote about human language. According to Mauldon, Flaubert said it was
‘like a cracked kettledrum on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make music that will move the stars to pity’. Well, it certainly sounds precise.
But it isn’t, quite. In his introduction to the first, 1950, edition of his translation, Alan Russell revealed that he thought
Les liaisons dangereuses
was a seventeenth-century
novel – wrong by a hundred years. (He quietly corrected the blunder for later editions, but it remains a pretty noisy blunder to have made.) He knew, however, that a
chaudron
isn’t a kettledrum. Back in Sydney, in the First Kogarah Company of the Boys’ Brigade, I played the kettledrum often enough to know that its barrel can be pretty seriously cracked and
it still won’t yield a dud note. It does that when its skin is split. If Flaubert had meant a kettledrum, he would have said so. What he meant was a kettle. Russell rendered the word that
way, and so did Gerard Hopkins.

So much for accuracy as a fetish: it is bound to lead you into trouble when you stray into the territory of stuff that won’t stay still to be researched. And in that territory lie the
things of the mind. As his learned admirers, from Francis Steegmuller to Julian Barnes, have had so much constructive fun telling us, Flaubert would go to any lengths in the quest for factual
precision. But Flaubert was a creative genius: he was putting his research to work, in aid of psychological perceptions that were uniquely his. One of those perceptions was that he himself was
Madame Bovary. No wonder he loved her. Loving her, he gave her novel everything he had. Henry James thought that
Madame Bovary
was as good as Flaubert ever got. James was wrong to believe
that the book was a tract against immorality. If it was, then its own author notably failed to heed the lesson. But James might have been right to believe that everything Flaubert subsequently
wrote added up to a decline. Even Proust thought that
le mot juste
made a totem out of what should be taken for granted. The Monty Python crew translated
Wuthering Heights
into
semaphore, and incidentally proposed that in a novel, story comes before language. So it does, even when the language is a miracle.

As a story,
Madame Bovary
is fit for worship, but it should be worshipped critically, as if it were man-made, and not a sacred text. At one point, Emma confides her sexual frustration
to her maid, Félicité. But nothing comes of it. Flaubert might have had the idea of making Félicité part of the action as Emma’s confidante. If he did, he forgot
about it, and then forgot to take that bit out. It was a big uncertainty to leave in. There is no uncertainty about the style, but there again, the wrong kind of worship leads to myopia. Blinded by
the dazzle, Mauldon just doesn’t seem to see the absurdity of leaving some of the French as French. Various periodicals are read by the characters in the novel. Mauldon leaves their titles
untranslated. So did Hopkins, but Russell was daring enough to give rough English equivalents. The tacit claim behind leaving French words as they are is that your sense of accuracy is so highly
developed that if you can’t find an exact equivalent, the word should be left inviolate. But in that case, why translate the thing at all?

The question is all too well worth asking, alas. Judging from its introduction and appended apparatus, this translation is looking for a home on the kind of university syllabus in which students
are encouraged to believe that they can absorb foreign literatures without ever bothering themselves with the languages in which they were written. In that regard, America’s economic
dominance of the earth has made the English language imperialistic beyond the dreams of the people who invented it. No doubt it had to happen. Most of the amateur translators were already primed
with at least one of the two ancient languages when they arrived at university, after which they acquired three or four of the modern languages as easily as if dipping themselves in paint. Those
times won’t be coming back. Nor will the once universal assumption among the literate that their time at university was merely the beginning of an education that would last for the rest of
their lives.

But surely some of the effort put into the illusory omniscience of today’s comfortably monoglot students could be put into teaching them at least one foreign language as a compulsory
subject; and surely, in that case, French should be the first on the list. One doesn’t ask for perfection. Anyone, even starting late, can learn enough French to know that Flaubert
didn’t actually sound like any of his translators, no matter how accurate. Using Proust as my handbook, I spent fifteen years learning to read French, and I still don’t read it much
less haltingly than I speak it. But I can read enough of Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary
to know that a translator who can’t carry the reader with her own style will put that
marvellous book further away, even while she strains every nerve to bring it close.

Atlantic Monthly
, October 2004

Lecturing at the time of the Franco-Prussian war, Jacob Burckhardt told his history students that the revolutionary age from 1789 onwards had been
lehrreich
: rich in
teaching. The greatest spirits of a hundred years before were now looking short of knowledge, but only because of what had happened since. Modern students should not attribute virtue to themselves
just because they could see so much that their mental superiors had not foretold. It is worth remembering Burckhardt’s principle when we come to deal with another great lecturer, Isaiah
Berlin. He was once famous for understanding everything about the age he lived in. There is still reason to believe he understood a lot. But if today he is starting to look a bit less penetrating
about it all, it could be because things have moved on.

Though Berlin wrote comparatively little about the twentieth century’s worst horrors, there wasn’t much he didn’t know about them. The question is how much he usefully wrote
about them: a question worth trying to answer, because on the answer will eventually depend how much we can usefully write about him. On the level of personal publicity, his renown as an amiable
sage goes on increasing after death. Mainly due to the beavering diligence of his editor Henry Hardy, compilations of Berlin’s essays have continued to appear, making him seem more productive
than when he was alive. Michael Ignatieff’s finely proportioned biography, a model of the genre, summarizes and clarifies Berlin’s themes with a terseness that might lead its readers to
skip through the subject’s own compositions when it is found that they are seldom as tightly written. But
The Proper Study of Mankind
, a concentration of the compilations, provides
sufficient evidence that Berlin’s best prose was something more weighty than the distilled monologues of a fascinating talker: as a set book it is likely to go on being a touchstone of
liberal thought for many years to come. Thus attended by curators and commentators, Berlin continues to enjoy a bustling second life, like the city of the same name. Yet somehow it has become
necessary to assert, instead of just accept, that he had deep feelings about what was going on in modern history, because all too often his written response sounded shallow.

As the bright young son of a bourgeois family that sensibly fled Riga to escape the Bolshevik revolution, he took with him, as part of his baggage, memories of Cheka arrogance that made him
suspicious for life about any concept of freedom that presumed to impose itself through political coercion. But even on the subject of the Soviet Union, he would later write much more about the
repression of individual artists than the mass obliteration of ordinary people – which, as Michael Burleigh has tried to remind us, is the thing to concentrate on, not gloss over. And the
depredations of Nazi Germany scarcely figure in Berlin’s writings at all, even though he played an honourable part in fighting Hitler. He spent much of the war in Washington only because he
had been sent there on a diplomatic posting, not because he was playing for safety. If he had been caught in Britain, he would undoubtedly have shared the fate of millions of other Jews had the
battle been lost. Silence about Mao’s China might be understandable – the full story emerged late in his life – but how was it that the global aggregate of totalitarian mania
failed to take a central place in his treatment of recent history? Does his eloquent advocacy of liberalism take the full measure of the forces ranged against it? We are not necessarily in
contravention of Burckhardt’s principle if we say that the twentieth century’s seismic outbursts of irrationality were its defining events. There were plenty of thinkers who thought so
at the time. But if Berlin thought so, he was reluctant to say so; and if he starts looking weak there, then doubts are bound to creep in about the strength of his contribution to his main field,
the history of ideas in the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. If he could say so much about the preparation for the main event, but so little about the main event, how good was he on the
preparation? Perhaps the first defence against so subversive an enquiry would be to say that a later superficiality doesn’t necessarily erode an initial seriousness. If it did, Bertrand
Russell’s recommendations for unilateral nuclear disarmament would have made nonsense of
Principia Mathematica
. But a better defence would be to show that Berlin’s
superficiality was only superficial.

This would be easier to show if this whopping first volume of his collected letters had not been published. Wilfully complete – it was Berlin himself, and not, for once, his editor, who
wanted everything included – the book begs for belittlement, which it has duly received from some reviewers, especially if they placed a high value on his more formal work. With a lot more to
come, the letters cover his active life from the late 1920s, in which the young refugee from revolutionary Russia became almost immediately assimilated into the English
beau monde
, through
to 1946, by which time he was established as the most dazzling Jewish social asset since Disraeli, and without being baptized. The contemplative life, however, is largely absent, which is probably
the reason why some of the reviewers reacted as if to the diaries of Chips Channon, or of Harold Nicolson at best. Certainly there is an awful lot about grand houses, dinner parties whether in
London or in Washington, and – this above all – academic politics in all their bitchy intricacy, as if recorded by a less ponderous and more cultivated version of C.P. Snow.

But ‘cultivated’ is the operative word. Although the letters might give the impression that Berlin was always at least as interested in the power struggles going on within Balliol
and All Souls as those going on within the Foreign Office, the US State Department, the Wilhelmstrasse or the Kremlin, the knowing gossip is enriched by the intensity of his enthusiasm for the arts
and for civilized institutions. Indeed he treats British institutions as works of art in themselves, as if endorsing Chesterton’s idea that democracy was another name for the sum total of
humane traditions. In that crucial regard, this book of letters – and further volumes are bound to confirm the impression – is a sumptuous demonstration of one of his key principles,
and ought to be valued as such. The principle is no less valuable because Burke thought of it first: a tolerable polity is an inheritance, and too multifariously determined by the past to be
altered comprehensively in the present without the risk of its lethal disintegration. Later on, Karl Popper, in exile in New Zealand, would do the theoretical work establishing the imperative that
any imposed social change should be aimed only at the correction of a specific abuse: the theoretical work that decisively identified revolution as the enemy of an open society. Berlin might have
elaborated the same theory earlier, if he had had the time. But he was too busy embodying its truth. Sixty years later, nearing death after a happily fulfilled life, he was right to demand that
none of his early letters should be left out, because they registered all the different ways he could function, as a free and thoughtful human being, in the full and complicated texture of an
historically continuous society, an order which he thought needed no fundamental reordering. If he failed to notice some of its failings, it was only because he was enjoying so many of its virtues.
The Jew out of nowhere was in demand everywhere, and he can be excused for loving every minute of it. To call him profoundly conservative hardly meets the case. He thought even the frivolity was
part of the bedrock. The ideal guest, a fountain of scintillating chatter to match the fountain in the courtyard, he would gladly have revisited Brideshead every weekend.