Testaments betrayed, p.9
Testaments Betrayed, page 9
Repetition
Stunden (hours) occurs three times—repetition preserved in all three translations;
gemeinsamen (mutual) twice—repetition eliminated in all three translations;
sich verirren (go astray) twice—repetition preserved in all three translations;
die Fremde (strange) twice, and then once die Fremdheit (strangeness)—in Vialatte: “à l’étranger” (abroad) once, “strangeness” replaced by “exile”; in David and in Lortholary: once “foreign” (as an adjective) and once “foreignness”;
die Luft (the air) twice—repetition preserved by all three translators;
haben (have) twice—the repetition exists in only one of the translations;
weiter (farther) twice—this repetition is replaced in Vialatte by repetition of the word “continue”; in David by the (weak) repetition of the word “still”; in Lortholary, the repetition has disappeared;
gehen, vergehen (go, went by)—this repetition (admittedly difficult to preserve) has disappeared in all three translations.
In general, we see that translators (obeying their schoolteachers) tend to limit repetitions.
The Semantic Meaning of Repetition
Twice die Fremde, once die Fremdheit: with this repetition the author introduced into his text a term with the quality of a key notion, a concept. If the author develops a lengthy line of thought from this word, repeating the word is necessary from the semantic and logical viewpoint. Suppose that, in order to avoid repetition, a Heidegger translator were to render “das Sein” once as “being,” next as “existence,” then as “life,” then again as “human life,” and finally as “being-there.” Never knowing whether Heidegger is speaking of a single thing under different names or of different things, we would have not a scrupulously logical text but a mess. A novel’s prose (I am speaking, of course, of novels worthy of the name) demands the same rigor (especially in meditative or metaphorical passages).
Another Remark on the Necessity of Preserving Repetitions
A bit farther on the same page of The Castle: “…Stimme nach Frieda gerufen wurde. ‘Frieda,’ sagte K. in Friedas Ohr und gab so den Ruf weiter.”
Literally, this means: ‘…a voice summoned Frieda. ‘Frieda,’ said K. in Frieda’s ear, thus passing on the summons.”
The French translators want to avoid the triple repetition of the name Frieda:
Vialatte: “‘Frieda!’ said he in the maid’s ear, thus passing on …”
And David: ‘“Frieda,’ said K. in his companion’s ear, passing on to her …”
How false the words replacing Frieda’s name sound! Note that in the text of The Castle, K. is never anything but K. In dialogue, others may call him “surveyor” or perhaps other things, but Kafka himself, the narrator, never refers to him by the words “stranger,” “newcomer,” “young man,” or whatever. K. is nothing but K. And not only he but all the characters in Kafka always have just a single name, a single designation.
Thus Frieda is Frieda; not lover, not mistress, not companion, not maid, not waitress, not whore, not young woman, not girl, not friend, not girlfriend. Frieda.
The Melodic Importance of Repetition
There are moments when Kafka’s prose takes flight and becomes song. That is the case with the two sentences I have been considering. (Note that both of these exceptionally beautiful sentences are descriptions of the love act; this says a hundred times more than all the biographers’ research about the importance of eroticism for Kafka. But let’s go on.) Kafka’s prose takes flight on two wings: intensity of metaphorical imagination and captivating melody.
Melodic beauty here is connected to the repetition of words; the sentence begins: “Dort vergingen Stunden, Stunden gemeinsamen Atems, gemeinsamen Herzschlags, Stunden …” (“There, hours went by, hours of mutual breaths, of mutual heartbeats, hours …”) In nine words, five repetitions. At the middle of the sentence: the repetition of the word “Fremde” (“strange”) and the word “Fremdheit” (“strangeness”). And at the end of the sentence, yet another repetition: “… weiter gehen, weiter sich verirren” (“… keep going, keep going astray”). These multiple repetitions slow the tempo and give the sentence a yearning cadence.
In the other sentence, K.’s second coition, we find the same principle of repetition: the verb “seek” repeated four times, the word “something” twice, the word “body” twice, the verb “paw” twice; and let’s not forget the conjunction “and,” which, against all the rules of syntactic elegance, is repeated four times.
In German, that sentence begins: “Sie suchte etwas und er suchte etwas …” Vialatte says something entirely different: “She was seeking something and was seeking something again …” David corrects him: “She was seeking something and so was he, on his part.” How odd: preferring to say “and so was he, on his part” rather than to translate literally Kafka’s beautiful and simple repetition: “She was seeking something and he was seeking something …”
Repetition Skill
There’s a skill to repetition. Because there certainly are bad, clumsy repetitions (as when, in the description of a dinner, the words “chair,” “fork,” and the like appear three times in two sentences). The rule: a word is repeated because it is important, because one wants its sound as well as its meaning to reverberate throughout a paragraph, a page.
Digression: An Example of the Beauty of Repetition
The very short (two-page) Hemingway story “One Reader Writes” is divided into three parts: 1) a brief paragraph describing a woman writing a letter “steadily with no necessity to cross out or rewrite anything”; 2) the letter itself, in which the woman speaks of her husband’s venereal disease; 3) the interior monologue that follows it, quoted here:
“Maybe he can tell me what’s right to do, she said to herself. Maybe he can tell me. In the picture in the paper he looks like he’d know. He looks smart, all right. Every day he tells somebody what to do. He ought to know. I want to do whatever is right. It’s such a long time though. It’s a long time. And it’s been a long time. My Christ, it’s been a long time. He had to go wherever they sent him, I know, but I don’t know what he had to get it for. Oh, I wish to Christ he wouldn’t have got it. I don’t care what he did to get it. But I wish to Christ he hadn’t ever got it. It does seem like he didn’t have to have got it. I don’t know what to do. I wish to Christ he hadn’t got any kind of malady. I don’t know why he had to get a malady.”
The entrancing melody of this passage is based entirely on repetitions. They are not a device (like rhyme in poetry), but they come out of everyday spoken language, thoroughly unpolished language.
In addition: this very short story, it seems to me, is a unique instance in the history of prose fiction where the musical intention is primordial: without that melody the text would lose its raison d’être.
Breath
By his own account, Kafka wrote his long story “The Judgment” in a single night, without interruption, that is to say at extraordinary speed, letting himself be carried along by a practically uncontrolled imagination. Speed, which later became the surrealists’ programmatic method (“automatic writing”)—allowing for the liberation of the subconscious from supervision by reason, and making the imagination explode—played roughly the same role in Kafka.
Roused by that methodical speed, the Kafkan imagination runs like a river, a dreamlike river that finds no respite till a chapter’s end. That long breath of imagination is reflected in the nature of the syntax: in Kafka’s novels, there is a near absence of colons (except for those routinely introducing dialogue) and an exceptionally modest number of semicolons. The manuscripts (in the critical edition: Fischer, 1982) show that even commas seemingly required by the rules of syntax are often lacking. The texts are divided into very few paragraphs. This tendency to minimize the articulation—few paragraphs, few strong pauses (on rereading a manuscript, Kafka often even changed periods to commas), few markers emphasizing the text’s logical organization (colons, semicolons)—is consubstantial with Kafka’s style; at the same time it is a perpetual attack on “good German style” (as well as on the “good style” of all the languages into which Kafka is translated).
Kafka made no definitive version of The Castle for the printer, and one could reasonably assume that he might still have brought in this or that correction, including punctuation. So I am not enormously shocked (not pleased, either, obviously) that Max Brod, as Kafka’s first editor, from time to time should have created a paragraph indentation or added a semicolon to make the text easier to read. Actually, even in Brod’s edition, the general character of Kafka’s syntax still shows clearly, and the novel preserves its great long breath.
Let’s go back to that third-chapter sentence: it is relatively long, with commas but no semicolons (in the manuscript and in all the German editions). So what disturbs me most in the Vialatte version of this sentence is the added semicolon. It represents the end of a logical segment, a caesura that invites one to lower the voice, take a short pause. That caesura (although correct by the rules of syntax) chokes off Kafka’s breath. David then even divides the sentence into three parts, with two semicolons. These two semicolons are all the more incongruous given that throughout the entire third chapter (according to the manuscript) Kafka uses only one semicolon. In the edition established by Max Brod there are thirteen. Vialatte reaches thirty-one. Lortholary twenty-eight, plus three colons.
Typographical Appearance
You can see the long, intoxicating flight of Kafka’s prose in the text’s typographical appearance, which is often a single “endless” paragraph, over pages, enfolding even long passages of dialogue. In Kafka’s manuscript, the third chapter is divided into just two long paragraphs. In Brod’s edition there are four. In Vialatte’s translation, ninety. In Lortholary’s translation, ninety-five. French editions of Kafka’s novels have been subjected to an articulation that is not their own: paragraphs much more numerous, and therefore much shorter, which simulate a more logical, more rational organization of the text and which dramatize it, sharply separating all the dialogue exchanges.
In no translation into other languages, to my knowledge, has the original articulation of Kafka’s texts been changed. Why have the French translators (all, unanimously) done this? They must certainly have had a reason for it. The Pléiade edition of Kafka’s novels contains over five hundred pages of notes. Yet I find not a single sentence there giving such a reason.
And Finally, a Remark on Type, Large and Small
Kafka insisted that his books be printed in very large type. These days that is recalled with the indulgent smile prompted by great men’s whims. Yet nothing about it warrants a smile; Kafka’s wish was justified, logical, serious, related to his aesthetic, or, more specifically, to his way of articulating prose.
An author who divides his text into many short paragraphs will not insist so on large type: a lavishly articulated page can be read rather easily.
By contrast, a text that flows out in an endless paragraph is very much less legible. The eye finds no place to stop or rest, the lines are easily “lost track of.” To be read with pleasure (that is, without eye fatigue), such a text requires relatively large type that makes reading easy and allows one to stop anytime to savor the beauty of the sentences.
I look through the German paperback edition of The Castle: on a small page, thirty-nine appallingly cramped lines of an “endless paragraph”: it’s illegible; or it’s legible only as information; or as a document; in any case not as a text meant for aesthetic perception. In an appendix, on some forty pages: all the passages Kafka deleted from his manuscript. They disregard Kafka’s desire (for thoroughly justified aesthetic reasons) to have his text printed in large type; they fish out all the sentences he decided (for thoroughly justified aesthetic reasons) to destroy. In that indifference to the author’s aesthetic wishes is reflected all the sadness of the posthumous fate of Kafka’s work.
FRENCH TRANSLATIONS OF THE SENTENCE
Des heures passèrent là, des heures d’haleines mêlées, de battements de coeur communs, des heures durant lesquelles K. ne cessad’éprouver l’impression qu’il se perdait, qu’il s’était enfoncé si loin que nul être avant lui n’avait fait plus de chemin; à l’étranger, dans un pays où l’air même n’avait plus rien des éléments de l’air natal, où l’on devait étouffer d’exil et où l’on ne pouvait plus rien faire, au milieu d’insanes séductions, que continuer à marcher, que continuer à se perdre.
—Alexandre Vialatte
Des heures passèrent là, des heures d’haleines mêlées, de battements de coeur confondus, des heures durant lesquelles K. ne cessa d’éprouver l’impression qu’il s’égarait, qu’il s’enfonçait plus loin qu’aucun être avant lui; il était dans un pays étranger, où l’air même n’avait plus rien de commun avec l’air du pays natal; l’étrangeté de ce pays faisait suffoquer et pourtant, parmi de folles séductions, on ne pouvait que marcher toujours plus loin, s’égarer toujours plus avant.
—Claude David
Là passèrent des heures, des heures de respirations mêlées, de coeurs battant ensemble, des heures durant lesquelles K. avait le sentiment constant de s’égarer, ou bien de s’être avancé plus loin que jamais aucun homme dans des contrées étrangères, où l’air lui-même n’avait pas un seul élément qu’on retrouvât dans l’air du pays natal, où l’on ne pouvait qu’étouffer à force d’étrangeté, sans pouvoir pourtant faire autre chose, au milieu de ces séductions insensées, que de continuer et de s’égarer davantage.
—Bernard Lortholary
Là, s’en allaient des heures, des heures d’haleines communes, de battements de coeur communs, des heures durant lesquelles K. avait sans cesse le sentiment qu’il s’égarait, ou bien qu’il était plus loin dans le monde étranger qu’aucun être avant lui, dans un monde étranger où l’air même n’avait aucun élément de l’air natal, où l’on devait étouffer d’étrangeté et où l’on ne pouvait rien faire, au milieu de séductions insensées, que continuer à aller, que continuer à s’égarer.
—Milan Kundera
* Literal English versions of the three published French translations of Kafka’s sentence are given here with the aim of enabling monolingual readers to understand the author’s argument. These are followed by the German original with an exact English translation. For Vialatte, David, and Lortholary’s translations, as well as the author’s own translation into French, see the end of this part (pp. 116–117). (Translator.)
PART FIVE
À la Recherche du Présent Perdu
1
In the middle of Spain, somewhere between Barcelona and Madrid, two people sit in the bar of a small railroad station: an American man and a girl. We know nothing about them except that they are waiting for the train to Madrid, where the girl is going to have an operation, certainly (though the word is never spoken) an abortion. We don’t know who they are, how old they are, whether or not they are in love; we don’t know the reasons that brought them to their decision. Their conversation, even though it is reproduced with extraordinary precision, gives us no understanding either of their motivations or of their past.
The girl is tense and the man is trying to calm her: “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig. It’s not really an operation at all.” And then: “I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time….” And then: “We’ll be fine afterward. Just like we were before.”
When he senses the slightest agitation on the girl’s part, he says: “Well, if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to.” And eventually, again: “You’ve got to realize that I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.”
Behind the girl’s replies, one can sense her moral scruples. Looking at the landscape, she says: “And we could have all this. And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.”
The man tries to calm her: “We can have everything….”
“No…. And once they take it away, you never get it back.”
And when the man again assures her that the operation is safe, she says: “Would you do something for me now?”
“I’d do anything for you.”
“Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”
The man says: “But I don’t want you to. I don’t care anything about it.”
“I’ll scream,” says the girl.
At this point the tension reaches its peak. The man gets up to take their bags to the other side of the station, and when he returns: “Do you feel better?”
“I feel fine. There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.” And these are the last lines of the famous story “Hills Like White Elephants,” by Ernest Hemingway.
2
What is odd about this five-page story is that from the dialogue we can imagine any number of stories: the man is married and is forcing his mistress to have an abortion to spare his wife; he is a bachelor and wants the abortion because he is worried about complicating his life; but it is also possible that he is unselfishly looking ahead to the problems a child would cause the girl; maybe—anything is imaginable—he is seriously ill and is concerned about leaving the girl on her own with a child; we can even imagine that the child’s father is some other man whom the girl left to go off with this one, who is advising her to have the abortion but stands ready, should she refuse, to take on the father role himself. And the girl? She might have agreed to the abortion to satisfy her lover; or maybe she took the initiative herself but, as the day approaches, is losing her nerve, feels guilty, and is engaging in some last verbal resistance, directed more at her own conscience than at her partner. Indeed, one could go on forever inventing the situations that might lie behind the dialogue.
