The Challenges of Translating J-J Rousseau 300 years after his birth

Russell Goulbourne est Professeur de littérature française moderne à l'Université de Leeds, en Angleterre. Sa traduction des Rêveries du promeneur solitaire de Rousseau a été publiée par l'Oxford University Press – dans sa collection des Classiques du monde – en 2011. Elle lui a valu des critiques élogieuses dans le Guardian et le supplément littéraire du Times.

Professor Russell Goulbourne

On the occasion of the 300^th anniversary of the birth of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we asked Professor Goulbourne to write a piece for the blog about the challenges of translating Rêveries du promeneur solitaire. He was very gracious in sending us the following article which, we believe, makes a substantial contribution to the blog and allows us to maintain the high standard of articles to which we aspire.

Paperback: 176 pages Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (July 7, 2011)	Broché: 222 pages     Editeur : Flammarion (4 janvier 2012)

'Bending the Bow of Ulysses':
Translating Rousseau's Rêveries

I am not the first to translate into English Rousseau's Rêveries du promeneur solitaire his last great work of introspection and self-analysis, which he left incomplete at his death in 1778. The French text was first published posthumously in Geneva in 1782; the following year the first English translation appeared, published in London in April 1783. This translation was followed by another, seven years later, published in London in November 1790. Commenting on that second translation, the Critical Review observed in March 1791: 'To translate Rousseau is a labour of difficulty; it is bending the bow of Ulysses, which few weaker hands can perform.' Translating the Reveries is indeed a 'labour of difficulty', because that is precisely what writing was for Rousseau, as he admits in Book 3 of the Confessions: 'I have turned some of my sentences over and over in my mind for five or six nights before they were ready to be committed to paper.'

This might seem not to be the case in the Reveries, given that Rousseau dismisses his work – in the first of the ten Walks that make up the text – as 'merely a shapeless account', adding: 'I shall say what I have thought just as it came to me and with as little connection as yesterday's ideas have with those of tomorrow.' However, this is not a disorderly text, but rather one shaped by the thought processes of a painstaking writer – so painstaking, in fact, that he wrote drafts of his work on playing cards while he was out walking. (These cards were found amongst Rousseau's papers after his death and are now in the Bibliothèque publique et universitaire in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.)

So the demands on the translator are high. In a sense, though, some of the demands are typical of those faced by the translator of any text from the past. Most obviously, some words have changed in meaning since the eighteenth century, so it's important to check contemporary dictionaries, such as the fourth edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française (1762). For instance, in the Second Walk, at the beginning of his famous account of being knocked down by a Great Dane, Rousseau records that he set off for a walk 'après dîner'. But this doesn't mean that he was going out for a night-time stroll; rather, as the Académie's dictionary informs us, 'dîner' is the 'repas qu'on fait ordinairement à midi' – also known as lunch. So he was out for an afternoon stroll, which meant that he could see all too clearly the huge dog as it came hurtling towards him.

But Rousseau's Rêveries pose more specific challenges too. At the macro-structural level, each of the Walks is carefully ordered, and so too, at the micro-structural level, are all of Rousseau's sentences: they are very often long, elaborate, and sinuous; in them, Rousseau characteristically deploys thought-provoking symmetries and antitheses, evocative repetitions and cadences, and poignant exclamations and interrogations; and through them, he holds in delicate tension a range of different discourses and styles, from the philosophical to the personal, from the elevated to the everyday, and even from the tragic to the comic. The artfulness of Rousseau's prose is particularly evident in the central Fifth Walk, in which Rousseau recounts his time on and beside the lac de Bienne in the west of Switzerland. Here's an extract from that Walk, both in Rousseau's French and in my English:

L'exercice que j'avais fait dans la matinée et la bonne humeur qui en est inséparable me rendaient le repos du dîner très agréable; mais quand il se prolongeait trop et que le beau temps m'invitait, je ne pouvais si longtemps attendre; et pendant qu'on était encore à table, je m'esquivais et j'allais me jeter seul dans un bateau que je conduisais au milieu du lac quand l'eau était calme, et là, m'étendant tout de mon long dans le bateau les yeux tournés vers le ciel, je me laissais aller et dériver lentement au gré de l'eau, quelquefois pendant plusieurs heures, plongé dans mille rêveries confuses mais délicieuses, et qui sans avoir aucun objet bien déterminé ni constant ne laissaient pas d'être à mon gré cent fois préférables à tout ce que j'avais trouvé de plus doux dans ce qu'on appelle les plaisirs de la vie.

My morning exercise and the good mood it invariably put me in made it very pleasant to have a relaxing lunch; but if it went on for too long and the fine weather was enticing me, I could not bear waiting, and while the others were still at the table, I would slip away and get in a boat all alone, which I would row out to the middle of the lake when it was calm, and there, stretching out full-length in the boat, my eyes looking up to the sky, I would let myself float and drift slowly wherever the water took me, sometimes for several hours at a time, plunged in a thousand vague but delightful reveries, which, although they did not have any clear or constant subject, I always found a hundred times preferable to all the sweetest things I had enjoyed in what are known as the pleasures of life.

I shall leave the reader to judge the strengths and weaknesses of that attempt faithfully to render Rousseau's French into readable English. What is clear, though, is that the artful complexity and perceptible musicality of Rousseau's prose are part and parcel of who he is: the manner and the matter are as one, and that's why translating the Rêveries is a labour of difficulty as well as of love.

 

Comments

[Rédigé par : Catherine Cauvin-Higgins]

A good choice...with a lovely rendering. Thank you for sharing, and happy first anniversary for your published translation of the Reveries!

[Rédigé par : sylvie]

Oui, le français comme toutes les langues, c'est le plaisir du son, du rythme aussi:)
Les meilleurs amants d'une langue et d'une culture sont des étrangers et certains de cette vieille culture qui luttent encore pour la préserver.
Les français ne disent jamais merci mis te taperont dans le dos en disant: Patron, remets-nous ça;)