MrsDarwin is reminiscing about having translated Sartre's Huis Clos (No Exit) in college for a theater production, and I am sharing her distaste for English translations of it.
From her first post:
One thing I noticed quickly was that of the small number of translations I could find, none of them made use of Sartre's own phrasing, so essential in creating from the very first lines the ennui of Hell and the cyclical feel of the plot.
Garcin, il entre et regard autour de lui. -- Alors voila.
Le Garçon. -- Voila.
Garcin. -- C'est comme ça...
Le Garçon. -- C'est comme ça.
Stuart Gilbert's translation starts off:
Garcin [enters, accompanied by the Room-Valet, and glances around him]: Hm! So here we are?
Valet: Yes, Mr. Garcin.
Garcin: And this is what it looks like?
Valet: Yes.
You don't have to know French to see that Gilbert is padding here.
Even though I read French pretty well, I sometimes would rather read a work in English translation just so I don't have to work too hard to understand it. Not so with Huis Clos. Maybe it is just because the French isn't very difficult, but I have always found it easier to read in the original -- I encountered it first in the original, and all the English translations bug me because they aren't the play I remember.
MrsDarwin posts a sample of her own translation here. I much prefer it to the one she was working from.
Here is a little Sartre-translation story of my own:
In high school, fourth-year French, we read Sartre's Les Jeux Sont Faits, a novel with themes of powerlessness to change past choices. My teacher (really, a great teacher, one of my best) told us off-hand that the title meant something like "The Game is Up" or "The Jig is Up," but she didn't spend much time on it.
I remember being displeased with that rough translation. I knew from the context, roughly, what the title meant (along the lines of "There's no going back now"). I also recognized that neither "The Game is Up" or "The Jig is Up" really captured that meaning perfectly -- those have connotations of guilty discovery, which is technically a theme in the book but is a minor theme, not really worthy of the title. It bugged me.
This is before Wikipedia and Google, you understand.
Some years later I was watching Casablanca, some scene in the casino; extras, gamblers, placed bets in the background, and the real action was happening between the movie stars in the foreground. I would have to watch it again to find the specific scene. Suddenly my ears pricked up, because in the background the French-speaking roulette croupier was announcing that the time for placing bets was over: "Les jeux sont faits, les jeux sont faits."
I yelped, "So that's what that means!" confusing my companion. That is exactly what the title means. There is no going back now; we will only watch as the ball falls into place, and the table will be divided into winners and losers.
Idioms are fun, but you have to be able to recognize them. Googling the phrase now, I discover that the novel's title has been rendered most often as The Chips Are Down. I don't frequent Las Vegas often enough to know what roulette croupiers say there to stop people from betting as the wheel's turning begins to slow.
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