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Translation as illustration: the visual paradigm in Mallarmé’s translations of Poe

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02666286.2014.938531

1943-2178

Dominique Jullien,

Historical and Literary Studies

AbstractFocusing on Mallarmé's translations of Poe, this essay articulates two issues: on the one hand, the foreignizing ideal which dominated translation practice and theory in nineteenth century France; on the other hand, the "pictorialist poetics" (in David Scott's terms) prevalent in nineteenth-century French culture and literature, with its exceptional intensity of interarts relations. In privileging foreignizing choices, translation theory followed the same trend as painting or travel writing: departing from the classical ideal of domestication, local color, the picturesque, and the exotic were prized, all in the name of visual effects. When translating Poe's notoriously untranslatable poems, specifically "The Bells" and "The Raven", this study argues, Mallarmé's foreignizing choice of a prose translation (with the consequent and inevitable forsaking of Poe's quintessential musicality) required the transposition of musical effects into visual ones: thus the translation of Poe's poetry was shaped by a theoretical model analogous to Jakobson's "intersemiotic translation". This strategy was best exemplified by the joint Lesclide edition of "Le Corbeau" illustrated by Edouard Manet (1875), where the translation was complemented and indeed completed by the illustrations. Revisiting some well-studied questions (pertaining to translation theory and to pictorialist poetics) the present essay situates Mallarmé's translations at their point of convergence, and shows that these translations are best understood when framed by the debate on artistic transposition. In turn, this helps account for the high degree of self-representation observable in both text and images: this search for self through another's text or another's artistic medium, it is suggested, rests on a profoundly Mallarméan mechanism of failure-and-transposition.Keywords: translation theorypictorialist poeticsEdgar Allan PoeStéphane MallarméCharles BaudelaireÉdouard Manet Notes1 – Stéphane Mallarmé, "Edgar Poe," in Médaillons et portraits, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bertrand Marchal, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2 vols. vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1998) 145. All further references are to this edition.2 – Juliet Wilson-Bareau and Breon Mitchell document this commercial failure in their study, "Tales of a Raven: the Origins and Fate of Le Corbeau by Mallarmé and Manet," Print Quarterly 6, no. 3 (1989): 258–307. François Chapon credits "Le Corbeau" with initiating a new era in book illustration, bringing about a "transformation du concept d'illustration." François Chapon, Le Peintre et le livre: L'âge d'or du livre illustré en France, 1870–1970 (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), 9.3 – David Scott, Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).4 – In addition to the studies mentioned in note 2, the following have dealt extensively with the iconic Lesclide "Corbeau": Ségolène Le Men, "Manet et Doré: L'illustration du Corbeau de Poe," Nouvelles de l'estampe 78 (1984): 4–21; Penny Florence, Mallarmé, Manet, and Redon: Visual and Aural Signs and the Generation of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Burton R. Pollin, Images of Poe's Works: A Comprehensive Descriptive Catalogue of Illustrations (New York: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1989); "Le journal du Corbeau. Dossier reconstitué par Michael Pakenham à partir de la Correspondance jusqu'à ce jour inédite de l'éditeur Richard Lesclide," in Edgar Allan Poe, Le Corbeau, traduction de Stéphane Mallarmé, illustrations par Édouard Manet, ed. Michael Pakenham (Paris: Séguier, 1994), 1–99; Michael Pakenham, "Le Fleuve et Le Corbeau illustrés par Manet, problèmes d'édition et de réception du livre de peintre au xixe siècle," in L'Illustration. Essais d'iconographie, ed. Maria Teresa Caracciolo and Ségolène Le Men (Paris: Klincksieck, 1999), 365–80; Michèle Hannoosh, "From Nevermore to Eternity: Mallarmé, Manet and "The Raven,"" in The Dialogue between Painting and Poetry. Livres d'artistes 1874–1999, ed. Jean Khalfa (Cambridge: Black Apollo Press, 2001), 37–57; Mireille Ruppli and Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau, Mallarmé, la grammaire et le grimoire (Geneva: Droz, 2005). Naturally, this fascination is also shared by poets and artists, as we can see from a number of editions, sequels, and books-about-a-book, among which the playful variations by Michel Butor: Michel Butor, Stéphane Mallarmé, Axel Cassel, and Edgar A. Poe, Réminiscences du Corbeau (n.p.: Éditions Luigi Mormino, 1982) and Michel Butor, John F. Koenig, Edgar A. Poe, and Jane Otmezguine, Le Corbeau revient vers la côte Nord-Ouest (Nice: Jane Otmezguine Éditeur, 1998); Claude Cluny, Le Livre des quatre corbeaux: Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Pessoa, peintures de Júlio Pomar (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1998) 5th edition, or the bilingual, three-text edition The Raven/Le Corbeau (Paris: Éditions du Boucher, 2002). The Spanish language tradition also has a long and rich history of engaging with both Poe and Mallarmé (and additionally, Borges): see for instance Edgar A. Poe and Francisco Pino, Traducción infiel de El Cuervo de Edgar A. Poe: con un poema, ocho poeturas y prólogo (Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, 1997).5 – According to Schleiermacher, the translator has a choice between two possibilities: "Either the translator leaves the author in peace as much as possible and moves the reader toward him; or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the writer toward him" (Friedrich Schleiermacher, "On the Different Methods of Translating," quoted in Lawrence Venuti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader (New York & London: Routledge, 2004), 49). On the German Romantic foreignizing position, see also Venuti, The Translator's Invisibility: a History of Translation (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 15–16.6 – L'Iliade, traduction nouvelle en vers français, précédée d'un Essai sur l'épopée homérique, trad. Anne Bignan, 2 vols. (Paris: Belin-Mandar, 1830). See Appendix.7 – Homère, Iliade, trad. Leconte de Lisle (Paris: A. Lemerre, 1882). See Appendix.8 – "Les Érynnies," in Poèmes tragiques (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1884), 262, line 4.9 – Homère, Odyssée, trad. Leconte de Lisle (Paris: A. Lemerre, 1877), Rhapsodie 7, 101, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k2003192 (accessed September 16, 2014). A similar phenomenon was occurring in England, with William Morris's "deliberately, consciously archaic" translations of the Odyssey and the Aeneid. See Susan Bassnett, ed., Translation Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 71. On the archaizing tendency, see also Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader, 141–45.10 – Leconte de Lisle Œuvres diverses, vol. 4 (Paris: Les Belles-Lettres, 1978), 479. Also quoted in Scott, Pictorialist Poetics, 93. Serge Meitinger stresses the Parnassian poet's "mise en évidence du caractère d'abord plastique et quasi visuel de l'image poétique." See Serge Meitinger, "Leconte de Lisle ou la passion du pittoresque," Revue Grand Océan 6 (1995): http://www.lrdb.fr/articles.php?lng=fr&pg=621, mis en ligne en septembre 2007.11 – Remy de Gourmont, La Culture des idées (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1900), 40, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k810225/f1.image.12 – Ibid., 40.13 – Ibid., 20.14 – Ibid., 40.15 – Ibid.16 – Interestingly, the terms of the debate were also applied to translations from Arabic. When Joseph-Charles Mardrus published his foreignizing translation of The Thousand and One Nights at the turn of the century, Michel Arnauld, one of the reviewers of the new translation for the Revue blanche, quoted Gourmont's appreciation of Leconte de Lisle's translation to apply it to Mardrus. See Dominique Jullien, Les Amoureux de Schéhérazade: Variations modernes sur Les Mille et Une Nuits (Geneva: Droz, 2009), 107–8.17 – Gourmont, La Culture des idées, 40.18 – Stéphane Mallarmé, "Préface de 1876 à Beckford," in Vathek, 2: 6.19 – Defending the "orthographe germanique" he adopted in his Récits des temps mérovingiens, Augustin Thierry claims that the foreignizing spelling was necessary to convey the true color: "cette restitution était ici une convenance inhérente au sujet. Elle contribue à la vérité de la couleur [emphasis added] dans ces récits, où j'ai mis en scène les diverses populations de la Gaule conquise; elle forme un contraste qui sépare, en quelque sorte, les hommes de races différentes. Si le lecteur s'étonne de trouver changés des noms qu'il croyait bien connaître, de rencontrer des syllabes dures et des lettres insolites, cette surprise même sera utile, en rendant plus marquées les distinctions que j'ai voulu établir." Récits des temps mérovingiens, Précédés de Considérations sur l'histoire de France, 6 vols, (Paris: Furne, 1866), 1: 261.20 – Scott, Pictorialist Poetics.21 – Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 2: 744. All further references are to this edition.22 – On Mallarmé's ties to many of the major artists of his time, see Lloyd J. Austin, "Mallarmé critique d'art," in Francis Haskell, Anthony Levi, and Robert Shackleton, eds., The Artist and the Writer in France: Essays in Honour of Jean Seznec (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 153–62.23 – See Scott, Pictorialist Poetics, 61. He also points to technological advances that allow interpenetration of illustration and text.24 – On this short-lived collaboration, see Alexia Kalantzis, "Remy de Gourmont et L'Ymagier (1894–1896), une utilisation symboliste du rapport texte–image," in L'Europe des revues (1880–1920): Estampes, photographies, illustrations, ed. Évanghélia Stead and Hélène Védrine (Paris: PUPS, 2008), 279–94, esp. 281.25 – This is not to say that this fraternité des arts as a practice was unproblematic during the nineteenth century. Recent work has shown that the ideal of artistic brotherhood came under increasing strain at the end of that period, particularly because of a shift in balance between image and text with the expansion of illustrated journals: this is what Évanghélia Stead and Hélène Védrine argue in "La force et l'expansion de l'image," in L'Europe des revues, 7–11, esp. 10.26 – "Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems." Roman Jakobson, "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation," in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987), 429. While in this definition Jakobson seems to privilege a single direction (from verbal to nonverbal), later on in his essay he broadens the definition into "transposition … from one system of signs into another" (435).27 – Albert Thibaudet, Intérieurs. Baudelaire, Fromentin, Amiel (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1924), 124; quoted in Scott, Pictorialist Poetics, 21. Emphasis added. Baudelaire also uses the word traduire; he remarks in "Le Paysage," in his Salon de 1859: "Tout paysagiste qui ne sait pas traduire un sentiment par un assemblage de matière végétale ou minérale n'est pas un artiste" (Œuvres complètes, 2: 660). Tom Conley comments on the passage as follows: "The artist is … viewed as an exemplary translator who turns matter into objects of contemplation" (Tom Conley, "Colors in Translation: Baudelaire and Rimbaud," in Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 177–95, p. 179).28 – Baudelaire, "À quoi bon la critique?," in Salon de 1846, 2: 418. Because of this emphasis on subjectivity and rêverie, Scott argues, "much nineteenth-century literary art criticism was to become more or less poetry in prose" (Pictorialist Poetics, 22).29 – See David Kelley, "Transpositions," in Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Peter Collier and Robert Lethbridge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 178.30 – Théophile Gautier, "Introduction," L'Artiste (14 décembre 1856): 4, quoted in Lois Cassandra Hamrick, "Au-delà de la traduction: Baudelaire, Gautier et le dictionnaire du poète-artiste-critique," in Langues du xixe siècle, ed. Graham Falconer, Andrew Oliver, and Dorothy Speirs (Toronto: Centre d'Études Romantiques Joseph Sablé, 1998), 215–32, p. 216.31 – Baudelaire, Œuvres, "Avis du traducteur," 2: 347.32 – Baudelaire, Œuvres, "Études sur Poe," 2: 274.33 – Ibid., 2: 336. "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe".34 – Baudelaire, preface to the translation of "The Philosophy of Composition": "La Genèse d'un poëme," Œuvres, 2: 344. See Haskell M. Block, "Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and the Problem of the Untranslatable," in Translation Perspectives, ed. Marilyn Gaddis Rose (New York: SUNY Binghamton, 1984), 104–12.35 – "J'accepte cette tâche comme un legs de Baudelaire," Mallarmé wrote to Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, who had asked him for translations of Poe for his literary journal. See Block, "Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé," 106.36 – Mallarmé, "Scolies," Œuvres complètes, 2: 771. It is possible that the word chosen by Mallarmé, "calque," is a reference to Chateaubriand's preface to his translation of Milton's Paradise Lost, itself a manifesto in favor of foreignizing translation: "J'ai calqué le poëme de Milton à la vitre; je n'ai pas craint de changer le régime des verbes lorsqu'en restant plus français j'aurais fait perdre à l'original quelque chose de sa précision, de son originalité ou de son énergie" (Remarques sur la traduction du Paradis perdu de Milton (Paris: Renault et Cie, libraires-éditeurs, 1861), iii–iv, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5452523p, accessed September 16, 2014). I am grateful to Hélène Védrine for pointing out this intertextual connection.37 – Mallarmé, "Notes sur les poèmes: Les Cloches," Œuvres complètes, 2: 781.38 – Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, 2: 744–45. See Appendix. The earlier versions of "Les Cloches" are included in a "Dossier des Poèmes d'Edgar Poe" which gives two slightly different translations ("Premier jet" and "État corrigé," both 1860): there Mallarmé kept much closer to the verse format, the rhythms, and the repetitions (Œuvres complètes, 2: 801–803 and 817–20).39 – Mallarmé, "Scolies," 2: 781.40 – Ibid. Blémont's translation of "Les Cloches," with illustrations by Henri Guérard, was published in 1876 by Lesclide, the same publisher who issued Mallarmé's "Corbeau" with illustrations by Manet. See Évanghélia Stead, "De la revue au livre: Notes sur un paysage éditorial diversifié à la fin du xixe siècle," Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France 4 (décembre 2007): 803–23, esp. 813, and Luce Abélès's article in this issue, "Les traductions illustrées d'Edgar Poe en France (1855–1914)."41 – However, at other times Mallarmé proved perfectly capable of retaining alliterations in his translation, for instance in the following passage describing the rustling of the curtains: "And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain / Thrilled me," translated by Mallarmé as "Et de la soie l'incertain et triste bruissement en chaque rideau purpural me traversait" ("Le Corbeau," Œuvres complètes, 2: 731), a close echo of Baudelaire's "Et le soyeux, triste et vague bruissement des rideaux pourprés me pénétrait." See Claude Cluny, Le Livre des quatre corbeaux. Interestingly, Pessoa's 1924 translation of "O Corvo" is the most effortlessly close to the original.42 – See Suzanne Bernard's analysis on the connection between the prose translation and the prose poem as a genre, in Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu'à nos jours (Paris: Libraire Nizet, 1959, repr. 1988), 33–4.43 – See Scott, Pictorialist Poetics, 60, and Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, 2: 736. On the constant "affinité entre pointe et plume", see E. Stead, "Gravures textuelles: un genre littéraire," Romantisme 118 (2002): 113–32, esp. 121–22.44 – See Wilson-Bareau and Mitchell, "Tales of a Raven," 262.45 – Arsène Houssaye defends illustration on the grounds that it has the same effect on the reader as a translation: "Feuilletez un livre illustré que vous avez lu autrefois; ce sera comme si vous voyiez jouer en langue étrangère une pièce à vous bien connue: Hamlet ou Les Brigands" ("Le livre illustré" (1877), quoted in Philippe Kaenel, Le Métier d'illustrateur, 1830–1880 (Geneva: Droz, 2005), 7).46 – Le Siècle (13 June 1875), quoted in Wilson-Bareau and Mitchell, "Tales of a Raven," 265.47 – Paris-Journal (17 July 1875), quoted in Wilson-Bareau and Mitchell, "Tales of a Raven," 265.48 – See Kaenel, ""Illustration," "Illustrer," de 1830 à 1875," annexe 1 in Le Métier d"illustrateur, 597–601.49 – Such seems to have been also the intention of the Pléiade edition, which reproduced the raven directly opposite Mallarmé's "Le Corbeau" (2: 730).50 – Mallarmé, "Notes sur les poèmes: Le Corbeau," Œuvres complètes, 2: 771.51 – Ibid., 772.52 – Sarah Whitman, Poe's former muse and fiancée, thanking Mallarmé for her copy of "Le Corbeau," nevertheless confessed to being baffled by this last picture: see Wilson-Bareau and Mitchell, "Tales of a Raven," 267.53 – Mallarmé, "Sur l'évolution littéraire [Enquête de Jules Huret]," Œuvres complètes, 2: 700.54 – See Rosemary Lloyd, Mallarmé, The Poet and his Circle (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1999), 123, and Anna Sigrídur Arnar, The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist's Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 106–07, 132 and 138.55 – Venuti takes issue with the "illusion of transparency" prevalent in contemporary practice. See "Invisibility," The Translator's Invisibility, 1.56 – Baudelaire to Théophile Thoré [c. June 20, 1864], in Correspondance, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 2: 386, quoted in Andreas Wetzel, "Poe/Baudelaire: Poetics in Translation," Cincinnati Romance Review 6 (1987): 59–72, p. 62. Wetzel describes Baudelaire's translation and creation of a French Poe as "an act of repossession" (63). However, more recently, Michel Brix cautions against the "soul mate" theory, pointing out Baudelaire's ambivalence toward the American master and the time and effort spent translating his works. See Michel Brix, "Baudelaire, 'disciple' d'Edgar Poe?," Romantisme 122 (2003): 55–69, esp. 57–60.57 – Mallarmé to Paul Verlaine, November 16, 1885, Œuvres complètes, 1: 788.58 – Fritz Gutbrodt, "Poedelaire: Translation and the Volatility of the Letter," Diacritics 22, no. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 1992): 49–68. In the same vein, we might note the striking resemblance between two of Manet's etched portraits (one of Poe, intended for the Memorial Volume put together by Sara Sigourney Rice, and one of Baudelaire submitted for Charles Asselineau's biography), reproduced in Wilson-Bareau and Mitchell, "Tales of a Raven," 292, figs. 135 and 136.59 – Mallarmé, "Scolies," 768. Such is the grip of Baudelaire's translation of Poe in French culture that virtually the only works known to French readers, to this day, are those Baudelaire translated. Jany Berretti speaks of a "traduction obstructrice," in "E. A. Poe en traduction française: questions méthodologiques," Revue de littérature comparée 63, no. 2 (1989): 189.60 – Mallarmé, Quelques médaillons et portraits en pied, 2: 146–7. See R. Lloyd, 128, on Mallarmé's medallion of Manet, written more than ten years after the painter's death. The poem, she argues, doubles as a self-portrait of the artist facing the crowd's incomprehension. In the same vein, Borges evoked the merging of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam and his English translator Edward FitzGerald into a single poet: "Death and vicissitudes and time led one to know the other and make them into a single poet," Jorge Luis Borges, "The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald," in Selected Non-Fiction, ed. Eliot Weinberger (Penguin Books, 1999), 368.61 – See Simon Abrahams, "Gauguin's Stéphane Mallarmé (1891)," Every Painter Paints Himself, last modified November 8, 2010, http://www.everypainterpaintshimself.com/…/gauguins_stephane_mallarme/62 – Mallarmé's last letter to his wife and daughter, written September 8, 1898, the day before his death (Œuvres complètes, 1: 821). Emphasis added.63 – Yves Bonnefoy, "La traduction au sens large: À propos d'Edgar Poe et de ses traducteurs," Littérature 150 (juin 2008): 9–24, p. 22. On Bonnefoy's theory of translation, in particular the idea that verse should only be translated into verse (albeit free verse), see the preface to his 2007 translations of Shakespeare's poems: Shakespeare, Les Sonnets, précédés de "Vénus et Adonis", "Le Viol de Lucrèce," "Phénix et Colombe," trans. Yves Bonnefoy (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 36, as well as his preface to his earlier translation (1993) of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece "Traduire en vers ou en prose," reprinted in the 2007 edition, 316. By an interesting paradox, Bonnefoy himself reverted to prose in his new translation of "Venus and Adonis," arguing that it was better suited to the pictorial quality of the poem, a choice he described as "abdiquer la virtualité poétique pour des effets de peinture" (Les Sonnets, 325).64 – Bonnefoy, "La traduction au sens large," 23.65 – Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (London: Penguin Classics, 1986), 91.66 – Œuvres complètes, 2: 744.67 – Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, 77.68 – Œuvres complètes de Baudelaire (Paris: Louis Conard, 1936), 19 vols, vol. 9: Traductions: Eureka, Genèse d'un poème, Le Corbeau, Méthode de composition, par Poe, p.155.69 – Œuvres complètes, 2: 731.