The French Reception of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Belated Consecration

Abstract

Classics are commonly viewed as illustrious cultural artefacts expressing a national spirit. They stake out a nation's cultural identity and patrimony and contribute to build up the “imagined community” whereby Benedict Anderson defines a nation.1 In the United States, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in particular has long been considered as the expression par excellence of American culture, if not the prototype of American literature. In the later 1940s, a process that Jonathan Arac labeled academic “hypercanonization” allowed the novel to reach the highest rank within the canon of American classics and be valued in U.S. culture at large as “a masterpiece of world literature” and the “highest image of America.”2 In France, however, in spite of a few editorial attempts to elevate it as a classic, the novel remained mostly catalogued as juvenile literature until the early-twenty-first century, when its reception was radically modified by three new translations published by Bernard Hoepffner (Tristram edition, 2008), Freddy Michalski (L’Œil d'or, 2009) and Philippe Jaworski (La Pléiade, 2015)3—the entry into the illustrious Pléiade edition being the climax of literary recognition in the French cultural sphere. While previous versions had domesticated the narrative voice, thus wiping out much of the book's linguistic significance, these retranslations share a common endeavor to convey the simultaneously subversive and creative potential of Mark Twain's vernacular language, thereby allowing the novel to be recognized as a proper classic. Focusing on the canonizing process that took place in the French cultural sphere, this essay envisages it as stemming from a new ethics of translation as defined by Antoine Berman, Lawrence Venuti, and Henri Meschonnic.4 It considers how the shift from a “domesticating” approach of translation to a “foreignizing” one,5 along with the cultural positioning of the 2008, 2009 and 2015 translations, allowed the novel not only to become popular among an adult readership but to take part in the open-ended remapping of high literature across national borders.From its first French translation in 1886 through the early-twenty-first century, the reception of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in France was impaired by a process of domestication occulting the linguistic significance of the novel. Mark Twain failed to achieve proper literary recognition among the French readership in that period, contrary to most nineteenth-century American writers whose works had been valued as foreign classics by French readers and critics, whether for their literary qualities or their historical significance. By the end of the nineteenth century, translations (and retranslations) of American works flourished, disproving Ferdinand Brunetière's scornful dismissal in the prestigious Revue des Deux Mondes on 1 December 1900—“Is there just such a thing as an American literature?”6 Translations of the works of Washington Irving, Poe (famously translated by Baudelaire in 1852–1855 and Mallarmé in 1875), Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Whitman had contributed to the recognition of American literature among French readers. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in particular enjoyed considerable popularity in France, passing through eleven translations in 1852–1853.7The initial French reception of Huckleberry Finn as a book for children largely resulted from the domesticating process of translation—both a taming of the narrator's un-“sivilized” ethos and an assimilation to the aesthetic and moral values of French culture. Building up on Berman's concept of a “translation ethics” based on the relationship between the domestic and foreign cultures that is embodied in the translated text, Venuti conceded in The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference that “domestication” is an unavoidable dimension of the translating process, which “constructs a domestic representation for a foreign text and culture” and thereby produces “a domestic subject, a position of intelligibility that is also an ideological position, informed by codes and canons, interests and agendas of certain domestic social groups.” Yet translation practices “dehistoricize” foreign texts, according to Venuti, when they are “rewritten to conform to styles and themes that currently prevail in domestic literatures,” and lead to their “misrecognition” when the “domestic inscription is taken for the foreign text” itself.8Huckleberry Finn came to be misrecognized as a consequence of domesticating translation practices. As scholars have demonstrated,9 William-Little Hughes’ version, issued in 1886 and which remained the sole French translation until 1948, created a cultural misunderstanding of the novel which subsequent translations by Suzanne Nétillard (1948), René and Yolande Surleau (1950), and André Bay (1960) only partially mended.10 In various degrees, these translations normalized the narrator's non-standard language and elevated its register, thereby obliterating much of the linguistic disruptiveness and creativity of the text and hence much of its literary, ethical, and political significance.Far from the authorized translation it claims to be, Hughes’ initial version is a free adaptation of the novel meant to serve the educational ideology of the Third French Republic and to provide reading material for children.11 It abides by a pre-conceived, normative vision of juvenile literature excluding any form of linguistic, moral, and cultural disruption. It purges the novel from non-standard linguistic forms (though Jim addresses Huck as “Massa,” a marker of his status as a slave) and allows Huck to master a formal register: he uses the passé simple (“J'eus beau chercher . . . je n'y pus réussir”) and even the subjunctive past (“Ma première idée fut d’écrire à Miss Watson afin qu'elle le réclamât”), literary tenses antithetical to the orality of the original text, as well as inversions of subject and verb which are specific to a literary style, as in interrogative forms (including Jim's agrammatical “Who is you? Whar is you?” translated as “Qui êtes-vous? Où êtes-vous?”), in clauses framing direct speech (“m’écriai-je”) or following “aussi” when expressing a consequence (“Aussi fus-je”).12 Hughes also radically altered the plot, inserting apocryphal elements and cutting off disruptive passages to the effect of modifying the characterization of both Huck and Jim. For instance, he added a dialogue stating that Huck's mother had taught him how to write, making him consequently a literate and educated character—in coherence with the formal language he is here endowed with—and, as Claire Maniez points out, “intellectualizes” his perspective as a narrator.13 He also invented passages making Jim a servile character, as when he claims that he would gladly have remained a slave at Miss Watson's place had not a trader come around or when he offers to carry both the wounded Tom and Huck on his back for a whole day. Meanwhile, Hughes downplayed Jim's insight and humanity, cutting off passages where he criticizes white characters or stands watch for Huck in chapters 20 and 23.14 In Lavoie's term, this version “aseptizes” the novel and reverses the ideological stance of the text by reinforcing conventions and stereotypes instead of destabilizing them.15 The normalizing process enacted here exemplifies the “ethnocentric” attitude which Berman describes in The Experience of the Foreign as “a negative ethics” of translation—a practice which, “generally under the guise of transmissibility, carries out a systematic negation of the strangeness of the foreign work.”16Nétillard's 1948 translation pursued opposite aims. Written during the Cold War, it was prefaced by Jean Kanapa, a Marxist intellectual who celebrated Twain for his anti-imperialist commitment and stated that the collection wherein the new translation was published aimed at promoting forgotten or overlooked “classics” of the “universal progressist patrimony.”17 Nétillard's translation was praised for restoring a complete version of the plot and for the aesthetic and ethical positioning of the text: it emphasizes the novel's polyphony, creates a specific idiom to translate the African American dialect, and includes elements of orality and linguistic faultiness in dialogues, such as lexical deformation and elisions (“ézistence” for existence, “p'têt’” for peut-être, “et pis” for et puis, “y a” for il y a).18 The narrative language includes some colloquial turns (“ça,” “Bah!”) yet Nétillard remained reluctant to resort to faulty grammatical structures and abided by stylistic norms through the use of the passé simple (more often than the more colloquial passé composé) and the subjunctive past (“J'aurais bien voulu que la veuve le sût,” for “I wished the widow knowed about it”).19 The orality of the narrative language thus remained too partial to destabilize linguistic standards and fully convey the aesthetic significance of the text.20 Besides, the reception of the text seems to have been impaired by the heavy ideological frame in which the preface was set. While originally meant for an adult readership, this version was republished in 1960 as juvenile literature and was quickly overshadowed by new translations which shifted back to a more conservative approach.21 René and Yolande Surleau's 1950 version in the juvenile collection of the Bibliothèque Verte, for instance, shares some of Hughes’ normalizing strategies: it purges the plot from many of its disruptive elements (replacing Huck's drunk and violent father with his uncle in chapter 2 as a way to preserve the respectability of the father figure) and elevates the narrator's language, still using the passé simple and the subjunctive past (“Que vouliez-vous que je fisse lorsque j’étais enfermé?”).22While the author's explanatory had been omitted in the previous versions, Bay's 1960 translation integrated part of it within a note acknowledging the linguistic and literary “revolution” that Twain had operated with his novel. Yet he claimed to have remained as respectful of French grammar as possible in his own translation—a paradoxical choice which deprived the text of much of its literary significance. He introduced some markers of orality in the narrative voice yet remained reluctant to disrupt standard language. He significantly restored a correct spelling for Huck's emblematic “sivilize”—the “s” of which gives a savage twist to “civilization” and expresses his fundamental dissidence—only hinting at the original misspelling of the word in a footnote.23 Huck's language was thus still considered as a fault to be mended or redressed. Bay's version was republished in 1994 in a literary collection of translated world classics at GF-Flammarion without the translator's preliminary note and with a scholarly introduction by Claude Grimal offering an insightful literary analysis of the text demonstrating its literary significance and unsettling of linguistic norms, with a special mention of the irony of Huck's misspelling of “civilize.” Yet the translator's own reluctance to disrupt established standards of linguistic correctness curtailed the literary recognition of the book and left its aesthetic significance unnoticed—except among the few readers who had direct knowledge of the original text and in academia, where the text was recognized as part of the American literary canon.24The normalization of Huck's language effected by these translations undermines the very principle whereby the novel, after being banned by the Concord, Massachusetts, library committee, came to define a new and specifically American literary tradition. As Myra Jehlen notes, Huckleberry Finn was eventually celebrated in the United States as the archetypal American novel for the very roughness which had initially caused it to be rejected by the literary establishment.25 Besides, even though it was at odds with literary standards (mostly inherited from Europe) when the novel came out, the creativity of Huck's language draws on a dynamics of linguistic innovation which is constitutive of the American language. In the nineteenth century, Americans “created new words by the hundreds” and “gave new meaning to old ones.”26 While the historicity of the original text can by no means be restored, the obliteration of such linguistic creativity plays out a “domesticating” practice of translation which “dehistoricize[s]” the text and “remove[s] [it] from the foreign literary tradition where [it] draw[s] [its] significance.” A “foreignizing” practice of translation, Venuti writes, might instead “signify the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text.”27The translators’ long-lasting reluctance to confront Huck's language may be due to the cultural and moral standards of juvenile literature, but also to the resistance of the French language to such linguistic innovations. Only progressively over the course of the twentieth century did a linguistic change actually take place in French literature in the wake of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Raymond Queneau opening up new possibilities in the field of translation. With the free use of orality, slang, as well as lexical and syntactical disruption on the narrative plane, the notion of bon usage lost much of its relevance to literature. Works of literary criticism like Roland Barthes's Le Degré zero de l’écriture (1953) also contributed to bring linguistic standards into question.28 Such changes in the literary sphere authorized and legitimized a more disruptive and creative treatment of language in the field of translation, which in the case of Huckleberry Finn occurred belatedly.A turning point took place with Hoepffner's and Michalski's translations of the novel published in 2008 and 2009 respectively, which share a common endeavor to confront the creative and subversive potential of its language. These two versions bear the stamp of what Barbara Godard identified in 2001 as the “ethical turn” of translation, which followed from the publication of Berman's L'Epreuve de l’étranger in 1984 (translated by Venutti as “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign”) and Venuti's works in the 1990s. They perform a “foreignizing” approach of translation which Venuti, developing Berman's ethics of translation, defines as “a translation practice deviating from native norms to stage an alien reading experience,” as opposed to domesticating practices which submit the foreign text to the linguistic and cultural norms of the receiving culture.29Hoepffner's project to retranslate the book directly originated from the observation that in the early-twenty-first century, Twain's image in France was still that of a juvenile entertainer rather than a major writer and that only a minority of French readers had actually read Huckleberry Finn. He meant to give his readers a sense of how Twain had turned the vernacular language into literature, making the novel the first truly piece of American literature which Hemingway famously celebrated, so as to pull his works out of the “ghetto” of juvenile literature (as had been done for Stevenson and Conrad, he said, and should also be done for Swift).30 The “jolly leonine man writing for children had to be changed into one of America's greatest writers,” Hoepffner wrote.31 This concern converged with the editorial project of the Tristram publishing house to retranslate challenging classics. A non-conformist and proudly small, provincial edition, Tristram owes its name to its inaugural publication of a French translation of Sterne's Tristram Shandy and self-derisively presents itself as an association of “wrongdoers lighting up literary firecrackers”32—an edition interested in texts that jolt literary and cultural conventions. For Jean-Hubert Gailliot, co-founder of the edition, the new translation of Huckleberry Finn was designed to give broader access to the very novel which marks the birth of an anti-racist consciousness in American literature.33 Tristram's project was consequently to give a sense of the cultural value that the text originally played within U.S. culture. Michalski's edition, issued by the publishing house L’Œil d'or, founded in 1999, is also small and unconventional, an eclectic edition selecting favorites with a purpose of breaking new paths for readers.34 As a translator, Michalski felt challenged by the higher flexibility and creativity of the American language and claimed that the United States has had “the great happiness not to know Vaugelas,” a grammarian who defined the bon usage of the French language in the seventeenth century.35From their unconventional editorial standpoint, the two translations offer new perspectives on the text. Contrary to previous translations which conformed to standards of lexical and grammatical correctness at least in the narrative frame, these two primarily stand out for addressing the narrator's vernacular language. As T. S. Eliot pointed out in a famous statement, the “innovation” and “new discovery in the English language” which Twain accomplished with this novel was to use oral language in the narrative frame: “Other authors had achieved natural speech in relation to particular characters—Scott with characters talking Lowland Scots, Dickens with cockneys: but no one else had kept it up through the whole of a book.”36 Respecting the principle of a text narrated by a semi-literate youth, Hoepffner and Michalski crafted a new idiom conveying the simultaneously disruptive and creative capacity of the vernacular language. The object here is not to conduct an exhaustive analysis of the linguistic disruption at work in these translations, which in Hoepffner's case has already been done,37 but to consider how a new ethics of translation allowed the novel to play out its aesthetic potential.The two translations converge with Henri Meschonnic's statement in his Ethics and Politics of Translating that it is “what a text does” to language that is at stake in the activity of translating rather than just the meaning of words.38 The French poet and translator argued that the object of translation is to give a sense of the way the text affects language—its disruption and creativity in this particular case. Hoepffner accordingly claimed that his own strategy as a translator of Huckleberry Finn had been to disrupt the French language from within, just as Twain had done with the English language.39Contrary to previous translators, Hoepffner and Michalski crafted an aesthetics of orality based on non-standard forms, including misspelling, syllabic alteration, neologisms, onomatopoeia, and incorrect grammatical structures—with divergences since Michalski brought linguistic disruption to a higher degree than Hoepffner. Thus Hoepffner translates Huck's “sivilize” as “siviliser” and Michalski as “ziviliser,” adding mispronunciation to misspelling. They both resort to syllabic alteration as a way to suggest oral inflections in the narrative language just as in dialogues. Hoepffner, for instance, writes “chimnée” for cheminée (“chimbly”), “pasqu'il” for parce qu'il, and in dialogues “kekfois” for quelquefois and “kekchose” for quelque chose, while Michalski resorts to syllabic alteration in a more systematic way, including vowel or consonantal elision: “v'la” (for voilà), “y” (for il) as in “y avait” (il y avait) or “y z'on” (for ils ont), “y z’étaient” (for ils étaient), or “si z'avaient” (for s'ils avaient).Both translators subverted linguistic norms in such a way as to create a new lexicon while also conveying the humorous dimension of the novel—Huck's vernacular voice being, in Harold Beaver's words, both “the culmination of one strand of American humor” “and the origin of a modern American prose style.”40 To translate Huck's “preforeordestination,” a conflation of “predestination” and “foreordination,” Hoepffner created the word “préordestination” and Michalski “préordidestination,” both cases conflating “préordination” and “prédestination,” while Bay had restored “prédestination.”41 Aunt Sally's “putrefied with astonishment” is rendered by Hoepffner as “putréfiée d’étonnement” and by Michalski as “j'en suis restée putrifiée” (a blending of pétrifiée and putréfiée) while Bay had restored a correct phrase with “pétrifiée d’étonnement.”42 Hoepffner and Michalski also coined neologisms based on Huck's own ways, such as “une tonsuration précoce” (Michalski) or “chauvitude prématurée” (Hoepffner) for the Dolphin's “premature balditude” (in the Duke's words).43 Likewise, for “majestying” Hoepffner and Michalski respectively coined “majestiser” and “majestifier,” where Bay had used a standard, idiomatic phrase (“lui donner du ‘Majesté’”).44 To compensate for lost neologisms such as “spider-webby,” they also introduced coinages in Huck's manner in instances where the original text uses standard words, like “gripper” for grimper (to climb up) in Hoepffner's text or “des escroqueurs” for des escrocs (confidence men) in Michalski's.45Translation here comes close to literary creation, or rather—following both Michalski's and Hoepffner's claims—to a form of handicraft, a confrontation with the linguistic material to create something new. Through their common endeavor to convey Huck's subversive and creative treatment of language, these translations allow the French language to be modified by the original text. The process exemplifies Berman's definition of the “ethical aim” of translation as a practice staging “an opening, a dialogue, a cross-breeding, a decentering” of the domestic language and culture, registering the foreignness of the original text and enriching the receiving language.46 In the wake of Berman's analysis, Venuti therefore argues that translations are “texts in their own right,” involving a form of authorship never duly acknowledged due to the well-established illusory ideal of translation transparency and non-interference with the original text.47Rather than a jolting of the French language, the foreignizing process at work on the lexical plane implies a dialogue between the American and French cultures. Though there is by definition no preexisting example for Huck's idiom, Hoepffner drew some of his inspiration from twentieth-century French literature. To hone his style, he reread Queneau and Céline, who both generalized the use of orality in narration and turned it into a new literary language (though not in the same way as Twain). Hoepffner borrowed one of Queneau's coinages from Zazie dans le métro (1959), “voilatipa” (ne voilà-t-il pas), which he used twice to translate standard phrases (“sure enough” and “lo and behold”). Queneau's word itself is in line with Gavroche's own “keksekça” (qu'est-ce que c'est que ça) in Les Misérables, so that the intertextual echo inscribes the translated novel within a French literary tradition. Hoepffner also borrowed Queneau's “kikelà” (“qui est là”) for Jim's “Who dah” in chapter 2 while Michalski used a spoken form with slighter syllabic alteration (“Y a quéqu'un?”). Taking his cue from Queneau and Céline—as well as Jacques Roubaud (a disciple of Queneau's and a member of the Oulipo movement) whom he had previously translated—as well as from Twain's own use of visual markers and syllabic alteration to render oral forms, Hoepffner coined neologisms based on the transcription of sonorities or on the conflation of distinct words. While Bay translated the slang term “sockdolager” with the standard terms “éclairs et grondements,” Hoepffner coined “tintamaramdam,”48 a conflation of tintamare and ramdam (two words referring to noise), which is fully in line with Queneau's “Doukipudonktan,” the opening word of Zazie. Hoepffner's practice of translation thus involves a transnational linguistic and literary dialogue which makes Twain a contemporary of twentieth-century French writers, if not their heir when the French text incorporates their legacy.The foreignizing approach of the text also depends on rhythm, which Meschonnic placed at the core of his reflection on the ethics and politics of translation. Diagnosing a state of cultural deafness, he called for a sensory approach of translation based on the idea that texts generate meaning through their poetic power of expression rather than just their semantic content—“the sense of language, not the meaning of words.” He argued that a text's power of expression strongly depends on its rhythm understood not in its ordinary sense (the alternation of strong and weak beats) but as the “movement of speech,” based on syntactical structure, sentence length, punctuation, as well as prosodic, consonantal or vocalic patterns.49The movement of speech is a primary principle of characterization in Twain's works of fiction and first and foremost in Huckleberry Finn. Looking back at the composition of his novels, he insisted that his characters developed from their talk: I never deliberately sat down and “created” a character in my life. [. . .] One of the persons I write about begins to talk this way and another, and pretty soon I find that these creatures of the imagination have developed into characters, and have for me a distinct personality. They are not “made,” they just grow naturally out of the subject. That was the way Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and other characters came to exist.50Within the novel's polyphony, Huck's language defines a specific ethos, a way of being as well as a specific relation to the world. It conveys the immediacy of his vision and develops into a subject who is in tune with nature, naive but also inherently dissident in his refusal to be “sivilized.” His style conveys a naive vision which Tony Tanner defines as a “deliberate attempt to regard reality with minimum reference to previous familiarity and interpretative knowledge”; his “simple phrases have an elemental potency stirring in them,” revealing his “almost primitive, reverent response to nature in all her moods.” The vernacular style also has a “strong ‘democratic’ undertow” expressing the “presupposition that all men will respond to its imagery and accents.”51Hoepffner, whose interest in rhythm seems to have been shaped by his reading of Meschonnic,52 paid close attention to the novel's movement of speech, and more specifically to the unprecedented use of multiple coordination which had not been conveyed in previous translations. Noting that the use of the conjunction “and” is more frequent in this novel than in any other text in the English language except for the translation of the Bible, he adopted a specific method to convey this style as adequately as possible, though not in a systematic way since the French language offers more resistance to multiple coordination than the English one: he reread the original text seven times in a row to become attuned to its specific movement of speech and quickly jotted down a first draft.53 He claimed that this practice of spontaneous translation brought him closer to the text's specific movement of speech and allowed him to use more syntactic coordination than with a more pondered approach.54Multiple coordination in the novel expresses a sense of simplicity and plainness which is fully in tune with the ethics of a simple life in nature. It often occurs in passages where Huck describes his life away from civilization, as in “I got into my old rags, and my sugarhogshead again, and was free and satisfied,” where Hoepffner preserved multiple coordination (“J'ai remis mes vieux haillons, et j'ai retrouvé ma barrique de sucre, et j’étais de nouveau libre et satisfait”). Michalski also avoided the use of a hypotactic structure to translate this sentence but resorted to a different strategy, combining coordination with an appositive structure (“J'ai renfilé mes vieux habits et je suis retourné vivre dans ma barrique à sucre, enfin libre et heureux”).55 Like Hoepffner, Michalski placed primary importance on the rhythm of a text, which he saw as the source of its subjective impact.56Polysyndeton and parataxis shape what Beaver has termed Huck's “Mississippi style,” a “loafing” style that “drifts as he drifts,” his “verbal raft.”57 It expresses a particular ethos and unsurprisingly recurs in passages relating life on the river, as in the following lines: Once or twice of a night we would see a steamboat slipping along in the dark, and now and then she would belch a whole world of sparks up out of her chimbleys, and they would rain down in the river and look awful pretty; then she would turn a corner and her lights would wink out and her pow-wow shut off and leave the river still again; and by and by her waves would get to us, a long time after she was gone, and joggle the raft a bit, and after that you wouldn't hear nothing for you couldn't tell how long, except frogs or something. (Chapter 19, pp. 136–37)Hoepffner's translation of the passage here again preserved the principle of multiple coordination,58 while Michalski omitted the conjunction in some cases, replacing it once with a relative subordinate clause and otherwise just using commas, thereby keeping subordination to a low level.59 In contrast, Bay's translation had split Huck's long sentence into four shorter ones, breaking the flow of the original text.By drawing attention to Huck's voice, style and vision and by conveying the humorous dimension of the novel's linguistic disruption, Hoepffner's and Michalski's translations allowed the novel to be rediscovered and popularized among a mature readership. They lit up a surge of interest in Twain's work among French readers, as can be seen from the subsequent plethora of newspapers, magazines, blogs, cultural center conferences, and radio programs focusing on his life and work or on Huckleberry Finn. France Culture, the national public radio's cultural channel, broadcast a presentation of Twain's life and work in 2013 referencing both Hoepffner's and Michalski's translations. It was followed with an interview of Collège de Franc