Les Verts Research Articles

Borges Translates Joyce Who Translates Himself

Borges Translates Joyce Who Translates Himself Mark Harman (bio) Only three years after the first appearance of Ulysses in Paris, Jorge Luis Borges calls himself, with uncharacteristic immodesty, “the first Hispanic adventurer” to have reached the shores of Ulysses. Yet his pioneering 1925 review of the novel is ambivalent. Although he praises Joyce’s artistic audacity and stylistic prowess, that of “a millionaire of words and styles,” he infuses the piece with barbed comments, especially about the inordinate demands Joyce makes on his readers. Yet he also pays homage to Joyce by appending to the review his partial translation of the final “Penelope” chapter of Ulysses. However, in “Fragment on Joyce,” a piece written to mark Joyce’s death in Zurich in 1941, he claims that he did not so much read as skim the book, savoring only individual passages and scenes. Borges’s upsetting of received opinion about translation is legendary. In his view, translations are not necessarily inferior to so-called originals: In “The Homeric Versions,” he suggests that all writers can do is create drafts, since there is no such thing as a definitive text, a concept which corresponds “only to exhaustion or religion.” In “On William Beckford’s Vathek,” he famously claims—not entirely tongue-in-cheek—that “the original is unfaithful to the translation.” Borges began his lifelong side-career as a literary translator at the age of nine with a Spanish rendering of Oscar Wilde’s The Fairy Prince. His lengthy practice as a translator does not, however, quite live up to his provocative pronouncements about the craft. Although he takes some liberties in his—often collaborative—Spanish translations of prose works by the likes of G. K. Chesterton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Franz Kafka, Jack London, Henri Michaux, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson, the original versions of those texts are by and large—to use Borges’s provocative phrasing—not “unfaithful” to his translations. Although by no means as prolific a translator as Borges, Joyce had even more languages at his fingertips than the Argentinian writer. Among his achievements as a translator are renderings of “Stephen’s Green,” a modest little poem by an Irish contemporary of his, James Stephens, into five languages. It was to Stephens, best-known today as the author of a witty fantasy novel, The Crock of Gold, that the ailing Joyce contemplated entrusting the unenviable task of completing his intricately woven and indefatigably punning Finnegans Wake. [End Page 201] Joyce’s renderings of “Stephen’s Green” into French, German, Italian, Latin, and Norwegian, which can be found in Richard Ellmann’s magisterial biography of the Irish writer, are a linguistic tour de force. Joyce even wanted to add a sixth language by having Stephens himself translate his poem into Irish. Unfortunately, Stephens’s grasp of Irish was not up to the task. Here, by way of a sample, is the original poem, followed by Joyce’s French version: Stephen’s Green The wind stood up and gave a shout.He whistled on his fingers and Kicked the withered leaves aboutAnd thumped the branches with his hand And said he’d kill and kill and kill,And so he will and so he will. Les Verts de Jacques Le vent d’un saut lance son cri,Se siffle sur les doigts et puis Trépigne les feuilles d’automne,Craque les branches qu’il assomme. Je tuerai, crie-t-il, holà!Et vous verrez s’il le fera! James Joyce’s fondness for James Stephens’s poem is not altogether surprising. Like Stephens, he had a thing about the name Stephen: Stephen Dedalus, his alter ego in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, bears that first name as does his own grandson, Stephen James Joyce, whose birth he memorializes in “Ecce Puer,” his finest poem. Writing to James Stephens in December 1931, Joyce downplays his French version, calling it a mere “pleasantry” and its title “Jacques’s Greens” an “obvious pun” on Stephens’s title, the name of a popular park in the center of Dublin. Joyce’s subsequent comment about the rendering of Stephens’s “thumped” as “craque” shows, however, his confident grasp of...

Fifty Shades of Green? Political differences between elites, members and supporters of Europe Ecologie Les Verts

ABSTRACTIn recent years, many political parties have created new forms of affiliation and have justified the blurring of membership boundaries with claims that sympathisers would be more representative of the electorate and less radical. Such claims are based on ‘popular wisdom’ inspired by John May’s ‘special law of curvilinearity’, which states that activists hold more extreme views than voters and elites. When this expectation has been tested, results have been at best inconclusive; but testing has so far never used a single survey to compare different groups. Using an online survey of Europe Ecologie Les Verts party members and their extended networks (affiliated supporters, lapsed members, sympathisers), relationships between ideological differences and degree of investment in party activities and decision-making are analysed. The results, contradicting May’s special law along all ideological dimensions other than intra-party democracy, can be explained if May’s narrowly instrumental assumptions about preference formation are rejected.

Political Parties and Policy Change: Explaining the Impact of French and German Greens on Energy Policy

This article assesses the conditions of partisan influence on public policy change, by comparing the action of the German and French Greens with regard to energy during their participation in the “Red–Green” (1998–2005) and “Plural Left” (1997–2002) coalitions, respectively. First, it highlights the importance of the institutional context in which political parties operate. In Germany, both political and sector-specific institutions made it possible for Die Grünen to have a stronger and deeper impact on energy policy than Les Verts. Second, it emphasizes the strategic and relational dimensions of partisan influence. The ability of the German Green party to foster contacts with the renewable energy industry and experts also explains its policy impact and the success of its strategy focusing on specific issues during its participation in government.

Evolution of New Parties: From Electoral Outsiders to Downsian Players — Evidence from the French Greens

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom about New Left parties in Europe. I show that institutional context influences party behavior by analyzing the strategic decisions of the French Green Party, Les Verts, from 1997 to 2002. I demonstrate that in order for the Greens to compete with the larger, more established, parties, they must recognize the demands of the institutional context and act accordingly. In doing so, they have become a Downsian party, whose goal is winning seats in parliament. Two implications of this study are that these decisions have important consequences both for the outcome of the pending election and for the future of the party as a viable competitor in the French political space. Importantly, the findings can be more generally applied to understanding new party behavior across Europe.

Developments in the Study of Green Parties

With Green parties making substantial electoral gains across Europe in the past decade, the literature on these parties has also continued to develop. This article reviews recent contributions to this literature and focuses on those that include the French Green Party, Les Verts, as a case for analysis.

Party organisation and democracy – A comparison of Les Verts and the British Green Party

The environment is the issue most closely identified with the Green movement. However, a commitment to the rejuvenation of political practices has been equally important in the development of their partisan organisations. Green party members share the conviction that democracy is the best way to attain a sustainable society. They aspire to a more participatory politics and have translated their ideals of equality and individual fulfilment into alternative party structures. Many of their practices demonstrate that they share values and attitudes which inspire their behaviours and intra-party regulations. However, Green parties are also influenced by the national structure of political opportunities. The practical arrangements French and British Greens have developed reflect their relative integration within the political system as well as the influence of national political culture on conceptions of equality and participation.

Is there hope for the French ecology movement?

Despite a few years of success, the French green movement seemed to have collapsed by 1995. The situation was abruptly reversed by the 1997 legislative elections in which they obtained eight deputies and a government minister. To what extent have Les Verts managed to rebuild the movement in these two years? Is the recovery sustainable? The history of the movement illustrates the most important cleavages and shows that despite its claim of unity, the French movement has essentially been divided by ideology, strategy and leaders. With the disintegration of its structures over the last few years, the green movement has lost some of its expertise and political experience as many activists have given up on political ecology. Its image has been damaged by political inconsistencies, by internal infighting and by the stress on social issues at the expense of traditional environmental questions. Conscious of their drift and downward fall, activists have worked to rebuild unity. The recent electoral and political success of Les Verts masks a movement which is weakened and divided. Les Verts have now to convince their activists that the strategy of co‐operation with the socialists is worth pursuing.

French ecosocialism: From Utopia to contract

Ecosocialism runs deeper in the French political ecology movement than most commentators have acknowledged. In the 1970s, André Gorz and René Dumont first tried to draw ecologists’ attention to links between resource depletion, alienating work conditions, and the ujust treatment of Third World countries. Their penchant for Utopian theorising created unresolved tensions between centralising and decentralising approaches to ecological reform. The 1980s saw efforts by Pierre Juquin and Félix Guattari to develop a more relativistic ecosocialism. More recently, Jean‐Paul Deléage and Alain Lipietz have favoured a contractual ecosocialism in which ideals of equality and autonomy are conceived as the fundamental values of ecological negotiators who seek to win the assent of diverse groups to a stable, environmentally responsible social order. Such contractualism, which orients Les Verts today, expresses a commitment to an egalitarian pluralism.

Ecology and Artifice: Shifting Perceptions of Nature and High Technology in Postwar France

Ecology and Artifice: Shifting Perceptions of Nature and High Technology in Postwar France MICHAEL D. BESS The French do not enjoy a very positive image in the eyes of the world’s green activists. During the early 1980s, when the German Green Party was clamorously making headlines in the Bundestag, the French environmentalists remained relatively weak and divided.1 While the Italians, British, Dutch, and Germans were taking to the streets, launching huge demonstrations against nuclear weapons, the French Left kept noticeably aloof.2 Indeed, to a foreign observer, the primary association between the Socialist government of François Dr. Bess is assistant professor of history at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches 20th-century European history. He finished his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989, under the supervision of Susanna Barrows and Martin Jay, and is the author of Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom Cloud: Four Activist Intellectuals and Their Strategiesfor Peace, 1945-1989: Louise VVras (France); Leo Szilard (USA); E. P. Thompson (England); Danilo Dolci (Italy) (Chicago, 1993). He would like to thank the Vanderbilt University Research Council and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt for funding his research for this project, as well as the following, whose kind assistance and advice have proved invaluable: Susanna Barrows, Mark Cioc, David Coe, Andrée Corvol, James Epstein, Carole Fink, Paul Freedman, Robert Frost, Roger Hahn, Joel Harrington, Gabrielle Hecht, Thomas Hughes, Paul Israel, Martin Jay, Brice Lalonde, Bruno Latour, Laurence Mermet, Théodore Monod, John Opie, David Pace, Matthew Ramsey, Mark Rose, Helmut Smith, Arleen Tuchman, Meredith Veldman , Antoine Waechter, Spencer Weart, and the reviewers for Technology and Culture. The author owes a special debt to Alain Beltran, Jean Carlier, Jean-Pierre Raffin, and Pierre Samuel, both for their insights and comments and for generously allowing him access to their rich personal archives on environmental issues in French history. 'On the history of the French environmentalist movement in the early 1980s, see, for instance, Jean-Luc Bennahmias and Agnès Roche, Des verts de toutes les couleurs: Histoire et sociologie du mouvement écolo (Paris, 1992); Guillaume Sainteny, Les verts (Paris, 1991); Dominique Simonnet, L'écologisme, 2d ed. (Paris, 1982); and Marc Abélès, ed., Le défi écologiste (Paris, 1993). 2See Diana Johnstone, The Politics of Euromissiles (London, 1984); and Jolyon Howorth , France: The Politics ofPeace (London, 1984). See also Jolyon Howorth, “Consensus and Mythology: Security Alternatives in Post-Gaullist France,” in France in World Poli­ tics, ed. Robert Aldrich and John Connell (London, 1989).© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/95/3604-0003$01.00 830 Perceptions ofNature and High Technology in Postwar France 831 Mitterrand and the ecological movement occurred in 1985, when French secret agents blew up the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior— and the Socialists’ response amounted to little more than a lame at­ tempt at a cover-up.3 After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the French once again stood out among the nations of Europe: day after day, while the Italians, British, Belgians, Swiss, and Germans were issuing iodine to children or banning the sale of lettuce, the French government insisted that its neighbors were overreacting, that the radioactive cloud posed no threat, and that France, which possessed the world’s most concen­ trated network of nuclear reactors, remained fundamentally safe. The French government’s chief scientist in charge of emergency pub­ lic health measures went so far as to tell the French people in a press conference on May 2, 1986 (six days after the reactor meltdown in Ukraine): “I personally am ready to go and stand, without protection, a few kilometers away from the Chernobyl reactor, just to show you how small the danger is.” Ten days later the same official admitted that the government had deceived the people of France, deliberately concealing the fact that the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl had passed over significant parts of French territory.4 Nevertheless, despite these “un-green” images, I will argue in this article that the French are by no means less green than the citizens of other industrialized countries. Rather, their favorable attitudes toward certain forms of...