Picturing Mark Twain's Work Differently…

A travel through a rich literature, a major language and a character, Huck, witnessing the society of the 19th century.

Mark Twain’s two major books, ‘The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer”, published in 1876, and those of his friend Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884, belong to the category of books that one read once or was about to read. These stories have been heard by so many generations. Every French reader once feverishly turned the pages of the Pink Library or the Red And Gold collections but had no idea that their happiness could have been even greater.

The French readers got to know the text thanks to the new translation by Bernard Hoepffner (in its later complete version some excerpts were deleted); this gives a brand new dimension to Twain’s work. Where the previously published translation used and misused some unusual grammatical tenses and too much use of “vous”, this new version breathes life into the original text, conveying a freshness and revolutionary aspect that only English-speaking people could feel. Hemingway himself was a spokesman on the issue, stating: “There was nothing before, and nothing better has been done since then”.

Mistakenly categorized as literature for youth, Huck’s peregrinations along the Mississipi river brought something new and a thousand possibilities to American literature. The Southern writer, born in 1835, dared at that time to use an oral and slang vocabulary by writing the part of his young illiterate tramp in the first person.

Almost anyone knows that Mark Twain was a former steamer operator; he was also well informed on the region and had drawn his inspiration from his childhood. However, not everyone knows that his books were the result of a very accurate analysis of regional dialects (spoken by the Black people from the Missouri state, the “Pike County”) and their variants. He gave little explanation about his research: “The linguistic shades have never been introduced at random or judgementally, but my knowledge of these various types of language helped and guided me”. This language actually was so much more than a simple framework: it was THE start.

More than ever, the reader is mentally travelling on the waterways, deep in the heart of Huck’s falsely naive thoughts, his wrangling between his consciousness and established law and order. Huck’s friendship with the escaped slave Jim is, of course, dealt with. As a young White young boy with a predominantly white culture, his attraction to this Black man is so strange. Huck’s narration is thrilling, touching, colorful, its form and substance are so much more interesting than the traditional history books. Mark Twain’s literature is a portrayal of the mid-nineteenth century’s Southern society.

Sabine Audrerie

By the same author: THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, 438 pages, 24. Editions Tristram.

Translated from English to French by Bernard Hoepffner

INTERVIEW with the translator Bernard Hoepffner

“A LANGUAGE DEFENDING ITSELF IS A DYING LANGUAGE”

The new translator of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn explains how he feels about Mark Twain’s texts and the meaning he gives to his job, which is more an artisanal than a purely intellectual occupation.

How did you get this idea of retranslating these two books?

Bernard Hoepffner : I’ve been reading and re-reading them for numerous years, especially Huck Finn. Ten years ago, while I was in charge of translating Mark Twain’s biography, I had to make a comparison between both texts, in order to add quotations, and realized how the French translation not only betrayed Twain’s mother tongue, but was a complete denaturalization of the book as well. Whereas Huck, who is the narrator of the book, speaks in the first person, is a rather illiterate and mocking boy expressing himself in a pretty colorful language, he was in these previous translations speaking in a polished style, using complicated French tenses such as the subjunctive imperfect or the simple past. Thanks to the Editions Tristram, the project of retranslating both books actually came true. I was given total freedom, I could write a “good bad” language.

How did you proceed?

I had the advantage of knowing the text very well, but nevertheless had to find a method to make the style of language unique. First of all, I conscientiously read books by Queneau again, and more briefly, those written by Céline. These two writers had managed in their time to add a popular way of speaking to the literary world. They changed French literature just as Twain had previously changed American literature. Afterwards, I did a lot of work on how people currently express themselves in the street, in the subway: I’ve even carefully listened to the teenagers around me, picking their neologisms up, and came to the view that some of those words were part of Huck’s vocabulary too!

Why would you add words from the 21st century to this text written in 1884?

The translation must not allow people to think that the text was originally written in French. Huck wasn’t strolling by the Loire river! A French language from the year 1884 would have sounded too old fashioned, even though the ‘bygone’ atmosphere of the story has to show through the text. I tried to write in a timeless French, mixing today’s and yesterday’s lexicons. A translation is almost always on this side of the original text, simply because the world, the society that inspired it at first no longer is. Twain’s voluntary mistakes could not be deleted and each character had to be given a specific identity, using the English language.

Twain himself proceeded so, he inserted different regional dialects to give his characters their own personality. Neologisms were made up for this purpose, and since these invented words are untranslatable by we French translators, we had to use, for instance, some letter combinations. There are some typing mistakes that were chosen to give equivalent words to those of his own. The Duneton language dictionary was necessary. This is a glossary, thematically recording every single idiomatic expression from the Dark Ages to nowadays.

Such a book proved to be very useful to translate typical expressions from the left side of the Mississipi river in the mid-nineteenth century. I then adapted those expressions to the French language spoken during the same century, although these latter expressions are no longer used. It was important for me that the historical background of the story matched the original one. I didn’t use any type of contemporary slang, this would have made no sense.

How did you find the right “tone”?

I previously never wanted to translate literature from the Southern region of the USA – Faulkner or Welty for example – because I had no idea of what could be done with the dialect spoken by Black people. A Caribbean friend of mine found a solution to this problem: he told me to invent! Jim’s way of speaking has nothing to compare with the way French Black people, or Americans or Black people in the 19th century speak. It’s a kind of new language, which I hope gives the character an identity, without sounding ‘pidgin’. Mark Twain had his own vocabulary tricks: he used to delete the letter “r” at the end of the words, for example.

What does Huck Finn mean to you?

Huck Finn is the reflection of everyone’s personal dream: he lives the life he wants to live, wearing torn pants, going wherever he wants. He’s especially smart, thinking a great deal, exploring themes such as religion, morals, his friendship with Jim, this escaped slave. At the beginning of the book, he is very similar to all the Americans that lived during these years: very racist and prejudiced towards Black people, and although at the end of the book he says that Jim is a Negro with a white heart, which may sound a little racist, his story shows an evolution, an inner progress, a behaviour which was very innovative then.

You claim the translator’s freedom in consideration of the original text, as well as the right to re-write the text.

I will never believe that a translator’s job is to be “transparent”. I’ve been a craftsman for a long time, and long ago restored ancient artefacts from the Far East. I often say that I’m a “manual translator”. Translation is not just an intellectual task, it’s a manual one too. Every aspect of it is important: the way you make yourself comfortable to work, or where the book is set, etc… As far as Finn is concerned, I didn’t really focus on the book, it was rather quick. I’m much less finicky than I was when I started this occupation.

Dynamism is the major guide needed when I start writing my draft. Mark Twain wrote this book gradually, according to his own feelings. It’s a sort of language which makes things real, one word following the previous one- Once my first draft has ended up in a text with nice words in it, I can go back to the whole draft and refine the text again and again. It’s kind of creative, artistic. The line between translation and writing is very thin and there’s a balance to respect, you must save this ethical frame, you must be totally true to the style and language from the very start. A culture, a universe is at stake. Reading Huck Finn may help you understand why a majority of Americans voted for Bush. It’s a good medium to grab a culture and its history.

You have already translated books by Joyce, Toby Olson, William T. Vollmann, Martin Amis or Sorrentino, these many authors are very accurate when it comes to the language itself…

If by mistake, I write a word instead of another one (he gives the example of two French verbs: “gripper” –to jam- or “grimper” –to climb-), I will save my mistake because Twain, elsewhere in the book, invented some verbs that are impossible for me to translate. He kind of “attacked” American grammar. I do the same with French grammar. Voltaire –a French writer from the 18th and 17th centuries- used to say : “Translation means that the final language has to be treated badly”. Languages have their own specialities. A mistake in English is “incorrect”. A mistake in French is “not French”. The relationship between both languages is a tight one, this is the reason why we have to make it easy.

Too many translators think : “French is spoken/written that way, so I have to work according to this frame”. I want to insist on the point that anything written in French is good. I sometimes hear: “That doesn’t sound nice”.

What’s the bond between aesthetics and translation? If a child says “I arrived LEFT” instead of “I arrived LATE”, how wonderful this sounds! I’m always happy to use such pretty mistakes in all my translations.

It sounds like innovation in the language field is very up to date. Is the French language involved in this new process?

Being lazy is somewhat good for a language, it enables it to improve. From Latin were born Italian, French, Romanian. Why? Because each one of these cultures was lazy enough not to create its own language. Refusing any linguistic improvement means that a language is about to die. If a language is poor, it’s because its culture is poor. The universe, the world we live in are naturally and obviously responsible for any linguistic improvement. The way youngsters speak in the suburbs is great, its bad reputation isn’t its fault, but it sometimes is a vector conveying violence. Unfortunately, both sides are very often confused. As a translator, we need this involvement do our job as best as we can.