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Some past postings from Programme Updates Page
contents
Who
was Adrien Le Corbeau? For a long time, almost no biographical information was available about Adrien Le Corbeau, author of the French-language original of Lawrence's translation The Forest Giant. It was not until April 2004 that we knew Le Corbeau's real identity. Until then, while we knew his dates we could find few other traces. Nicole looked at some letters by him in the Bibliothèque Nationale. They are interesting testimony to his literary ambitions, but reveal little else; a French scholar showed us a letter written after his death by his mistress, which told us that he had died in poverty. We knew there had been an obituary by Edmond Haraucourt, but not where it was published. We knew that Le Corbeau had published (anonymously) a literary hoax about Maupassant before WWI. We also knew he had published three novels in French and at least one short story (and we had managed to obtain copies of these). The possibility that Le Corbeau might be a pseudonym had to be balanced against the fact that he used the name in private correspondence. He had a printed 'ALeC' device on his notepaper. We have a copy of Le Gigantesque with an inscription to his publisher signed Adrien Le Corbeau. We had seen another inscribed copy, and there too he used the name Le Corbeau. Then an article in a Romanian cultural revealed that 'Adrien Le Corbeau' was just one of several pseudonyms of a Jewish writer who spend his early years in Romania. He went to France in about 1910 and died in Paris in 1932. He seems to have been born Rudolf Bernhardt, though he later used the form Bernhaut. In Romania he wrote as 'Radu Baltag' and as 'Adrian Corbul', a pen-name he used when working as Paris correspondent for several Romanian papers. Bernhardt's ambition was to become a great French writer (his hero was Balzac). He translated both Balzac and Mérimée into Romanian.
Content
and design Content Usually - though not always - the French text is longer. That does not mean that Lawrence abridged (though he did make some cuts). A French text is almost always longer than the English equivalent. So we start by finalising the French typesetting which will appear on the left-hand pages. We then sort out typesetting problems in the equivalent English text (loose lines, etc) before deciding where to make the page-break. As Lawrence's rendering is very free, page-breaks can be problematic. His paragraph and sentence breaks do not necessarily follow Le Corbeau's. Often, he changes the construction, or uses an English expression that is different from the French. So the equivalent to a page-ending in Le Corbeau's text may not be immediately obvious. In general, we aim to break pages within an equivalent sentence in both texts, accepting that the words on each side of the break are not necessarily equivalent. An alternative would be to restrict breaks to ends of sentences; but there would be problems where sentence-breaks did not correspond. Lastly, we adjust the beginnings of new paragraphs in the English text so that they align with the beginning of the French equivalent. This often means inserting a blank line or two between paragraphs in the English. Occasionally, however, Lawrence's version is longer - sometimes so much so that the chosen page-break appears on the following page! When that happens, we have to go back to the French and make a page-break higher up, corresponding to the page-end in Lawrence's version.... His free translation is far more revealing than a strict translation would be. On one level you can see him refining Le Corbeau's ideas, while on another he is choosing the best words and expressions to render Le Corbeau's text. What he achieved is unquestionably better than the original. It offers rich testimony to anyone interested in Lawrence as a writer. Design Our decision to reduce the edition to 352 copies led to a search for different paper. We have enough unused paper in stock for two more volumes in the Letters series. It would be wasteful to use part of that on a short run. The only suitable paper we were offered was not quite large enough to print the volume in our Letters series format. The pages would have been 3mm short, which would have meant a corresponding adjustment in width to maintain the book's proportions. As we could not match the Letters series format exactly, we have decided to publish the Gigantesque | Forest Giant edition in the same format as the Subscribers' Library Edition of the 1922 Seven Pillars. That raised the question of design. For the 2003 Seven Pillars we used a modern page design, in order to fit a long text in a single volume you could easily read and hold. We will use the same design for part of the Letters series. It was a new departure for the press, since previously we had used traditional fine-press page designs. However, in the case of Seven Pillars we had already produced a fine-press edition, back in 1997. For the Gigantesque, we went back to type-panel design principles we use in the Letters series. These were established in the Middle Ages, and have been widely imitated by fine-press printers. The exact geometric rules on which so many beautiful mediaeval books and manuscripts were based had been lost, but they were rediscovered in the twentieth century by Jan Tschichold, a celebrated typographer. The photograph below shows how, starting with the page dimensions of the Library Edition, we used his diagram to establish the type panel and margins for the Gigantesque|Forest Giant. (In the working drawing shown, the pencil lines have been inked over to make them more visible.)
T.
E. Lawrence as a translator For various reasons The Forest Giant | Gigantesque parallel text will go to press later than planned. We may send it out in early September, since many people are away from home during August. Re-reading the text, side by side with the original French, is a constant reminder of Lawrence's skill in translating. As he readily admitted, the idea that inspired Le Gigantesque was 'magnificent'. It was surely the idea, rather than Le Corbeau's prose, that earned the novel the Prix Montyon. Alas (at least when writing in French) Le Corbeau lacked the calibre to do his idea justice. Skilled writers can achieve deeply moving effects using simple words: think of Rupert Brooke's 'The Soldier', or the best-known stanza from Binyon's 'For the Fallen'. Le Corbeau, by contrast, mars his creation by labouring points that should have been stated simply, or spelling things out that could have been left to the reader's imagination. Lawrence could not abandon the French text altogether. He had at least to render the essentials. Yet his English version very frequently improves on the original. To do that, he resorted to free translation - taking liberties in a good cause. It is a pity that so few of the people interested in Lawrence have read The Forest Giant. The combination of Le Corbeau's idea and Lawrence's writing definitely ranks among Lawrence's achievements. Not long after completing the translation, he wrote: "Do you know that lately I have been finding my deepest satisfaction in the collocation of words so ordinary and plain that they cannot mean anything to a book-jaded mind: and out of some of such I can draw deep stuff. Is it perhaps that certain sequences of vowels and consonants imply more than others: that writing of this sort has music in it? I don't want to affirm it, and yet I would not deny it: for if writing can have sense . . . and sound why shouldn't it have something of pattern too? My sequences seem to be independent of ear... to impose themselves through the eye alone. I achieved a good many of them in Le Gigantesque: but fortuitously for the most part."
Some
observations In the 1924 edition of The Forest Giant, at Lawrence's suggestion, Cape omitted the author's dedication. Cape included it, however, in the edition published after Lawrence's death. By then, Cape probably had no copy of the French original. The English typesetter may have set the text from Lawrence's handwritten draft. At all events, in Lawrence's translation the name of the dedicatee is misprinted 'Professor Simon Dupley'. In the original French the surname is 'Duplay'. Nicole has found that Simon Duplay was an eminent French doctor who specialised in deafness. Knowing that, it is surely significant that in the dedication Le Corbeau mentions hearing Duplay "tantôt sourdement, tantôt avec sonorité". If you know nothing more, the use of 'sourdement' seems hard to explain. Lawrence completely misconstrued it in his translation. It seems likely that Le Corbeau was partially or intermittently deaf. Perhaps, as with many others, his hearing had been damaged during WWI. This is interesting because it might help explain the unusual point of view from which Le Gigantesque is written. There are no speaking characters. The entire narrative with its associated lateral thinking takes place inside the author's head and is explained, at the end, as a dream. I need to check, but I think this is also true of Le Corbeau's two other novels. More generally, we know that Le Corbeau had a serious attack of typhus during WWI and died of illness in his mid-40s. About 100 copies of our 2004 edition of Le Gigantesque | The Forest Giant were bound for subscribers. However, by the time these were available we knew that new research was producing much more information about the tragic life of Adrien Le Corbeau. The foreword to our edition was therefore seriously out of date. We decided to halt publication and bind no further copies. Now that the research has had more time, we can publish a much fuller biographical account. We hope to do this in the spring of 2009. We will then have the longer forward printed and the book will finally be published. The new foreword will also be available as a booklet for subscribers who received copies of the first issue.
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