T. E. Lawrence once
wrote that in the distant future he expected to be remembered - if
at all - as a man of letters rather than a man of action. One of
the central aims of our T.E. Lawrence publishing programme is to
bring together his remarkable legacy of writings in a major
scholarly edition.
Of his two
surviving translations, one needs no introduction: The Odyssey
of Homer quickly became a classic and is still in print,
nearly seventy years after it first appeared. It has often
attracted scholarly comment.
By contrast,
virtually nothing has been written in English about his
translation of Le Gigantesque, first printed in small
English and American editions in 1924 and reprinted just once,
soon after his death in 1935.
Although Lawrence sometimes belittled
his translating in letters to literary friends, we know from his
correspondence about the Odyssey that he took immense pains
over it.* He saw himself as a literary craftsman, and translating
gave him the opportunity to practice this craft in one of its
purest forms. For it is no minor undertaking to search out the
subtleties of another
author's meaning in a foreign language, and then to
express them - as well or better - in one's own.
In this task,
Lawrence started out with an advantage, because his grasp of
French had deep-roots. He had first learned it while living in
Dinard as a child, and had kept this native understanding alive in his youth through holidays in France and through
French books. Enjoyment of the latter did not stop when he left
university. In June 1911, for example, he wrote home from
Carchemish that he was reading a French edition of Rabelais every
night, 'a most profound comfort'. He used French during the war,
and afterwards at the Peace Conference. There were French-language
works in his library when he died.
Nowadays, many more people
read French than ancient Greek, so it is surprising that (to the best of
our knowledge) there has yet to be a critical examination of The Forest
Giant by an English-speaking scholar. The main reason, in all
probability, is that copies of Le Gigantesque - an obscure intellectual French
novel - are hard to find, even though it was awarded the Montyon
prize by the Académie Française.
As part of our definitive edition of
Lawrence's works and letters, we are now preparing a full parallel
printing of
the French and English versions, with Le Corbeau's French text printed on the left-hand page and
Lawrence's English rendering facing it on the
right. This will allow anyone with a reading knowledge of French to
see that Lawrence's Forest Giant is a remarkably skilful recreation, rather than
straightforward translation. In our
judgment it is a far better work than the French original, and it deserves
to rank among Lawrence's most distinguished literary achievements.
* See Jeremy Wilson, 'T.
E. Lawrence and the Translating of the Odyssey', Journal of the
T. E. Lawrence Society Vol. III, No. 2, pp. 35-66.
The history of the translation
In January 1923
Lawrence lost his place in the ranks of the RAF and withdrew from
publishing either the 1922 Seven Pillars abridgement or his
complete 1922 text. Shortly afterwards he re-enlisted, this time
in the Tank Corps, and was posted to Bovington Camp in Dorset.
There, for the first time since his childhood years at Langley
Lodge on the border of the New Forest, he found himself surrounded
by some of the most beautiful countryside in England.
He was also in a
profoundly introspective mood, as is shown by the sequence of
letters that he wrote to Lionel Curtis between March and June 1923
[DG pp. 410-21]. In one of these, on 30 May, he wrote:
"The perfect beauty of this place becomes tremendous, by its
contrast with the life we lead, and the squalid huts we live in,
and the noisy bullying authority of all our daily unloveliness.
The nearly intolerable meanness of man is set in a circle of quiet
heath, and budding trees, with the firm level bar of Purbeck
beyond. The two worlds shout their difference in my ears. Then
there is the irresponsibility: . . . There has not been presented
to me, since I have been here, a single choice: everything is
ordained . . . perhaps in determinism complete there lies the
perfect peace I have so longed for."
At this particular
time, his career as a writer had also stalled. Seven Pillars
was in abeyance, while dismissal from the RAF had halted his
second major book-project (eventually completed in truncated form
as The Mint). Soon after arriving at Bovington he wrote to
Jonathan Cape: "If you, as a publisher, ever have anything in
French which needs translating (for a fee!) please give me a
chance at it. I've plenty of leisure in the Army, and my French is
good, and turning it into English is a pleasure to me: also the
cash would be welcome, however little it was." Cape's reply
was encouraging, and Lawrence wrote again a few days later
"it would be nice to play with words again. Squad drill is a
little heavy on the mind."
Cape's first
proposal was a truly daunting project: the French text by Mardrus
of The Arabian Nights. Despite its immense length,
Lawrence was enthusiastic: "I'd like to do it very well...
into as good English as we moderns can write . . . I'll be eager
to hear how the idea grows with you." Cape set about
investigating whether the English rights to Mardrus were
available, and meanwhile sent Lawrence Le Gigantesque,
which had been published the previous year. Lawrence wrote in
early June: "I've read the Gigantesque - and it seems
to me quite a good book - likely to interest the better class of
your public: though the thinking in it is too frequent for the
crowd. I'll translate it with pleasure: and have done a couple of
chapters already." As it happened, Le Corbeau's central theme
of determinism - in human life as in nature - probably held a
strong personal appeal for Lawrence.
Despite his initial
confidence, Lawrence soon found the task more difficult than he
had expected. In early July he wrote: "This is how
Le Gigantesque stands. I started gaily: did about 20 pages into direct swinging English then turned back and read it,
and it was horrible. The bones of the poor thing showed through.
"So I cancelled that, and did it again more floridly. The book is
written very commonplacely, by a man of good imagination and a bad
mind and unobservant. Consequently it's banal in style and ordinary
in thought, and very interesting in topic.
"I've dressed up about a third of it in grand-sounding prose to
hide its hollowness. And am not pleased with it. What hurry are you
in? I'll finish translating it in about ten days - and would like
then to set it aside for a week and then paraphrase the whole thing
again from end to end. This is I suppose an impossible proceeding
from your point of view, as an honest publisher: but it would be best
artistically.
"Sorry for making a mess of it: but it's infuriating to find
second-class metaphysics, and slip-shod writing, on so extraordinarily
good a theme. I'd like to wring Le Corbeau's neck."
It was five more
weeks before Lawrence wrote to Cape again, this time with typical
self-deprecation:
"Here at last is the first half of
Le Gigantesque: it's been written over twice, and I still feel it very deficient, both as
English and as a work of fiction. However I also feel that it's better than the French. If the man had had a grain of
humour.
"Will you let me see it once more, if it gets into type or print?
"The revise of the second half is half-way. I'm very sorry for
the slowness, but I've worked at it a little more than I expected:
and have been passing army exams and getting fever in-between. . .
.
"I'd call this
The Forest Giant or something of that sort. Better than The
Biggest Tree or The Giant."
He wrote again a
few days later, promising the second half that week: "It has
been stiff to do: not because the French was hard, but because the
style was banal. I have four chapters yet to re-write."
It was 13 September
before these chapters were finally sent off:: "At last this foul work: complete. Please have typed and send
down that I may get it off my suffering chest before I burst. Damn
Adrien le Corbeau and his rhetoric. The book is a magnificent idea,
ruined by jejune bombast. My version is better than his: but dishonest here and there: but my stomach turned. Couldn't help it."
Cape was impressed
by what he read; but the more he praised it, the more Lawrence
protested: "no, I don't feel proud of Le Gigantesque
or that I have done any special good thereby. A fellow with
another standard in English might have done differently. So no
more pay than was bargained for. It isn't earned, chez moi,
and you won't make money on the book: for I cannot see the British
Public buying it."
When Cape ignored
this, Lawrence protested again: "Your cheque and letter arrived
today. The first is too large, and I'll hold it till you reconsider.
The book is going to cost you money.
"I have the typescript of the first half (corrected) by me, and am
holding it till the second comes, that I may see how they fit together. Please send it down that I may see over it and get over it!
These last corrections are very dear to the writer, since they remove
blemishes particularly sharp in his sight."
In the event, this
was to be the only translation of a French book that Lawrence
completed. Later that year he abandoned a second novel, Pierre
Custot's Sturly, and then in December he became fully
committed to a subscribers' abridgement of Seven Pillars
- a task that would take up his free time for three years. The
next book he would translate was the Odyssey, published in
1932. Nevertheless, the idea of translation continued to appeal to
him, and he mentioned it to publishing friends from time to time.
Perhaps the best indication of the pleasure it gave him is in a
letter to Edward Garnett, written a few weeks after the Forest
Giant was finished: "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 it has: this letter has) 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.
"Do you think
that people ever write consciously well? or does that imply
an inordinate love for the material, and so ruin the art. I don't
see that it should."
Adrien Le
Corbeau was a pseudonym of Rudolf Bernhardt. He was born
in Romania in 1886, two years before Lawrence, and moved to Paris
in his twenties. He died in 1932, like Lawrence in his mid-forties. During the First
World War he was very ill with typhus, and this experience became
the inspiration for his second published book, L'Heure Finale
(1924). He published just one other book, in 1931, the year before
his death. This was Le Couple Nu, a novel in the tradition
of French erotic literature. Like The Forest Giant, it is
filled with references to the natural world.
We have typeset the
French text from the copy of Le Gigantesque that Le Corbeau
gave to Charles Fasquelle, the son of his publisher. It is an
out-of-series copy of the limited issue printed on Papier
Hollande. As the inscription is signed 'Adrien Le Corbeau'
this may not have been a nom de plume. French
directories suggest that the name exists, but is extremely uncommon, so we may
yet find out more. The English text has been scanned from the copy
of The Forest Giant that belonged to Jock Chambers, one of
Lawrence's closest service friends of that period.
Specification
