Victor Segalen: Stèles
(Translated by Timothy Billings & Christopher Bush, with a foreword by
Haun Saussy. Wesleyan University Press, distributed by University
Press of New England,
2007. 456
pp, 71 illus., 5 1/2ins x 9 1/4ins, $34.95 Paperback, isbn 0-8195-6832-5,
$80.00 Cloth, isbn 0-8195-6833-3).
For longer than I care to remember, I have had
a copy of Nathaniel Tarn's excellent translation of Segalen's Stèles (published
as Stelae by Unicorn Press, Santa Barbara, CA,
in 1969). That was a bilingual edition (although the French text
was printed after the English), nicely printed and bound, with
a frontispiece photograph of Segalen in China, looking every inch
the colonial mandarin, and reproductions of the calligraphy from
the first edition (Beijing, 1918).
Segalen (1878-1919) was born in Brest and was
a doctor who served as Professor of Medicine at Tientsin University.
He also had an interest in archaeology and came to know Edouard Chavannes,
then the leading French sinologist, whose archaeological mission
discovered many significant funerary monuments from the Han Dynasty.
Evidently spurred by these discoveries, Segalen created this series
of stelae (1912-1914) — original poems, not translations — slightly
infected, it must be said, by odd overtones of what can only described
as orientalism. That said, the others of this period who were interested
in things Chinese (or, indeed, Japanese) were not free of this either:
Pound's Cathay and Waley's translations come
to mind, although it must be admitted that they were searching for
an appropriate idiom with which to convey the very alien original
poems with which they were working, and the idiom serves to estrange the
text, not to domesticate it — something of which I thoroughly approve. Stèles is,
quite frankly,
sui generis and it is absolutely fascinating. There are other
poems by Segalen (Odes, Peintures and Thibet),
which I have not read, but which apparently use formal structures
that will be less appealing to the modern anglophone translator. Stèles is
also a text which will appeal to modern readers, its curious timeless
quality and its estranged language serving to reach across the intervening
decades (and implicitly across centuries) in a way that much poetry
of this period does not. Segalen, intentionally or not, created an
early form of modernism that deserves to be recognised alongside
figures such as Pound and St-John Perse.
What of the new edition? Firstly I must congratulate
Wesleyan on their impeccable presentation of this book: great care
has been taken with the typesetting and layouts, and each English
text is presented (as one would expect) on the recto, but with a
reproduction of the first edition opposite, emphasising the vertical
structure, each French text enclosed in a black border which suggests
the edges of the stela. There are places where the translations are
perhaps not perfect, but then translations never are perfect, but
the cumulative impact of this version is splendid, and the apparatus
that comes with it, exceptional. It is in fact, the book that we
have always needed, even if we didn't know it before. As if this
were not enough, there is a second volume available online here,
in PDF form, which offers a full critical apparatus dealing with
the French texts and the Chinese inscriptions which inspired them
(and explanations for references therein), as well as unpublished
'Stelae' found amongst the author's posthumous papers, with facing
translations. This free additional volume runs to 246 pages and makes the
main book — not expensive at $35 in paperback — an even more attractive
proposition.
The translations appear to me to need a little
more freedom at times, more freedom from the French grammar and greater
application of English usages, but in all honesty the quibbles are
minor: the meaning is there, the occasional strangeness part of the
package of translation of classic texts: and make no mistake, this
IS a classic, and you should all go out and buy it as soon as possible.
Here is part of the poem 'Musical Stone', 'the
sixth stela facing east' (and one of the oddest translation choices
in the new book is to translate orienté as 'oriented' and occidenté as
'occidented'. The French original describes north-facing stones as
being face au nord, south-facing as face
au midi, but chooses orienté and occidenté for
the other two directions. A French reader will understand these to
mean westward- and eastward-facing, whereas an English reader might
think twice: oriented after all means 'positioned', rather than east-facing.
It's rather as if one were translating the German word abendländisch as
evening-landish, rather than occidental (which is what it means).
A minor quibble, though. I should add that the textual presentation
of the original ensures that each line breaks, with the continuation being
indented. This HTML page loses the breaks. The full poem has 9 long
"lines".
Pierre musicale
Voici le lieu où ils se reconnurent, les amants
amoureux de la flûte inégale;
Voici la table où ils se rejouirent l'époux habile
& la fille enivrée;
Voici l'estrade où ils s'aimaient par les tons
essentiels ...
[...]
Qu'on me touche: toutes ces voix vivent dans ma
pierre musicale.
Musical Stone [translated
by Billings & Bush]
Here is the place where they discovered each other,
the lovers in love with the variable flute;
Here is the table where they both rejoiced, the
talented husband & the tipsy girl;
Here is the platform where they loved each other
through the fundamental tones ...
[...]
Let me be touched: all of these voices live in
my musical stone.
Musical Stone [translated
by Tarn, op. cit, 1969]
Here is the spot where they recognized each other,
the lovers in love with the sporadic flute;
And here is the table where they took their pleasure:
the expert husband & the drunken girl.
And the couch on which they made love
through the spectrum of colors ...
[...]
Touch me: all these voices live in
my musical stone.
I've chosen here an example which stands out for me: I
confess I prefer Tarn's version on this occasion, as I think he's
hit on what's happening in the French. The new version translates
the words completely accurately but misses the insights that Tarn
(a fully bilingual poet, and a native French-speaker) brings to the
subtext. The awkward point in such cases is always: how much does
one leave in subtext and how much does one bring to the surface?
The second line strikes me as a spectacular success in Tarn's version,
although I admit I prefer the new version's 'tipsy' to Tarn's 'drunken'. Enivré is
'inebriated', which can indeed be rendered as 'drunken', but 'tipsy'
in Tarn's line would have made it perfect in terms of the image that
I think Segalen was trying to convey. Tarn's third line takes an
imaginative leap, it seems to me, and I think couch is the right
word here, but what on earth are the 'fundamental tones' in the new
version? There are a number of other such instances in
the new book, but the presentation means that anyone, even if their
French is merely adequate, can read both texts and quickly see what
has been done. If I were reading the translations as English poems
for pleasure, then I would look for Tarn's almost-40-year-old version,
long out of print though it is. But, minor irritations aside, this
new version and its online accompaniment (which, incidentally, carries
some seven pages of notes for the poem cited above), are a marvellous
achievement and one can only be grateful to the translators and to
Wesleyan for their evident care and hard work. Recommended with only
minor reservations.
Text copyright © Tony Frazer, 2007.
All quotations are copyright © by the translators, 2007 (Billings
& Bush) and copyright © 1969 (Tarn).
