[lbo-talk] [Not sent] Re: What we lose in translation

[andie nachgeborenen]

Well, Joyce's Ulysses was tried for obscenity in 1933 and held to be protected by both the trial court and the Second Circuit, One Book Entitled Ulysses by James Joyce, 72 F.2d 705, 706-07 (22d Cir. 1934) (L. Hand, J.), in an opinion by Judge Learned Hand, the greatest American judge never to sit on the Supreme Court. Hand rejected the rule that a work was obscene if it woulds tend to deprave a vulnerable child because that would take out a great swathe of the great works of literature (Chaucer! Rabelais! Balzac! -- to mention the "dirty books" singled out by the prudes in The Music Man 30 years later). So it's not so clear that A La Recherche in any translation would have been suppressed by 1930, anyway. Hand was a free speech relative radical in his day and his opinions went much further than the S.Ct ever did. Here he is on the "deprave a child" rule for obscenity from a 1913 district court opinion:

It seems hardly likely that we are even to-day so lukewarm in our interest in letters or serious discussion as to be content to reduce our treatment of sex to the standard of a child's library in the supposed interest of a salacious few, or that shame will for long prevent us from adequate portrayal of some of the most serious and beautiful sides of human nature.

Could that judge write or what? He wrote his own opinions too. Here he is in the Masses case adopting a position on advocacy of illegal conduct (seditious speech) the S.Ct could not approach for 50 years years, in Brandenberg v. Ohio:

Detestation of existing policies is easily transformed into forcible resistance of the authority which puts them in execution, and it would be folly to disregard the causal relation between the two. Yet to assimilate agitation, legitimate as such, with direct incitement to violent resistance, is to disregard the tolerance of all methods of political agitation which in normal times is a safeguard for free government. The distinction is not scholastic subterfuge, but a hard-bought acquisition in the fight for freedom.

Anyway, it is at least possible and perhaps likely that Proust would have survived contact with Learned Hand, who was on the Appellate Court by the time Scott-Montcrieff started publishing.

A dreadful confession: I have got 70 pages into Swann's Way about 10 times and no further. I can't do Proust. When I was a child with depraved tendencies I just read the "good" parts of Ulysses. I have read the whole thing -- once. 

--- On Thu, 7/31/08, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:


> From: Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] [Not sent] Re:  What we lose in translation
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Thursday, July 31, 2008, 2:22 PM
> On Thu, 31 Jul 2008, Ulhas posted a Hindu reprint of a
> Guardian article:
> 
> > Wednesday, Jul 30, 2008
> >
> > Opinion
> >
> > What we lose in translation
> >
> http://www.hindu.com/2008/07/30/stories/2008073055211100.htm
> >
> > Stuart Jeffries
> 
> > that fidelity to the spirit of the original may mean
> betraying it at a
> > literal level. C.K. Scott-Moncrieff may have been
> thinking along these
> > lines when he gave his English translation A la
> recherche du temps
> > perdu a title the author hated, namely Remembrance of
> Things Past
> > (which riffs on a line from Shakespeare), though why
> he left out
> > Proust's rudery is less clear. Only 70 years
> later, in 1992, did Chatto
> > put out an edition with the more literal title In
> Search of Lost Time
> > and favour English readers with the smut.
> 
> There was nothing unclear about it! In the 1920s it would
> have been banned 
> in a second.  And Montcrief left in all the important
> scenes.  But he had 
> to change some titles to throw them off the track.  The
> literal title of 
> the fourth volume is Sodom and Gomorrah.  His title, Cities
> of the Plain, 
> was an inspired euphemism; the bible uses the phrases
> interchangeably, but 
> nobody who didn't already know what it was referring to
> would notice. 
> But if a novel came out called Sodom and Gomorrah, and you
> were 
> self-respecting censor in the 1920s, you'd have *had*
> to read it. And 
> fifty pages in you'd have found a scene of tumultous
> anonymous gay sex. 
> Not to mention that, as the title indicates, male and
> female homosexuality 
> is a major theme of the whole volume.
> 
> That would have gotten the entire series banned for
> decades.  Miller's 
> Tropic of Cancer didn't win its trial for obscenity
> until the mid 1960s.
> 
> That said, the new and improved translation that built on
> Montcrief and 
> then built again on top of that is definately better.
> 
> Lastly BTW, sometimes his euphemisms are actually dirtier
> than the 
> original.  The original title of the second volume is Young
> Girls in 
> Bloom.  He completely threw people off the track with _In a
> Budding 
> Grove_.  But once you know what it's referring to
> I'm not sure that's not 
> more explicit than the original.
> 
> Michael
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