This brings me to the subject at hand: French translations of literature in the English of yore—British and American. And to a highly important first point:
No two languages are closer and farther apart than English and French. They are close in their mixed history and mutual borrowings, and they look close in their vocabularies—thousands of words are spelled exactly or nearly alike. But they are far apart in grammar and idiom and in the meaning of these very thousands of look-alikes. They are farthest apart in turn of thought and, most important, in the way the “same” sounds are uttered.
I am here quoting from Jacques Barzun’s
Essay on French Verse for Readers of English Poetry, one of that great intellectual historian’s most perceptive publications. “French is a vowel language,” Barzun goes on to say: “That is the great principle to remember. […] Whoever wants to learn to speak, or simply to read poems in French, must believe this primacy of the vowels and do something about it”—namely, take a course in phonetics—because “only by being able to
utter can one properly
hear.”
1 Barzun, Essay on French Verse, 9. Unfortunately, Barzun wrote no companion piece on English verse (or English prose) for readers of French poetry (or French prose). That would have helped us to understand what Berlioz was up against. Berlioz tried to sum things up in chapter 15 of the
Mémoires:
“It is considerably more difficult for a Frenchman to appreciate the subtleties of the style of Shakespeare than it is for an Englishman to feel the originality and finesse of the style of La Fontaine or Molière. Our two poets are rich continents; Shakespeare is a world.”
2 Mémoires, 228. I am not certain of the truth of this assertion, but it represents clearly what our fellow believed.
A highly important second point is this: that Berlioz was living at a time of an explosion of interest in English literature, when such successful booksellers as John and William Galignani could publish in Paris a daily newspaper and a weekly literary magazine in English, and when English-language publications were increasingly available in reading rooms known as “cabinets de lecture,” which we can be sure Berlioz frequented, as did thousands of his contemporaries.
3 Barber, “Galignani’s and the Publication of English Books,” 273.We know that Berlioz was a fluent reader of Latin; we know that he learned enough Italian to manage simple conversations during his sojourn in the Eternal City and its environs; we know that despite his many crossings of the Rhine, he never learned a word of German, perhaps suffering from the prejudice common at the time that the language (not the music or the literature) was “Gothic” or “Vandalesque,” as Gérard de Nerval humorously put it in his
Études sur les poètes allemands: “C’est l’irruption des Goths et des Vandales!”
4 Nerval, Études sur les poètes allemands, 3. Many of us have wondered more seriously about Berlioz’s competence in English. In speaking, he would have found most difficult what my French wife and French friends find most difficult: the matter of accentuation. Some definite stress is part of every English word, while gentle inflection is rather the norm in French. In reading, what may have stymied the French composer are the
faux amis, the words that look the same in French and English but do not mean the same thing. At the time of his marriage to Harriet Smithson, Berlioz’s reading knowledge of English was more than adequate. His translation of the gentle letter of thanks that his wife wrote to his sister Adèle—apparently the sole member of the family to maintain contact with the composer in the months following the wedding—is at once entirely faithful and entirely idiomatic, which is to say not at all literal. (I find it amusing that when he published this letter in the
Correspondance générale, Frédéric Robert mistook Berlioz’s freedom of expression for lack of comprehension.)
5 CG 2:146. By the eighteen-fifties, after several visits to England, Berlioz seems to have developed a certain degree of mastery. I say this in particular because of the wordplay that we find in a letter dated July 3, 1855, and sent to his young friend Théodore Ritter, who had come to London with his father, Toussaint Benet, to hear Berlioz’s performance of
Roméo et Juliette, on June 13 of that year. Ritter apparently spoke enough English to understand Berlioz’s joke: “We have no pineapples” wrote Berlioz—“pas d’ananas”; we’ve been deprived of them—“nous sommes volés”; but we have a lot of strawberries—“mais force fraises”; indeed we have so many strawberries,
fraises, that we even have
fraises de veau— “calf’s ruffles”—which of course have nothing to do with
fraises, except in name. Berlioz goes on to say: “vile phrase, calembourg anglais”— that is, “vile phrase, English pun.” All of this turns on Polonius’s remark to Gertrude, in act 2, scene 2 of
Hamlet,
that “‘beautified’ is a vile phrase”; it turns on knowing that Shakespeare’s
vile, pronounced with a French accent, becomes the English word
veal (the French
veau), and on knowing that Shakespeare’s
phrase, pronounced with a French accent, becomes the French word
fraises (strawberries); it turns, finally, on the recurrence of
fraises in
fraises de veau, which is the connecting membrane of veal intestines and a culinary delicacy for carnivores in the know.
In other words, if you followed all of that, you might think, as I do, that Berlioz was by then sufficiently in command of English to do wordplay on vile, vile, phrase, and fraise, and that he was of course still very interested in food, despite digestive misery provoked by what we now believe was Crohn’s disease, which poisoned the later years of his life. In what follows I want to say a word about Berlioz’s literary appetite for Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, and then touch upon some of the other authors—especially Byron and Moore—who came to have a memorable impact on the composer’s life and work.