Laziness
I want to add something to this well-known story and tell you about some discoveries I have made in the Bibliothèque National in Paris. Much has been written about Diderot’s nephew and Goethe’s translation. Although the existence of 1821’s publication by de Saur and de Saint-Geniès is known, there has been hardly anyone who has done some serious research about the results. Because the so-called original appeared to be a fake and because afterwards the original text became available, no one was really interested in the text composed by the two aristocrats. Scholars like Rudolf Schlösser in 1900 and Jean Fabre in 1950 consecrated only a few pages to the retranslation, but I suspect them of having done this just to demonstrate the immorality of the deed itself. They did not pay any attention to the content and it might be possible that later researchers have followed in their steps, just out of laziness.
Differences
When I had a look at the translation of de Saur and de Saint-Geniès to compare their text with the German version I found some interesting facts: these men have been extremely creative. They have invented a substantial part of the novel. Some stories in the dialogue appear to be made up by them. They even changed the end of the story: while in the text of Goethe – who did a proper translation – the protagonists Moi and Lui separate in the end and say goodbye to each other, de Saur and de Saint-Geniès decide to let them have dinner together, as if they wanted to indicate the social character of the French! But there is more. There are differences to be found in the passages about music; when it comes to telling naughty stories about women and in the descriptions of French behaviour.
Now I would like to show some of the conduct of the couple in their translation. The following example is the moment when Moi and Lui discuss the definition of happiness, in the German text as follows:
ER: Nichts ist beständig auf der Welt. Am Glücksrade heute oben, morgen unten. Verfluchte Zufälle führen uns und führen uns sehr schlecht (Neffe, 745).
In the big wheel of fortune, it says, you’re sometimes up but just as often down. The French text however states that the nephew is completely bound up in the subject. He addresses fortune direct and illustrates the subject with a metaphor:
Rien de stable ici-bas que l’instabilité, je vous l’ai déjà dit : l’instabilité est donc mon unique espérance. Aujourd’hui la roue de la Fortune nous élève plus au moins vite, demain plus ou moins vite nous redescendons sous la roue qui finit toujours par nous écraser, quand elle est lasse de son jeu: comme un chat joue avec une souris souvent dans la farine même ; d’abord feint de la caresser, la pince et la mord après, et finit toujours par la manger. Nécessité, hasard ou destinée, tu nous entraînes, tu conduis tout…Tu conduis tout bien mal ! (Neveu, 241).
(Translation: “Nothing down here is as stable as instability, as I’ve already told you, so instability is my only hope. Today the wheel of fortune lifts us up, but tomorrow we are going down to the point where we will get crashed as soon as fortune is bored with the game: like a cat she’s playing with a mouse; at first she pretends to caress it, then she grabs it and kills it, and finally she will devore it. Necessity, be it coincidence or predestination, you are toying with us, you direct all… You direct all pretty bad!”)
It has occurred to me that the French translators unfold the events over and over again in a very extended way. The second example of their skills is how they handle with an ordinary gossip, Goethe had made this translation:
Madam die und die hat auf einmal zwei Kinder gekriegt. So kann doch jeder Vater zu dem seinigen greifen…(Neffe, 641) (Translation: “Mrs so and so got two children at once. Thus each father could grab his own…”)
The story becomes in the view of the couple a roaring farce:
Madame … que vous connaissez, est accouchée de deux enfans à la fois, garçon et fille. Je les ai vus ; et, chose singulière, le garçon est noir comme son nègre, et la fille blanche et blonde comme le petit commis de son mari… (Neveu, 230). (Translation: “Mrs… you know her, has given birth to two children at once, a boy and a girl. I have seen them, and a curious thing, the boy is just as black as their negro servant, and the girl is just as white and blonde as their husbands clerical assistant…)
In asking myself how to consider their translation, I searched in the Parisian library for other novels which they might have had “fabricated” together - and I found about twenty titles, written within a period of seven years. Every title tells a comparable story: their oeuvre consists out of fakes, plagiarism and imitations.
Expansion
The most striking example is their translation of a novel by Friedrich Maximillian Klinger (whom we already met at the start when he discovered at the Hermitage the unknown manuscript of Rameau’s Nephew), titled Faust’s Leben, Thaten und Höllenfahrt (1791), into Les aventures de Faust et sa descente aux Enfers (1825), (The adventures of Faust and his descént in Hell). In the preface de Saur and de Saint-Geniès boast about their own efforts. While Goethe did some nice work – so the couple says – and writers like for instance Klinger have produced some nice work as well in this field, it’s only thanks to de Saur and de Saint-Geniès that the French people will learn the Faust legend properly. While Klinger’s original narrative counts 195 pages, the translation expands into 836 pages. So here as well the notorious couple made use of their imagination…
A forgerie?
I would like to end with some considerations about the phenomena of the literary forgery. Does the retranslation of Le Neveu fall under the chapter of Monkey Tricks or should we consider the whole issue as a foul play? As long as literature has existed, there have been forgeries. The components that can be forged, are the legend of the work, the handwritten manuscript, the names of the author and the publisher and the translation. De Saur and de Saint-Geniès forged the legend of Le Neveu by pretending that they had found the original that was said to come from the estate of Diderot. But they also faked the translation by expanding the text with their own stories and ideas, pretending that those ideas were the mental legacy of Diderot.
In general there are several reasons why a forger takes all the trouble to create his forgery. Most forgers are eccentric figures with antagonistic features. There is a kind of implicit criticism hidden in their acts. They think they can do better than the creator of the work of art, or they think that the original lacks something. In the case of Le Neveu the two aristocrats have done their utmost – so they claim – to translate and create a novel in the style of Diderot, one of the greatest writers France ever had. They meant they could do this better than Goethe, who, after all, was not a Frenchman…
It could have been the reason why they kept silent about their names as translators. Maybe it has been rather a practical joke with a slight serious intention, than real, foul play.
