DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

Review of Daniel Deronda

Authors

Alain Jumeau

Date of this Version

2011

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 42 (2011)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

Alain Jumeau's new French translation! of Daniel Deronda is the first since Ernest David's in 1881,1882 and 1886, no longer easily accessible. Jumeau is an excellent George Eliot scholar as well as an experienced translator - his translations include The Mill on the Floss and The Way We Live Now - and he has produced a graceful and fluent translation with preface and notes, introducing the great Victorian novel, so radically experimental in psychology and narrative form, to a new Francophone readership."

Whether Jumeau is aware of translation theory or not, his version exemplifies the chief processes of translation technically known as transposition, modulation, situational equivalence and adaptation, necessary when formal equivalence resists the 'genius' of the target, or second, language.' Transposition is shifting parts of speech without changing the meaning: for instance, in translating 'she swam across the lake' into French we replace the preposition 'across' by a verb ('a traverse') and the verb 'swam' by an adverbial phrase 'a la nage', in 'elle a traverse le lac a la nage'. Modulation involves a change of perspective in the message, so 'open to the public' becomes 'entree libre'. In situational equivalence a similar situation is rendered by different linguistic or stylistic means, as in idiomatic phrases, proverbs or metaphors: the equivalent of 'let's split the difference' is 'coupons la poire en deux'. Adaptation creates an equivalent meaning for something not in the target culture, as 'weekend' ('le week-end' in France) is translated literally by French Canadian 'fin de semaine'.

When we disagree with Jumeau's rendering of George Eliot's complex and original language, it is to critique particulars not principles. It is easy to pick holes in a translation but the interest of scrutinizing a perceptive version like this is to discover differences between two languages, and nuances in the original text, which we didn't notice or appreciate in the thrill and speed of mother-tongue reading. Study of translation can be a form of explication de texte, a rewarding process that involves some lateral thinking. Reading an English novel in French, if one knows the original well, is an instructive exercise in defamiliarization. If the translator is critic as well as linguist, like Jumeau, an experienced reader in both languages reads the translation almost like the original, though as a transparent medium becoming opaque when it provokes comparison. This is high praise: the perfect translator of Daniel Deronda would be the bilingual ghost of George Eliot.