Translating The Mill on the Floss into French

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

Before dealing with my personal experience of translating The Mill on the Floss into French, I shall start with a few remarks on George Eliot's literary status in France compared with that in English-speaking countries. In Britain, in the States and other English-speaking countries, George Eliot is usually regarded as a great novelist, of the same magnitude as Dickens perhaps, although her novels are definitely more 'high-brow'. It might even be argued that she is the greatest female English novelist. In France, her reputation is quite different and it is possible to find educated people who have never read her or even heard about her, and the idea that she might be the greatest female English novelist seems to be simply preposterous, for, as French people will say, if she had been so, she would have been familiar to us! In France, great novelists of the world are usually canonized once they are received into the famous Bibliotheque de la Pleiades of the French publisher Gallimard. There you find many major British novelists, like Scott, Dickens, Stevenson, Conrad, Kipling, Joyce and also female novelists like Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters and soon Virginia Woolf, but at present, there is no room for George Eliot in this series. Like the great Victorianist and translator Sylvere Monod, I have tried to persuade the Gallimard people that it is a mistake to ignore her, but with little success so far.

When my translation of The Mill came out in 2003, in Folio classique, a paperback series published by Gallimard, which can be compared with Penguin Classics or Oxford World's Classics, there was no other George Eliot novel in the Gallimard catalogue, apart from a translation of Silas Marner by Pierre Leyris. At that time, Middlemarch, translated by Sylvere Monod was ready for publication, but, for obscure reasons, it did not come out until 2005. My own translation of Daniel Deronda was published there recently, in February 2010. Thanks to this publication of four of George Eliot's eight works of fiction, one may hope that she will be better known in France now than she was a few years ago, but she is not yet really part of our common culture, even among French people interested in the English novel.

It cannot be denied, however, that she had a decisive influence on two great French writers of the 20th century, whose works have little in common: Proust, the major reference for the psychological novel, and Simone de Beauvoir, the major reference for women's studies. Proust read The Mill on the Floss in the 19th-century translation by Fran90is d' Albert-Durade, George Eliot's friend in Geneva, and in spite of its imperfections, he considered it a masterpiece. In a letter of 1910 to his friend Robert de Billy he praises the novel very warmly: 'There is no literature which could have the same impact on me as English or American literature. Germany, Italy, and very often France can leave me indifferent, but two pages of The Mill on the Floss can move me to tears."