Scenes of Clerical Life: George Eliot\u27s Own Version of Conversion

Before the publication of Scenes of Clerical Life, few people would have thought that Miss Evans had all the qualities for writing fiction, or, what is more, that she would become a great novelist. She was in her late thirties when she came to fiction writing, although, at the approach of middle age, most novelists have already tried their hand at it. Yet, as she confessed in her Journal, when she started writing the first story of Scenes of Clerical Life, it marked a new beginning for her, because she had always dreamt of writing fiction: \u27September 1856 made a new era in my life, for it was then that I began to write Fiction. It had always been a vague dream of mine that some time or other I might write a novel. This vague dream would perhaps never have materialized without the encouragement and help of her companion, George Henry Lewes, who persuaded her that she had all the gifts to do it well, and helped her find a publisher (Blackwood) - always an essential step for a would-be novelist. The religious subject she chose for this first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, was something unexpected, perhaps, considering that she was known as the translator of Strauss and Feuerbach, two German critics of Christianity. Moreover, she was associated with the Westminster Review, a Radical and freethinking journal, for which she wrote literary articles and acted as deputy editor for Chapman. Who would have thought that someone who had parted from Christianity would choose a religious subject for her first work of fiction

Translating The Mill on the Floss into French

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\u27s 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 \u27high-brow\u27. 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\u27s 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\u27s 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\u27s studies. Proust read The Mill on the Floss in the 19th-century translation by Fran90is d\u27 Albert-Durade, George Eliot\u27s 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: \u27There 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

Romola\u27s Religious Experience

Romola can be seen as a landmark in George Eliot\u27s career, when we bear in mind her striking confession to her second husband, John Cross: \u27I began it a young woman -, I finished it an old woman\u27 (Haight [1968] 362). Many of her readers, indeed, felt it represented a new departure, far from the world of Adam Bede, Mrs Poyser and Silas Mamer. It was a more ambitious novel, with more refined and educated characters, set in a foreign country, in a distant past. Her first works of fiction were also set in the past, but only one or two generations before, and some of them Mr Gilfil\u27s Love-Story\u27, Adam Bede and Si/as Mamer) might have been given the same subtitle as Walter Scott\u27s Waverley, Tis sixty years since\u27. Because she had such a great admiration for Scott, George Eliot was bound sooner or later to write a truly historical novel. And this was Romola, dealing with the political and religious situation in Florence at the very end of the fifteenth century, and introducing the complex historical character of Savonarola, the controversial Dominican friar who regarded himself as a prophet, although his enemies declared that he was a liar and a hypocrite, and whose death George Eliot saw as a possible redefinition of the idea of martyrdom (Carroll [1998]). The political theme here is something new, which she was to develop in her late novels. But, because of the intricacies between politics and religion in the life of Savonarola, it is given secondary importance compared with religion, a familiar theme of her early novels. What is new in this respect, however, is that it is the first and last time Eliot deals with Roman Catholicism, instead of Anglicanism, Evangelicalism, Methodism and other varieties of Nonconformity. Here, Eliot\u27s reader is confronted with aspects of religion with which he is not necessarily familiar, because they belong to Catholicism in its earlier form: popular religious festivals, processions, bonfires of vanities, a corrupted papacy, excommunications, etc. Against this exotic historical background, it is interesting to see what religion represents in the lives of the characters, particularly in the experience of Romola, the heroine of the novel

In search of lost hybridity: the French Daniel Deronda

Starting from a set of examples of borrowings from French in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, I explore the various ways in which the characters’ and narrator’s use of mixed English–French utterances generates inferences which make the transcending of their mono-cultural self possible. I go on to argue that in Jumeau’s recent French translation of the novel, the reader is not given access to those inferences, resulting in the erasing of an Anglo-European, cosmopolitan identity

Review of Daniel Deronda

Alain Jumeau\u27s new French translation! of Daniel Deronda is the first since Ernest David\u27s 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 \u27genius\u27 of the target, or second, language.\u27 Transposition is shifting parts of speech without changing the meaning: for instance, in translating \u27she swam across the lake\u27 into French we replace the preposition \u27across\u27 by a verb (\u27a traverse\u27) and the verb \u27swam\u27 by an adverbial phrase \u27a la nage\u27, in \u27elle a traverse le lac a la nage\u27. Modulation involves a change of perspective in the message, so \u27open to the public\u27 becomes \u27entree libre\u27. In situational equivalence a similar situation is rendered by different linguistic or stylistic means, as in idiomatic phrases, proverbs or metaphors: the equivalent of \u27let\u27s split the difference\u27 is \u27coupons la poire en deux\u27. Adaptation creates an equivalent meaning for something not in the target culture, as \u27weekend\u27 (\u27le week-end\u27 in France) is translated literally by French Canadian \u27fin de semaine\u27. When we disagree with Jumeau\u27s rendering of George Eliot\u27s 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\u27t 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

Françoise Dupeyron-Lafay. L’Autobiographie de Thomas De Quincey. Confessions d’un mangeur d’opium anglais (1821 et 1856), Suspiria de Profundis (1845), Esquisses autobiographiques (1853)

Grâce à l’édition des vingt-et-un volumes des œuvres complètes de Thomas De Quincey par Grevel Lindop aux éditions Pickering and Chatto entre 2000 et 2003, nous commençons à mieux prendre conscience de l’ampleur de sa production. On y trouve des souvenirs, des portraits littéraires, des nouvelles, mais aussi des centaines d’essais et d’articles destinés à des journaux, des revues et des magazines littéraires, traitant de sujets extrêmement variés : littérature, religion, philosophie, histoire..

K. K. Collins ed., George Eliot : Interviews and Recollections

À côté des biographies des grands écrivains, on trouve souvent des recueils de témoignages et de souvenirs qui permettent de compléter leur portrait, d’ajouter des détails différents, inattendus, souvent très subjectifs et donc à prendre avec précaution, mais toujours d’un intérêt réel. C’est à cette tradition des Interviews and Recollections qu’appartient le volume de K. K. Collins. Le second terme, Recollections, se comprend facilement ; mais une mise au point n’est peut-être pas inutile po..