At first it had no name. It was the thing itself, the vivid thing. It was his friend. On windy days it danced, demented, waving wild arms, or in the silence of evening drowsed and dreamed, swaying in the blue, the goldeny air. Even at night it did not go away. Wrapped in his truckle bed, he could hear it stirring darkly outside in the dark, all the long night long. There were others, nearer to him, more vivid still than this, they came and went, talking, but they were wholly familiar, almost a part of himself, while it, steadfast and aloof, belonged to the mysterious outside, to the wind and the weather and the goldeny blue air. It was part of the world, and yet it was his friend.
Look, Nicolas, look! See the big tree!
Tree. That was its name. And also: the linden. They were nice words. He had known them a long time before he knew what they meant. They did not mean themselves, they were nothing in themselves, they meant the dancing singing thing outside. In wind, in silence, at night, in the changing air, it changed and yet was changelessly the tree, the linden tree. That was strange.
Everything had a name, but although every name was nothing without the thing named, the thing cared nothing for its name, had no need of a name, and was itself only. And then there were the names that signified no substantial thing, as linden and tree signified that dark dancer. His mother asked him who did he love the best. Love did not dance, nor tap the window with frantic fingers, love had no leafy arms to shake, yet when she spoke that name that named nothing, some impalpable but real thing within him responded as if to a summons, as if it had heard its name spoken. That was very strange.
He soon forgot about these enigmatic matters, and learned to talk as others talked, full of conviction, unquestioningly.
The sky is blue, the sun is gold, the linden tree is green. Day is light, it ends, night falls, and then it is dark. You sleep, and in the morning wake again. But a day will come when you will not wake. That is death. Death is sad. Sadness is what happiness is not. And so on. How simple it all was, after all! There was no need even to think about it. He had only to be, and life would do the rest, would send day to follow day until there were no days left, for him, and then he would go to Heaven and be an angel. Hell was under the ground.
Matthew Mark Luke and John
Bless the bed that I lie on
If I die before I wake
Ask holy God my soul to take
He peered from behind clasped hands at his mother kneeling beside him in the candlelight. Under a burnished coif of coiled hair her face was pale and still, like the face of the Madonna in the picture. Her eyes were closed, and her lips moved, mouthing mutely the pious lines as he recited them aloud. When he stumbled on the hard words she bore him up gently, in a wonderfully gentle voice. He loved her the best, he said. She rocked him in her arms and sang a song.
See saw Margery Daw
This little chicken
Got lost in the straw
In het begin had het geen naam. Het was het ding zelf, het levendige ding. Het was zijn vriend. Op winderige dagen danste het, dol en uitbundig, met wilde armen waaiend, of het dommelde in en droomde in de stilte van de avond, wuivend in de blauwe lucht met gouden tinten. Zelfs ’s nachts ging het niet weg. Ingepakt in zijn bed op wieltjes kon hij het horen ruisen, buiten in het donker, heel de nacht lang. Er waren anderen, dichter bij hem, die nog levendiger waren, die heen en weer gingen en praatten, maar zij waren volledig vertrouwd, bijna een deel van hemzelf, terwijl ‘het’, standvastig en afzijdig, tot de onbekende buitenwereld behoorde, tot de wind en het weer en de goudblauwe lucht. Het was een deel van de wereld, en toch was het zijn vriend.
Kijk, Nicolas, kijk! Kijk naar de grote boom!
Boom. Dat was zijn naam. En ook: de linde. Het waren leuke woorden. Hij kende ze al lang voordat hij wist wat ze betekenden. Ze betekenden zichzelf niet, op zichzelf waren ze niets, ze verwezen naar het dansende, zingende ding buiten. In de wind, in de stilte, ’s nachts, in de veranderende lucht, veranderde het, maar bleef het ook zonder verandering de boom, de lindeboom. Dat was raar.
Alles had een naam, maar hoewel geen enkele naam iets was zonder het ding waar hij naar verwees, gaf het ding niets om zijn naam, die het niet nodig had, en was enkel zichzelf. En dan waren er de namen die niet naar een substantieel ding verwezen, zoals linde en boom op die duistere danser duidden. Zijn moeder vroeg hem van wie hij het meeste hield. Liefde danste niet, klopte ook niet op het raam met rusteloze vingers, liefde had geen gebladerde armen die het rond kon slingeren, maar wanneer ze die naam die naar niets verwees uitsprak, antwoordde een onvoelbaar maar werkelijk iets binnenin hem alsof het opgeroepen werd, alsof het zijn naam gehoord had. Dat was heel erg raar.
Al snel vergat hij deze raadselachtige overpeinzingen, en leerde hij praten zoals anderen dat deden, vol overtuiging, en zonder zich dingen in vraag te stellen.
De lucht is blauw, de zon is van goud, de lindeboom is groen. Overdag is er licht, en wanneer dat gedaan is, is het nacht, en dan is het donker. Je gaat slapen, en ’s ochtends word je weer wakker. Maar op een dag word je niet wakker. Dat is de dood. De dood is verdrietig. Verdriet is wat geluk niet is. Enzovoort. Hoe simpel was het eigenlijk allemaal! Hij moest er niet eens over nadenken. Hij moest enkel maar zijn, en het leven deed de rest, het zou na elke dag een nieuwe dag sturen, totdat er geen dagen meer waren, voor hem, en dan zou hij naar de hemel gaan en een engel worden. De hel was onder de grond.
Liefste vier evangelisten
Zegen het bed waar ik in lig als goede Christen
Sterf ik vannacht, en ben ik dood en stil
Vraag dan aan God of Hij mijn zieltje meenemen wil
Vanachter zijn gevouwen handen tuurde hij naar zijn moeder, die knielde in het kaarslicht. Onder de gepolijste kap en krullende haren was haar gezicht bleek en star, zoals dat van de Madonna op het schilderij. Haar ogen waren gesloten, en haar lippen bewogen; geluidloos prevelde ze de vrome lijnen mee terwijl hij hen luidop voordroeg. Wanneer hij over de moeilijke woorden struikelde, hielp ze hem teder weer overeind, met een wonderlijk zachte stem. Van haar hield hij het meest, zei hij. Ze wiegde hem in haar armen en zong een lied.
Zee zo, Margrietje Do
Dit kleine kippetje
Verdwaalde in ’t stro
In general, it can be remarked that Banville’s style is quite elaborate, and it was especially the length of most of his sentences in the passage from Eclipse that posed problems to the translation. In the second sentence (“As a boy I liked best … offer itself to my attention”, Eclipse 32) I felt forced to cut the sentence in half and link the two parts together with a semicolon, as a literal translation would probably not work in Dutch – apart from the length itself, there is also the problem of inversion, which does not apply to the original English version, and which is now (hopefully satisfactorily) dealt with. In other instances I have mostly respected the original typography, and tried to formulate long sentences in a way that they remain fluent enough.
Word play is another difficulty to translations. In the passage from Eclipse I have, to my knowledge, not encountered any examples of clear ambiguity, but there were instead examples of stylistic word choice, most notably in the sentence “The open doorway of a hardware shop breathed brownly at me as I went past” (Eclipse 32; my emphasis). Apart from the ‘open doorway’ – the Dutch translation “deuropening” for “doorway” already encompasses the meaning of openness, making the adjective redundant – and its personification, it is the alliteration of the synaesthesia that challenges the translation. I have attempted to keep both, with the translation “bruine braaklucht”, even though Banville did not describe the smell as coming from “braaksel” (vomit). I think, however, that this translation enhances the representation of the smell and makes it more vivid, and that, in this case, retaining the alliteration is to be preferred to a literal translation.
In Dr. Copernicus, on the other hand, preserving the alliteration proves more challenging. In the sentence “On windy days it danced, demented, waving wild arms, or in the silence of the evening drowsed and dreamed (…)” (Dr. Copernicus, p.3) one can find no less than three different pairs of alliteration – d, w, dr – and the Dutch translation consequently faces a choice between form and meaning. In my translation, I opted for the inclusion of the word “dol”, so as to preserve the alliteration of the ‘d’ while reinforcing the other adjective, together with another minor change: “zwaaiend”, the literal translation of “waving”, became “waaiend”, which retains the ‘w’-alliteration and is also acceptable, if not more suitable, in the context of the sentence. I found no way to retain the ‘dr’-alliteration, but matched a ‘d’-word with a ‘dr’-word. The result is, in my opinion, also quite melodious, as “waaiend” and “avond” resemble one another in terms of sound.
The most difficult task was the translation of the two songs that were sung by the young boy in Dr. Copernicus, especially the first song, because the rhyme needed to be retained. Translating the name of the apostle John as “Johannes” did not match up with a translation of the second line (preferably “Zegen het bed waar ik op lig”), nor did a change of sequence in the names of the four gospel writers offer a solution. Therefore, I opted for “Liefste vier evangelisten” (“Dear four gospel writers”) and a reference to Christianity in order to preserve the rhyme; the drawback, of course, is that the second and fourth line of the Dutch translation become longer in comparison to the original version, but I think this is only a minor problem. The second song was easier, as I could match the name of the invented character in the first line with the already established rhyme of “stro” (“straw”).
John Banville