Julian Barnes. Writer’s Writer and Writer’s Writer’s Writer [London Review of Books]


There is a slightly pretentious term in wine tasting and wine writing
called ‘mouthfeel’. (It is also slightly baffling: where else might
you feel wine if not in your mouth? On your foot?) The Oxford
Companion to Wine calls it a ‘non-specific tasting term, used
particularly for red wines, to indicate those textural attributes,
such as smoothness, that produce tactile sensations on the surface of
the oral cavity’. There is similar mouthfeel about translation.


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Imagine that you are about to read a great French novel for the first
time, and can only do so in your native English. The book itself is
more than 150 years old. What would/should/do you want? The
impossible, of course. But what sort of impossible?..


( Read more... )

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Davis castigates some of her predecessors for wanting ‘simply to tell
this engrossing story in their own preferred manner’. Interviewed by
the Times, she expanded on this: ‘I’ve found that the ones that are
written with some flair and some life to them are not all that close
to the original; the ones that are more faithful may be kind of
clunky.’ This is the paradox and bind of translation. If to be
‘faithful’ is to be ‘clunky’, then it is also to be unfaithful,
because Flaubert was not a ‘clunky’ writer. He moves between
registers; he cuts into the lyric with the prosaic; but this is French
prose whose every syllable has been tested aloud again and again.
Flaubert said that a line of prose should be as rhythmical, sonorous
and unchangeable as a line of poetry. He said that he aimed only at
beauty.