A Story that Might Be on the Move

Ho hum. Spring pollen has me committing so many of my energy-bearing resources to the struggle simply to stay awake that my ability to put two coherent thoughts together, much less post them, has been significantly impaired. But I did manage to finish the little two-novella collection I was reading by Gottfried Keller, The Banner of the Upright Seven and Ursula.

Zentralbibliotek Zürich

What a great read-- maybe because the initial feeling that you're entering into a world of old-school starched collars and self-conscious diction soon gives way to the sense that something transitional is going on here, and that Keller, trained as a painter and for a time, at least, into radical politics, probably wouldn't have enjoyed sitting around in stiff salons and drinking very proper tea. The author is considered a literary realist, but something about the first story, at least-- that vaguely transitional "something" I mentioned and that almost seems to catch a glimpse of modernism on the horizon-- keeps it from exemplifying that school.

(What follows are purely personal interpretations, which I know would be slammed by any literature scholar worth the name, but here goes.) Young Karl in "Upright Seven," for example, seems too tickledly detached from everything except Hermine, and the couple somehow too good-naturedly airy, or aware of the slight goofiness of their infatuation and situation, to fall in with the creations dreamed up by the Big Russians (except, maybe, for Chekhov). What really fascinates me about this story, though, is its ending. (Insert obligatory spoiler alert here.) Our young couple has finally overcome the objections of their fathers, and is sharing a happy post-proposal moment, when a former military colleague of Karl's shouts out to them in recognition. And then, "[t]he betrothed sat down on the steps at his feet and chatted with him for a full half hour, before they returned to the company."(1) End of story. This pair, who's been sneaking around and scheming ever since the tale began, and who's cocooned into a little universe all its own, suddenly pops out of it and goes to hang out with a guy Karl doesn't know all that well anymore. There's something-- I don't know what-- about the fact that it was a "full half hour," and not just a half hour, that's also contributing to my reaction of "Huh? Interesting." Sure, it would've been rude not to have acknowledged the sentry's presence, and the couple was probably bursting with eagerness to broadcast the engagement all over the place. But that apparent ability to snap out of one engrossing emotional situation, right into another, and thereafter to head back to the oldheads, is curious, even if young adults were probably just as flighty in their own way then as they are today.

Maybe I've undermined my own initial assertions about the tale's impatience with its assigned genre. Oh well. The only other observation I have is that with "Ursula," Keller managed to make a fictional account of mass Reformation nuttiness interesting-- maybe because he let the implications of religious upheaval play themselves out without really overtly discussing religion in general.

So: a short-ish review of a short-ish book. That seems appropriate for a Friday, especially one on which the ol' nasal passages are suffering fits of ticklishness. In that spirit, I'm setting down the metaphorical pen and going in search of some Kleenex.



(1) Gottfried Keller, "The Banner of the Upright Seven," in The Banner of the Upright Seven and Ursula, transl. Bayard Quincy Morgan (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1974), 67.

A Curious Footnote Speaks Volumes (Maybe)

Sometimes, a translator's inner pedant escapes and just has to rear its little homunculean head. I found the tracks of such a creature in last night's reading of The Banner of the Upright Seven (by Gottfried Keller, translated in 1964 by one Bayard Quincy Morgan, apparently known in sporting fashion as "B.Q," and, I would assume, entirely comfortable with utterances such as "old chap").

Behold, at the bottom of page 41, the description of a dinner party receives the following note:
"Feminine readers may be interested in the cakes which Keller specifies, and which are as follows: Hüpli and Offleten, crisp brown cookies of flour, cream and sugar; both are very thin, but the former are rolled into small tubes, while the latter are flat and frequently stamped with a decorative pattern, or with the coat of arms of the family... [etc., etc.] TRANSLATOR."

Before examining the amazed guffaw that issued from yours truly, I first have to state that I love the biblical-style, all-caps-smaller-font signature B.Q. was granted here, much like THE LORD gets any time HE makes an appearance in Old Testament get-togethers.

But seriously, folks, "feminine readers"? 

Source: Motif Magazine

Yep, this was 1964, before the longhairs were running roughshod over innocent America and the women's libbers were trying to bring civilization to its unstockinged knees. But just a year earlier, Betty Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique. And here begins the wild speculation that was going through my head just a few hours ago: it's hard to believe something that made the splash Friedan's book did wouldn't have crossed the path of a well-informed Stanford Emeritus Professor such as our intrepid translator.

Maybe he and the publisher thought this little uproar was just a phase. (It's more likely they didn't think about it at all, in relation to the dumb footnote, but let's keep going, just for fun.) Morgan was in his eighties when Upright Seven came out; he was born in 1883, and I'm sure he'd seen enough to know that the world usually doesn't change drastically overnight, especially as the result of a book. But the way in which B.Q. assumed what sort of audience would (and would not) be interested in his footnote (especially when footnotes had thankfully been almost non-existent up to this point), and the way in which he addressed that audience, places him solidly in line with pre-Friedan attitudes.

Would there be something wrong with a man interested in knowing just what all these pastries were? If interested, would he be counted as "feminine"? Was Morgan using the adjective, not as an indicator of gender, but as a one-word label of bundled assumptions involved in a standard view of a particular gender? Did he use "feminine readers" in place of "ladies," for example, because he was aware that these days, only certain types of women-- those paragons of their "sex" still committed to the home and to "femininity"-- were remotely concerned with impressing the guests at their next dinner party?

I realize I've gone off on a zany tangent here that many will find ridiculous. But-- time for a little self-disclosure-- since I am a translator, I know 1) word choices loom incredibly large, whether bringing a text into another language or selecting the right phrasing for a margin note or clarification, and 2) my colleagues and I, at least, tend to make sparing use of footnotes. B.Q. had, so far, stayed true to point #2, and so I find it especially curious that he took the time here to seek out his lady friends, who, had they really been that interested in what was on Herr Frymann's table, probably would have done their own research.

And then: the text itself will bear with it its own date-stamp; how much do you, as a translator, want to 1) insert yourself into the text and/or 2) mark your own interventions with an additional era-indicator, thus (probably) leaving that much more excuse for someone else to come along and improve upon your own dated production?

I feel I've been a bit hard on ol' B.Q., who really was a mover and shaker in the world of translation, a world to which he was deeply committed. And I can at least recognize that his little comment was more apropos in the mid-'60s than it would be today-- and be thankful that, even though hearty strains of sexism still assume I'd rather be shopping and taking advice from The Millionaire Matchmaker, most people I know would laugh just as nuttily as I did upon reading that little gem at the bottom of page 41.