Keeping Loti Cold

In the summer of 1885 a French naval officer was rowed ashore at Nagasaki lying face down in the bottom of a small sampan, in a space, he wrote, exactly the size of his own body. His name was Julien Viaud. He published under the name Pierre Loti, and the book he made out of that summer, Madame Chrysanthème, is one of the stranger things in nineteenth-century French fiction: a novel that is barely a novel, fifty-six short chapters lifted straight from a diary, about a marriage he arranged by the month and never once mistook for love.

We have brought it back into English, and I want to walk through a few of the decisions that went into the translation, because they are the reason the edition exists at all.

Start with the tense. Loti wrote the book in the present. Not the historical present that novelists reach for to make a scene feel close, but the literal present of a journal kept as the days pass: I see, it is hot, we climb the hill. The English version that has represented this novel for more than a century moved all of it into the past, the way Victorian literary convention preferred. It reads more like a proper novel that way. It also misstates what the book is. A diary in the past tense has already survived itself; the narrator is looking back, and the looking back softens everything it touches. A diary in the present tense is still going on. Pierre is still in that room while you read him, still bored, still watching. Clémence Aubert kept the present tense from the first chapter to the last. The reader who feels faintly trapped in his company is reading it correctly.

The harder decision was what to do with the way Loti sees the woman he has married. He calls her his little yellow thing. He refers, more than once, to her yellow brain. Any translator feels the pull to sand this down, to make the narrator a shade more bearable to a reader today. We resisted it. The coldness is not a flaw in the novel that a careful edition can quietly repair; it is the novel’s actual subject, whether or not Loti knew that it was. His narrator studies Chrysanthème with the same precise attention he gives the light on the harbour, and the same inability to grant her a life of her own. Edit his vocabulary and you produce a gentler man telling a gentler story, which is a different book, and a false one. The discomfort is doing work. It is meant to reach you.

There is one moment I love, and it happens to be a moment about translation itself. For most of the book Loti calls the instrument Chrysanthème plays a guitar. It is not a guitar, and he knows it is not; guitar is simply the nearest European word to hand, and he uses it the way he uses everything Japanese around him, as an approximation good enough for a passing officer. Then, in Chapter XLIX, he stops. He writes that neither guitar nor mandolin will serve, and for the first time he reaches for the real thing: chamécen, his own rough spelling of shamisen. It is the single instant in the whole diary when the narrator catches his own descriptions being wrong. Clémence follows him exactly, guitar through Chapter XLVIII and chamécen from Chapter XLIX on. We could have corrected him all the way through and spared him the error. That would have erased the one moment he sees himself.

The novel came back into English for the first time in over a century on the fourteenth of July, which felt like the right day for a French book that has spent most of its life standing just out of sight behind a famous opera. Puccini’s Madama Butterfly grew out of this material, by a long route through other hands, and the opera will always be the reason most people know the story at all. But the opera pities the girl, and Loti does not, and that refusal is what makes his version worth reading now.

So read him in the present tense. It is the tense he chose, and the book needs it. Pierre is still up the hill in the rented house, still watching a woman he will not trouble himself to understand, still writing it all down. The older translations shut that door and told you the story was finished. It isn’t. It is still happening, and that is the whole reason to read it now.

Idara Crespi
Publisher, Espresso Publishing House