Umberto Eco’s Baudolino: a tale for our times

     I’ve read this – Eco’s second mediaeval masterpiece – several times, but for the first time in English, as when the novel was first published, the French translation came out a year before the English one. But I’ve wanted to read it in English for a long time, as Eco himself praised his translator William Weaver so highly. And it was very good, and also had me reflecting on my reading of French and my decreasing fluency with age in that language, for initially I found the English version of the novel much lighter, more flowing and easier to read…

What you have to wonder and marvel at is Eco’s total mastery of the mediaeval world, the confidence and knowledge which allows him to weave in every aspect of its ways of being and thinking into his novel… history, geography, theology, you name it, he can present it all from the mediaeval perspective.

From the outset, it’s a story about languages and understanding them, as Baudolino the hero has the ability quickly to learn and communicate in any dialect; given the travels and adventures he is to become involved in, this is a necessary. Along with this goes his ability to make things up, and for them then to become real and believed by many: this mediaeval trope has clearly reappeared in our less rational times…

As Constantinople burns and is looted once again, in the early thirteenth century, Baudolino rescues an official of that city and regales him with his life story, although we are constantly invited to be sceptical of this story-teller, who moves so seamlessly from fact to invention, from things that are to things that ought to be – and the thing is that, if something ought to be, then it surely is, somewhere, if only we knew where to find it. What you imagine as a possibility can become real just by fiat, by thinking of it; the borderline or demarcation is so much vaguer. This opens up a marvellous world of fantasy into which Eco weaves the mysterious death of the Emperor Frederick, and the quest for the (mythical?) Prester John, somewhere in the orient.

Having heard a rumour of this mysterious, very powerful Christian potentate somewhere in the East, Baudolino and friends make him real through writing letters from him to the Emperor, and convince themselves to go in search of him and present him with the holy Grail, a relic which they have ‘found’ – relics are manufactured to order in these times, six heads of John the Baptist in particular.

They encounter all sorts of weirdnesses – natural marvels and wondrous creatures – that were believed to exist in mediaeval times, such as those that adorn the frieze of the famous Hereford Mappa Mundi. The strange humanoid races that the travellers encounter as they approach the realm of Prester John are used to embody a huge range of Christian heresies, and open up an entire world of theological disputations such as were common in mediaeval times.

Again, Eco’s mediaevalism supports the nature of his story, which is not so much a novel with a plot and sharply defined characters (apart from the elusive eponymous hero) as a linear narrative in the style of the simpler and cruder mediaeval tale. As in mediaeval times, he does not shy away from copying others: thus there are links suggested between the Dalai Lama and the elusive Prester John, and at least one of the mysterious languages met in the orient is lifted from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

It’s not for everyone and not an easy read, but if you’ve enjoyed The Name of the Rose, I highly recommend this as a marvellous yarn, full of surprises, knowledge and entertainment, and another example of Umberto Eco at his very best. And the exploration of truth, lies and make-believe is somehow alarmingly resonant today.

On translation (again!)

The Qur’an is only the Qur’an in the original Arabic; if it’s in another language, it’s only a ‘version’, not the authentic Qur’an. At least, that’s my understanding of its status, and it led me once again to thinking about the business of translation. Obviously in my learning of languages, I’ve had to do plenty of it; I first became aware of the complexity when studying French at university. Turning the French words into English ones was straightforward enough, but making the whole read and flow like something in real English was much more of an art, and in the other direction was far harder, for coming from outside French, as it were, how well could I judge whether my effort felt like proper French? Nuance and idiom were everything, both ways…

Speaking the language was different: the revelation, epiphany even, which had come much earlier, before O level, when I was visiting my French pen-pal, was that I could speak the language more than passably and was understood by real French people, and that what I was saying did not involve any translating from English to French. The thoughts were there in my head, I articulated and they came out in French, because I was in France, talking with French people.

So what is a translation? Etymologically, from the Latin trans = across and latum, supine of the verb ferre to carry, so ‘carried across’. What do translators do? Somehow they enable us to read and understand a text written in a language we are unable to use. This involves putting the meanings of all the words into our language, and so much more: the sense, the feel, the meaning of the text as a whole also must be conveyed; idiom ideally is retained so we get a sense of the style of the original, the nature of the diction, the impression that the original author was trying to convey to her/his readers in the first language. Once you think of all these aspects of the task, it becomes formidable. And how can I be sure that, as a non-Russian and a non-Russian speaker (for these are surely different things) I’m actually getting what Tolstoy or Dostoevsky was saying?

I’ve enjoyed many of the novels of Ismail Kadare, some in English, more in French. And, to the best of my knowledge, most of the translations available in English until recently were done from the French, not the original Albanian. So how far am I from Kadare’s original meaning when I read Broken April, or The Pyramid, for example? Or, looking at an example in the other direction, consider Joseph Conrad, nowadays rather a neglected modernist writer. First language Polish, second language French, and yet he wrote brilliant novels in English, his third language, for heaven’s sake! Yes, you can detect French-isms in his English occasionally, but not that often…

I was struck many years ago when I read a comment by Umberto Eco about his translator into English, William Weaver. Eco actually said that he thought Weaver’s version of The Name of the Rose was better than his (Eco’s). Now (a) what does this mean, and (b) how could Eco actually know? My head spins. And for me, it is a brilliant novel – Weaver’s version, that is, for I don’t read or speak Italian. So what have I read?

I’m currently reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from A Dead House, translated by the well-known pair of translators of Russian literature, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. From articles I’ve read, one either hates their translation style or loves it. I’ve read many of their translations, and I’m firmly in the latter camp: for me they bring the stories alive, and with a modern enough idiom to make them comfortable to read unlike some of the stilted and wooden older translations. I’m not qualified to comment on accuracy or anything like that as I don’t speak Russian, but what they do works for me. But the more I read and think about translation as an art, the more in awe of its practitioners I am.