Abstract
This volume of essays is devoted to that famous waterway, the English Channel – ‘la Manche’ in French – which migrants in small inflatable boats are currently finding it so easy to cross. The editors are, however, not concerned with that, but focus on an earlier era when the steamer, and later the ferry, were the only means of surface transportation between England and France. ‘Read together’, they write, ‘the essays . . . chart untold stories of artistic and intellectual endeavour back and forth across the Channel in the first decades of the twentieth century’, when the Channel becomes ‘a modernist caesura marking a radical, avant-garde break with tradition and the past’ (pp. 12, 5).
Not the least of the pleasures in reading the essays is the discovery that Virginia Woolf’s French was, well, ‘schoolgirl French’. On a steamer to France she asked a French seaman if the sea was ‘brusque’. She must have looked up ‘rough’ in her pocket dictionary and, like so many aspiring speakers of French, chose the wrong meaning of the word. Anyone who has had to mark French proses will be all too familiar with the phenomenon.
Sydney Schiff, a wealthy patron of the arts, who after Scott Moncrieff’s death translated Le Temps retrouvé under the pseudonym Stephen Hudson, was – Emily Eells tells us in her chapter on Schiff and Proust – not much better at French than Virginia Woolf. He misread tenture (wallpaper) as curtains. Tenture can mean curtains or drapes, but not in the context of the opening sentence of Time Regained, and context, as teachers try to get their students to understand, is everything. English-speaking readers of Proust can only be grateful that Penguin Books have ensured that Ian Patterson’s excellent version of the closing volume of La Recherche has rendered Hudson’s obsolete.
Ford Maddox Ford, on the other hand – Max Saunders informs us – knew French perfectly, thanks to his father and grandfather. Ford was a close friend and collaborator of Joseph Conrad for whom, as a member of the Polish nobility, French was a second mother tongue. He and Ford debated endlessly the finer points of translation from French into English. ‘In one bravura example, [Ford] devotes seven pages . . . to the question of how best to translate just one sentence – the opening one – of “Un cœur simple”, the first of Flaubert’s Trois Contes’ (pp. 53–4).
Other excellent essays in this collection focus on Joyce, whose Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man frees the artist to ‘leave Ireland – and . . . then really return’ (p. 150); on the influential film journal Close Up (1927–33) which (p. 167) ‘looked to European models for British film and culture to follow’ (in that respect a precursor of the late Thomas Elsässer’s equally influential Monogram, 1971–5); and on Virginia Woolf’s meditation on the widely shared belief that the sound of British guns bombarding German trenches in Flanders could be heard from the top of the South Downs, like ‘nocturnal women beating great carpets’ (p. 219).