Читать книгу Revenge of the Translator - Brice Matthieussent - Страница 25

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* Here is the beginning of this chapter in the original American edition:

“Abel Prote was born January 1, 1950, at the American Hospital in Paris. His family lived in a bourgeois building in the 6th arrondissement, not far from the Odéon theater. His father, Maurice-Edgar Prote, wealthy Parisian publisher and audacious purveyor of American literature, decided to name him Abel because of the child’s rather unusual birth date, at the exact caesura of the century. As for the surname, Prote, it comes from distant ancestors on the father’s side, who were foremen in the first printer’s shops: ‘prote,’ the French word for ‘master printer,’ comes from the Greek prōtos, ‘first.’

An old American lady, who for some obscure reason begged me not to divulge her name, happened to show me in New York the diary she had kept in the past, during her Parisian years. So uneventful had those years been—apparently—that the collecting of daily details—which is always a poor method of self-preservation—barely surpassed a short description of the day’s weather. Luck being what it is when left alone, here I was offered something which I might never have hunted down had it been a chosen quarry. Therefore I am able to state that the afternoon of Abel Prote’s birth was a sinister windy one, with two degrees (Celsius) above zero … this is all, however, that the good lady found worth setting down. On second thought I don’t see why I should yield to her desire for anonymity. That she will ever read this book seems wildly improbable. Her name was and is Jane Jennifer Janireff: baroque babble which it would have been a pity to withhold!”

It’s without remorse that I delete these first paragraphs of Chapter 2, even if I supply them here to be read as a note. Paradox? Contradiction? I don’t care. Indeed, how surprised I was, and what indignation I felt, to discover, in a rather large coincidence—“that’s luck for you”—that it is almost word for word the first page of Vladimir Nabokov’s first novel written in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight! Shame on my author … Who does he think he’s fooling with such blatant impostures? His only originality lies in replacing Nabokov’s splendid “Olga Olegovna Orlova—an egg-like alliteration” with “Jane Jennifer Janireff: baroque babble.” Nice idea, but it doesn’t at all justify keeping this shameful plagiarism in my French translation. (Trimmer’s Nota Bene)