Cecilia: “the VOLUBLE […] are flirting, communicative, restless, and familiar, and attack without the smallest ceremony”

1/ Evelina, Frances Burney’s first book, is an epistolary novel, but because it’s mainly composed of Evelina’s letters narrating her experiences in London, it very quickly stops looking like letters, and looks more like a first-person narrative—with scenes, dialogue, characters, etc. Cecilia has a third-person narrator, though Frances Burney mainly focuses on the perspective of Cecilia Beverley. 

“… This, added to the behaviour of young Delvile, made her suspect that some engagement was in agitation on his own part, and that while she thought him so sedulous only to avoid her, he was simply occupied in seeking another. This painful suggestion, which every thing seemed to confirm, again overset all her schemes, and destroyed all her visionary happiness. Yet how to reconcile it with what had passed at their last meeting she knew not; she had then every reason to believe that his heart was in her power, and that courage, or an opportunity more seasonable, was all he wanted to make known his devotion to her; why, then, shun if he loved her? why, if he loved her not, seem so perturbed at the explanation of her independence?” (B.4, ch.10)

That’s an example of free indirect discourse, though Frances Burney doesn’t use it extensively in the novel. 

“Her pity, however, for Miss Belfield was almost wholly unallayed by jealousy; she harboured not any suspicion that she was loved by young Delvile, whose aspiring spirit led her infinitely more to fear some higher rival, than to believe he bestowed even a thought upon the poor Henrietta; but still she wished with the utmost ardour to know the length of their acquaintance, how often they had met, when they had conversed, what notice he had taken of her, and how so dangerous a preference had invaded her heart.

[…] Would she obtain them? no; the most romantic generosity would revolt from such a demand, for however precarious was her own chance with young Delvile, Miss Belfield she was sure could not have any; neither her birth nor education fitted her for his rank in life, and even were both unexceptionable, the smallness of her fortune, as Mr Monckton had instructed her, would be an obstacle insurmountable.

Would it not be a kind of treachery to gather from her every thing, yet aid her in nothing? to take advantage of her unsuspicious openness in order to learn all that related to one whom she yet hoped would belong ultimately to herself, and gratify an interested curiosity at the expence of a candour not more simple than amiable? “No,” cried Cecilia, “arts that I could never forgive, I never will practice; this sweet, but unhappy girl shall tell me nothing; betrayed already by the tenderness of her own heart, she shall at least suffer no further from any duplicity in mine. If, indeed, Mr Delvile, as I suspect, is engaged elsewhere, I will make this gentle Henrietta the object of my future solicitude; the sympathy of our situations will not then divide but unite us, and I will take her to my bosom, hear all her sorrows, and calm her troubled spirit by participating in her sensibility. But if, on the contrary, this mystery ends more happily for myself, if Mr Delvile has now no other engagement, and hereafter clears his conduct to my satisfaction, I will not be accessory to loading her future recollection with the shame of a confidence she then cannot but repent, nor with an injury to her delicacy that may wound it for ever.”” (B.5, ch.9) 

Frances Burney narrates Cecilia’s feelings; then uses free indirect discourse, blending the narrator’s voice with the thoughts of Cecilia; and then switches to direct speech (why does Cecilia make such a long speech to herself though?). 

2/ When I read Vanity Fair (1848) a couple of years ago and came across the passage “I wonder how many families are driven to roguery and to ruin by great practitioners in Crawley’s way?—how many great noblemen rob their petty tradesmen, condescend to swindle their poor retainers out of wretched little sums and cheat for a few shillings?...” (ch.37, it’s a long passage), I wrote: 

“… personally I find it interesting because I often read 19th century novels and don’t think other writers directly address, as Thackeray does, the impact on the tradesmen and employees when a person of higher class lives beyond their means and cheats them, or goes bankrupt and cannot repay debts.” 

We don’t see this in, say, Madame Bovary or The Custom of the Country. But look at Cecilia: not only had Frances Burney done it in 1782 but she also went further, letting us meet the workmen and the creditors. 

3/ Except for the heroine, the characters in Cecilia are largely characterised through dialogue, which would make it easy should anyone intend to adapt it for the screen (hint hint). Cecilia would work best as a TV series, but a lot would still have to be cut: lots of scenes could be shortened or cut altogether; Mr Gosport could easily be removed; Mr Morrice could go; etc.

Unfortunately I think a lot of these things should have been cut from the novel itself. I have always defended the length of Moby-Dick and War and Peace (and read both from cover to cover twice), but Cecilia should be significantly shorter: there is too much dialogue; most scenes are too long; many conflicts and misunderstandings are too drawn out… 

Take for example the development of the Harrels. Cecilia has three guardians after her uncle’s death: Mr Harrel, Mr Briggs, and Mr Delvile. She moves into Mr Harrel’s house because his wife Priscilla was her childhood friend, and at first she has a nice time as the Harrels are merry people and she gets introduced to high society and all sorts of amusements in London. Gradually Cecilia realises that the Harrels live a life of extravagance and dissipation: not only do they live beyond their means, paying no heed to the poor workers and tradesmen, but Mr Harrel is also a gambler. Mr Harrel is one of the most well-delineated, well-developed characters I’ve come across in fiction—Frances Burney doesn’t hold back—she depicts the recklessness and duplicity and treachery of Mr Harrel as he becomes more and more desperate. The development of Mr Harrel, as Burney gradually removes the layers and exposes his base character, is excellent. Mrs Harrel is also very well-written—she is shallow and callous and selfish, living as though actions have no consequences. I can’t help wondering, was Thackeray influenced by Frances Burney? Was George Eliot? Was Edith Wharton? Were Emily and Anne Bronte?

Frances Burney’s depiction of Cecilia’s naïveté and gullibility (though extremely irritating) is also excellent, especially when Cecilia struggles with herself: 

“… Startled by this consideration, she most severely reproached herself for a compliance of which she had so lightly weighed the consequences, and thought with the utmost dismay, that while she had flattered herself she was merely indulging the dictates of humanity, she might perhaps be accused by the world as an abettor of guile and injustice.” (B.5, ch.9) 

At the same time, parts of the novel are too long. Do we need pages and pages of vapid conversations? Do we need Mr Gosport’s analysis of various types of people in high society? Do we need so many scenes—and such long scenes—of Cecilia getting manipulated by the Harrels? Do we need such a long elaborate scene at Vauxhall, with all the empty talks thoroughly and meticulously written down, before the fatal act? I don’t think we do. It gets exhausting and I think a lot of the dialogue could be cut. Frances Burney has great talent for giving each character an individual voice, but she doesn’t know when to stop—very often I find myself thinking, all right Fanny, you have delighted us long enough.

The quote in the headline comes from B.1, ch.5. 

If This Be Magic and Shakespeare in translation: some further thoughts

 1/ When asked whether we know a writer if we only read them in translation, I suppose most people would say either yes or no. I think it depends: I think some but not too much is lost if we’re talking about Jane Austen, Trollope, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Fielding, Balzac, Zola, Molière…; but Nguyễn Du in translation is no longer Nguyễn Du and I’d say the same about Shakespeare, Melville, or Wodehouse; and I can’t help feeling that I don’t really know Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, or Ovid. 

There’s a reason that non-Russians name Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, or Chekhov as the greatest Russian writer, whereas Russians say Pushkin. 

That doesn’t mean we reject everything in translation. We look at different translations; we do what we can. Am I going to learn ancient Greek? No, I have no gift for languages. To read as widely as I aim to do, I need translators, for whom I’m forever grateful. I’m just saying that sometimes we do lose a lot: Wodehouse’s comic genius is in the phrasing, so what do we have when his sentences are now rephrased by someone else? It’s something to keep in mind. 

2/ In my previous blog post about Daniel Hahn’s If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation, I wrote: 

“When people read or watch Shakespeare in translation, his poetry is lost but his other qualities—his metaphors, his range, his characterisation and psychological insight, his examination of power and politics, his understanding of human nature, his sense of pacing and understanding of drama, and so on—are still there. When I read Racine, I suspected that much of his greatness was in the French alexandrine verse that got lost in translation.” 

Glad to later find Hahn making the same point in his book: 

“… Jean-Michel cited this distinction to explain why we see so few plays by Racine staged in English—he’s a writer for whom language is everything. A play like Bérénice has very little plot— ‘it’s all music, it’s all language.’ It’s a beautiful literary play, but Racine never wrote anything as generously, theatrically user-friendly as A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” (ch.32) 

The plays of Racine are all talk talk talk. 

If we leave aside the ancient Greek plays (different tradition of drama, with lots of singing), I have noticed that sometimes a long speech in someone else’s play is just the author writing poetry, whereas long speeches in Shakespeare are usually either rhetoric (a character trying to persuade another, which moves the plot forward), or a soliloquy (which depicts a character’s stream of thoughts). Spanish Golden Age playwrights, except for Lope de Vega, very often write those long speeches which neither move the plot forward nor do anything for characterisation (I’m looking at you, Tirso de Molina—what’s the point of that four-page speech about Lisbon?). The closet plays of Seneca, or Goethe’s Faust, have many passages and scenes that I know wouldn’t work well onstage. 

Shakespeare and Molière are performed widely around the world—in translation—because they understand theatre so well, having such a great sense of pacing and tension and pitch and dramatic effects (I once saw a bad production of Othello which still managed to make me tear up at the end).  

I’ve also noted that some of the playwrights who do well onstage in translation wrote in prose: Chekhov, Ibsen (except for some early plays)… Different beast, then. 

3/ Daniel Hahn’s book makes me have immense respect for translators of Shakespeare into other languages, and I do think many of the examples—the choices, the solutions to the problems inherent in translating Shakespeare—are brilliant. But at the same time, the book reinforces my view that Shakespeare is best appreciated in English, that I’m glad to read and watch his works in the original, and that it’s silly to call for a translation of his plays into today’s English. 

(Yep, over the years I’ve encountered lots of philistines who think readers of Shakespeare in translation have an advantage over us). 

When a translator finds a clever solution for a joke or a pun in Shakespeare, it might be funny (and the translator deserves an applause), but that joke or that pun is not Shakespeare’s. Hahn also explores many other problems and not everything gets a neat solution. What do you do when Shakespeare plays with the coexistence of Latinate/ Romance and Germanic words in the English language? Or when he marks an accent or regional dialect? Or when he includes words from another language? Or when he includes words from the target language itself (i.e. what does a French translator do with the French passages in the plays)? And if you make a choice between domestication and foreignisation, how far do you go and where do you draw the line? 

The translator is thus the second author. 

Hahn raises a million questions—sometimes there’s a brilliant answer, sometimes there’s no neat solution—and the book gets one to think more deeply about Shakespeare and about the art of translation. One aspect I’ve never considered, for example, is that a translator of Shakespeare tries to think about beats, rhythm, and rhyme, which is challenging enough if some languages (such as Italian or Greek) have longer words than English does, but things could be even further complicated by accents: a play translated by a Brazilian might end up losing some effects in the mouth of a Portuguese actor, as they pronounce syllables differently.

4/ This is interesting: 

“Just as everyday English carries idioms drawn from our own greatest canonical translation, the 1611 King James Bible (and its more quietly influential predecessors), so translated Shakespeare looms large in other languages, phrases from his work inflecting people’s speech.” (ch.37) 

I like that. 

(Does this happen in Vietnamese? I have no idea). 

“We readers can become attached to [translations] in just the same way, and it’s hard to imagine the validity of alternative interchangeable versions. Just recall the stories that mattered most to you as a kid, when some of the strongest bonds were formed. For me, those books included classics that were definitely not called ‘Gretel and Hansel’ or ‘Cindergirl’, Lindgren’s Pippi Longsocks, Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Small Mermaid’.” 

In Vietnam, some titles of classics—Giấc mộng đêm hè (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Bắt trẻ đồng xanh (The Catcher in the Rye), Đỉnh gió hú (Wuthering Heights), Cuốn theo chiều gió (Gone with the Wind), Tội ác và trừng phạt (Crime and Punishment), and so on—have become so iconic that retranslated titles would flop, or new translators don’t bother. It’s like Dostoyevsky’s Братья Карамазовы: since Constance Garnett, everyone has called it The Brothers Karamazov even though some later translators (such as Ignat Avsey) translated it as The Karamazov Brothers. 

We become attached to translations: I love Constance Garnett’s translations of Chekhov (still going through the 13 volumes); Aylmer and Louise Maude’s versions of Tolstoy are dear friends, including their War and Peace (revised by Amy Mandelker), though now the Anna Karenina copy I keep is by Rosamund Bartlett; I suspect I’m also attached to Robert Fitzgerald’s translations of Homer, which is why I (unreasonably) stick to Akhilleus when everyone else says Achilles, and so on. 

If This Be Magic is a very good book—a celebration of Shakespeare and a celebration of translators—and it’s certainly one of the books I’ve enjoyed most this year.