Volume 36, Number 20 · December 21, 1989
Written on Water
By John Weightman
The Walnut Trees of Altenburg
by André Malraux, translated by A.W. Fielding
Howard Fertig, 224 pp., $35.00
This publication is something of a puzzle. The statement on the copyright page, the 'First American Edition,' leads one to expect a new translation, but the text turns out to be an undeclared reissue of an English version, published in 1952, four years after the appearance of the French original. Nor has much care gone into its production. Any first-time reader will be baffled by the fact that the words 'Chartres, 21 June 1940,' which should stand at the head of the opening section of the novel to indicate the time of the action, have slipped back to a previous page, where they figure at the end of Malraux's preface. How, the reader will wonder, can the author have written the book and the preface before the events he goes on to describe? More seriously, although the translation was first published under the auspices of the late John Lehmann, a noted Francophile, it is nevertheless bespattered with elementary mistakes—e.g., 'he put on his glasses' instead of 'he put down his glasses' (il posa ses lunettes)—which sometimes obscure the meaning of whole paragraphs. Imagine a performance of a piece of music in which the instrumentalist resolutely hits a wrong note every two or three bars, and you get the effect. If the publisher thought Malraux worth relaunching at this point, why did he not commission a new translation, or at least have the old one revised?
Review, 3125 words
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