Portrait of a Passive Lady
DUNBAR, GEORGIA SHERWOOD
Portrait of a Passive Lady The Other One. By Colette. Farrar. Straus. 160 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Georgia Sherwood Dunbar Associate Professor of English, Hofstra College THE OTHER ONE is...
...They are entirely believable but they generate little excitement in the reader...
...it cannot be ranked with The Ripening Seed, Cheri and The Last of Cheri...
...The brilliant tigress has been changed into the drab alley cat...
...When she comes to suspect that her closest friend, Jane, who is also Farou's secretary and the general manager of the whole household, is having an affair with Farou, she cannot at first accept the situation as easily as before...
...She comes to realize that both Jane and her husband are essential to her happiness and to the well being of the whole household...
...None of her husband's previous women had been her intimates...
...Again and again, syntax is altered so that force and suspense are lost, verbs are turned into participles, independent clauses into dependent clauses, and the whole sinuous strength of Colette's magnificent handling of the language is weakened to flabbiness...
...The translators' clumsiness is seen on almost every page and seriously affects the tone of the whole...
...In Oedipus and King Lear we also know almost from the first page what the end will be, but we are made to feel the enormous, explosive passion of each protagonist and hence we read on with increasing involvement: with such a protagonist our foreknowledge of his doom contributes immeasurably to our participation in the tragedy...
...Its weakness lies not in the writing, which is superb, warm, sensuous, minutely perceptive—Colette at her best—but in the characters...
...Of course, The Other One is not intended as a tragedy at all, especially not a tragedy of classic stature, but the comparison with Oedipus and Lear is nevertheless not unfair...
...Fanny is not, therefore, a protagonist to catch and hold our attention...
...In the final scene Fanny and Jane are almost conspiratorially agreed to continue the menage-a-trois and between them to keep Farou happy and productive in his career...
...In both classic comedy and classic tragedy the leader always knows from the beginning what the end will be and the protagonist is always shown as struggling against his certain destiny...
...In the opening scene we are told that she learned long ago to accept with calm her playwright husband's repeated casual infidelities...
...However, as a character study of such a person The Other One is a brilliant portrait...
...more especially, none had been a member of the same household...
...She is by nature extraordinarily passive and adaptable...
...Since Colette's style has an extraordinarily individualized richness and seems indeed a sort of concentrated personal essence, the translator of her works is under a special obligation...
...Indeed, Fanny hardly thinks at all, and her sense impressions do not even rise often to the level of emotion...
...The translation of the novel by Viola Gerard Garvin, published in 1931, is somewhat better in the matter of syntax, but to capture Colette's style would require another stylist of virtually equal skill, which is more than can be fairly asked of a translator...
...What is true of comedy and tragedy is also true of dramatic narrative in general...
...Fanny Farou, the protagonist of the dramatic narrative, The Other One, does not struggle...
...Something must be said also about this translation...
...It is unfortunate, nonetheless, that these translators did not exert themselves further...
...The Other One, as a whole, fails to be dramatic, but in French the individual sentences and paragraphs have the wonderful structural drama of the great classic stylists...
...The strength and intensity of his struggle largely determine the strength and intensity of the reader's response...
...Perfect translation of a work of literary art is, by the very nature of language, impossible: but this fact should not excuse the translator from using all his skill to capture not only as much of the matter of the original, but also as much of the manner, as is possible...
...To know Colette one must still read her work in French, and then even this minor novel will be found to be delightful...
...The lack of great anguish in Fanny is entirely believable...
...Reviewed by Georgia Sherwood Dunbar Associate Professor of English, Hofstra College THE OTHER ONE is representative but minor Colette...
...Accuracy, however, can surely be demanded, and this translation is often jarringly inaccurate...
...We know, almost from the first page, what the end will be, and because of the personalities of the characters we cannot feel much eagerness to observe the end...
...However, her struggle is brief and so subdued that it hardly merits the name "struggle...
...The essence of narrative is action, emotional or physical, but the essence of Fanny is passiveness...
...she lives an almost completely sensuous life, delighting in the most minute physical responses, the texture of her clothing, the varying scent of her husband's body at different hours of the day, and she long ago had happily turned all the active planning of the household over to Jane...
...she cannot live without both together, and so she rejects Jane's offer to leave...
...This drama, which in the original compensates for the narrative weakness described above, is almost entirely lost in the Elizabeth Tait and Roger Senhouse translation under review...
Vol. 43 • June 1960 • No. 26
