Jean Pélégri, The Olive-Trees of Justice (1959; 1962)

In You've Had Your Time, Burgess recalls the early 1960s, when impoverishment impelled him to all sorts of literary labour:

If I considered a book from France or Italy worthy of translation, I would sometimes be offered a hundred pounds to do the job myself. The contract specified 'good literary English', whatever that was. Lynne and I stayed up for most of the night, on three very minor French novels. With the help of the big Cassell's dictionary she would rough out the English and I would then gorblimey it into the good literary form required. But Lynne's tenses were weak, and she would confuse imperfects and conditionals. This would entail cursing retyping and dawn threats of suicide. I sometimes improved the style of the Frenchman, so much so that when The Olive Trees of Justice appeared in America (Les Oliviers de la Justice, by Jean Pelligri), a critic acclaimed its elegance and searing imagery and asked why Anglo-Saxon novelists could not write like that. [35-36]

It's not exactly encouraging that Burgess gets the name of the author wrong here, though what's an extra 'l' (perhaps standing for Lynne, who did the groundwork for the translation) amongst friends. At any rate, I've ordered a copy of the translation from eBay, and a copy of the original from amazon.fr, and when they arrive I shall compare them to see how much of the book is original Burgess. I suspect the answer will be: not much. At any rate, I'll report back.

I am sorry to confess that Jean Pélégri was a name unknown to me, until I chanced upon this reference. Wikipedia makes him sound like an interesting writer, and quotes Mohammed Dib from 2003, the year of the man's death: 'Jean Pélégri, Algerian by birth and one of the great writers of our time, greater than Albert Camus in any case, remains unknown in France. Why? Because he tried so hard to mark his terrority as an Algerian that he created a different kind of French language just for his own use. And for that, French readers rejected him.' Intriguing.

----
[Update: 15th June] My French copy finally arrived, and I've been able to look at the two side by side. The novel itself is a striking, if (deliberately) attenuated story: the narrator relates life in French Algeria in the mid 1950s; the constant threat of Arab terrorism (or freedom fighting), the hardscrabble existence. Mostly he is concerned with the death of his father, Michel. The first two thirds of the novel trace the old man's decline and eventual demise. The final third sees him buried, and the country finally igniting. French-Algerian Pélégri ends with a panegyric to Arab-Algerians, 'ces-hommes là, si tendres, si charitables, que nous avions tout refusé même la plus simple des justices', and a cry for peace. It is these men, the book says, who are the true oliviers de la justice. Most of the book is closely described landscapes, rooms, the paraphernalia of ordinary life. This is how Pélégri opens his novel:

C'était un samedi, un samedi d'été comme les autres, le dernier samedi du mois d'août, et je ne me doutais pas, non, je ne me doutais pas que mon père le lendemain matin allait mourir. [LODLJ, 13]

Here's Burgess:

It was Saturday, a typical Saturday in the summer, the last Saturday in August, and I had not the slightest doubt that, the following morning, my father was going to die. [TOTOJ, 11]

If we're looking for evidence of fancyfying and gorblimeying of the French, this, with its rather plainer English (omitting for instance the flourish with which Pélégri repeats the phrase 'je ne me doutais pas') is liable to disappoint. Not that it's badly done: only that the implication that P.'s style is plain and B. titivated it isn't borne out by comparison. Some examples:

Je m'étais assis derrière le chauffeur, près d'une fenêtre ouverte. Cependant, même en pleine course, l'air restait chaud. La blancheur des murs brûlait les yeux et quand, en croisant une auto, étincelait un chrome ou un pare-brise, cela blessait, comme une lame. [LODLJ, 13]

I sat down behind the driver, near an open window, but even when we were going at full speed the air was still hot. The whiteness of the walls seared the eye, and when another car came in sight the sparkle of chromium-plating or a windscreen struck like a knife-blade. [TOTOJ, 24]

Sur le balcon, dans la lumière électrique, les géraniums rouges semblaient phosphorescents. Ce soir, c'était la mort qui rôdait. La rue était déserte, plongée dans un silence anormal. [LODLJ, 62]

On the balcony under the electric light the red geraniums seemed to have a phosphorescent glow. That evening death was on the prowl. The street was deserted, plunged in an abnormal silence. [TOTOJ, 50]

Le mur de briques était percé d'une ouverture basse, derrière laquelle s'ouvrait une petite grotte. On se courbait pour y entrer, comme pour le marabout du palmier, on se faisait petit. Et là, au fond de cette crèche humide, doucement éclairée par la lampe, on apercevait enfin, au milieu d'un bouquet de bulles, blottie dans son nid d'argile, palpitante, vernant de naître, la source! [LODLJ, 158]

The brick wall was pierced by a deep hole behind which a little grotto opened out. You had to bend down and make yourself small in order to get in, just as you had to for the shrine under the palm-tree. And at the bottom of this damp crèche, softly lighted by a lamp, you could see at last—in the middle of a cluster of bubbles, snuggled down in its nest of mud, the palpitations of the stream which had just been born. [TOTOJ, 128]

A cause de chaleur, la place du Gouvernement était déserte, comme un champ à l'heure de la sieste. C'était là, autrefois, que je venais chercher la verité.... Mais avant d'aller vers la mer, j'ai voulu continuer un peu, jusqu'à cette impasse toute proche où je venais souvent avec mon fils, et que nous appelions l'Impasse aux Oiseaux. Au coucher du soleil, en effet, les oiseaux s'y rassemblent sure les fils électriques, par centaines, par milliers, et c'est un jacassment assourdissant. [LODLJ, 224]

Because of the heat, Government Square was deserted, like a field at siesta time. It was here that, in the past, I had come looking for truth .... But before proceeding towards sea, I wanted to go on a little farther, as far as a near-by dead-end where I often went with my son and which we called 'the cul-de-sac of the birds'. Indeed at sunset the birds would assemble on the telegraph wires in their hundreds, in their thousands, and their chatter was deafening [TOTOJ, 181]

This is all perfectly fine translation; but it cleaves very closely to the original ('plunged' for 'plongée', 'damp crèche' for 'crèche humide' and so on) in a way that rather suggests a translator hugging the shore. Does the job, mind you.

I went through pretty closely looking for evidence of stylistic enrichment, without finding any. Occasionally a sentence (let's say: 'tu t'enfonçais toujours davantage dans le noir de ce puits sans fond', 163) is rendered in a way that sort-of foregrounds a self-consciousness literariness: not 'you sank ever deeper into the darkness of that bottomless well', but AB's 'you penetrated the blackness, sinking deeper and deeper into the bottomless well' [131]. But it's not much. Moments you might think are sly Burgessisms turn out not to be, as when the narrator finds it hard to believe that the Archangel Gabriel could talk to Mohammed in Arabic (as his Arab servant insists he did) and also to the Virgin Mary in Hebrew (as the priest says), and declares: 'I couldn't accept the idea of a polyglot Archangel Gabriel' [143]. Actually this is straight from the French: 'je ne pouvais me faire à l'idée d'un archange Gabriel polyglotte' [175]. Overall I adjudge Burgess's account of his role as that of rewriter-cum-improver to be a big fib. He instead has, to his credit, produced a close, readable and accurate translation. Ah well.