Strong opinions

SARTRE'S FIRST TRY

Nausea. By JeanPaul Sartre. Translated by Lloyd

Alexander. 238 pp. New York: New Directions, 1949

Sartre's name, I understand, is associated with a fashionable brand of cafe philosophy, and since for every so-called «existentialist» one finds quite a few «suctorialists» (if I may coin a polite term), this made-in-England translation of Sartre's first novel, La Nausee (published in Paris in 1938) should enjoy some success.

It is hard to imagine (except in a farce) a dentist persistently pulling out the wrong tooth. Publishers and translators, however, seem to get away with something of that sort. Lack of space limits me to only these examples of Mr. Alexander's blunders.

1. The woman who «s'est offert, avec ses economies, un jeune homme» (has bought herself a young husband with her savings) is said by the translator (p. 20) to have «offered herself and her savings» to that young man.

2. The epithets in «If a Vair souffreteux et mauvais» (he looks seedy and vicious) puzzled Mr. Alexander to such an extent that he apparently left out the end of the sentence for somebody else to fill in, but nobody did, which reduced the English text (p. 43) to «he looks».

3. A reference to “ce pauvre Gbebenno» (French writer) is twisted (p. 163) into «Christ . . . this poor man of Gehenna».

4. The “foret de verges” (forest of phalli) in the hero's nightmare is misunderstood as being some sort of birch wood.

Whether, from the viewpoint of literature, La Nauseewas worth translating at all is another question. It belongs to that tenselooking but really very loose type of writing, which has been popularized by many second-raters — Barbusse, Celine, and so forth. Somewhere behind looms Dostoevski at his worst, and still farther back there is old Eugene Sue, to whom the melodramatic Russian owed so much. The book is supposed to he the diary («Saturday morning», «11.00 p.m». — that sort of dismal thing) of a certain Roquentin, who, after some quite implausible travels, has settled in a town in Normandy to conclude a piece of historical research.

Roquentin shuttles between cafe and public library, runs into a voluble homosexual, meditates, writes his diary, and finally has a long and tedious talk with his former wife, who is now kept by a suntanned cosmopolitan. Great importance is attached to an American song on the cafe phonograph: «Some of these days you'll miss me, honey». Roquentin would like to be as crisply alive as this song, which «saved the Jew [who wrote it] and the Negress [who sang it]» from being «drowned in existence».

In an equivocal flash of clairvoyance (p. 235) he visualizes the composer as a clean-shaven Brooklynite with «coal-black eyebrows» and «ringed fingers», writing down the tune on the twenty-first floor of a skyscraper. The heat is terrific. Presently, however, Tom (probably a friend) will come in with his hip flask (local color) and they will take swigs of liquor («brimming glasses of whisky» in Mr. Alexander's lush version). I have ascertained that in reality the song is a Sophie Tucker one written by the Canadian Shelton Brooks.

The crux of the whole book seems to be the illumination that comes to Roquentin when he discovers that his «nausea» is the result of the pressure of an absurd and amorphous but very tangible world. Unfortunately for the novel, all this remains on a purely mental level, and the discovery might have been of some other nature, say solipsistic, without in the least affecting the rest of the book. When an author inflicts his idle and arbitrary philosophic fancy on a helpless person whom he has invented for that purpose, a lot of talent is needed to have the trick work. One has no special quarrel with Roquentin when he decides that the world exists. But the task to make the world exist as a work of art was beyond Sartre's powers.

[The New York Times Book Review, when publishing this piece in its issue of April 24, 1949, left out my fourth example of Mr. Alexander's blunders. From Ithaca, N. Y., where I was teaching at Cornell University, I immediately propelled a fierce telegram accusing the editor of having disfigured my article. On Monday, April 25, I delivered my third and last lecture on Turgenev's Fathers and Children. On Tuesday night we had guests at our dreadfully dratty dacha on steep Seneca Street (Lloyd Alexander would have glossed: Lucius Annaeus). I regaled them with a copy of that violent wire. One of my colleagues, a tense young scholar, observed with a humorless chuckle: «Yes, of course, that's what you would want to have sent, as we all must have wanted in many similar cases». My retort, I thought, was not unfriendly, but my wife said later I could not have been ruder. On Wednesday I started to analyze, before a torpid class full of vernal languor, Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich. On Thursday I got a letter from The New York Times Book Review explaining their action by «considerations of space» I have now reinstated the missing passage from a note in my files. I do not know if the editor was sufficiently farsighted to preserve my typescript and telegram. According to the italicized bit at the bottom of the piece: «Mr. Nabokov is the author of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight» — which had been published by New Directions.]