There was not one of them but would have passed a blind man begging in the street, not one that felt moved to pity by a tale of misfortune (p. 24).

Is Balzac the artist who has recorded for our modern era the death of the soul? The death of all belief in something greater, grander, than the individual? The damning portrait of the boarders seems to suggest as much. So do other passages elsewhere in Balzac’s enormous oeuvre: “With the monarchy we lost honor, with the religion of our fathers, Christian virtue, with our sterile governments, patriotism. These principles now only exist partially instead of animating the masses.... Now, shoring up society, we have no other support than egotism. Woe betide the country thus constituted. Instead of believers, we have interest” (Le Medecin de campagne [ The Country Doctor]; “interest” meaning both self-interested motivations for action and financial interest).

“He does not go in for deep psychology; he is not especially attached to the interior workings that make or unmake a soul,” wrote Lanson (in Vachon, p. 321). “I am not deep, but very thick”: The boarders in Père Goriot do not know the “interior workings,” the inner turmoil that forms the basis of the psychological novel and that marks some kind of attachment, however conflicted, to a greater ideal (of duty, faith, honor, etc.); they have known rather the strain of an exterior struggle that has worked over their bodies and left their faces “bleached by moral or physical suffering” (p. 20). Hence, Balzac claims himself to be “the inventor of the physiological novel,” a novel in which the characters, these “desolate souls” (“hapless beings” in this translation, p. 24) are moved not by pity or empathy, but by their stomachs. “‘Come, sit down to dinner, gentlemen, ”’ says Madame Vauquer, when Bianchon announces the death of Goriot, “or the soup will be cold” (p. 288). And the noise of civilization—“the rattle of spoons and forks” (p. 289)—covers over the events of the day.

 

Among the upwards of 2,500 named fictional characters in La Comédie humaine there is, as far as I know, no translator. Had there been one, we would know everything about how translators lived and worked in the early nineteenth century; we would know in which quarter of the city they lived, what, where, and with whom they ate, where they bought their ink and quills and the price they paid for them, and a host of other details that, taken together, would make up a vivid portrait of a type, a complete sociology of the translator.

The absence of a translator is hardly surprising, of course: In Balzac’s time the practice of translation did not amount to a self-sustaining profession (it does for only a few even today). In reading Père Goriot in English, one should remember that one is reading a translation, and it is perhaps worth giving a little attention here to the particular version we have before us, by Ellen Marriage, dating to 1901. Given what has been said about the disorderliness of Balzac’s style, it might be assumed that any hack with a knowledge of French could do a fair job of bringing him into English. Marion Ayton Crawford, translator of the widely read Penguin edition of Goriot, comes close to just such a position in her introductory remarks: “The translator of Balzac need not mourn the loss of French lucidity and grace of style, for whereas force is of the essence of his writing, lucidity is often a minor consideration and grace of little importance to him” (“Introduction,” p. 23). In other words, we need not mourn the loss of the eighteenth century, nor must we try to restore to Balzac an eighteenth-century refinement of diction. A different perspective is provided by the English writer Wilkie Collins, although I think his theory of translation is in the end quite close to Crawford’s. Collins was sensitive to the special challenges facing the translator of Balzac. After reflecting upon the popular success in England of Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Eugène Sue, he laments the lack of good translations of Balzac and the consequent neglect of this great author, who in Collins’s estimation is “superior to all three”:

Many causes, too numerous to be elaborately traced within the compass of a single article, have probably contributed to produce this singular instance of literary neglect. It is not to be denied, for example, that serious difficulties stand in the way of translating Balzac, which are caused by his own peculiarities of style and treatment. His French is not the clear, graceful, neatlyturned French of Voltaire and Rousseau. It is a strong, harsh, solidly vigorous language of his own; now flashing into the most exquisite felicities of expression, and now again involved in an obscurity which only the closest attention can hope to penetrate. A special man, not hurried for time, and not easily brought to the end of his patience, might give the English equivalent of Balzac with admirable effect. But ordinary translating of him by average workmen would only lead, through the means of feeble parody, to the result of utter failure.5

“Strong, harsh, solidly vigorous”: These are not the adjectives associated with French prose prior to Balzac, and they point to the originality of Balzac’s style.