The Pastoral Symphony

Table Of Contents

Title Page

The Pastoral Symphony

A Novel by André Gide

English Translation by Walter Ballenberger

© Copyright 2013 Walter Ballenberger All Rights Reserved

PO Box 2153, Monument, CO 80132

[email protected]

The cover image is a photo of an original oil painting by Walter Ballenberger

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About the Author/Translator's Preface

André Gide is a very famous French author. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947. The Pastoral Symphony (in French, La Symphonie Pastorale) was one of his more famous novels and was originally published in 1919. While translating this novel I thought it would make an excellent subject for a movie. I subsequently looked it up, and sure enough, a film was produced with the same name in France in 1946. This film won the top prize, Le Grand Prix (equivalent to the Palme d’Or) in that year at the Cannes Film Festival. I look forward to seeing it one day.

This is my fourth translation of a classic French novel. The first three I did were by François Mauriac, who was also the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Both authors write in a formal French literary style, but Mauriac is more formal than Gide with almost every sentence written in the subjunctive. This style occurs with Gide as well, but to a lesser extent. That alone would make me prefer Gide over Mauriac, but I also prefer Gide’s characters and story line, at least in his books that I have read so far. Some of Mauriac’s main characters are somewhat dark, and through them he was able to stir the cultural pot in his day. Gide’s characters can also have serious flaws in their personalities and behavior, however. Gide was also known for challenging the cultural norms of the time (the two were contemporaries, but Gide was older than Mauriac).

It would be fun to see a modern film rendition of this story.

Walter Ballenberger

07/14/2013

About the Translator/Publisher

Walt Ballenberger originally grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona, but for the past 25 years he has resided in Colorado.

He graduated from West Point and is a Vietnam veteran.

He subsequently worked in engineering and in marketing for a leading semiconductor company. That company sent him and his family to live in Toulouse, France, for two years in the 1980s. During that time he learned to speak French fluently, building upon his high school French and Latin classes.

After taking early retirement, he founded Beaux Voyages, Inc. along with his son, and they spent the next 10 years leading bicycle tours all over France, including the Provence, Normandy, Loire, Dordogne, Burgundy, Alsace and Bordeaux regions. He still watches the French national news every day on the French language channel TV5.  Walt says that living in a foreign country was a life-altering experience for himself and his family.  He is fond of the Rudyard Kipling line: “And what should they know of England who only England know?”

This is the fourth classical French novel that Walt has translated into English and the first by André Gide. The first three were written by François Mauriac who was also a Nobel Prize winner in literature. Walt plans to translate other books by Gide in the near future.

First Notebook

10 February 189-

The snow, which has not stopped falling for three days, is blocking the roads. I was not able to travel to R… where twice each month for the past 15 years we have held a religious celebration. This morning only 30 of the faithful assembled in the chapel of La Brévine.

I will take advantage of the leisure provided by this forced confinement to step back and recount how it was that I came to take care of Gertrude.

I had planned to write here everything concerning the training and development of this pious soul whom I only led out of the darkness because of adoration and love. Blessed be God for having confided this task to me.

Two years and six months ago, as I was returning to La Chaux-de-Fonds, a young girl whom I did not know came looking for me in all haste to take me seven kilometers from there because a poor old woman was dying. The horse was not uncoupled. I put the child in the carriage after obtaining a lantern, because I thought that I would not be able to return before nightfall.

I thought I knew the area around the community rather well, but after passing the farm at la Saudraie, the child made me take a road that until then I had never adventured upon. Two kilometers from there, however, I noticed on the left a little mysterious lake where as a young man I had sometimes gone to ice skate. I had not seen it for 15 years because none of my pastoral duties had called me in this direction. I would no longer be able to say where it was, and I had at this point stopped thinking about it. Then it seemed to me, when I recognized it suddenly in the pink and gold enchantment of the evening, that I had only seen it previously in a dream.

The road followed the course of a stream, cutting through the extremity of the forest, and then ran alongside a peat bog. Certainly I had never been there before.

The sun was setting, and we were walking for a long time in the shadows.