Sexy Stendhal!

Our book today is Le Rouge et le Noir, the great 1830 novel written by Marie-Henri Beyle under his world-famous pseudonym Stendhal. Actually, our book today is an English-language translation of Le Rouge et le Noir, and not just any translation, oh no! Our translation today is one I came across just recently (at my beloved Brattle Bookshop, of course) after having forgotten about it completely when it first appeared in 2003 – and now, gazing upon it, I wonder how on Earth I could have forgotten about it, since it sports a, shall we say, rather unconventional cover.

Designed by Gabrielle Bordwin (who did, among many other things, the fittingly ornate cover for Salman Rushdie’s great novel The Enchantress of Florence and the fittingly elegiac cover for the cover for David Gilbert’s & Sons), this The Red and the Black cover was for a new translation by Burton Raffel, and it features a close-up of a topless young man’s hand resting on the sinuous curve of his lower back, just at the top of his black pants – or is it a young man’s hand placed (awkwardly, but I suppose theoretically plausibly) guidingly at the base of a young woman’s back?

Either way, the book had never had a cover quite like this one before. The novel tells the story of callow Julien Sorel, a working-man’s son from the provinces of 19th century France who burns with the utterly unthinking desire to ascend to the top ranks of society and bitterly regrets that under the newly-restored and famously corrupt Bourbon regime, pathways for such social advancement aren’t as open as they were under Napoleon Bonaparte, when at least the civil service and the army gave a chance to a provincial nobody who wanted to better his station in life.

Stendhal’s satire throughout the book is fairly biting, but readers are mostly left to figure out on their own that Julien Sorel wouldn’t have risen very far under any regime, meritocratic or otherwise. He’s shallow, unsympathetic, unimaginative, and opportunistic – in fact (though this, too, is curiously muted throughout the book), the only thing he really has going for him is that he’s good-looking. That’s what leads me to suspect Gabrielle Bordwin’s cover depicts a young man and only a young man: The Scarlet and the Black is quintessentially the story of a young man who tries – and ultimately fails – to parlay his good looks into anything more substantial.

Book designers worth their salt have always seized on that theme. The sturdy 1953 Penguin Classic translation (simply rendered Scarlet and Black) features a detail from a portrait by the great Pierre-Paul Prud’hon (who was very nearly a contemporary of Stendhal, and whose studies and finished sketches of nudes are the glory of that particular sub-strata of art): the handsome face of a young man bordered in shadow and looking a bit worried.

The cover of the 1991 Oxford World’s Classics paperback makes the proposition even more openly: here we have a slightly darkened detail from a painting showing the very item itself, a very handsome, slightly foppish young man (Oxford’s later trade paperback makes the smart decision of giving us the whole portrait, so we can take in the top-hat held with false negligence, the coat-tails, the ostentatious little shoes – whether or not he actually did, this is exactly how Julien Sorel would have imagined himself dressing) – a man whose perfect face and elegant (though exceedingly Gallic!) nose would have acted as by far his most effective social trump-card, gaining him admittance to social circles that would have been denied to rude mechanicals.

In the shrewd, unforgettable second part of Stendhal’s novel, the Parisian social circle in question is that of the Marquis de la Mole, whose household Julien Sorel has joined as a kind of general secretary and factotum. It’s here that he encounters Mathilde, his employer’s daughter, and Stendhal immediately busies himself with the sexual tension between these two young idiots. So surely it’s in a scene between these two characters that we’ll best be able to determine if this 2003 Burton Raffel translation only looks sexier or in fact is sexier than all other contenders! Let’s look for example, at Chapter 20, “The Japanese Vase,” in which so many of the flirting games and serious ploys between Julian and Mathilde begin to erupt. It’s in this chapter that we’re taken into Mathilde’s cresting self-revulsion at the thought of becoming intimate with somebody so far beneath her own social rank, for instance, which translator Margaret Shaw renders this way for the Penguin Classic:

Remorseful virtue and resentful pride made her, that morning, equally unhappy. She was in some sort shattered by the dreadful idea of having given certain rights over herself to a mere humble priest, who was a peasant’s son. It’s almost, she said to herself at moments when she exaggerated her misfortune, as if I had to reproach myself with a partiality for one of the footmen.

… which is, as even my readers without French will immediately see, almost unrelievedly dreadful. Things are slightly improved in Catherine Slater’s rendition for Oxford World’s Classics:

Virtue and pride were both causing her remorse that made her equally wretched that morning. She was somehow devastated by the appalling idea of having given rights over herself to a little abbe, the son of a peasant. It’s more or less, she said to herself at times when she was exaggerating her wretchedness, as if I had a lapse with one of the lackeys on my conscience.

That at least tries to capture some of the euphony that Stendhal could toss off so casually, and “little abbe” is very good. But what about the Raffel, with its sexy cover? Here’s what it does with the same passage:

Remorse caused by virtue and by pride, had made her, that morning, equally wretched. To some extent, she was overwhelmed by a frightful idea: she had given claims on herself to a petty priest, a peasant’s son. “This is almost the same,” she told herself, in moments of exaggerating her misery, “as if I had reproached myself, having had a weakness for one of the servants.”

It might not be particularly sexy, but that’s clearly better than either of the other two, yes? More effective, more direct, if less strictly beholden to the French. And since Chapter 20 is also something of a high point in Julien Sorel’s self-awareness – and since it’s very likely his flexing abs on Gabrielle Bordwin cover – it seems only right to check in on him too, in the shocking moment when he dimly realizes that Mathilde might actually exist as a person (and a person who doesn’t at the moment seem to like him too much). Here’s Shaw from the Penguin:

For the first time in his life, Julien found himself subjected to the action of a superior mind provoked by the most violent hatred against him. So far from having at that moment the least thought of defending himself, he reached the point of self-contempt. Hearing her heap upon him such cruel marks of scorn, so skilfully calculated to destroy any good opinion he might have of himself, it seemed to him that Mathilde was right, and that she was not saying enough.

That’s a more respectable showing, especially in the neatly-navigated shoals of all those ‘s’-sounds and hard-’c’ sounds. What about Slater for Oxford? She had it like this:

For the first time in his life Julien found himself subjected to the working of a superior mind fired by the most violent hatred of him. Far from having even the slightest thought of defending himself at that moment, he reached the stage of despising his own self. As he heard himself assailed with such cruel outbursts of scorn, so cleverly calculated to destroy any good opinion he might have of himself, it seemed to him that Mathilde was right and that her words did not go far enough.

And the balance-scales tip in the opposite direction! In this passage, Slater is clumsier than Shaw, muddying things up with ‘his own self’-style paddings and thereby muting the comparatively brutal impact of the moment. And how will Sexy Raffel handle it? Like this:

For the first time in his life, Julien found himself subjected to the workings of a superior mind, motivated by extraordinary hatred, and entirely directed at him. He was unable even to think of defending himself; indeed, he began to share her burning contempt. As he heard Mathilde heaping up her disdain, her cruelties, all cleverly calculated to destroy whatever good opinion he might have had of himself, he felt she was right, and she could not have said enough of such things.

Again, very much the best of the three – by judiciously cutting a few corners, Raffel manages give the moment a – dare we say it – muscularity that’s lacking in the two earlier, less sexy translations. His The Red and the Black is a world different from, for example, his disastrous 2008 ‘translation’ of The Canterbury Tales – it’s uniformly excellent, a fine representation of this fantastic novel.

And sexy too! A kind of companion to Wendy Lai‘s equally-sexy (and of course equally-irrelevant) cover design for Random House’s 2004 edition of “The Lion in Winter” – and let’s hear it for such treatments! War and Peace, anyone?