Kitabı oku: «Papillon»

Translator’s Introduction

All this last year France has been talking about Papillon, about the phènomène Papillon, which is not merely the selling of very large numbers of an unusually long book, but the discovery of a new world and the rediscovery of a kind of direct, intensely living narrative that has scarcely ever been seen since literature became self-conscious.

The new world in question is of course the underworld, seen from within and described with extraordinary natural talent by one who knows it through and through and who accepts its values, which include among others courage, loyalty and fortitude. But this is the real underworld, as different from the underworld of fiction as the act of love is different from adolescent imaginings, a world the French have scarcely seen except here and there in the works of Jean Genet and Albertine Sarrazin, or the English since Defoe; and its startling fierce uncompromising reality, savagely contemptuous of the Establishment, has shocked and distressed many a worthy bourgeois. Indeed, we have a minister’s word for it (a minister, no less) that the present hopeless moral decline of France is due to the wearing of miniskirts and to the reading of Papillon.

Nevertheless all properly equipped young women are still wearing miniskirts, in spite of the cold, and even greater numbers of Frenchmen with properly equipped minds are still reading Papillon, in spite of the uncomfortable feelings it must arouse from time to time. And this is one of the most striking things about the phénomène Papillon: the book makes an immense appeal to the whole range of men of good will, from the Academie française to the cheerful young mason who is working on my house. The literary men are the most articulate in their praise, and I will quote from François Mauriac, the most literary and articulate of them all, for his praise sums up all the rest and expresses it better. This piece comes from his Bloc-notes in the Figaro littéraire.

I had heard that it was a piece of oral literature, but I do not agree at all: no, even on the literary plane I think it an extraordinary talented book. I have believed that there is no great success, no overwhelming success, that is undeserved. It always has a deep underlying reason…I think that Papillon’s immense success is in exact proportion to the book’s worth and to what the author has lived through. But another man who had had the same life and had experienced the same adventures would have produced nothing from it at all. This is a literary prodigy. Merely having been a transported convict and having escaped does not mean a thing: you have to have talent to give this tale its ring of truth. It is utterly fascinating reading. This new colleague of ours is a master!

A thing that struck me very much in the book is that this man, sentenced for a killing that he did not commit…takes a very sanguine view of mankind. At the beginning of his first escape he was taken in and given shelter on a lepers’ island. The charity these most unfortunate, most forsaken of men showed to the convicts is truly wonderful. And it was the lepers who saw to it that they were saved. The same applies to the way they were welcomed in Trinidad and at Curaçao, not as criminals but as men who deserved admiration for having made that voyage aboard a nutshell. There is this human warmth all round them, and all through the book we never forget it. How different from those bitter, angry, disgusted books – Céline’s, for example.

Man’s highest virtues are to be found in what is called the gutter, the underworld; and what gangsters do is sometimes the same as what heroes do. I have already confessed that when I am very low in my mind I read detective stories. In these books, where everything is made up, the human aspect of the characters, the ‘humanity’, is appalling. But in Papillon’s tale, which is true, we meet a humanity that we love in spite of its revolting side. This book is a good book, in the deep meaning of the word.

When one has read a little way into Papillon one soon comes to recognize the singular truthfulness of the writing, but at first some readers, particularly English readers, wonder whether such things can be; and so that no time, no pleasure, should be lost, a certain amount of authentication may be in place.

Henri Charrière was born in 1906, in the Ardèche, a somewhat remote district in the south of France where his father was the master of a village school. After doing his military service in the navy, Charrière went to Paris, where, having acquired the nickname of Papillon, he soon carved himself out a respected place in the underworld: he had an intuitive perception of its laws and standards, and he respected them scrupulously. Papillon was not a killer at that time, but he fell foul of the police and when he was taken up on the charge of murdering a ponce he was convicted. The perjury of a witness for the prosecution, the thick stupidity of the jury, the utter inhumanity of the prosecuting counsel, and the total injustice of the sentence maddened him, for like many of his friends he had a far more acute sense of justice than is usual in the bourgeois world. What is more, the sentence was appallingly severe – transportation to the penal settlements in French Guiana and imprisonment for life without a hope of remission: and all this at the age of twenty-five. He swore he would not serve it, and he did not serve it. This book is an account of his astonishing escapes from an organization that was nevertheless accustomed to holding on to thousands of very tough and determined men, and of the adventures that were the consequences of his escapes. But it is also a furious protest against a society that can use human beings so, that can reduce them to despair and that can for its own convenience shut them up in dim concrete cells with bars only at the top, there to live in total silence upon a starvation diet until they are tamed, driven mad or physically destroyed – killed. The horrible, absolutely convincing account of his years in solitary confinement is very deeply moving indeed.

After years on the run, years of being taken and then escaping again even though he was on the ‘very dangerous’ list, Papillon finally got away from Devil’s Island itself, riding over many miles of sea to the mainland on a couple of sacks filled with coconuts. He managed to reach Venezuela, and eventually the Venezuelans gave him his chance, allowing him to become a Venezuelan citizen and to settle down to live in Caracas as quietly as his fantastic vitality would allow.

It was here that he chanced upon Albertine Sarrazin’s wonderful l‘Astragale in a French bookshop. He read it. The red band round the cover said 123rd thousand, and Papillon said, ‘It’s pretty good: but if that chick, just going from hideout to hideout with that broken bone of hers, could sell 123,000 copies, why, with my thirty years of adventures, I’ll sell three times as many.’ He bought two schoolboys’ exercise books with spiral bindings and in two days he filled them. He bought eleven more, and in a couple of months they too were full.

It is perhaps this extraordinary flow that accounts for some of the unique living quality of the book. A professional writer who puts down between one and two thousand words a day is doing very well: Papillon must have written about five thousand a day, and the result is very like the flow of a practised raconteur – indeed the book has been called a masterpiece of oral literature, and although this is not Mauriac’s view, with the utmost diffidence I (having lived with Papillon for months) venture to agree with it.

As luck would have it the manuscript was sent to Jean-Pierre Castelnau, the publisher who had discovered Albertine Sarrazin; and here I quote from his preface.

His manuscript reached me in September. Three weeks later Charrière was in Paris. Jean-Jacques Pauvert and I had launched Albertine: Charrière entrusted me with his book…

I have left this book, poured red-hot from his glowing memory and typed by various enthusiastic but not always very French hands, virtually untouched. All I have done is to put some order into the punctuation, change a few almost incomprehensible Spanish turns of phrase, and straighten out certain muddles and inversions that arise from his daily use of three or four different languages in Caracas, all learnt by ear.

I can vouch for the basic authenticity of the book. Charrière came to Paris twice and we talked a great deal. Whole days: and some nights too. Clearly, in thirty years some details may have grown dim and memory may have altered others. They are not of any importance. As for the background, one has but to glance at Professor Devèze’s Cayenne (Collection Archives, Julliard, 1965) to see that Charrière has by no means exaggerated either the way of life and morality of the penal settlement or its horror. Far from it.

As a matter of principle we have changed the names of all the convicts, warders and governors of the prison service, this book’s intention being not to attack individuals but to describe given characters and a given community. We have done the same with the dates: some are exact, others merely give a general notion of the period. That is all that is required.

Perhaps I should add something about the translation of the book. To begin with it was one of the hardest I have ever undertaken, partly because Papillon could not get into his stride, and I had to stumble along with him, for I resent ‘improvements’ in translation – they do not seem to me right. (Once, in one of my own novels, an Italian translator improved a difficult poem right out of existence.) And then there was the problem of his slang: Papillon does not use very much – nothing to compare with Albertine Sarrazin or Céline, for example – and it offers no great difficulty from the point of view of comprehension; but what he does use is strongly alive, far more immediate and personal than the comparatively limited vocabulary of the English underworld. So I was obliged to draw upon the more copious and vivid American: but then Papillon’s prison days were in the thirties and forties, so the slang had to belong to that period. Occasionally I have fallen into anachronism rather than sacrifice vividness, but on the whole I think the language, particularly the dialogue, is a reasonably faithful reflection of the original. Then again there was the question of obscenities. French of course makes a very free use of expressions such as con and merde whose literal equivalents are less often heard in English and therefore have a rather stronger effect; but on the other hand no one can be so simple as to suppose that thousands of ill-treated convicts herded together sound anything like a Sunday-school, so I have tried to steer between unnecessary grossness and inaccurate insipidity.

By the time I had settled these points Papillon had thoroughly hit his stride, and then I found that the best way of following his breakneck pace was to keep up with him. It is a pace that I am used to, for I have lived half my life among the most loquacious people in France, and although I could not translate quite as fast as Papillon wrote, I still finished the book in three months, treating it (to use Jean-Pierre Castelnau’s words) as the flow of ‘a sunlit, rather husky southern voice that you can listen to for hours on end’. And I may say that although in places it was tough going, all in all it was one of the most full and rewarding experiences in a literary life that has not been sparing in delights.

PATRICK O’BRIAN

Collioure, 1970