Kitabı oku: «The Roman Tales»

Introduction

L’Abbesse de Castro, together with the stories ‘Vittoria Accoramboni’ and ‘Les Cenci’, first appeared in book form in Paris at the end of 1839. The volume was among the prolific author’s last completed works; remarkably, he wrote it in tandem with his long masterpiece La Chartreuse de Parme, published that same year. But despite its compelling characters and narrative perfection, L’Abbesse remains one of Stendhal’s least understood and appreciated novels.

We know a good deal about the origins and history of The Abbess of Castro and of Stendhal’s other Roman tales. Sometime in March 1833 he acquired from the archives of certain Roman patricians – it is said from the library of the Caetani family – the right to make copies of a number of old and yellowing manuscripts concerning celebrated trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which for the most part ended in the torture and brutal execution of the accused. Among these lurid narratives were accounts of popes dispatching cardinals, executions for murder, beheadings, burnings at the stake, and so forth. Most involved high-ranking Church officials and Roman nobility. In 1834 Stendhal records in the margins of one of his own books, ‘I have seven volumes replete with Roman exploits, the telling of which in a translation, without any embellishment, would be sufficiently authentic and typical but probably less entertaining that [than] the actual tales.’ (The italics here and that follow are Stendhal’s English, words and phrases of which he habitually interspersed with his French.) On his death the author left another seven volumes of these copied texts. At some point, he singles out the narratives concerning Victoria Accoramboni and the Cenci and sees in some of his material the possibility ‘To make … a little romanzetto.’ That is, to draft a short novel.

But by 21 December 1834 the author seems to have shifted his position. On this date, writing to the critic Sainte-Beuve, Stendhal says that when he falls on hard times and needs money he will translate some of these manuscripts, and he asks, ‘What should the collection be called? Roman Tales faithfully translated from accounts written by contemporaries (1400 to 1650). But can the account of a tragedy be called a tale?’

He goes on to tell Sainte-Beuve that these short histories, almost all of them tragic, are written ‘in the common speech of the period’ and can ‘be seen as a useful complement to Italian history’ of their day. He characterizes them as composed in ‘demi-jargon’, by which he meant semi-dialect. But they aren’t – not in the texts I have studied, which are of a simple Italian set down long before the Italian language reached a purified and fixed state.

In fact, Stendhal’s translations are more adaptations than the ‘faithful’ versions he liked to trumpet. As one would expect of an impetuous character like him, he has pared down and uncluttered the Italian texts to make his versions more fluent, more readable. With regard to ‘The Bishop of Castro and the Abadessa’, notwithstanding the author’s claims that his sources are two manuscripts, one Florentine, the other Roman – claims that he won’t let us forget throughout the course of the novel – the romanzetto is neither a translation nor an adaptation but an original piece of writing. This is plain to see when the story of Elena and Giulio is compared to other of Stendhal’s Roman tales, the so-called faithful translations. The plot, the character of Giulio himself, the sparkling dialogue, the insights into the protagonists’ psychology, the melodramatic ending are all pure Stendhalian invention. His only source, the thirty-odd-page manuscript account of the affair, the trial, and the scandal of the Abbess of the Convent of the Visitation and the Bishop of Castro, provided no more than a spur, a point of departure, for one of the author’s most perfect creations.

In his lifetime, Stendhal published four of his Roman stories and – as stated – saw but three of them collected in book form. In 1855, some thirteen years after his death, a selection of five of these tales appeared under the name of Chroniques italiennes (a title not Stendhal’s but that of his cousin Romain Colomb and a title that has persisted down the years). From here on, successive editions of these ‘Italian chronicles’ have varied in content according to each editor’s criteria.

Not all the stories in these collections have their sources in the old copied manuscripts. Recent editions have provided us with supplements and appendixes, often with variants, of a number of unfinished texts. These editions have comprehensive introductions and meticulous notes. Stendhal was a tireless scribbler in the margins of his work, particularly in the Italian manuscripts, and these jottings too are brought to our careful attention. The fascination with this material among Stendhal scholars and fans and the continued overlapping presentation of it is almost claustrophobic.

But what was Stendhal getting at in these Italian tales? What did they represent to him? What was he using them to illustrate? One of the constants throughout his career was his love of Italy, and over and over he reiterates a pet theory – such as the following from the introductory pages of the Abbess – that

In sixteenth-century France, a man could show his manhood and true mettle … only on the battlefield or in a duel. And as women love bravery and daring, they became the supreme judges of a man’s worth. Thus gallantry was born. This led to the successive destruction of all passions, including love …

In Italy, a man could distinguish himself as much by the discovery of an old manuscript as by the sword … A sixteenth-century woman would love a man who was versed in ancient Greek as much or more than one renowned for his courage in war. Passions rather than gallantry held sway.

A short note to the reader on the first pages of The Charterhouse of Parma states that ‘the Italians are sincere, honest folk and … say what is in their minds; it is only when the mood seizes them that they show any vanity; which then becomes passion …’ Again, in a preface to his story of the Duchess of Palliano, Stendhal speaks of ‘the unfettered passion that appeared in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and that died out in our time owing to the aping of French customs and Parisian fashion’. He tells us he will not in his translation ‘make any attempt to adorn the simplicity, the occasionally startling crudeness’ of the narrative. He saw that the essence of this passion rested on the fact that it sought its own satisfaction and was not bound up in vanity. Such passionate feeling required deeds, not words. Stendhal warned his readers that very little conversation would be found in his Italian tales. ‘This is a handicap to my translation, accustomed as we are in our fiction to long conversations by the characters …’

All these claims except one are perfectly illustrated in his story of the tragic love affair of Giulio Branciforte and Elena de’ Compireali. The remark about long conversations, however, is a flat contradiction of what he wrote, the way he wrote it, and of the resulting spell he cast in The Abbess of Castro.

Marie-Henri Beyle, best known by his favourite pen name Stendhal, was born in Grenoble on 23 January 1783. His immediate family was pious, royalist, and firmly conservative, whereas from an early age young Beyle came to despise convention, was an atheist, and, as a follower of Napoleon, a fervent advocate of the French Revolution.

The details of his life, the range of his experiences, his tireless travels, are truly extraordinary. He adored women and had countless women friends and lovers, none forgettable, none forgotten, and all his liaisons ultimately unsuccessful; he never married. He understood women and wrote about them in a way that is revolutionary and still unmatched. His female characters Madame de Rênal and Mathilde de la Mole (The Red and the Black), Gina Sanseverina and Clelia Conti (The Charterhouse of Parma), Vittoria Carafa and Elena de’ Campireali (The Abbess of Castro), and even Lamiel in the author’s last and unfinished eponymous novel, are among the greatest creations in all literature.

Beyle left Grenoble for Paris at the end of 1799, whereupon influential relatives got him a post as a lowly clerk in the Ministry of War. He was only seventeen when in May 1800 he was allowed to follow Napoleon’s army into Italy, where he found a position doing clerical work for the governor of Lombardy. Here he fell in love with Italy, with Italian opera, with Milan, and was enthralled by the city’s relaxed atmosphere. Later he was to write, ‘were I to follow nothing but my inclination, I should never set foot outside Milan.’ By September he was appointed a sub-lieutenant in the dragoons (without knowing how to ride a horse) and aide-de-camp of General Claude Michaud.

Thus began a farcical army career, which he really detested, but that allowed him to witness battles in Austria, Germany, and Russia. In 1812 he saw the torching of the Russian capital and soon after joined in the French army’s ill-fated retreat from Moscow.

After the fall of Napoleon Beyle retired to Italy, where he lived the life of a penurious dilettante and began to write. His first books, lives of Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio, and a history of Italian painting, were largely cribbed compilations – a practice widespread at the time – that he signed with different pen names. It is said that, as a form of protective cover, Beyle used in his life and in his writing up to a hundred different pseudonyms.

There followed a series of travel books on Italy, whose cities and towns he explored and researched assiduously. The chatty volume Rome, Naples et Florence en 1817 was his first success as an author; the French text was reissued in London in 1817, and the next year appeared in an English translation. This was the earliest of his books to bear the pen name Stendhal. In 1822 he published a semi-didactic, semi-autobiographical dissertation on love.

Armance, the first of his novels, appeared in 1827, followed three years later by The Red and the Black. In 1830 he entered the civil service and was appointed consul at Civitavecchia. The post he really coveted was at Austrian Trieste, but Stendhal’s association with Italian patriots who were plotting for national independence made him a persona non grata with the Austrians, and he was turned down. With little else to do in sleepy Civitavecchia, he began the novel Lucien Leuwen, which he left unfinished and which remained unpublished until 1894. From 1836 to 1839 he took sick leave and returned to Paris, where he began a life of Napoleon and completed two more novels, The Charterhouse of Parma and The Abbess of Castro.

For a while Stendhal supported himself by journalism, writing cultural articles for three or four English reviews. He also kept a diary and undertook a series of autobiographical writings, all unpublished in his lifetime. His fiction, while admired by a small circle of literary figures such as Balzac and Mérimée, did not sell, and the general public found his work incomprehensible and eccentric. The proverbial outsider, he himself predicted that his books would only be discovered and read fifty years after his death. This proved an uncannily accurate assessment.

Beyle died in Paris on 23 March 1842 and was interred in Montmartre cemetery. It is said that three persons attended the funeral.

Susan Ashe’s translation, designed for the contemporary reader, concentrates on the narrative drive and drama of each story. This has meant taming a number of the author’s excesses. Stendhal, who wrote and dictated with notorious speed, is guilty in descriptive passages of the careless repetition of words and phrases that today we find only clumsy and annoying. Another peccadillo, eliminated in the current version, is his now pointless footnotes that translate for us the value of items in terms of French currency of the 1830s. Also eliminated are footnoted references to obscure works such as Montesquieu’s Politique de Romains dans la religion or Saint-Simon’s Mémoires de l’abbé Blache, which it is doubtful any reader today would trouble themselves over. The chief items to have been pruned, however, are the repeated references in The Abbess of Castro by which Stendhal sought to convince us that the story is not his but the work of Florentine and Roman antiquarians. These passages are both feeble and unconvincing.

Of course, the above confessions will offend purists. The field of translation is awash with quibbles regarding purity and fidelity. A good translation, however, does not try to duplicate the original but strikes out on its own. Anyone wishing to read Stendhal untouched and unadulterated can do so ungrumblingly in the author’s native French.

‘Vittoria Accoramboni’ was first published, unsigned, in La Revue des deux mondes, 1 March 1837. It should be pointed out that Webster’s 1612 play The White Devil was based on this same story.

‘Les Cenci’, also unsigned, made its first appearance in La Revue des deux mondes, 1 July 1837.

‘L’Abbesse de Castro’, under the pen name F. de Lagenevais, saw first light in La Revue de deux mondes, 1 February and 1 March 1839. When The Abbess was published in book form the author’s name appeared as Stendhal.

Stendhal’s works are currently issued, with more to come, in seven volumes in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

Norman Thomas di Giovanni

Keyhaven, Lymington

Hampshire

January 2012