This will be mainly a note on translations--and a rather muddled one at that.
Years before I read "Charterhouse of Parma" I read "Red and Black," and one thing I noticed with that book, which I love, is what a tricky thing it is to translate Stendhal. I read the old Margaret Shaw translation in an old used Penguin--much maligned, just like her "Charterhouse" translation. But I found something odd: Shaw's very British failure to even try to approximate Stendhal's dash and offhand brio, his proto-modern style-of-no-style, actually worked well. Shaw concentrated only on faithfully conveying Stendhal's sense, and so in spite of her mid-twentieth century educated British English, Stendhal's authorial voice came through beautifully. She didn't get his literary style but she caught his thought on the wing, and in "Red & Black" that's what really matters.
But in "Charterhouse," literary style is really inseparable from the work. For this deconstructed medieval fairytale set among the reactionary, repressive, collapsing aristocracies of revolutionary Europe, Stendhal employed a self-consciously traditional tale-teller's style, yet laced through with his own ironic realism. That hybrid/clash of styles is crucial, since it embodies Stendhal's vision of a modern Europe groaningly aborning amid its contradictions: for example, say, in expressing the delicious mash-up of incongruities between that old staple of Euro-tales, the humble subject approaching the throne of the king for a favor, and the shockingly novel, psychologically and politically realistic use Stendhal makes of that received form here. This is the thrilling birth of modern literature, and the presentational voice really matters. And is really hard to get right, judging from the translation attempts I've tried.
So, to cases: I started out with Richard Howard, having heard his was a great new translation. (This was the late '90s.) Ouch! I found him unreadable. Howard was unwise enough to try what Shaw had foregone, a writerly re-creation in English. But he seems not to have gotten Stendhal at all, or was arrogant enough to think he could just re-write the book. Stay away! No Stendhal here. I put "Charterhouse" down for five years.
But I really wanted to read it, so I went back--to trusty Margaret Shaw. But I soon recognized what I noted above: what had worked for "Red and Black" wasn't working for "Charterhouse." Here there WAS a strong if elusive literary style, and Shaw wasn't getting it across.
So I picked up Margaret Mauldon's Oxford translation (I'd read her "Madame Bovary" and liked it, and was thinking Flaubert>Stendhal, that might work)--and that was more like it. Mauldon gets Stendhal, she's very close to his style. And yet...this was more the Stendhal of "Red and Black." Almost hard-boiled. Mauldon was missing a certain romantic warmth (very un-Stendhalian, I know, but there's a bittersweet sense of romance--ironic, satirized, yet almost desperate romance in "Charterhouse")...and so I actually found myself going back and forth between Shaw and Mauldon, sometimes able between them to catch what felt like the real Stendhal, often, not really. So finally, determined to get closer, during the last 100 pages (!), I tried the new Penguin Sturrock.
I think it's the best I found--more like Mauldon than Shaw, but less cool than Mauldon. Sturrock is sure-footed, and gets something fairly close, one feels, to Stendhal's tone and rhythms. Fairly close...
So, finally, I think I'd recommend Sturrock. But is it...the true "Charterhouse"? No, I don't think so. Maybe you should go to the library and check out several versions, if you can, and read twenty-five pages of each. See which reads right(est) for you.
"Charterhouse" is a fascinatingly elusive beast, and in the end the truth may be that it's just untranslatable. But well worth reading!
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