Me and the Musketeers

by Lev Raphael

The first classic novel of any kind that I fell in love with was The Three Musketeers. I read it over and over when I was in grade school, and it sparked a life-long fascination with France and French history. I was lucky enough to start learning French in fourth grade and eventually excelled at it, thanks to my parents’ having lived in Belgium for five years. None of my peers had anyone at home who had lived in a Francophone country and could help them so consistently with homework.

My years of devotion to French led me to ultimately win my high school’s French award. That meant a fancy certificate and a handshake from the French ambassador at the Alliance Française at a time when I was taking a class in which we read Molière and explored the intricacies of le subjonctif.

Intricacies of a different sort held my attention back in grade school, and speaking even a few words of French made me feel close to D’Artagnan adrift in a sea of infinite complications, even though I read the book in English. What a story Dumas had conceived: young man from the provinces rises from mockery to Musketeer. He may be naïve, but he’s bold, resourceful, and courageous, keeping his head while navigating through treacherous politics, duels, abductions, betrayal, attempts on his life and even war. It’s a book with gloriously larger-than-life heroes in the Musketeers and equally grand villains in Richelieu, the Comte de Wardes, and Milady de Winter (played so fiercely by Faye Dunaway in Richard Lester’s two Musketeer films).

High above most of the rest of New York in our Washington Heights apartment building designed in 1900 by a celebrated New York builder, I read The Three Musketeers lying on my bed as the light streamed into the large room I shared with my older brother. It was an urban aerie where I could lose myself in each twist and turn of Dumas’s tale.

I read my 1952 Doubleday Literary Guild edition to pieces, and that’s no exaggeration. My original copy is missing pages and illustrations, and the binding is shredded. But I found a copy of the same edition in far better condition at a local used book store in Michigan some years ago, and the gold of the fleur-de-lis on the sky-blue and beige cover is not quite faded, giving me a taste of what the book looked like before I began devouring it. Everything’s intact, including Daniel Rasmusson’s wonderful pencil and ink wash illustrations.

Well, not everything is intact, exactly, because even though I read the book easily a dozen times (annoying my parents intensely), I hadn’t actually read the entire book. This Literary Guild edition, with text translated by Isabel Ely Lord, was “designed for modern reading,” which means it’s been abridged in places and edited. It clocks in at only 428 pages, as opposed to the Penguin Classic, for instance, which is 720. Granted that the Penguin pages are somewhat more tightly packed, there’s still a big difference. In Chapter twenty-six, for one, a long satirical discussion of a religious thesis Aramis might write if he were to become a priest is all but eliminated.

The 1983 Penguin version, whose text was translated by Lord Sudley, is the one I first read in graduate school as a comfort read. I was surprised to find Dumas’s famed novel even more enthralling than I remembered it, dazzling in its pace and excitement (with the exception mentioned above). I told a professor on my dissertation committee I was reading it for fun, and she was dumbfounded, though she didn’t say whether it was surprising I would read anything for fun, or that I would read Dumas.

I went on to relish this version twice more, and it was so entertaining I continued the adventures of the Musketeers with Twenty Years After, which unfortunately isn’t as gripping a book (after all, they’re middle-aged), but contains a memorable villain in the son of Milady. There’s also one truly unforgettable scene where the Musketeers fail at trying to rescue England’s Charles I from execution. One of them is hidden under the scaffold, and the beheaded king’s blood drips down onto him.

Given my history with The Three Musketeers (or its history with me), I’ve been looking forward to the right time to read the newest translation, especially since the prize-winning translator Richard Pevear has been acclaimed for his work with Russian authors. Having just finished this new Three Musketeers, I’m sorry to say that the book I’ve read is not the book I fell in love with all over again in graduate school, the book as I think of it today.

Pevear notes in his introduction that many existing translations of this novel are “verbose, periphrastic, and dull,” and that he’s tried to “keep as much as possible of the pace, pungency, and wit of the original.” If only! Pevear’s version strikes me as consistently heavy and dull, exactly what he claims he’s avoided.

One of Dumas’s most amazing scenes pits young D’Artagnan against the evil Milady. She sleeps with him only to turn him against the Comte de Wardes, who she believes has bedded her one dark night and then abandoned her. The sole cure for her humiliation? Murdering de Wardes. Milady rolls like that.

But it’s actually D’Artagnan who had slept with her in utter darkness, not de Wardes. For reasons of his own, D’Artagnan wanted to fool Milady and did so with the collusion of her maid Kitty.

In post-coital bliss, D’Artagnan rather maladroitly tries to placate Milady about de Wardes and talk her down from her plans of revenge by revealing that in fact, he’s the one who had been her recent night visitor. Milady understandably goes wild and, in the subsequent struggle in which she tries to stab him, the peignoir slips from one of her shoulders, revealing the fleur-de-lis brand of a criminal. Her secret out, she’s even more enraged, and shouts at D’Artagnan “Ah, you scoundrel! You have basely betrayed me, and what’s more you know my secret. You shall die!”

Though it’s quite faithful to the French (“Ah! misérable, dit-elle, tu m’as lâchement trahie, et de plus tu as mon secret! Tu mourras!”), it’s too much so, with the syntax and diction sounding too elaborate for a woman so distressed. I much prefer Sudley’s “Fiend! You’ve played a vile trick on me, and you know my secret! You shall die!” That’s more direct, more powerful, and moves the scene along more deftly.

As they struggle, she tries to stab him, he draws his sword to fend her off and holds her at bay even though she tries grabbing the naked blade. Here’s how Peaver gives us what happens next: “Milady, meanwhile, kept hurling herself at him with horrible paroxysms, roaring in a frightful way.” This echoes the movement of the sentence in French: “Milady, pendant ce temps, se ruait sur lui avec d’horribles transports, rugissant d’une façon formidable.” But it doesn’t make for enough euphonious drama in English. Once again, Sudley produces a line that moves better and sounds better: “Meanwhile, Milady made frenzied attempts to get near him and strike him, uttering low growls of baffled rage.” Placing “meanwhile” at the beginning of the sentence rather than second and in commas is a simple but smart choice. And “baffled” is perfect, because that’s exactly what she is: incapable of striking a blow at him.

When D’Artagnan cockily threatens to carve another fleur-de-lis on her bare shoulder, Milady freaks out. Peaver has her scream “Vile wretch!” and that strikes me as weak compared to the original “Infâme ! Infâme !” Once again, Sudley triumphs with “Fiend of Hell! Fiend of hell!”

Is that over-the-top? Perhaps, but just barely. First, it captures the double accusation. More importantly, given the nature of the scene it punctuates, Sudley accurately shows us Milady driven almost to madness, the ferocity of her words matching her desperate actions.

Similar instances occur throughout the book, so that even though Pevear’s translation may be more faithful word-for-word than either of the ones I’ve previously read, it’s definitely not more enjoyable. At times it’s not just flat but confusing, because Pevear makes some very odd choices as a translator. Why insist on using “conciliabule” when “conference” is more recognizable? Why mention “every trusty, every alguazil, every black cap of the Cardinal’s”? Sudley’s “all of the Cardinal’s spies” is much less opaque.

Scene after remembered scene that I came to with anticipation left me disappointed. I almost wonder if the translator ever really connected to these stirring adventures or found himself truly at home in the world of duels and deception. Perhaps he even held himself in some way above them and felt unconsciously obliged to tone it all down, to make cloaks swirl a bit less grandly and evildoers snarl less viciously. Dumas, after all, is not Dostoevsky.

In the end, the way this book read in its new translation reminded me of the dismal movie of The Three Musketeers starring Charlie Sheen compared to the colorful, witty, high-spirited twin films done by Richard Lester. It turns out that I’m not the only reviewer of this new translation to find it less than consistently stirring. Writing in The Australian, Peter Craven prefers the Penguin translation by Sudley to Pevear’s:

the Englishman’s translation, done after the war, is consistently more polished and more colloquial. It sounds freer but in the tight sense favoured by St Jerome, whereby the translator should proceed meaning by meaning rather than word by word... [the difference between Pevear and Sudley] doesn’t actually suggest someone who knows less French, just someone who knows more English, or at least more about letting it flow and purr.

That’s exactly what Peaver’s translation doesn’t do. It stumps along, workmanlike, flat, stopping its own flow with stiff phrasing and far too many commas. David Foster Wallace apparently found the translations that Pevear and his wife did of Dostoevsky “starchy,” and his assessment fits this translation, too. That’s a shame, since starchy is the very last word anyone should ever associate with D’Artagnan.

In a recent San Francisco Chronicle article about famed translator Edith Grossman, Hillel Italie notes that translation “is about words and music.” Sadly, Pevear’s translation of The Three Musketeers is so intent on getting the words right that it never sings.