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Thomas Warburton, 2003
3.
Tristram Shandy and its Finnish translation
3.1. The author and
his book
In
May 1759 a well known London publisher, Robert Dodsley, received a letter from
Yorkshire, offering for publication
‘the Life & Opinions of Tristram
Shandy, wch I choose to offer to You first [...] The Plan, as you
<may> will perceive, is a most extensive one , – taking in, not only,
the Weak part of the Sciences, in wch the true point of Ridicule
lies –- but every Thing else, which I find Laugh-at-able in my way [...] –-The
Book will sell;–- What other Merit it has, does not become me either to
think or say’. (Sterne 1935: 74)
The
sender of this self-confident letter was Laurence Sterne, the 46-year old
vicar of two Yorkshire parishes, Sutton-on-the-Forest and Stillington.
According to Ross’ new biography (2001) Sterne had started writing Tristram
Shandy after most copies of his satirical pamphlet in Swiftian style,
which dealt with ecclesiastical politics in York, were taken from the printers
and burned. Sterne’s upward mobility in the church had come to a halt after
he had quarrelled with his patron and uncle Jaques Sterne, and the fate of the
pamphlet made things worse. His life was unhappy in other respects as well:
his wife Elizabeth had a mental breakdown in the summer 1759 – possibly as a
result of Sterne’s infidelities – and his health was not good: since a
student at Cambridge he had suffered from consumption.
It
seems Dodsley suggested that Sterne should leave out local references and
adopt a more general stand, which advice Sterne took (Ross 2001: 201-204). The
first two volumes were printed in York, as Dodsley refused to take the risk,
but were sent to London to be sold in his shop in Pall Mall. Tristram
Shandy was immediately a phenomenal success. Dodsley printed three
editions in 1760, and five more volumes were to follow, the third and fourth
in 1761, and later in the same year volumes five and six, volumes seven and
eight in 1765 and the final, ninth, volume in 1767.
The
extent of his success came as surprise to Sterne, but he had worked towards it
quite consciously. Sterne was the impoverished younger son of a younger son of
a gentleman, and having been educated with the help of relatives, he took the
only road available to him: priesthood; nevertheless, nothing indicates that
the choice was objectionable to him. Ross (2001) demonstrates convincingly
that after a failure to acquire patronage to maintain living standards that a
gentleman would expect within the church, Sterne turned to the new middle
classes in a commercial literary venture.
In
1768 Laurence Sterne published his only other book, A Sentimental Journey,
and died soon after of consumption in London, on 18th March.
3.2. Contemporary
context
Tristram
Shandy is a highly original
book, but even so, Daniel Defoe, Tobias Smollett, Henry Fielding and Samuel
Richardson had published novels in the previous decades to which contemporary
readers could relate Sterne’s writing. A book with a hero who finds himself
in various adventures, addresses his readers and indulges in bawdy jokes was
not new (Milic 1971: 243). Jonathan Swift’s writings, both their style and
satire, were a very important influence, and according to New, The Tale of
the Tub is vital to understanding the book (1997: xxxiii), although Swift’s
satire is much harsher than Sterne’s (Stedmond 1967: 48). Most critics agree
that John Locke’s theories on the workings of the human mind run as a
central theme all through the work, but probably even more influential were
some earlier writers, such as Rabelais and Cervantes, whom Sterne mentions and
quotes extensively in Tristram Shandy. Stedmond (1967) points out that
bawdy and digressions are not alien to Rabelais, and hobby-horses are closely
related to Don Quixote’s obsessions. Lists, strange names, frequent
apostrophes can also be traced back to these authors (38-43). According to
Stedmond, Sterne shares his anti-romantic view of love as a folly with
Rabelais, Cervantes and Burton (125). It has been said that even the features
that are often seen as the most original, Sterne’s use of typographical
devices such as blank, blackened and marbled pages, wriggly lines, asterisks
and so on, could be a parody of seventeenth-century ‘shaped’ poems,
according to Bateson (cited in Jefferson 1951: 511n)
3.3. Early
reception
The
secret of Tristram Shandy’s success was the fact that it was the
general reading public who bought thousands of copies of the book. Tristram
Shandy was not pitched for the nobility or the learned, it was a book that
any literate person could read. Nevertheless, commercial reasons might not
have been the only ones behind the choice of audience: Stedmond (1967) argues
that by the mid-eighteenth-century savage satire was beginning to lose its
bite. If one wanted to have influence one should approach ‘not […] the
discriminating few but the undiscriminating many [...] to make them more
discriminating’ (54). Sterne seems to have approached the public at large
quite consciously as he writes:
my life and opinions are likely to make
some noise in the world, and, if I conjecture right, will take in all ranks,
professions, and denominations of men whatever […]. (TSE 8)
The
immediate reception of Tristram Shandy was very positive, albeit
sometimes baffled. William Kenrick (1759) wrote: ‘His characters are
striking and singular, his observation shrewd and pertinent; and, making a few
exceptions, his humour is easy and genuine’ (472). ‘This is a humorous
performance, of which we are unable to convey any distinct ideas to our
readers. The whole is composed of digressions, divertingly enough introduced,
and characters which we think well supported’, wrote an anonymous critic in Critical
Review (1760: 472). But soon, especially as it turned out that the writer
was a clergyman (the name of the author had not appeared in the title page),
other voices began to be heard. The book was deemed to be too bawdy. ‘It
were to be wished, though, that the wantonness of the author’s wit had been
tempered with a little more regard to delicacy’, writes the Royal Female
Magazine in February 1760 (cited in Sterne 1979: 473). The book’s early
readers saw it as clever and funny, but perhaps a bit indecent.
As
the century of reason slowly turned into an age of feeling, and enlightenment
gave way to romanticism, the sentimental quality of Sterne’s writings won
more and more prominence in the critical response to his work (Stedmond 1967:
48). A collection of sentimental extracts of Sterne’s works was compiled
under the title The Beauties of Sterne and was reprinted some fifteen
times before the end of the century (New 1994: 14), even if Samuel Johnson
famously commented: ‘Nothing odd will do long, Tristram Shandy did
not last’ (1776: 484).
Tristram
Shandy’s fame reached France before the book was even translated. Sterne was
received in Paris as a celebrity in 1762 just as he had been received in
London two years earlier (Ross 2001). He donated copies of his work to Diderot
who called it ‘the maddest, wisest, the gayest of all books’ (cited in
Ross 2001: 285).
In
Germany both Goethe and Wieland extolled the virtues of Sterne although
A Sentimental Journey received more attention than Tristram
Shandy.. Novelist, poet and Shakespeare’s translator Wieland wrote: ‘[G]enuine
Socratic wisdom, such profound knowledge of man, such a fine feeling of
goodness and beauty with a host of new and fine moral observations, so much
sound judgment is combined with so much wit and genius’ (cited in Fabian
1971: 202). German literature was only entering its classical era;
Sterne was seen as a classicist and his idiosyncratic writing was read
as ‘quasiphilosophical pronouncements on man in general’ (Fabian 1971:
204). This shows how a writer can have a very different role in the context of
another country.
Americans
reacted to Sterne rather similarly to Englishmen. Tristram Shandy was
very popular in the best Virginia society, where Sterne was read mainly as a
sentimentalist, but great stress was also given to the moral philosophical
aspects of his writings (Hartley 1971). Thomas Jefferson found the writings of
Sterne ‘form the best course of morality that was ever written’ (cited in
New 1994: 13), but there were also voices that condemned his bawdy (Hartley
1971).
In
the nineteenth century English literary fashion moved away from Sterne’s way
of writing. Novelists such as Dickens strove to maintain the illusion of true
events in readers’ minds, which emphasised the importance of a narrative
plot. Sterne’s digressive self-reflective writing alienated readers who
wanted to feel they were actual observers of events (Davis 1971). Victorian
sensibilities found his sexual innuendo unsavoury, some editions were censored
(Ross 2001: 429), and Sterne was also found lacking of serious intent (New
1994: 18). Nevertheless Hazlitt (1819) called him an ‘idiomatic’ writer
and claimed that the story of Le Fever was ‘perhaps the finest in the
English language’ (488-489). Sir Walter Scott (1834) accused Sterne of
indecency, affectation and plagiarism, but praised his ability to touch the
‘finer feelings of the heart’ and his originality (487-492). All these
comments prove that in spite of not being fashionable any more, Tristram
Shandy was still read in Britain all through the nineteenth century.
3.4.
Twentieth-century acclaim
Laurence
Sterne’s reputation has risen steadily in the twentieth century. It is
almost as if every new school of literary criticism has seen Tristram
Shandy as an early example of its theories.
The first praise came from an unexpected
direction: the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky
took up Sterne's novel (1929) because he wanted to describe ‘the general
laws governing plot structure’ and saw Sterne as a revolutionary in matters
of form. He called Tristram Shandy ‘the most typical novel in world
literature’ (89) because of the way he reveals the structure of the novel
and claimed that the ‘disorder is intentional’ (67). According to him some
of Sterne’s devices are new, and when he uses old ones, he does so to reveal
their conventionality.
Both
modernist writers and scholars have been excited about Sterne. Virginia Woolf
enthused about him (1932: 96) and when discussing Finnegan’s Wake
James Joyce asked rhetorically: ‘Did you ever read Laurence Sterne?’
(cited in New 1997: xxxvii). Traugott (1961) lists attributes, or ‘vices’
as he calls them, of the modern mind: ‘self-conscious, analytic of art,
destructive of substantial "reality"[...] forever searching out
secret meanings’ (2) and goes on to point out how all of these can be
applied to Sterne. Golden argues that
[m]odernist texts could not be read: they could only be
re-read, because the reader first had to recognize and accumulate all
of the cross-references in the text in order for them to resonate and be
played off against each other in successive readings of the text […].
(Golden 1996: 278-279)
This is certainly true of
Tristram Shandy, which can be rather overwhelming when read for the first
time. It is also possible to see Sterne’s digressive style as a
forerunner of the technique of stream of consciousness, although Sterne's
characters do not develop quite the way they do in modernist novels (Traugott
1961: 13). New describes how Tristram has been seen as a modern
existentialist, ‘alienated and absurd’. Accoring to them, far from
subscribing to Locke’s theories, Sterne exposes Locke’s fallacies and
explores the possibilities of the human mind, memory and experience like
Proust and Joyce almost two centuries later (Traugott 1961: 13, New 1994:
19-20). Traugott sums up: 'We might rightly
appreciate Sterne's prescience of new worlds to come -- one thinks especially
of his similarity to Samuel Beckett -- but in the rationalistic and calculated
purpose of his associations, our author is yet an Augustan’ (ibid: 14).
Postmodernists,
too, have claimed Sterne for themselves. It is true that some of Sterne’s
techniques bring to mind certain postmodernist emphases. Watts (1996)
lists some of these postmodernist
devices in Tristram Shandy:
parody
and pastiche, its problematization of representation, its absurdist exposure
of the limits of referential theories of language, its complex treatment of
identity in time and history, its stress on the local rather than universal,
and the consequent provisionality of the ‘I’ subject, and so on. (26)
In
Postmodernist Fiction, McHale (1992) describes some features of
postmodernism, and many of these seem to apply to Tristram Shandy.
According to him a postmodernist does not aspire ‘to master disorder, simply
accepts it’ (21), he stresses the playful, non serious nature of writing,
adds overwhelming amounts of detail in his story, and seeks to defamiliarize
his work. A postmodernist ‘‘refuses to write an ‘original’
text, instead producing a meta-text’ (27; emphasis original). McHale argues
that there is often a ‘problematic presence of the author in his text’
(37) and that ‘[d]ifferent languages, different registers of the same
language, different discourses each construct the world differently; in effect
they each construct different worlds’ (153; emphasis original). He
also mentions a way of reading which he calls ‘paranoid’, in which the
reader suspects hidden meanings in every word (167).
There
is no doubt that all these characteristics can be found in Tristram Shandy,
but calling a book that was written two hundred years before the word
was invented postmodern is obviously problematic. Nevertheless, postmodernist
ideas can be quite helpful in trying to understand Tristram Shandy, as
will be demonstrated later, after I have described the features in Tristram
Shandy which are the main focus in my discussion.
As
a contrast to all these heavyweight theories Milic’s article “Information
Theory and the Style of Tristram Shandy” (1971) presents an
interesting and simple idea. Milic claims that Sterne decided to write a book
which was as original as possible so that the readers could never predict what
was coming next. For this purpose he had to come up with more and more tricks
as the reader got used to the old ones. As argued above, Tristram Shandy was
a commercial venture and it was very important for Sterne that it sold well
and made money (Ross 2001). This does not diminish its literary merits but it
should be borne in mind when reading heavyweight and complicated aims into
Sterne’s work. Some complex interpretations of Tristram Shandy can
seem somewhat overworked.
3.5. Serious or
not?
Sterne
has been praised for his morality as well as accused of having no serious
aims. Modernist and postmodernist scholars have read all sorts of
philosophical ideas and literary principles into Sterne’s writing whereas
Milic (1971) suggests that he was simply playing as many tricks as he could
think of. It has been said Sterne borrows to look learned and that he quotes
to mock scholarship. The bottom line seems to be: is Tristram Shandy a serious
book or a mere romp? Maybe it is possible to reconcile some of these seemingly
contradicting views. A quote from Sterne can perhaps help find a way out. His
alter ego
Yorick had an invincible dislike and
opposition in his nature to gravity; not to gravity as such;–for where
gravity was wanted, he would be the most grave or serious of mortal men for
days and weeks together; but he was an enemy to the affectation of it, and
declared open war against it, only as it appeared a cloak for ignorance, or
for folly: and then, whenever it fell in his way, however sheltered and
protected, he seldom gave it much quarter. (TSE 23)
Sterne advocates honesty, openness,
reason, and charity, and despises pomp, hypocrisy, and lack of feeling. He
makes his opinions known mainly by
making the reader laugh, but this is no trivial ambition for him. As discussed
above, Tristram Shandy was written by a disappointed and sick man. He
firmly believed that laughter is an antidote to unhappiness and other life’s
problems:
I live in a constant endeavour to fence
against the infirmities of ill health, and other evils of life, by mirth;
being firmly persuaded that every time a man smiles,–but much more so, when
he laughs, it adds something to this Fragment of Life. (TSE 3)
Tristram
Shandy is a seriously funny
book.
3.6. Tristram
Shandy in Finland
Kovala (forthcoming) has written on the
treatment of Tristram Shandy in Finland and most of the following
information of its reception before the Finnish translation is based on his
article. According to him Finnish gentility read books in Swedish, German and
French in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and there were books by Sterne
in translation in the bookcases of some Finnish mansions. Swedish was the main
language spoken by the middle and upper classes and the language of education
well into the early twentieth century. There seems to have been no public
discussion about Sterne in Finland before the twentieth century, but in the
1920s two scholars emerge who comment on his work. The Swedish literary
historian Henrik Schück, who was apparently widely read in Finland, held
rather dim views on Sterne and went as far as call him a ‘disease’. At the
same time the Finnish literary scholar Yrjö Hirn wrote more appreciatively,
saw order in Tristram Shandy’s chaos and even noticed a connection
between Sterne and the modernist tendencies of the time. On the other hand,
Eino Railo, who wrote in the thirties, relied heavily in Schück and said:
Sterne’s work is self-centred, his
starting-point is a very strong sense of his own importance; his aphorisms are
not worth mentioning; and his humour and sensitivity are impossible for many
people to understand. (transl. Kovala)
Kovala points
out that in fact many contemporaries found Railo’s Golden Book of
Literature, in which the above appeared along with a translation of the Story
of Le Fever, rather biased. After The Second World War Rafael Koskimies saw
structure and organisation in Tristram Shandy and claimed that there
was intelligence behind the sentimentalism, and text books of literary history
began to mention connections with modernism. Predictably a postmodernist angle
has dominated the scene recently.
A Swedish translation of Tristram
Shandy by Thomas Warbuton, a Finland-Swedish writer and translator, was
published in 1980. Kovala argues that it is not surprising that the book was
translated into Swedish before it appeared in Finnish, as modernism reached
the Finland-Swedish culture much earlier than the Finnish mainstream.
As
long ago, however, as in 1872, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura (The Society
of Finnish Literature) had advertised for a translator to carry out the
translation of Tristram Shandy into Finnish. Considering there was very
little original Finnish literature at the time – the first Finnish novel,
Aleksis Kivi's Seven Brothers, was not published until the following
year – this was very early indeed, and it took another 125 years before I
was approached by the publishing house Werner Söderstöm (WSOY) in 1995. The
publishers and I agreed that the translation of Tristram Shandy should
be aimed at the general public: if anyone wanted to do academic work on the
book, they should turn to the original. This decision can be seen to comply
with the spirit of the original work and its intended contemporary target
audience: the original was not aimed at an elite audience, it was written to
entertain and make money. I translated Tristram
Shandy into fairly standard modern Finnish. Gutt’s rule (1990: 140) can
be applied here: it was felt that the text offered to Finnish readers must
make sense and be readable, accessible. The book is complicated enough and
does not need any deliberate distancing. The fact that there is no such thing
as eighteenth-century literary Finnish made the decision easier. Some
imaginary mock-archaic Finnish would surely turned Tristram Shandy into
a curiosity and denied the modern Finnish reader its moral backbone, satiric
bite and most of all the laughs. Nevertheless, expressions that are
recognizably modern were avoided and preference given to layers of Finnish
vocabulary and style that have been around for a long time. While transposing,
as it were, the eighteenth-century key into a modern one, I did nevertheless
try to include the melody and variations of style and register. A short
foreword was included to introduce the book and explain some of these
principles. My Finnish translation, Tristram
Shandy, elämä ja mielipiteet,
came out in September 1998.
Eight full scale reviews of my Finnish
translation appeared in the press, which covers most of the big Finnish
newspapers, plus one interview with myself as the translator, and several mini
reviews in various popular magazines. The event was also mentioned in the main
television news forecast on the day of publication. All hailed the long
awaited availability of Tristram Shandy in Finnish, and those who
commented on the translation, tended to praise it. ‘When naming the cultural
act of the year -- if we leave out Mika Häkkinen – the translation into
Finnish of the classic novel Tristram Shandy comes near the top of the list.’
(Ruotsalo 1998). Many discussed the readability and humour of the book, which
indeed were my main priorities, explicitly stated in the foreword. Not one
complained about lack of annotation or other explanatory material. Mainly the
reviews concentrated on describing the extraordinary and chaotic book and
placing it into a literary context. Most mentioned modernity and
postmodernism, but some linked Sterne to his own time, as well. On the whole
they were well informed and knowledgeable, and very excited about the book.
Two even imitated Tristram’s style and quirkiness: ‘Tistram Shandy weighs
almost 800 grams. Not a lightweight novel, then’ (Petäjä 1998). Personally
I had hoped for more personal accounts of the actual reading experience and
less literary history, anxious as I am to have readers ‘ in all ranks,
professions, and denominations of men whatever’ (TSE 8). Slightly
worryingly, the most personal account showed symptoms of Tristram-fatigue: ‘I
am now half way through the book, and will probably keep on reading for the
rest of my life. The book doesn’t seem to let me go… nor take me anywhere’
(Ahti 1999).
In 1998 I was awarded a Suomi Prize by
the Finnish the government for the translation and in 1999 I received the
Agricola Prize for the best translation of the previous year. In 1999 I was
invited to lecture on my translation at Helsinki University – this study is
a spin-off of that lecture. In 2001 the first edition was sold out in the book
sales and when writing this the Finnish Tristram Shandy is out of
print.
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