Pirates of Love

The French novelist Françoise Sagan died in 2004, putting an end to her twenty stories about life, sex, and wild parties of the Paris beau monde. Yet the symbolic life of Sagan's novelistic work still seems to haunt the readers in English translation. In 2009, the free (or better, liberated) re-translation of Sagan's That Mad Ache into English (trans. Douglas Hofstadter of La Chamade, 1965) has ventured upon bridging the linguistic and cultural gap with contemporary society (see American Book Review 30.5). Now we can "smile" at the re-publication of A Certain Smile of 1956, highlighting the days of the disorientation of existentialism, the confusion of the Western world by the Communist nations, the exploration of Sputnik 1, the Beat generation, psychoanalysis, and the popular jazz tunes over the radios. Green's 1956 English translation of Sagan's A Certain Smile has been re-edited in 2011, provided with a new foreword by Diane Johnson. Re-reading A Certain Smile more than a half-century after its first appearance, Sagan's graphic impression of love, friendship, and marriage in the French spirit has become no laughing matter but has its own logic of disguise and masquerade.

There could be many reasons for the "old" novelty made "new," but Johnson's foreword will tell the reason. Herself an American novelist in Sagan's tradition, writing French-based comedy of manners concerned with scandal, Johnson hardly gives any answer. A Certain Smile is Sagan's second novel after Bonjour Tristesse (1953), but as "co-author," Johnson argues that it would prove her novelistic talent. Johnson reduces the differences between the period after World War II and today by telling Sagan's stories about making love without contraceptive pills and the habits of smoking cigarettes in public places. Beyond the matters of corporal pudor, no reference answers to questions of morals, such as work and play, wealth and security, etiquette and feminism. The foreword is not only short but also disappointing. The re-edition of A Certain Smile could provide an opportunity for adding further remarks about Sagan's "anthropological" skill of her firsthand narrative of French civilization of the historical context, in which a certain culture (or subculture) of a privileged class is signified as meaningful performance—and even how Sagan's novel has been/is translated into English. Perhaps the cover pages picture the scenario: Sagan's good-natured smile of 1956, pointing to the diary of her protagonist Dominique, is in sharp contrast to the decoration of the 2011 edition: a striped pattern of a glass/cigarette/cushion that symbolizes anything in the mundane world.

Ready to see both past and future fashioned in A Certain Smile, the French novel and the English translation are re-read and re-imagined to find out how the 1956 linguistic and cultural keywords are working today. The novel was written by Sagan in two months, and the English translation had to be composed in great haste to please the editor's wishes and become the same spectacular bestseller as Bonjour Tristesse. Despite the haste and hurry, Sagan's A Certain Smile presents a highly mannered and stylized story consisting of three seasonal chapters—spring, summer, autumn—about the visible idleness of Dominique, a young law student at the Sorbonne and her life in vicarious leisure. Dominique is introduced by her lover, Bertrand, also a law student, to his uncle Luc, an older businessman called "le voyageur." Happily married to Françoise, Luc proposes an "aventure" to Dominique and publicly calls her "tu" instead of the ceremonial "vous." These keywords form the descriptive and emotive meanings throughout the French novel, that are re-defined, re-informed, modified, or altered to give the "equivalent" meaning in English language.

For Sagan, life is an "ennui" (undertranslated as "boredom," "at my ease completely," or not even translated) of visits to cafés and restaurants, with hardly any work on the daily program. The "ennui" allows...