Between Version and Traduction: Sterne's Sentimental Journey in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France

'Ce voyage est une peinture gaye & plaisante des mœurs françoises.'¹ It was in these terms that the Journal Encyclopédique for July 1769 greeted the first translation of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, by Joseph-Pierre Frénais, a little over a year after the original was published in London. Given the rampant Francophobia of many other British travel writers of the same period, Smollett being the most notorious,² it is hardly surprising that the French reading public took Sterne and his charming sketches of French life to their hearts.As in England, Frénais' translation of Le Voyage sentimental gave rise toa host of sentimental imitations, including Deux chapitres dans le genredu Voyage sentimental by Julie de Lespinasse (early 1770s); Le Nouveau voyage sentimental by Jean-Claude Gorjy (1784); Le Voyageur Sentimentalby François Vernes (1786); and Fragments d'un voyage sentimental et pittoresque by Jean-Florimond Saint-Amans (1789). A Sentimental Journey enjoyed far greater popular success than Tristram Shandy, which by turns perplexed and outraged readers in France as it had in England. Tristram Shandy remained untranslated until 1776, when Frénais took on the Herculean task, only to declare himself unequal to the challenge halfway through; the job was completed in 1785 by two translators working independently, Charles-François de Bonnay and Antoine-Gilbert Griffet de la Beaume.³

At least nine further editions of A Sentimental Journey were printed by the end of the century, all in Frénais' translation, which might be more accurately termed an adaptation. Frénais' approach to translation was typical of his day: belle mais infidèle. He made no bones about this in the preface to his translation of Tristram Shandy, writing 'il a fallu que je retranchasse beaucoup de l'original, et suppléer à ce que je retranchois … Je crois que l'on peut se permettre cette liberté dans la traduction d'un ouvrage de pur agrément.'⁴ As a later translator, Paulin Crassous, indicates in the avertissement to his own 1801 translation, Frénais 'semble s'être étudié à dépouiller Sterne de ce caractère d'originalité qui constitue son principal mérite. Il a voulu le vêtir à la française.'⁵ For example, Frénais takes Yorick not through the Bourbonnais to the Alps but to Touraine and the Loire, where Maria de Moulines becomes Juliette d'Amboise. The Case of Delicacy is transposed from the Alpsto Brittany, and Frénais also tacks an innocent explanation onto the famously ambiguous concluding aposiopesis (or not), 'I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre's END OF VOL. II'.⁶

The infidelity, not to say incompetence, of Frénais' translation does have the benefit of making it an easy matter to trace the exploitation of this version by subsequent translators. Crassous notes that the dual-language edition printed by Didot le jeune 'en l'an VII' claims to have corrected Frénais, but that the correction 'se borne à en avoir élagué les défauts les plus saillans [sic] et les plus aisés à remarquer, commede restituer les noms adoptés par Sterne … Du reste, l'infidélité, l'inélégance, l'incorrection subsistent dans leur entier [sic].'⁷ Likewise, it is apparent that the translations by M. E. Henrion (1829) and Francisque Michel (1835) owe much to Frénais, to the point where Serge Soupel accuses the latter, at least, of straightforward plagiarism.⁸ Other translators did move beyond Frénais to produce their own versions. Paulin Crassous' own effort, as Serge Soupel points out, is more didactic in intention than that of Frénais, with a volume of notes explaining particular terms and justifying his choices as translator.⁹ Louis-Mathurin Moreau-Christophe, in the preface to his 1828 translation, denounced Frénais' work as 'une pâle parodie' full of 'contresens, non sens, omissions, changemens [sic] de noms, de lieux'.¹⁰ Notwithstanding these criticisms, however, Frénais' version remained the standard translation until the 1840s, being reprinted at least a further...