Translating Boris Vian's Vercoquin et le plancton : Does it mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing?

Abstract

This article is the result of research and reflection undertaken in the process of translating Vercoquin et le plancton. Focusing on music-related references in Boris Vian's first published novel, this article will discuss different layers of meaning and a variety of techniques that can be discerned in Vian's punning and wordplay. The complexity and compactness of his writing make for an exceptional case study. Whilst much of the wordplay may justifiably be classed as ‘juvenile’, its many facets also reflect life in Occupied France, document the Zazou movement, voice a manifesto for jazz, and stage playfulness that can be viewed as ranging from the very silly to a form of resistance. Such sophistication – largely overlooked, hitherto – justifies re-evaluation of Vian's early work. Analysis of a number of challenges to translation gives rise to discussion of possible solutions, based on different considerations – genre, function and audience – and using different ‘tools’. This article seeks not to justify my own choices in translation. Rather, it should illustrate the point that research is essential, and that interpretation and creativity are necessary if one's strategy in literary translation is to try to provide a new audience with similar opportunities for their own readings as a Francophone audience might have.

Introduction

Close analysis of Boris Vian's treatment of music in Vercoquin et le plancton (henceforth, VP) reveals levels of complexity craved by the cryptographer and cruciverbalist. If Vian is to mean anything in translation, or swing, the translator must seek to comprehend and confront this complexity. Vian's cryptogrammatic, multi-layered punning, and the density of intermedial reference to songs and musicians in his texts, pose a raft of challenges to the translator. A number of academics and writers have already examined how he incorporated song and music into his novels, and others have discussed his work in terms of translation. This article will build on these studies – and combine them – through detailed analysis of music-related items from the perspective of a translator. ¹ We shall examine the role of music in Vian's work – essential for a translator's understanding of the source text – and discuss how music-related translation issues might be treated. ² This approach will shed light on narrative uses of song through the lens of translation theory and practice whilst providing new readings of Vian's early work, typically written off as ‘minor’: his first published novel, VP (written 1943–1944, published 1947), is typically classed with Trouble dans les andains (written 1942–1943, published 1966) as belonging to his ‘juvenile’ period. ³

In discussing the ‘myth’ of Vian, Scott (1998: 10) describes him as being ‘undeniably perceived as a leader of the [Zazou] movement’. ⁴ His pedigree is well documented: as jazz critic, jazz musician, singer-songwriter, as well as jazz ‘curator’ for Philips, Vian is peerless in this regard (see Rameil, 2012). Even more exceptionally, Vian is renowned for having incorporated song and music in his novels. Bourderionnet (2018: 1) neatly summarises some of the ways in which he did this:

Les critiques ayant examiné L’écume des jours sous l’angle du jazz ont insisté sur son influence esthétique et structurelle ainsi que sur son rôle central en tant que protagoniste du roman. En effet, des références discographiques, aux décors et motifs musicaux, en passant par l’expérimentation prosodique et la synesthésie, les registres dans lesquels se manifeste l’intertexte jazzistique sont multiples.

Scholarly scrutiny of Vian's literary œuvre has already gone far in producing a typology of song in Vian's novels. ⁵

To be clear, this is a case study of music in one French novel (and only one of Vian's novels). In the grand scheme of Word and Music Studies, it examines ‘music in literature’, and seeks to make no general contribution to studies of ‘music and literature’. It betrays, moreover, a certain bias and limitations on my own part: I am not a musicologist and the focus – on literary translation – is on what Wolf calls ‘intracompositional intermediality’. This:

[…] can generally be defined as a direct or indirect participation of more than one medium in the signification and/or semiotic structure of a given semiotic entity (a ‘work’), an involvement that must be verifiable within this entity. (Wolf et al., 2009: 4)

Questions of ‘extracompositional intermediality’ – regarding ‘music and literature’ – can be seen ‘for instance, on the level of ahistorical formal devices that occur in more than one medium’ (Wolf et al., 2009: 5). Therefore, such concerns are beyond the scope of this paper, because my ability to make meaningful broader comparisons or pronouncements – as a non-musicologist – is limited. Even so, this article seeks to achieve more than merely ‘collecting evidence of references to, or occurrences of, music in individual literary texts, and […] elucidating their uses and functions’. (Wolf et al., 2009: 2)

As a case study of how Vian's complex use of music in literature might be translated, this article has a number of aims, in addition to constituting a particular study of music in literature. Firstly, through detailed discussion of translation issues, it contributes to Vian studies and calls for a re-evaluation of his early (‘juvenile’) work. As Vian's use of language is so complex and distinctive, discussion of possible solutions seeks to make it very clear that any attempt at reproducing such complexity is selective and demands creativity. This study also aims to provide a concrete example of how the translation product must be informed by research. This involves reading previous Vian studies as well as original research, as we shall see. Whilst discussion is based on my own experience of translating this novel, it is designed to be open: this article is not a stage for justifying my translation or arguing that one solution or strategy is necessarily better than another. Where explanation is given as to what motivated a certain approach, this is done critically against the backdrop of Hervey and Higgins’ general theory of ‘thinking’ translation and Low's work (2011) on translating wordplay.

Translating music, songs and chanson in Vercoquin et le plancton

Songs participate in this novel in a number of ways. From the first to the last chapter, there are references to song(s) and music. Occasionally, song titles mentioned in the text reference genuine jazz standards, such as Fats Wallers’ ‘Honeysuckle Rose’: for Mitura (2008: 97), ‘les titres des chansons parodient et caricaturent les schémas des titres réels’. Are they intended solely as entertaining? Or can they be seen as part of a coherent musical critique or manifesto? ⁶ Perhaps in tandem with this, music is sometimes described, providing a soundtrack for the novel's many ‘surprise-parties’. And performers – such as Claude Abadie, with whom Vian played in the 1940s – are among the dramatis personæ. There are, therefore, linguistic, narratological, historico-cultural and autobiographical issues at play in the translation of this novel.

Musical references also have an impact on the style and structure of the novel. More abstractly, Vian's writing style, and the values it seems to promote, could be said to embody a certain idea of jazz itself, as jazz and the Zazou movement are commonly associated with freedom and pleasure (embracing improvisation and creativity). Vian's playfulness at the levels of lexis, form, and intertextuality have resulted in his style being characterised as jazz, jazzy or jazz-like. ⁷ Rather than seeking to answer this nebulous question, this work will seek to explore the implications of Vian's so-called ‘jazzy’ writing for the translator. ⁸

In considering VP as a source text for translation, it is necessary to consider the text's genre, function, and audience: this enables a translator to establish an overall approach or strategy (Hervey and Higgins, 1992: 14). Very loosely, we might consider VP (in terms of genre) as a surrealist novel with elements of autobiography. The most indisputable intention would seem to be to entertain, but it could be said to have any number of functions: from constituting social comment and/or jazz manifesto to auto-mythology or form of resistance, for example. Where the original audience may have been made up primarily of a young, Parisian in-crowd, the target audience of a translation must be imagined and defined – if only internally – by the individual translator (perhaps in conjunction with the publisher).

One imagined target audience could be a very academic or intellectual crowd: this might allow for extensive annotations (which could sanction – and compensate for – a fairly literal or even interlineal translation). At the other extreme, the imagined audience could consist of anyone inclined to read any literature – from any age – in translation. In this case, a typical approach would range from the so-called ‘faithful’ to the ‘free’ (or ‘communicative’) end of the scale defined by Hervey and Higgins (1992: 21). This would suit the production of what Venuti (1995: 116–117) has called ‘transparent discourse’, which is ‘eminently consumable in the contemporary cultural marketplace’. My own approach was to imagine as inclusive an audience as possible, embracing – most probably – Francophiles, students of (comparative) literature, fans of surrealism, jazz and Vian fans, as well as a more general readership who might be attracted to this unusual novel. This approach does away with the mechanism of providing footnotes or annotations, which could detract from the novel's entertainment value by transforming it into a scholarly edition. Precisely because the most obvious operative function of Vian's wordplay is to entertain, the translation strategy of transparency involves seeking to produce similar effects on an Anglophone audience as may be produced on a Francophone audience. Low's advice (2011: 60) is invaluable in this endeavour:

What we should and can do is translate humour well enough for it to be recognisable as humour and to have some chance of amusing people. (It is also permitted for a translator to make a joke even more amusing in the TT.)

This affords a translator a lot of freedom, necessarily involving interpretation, creativity, and making decisions. Helpfully, Low (2011: 67) provides a toolbox that translators can use to this end: it includes replication (where possible), creation (resulting in ‘dynamic equivalence’), using a ‘different humorous device’, compensation, and expansion.

Before looking in more detail at the text itself, it is worth remembering – briefly – what the translator (as reader) is up against, when dealing with Vian specifically. In his discussion of the myriad readings of just one word in the novel's title (‘Vercoquin’), Martín Hernández (1986: 181) concludes:

Bref, l'imagination débridée de Vian est à la base d'une production sémique, résultat de nombreuses opérations souvent très complexes, souvent très naïves.

He has, by this point, dissected the word as ‘Verts coquins’/‘naughty youngsters’, ‘vers coquins’/‘saucy poems’; he has also noted that the Major – the main protagonist – has ‘un œil de verre’ (‘a glass eye’) and that the word ‘Vercoquin’ contains ‘coq’, which could be a metaphor for the ‘cocks’ sparring for Zizanie's hand. We might also note that there is something intrisically musical about the main protagonists: the Major shares his title with a technical musical term, and (Antioch) Tambrétambre's rhythmic name calls to mind timbre and tom-toms or tambours. However, Vian's polyphonic punning means that these words evoke more than just music, and can be read – simultaneously – in other ways. For example, the Major – precisely celebrating the age of majority in Part One – is frequently entrenched in a militaristic lexical field. And could it be that Tambrétambre references – by way of coded homage – the Tambour sisters, Germaine and Madeleine, who had links with the Hot Club de Paris (Vian's stomping ground) and were arrested by the German Abwehr in 1943? (See Stroud, 2017: Chapter 8.)

Vian's rich punning and cryptic referencing – and the fact that the target audience inhabit an entirely different world (far removed from the context of Occupied France) – make equivalent translation especially difficult and, at times, impossible. As Low (2011: 66) argues, however, ‘translators should not hastily dismiss any pun as untranslatable, and need not to “sit waiting for a brainwave”’. He suggests either a systematic approach – creatively experimental in nature – or ‘a kind of combined exploration and intuition very similar to the kind that people develop to solve British cryptic crosswords – a skill which certainly improves with practice’. (Low, 2011: 64) In this light, non-literal solutions at the micro-level (or ‘decisions of detail’, as Hervey and Higgins describe them) can be informed by the overall strategy of the target text and depend on subjective readings and creative techniques. As Rolls (1998: 16) writes that ‘no intertextual reading can expect to be hailed as the definitive reading of a text’, so no translation should or could ever be considered as the definitive translation.

With particular attention to ‘intracompositional intermediality’ (and translation issues raised thereby), let us now examine some of the manifestations of music in the ‘complex’ but ‘naïve’ novel that is VP. The following analysis and discussion focus, in turn, on the intradiegetic use of songs (The Song of the Cuckoo, La Femme du roulier, and Mon légionnaire), the jazz records and songs that Vian names or references, and the artists that Vian names, references or describes in VP. Extracompositional questions of form and structure – and other musical aspects of the novel – will be considered only briefly by way of conclusion.

The cuckoo and the sparrow

In setting the scene for Part One of VP, the narrator relates the following:

C’est dans cette atmosphère intime, au chant du coucou séculier, que, le matin même, Antioche Tambrétambre, le bras droit du Major, avait installé le banc de bois d’arbouse de vache peint en vert que l’on utilisait en ces sortes d’occasion. (VP: 3)

There are many, many species of Cuculidæ, but the ‘secular cuckoo’ is not one of them. An unthinking word-for-word translation would seem, therefore, to be missing something. As with ‘le banc de bois d’arbouse de vache’ – in which ‘arbouse’ (the Arbutus or strawberry tree) is followed by an odd complement, producing ‘[ar]bouse de vache’ (‘cow shit’), we can read ‘le coucou séculier’ (on the model of the embedded clue in cryptic crosswords ⁹ ) thus:

au chant du cou – coup sec! – ulier

This collocation (coup sec) – signifying ‘sharp blow’ or ‘brisk tug’ or ‘yank’ – potentially illustrates how Vian uses word association to generate (surreal) detail and even plot. To add another layer of meaning, the term ‘coup sec’ is French slang for ‘coitus reservatus’. Hartford (2018: 198) has discussed how Michel Tournier's novel Les Météores puns on this term in the form of the priest character Koussek, who has a ‘penchant for repressing orgasm’. Prioritising wordplay over the specificity of the species of bird, but wishing to maintain the seemingly significant reference to song, yielded this translation:

It was in this cosy atmosphere, that very morning, to the song of the Red Distedæ crow, that Antioch Tambrétambre, the Major's right-hand man, had placed the green bench – made from the wood of the Indian cow crape jasmine tree – that was used on occasions such as these.

This attempt uses compensation to make up for the loss of the linguistic or sexual ‘joke’. It includes a seemingly erudite, scientific term (Distedæ) – and Vian was very fond of such vocabulary. The colour of the crow is surreal, but it is presented as a natural phenomenon, like the grass in Vian's later novel, L’Herbe rouge. And, whilst convoluted, this creature's name echoes the expression, ‘Ready, steady, go!’ Insomuch as this represents some form of wordplay, it is – at least – an improvement on a word-for-word translation as it hints at the complexity of Vian's wordplay and fits the surrealist æsthetic. In narrative terms, it perhaps has the disadvantage of evoking a squawking crow rather than the calming call of the cuckoo. Ornithologists, on the other hand, might deem such a view unfair:

Unlike many birds, crows don’t sing loudly to attract mates from a distance. Instead, they sing softly – and at close range – during courtship, with a mix of soft cooing, rattles, growls, bowing movements, and mutual nuzzling. (Sundstrom, n.d.)

In this translation, the crow was preferred to the cuckoo because it was felt that reference to the Red Distedæ cuckoo (Ready, Steady, Cook-oo) – which was the initial (if desperate) logic behind the creative attempt at an equivalent pun – was anachronistic.

Another hypothesis, however, is that the ‘secular cuckoo’ is not merely an odd collocation or wordplay for its own sake. In the history of music in England, ‘The Song of the Cuckoo’ is synonymous with ‘Sumer is icumen in’:

Sumer is icumen in is the second earliest surviving secular song in the English language (the earliest being Mirie it is) and until recently had the distinction of being the earliest surviving example of English polyphony. (Pittaway, 2016.)

Reese (1945) described this song as ‘one of the most famous compositions in musical literature’, and explained that Time Magazine featured an article about the song in January 1945. It is highly likely, therefore, that Vian knew of this English song. Taking this tack, the only translation issue would seem to involve the position of the adjective (secular): A:

The song of the secular cuckoo

B:

The secular song of the cuckoo

Grammatically, the adjective ‘séculier’ qualifies the ‘cuckoo’, not the ‘song’, so option A would appear to be the more ‘accurate’ translation. This hints at a certain species – albeit non-existent – as the French does, but obscures the already obscure reference to ‘The Song of the Cuckoo’. On the other hand, option B arguably better constitutes a musicological in-joke, but the particularity – and oddness – of its surreal species is lost As such, neither option covers both bases.

These hypotheses are offered only as potential readings or interpretations. Importantly, they are not mutually exclusive, and other readers may make different associations. So what is the translator of Vian to do? Whatever the solution, it should arguably leave itself open to a number of interpretations – as the source text is – and/or compensate somehow for inevitable translation loss by way of expressing the richness, playfulness, and intermediality of Vian's writing in other (necessarily creative) ways.

Incidentally, the opening scene heralded by the cuckoo contrasts markedly with that in the final chapter of Part Two:

Au trente et un de la rue Pradier, nul chant d’oiseau ne retentissait dans les lavabos, nul grillon ne fredonnait en sourdine La Femme du roulier , nulle fleur ne déployait son éventail multicolore pour capturer l’imprudent chéchaquo ailé […]. (VP: 113)

In a text dating from 1853, La Femme du roulier is described as a song ‘qui peint rudement l’abrutissement du vice et les suites du mauvais exemple’. (See Ampère, 1853: 22–23.) In the novel's opening scene, song represents optimism, colour, and hope. Here, the absence of music reflects the Major's isolation and melancholy. The reference to La Femme du roulier – a traditional ‘chanson gaillarde’ or ‘chanson populaire’ – echoes the Major's status as a ‘cocu’, and is comically inappropriate. At the level of lexis, there are no difficulties in translating this item: a standard rendering would be The Trucker's Wife. At the cost of no longer referencing a certain song, and its raft of bawdy associations, this literal but idiomatic translation is nonetheless communicative and humorously suggestive enough – with a little imagination – of a story of infidelity. In that light, such an approach would be more effective than non-translation, which – whilst exotic – would be perfectly opaque to an Anglophone audience. If a more domesticating approach is to be used in the name of humour, the translator could opt to reference some ‘equivalent’ song from US/UK cultural history or, indeed, make one up.

Another reference to a particular song can be found in the description of a drink that the Major pours himself:

C’était chaud. C’était bon. Ça sentait fort le polochon (comme dit Édith qui a un penchant pour les odeurs viceloques). ¹⁰ (VP: 40)

Whilst not explicitly named, this calls to mind – through form, rhythm, and pace – a song made famous by Edith Piaf, Mon légionnaire (1936), which contains the following lines: ‘Il était mince, il était beau. Il sentait bon le sable chaud’. If the target audience is reading a literal translation of this excerpt, it would be safe to assume that they will not ‘get’ the particular reference to the lyrics of Mon légionnaire. One might, therefore, assume that this may safely be ‘sacrificed’. Alternatively, a more creative solution would be to reference some other text – perhaps the lyrics of a 1940s song in English – that is more within the reach of the target audience. In that case, the evocation of Edith Piaf would be lost – but, at least, a similiar effect might be achieved.

On the other hand, it would be reasonable to assume that the target audience – presumably interested in 1940s French culture and society – is aware of the iconic Edith Piaf. Thus, avoiding the temptation to ‘domesticate’ Édith by shearing her accent could suffice, subtly, to hint at this reference:

It was hot. It was good. It smelt distinctly like the bottom of a duffel bag (as Édith – whose take on odour vies with the depraved – would say).

This translation of the parodic lyrics does not seek to find an equivalent song to replace that referenced in the source text. The original reference is lost, therefore, but textual coherence is maintained to some degree and the foreignizing or exoticising accent points to the most famous Édith probably known to the target audience. Another – subtly different – solution could see the translator seek to compensate for the ‘loss’ of this overt reference in French by making it clearer – in the target text – exactly which Edith is being referenced. This could be achieved through expansion: by spelling it out (É/Edith Piaf), by adding her nickname (É/Edith the sparrow), or – differently explicatively – by naming her profession (É/Edith the singer).

Lest we skip over this, because the sing-song rhyme [bon/polochon] has been lost in literal translation, the target audience is unlikely to appreciate Édith's supposed words – even if they have got the reference to Piaf – as those of a song, as they have no rhythm. They do not swing. In this light, another creative solution could involve an 8-syllable line that rhymes with ‘good’:

It was hot. It was good. It smelt like a duffel bag should […].

The song-like rhythm and rhyme are apparent in this solution, even if the reference is now a non-existent song.

Des disques

Enfin des disques, en hautes piles moirées à la surface de reflets symétriques et triangulaires, attendaient, pleins d’indifférence, le moment où, leur déchirant l’épiderme de sa caresse aiguë, l’aiguille du pick-up arracherait à leur âme spiralée la clameur emprisonnée tout au fond de son sillon noir. (VP: 15)

Anthropomorphised and described in quasi-sado-masochistic terms, thus does Vian introduce into the novel the instantly consumable vehicle of music that are records. Immediately after this passage, at the end of Chapter II, we are given our first pick of the disks: ‘Il y avait en particulier Chant of the Booster, de Mildiou Kennington, et Garg arises often down South, par Krüger et ses Boërs…’ (VP: 15) What may seem striking is that Vian confronts his 1940s Francophone audience with song titles in English. Given that the jazz culture consumed by his audience of Zazous (and Zazoutes) hailed originally from the United States, this could be seen as logical. Nonetheless, from a translation point of view, it is worth noting that Vian's choice has a certain effect on the original target audience – and to some extent reveals his expectations thereof. ¹¹ Just as the use of French in English adds a certain je-ne-sais-quoi, so the use of English appears as sophisticated, modern, and ‘cool’ – subversive, even – when used in the (1940s) context of French culture. This effect is necessarily lost on a contemporary Anglophone audience. To complicate matters, the original readership will have detected French-language puns in some of the English-language song titles. The priority for the French-English translator, therefore, is perhaps to ensure that the puns are somehow reproduced. The ‘snob’ effect may be lost, but the effect of humour – seemingly primordial, in this novel – would be maintained.

The majority of Vian's imaginary song titles arguably do not need translating at all. Holy Pooh Doodle-Dum Dee-Do, artist unknown (VP: 37), perhaps calls to mind – for jazz aficionados, at least – songs like Beedle Um Bum (by McKinney's Cotton Pickers, 1929) or Bo-Bo-Beedle-Um-Bo (by The Versatile Four, 1920). The Rabelaisian excess of Keep my Wife until I Come Back to my Old Country Home in the Beautiful Pines (Down the Mississippi River that Runs Across the Screen with Ida Lupino) artist unknown (VP: 18–19) could be a parody of certain jazz musicians’ penchant for fun song titles and parentheses. For example: The Mosquito Song (Where do Mosquitoes go in the Winter Time?) (by Wingy Manone and his Orchestra, 1940). And Vian's absurdity – seen in his creation of Until my Green Rabbit Eats his Soup like a Gentleman (VP: 20) and Give me that Bee in your Trousers, (VP: 37) – matches that of real songs such as You’re Bound to Look Like a Monkey When You Get Old by Clarence Williams’ Novelty Band (1930) and Who Put The Benzedrine in Mrs Murphy's Ovaltine? by Harry ‘The Hipster’ Gibson (1946). Here, then, we see Vian at play in a way that is informed by – and infused with – jazz and its intertextual history.

Sartre famously wove his novel ‘La Nausée’ (1936) around the jazz standard ‘Some of These Days’ (recorded by Sophie Tucker in1926). That some of Vian's songs are not references to real songs, however, soon becomes obvious. For Schweitzer (2005: 16–17), ‘Vian had his own Occupation-era fun inventing new names for jazz songs’, which involved ‘mixing American references with nonsense’. The first – ‘Chant of the Booster’ – would seem to present awkwardly (for a lay Anglophone audience, at least) as a jazz song. And yet, perhaps owing to the linguistic influence of New Orleans jazz, it would seem to mimic songs such as ‘Chant of the Blues’ (by Nat King Cole, 1946), ‘Chant of the Tuxedos’ (by George Lewis, n.d.), and ‘Chant of the Weed’ (by Don Redman, 1931). Where the ‘Booster’ comes from, on the other hand, one can only hypothesise. Is it a détournement of the ‘rooster’, the nickname of Lonnie Johnson, who played ‘music from around 1912 to 1917 in New Orleans’?

‘[Lonnie Johnson's] early nickname “Rooster” was not without relevance through his later life, since he always had a striking appeal for and interest in the ladies’. (Dean, 2014: 42.)

The connotations of this reference would certainly fit in with – and herald – the sexual exploits described in the novel. Synonymous with cock/cockerel, it would again echo the coq in Vercoquin. Or is it another French transliteration – this time of the American-English slang term ‘buster’? Whatever the case, there is a good argument for leaving this song title intact, for the same knowledge of jazz and similar levels of linguistic dexterity are expected of both a Francophone and Anglophone audience.

The same is not true, however, in the case of ‘Garg arises often down South’ (VP: 15), as this invented song title contains a French-language pun that would be missed by an Anglophone audience. Significantly, this onomatopœic item (the French verb ‘gargariser’, meaning ‘to gargle’) seems to hint – in this context (‘down south’) – at bodily functions. Whether Vian had in mind the gurgling borborygmus of the stomach, or the sexual arousal of the eponymous Garg (arising), is open to interpretation. One creative solution is this: ‘Many Göer Gulls down South’. Playing safely, perhaps, this attempt at replication incorporates onomatopœic wordplay and hints at a digestive bodily function [Göer Gulls / gurgles]. Whilst the words ‘go-er’ and ‘gulls’ both have sexual connotations of sorts, what this rendering fails to encompass, however, is the potentially sexual connotation of stirrings ‘down below’.

Similarly obsessed with sex is the record Baseball after Midnight, purportedly by ‘Crosse et Blackwell’ (VP: 54). For Bao (2019: 137), Baseball after Midnight ‘[…] fait référence à un standard de jazz, Round Midnight [Composé et enregistré pour la première fois par Thelonius Monk en 1944]’. It is debatable that Vian had this particular song in mind, as a number of jazz songs follow the model of ‘x after Midnight’: for example, ‘Harlem after Midnight’ (1933) and ‘Business after Midnight’ (1937). Be that as it may, seemingly innocuous to the Anglophone, the French pronunciation of ‘baise-ball’ (fuck-ball) is a common source of amusement. ¹² In an attempt to compensate for this potential loss, one (creative) solution, aiming for dynamic equivalence, could be this: ‘Sticky Wicket in the Moonlight’ (by Crosse and Blackwell). The thinking behind this is that it imitates the original in being sexually suggestive (Sticky Wicket), in alluding to sport (albeit cricket instead of baseball), in having the trappings of a jazz song (in the Moonlight), and – overall – in being very silly. Depending on the imagined audience, and because the original item has its roots in the United States, de-Americanizing the song title in this way could, however, be seen as inappropriate. The names of the artists – in this case – can perhaps remain as they are, given that an Anglophone audience may recognise them, incongruously, as the world-famous purveyors of soup.

There is arguably a more serious side to Vian's wordplay. As Shack (2001: 117) has explained, it was common during the Occupation for American jazz songs to be ‘re-baptised’ – as Vian (1958: 172) himself explained in En avant la zizique – in order that they might be performed in Paris, under the Nazis’ noses: ‘The renaming of jazz classics transformed what the Nazis called “American jungle music, jewish, negro and decadent” into French music’. Thus, Take the A-Train became ‘L’Attaque de train’ ¹³ and ‘Tiger Rag’ became ‘La Rage du tigre’. In this light, some of the mechanisms used by Vian to play with the sounds of words, to reference other songs and musicians, to pun interlingually, are reminiscent of what Shack sees as a form of resistance. Echoing Shack, McGregor (2016: 7–8) has also explored this idea of jazz as resistance:

By listening to jazz records, dancing to swing music, and wearing clothes connected to the swing subculture, individuals could publicly and visibly express views that ran counter to the official Nazi and Vichy views on both jazz and Frenchness. For some, jazz became synonymous with the resistance to the German invader, and Pétain's government outlawed dances because authorities believed they could be places for black market exchanges, immoral behavior, or sexual impropriety.

Seeking to reproduce such punning – only possible through a creative approach – seems necessary, as it has meaning on a socio-historical level, as well as signifying and embodying the fun and freedom of Vian's literary form of resistance.

At the final party, it is reported that Claude Abadie's band play one of their ‘vieux succès’, ‘Les Bigoudis’ (VP: 175):

Cet intitulé est une contrepèterie sur le titre de Lady Be Good, célèbre morceau de jazz au tempo vif. Composée par George et Ira Gershwin en 1924, cette chanson inspire Vian à la développer en tant qu’anecdote musicale. (Bao, 2019: 135)

Translating ‘Les Bigoudis’ literally as ‘The Hair Curlers’ would be unfortunate, as any link with Lady Be Good would be lost. Once more, a more appropriate translation solution may lie in using the same tricks that Vian uses. Lay By, Goody? Lady, By God!? As we see, it is very difficult – when constrained to this extent by a limited range of phonemes – to match Vian's skill and absurdity in producing a jazz ‘success’ manifestly about a mundane object such as hair curlers, but latently referencing an intertext. In this case, there is a strong argument for non-translation: that is, to ‘leave’ this item as ‘Les Bigoudis’. This has a number of advantages. It is coherent (as Abadie's band are French), it hints that French jazz bands were, at this time, developing their own styles and creating their own approaches to jazz, and it still allows the (Anglophone) reader the possibility to intuit the sounds of Lady Be Good (and so ‘get’ the reference). Furthermore, it is – in one sense – historically accurate and records the fact that European jazz bands themselves ‘translated’ American songs which were banned under the Occupation, as a form of resistance (Dellicour, 2007: 73).

Thanks to Bao's work (2019: 114–115), we can comment on another musical reference that poses another translation issue: ‘Parmi les calembours offerts par la bibliothèque du Major, on distingue « Les Propos sur l’Antimoine ou A Bas La Calotte, par le bon Père Nambuc »’ (VP: 114). For the purposes of illustration, a literal translation of this fictional book title and author would give something like this: ‘Remarks on Antimony or Down with the Clergy, by the good Father Nambuc’. Apart from the paradox of a man of the cloth calling for his own downfall, Vian's logic and humour are lost in this literal translation. In fact, ‘Père Nambuc’ is derived from the name of a type of wood: pernambouc/pernambuco or brazilwood, which – as an added music-related reference – is used in the making of violin bows. The pun missing in this literal translation lies in antimoine (lit. antimony) / anti-moine (lit. anti-monk). Further complicating the joke is the fact that A Bas La Calotte – as Bao (2019: 114) informs us – is a ‘chanson anti-cléricale écrite par Georges Bargas (18.. - 1914)’. ¹⁴ In this instance, this reader's solution – I, Chipmunk or Losing the Habit, by Father Lewis – sacrifices any musical or chemical references for literary allusions (lying in I, Claudius by Robert Graves and The Monk by Matthew Lewis) that complement a monk-related pun. A different – perhaps preferable – solution would lie in working a musical reference into the pun.

In summary, there would seem to be more at stake than simple entertainment or ‘schoolboy humour’ in Vian's use of song titles. Early in Vian studies, Noakes (1964: 54) hinted: ‘Les titres de disques chez Vian peuvent faire penser à ceux des livres de la bibliothèque Saint-Victor chez Rabelais’. Subsequent research into the book titles in Rabelais’ fictional library (Pantagruel, Chapter 7) reveals the relevance of Noakes's observation:

Parodies des ouvrages de dévotion, satire des théologiens, critique des appétits des gens d’Eglise, choix de titres scatologiques destinés sans doute à déprécier l’ensemble du catalogue, autant de moyens dont Rabelais use pour fustiger ceux qui prétendent fonder la conduite de leur vie et celle des autres sur des règles humaines, au lieu de suivre l’Evangile et de l’annoncer «quoy qu’on gronde». (Moreau, 1988: 37–42).

Just as we can discern a critical intellectual project in Rabelais’ punning and scatology, so we might infer something similar in Vian's work. However, perhaps because the frame of reference in Vian is musical rather than ecclesiastical, his parodic, satirical, and critical edge is less sharp: it relies, rather, on a shared love of jazz culture and appeals to an in-crowd. In a détournement of Rabelais, its aim is less mockery, more celebration and promotion of freedom and creativity (embodied in jazz).

Des artistes

The names of the ‘artists’ mentioned in VP illustrate another form of Vian's playfulness. ‘Mildiou Kennington’ (VP: 15) hints, bizarrely, at Duke Ellington. ‘Krüger et ses Boërs’ (VP: 15) could refer to Benny Krueger (jazz saxophonist, 1899–1967). His ‘Boërs’ might have their origins in the South-African association of the name Krueger/Kruger, but the band name also resembles that of many jazz bands on the model of ‘Benny Goodman and his Boys’. A more political – and entirely convincing – reading is offered by Bao (2019: 116), who sees in this group ‘les Boers et leur chef d’insurrection contre les Anglais pour la décolonisation de leur territoire’. ¹⁵

Once we have understood possible operations at play, translation – in the case of these names – is seemingly straightforward. Transliterating the first as ‘Mildew Kennington’ – and, indeed, translating it as such, for it is an obvious and correct interlingual solution – makes sense, as the ‘joke’ involves the reader ‘hearing’ the word ‘Duke’ [‘dewK’]. At a deeper level, it is probably no coincidence that mildiou/mildew is a cryptogram – not (merely) in the sense of a code, but in its specialist biological definition:

‘cryptograms n.plu. plants reproducing by spores, such as the mosses and ferns. The term has also been used for plants without flowers, or without true stems, roots or leaves’ (Lawrence, 2008: 151).

Without even dwelling on the myriad metaphorical possibilities of this association in relation to jazz music (or the uprooted history of the people who created it), we can observe that Vian's wordplay is sophisticated and self-referential. Happily, in this case, the words mildiou/mildew are phonetically equivalent, so the same ‘joke’ works in English. ¹⁶ Regarding ‘Krüger et ses Boërs’, a literal rendering (‘Krüger and his Boërs’) has the same range of associations as the original item (whether we imagine this to evoke Paul Kruger and the Boers or Benny Krueger and his Boys).

Other real artists who appear in the novel are the French jazz men Claude Abadie (1920–2020), Claude Luter (1923–2006), Claude ‘Doddy’ Léon (1921–2000), as well as Bing Crosby (1903–77) and George Gershwin (1898–1937). It is Claude Abadie's band that provides the entertainment at the final party:

Abadie jouait son grand succès : On est sur les roses. ¹⁷ La joie des zazous était à son comble. Leurs jambes se tortillaient comme des ocarinas fourchus pendant que les semelles de bois scandaient avec force ce rythme quadritemporel qui est l’âme même de la musique nègre comme dirait André Cœuroy qui s’y connaît en musique à peu près comme le douanier Rousseau en histoire. […] Plein de grâce, Abadie se tenait à la tête de ses hommes et lançait un piaulement agressif toutes les onze mesures, pour faire la syncope. L’atmosphère se prêtant particulièrement aux déchaînements de la cadence, les musiciens donnaient le meilleur d’eux-mêmes et arrivaient à peu près à jouer comme des nègres de trente-septième ordre. (VP: 174–175)

In his discussion of jazz criticism in wartime France, Lane (2013: 126) refers to VP and asserts that Cœuroy is ‘presented as a prime example of all those who had no understanding whatsoever of jazz music’. In this, therefore, we see a clear example of Vian using the novel as an extension of his jazz criticism. As for the description of the performance, it is positive – reflected in the joy of the Zazous. And yet, even ‘giving their best’, the band are described disparagingly as ‘thirty-seventh-rate black jazz musicians’. This at once indicates that the band are white and exhibits Vian's complete admiration for black musicians. ¹⁸ As he did in his jazz criticism, Vian is using the novel to counter real-world racism by underlining the superiority of African-American jazz musicians.

Luter – who did indeed play in Abadie's band – is disguised slightly as ‘Lhuttaire, le clarrrinnettisstte à vibrrrattto’ (VP: 176). ¹⁹ Similarly skimpily masked is Abadie's drummer, Claude ‘Doddy’ Léon, who appears as ‘Dhaudyt’. And if we recall that Vian played trumpet in Abadie's band, we might recognise Vian himself in the character of René Vidal:

René Vidal se remit à la copie de quelques partitions. Il jouait de la trompette harmonique dans l’orchestre de jazz amateur de Claude Abadie et cela prenait beaucoup de temps. (VP: 76)

Quite plausibly, Vian's original audience would have ‘got’ these self-referential nods and winks. Some 70 or so years on, it might seem tempting or valid to ‘domesticate’ such obviously French names. However, given that such references reveal this novel to be a roman à clefs, certain attempts to anglicise or domesticate them – with more recognisably English names – would leave the trail cold for anyone interested in the 1940s jazz scene in Paris. Even so, in order to give a helping hand to a contemporary target audience, there could be an argument for transliterating the more impenetrable – and potentially hard to pronounce – names of ‘Lhuttaire’ and the particularly convoluted ‘Dhaudyt’: Loutaire and Doddie?

Beyond Vian's coterie, we read that the recording artist of Palookas in the Milk – perhaps a playful reference to Blues in the Night (1941) – is Bongo Grosse-Bi (VP: 43). Vian's arguably juvenile play on Bing Crosby's name is one consonant sound short – in this selective transliteration – of ‘grosse bitte’ (fat cock). In this light, simply reproducing ‘Bongo Grosse-Bi’ in English would seem to miss a trick. If the aim is to somehow reference and denigrate Bing Crosby, then similar techniques could be used in English: namely, replication through consonant and vowel mutation. This reader suggests the following: Bingo Crossbow. Restoring the ‘C’ to the patronym makes the reference more easily recognisable; also, the ridiculous combination of unrelated nouns, their anglicisation, and the repeated ‘o’ sound might suffice to achieve these aims, in this case. Perhaps inevitably, the sexual aspect of the ‘joke’ is lost in this solution.

More sophisticated is what Vian does with Gershwin's name. He transforms it into ‘Guère Souigne’ (VP: 175), which – according to Brooks (1973: 78) – could represent once more the thoughts of Vian the jazz critic: to suggest that Gershwin souigne (an approximation of ‘swings’) guère is to say that Gershwin ‘barely swings’. Indeed, Brooks suggests that we can read this as Vian pinning his colours to the mast of Duke Ellington's style of jazz, as opposed to that of the music of Gershwin. It is, moreover, perfectly in keeping with what Vian wrote elsewhere about Gershwin in contrast to Duke Ellington. ²⁰ In this light, the latent references to jazz form part of a manifesto for a certain cognoscenti. In translating this item, one solution – once more – lies in phonetics and morphology. One offering – Heer Schwein – imitates Vian's in that it is a distorted transliteration of ‘Gershwin’. Syntactically, it fails – as it must? – to evoke, simultaneously, the idea of ‘barely swinging’. In an attempt to compensate for this, the offered solution could be read – at a push, but with obvious negative connotations – as ‘Here, swine’.

Conclusion

The references in VP to song(s), music, and musicians that have been analysed here are not exhaustive and have not been singled out with a view to adding to a typology of music in (Vian's) literature. Whilst based on subjective readings of Vian's writings (especially those seen as ‘embedded clues’), it is hoped that considering them through the eyes of a translator has, nonetheless, shed new light on their role in Vian's fiction, their relationship with the world and society in which he lived, and different strategies for translation in the twenty-first century. It is also hoped that this dicussion has gone some way to illustrating some of the complexity of translating Vian.

Vian's made-up song titles – providing an imaginary soundtrack – serve to entertain: through inter-lingual punning, cryptic wordplay, or sheer silliness. They evoke or mimic jazz culture, which can be seen as a metaphor for resistance (Shack, 2001) and freedom (Zwerin, 2000). The made-up names of artists and musicians may also serve to entertain. More than this, however, they can be read as jazz criticism (Ellington is king, Gershwin ‘barely swings’, and André Coeuroy – a rival critic – knows nothing about jazz). Furthermore, it is through his description of music that Vian challenges real-world racism, colour-blindness and social injustice (Bourderionnet, 2018: 5). Endearingly, Vian/Vidal is among the white musicians he denigrates. But this self-referentiality – even if it can be seen as a form of self-promotion or auto-mythologising of Vian and his musical mates – also serves as friendly banter and contributes to the sense of an ‘in-crowd’.

As we have seen, translating Vian's musical references involves much reflection (not translating unthinkingly), research (into biology, ornithology and history, for example) and creativity. Decisions of detail, informed by an overall strategy – defined in relation to the genre, function and audience of both the source and target texts – will necessarily vary from translator to translator. Just as it is in the tradition and nature of jazz to reprise, re-invent and improvise, so we might view each translation as a riff, an interpretation, an individual creation.

It has been seen that literal translation often fails to capture a joke, a reference, or even the sense of the original item. As such, a consistently literal approach would impoverish the text's multi-modality, polyphony and frames of reference. And yet, in some cases, it has been argued that non-translation – or deliberate foreignization or exoticisation – would be a valid solution, as in the case of Les Bigoudis. It seems important, overall, to enable the target audience to make the same (or similar) links and interpretations, to ‘solve’ similar linguistic puzzles, and to enjoy the polyphony of the text by leaving it as open to interpretation as possible. Loss is inevitable. But a creative approach – using tools described by Low (2011: 67) – can at least seek to compensate for loss and even lead to gains in translation.

Questions regarding the role of music in the form and structure of VP have largely been overlooked in this article, as they generally pose less of a problem for the translator than decisions of detail. If the translator respects the original structure of the novel (Prelude; Part 1 – 28 chapters  +  a digression; Part 2 – 20 chapters; Part 3 – 12 chapters; Part 4 – 6 chapters) – and there is no reason not to – then any musical ‘inside jokes’ ²¹ should remain intact. ²² More subtle, perhaps, are formal considerations of style. In considering translation issues raised by the reference to Piaf's Mon légionnaire, we explored formal constraints of song (rhyme, rhythm), even if the exact referent may be lost on the target audience. Whether the translator seeks an equivalent reference in US or UK musical history, or opts to reproduce more closely the nonsense of the original, a potentially ‘singable’ rendering is preferable to a literal translation, if the aim is to produce a target text that is as communicative, readable and open to interpretation as the original is (see Low, 2003).

In conclusion, if we agree with Dinerstein (2018: 22) that ‘artistic freedom [is] built into the musical form [of jazz], both individually and within an ensemble’, and if we agree with Malmkjær (2019: 4) that ‘translating per se is always creative’, translating Vian would seem to lend itself very well to embracing the metaphor of jazz for translation itself. To return to Hervey and Higgins’ scale, an interlineal/literal translation will fluff so many notes as to be unrecognisable and certainly not tuneful. A so-called faithful/balanced version may be technically competent but will barely swing or reproduce the ‘artistic freedom’ of the original. Only a communicative, idiomatic/free approach – on the model of jazz itself – can hope to give a hint of Vian's exceptional creativity and make the target text swing like the original.