It is a minor but regular disappointment to the present writer that translators of Madame Bovary into English have not taken the opportunity to fully translate the title, choosing to keep the heroine’s French honorific in place of the preferable Mrs. Bovary. While Mrs. is a horrible word—and no one would want to read a book called Mrs. Bovary—in dispensing with the glamour of Madame, and substituting the parochial and dislikable Mrs., we surely get closer to the effect of Flaubert’s title in French, since Madame in France must often seem as tawdry, punctilious, wasteful, as does Mrs. in English.

Macdara is very much interested in the question of titles, and never more so than titles in translation. He is a great admirer of Herta Müller, who has, by some strange misfortune, had to suffer several corrupted titles as her work has been published in English. Possibly Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt, man is a great pheasant in the world—being a saying in Romania—might give rise to some confusion, but what sweet confusion compared to picking up a book called The Passport. While the reader appreciates that the application for a passport to emigrate from Romania is a matter of the greatest importance in the novel, it is also a matter of bureaucracy, and the translator, or the publisher of the translation, have entirely shifted the emphasis of the work by choosing to emphasise the bureaucratic angle, unlike translators into several other languages, who actually troubled themselves to translate the name Müller gave her work. Something similar happened with the translation of Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet—today I would rather not have met myself—as The Appointment. Perhaps it is known that titles that put readers in mind of administrative affairs sell better in the English-language market?

In other cases, translators seem unwilling to translate her compound nouns, so Herztier—which can be translated quite tidily as heartbeast—becomes The Land of Green Plums, and Atemschaukel—breathswing—The Hunger Angel. This last example particularly bothers your correspondent, since the translator has replaced one compound noun with another: the one used as the original title, which refers to the easiest way for the emaciated protagonist to use the shovel in time with his breathing, is used rarely, perhaps twice, in the text, while the other, the Hungerengel who accompanies the prisoner, sitting on the spade of the shovel, is used much more widely. Once again, the writer’s intention is obliterated, including the secondary idea promoted by her publisher that the translation should be called Everything I Possess I Carry with Me.

Why is Macdara so perturbed by these kinds of alterations? That is easily answered: what is more important to a text than its title? Beginnings and endings, and the highlights in the texture of a work, are crucial, but the title is the hook upon which the text hangs. All we know of the text from the outside is its title. We could say the title is a stepping stone; from the nothing beforehand (only the world, empty of the text), we leap onto the tilting space of the title and decide whether to carry on to the island ahead a while, re-entering afterwards the great world (expanded by the fact of our having read the book)—or do we step back off the stone, retreat, but even then still knowing that there is more to the world that might one day be explored? Whatever the decision, it is taken while balancing on the name decided on by the writer. The title is short, suspended in space, but there we wait as long as we need before that great leap, the hardest work the reader has to do: from title to the mass of words beyond. It is the writer who decides on that brief space, gives it its solidity—perhaps even makes it a difficult, uncomfortable space, she is right to do so if the text requires it. Macdara suggests that if a work is worth the translation, it must be worth the effort of carrying across also the stone that is the name. 

Macdara cannot help underlining briefly also the importance of the conclusion of a text: he well remembers the extraordinary decision by one translator to render the final words of L’Étranger, cris de haine—cries of hatred—as howls of execration. This approach might most politely be described as maintaining the Pause that Camus might have expected of a reader who had just finished his novel, but giving it more of the character of confusion than that writer likely intended.