I had a French lesson this morning where I started by telling my teacher that I was tired after a busy weekend, and that I was frequently tired, and that perhaps it was because I was constantly trying “to suck the marrow out of life”. Of course, I could not remember the word for “marrow”, which is la moelle (pronounced more like the oi in la voile, but spelled with an oe). This segued to my explaining the reference, and then looking up the Thoreau quote and trying to translate it on the fly orally.
One thing led to another, and we spent the whole lesson constructing a translation of a paragraph-long excerpt of the essay. We discussed the nuances of the different vocabulary choices available to us and the grammatical structures that stayed true the original both in meaning and in register. There may be lighter ways to express these ideas in French, but of course Thoreau is rather ponderous in English, so I’m not sure that leavening him in translation does the reader a service.
Here’s the French translation we settled on:
Je suis parti dans la forêt car je désirais vivre délibérément, n’affronter que l’essence de la vie, et prouver si je ne pouvais apprendre ce qu’elle avait à enseigner, et ne pas, quand le moment de ma mort arriverait, découvrir ne pas avoir vécu. Je ne voulais pas vivre une fausse vie, la vie étant si chère; je ne voulais pas non plus me résigner à moins que cela soit absolument nécessaire. Je voulais vivre profondément et sucer toute la moelle de la vie, vivre aussi solidement et spartiatement afin de faire détaler tout ce qui n’était pas de la vie, de me frayer un large chemin et de raser de près, de coincer la vie et la simplifier à l’extrême.
And here’s the original Henry David Thoreau passage:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms…
I haven’t gone looking for other French translations of this quote, though I’m sure they exist and they differ from mine. But as they say, «Traduire, c’est trahir».
