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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain – C’est l’Amérique!
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (1876) French title: Les aventures de Tom Sawyer.
Tom Sawyer is so well-known that I’ll do us a favor and skip the summary part of my usual billets. I’ll focus more on my thoughts.
You might wonder why the title of this billet is The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain – C’est l’Amérique. Well, it explains why I’ve only read this classic now. Tom Sawyer is etched in my childhood memory as a Japanese anime I used to watch. The theme song was very catchy with a chorus that said “Tom Sawyer, c’est l’Amérique”. It’s the kind of sticky tune that stays in you mind all day when you’ve barely thought about it. Believe me, most of French people of my age remember this anime and know this song. And it was quite difficult to distance myself from the images flooding back and see Tom, Huck and Becky differently in my mind eye.
Reading Twain in the original helped keeping the anime images at bay but it was sometimes a challenge. Twain’s use of dialect made me pause and read carefully. I have a French translation of it and all is lost in translation and worse. The dialect is gone and the boys speak like a grammar book. In English, Huck makes a lot of grammar mistakes and comes from an outcast family, he can’t speak like an educated child but in French, he does. See an example here, an excerpt from the scene in the cemetery.
| “I wish I’d said Mister Williams. But I never meant any harm. Everybody calls him Hoss.”
“A body can’t be too partic’lar how they talk ’bout these-yer dead people, Tom.” This was a damper, and conversation died again. Presently Tom seized his comrade’s arm and said: “Sh!” “What is it, Tom?” And the two clung together with beating hearts. “Sh! There ’tis again! Didn’t you hear it?” “I –” “There! Now you hear it.” “Lord, Tom, they’re coming! They’re coming, sure. What’ll we do?” “I dono. Think they’ll see us?” “Oh, Tom, they can see in the dark, same as cats. I wisht I hadn’t come.” “Oh, don’t be afeard. I don’t believe they’ll bother us. We ain’t doing any harm. If we keep perfectly still, maybe they won’t notice us at all.” “I’ll try to, Tom, but, Lord, I’m all of a shiver.” |
– Oui, j’aurais dû dire monsieur Williams. Mais je n’ai pas voulu le froisser : tout le monde l’appelle le vieux.
– On ne fait jamais attention à ce qu’on dit des morts, Tom. La réflexion de Huck jeta un froid ; le silence régna de nouveau. Tout à coup, Tom saisit le bras de son camarade. – Chut! – Qu’est-ce qu’il y a? demanda Huck, le cœur battant. – Chut! Tiens, on entend quelque chose. Tu n’entends pas ? – Si. Ils viennent, ça c’est sûr. Qu’est-ce qu’on va faire ? – Sais pas, tu crois qu’ils nous voient ? – Pas de doute ; ils voient dans le noir comme les chats. Je voudrais bien être ailleurs, moi. – Allons, du cran. Je ne crois pas qu’ils nous en veuillent ; nous ne faisons rien de mal. Peut-être que si nous ne bougeons pas ils ne nous remarqueront pas. – Je veux bien essayer de rester tranquille, Tom, mais je ne réponds de rien : je tremble comme une feuille. |
I know that dialects are hard to translate but using spoken language. Here’s my suggestion :
| – Oui, j’aurais dû dire monsieur Williams. Mais je n’ai pas voulu le froisser : tout le monde l’appelle le vieux.
– On ne fait jamais attention à ce qu’on dit des morts, Tom. La réflexion de Huck jeta un froid ; le silence régna de nouveau. Tout à coup, Tom saisit le bras de son camarade. – Chut! – Qu’est-ce qu’il y a? demanda Huck, le cœur battant. – Chut! Tiens, on entend quelque chose. Tu n’entends pas ? – Si. Ils viennent, ça c’est sûr. Qu’est-ce qu’on va faire ? – Sais pas, tu crois qu’ils nous voient ? – Pas de doute ; ils voient dans le noir comme les chats. Je voudrais bien être ailleurs, moi. – Allons, du cran. Je ne crois pas qu’ils nous en veuillent ; nous ne faisons rien de mal. Peut-être que si nous ne bougeons pas ils ne nous remarqueront pas. – Je veux bien essayer de rester tranquille, Tom, mais je ne réponds de rien : je tremble comme une feuille. |
– J’aurais dû dire monsieur Williams. Mais c’était pas méchant, tout le monde l’appelle le vieux.
– On doit toujours faire attention à ce qu’on dit des morts, Tom. La réflexion de Huck jeta un froid ; le silence régna de nouveau. Tout à coup, Tom saisit le bras de son camarade. – Chut ! – Qu’est-ce qu’y a, Tom ? Ils se serraient l’un contre l’autre, le cœur battant. – Chut ! Tiens, on entend quelque chose. T’entends pas ? – Euh… – Là, t’entends pas ? – Mon Dieu, Tom, ils arrivent ! Ils viennent, c’est sûr. Qu’est-ce qu’on va faire ? – Sais pas, tu crois qu’ils nous voient ? – Oh Tom, pas de doute ; ils voient dans le noir comme les chats. Si j’aurais su, j’aurais pas v’nu. – Allons, n’aie pas peur. Je crois pas qu’ils nous en veulent ; on fait rien de mal. Si on se tient tranquille, peut-être qu’ils nous verront même pas. – J’veux bien essayer de rester tranquille, Tom, mais Bon Dieu, j’ai la trouille. |
Feel free to comment, I’m always interested in discussing translation matters. I’m not surprised that the dialect disappeared, it’s frequent in French translations. After all, peasants from Wessex speak like a French bourgeois.
Besides this translation that I explored later, I enjoyed reading Tom’s adventures. I loved Twain’s sense of humor and side remarks scattered along the book, like this one:
If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.
As a reader, I felt as the accomplice of the writer, watching Tom’s adventures unfold like a movie. I didn’t remember the dark passages, about the murder in the cemetery, the trial and Tom and Huck’s subsequent fears. Tom is a loveable character, a mischievous child. As a parent, I sympathized with Aunt Polly but it’s hard to stay mad at Tom for a long time. His heart is in the right place.
Maybe the theme song of the anime was spot on: Tom Sawyer represents a kind America. Nature around St Petersburg is exotic for us, with the Mississippi river flowing by. I’m not a historian but what Twain describes seems different from life in France at the same time. Religion is very important in the village’s life. Sunday school gathers the children and Aunt Polly adds religious times of her own at home:
The sun rose upon a tranquil world, and beamed down upon the peaceful village like a benediction. Breakfast over, Aunt Polly had family worship: it began with a prayer built from the ground up of solid courses of Scriptural quotations, welded together with a thin mortar of originality; and from the summit of this she delivered a grim chapter of the Mosaic Law, as from Sinai.
The characters of Jim and Injun Joe are also typically American. The way Twain drafted “Injun Joe” made me cringe but I can’t judge a book written in 1876 with today’s set of values. And I don’t think it should be censored but it should come with a foreword to explain the historical context. These books help us see where we come from.
But if we set aside the setting, it remains a childhood book. Tom plays with his friends, imagines he’s a pirate, a robber or Robin Hood. He enjoys his freedom during the summer and dreads going to class. He loves wandering in the country around him and explore. He has a crush on Becky. Is he very different from the young narrator in La Gloire de mon père by Marcel Pagnol or the boys in War of the Buttons by Louis Pergaud?
In the end, Tom is a symbol of childhood, with its dreams, its own vision of the world, its innocence and its freedom of mind. Maybe that’s why a Japanese firm made The Adventures of Tom Sawyer into an anime that was so popular in France. His childhood has become part of mine.
Book Around the Corner 