Read Pere Goriot for Free Online Page B

with punctuation, and has broken up sentences and paragraphs into more manageable bites. She might also be judged harshly for the rather refined (if accurate) “factitious” for Balzac’s rather plain “false” (fausse) to describe the energy that animates Eugène after the ball.
    Marriage has a fine knowledge of things and of the words for them, which is vital for a translator of Balzac, whose books are filled with objects. She knows what a “tester” is (p. 138); she knows that Goriot possesses a “posset dish” (p. 26); she knows that Anastasie has a “mantuamaker” (p. 256). She uses expressions current in her time that seem now quaint or outmoded. She has an ear for dialogue. In Goriot, the speech of each character differs from the others according to sometimes minute degrees of social distinction. It is often through their language, through their use or misuse of grammar and choice of words, that the characters reveal themselves. Madame Vauquer‘s speech, for example, is at once direct, vulgar, and pretentious. Readers will appreciate the niceness of Marriage’s renderings (“‘My angel,’ said she to her dear friend, ‘you will make nothing of that man yonder”’ [p. 29).
    It is perhaps worth mentioning that English translations of Goriot up to the middle of the twentieth century came with few or no notes. In 1901 Ellen Marriage saw the need for only a single footnote—on p. 105 (p. 113), to explain the reference to the initials T.F., for Travaux forces (hard labor) branded onto the convict’s skin. The Crawford translation of 1951 has no notes at all. With the passage of time, which has rendered some of the allusions and references obscure or obsolete, and with the increasing role of scholars and teachers in the preparation and translation of English editions, notes and prefatory materials have proliferated. The reader might wish to remember that generations of Anglophones have read Père Goriot without interventions from translator or editor. He or she might wish also to bear in mind the following word of caution from the pen of one of the most erudite of all Balzac scholars, the literary historian Pierre-Georges Castex: “Be wary of the erudition that swirls around texts, which can help approach them, but ... which does not get at what is essential, for what is essential is in the work and one must look there in order to discover it” (cited in Ambrière, “Hommage à Pierre-Georges Castex,” p. 9). The wonder of Père Goriot is in the work, in its details (“it is the author’s firm belief that details alone shall constitute henceforth the merit of works improperly called novels,” as Balzac writes in his preface to Scenes de la vie privée [Scenes of Private Life, 1830]),—for example, the character Goriot, the former vermicelli manufacturer and expert in flour, sniffing his bread before tasting it or, in the same vein, Madame Vauquer’s vexed glance at students who consume too much bread. These details succeed not only on account of their astuteness and plausibility, which contribute to the effect of realism in this carefully observed novel. They succeed also because they allude, without clamor or insistence, to the highly Balzacian theme of the necessities of life, of the daily bread that society refuses to the hungry, of the bread that some earn, some steal, some swindle, etc.
    Â 
    Peter Connor is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). He has translated Bataille’s The Tears of Eros (City Lights Press, 1989), as well as many works in the area of contemporary French philosophy, including The Inoperative Community, by Jean-Luc Nancy (University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

NOTES
    1 These numbers are from A. G. Canfield,