Essays from the Annales School 1914-1944
Bloomsbury Academic 2025
Translated and edited by Iona Singh
Sick of thinking my own thoughts and writing them down, the
possibility of trying to get into someone else’s thoughts and writing them down
instead interested me. I knew Lucien Febvre’s work and his subtle approach to
the role of feelings from A new kind of history, Sensibility and history
and History and psychology (RKP 1973). These are fantastic essays, unique
in their field, the kind you dream about when trying to understand the social
and political affects of art and design, for example, and they can be applied way beyond the
realms of historical studies. And Febvre, in
these essays kept mentioning this person Bloch, he died in the war, shot by the
Germans, and was a great loss.
When I first began as a French to English translator, some
years before, I had the naive idea that some of the ‘Frenchness’ of the
original language should be maintained in the translation, if possible, even if
this was not quite correct English. A slight miscommunication with the editor
of a Publisher I was translating several books for convinced me they
wanted a literal translation of the tenses used in French. English and French
are different in this way, the imperfect tense, for example, is used more
frequently in French. I’m embarrassed to say this now, but I followed this
through and the translation read like the events were ongoing and in the present,
like the editorial of Hello magazine. Luckily, the misunderstanding was soon
straightened out, forgiven, and I never did that again!
This is one set of innumerable choices that the translator
must make to determine not just how to interpret the meaning of the original writing
but also the way it is expressed, I would call this the politics of
translation. Is a text to be translated formally or officiously or is it casual,
should I use slang words or stick to polite terms, middle class or aristocratic
phrases and how literal do you need to be in the translation in order to really
convey what the writer wants.
They were all questions I needed to mull, especially when
translating the writings of Marc Bloch. In the beginning it still seemed
charming to retain a little of his French expressions and grammar, but by the
time I had finished, over years, I ended up understanding that I only needed to convey what Bloch actually MEANT and that alone. And often these charming
Frenchisms got in the way and definitely had to GO.
Translating a work awards a great deal of power, leverage
and responsibility to an interpreter. For me the best way to honour that was to
grasp the sentiment of what Bloch wanted to say, the feeling, as well as the language.
I decided it needed to be like Bloch chatting out loud and explaining it. His
writing has a chatty element and by the end of the process, every time I read
it, I could hear him saying the words out to me in English (with an English
accent)?!
It helps a translator to understand what they can about the
personality of the translated. When I began stumbling through Bloch’s long
sinuous sentences (even his biographer Carole Fink mentioned these as difficult)
and pairing them with the stiff war time photos of a middle-aged Bloch and his grand
position in French education, I was intimidated into reading and translating his
texts literally and formally, which came across as a bit boring and slightly
pompous. But with perseverance the nuances emerged and I realised it was in
fact ME reading these things into the work. If his writing is a bit polite and
formal at times it needs to be adjusted against the politeness and formality
of the epoch which is finally therefore negated to reveal that Bloch, who was mainly
addressing young people, students, and academics from outside the mainstream discipline
of history, was trying to convey things on their level. From then on, the
sentiment of what Bloch actually MEANT and how he meant to say it was much
clearer.
And how did he mean to say it? After Bloch’s death in the
war Lucien Febvre recalls him recounting an argument wearing ‘that slightly
amused look on his face’. And that image clicked with me, because on removing
those barriers whether from Bloch’s own pages or from inside my head, it dovetailed with the texts to reveal that Bloch was funny. That the contradictions he points out are
befuddling puzzles he’s trying to solve, and they often quite amuse him.
The difficulty of trying to get to this as a translator, to
facilitate his words as if he is enunciating them, (some of the chapters in
the book are transcriptions of lectures) and informally speaking to his class, became
the main challenge. When translating from French, the words chosen from the available English are not, of course, to be translated on their own, they are part of a
line of words, and sentences of words, and each of these, adjusts the others.
The meaning, starts as a fluid dynamic, moving through the intellectual variables of
space and time, but gradually
in view of the wider text, this is homed in and any inexactitudes whittled away until
the meanings are contained within their correct limits and the spirit, irony, and humour finally comes clean.
I’ve enjoyed listening to Marc Bloch chatting to me over
many afternoons while the thread of his language was checked and rechecked,
even if I couldn’t get a word in. Sometimes little paragraphs that caused so
much trouble at the time come back to me out of the blue. Ancient words in
French I did not know but now will never forget, and I’ve talked about them so
much to my husband that he won’t forget them either. And now the book is published it's a bit of a shame to leave my
talkative old mate behind.
A reviewer of the book mentioned that Bloch’s voice ‘shines
through’ from within the edition but made no reference to the role of translation in this. Bloch’s
voice does shine through, but not of its own accord as some transcendental
force that asserts itself under any circumstances, it shines through by the material
mechanics of translation, the processes of understanding what that voice is and of eventually ridding it of anything that stifles it.
Iona Singh
The paperback edition of The Selected Writings of Marc
Bloch: Essays from the Annales School 1914-1944 with be available from 20
August 2026 from Bloomsbury Academic https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/selected-writings-of-marc-bloch-9781350513433/
and Amazon.
