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Igor Žic about Herman Raucher

 

Some problems with the Croatian translation of Summer of '42 by Herman Raucher

 

One of the American novels which made the greatest impact on me, is rarely – if ever! - mentioned on lists of the most important works of literature. Summer of '42 for most middle-aged people is just a sentimental film about growing up, notably connected to the 1970s, and with the Second World War, during which the plot takes place. The masterful musical theme The Summer Knows by Michel Legrand, with its minor keys summarizes all the film’s sorrow and transience in an easily memorable way, even rose above the film and not surprisingly won an Oscar award in 1971. However, being carried away with the sentimental sound of the piano, we slip from the artistic into art and move further away from the starting point, from actual events and their literary formation.

Herman Raucher, known as Hermie, was born on 13th April 1928 in Brooklyn, New York, and was fourteen years old when, during the summer of 1942, he went to spend the school holidays on the island of Nantucket, on the East Coast of the United States. Here he socialized with his peers Oscar and Benjie, faraway from World War Two which was “over there somewhere” on the other side of the vast and chilly Atlantic. In the sensitive period of growing up, the terrible trio fought primarily against boredom and family authority, and then inevitably, they focused on girls.

Somewhat unexpectedly Hermie fell in love with the married, older, twenty year old Dorothy, who was spending the holidays with her husband Pete, a highly decorated soldier. After he left for the battlefield, Hermie became closer to the lonely woman. He visited her immediately after she found out, via telegram, that her husband had been killed, and spent a night of sad sex with her. By the following day Dorothy had left the island, leaving a short note of forgiveness and the confused Hermie with many unanswered questions.

However, the event which forced Herman Raucher to relive that bitter-sweet summer was the tragic death of Sergeant Oscar Oscy Seltzer, who was killed whilst being a medic offering help on the battlefield during the Korean War. As it happened on 13th April 1952, on Raucher's 24th birthday, he retracted from ever celebrating again – irrespective that he had ever been close intellectually with his distinctly out-spoken friend. The two lightly linked, but emotionally devastating events compelled him to write a script during the 1950s, in a period which he intensively worked on television and put it away in a drawer. He felt that he had an important and great piece of work which could be left too easily to a routine television production.

One real opportunity for the realisation of the script arose in the 1960s, after he befriended the director Robert Mulligan (1925-2008), who in 1962 had completed To Kill A Mockingbird. This famous film came from the same named Pulitzer Prize winning novel by writer Harper Lee. The novel, which in the United States is considered the most influential literary work after the Bible, is about the trial of a black man accused of raping a white woman, and is set in the time after the Great Depression of the 1930s. The author incredibly aptly writes about growing up in Alabama, her friendship with the equally young Truman Capote (In Cold Blood, Breakfast At Tiffany's), a brave and incorruptible lawyer father, and the horrifying hypocrisy of the adult world. The film is commonly cited as the best American courtroom drama, and as one of the best 25 American of all time. It won three Oscars: for best male role – Gregory Peck, for adapted screenplay, and for its overall artistic design.

Mulligan's success with serious and provocative themes was crucial for the realisation of Summer of '42. After some time, he managed to persuade the heads of the Warner Brothers that he could, for only one million dollars, make a film which would repeat the artistic success of To Kill A Mockingbird. As the managers were sceptical of the commercial viability of the film without a big name star, they offered Raucher 10% of the film's earnings, in place of a fixed amount. Believing in his own script and Mulligan's ability that he could adequately visualize the film, Raucher readily accepted the offer.

The main problem, during preparation for filming, was finding an appropriate actress for the role of Dorothy. The studio insisted on an older woman of thirty years old, however the agent was able to convince them that the well-known 22 year old model and actress Jennifer O'Neill, would be the right person with her combination of beauty, freshness, tenderness, all-American similarities, but also because of her age. Producer Richard A. Roth agreed along with the request from the model that the bedroom scene would be filmed without explicit nudity.

The film was shot in eight weeks, in various locations on the West Coast, because the island of Nantucket had been devastated. The director however insisted that Jennifer O'Neill was kept separately from the rest of the crew – especially from the three young actors - so that she would keep a convincing distance and an elusive mystery about her on the silver screen. As soon as the filming had finished, the producer Roth became really worried for the film's returns – and he found a simple, almost ingenious solution. He insisted that Raucher, very quickly, wrote a novel based on his script - with the film already made! And so in only three weeks a great American novel was created. A masterpiece born out of fear and greed!

Raucher's novel, which glides over bumps like its expensive Mercedes, became a great success and in the following years and was published 23 times, selling more than 2.5 million copies! Roth the producer used this opportunity to announce that the film was made from the national bestseller – which was a complete lie, however marketing anyway often relies on twisting the facts!

Thanks to the great acceptance of the novel the film also caused great interest and become the fourth most successful project of 1971, earning 25 million dollars. As it earned as much in the following years Raucher, with his 10% earnings became, unexpectedly, a very rich writer! Considerable critical acclaim followed, and so the film was nominated for a Golden Globe in the category of Drama and Best Director, and for an Oscar for the Best Original Screenplay. As already mentioned it received an Oscar for the Best Musical Score.

The Croatian edition of the novel was published by the Zora publishing house in Zagreb in 1974. The translation was – and still is! – irritating, unconvincing and superficial, as though it was made over a weekend. The translator, whose name is completely irrelevant, underestimated the education, reading and emotionality of the author.

In the text which deals with the American-Jewish, Europeanized, East Coast elite she persistently translates car to kola (wagon). Raucher wrote: ... The luxurious car turned the bumps into cotton..., she translated this to: ...raskošna su kola glatko zaobilazila okuke... and should have been translated to: ...luksuzni je automobil glatko klizio preko brojnih neravnina...; Raucher wrote: A house, cedar shingled..”, she translates into: ...kuća pokrivena cedrovinom... and should be: ...kuća pokrivena cedrovom šindrom...; he wrote ...grey-green sea..., she translated: ...sivoplavo more... and should be: sivo-zeleno more; he wrote: ...and the ocean rolled around in oil-painted chunks like seascapes in Boston museums; she translates as: a ocean se valjao u uljem obojenim valovima kao na krajolicima u bostonskom muzeju and should be: ...ocean se teško valjao kao na uljanim slikama u bostonskim muzejima...; he wrote: ... a magnificent example of man-made self-delussion..., she translated to: ...veličanstven primjer ljudske samoobrane… and should have been: ...veličanstven primjer ljudske samoobmane... etc., along with a never-ending series of clumsy, stylistic, unconvincing and sometimes nonsensical sentence structures.

So due to the slackness of the editor and the translator I went through the text in detail, because no author deserves such an underestimated treatment as Raucher has experienced with this outdated and only Croatian edition of his masterpiece.

Raucher's style is a direct result of his work in television, because he had to bring to perfection the lucidity of the spoken word, without forgetting the ironic detachment which attracts the intelligent viewers. Back in 1960 Herman Raucher married Mary Kathryn Martinet, a Broadway dancer. With her he had two daughters, and their marriage lasted until her death in 2002. He wrote the novel There Should Have Been Castles (or the little more laid-back - Almost A Fairytale) about their early days together. The book was a great success in the United States, as well as in Italy and Poland. Unconnected with this, due to Raucher's argument with a publisher, it went out of print. During the 80s he succeeded to sell the film rights for 250,000 dollars. The company left him the money, although the film was never made.

The third of his great successes was Ode to Billy Joe, with the screenplay and novel being commissioned by Warner Brothers in 1976. It was based on the excellent song by country singer Bobbie Gentry from 1967. In preparation to start writing he met the singer, but she would not explain the suicide in the song. She replied that she had no idea why Billie Joe jumped from the Tallahatchie Bridge, in the Mississippi delta, because her song deals primarily with the family's conversation at the table during dinner.

In the novel Raucher writes of the humid clamminess of the South, covered in dust, fields of cotton and the strong emotions wrecked by a drunken homosexual experience of the 18 year old Billy Joe and his inability to cope with it.

The film repeated the commercial of Summer of '42, made for a million and bringing in 27 million from ticket sales when it was shown in cinemas, and another 10 in the following several years, but anyway it is about something unconvincingly realised.

However let us return to the problem with the translations in Summer of '42.

“There was a sixth photograph of Penny Singleton in Hermie's possession, but he kept it in a drawer because it had been rather clumsily retouched by Hermie, who was no Norman Rockwell.” (p. 12) There are no notes with the text that Rockwell was one of the greatest American illustrators who had visualized the American ideals of that period. There were also no notes alongside the name Walter Winchell (p. 22) who was an extremely influential radio reporter and who shaped the attitudes and spirit of America at that time. By mentioning the large number of names of actors, musicians and sportsmen close to the Americans, Raucher revives the 40s, and the translator passes leisurely over the important people, as well as the famous aeroplanes and cars. The losers are the Croatian readers who are left without the minimal information needed for a true understanding of the text.

Here are several more characteristic problems with the translation, which actually call for a new translation and edition with the necessary notes about the author, the people who are mentioned, about the film and the destiny of the actors.

“The sun was high and happy when Hermie came out through the screen door on the front porch.” (p. 14). Translated to: “Sunce je bilo visoko i ugodno kad je Hermie izašao kroz rešetkasta vrata u prednji trijem.” (p. 16) It would be better as: “Sunce je bilo visoko i optimistično kad je Hermie izašao kroz mrežasta vrata na prednji trijem.”

“Hermie's comment came from somewhere out of left field, surprising even himself.” (p. 19). Translated to: “Hermieva izjava stiže odnekud iz lijevog polja, iznenadivši i njega samog.” Pointless, literally: left field – the space between the second and third base in baseball, the meaning of the phrase is: iz prostora neuračunljivosti, ludila. So in translation: “Hermijeva opaska došla je iz prostora smanjene uračunljivosti, iznenadivši čak i njega.”

“...Like Peter Pain in the Ben-Gay ads...” (p. 24) translated as: “Peter Pan u oglasima Bena Gaya...” (p. 23) – in reality: Peter Pain – Bolni Petar, a character from the adverts for painkillers from the Ben-Gay company.

“And later, as he was tilling his meager Victory garden...” (p. 27) Translated as: “A kasnije, kad je obrađivao svoj mršavi viktorijanski vrt...” (p. 25) Should be translated: “A kasnije, kad je obrađivao svoj skromni vrt Pobjede...” - namely, Victory garden is a garden which was created for the needs of war, and so for victory in war, because it provided additional food in tough times!

“And each panel revealed another angle of Sheena's throbbing topography...” (p. 28) Translated as: “I svaka je slika otkrivala drugi pogled na Sheenen uzbudljivi tlocrt.” (p. 26) Should be: “I svaka je slika otkrivala drugi pogled na Sheenene uzbudljive obline.”

“And there was a tiger who looked as horny as a rhinoceros.” (p. 28)

Translated as: “Bio je tu i tigar koji je izgledao tako rožnat kao nosorog.” (p. 26) Should be: “A bio je tu i tigar koji je izgledao jednako seksualno uzbuđen (napaljen) kao i nosorog.”

“For a McGregor shirt, you fight. But for Fruit of the Loom, which was the case, the hell with it.” (p. 44) Translated: “Za McGregor košulju bi se borio. Ali za plod tkalačkog stana, kao što je taj, do đavola s njom.” (p. 37) Should be: “Za McGregor košulju se boriš. Ali za Fruit of the Loom, kao što je sada bio slučaj, do vraga s njom.” The original text is referring to two brands of clothing.

“Less than fifteen yards up the beach, Oscy reversed gears and returned, not choking. Benjie, the pilot fish, returned with his master.” (p. 44) Translated as: “Manje od petnaest jardi uz obalu, Oscy se okrene i vrati ne gušeći se. Benji, kao riba pilot, vrati se sa svojim gospodarom.” (p. 37) Should be: “Manje od petnaest jardi dalje na plaži, Oscy je promijenio smjer i vratio se, dišući normalno. Benji, vjerni pratitelj, vratio se sa svojim gospodarom.”

“Hermie sprang on his feet, and there was blood on the moon.” (p. 50)

Translated as: “Hermie skoči na noge, i bilo je krvi na mjesecu.” (p. 42) Should be: “Hermie je skočio na noge, i započeo je Sudnji dan.”

“She wasn't really taller. Actually they were about the same height. It was her stateliness that made her seem so far above him.” (p. 67) Translated as: “Ona stvarno nije bila viša od njega. Zapravo su bili otprilike iste visine. Zbog otmjenosti se činilo da je daleko iznad njega.” (p. 53) Should be: “Ona nije bila zaista viša. U stvari, bili su gotovo iste visine. Njena savršena vitkost činila ju je višom.”

And so it says on the cover of the 1978 edition: “In everyone's life there is a Summer of '42, and: “The warmest, funniest, saddest, truest book you will read for a long time. It is perfect.” The adverts can, admittedly, be exceptionally close to the truth!

Unfortunately for the translation to be closer to the original a little more time would be needed and then this novel, a modest and witty masterpiece, would shine with an authentic brilliance in the Croatian language!

 

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