Françoise Sagan // That Mad Ache

 

Translation and foreword by Douglas HOFSTADTER

One volume (11 x 8.66 in): 137 pp. of text followed by a 49-page text called a foreword but placed after the novel, separately paginated.

Rare preliminary printing of Douglas Hofstadter’s English translation of La Chamade, four years prior to its American publication.

Autograph inscription signed by the translator, accompanied by a small ink drawing, on the inside front cover: “From one strange loop to another – Doug to Willis – 31 March MMVI”.

Françoise Sagan’s novel, published by Julliard in 1965, had already appeared in the United States in 1966 (E.P. Dutton & Co.) under its French title, in a translation by Robert Westhoff, the author’s second husband.

This new translation of La Chamade, which has become the standard one, bears witness to the new translator’s interest in languages and in the difficulties of literary translation.

Douglas Hofstadter (b. 1945), a cognitive scientist trained in mathematics and physics, became known through Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1980.

This new translation was to be published in 2009 by Basic Books, in an unusual layout: a tête-bêche (flip) volume with Sagan’s novel on one side and, on the other, an essay by its translator, Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation, each with its own cover and its own reading direction.

The present volume, dated 2005, already contains the whole of this translation as well as the text of this essay, placed after the novel under its original title, The Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation.

This spiral-bound printing, probably privately produced, thus represents a state earlier than the commercial edition of 2009, whose two essential components it already brings together, though in a different layout and pagination.

The wording of the inscription, “from one strange loop to another”, makes a playful but direct reference to one of Hofstadter’s best-known concepts: the strange loop, a self-referential structure in which moving from one level to another paradoxically leads back to the starting point. This idea, which became central to his thinking on consciousness and identity, would become the subject of an entire book, I Am a Strange Loop, published in 2007.

The recipient is probably the poet and translator Willis Barnstone, Hofstadter’s colleague at Indiana University, Bloomington. Hofstadter quotes Barnstone’s The Poetics of Translation (1993) in “Analogy as the Core of Cognition” (2001), and in Le Ton beau de Marot (1997) he gave a section a title that is an anagram of his name, “Will I Bar Sonnets”.

Rare printing, probably distributed in a very small number of copies.

Light foxing to the text block edges and a few small spots to the cover; very good condition overall.