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Amy S. Wyngaard TRANSLATING SADE

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Amy S. Wyngaard TRANSLATING SADE Translating Sade Amy S. Wyngaard TRANSLATING SADE: THE GROVE PRESS EDITIONS, 1953–1968 n the last paragraph of their foreword to the 1965 Grove Press edition of IThe Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, the translators Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse quote the marquis de Sade’s wish, expressed in his last will and testament, that acorns be scattered over his grave, “in order that, the spot become green again, and the copse grown back thick over it, the traces of my grave may disappear from the face of the earth, as I trust the memory of me shall fade out of the minds of men” (xiv). Seaver and Wainhouse, who believed in the importance of Sade’s writings and were deeply invested in their efforts to produce the frst unexpurgated American translations of his works, express doubt that this prophecy would ever come to pass. The success of the Grove Press translations, however, has in fact caused certain aspects of Sade’s (critical) history to be forgotten. Five decades after their original publication in the 1960s, and two decades after their reissue in the early 1990s, these once-controversial editions of Sade’s works can now be considered mainstream. Widely referenced and readily available, they are more or less an accepted part of the American literary landscape, with only their original prefatory materials left to bear witness to what was one of the most fraught and revolutionary moments in the history of American publishing, not to mention Sade studies. Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset saw the publication of Sade’s works as integral to his fght for the freedom of the press. After Rosset bought Grove in 1951, he systematically set out to challenge obscenity laws and battle censorship. The press is perhaps best known for its publication of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1959) and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1961). Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned from the mails; Tropic of Cancer was prosecuted as obscene in over sixty court battles from 1961 to 1964 (McCord vii–x). The lawyer Charles Rembar successfully defended the press’s right to publish and circulate the works according to the defnition of obscenity at the time, established in a 1957 Supreme Court decision known as the Roth opinions, as material appealing to prurient interest that was “utterly without redeeming social importance”; Rembar transformed this into the so-called social-value test, guided by the belief that “importance” imposed The Romanic Review Volume 104 Numbers 3–4 © The Trustees of Columbia University 314 Amy S. Wyngaard a higher standard than “value.”1 In 1958 the Parisian publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert won a similar, if mitigated, victory in French courts, which allowed his editions of Sade’s works—the frst complete, modern versions of the author’s texts—to continue to circulate in France.2 In producing translations of Sade, Rosset sought to capitalize on these victories and break new ground. In all, the press published fve volumes of writings and criticism pertaining to Sade: The Marquis de Sade: An Essay by Simone de Beauvoir with Selections from His Writings Chosen by Paul Dinnage (1953); Gilbert Lély’s The Marquis de Sade, A Defnitive Biography (trans. Alec Brown, 1962); The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings (trans. Seaver and Wainhouse, 1965); The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings (trans. Seaver and Wainhouse, 1966); and Juliette (trans. Wainhouse, 1968). That these editions were not subject to censorship is a testimony to the careful planning and positioning executed by Rosset and the translators—the success of which would prove to be a bit of a letdown for the men, who had anticipated a battle.3 The story of the Grove Press translations of Sade, contained in the Grove Press records and the Austryn Wainhouse papers housed in the Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse University Library, reveals the editorial strategies and the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that enabled these texts to be published and to circulate—and which recall those used by authors, printers, and booksellers in Sade’s eighteenth-century France.4 It provides a compelling 1. The Roth opinions involved two separate cases brought before the Supreme Court concerning the bookseller Samuel Roth and the mail-order businessman David Alberts: Roth had been convicted of mailing obscene circulars and an obscene book; Alberts had been convicted of selling obscene books and publishing obscene advertising for his products. See Glass 101–17; and Kendrick 209–11; see also Rembar 45–58, 453–68. 2. Although Pauvert was initially convicted in 1957 of crimes against morality for the publication of La Philosophie dans le boudoir, La Nouvelle Justine, L’Histoire de Juliette, and Les 120 Journées de Sodome, in 1958 his sentence was annulled and his conviction partially overturned. See Bridge 16–28; Ladenson 229–31; and Shattuck 245. See also Pauvert. 3. See, for example, the letter from Richard Seaver to Austryn Wainhouse, 2 July 1965: “It would be convenient, I agree, for there to be a little scandal, that is a little censorship.” See also the letter from Seaver to Wainhouse, 20 August 1965: “I am as astonished as you at the silence of the censors to date. You are probably right: part of the reason is the fact that the sale of the book has been somewhat disappointing” (Grove Press records, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library). Rembar asserts that the lack of government interference in the Grove Press Sade translations stemmed from the 1966 Supreme Court reversal of a Massachusetts court decision suppressing John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, another case he defended (488). 4. I refer here to the various methods (false publication dates and addresses on books; payment of censors; smuggling and clandestine sales) employed in an attempt to evade Translating Sade 315 snapshot of the state of American mores in the 1950s and 1960s, and how Rosset and his translators were able to capitalize on (and contribute to) a shifting cultural climate in order to evolve notions of obscenity, morality, and literary value. Further, it illuminates a key moment of literary and intellectual exchange between France and the United States, when French authors such as Sade played a major role in changing the face of American publishing in the 1960s and, in turn, when American publishing helped solidify the canonization of French authors.5 Grove Press’s publication of Sade’s writings must be included as a capital moment in the author’s critical rehabilitation— begun by the avant-garde in the early 1900s and taken up at various points throughout the twentieth century—that led to the publication of his works in the French canon of canons, the publisher Gallimard’s Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (1990–98).6 In the pages that follow, I reconstruct this story as well as the publishing trajectory it set in motion—one that ultimately affrms and extends Walter Kendrick’s and Lynn Hunt’s assertions about the political and cultural import of pornography as “an argument, not a thing” whose evolving constitution and defnition refect the articulation and progress of democratic rights and ideals, whether in eighteenth-century France or in civil rights–era America (Kendrick 31; Hunt 11–13, 42–45). Preparing the Terrain Grove’s publication of Sade’s texts was precipitated by the renewal of interest in the author in 1950s France, which followed Pauvert’s publication of Sade’s complete works beginning in 1947. In “The Vogue of the Marquis de Sade,” which appeared in the October 18, 1952, edition of the New Yorker, Edmund Wilson praised the recent critical turn in Sade studies—away from “the bias of the Sade cult”—represented by works such as Simone de Beauvoir’s 1951–52 essay, “Faut-il brûler Sade?” (163). Wilson called Beauvoir’s essay “perhaps the very best thing that has yet been written on the subject” and noted that it seemed to usher in “a new era in the study of Sade” (176). The essay was a seminal one for Rosset and the press, providing both the critical impetus and rhetoric needed to pursue their risky translation project. Rosset began the censorship and seizure of objectionable literature in eighteenth-century France. For a discussion of these methods, see Darnton; and Darnton and Roche. 5. While a handful of scholars have published partial studies of the Grove Press Sade translations, to date no one has completed a detailed analysis. See, for example, Glass 132–38; Shattuck 245, 290–93; and Steintrager 354–61. My focus here is an analysis less of the translations themselves than of their publication histories. 6. For discussions of Sade’s critical rehabilitation, see Bridge, esp. 172–253; Delon xliii–l; Marty; and Shattuck 236–56. 316 Amy S. Wyngaard to seek out works “which [merit] publication in this country” by soliciting the opinions of American university professors on Sade as well as other controversial French authors such as Diderot.7 It was at this time that Rosset also honed in on a parallel project to translate the works of Jean Genet, in which the press deployed many of the same strategies it used in publishing Sade; the appearance (without legal incident) of the Grove translations of Genet’s homosexually explicit Our Lady of the Flowers (1963) and The Thief’s Journal (1964) undoubtedly smoothed the way for the publication of Sade’s hard-core works. In 1953 Rosset began preparing the terrain for Sade’s novels by publishing a translation of Beauvoir’s critical essay, which focused on Sade’s philosophical value, alongside what he termed “mild” selections from the author’s texts, a chronology, and a bibliography, compiled and translated by Paul Dinnage.
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