Courrier Sud / Southern Mail / Postilento etelään, by Antoine de St-Exupéry

Courrier Sud was St-Exupéry's first novel. It's known in English as Southern Mail, and sometimes published together with his next book Vol de Nuit / Night Flight, both books being quite short. A few years ago it received a translation into Finnish, as Postilento etelään.

The story tells of a French mailplane pilot who on a return visit to Paris, meets up with a childhood friend he has always loved, just as her marriage falls apart when her child dies. He tries to take her away from an urban world and a husband now inimical to her, but away to his own world, which is even more alien; before they ever get there she falls ill and the dream is seen for what it is, an impossible one. The central narrative is topped and tailed by the circumstantial scenes of resting and flying in the harsh environment of the Sahara.

Short though the book is, I've been saving it up since finding, with great surprise and delight at the time, this Finnish translation. Who would have thought Finns would bother with a book such as this? I'd like to think it was a labour of love, because although St-Exupéry is not so well known nowadays, he is still well regarded by some - yes, including me - especially thanks to his children's book Le Petit Prince / The Little Prince, which has been translated into countless languages.

I read them together, all three books. It seemed like an ideal project for a June 2020 spent under coronavirus restrictions. Initially, I did it virtually as a parallel read, chapter by chapter. However, after the first part, I realised a feel for the story was as or even more important than what was becoming a very technical translation exercise, in particular with Postilento etelään, so I continued with Southern Mail and then carried on with Courrier Sud. I kept the English text next to me while reading the original; and in June both of those accompanied my painstaking reading of the Finnish translation. Though the most important nearby volume has been as you may imagine my large Finnish dictionary.

The question is, have I read three different books, or three versions of the same book? This relates to the well known doubt about how much is lost in translation. Personally, while I have read foreign literature in translation, I have never really felt I was appreciating the original to its fullest extent. I admire people who produce beautiful language as much as I admire great storytellers, so while I can enjoy the work of the latter, the quality of the former may be only dimly seen. That's okay. There are some excellent translators whose writing is very much on a level with the original. Anyway, who am I to say? I should be able to judge the quality of writing in English, on the basis of a degree in it, but as for other languages, I have *cough* lesser qualifications in French, Italian, and none at all in Finnish, apart from attendance at suomikoulu (Finnish School) for many years.

Let's see.

Courrier Sud is fiction, but it heavily reflects St-Exupéry and his world. The viewpoint veers between that of the protagonist, Jacques Bernis, and the unnamed narrator who is equivalent to St-Exupéry himself. They are both pilots, working on the long and dangerous route between France and South America, back in the 1920s. They were pioneering these routes, desperate to prove their practicality, and there was great pressure to carry on in the face of all the difficulties. Its environmental and meterological conditions, across endless desert as well as open ocean and the Andes, feature in all his books, especially the Sahara. It's this which draws readers; and it's not just a matter of his description of these scenes, but the vivid way he expresses his humility in the face of nature at the same time as his extraordinary sense of humanity, its nobility and its fragility. If Courrier Sud was only a narrative, it wouldn't amount to much. But St-Exupéry's humane and poetic sensibility evokes moving truths, about people in general, and about his own troubled soul. So his language is crucial, hence the challenge posed to any translator of his writing.

One striking aspect relates to the technology. Most contemporary accounts of aviation emphasise its glamorous modernity, but when St-Exupéry's aviators engage with their aircraft, it's all about the roughly used nuts and bolts, the sheet metal, the oil, the radiators and so on. They're merely working machines. He never names the planes or seems especially interested in the technological side of things. In fact, I've read that he wasn't a particularly skilled pilot. But he vividly renders what flying was like, from the joys of being up in the air, seeing the beauty of the heavens close up, as well as the terrors of what raw nature could do to the flimsy aircraft of the time.

In Courrier Sud, the author presents a contrast between the distant world of the African air routes, and an estate in rural France. Here, the expected picture of civilisation is not at all to do with progress (even the scenes in Paris don't reflect that) but with timeless tradition. It's here that Bernis and the narrator were boys, and knew Geneviève the daughter of the house. It seems they were welcome and familiar visitors, but usually chose to sneak in over a hedge, past a neglected shadowy water tank... The figures are often just blurred details in an old photograph; St-Exupéry's style consists of light playing over surfaces, tactile sensations, small sounds and movements. It's extraordinarily immediate.

There's only one English translation as far as I'm aware, by Curtis Cate in 1971. He's a respected biographer of St-Exupéry. I have to be grateful, because I'm not sure I could have read the French without having Cate's Southern Mail to hand; but I feel a better translation is begging to be done. Cate's feels dated, right down to coyness in translating swear words. That doesn't matter. But I had some difficulty with Cate's tendency to 'know better', to extemporise a bit if he felt the original was insufficiently clear. He invented new stuff a little too often for my liking, as I sometimes found checking back with the French when I was reading Pertti Jokinen's 2017 Finnish translation. Jokinen had a habit of missing out phrases here and there, I guess he felt they were redundant, but sometimes I found he was closer to the French than Cate.

One has to be cautious, in commenting on the translators' ways with words. In the end, how do I know? The poetic element may be important, but is my own sense of the sound of words in each language good enough? I will soon check this out with Finns I know, with the proviso that they are unlikely to be acquainted with St-Exupéry's French. Just for the sake of giving any sort of example, look at these versions of the same sentence.

• Ce petit poste au clair de lune: un port aux eaux tranquilles.
• This little outpost under the moonlight is like a smoothwater port.
• Tämä kuun valaisema vähäinen vartiolinnake on kuin makean veden satama.

I like the sound of the Finnish sentence in particular. Whether or not you understand Finnish, you can see the deliberate alliteration. Pertti Jokinen employs it a lot, often when St-Exupéry doesn't, I think because even if it's not the same effect, he is still reflecting the heightened poetic style of the original. Right down to sequences of short, clipped sentences - not something I'm used to seeing in Finnish(!). Unfortunately for me and my vocabulary resources, his deliberate crafting of his words has led him to seek out words which don't often see the light of day. And I've travelled to recesses of my Finnish grammar I've never walked in before.
Oh well.
Each writer aimed to render the idyllic peacefulness of the scene, and succeeded. The only word I raised an eyebrow for was smoothwater: a better word would have been freshwater, but I guess Cate wanted the moo in smooth, to resonate with moo in moonlight. In contrast, makean veden does more properly translate as freshwater, though makea by itself rather nicely means sweet.

You've heard enough...? I feel I could have opened Postilento etelään anywhere and found other examples of mellifluous writing, but I admit I often feel this way about the sound of Finnish. And it helps to have the writing of St-Exupéry in the first place. Courrier Sud? Sentimental, melancholic, low on drama it may be, with a tragic ending, but along the way its poetry and humane sensibility give power to the painful life experiences contained in the story, and the author's love of nature both in the cultivated countryside and in the raw wilderness.