“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”
Nobody who has read J.D. Salinger’s masterpiece will ever forget the episode when, late at night, Holden Caufield decides to visit his sister and slips into the family’s apartment to avoid being seen by his parents. Fortunately, they were out and Holden has a long conversation with Phoebe, who soon discovers that he had been expelled from his prep school after failing in all courses with the exception of English. Thanks to the unfailing wisdom of ten-years-old girls, his sister accuses him of not liking anything, and after Holden with great difficulty is able to say that he liked Allie (a brother who had died years before) and to be “sitting with her just chewing the fat”, Phoebe forces him to tell what he would like to be.
The answer, reproduced above, is typical of the coloquial style used with so much dexterity by Salinger to characterize the sixteen-years-old boy but also sums up two of Holden’s main traits: his refusal to accept the lifestyle of adults (as represented by the outrageous choice of what he would do as a grown-up), and his loving nature (also seen in the book’s last paragraph when he says that he misses even the people who treated him badly). Quite understandable, therefore, that Salinger should take the title of his book from this moving passage.
Yes, quite understandable if you have read the whole book, but certainly very enigmatic for anyone seeing that title for the first time. To begin with, Holden’s mention of the “catcher in the rye” stems from a misunderstanding since that is what he remembers a little kid was singing on a Sunday morning while walking on the street, near the the curb, although cars zoomed by, brakes screeched and his parents paid no attention to the boy. However, the wise Phoebe promptly corrects him by explaining that it is a poem by Robert Burns which in fact says “if a body meet a body coming through the rye.” Not told by her, the lines that follow make clear the ribald nature of the song: “If a body kiss a a body / Need a body cry.” The fantasy created by Holden of an edenic garden where he would save children from the fall is thus destroyed in a single stroke.
If the title may have posed problems for English-speaking readers, imagine the pains faced by the translators of the book in several languages. My two friends and I, who translated it into the Portuguese spoken in Brazil (different versions were made in Portugal) struggled because, more than sixty years ago, a literal rendering of the title would make no sense at all. Catcher would be apanhador, an ugly word that in everyday usage refers to a person who retrieves the balls that fall outside the pitch. On the other hand, at that time the word centeio, Portuguese for rye, would only apply to a kind of bread bought by well-to-do people in delicatessens, and nobody in Brazil would have seen a rye field. Consequently, we thought that titling the book O apanhador no campo de centeio would be like giving a beautiful child a strange name.
After many failed attempts, we settled on A sentinela do abismo – The Sentinel of the Abyss –, which fully respected the context of the author’s choice. But our happiness was short-lived: Salinger’s agents sent a curt ultimatum to our editor: the title would have be translated literally or the sale of the translation rights would be terminated. Author’s strict orders. I vainly tried to explain in writing that a literal translation would make no sense in Portuguese and, taking advantage of a professional trip to New York, met with a very nice lady agent because it was impossible already to communicate directly with the hermit in the boondocks of New Hampshire. No luck, but at least I was informed that Salinger had gone ballistic when he learned about some of the versions of a title which undoubtedly had great emotional value to him.
So I decided to check. In German, Sweedish and Czech the titles are faithful to the original, but, based on four other versions, I fully agreed with the author.
In Italian, the anodynous Il Giovane Holden – The Young Holden – is just a lame way of circumventing the challenge posed by the author’s conception.
In Spanish, they came out with El cazador oculto – The Hidden Hunter –, simply because a field was mentioned and the grown-up Holden would have to remain unseen in order not to jeopardize the spontaneity of the children at play. But what an extraordinary lack of sensitivity on the part of the translator in failing to perceive how much the idea of hunting and death were antagonistic to the message that the title sought to convey!
In French we were offered L’attrape-coeurs, which would correspond to a grotesque The Heart-Catcher. When Racine’s language already has an attrape-mouches (fly catcher) and an attrape-nigaud (confidence trick), the French version tastes badly even if we could ignore its sticky sugar coating.
And at last the most remarkable of all by its absurdity, the version in the Portuguese spoken in Portugal: Uma agulha no palheiro – A Needle in a Haystack! By the way, this translation, published during Salazar’s dictatorial regime, provides a sad example of self-censorship. When Edgar Marsalla almost blows off the roof of the chapel where the students were obliged to hear a speech by the undertaker who had given “a pile of dough” to Pencey, his terrific fart is metamorphosed into a tremendo arroto – tremendous belch. And when Holden becomes furious at the sight of the bad words written on the walls of the school attended by his sister and the Musem of Natural History, the many “Fuck you” are transmuted into the pale equivalents of “go to hell.”
Nevertheless, with over 65 million copies sold in at least 30 languages, we have to admit that the titles – whether good, bad or merely puzzling – in no way prevented Holden from becoming one of the most famous literary characters of all times.
By Jorio Dauster