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Notes
The notes accompanying pages 1779-86 detailing Faulkner's Venezuelan trip in April 1961 appear on pages 213-214 of the Notes section of the second volume. Blotner cites "Charles Harner, American Embassy, Caracas, to Dept. of State, 27 Apr. 1961; Hugh Jencks, 'Report to the North American Association on the Visit of Mr. Faulkner'" as his sources for the description of events and the specific award ceremony. But he does not date the Jencks' report (it was May 10, 1961) and, as remarked below, he does not document the source of his quotation in English from the speech.
In the One-Volume Edition in 1984 of his more comprehensive Faulkner: A Biography Blotner condenses all reference to the speech in one sentence, without quotation: "After Faulkner read his short, graceful acceptance speech—in Spanish—he took from his buttonhole the prized rosette of the Legion of Honor and replaced it with that of the Order of Andrés Bello."
In a phone conversation I had with Joseph Blotner on 6/18/85 he very kindly confirmed that in October 1972 he had supplied Meriwether with a xerox copy of Muna Lee's two-page undated translation of Faulkner's Andrés Bello speech from the Spanish. He also quoted to me the following note Muna Lee had penned at the end of page 2 of her translation: "This is my attempted translation. It is wholly unauthorized: Mr. Faulkner never saw it. Perhaps Mrs. Faulkner and Mrs. Summers would be willing to go over it and give it his turn of phrase. If they would not be willing to do so, and disapprove its present form, please destroy it. M. L."
The reprint of the Spanish translation actually created some incorrect variations in punctuation, spelling, accent marks, and pronoun correspondence from the text as printed in El Universal; more seriously, it allowed to go unrestored almost half of the penultimate sentence apparently dropped by the American typesetter.
I am indebted to Victoria Fielden Johnson for graciously welcoming me on my visit to her in Cape Coral, Florida, from May 20-24, 1985, and for letting me inspect and acquire various documents, letters, manuscripts, and photographs relating to William Faulkner and his family which formerly had belonged to her parents, Mr. and Mrs. William Fielden.
The important differences between the Faulkner holograph original and the Lee translation from the Spanish may be illustrated by quotation from Miss Lee's opening sentence versus Faulkner's: "The artist, whether or not he wishes it, discovers with the passage of time that he has come to pursue a single path, a single objective, from which he cannot deviate." Some of the differences derive, of course, as much from the Spanish version as from the translator, although these deviations account for very few of the major distortions attributable to Muna Lee's rendition. One such difference does occur, however, in the following version of Miss Lee's second paragraph: "This undoubtedly is his immortality; it may be, the only immortality that will be granted him. Perhaps the very impulse which led him to that dedication was nothing more than the single desire to leave carved upon the portal of forgetfulness through which all of us must some day pass [emphasis added] the words 'He passed this way.'" The phrase in italics represents a transposition from singular to plural pronouns committed by the original translator from English into Spanish, not the reverse as is generally the case in carrying across the relatively literal Spanish translation into English. The final sentence in Miss Lee's version goes, ". . . striving to capture and thus fix for a moment on some pages the truth of man's hope amidst the complexities of his heart, have received here in Venezuela the accolade which says in essence: 'What he sought and found and tried to capture was Truth.'"
I wish to acknowledge my appreciation to Jill Faulkner Summers for allowing me to make public the Spanish and English texts of Faulkner's acceptance speech and all other items in my Faulkner collection in intervening scholarly publications which call attention to the multi-volume series, Faulkner: A Comprehensive Guide to the Brodsky Collection, edited by Louis Daniel Brodsky and Robert W. Hamblin, and in which subsequently they will appear.
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