EVERY WRITER HAS THEIR FAVORITE WORDS. As a translator, you get to know them intimately. One of de Jong’s is koortsachtig—feverish, frenetic. We feel that feverishness in Erica’s caprices, her impulsivity, her tendency toward self-destruction. We see it in Bea’s unwavering—and at times unfathomable—tolerance of Erica’s behavior, her irrepressible urge to keep Erica close, and her inner battle against her own desires. Shortly after I started working on this translation, I gave the Dutch version to a my father-in-law to read. The next day he emailed me: “I read it in one breath.” In an effort to preserve the pace and the vivacity of the original, this feverishness entered my translation as well.
Dola de Jong was born Dorothea Rosalie de Jong in 1911 in Arnhem, The Netherlands, to a wealthy Jewish father and a German mother, who died when de Jong was five. As a young woman, she aspired to become a ballet dancer, but her conservative father viewed ballet as “one step away from prostitution,” as she told Het Parool in a 1982 interview. Her father wanted to send her to a finishing school in Lausanne, “but I was a rebel,” she said, “I always have been.” She took a job at a local news paper and eventually moved to Amsterdam in the early 1930s where she worked as a freelance journalist and secretary. While many around her were in denial of the growing threat to the east, de Jong was quick to realize that the Netherlands was no longer safe for Jewish people. She fled the country for Tangier in April 1940, weeks before the Nazis invaded Holland. There, she married her first husband (whom she would later divorce) and started a ballet school for children. It was the father of one of her students who helped the young couple obtain the necessary papers to move to America. They settled in New York City, where de Jong would live for most of her life. Her father, stepmother, and brother stayed behind the Netherlands and did not survive the war.
The Tree and the Vine was first published in Amsterdam in 1954 as De Thuiswacht—literally The Homewait. De Jong had been living in New York City for more than a decade by then and had published numerous children’s books and one critically acclaimed novel, And the Field is the World (En de akker is de wereld), which had been acquired by legendary Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins. As Eva Cossee notes, when she submitted the manuscript of her second novel to her Dutch publisher, it was immediately declared “shameless” and “unpublishable.” With the help of endorsements from prominent friends, among them her then retired editor Perkins and fellow writers in exile Leo Vroman and Marnix Gijsen, the novel found its way to publication and was met with acclaim. Gijsen called it “an important and remarkable book—and not because it addresses a delicate problem with so much understanding, that’s just the starting point. I’m more in awe of the finesse with which Dola de Jong sketches her two main characters.” The first English translation wouldn’t come out until 1961. Decades later de Jong still referred to it as “my favorite book.”
I don’t know whether de Jong was involved in the first translation of The Tree and the Vine. If she were alive today—she died in California in 2003 at the age of 92—I have a feeling that she would have had plenty to say about this new English translation. In her correspondence with editor Angèle Manteau—which is now housed in the Special Collections department of the Royal Library of the Netherlands in The Hague—de Jong often mentions the tension she feels between her first language and the language in which she has become the most at home, English. “I can still write a letter [in Dutch],” she wrote in 1982, “but as soon as I want to take the conversation a bit deeper, it all goes south. My Dutch is so dotted with English that it hardly seems like Dutch anymore.”
While it’s possible that de Jong’s command of her first language deteriorated over time, the influence of other languages on her Dutch is present even in The Tree and the Vine, which she wrote in her early forties. It is one of the things that makes her style idiosyncratic and gives it the feeling of being particular to the Netherlands of the 30s and also belonging to something broader. The text is peppered with anglicisms, which tend to disappear into the English translation, as well as French words and expressions (most likely vestiges of her upper-class background and time in French-speaking Morocco) that I tried to preserve. On the one hand, this display of linguistic versatility could be regarded as the work of an old bluestocking—an insult de Jong introduced me to in Chapter 5; on the other, it could also be a strategy to keep the text intentionally ambiguous. In Chapter 10, for example, Bea admits that, like Judy and Dolly—two of Erica’s lovers, though never named as such—she too had been the focus of Erica’s attention once, “albeit with less preponderance,” a word presumably borrowed from the French prépondérance. It’s a deliberate word choice, if a bit unclear in the Dutch, and one that had been translated out of previous editions. My editors, Adam and Ashley Levy, and I discussed it at length. What exactly does she mean here? Is Bea suggesting that she is less important than the other women in Erica’s life or is she referring to Erica’s level of absorption with her? Absorption was, incidentally, the word used in the 1961 translation. Maybe we aren’t meant to know. We decided to let the ambiguity speak for itself.
In one of her letters to Manteau, de Jong writes, “The trouble with the translation is that I don’t know the Dutch slang anymore. You have to find the equivalents for the American expressions, you can’t just translate them literally.” She’s right, of course, but while working on this book, I found that there were a few cases where a word-for-word translation of a Dutch expression actually presented new lexical possibilities in English. For example, in Chapter 3 when Bea says that Erica was someone who “when she gave you a finger, you wanted a whole hand,” she is using a variation of a commonplace Dutch expression, “als je haar één vinger geeft, neemt zij de hele hand.” Initially, I tried to translate it with a variation of what de Jong might have considered an English equivalent, for example “when she gave you an inch, you wanted a mile,” but it felt off, overly American, and unnecessarily cliché. Or consider the scene in Chapter 5, when Erica describes Judy as “no housecat.” Here, the Dutch expression she uses is “niet voor de poes,” literally “not for the cat,” meaning that she was not to be underestimated, that she could hold her own. I like the way referring to Judy as “no housecat” highlights the contrast between the rule-breaking American divorcée and the two country housewives in the restaurant and draws attention to the domestic expectations for women at the time. In both cases, hewing closer to the Dutch yields a more interesting image and better captures the spirit of the original.
It’s easy to look at this story through the lens of war or to see it as a lesbian romance that could never be because of the restrictions of the time. But as I got to know Erica and Bea better, I came to see their restlessness, struggles, doubts, and hesitations as reflective of a broader female experience. The Tree and the Vine is one of the richest texts I’ve had the pleasure of translating and one that will stay with me. It is my hope that, with this new translation, the story of Bea and Erica will move readers as it has moved me, that it will push them to think about their own inner worlds and those of the women they love.