How strong is the beating of the bird's heart? 'The Little Prince'
(Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese)

What is the heartbeat of a dying bird like, particularly after the traumatic experience of being shot? This is not something most people would give much thought to. Even reading Saint-Exupéry's sentence:

Je sentais battre son cœur comme celui d'un oiseau qui meurt, quand on l'a tiré à la carabine.
"I felt his heart beating, like the heart of a dying bird, shot with someone's rifle...",

one is first taken by the startling simile, the helplessness of the little prince as he clings to the aviator, and the foreboding of death in these words. One could be forgiven for not considering exactly how the heart might be beating.

But translators often give thought to details that don't occur to ordinary readers. Of course, it's possible to leave it to the reader to imagine what the heartbeat was like. But some translators feel compelled to embellish the sentence by adding a description of the little prince's heartbeat.

Unfortunately, this runs to two quite distinct possibilities:

• The heart of the terrified bird is palpitating wildly in a state of shock and fear.
• The bird's strength is ebbing away and its heartbeat is becoming fainter and fainter.

Looking at the translations from the three languages:

Chinese: Of the 51 Chinese translations I have (I exclude the plagiaristic Liú 2004 and those for which I don't have a full version), 33 make no explicit reference to the strength of the heartbeat. That leaves eighteen who do. That's about one third of the total.

Of these, seven indicate that the heartbeat was weak while eleven indicate that it was powerful.

Japanese: There are fifteen Japanese translations (we exclude Shinsan 2005 as an 'adaptation'), of which four use どきどき dokidoki meaning 'beat strongly, thump'. In addition, seven of the Japanese translators use the words 鼓動 kodō (5) or 動悸 dōki (2), both of which suggest a very strong beating or palpitation. That leaves only four who use a fairly neutral (心臓が)打つ (shinzō ga) utsu or みゃく打つ myaku utsu. No Japanese translators suggest a faint pulse.

It is interesting that the adapter, Shinsan, embellishes this further by using the expression ラストスパートしています rasutosupāto shite imasu, which means 'putting on a last spurt'. This suggests both a violent effort and the certainty that this is all that the heart is capable of. It is typical of the rather arbitrary way in which Shinsan touches up the story.

Vietnamese: Of the five Vietnamese translations, one uses the word hổn hển meaning 'out of breath' or 'panting'. This is, I think, closer to the 'beating strongly' interpretation (although the idea of being out of breath could mean a flagging heartbeat).

In all, 23 translators suggest a wild or powerful beating of the heart. Seven suggest a faint or weak heartbeat.

There is no correlation with the origin of the translation, i.e., the French original or Woods' English version.

The moral? The moral, if there is one, is that translators should be careful about trying to bring their material alive with embellishments or explanations unless they are quite sure what the original means. In the end it probably doesn't matter whether the heartbeat was weak or violent; the simile is a powerful one whichever interpretation is adopted. But perhaps we should think twice about what we read in translation. The translator could be touching it up.

The following table shows the use of words meaning 'weakly' or 'violently' in the translations that I have.