You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘French’ category.
| MORNING OF INTOXICATION
O my Good! O my Beautiful! Dreadful fanfare where I never stumble! Magical rack! Hurray for the extraordinary work and the miraculous body, for the first time! It started amid the guffaws of children, it will end with them. This poison will stay in all our veins even when, the fanfare changing, we are returned to the old disharmony. O now we so worthy of these tortures! Let us receive fervently this superhuman promise made to our created bodies and souls: this promise, this madness! Elegance, science, violence! We have been promised that the tree of good and evil will be buried .in the shadows, tyrannical decencies deported, that we may bring in our most pure love. It began with some disgust and it will end — we being unable suddenly to seize this eternity — it will end in a riot of scents. Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerities of virgins! Horror of the faces and objects here, blessed be you through the memory of this vigil. It began with complete boorishness and now it ends with angels of fire and ice. Little vigil of drunkenness! Sacred if only for the mask with which you have gratified us. We extol you, method! We have not forgotten that yesterday you glorified our every age. We have faith in the poison. We know how to give all our life each day. This is the time of the ASSASSINS. CITY
I am an ephemeral and not too discontented citizen of a |
translated Robert Yates
[The following piece on the French poet René Char is based on the translator's Notes for his presentation at the Poetry Café Wednesday 26th May -- see Events and Meetings. S.H.]
René Char’s name can generate mixed reactions. He has a high reputation amongst the international avant-garde, and counted amongst his friends Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso and Martin Heidegger. Yet, he also has a reputation of being difficult. In some ways, Char is to blame for this. His poems often throw up strange phrases, and surreal images aimed at provoking imaginative leaps. He once said it was not possible for us to live without the unknown. He invites us to leap into the unknown to change our way of looking at things. Yet, he also believed in the healing power of beauty, and even in prose poems, displays a lyrical side that can have great simplicity as in this late poem of his, with a haiku-like delicacy.
TO A TREE-BROTHER WHOSE DAYS ARE NUMBERED
Small harp of the larches,
On a spur of moss and fertile rocks
— Edge of the forest where the clouds break —
Counterpoint of the void in which I believe.
René Char was in 1907 in the village l’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, in Province. The young René was an angry passionate young man. He lost his father early and sought solace from nature in the woods around his home. Tall and powerful — he later played rugby — he would punch tree trunks to let off steam… A local blacksmith took him on board. In the 1920s, Char attended a Lycée in Marseille to study business, but spent more time reading literature.
He read Paul Éluard’s poems and on meeting, they became friends. It was Éluard who introduced Char to the Surrealists. Though later to break amicably with them, Char is still often referred to as a Surrealist poet. It’s around this time he married his first wife, Georgette who was Jewish.
This was in the late nineteen twenties / early thirties when Fascism was on the rise. The Surrealists campaigned against them. Char briefly joined the Communist Party, but left them, being too much of an individualist. He also broke with the surrealists at about this time. His poems of the time reflect this, there is a sense passionate engagement with politics and life. Here is a typical poem from his from his first major collection Le Marteau sans Maitre / The Hammer without a Master:
WATERSHED
Let’s yield to blessings of happy oblivion
Unperturbed
Let’s flee with the dust from those things we clung to
Let’s abandon those watery facades we call our fate
With the dignity of leaves
At the moment they shed all precedent
For whatever window appears through our tears
What are you waiting for
You partisan hearts?
The words “partisan hearts” has a prophetic ring to it. When the Second World War broke out, Char was called up. When the Germans invaded, he escaped back to Province, only to find himself outlawed as a Communist on the grounds of being married to a Jew.
He joined the Resistance. Being familiar with the Provencal countryside, made him well equipped for waging guerrilla warfare. He became the regional commander there, known as Capitaine Alexandre. He had many adventures, often sheltered by peasant farmers, escaping death many times. His memories of this are recorded in a collection of prose pieces from his notebook at this time, published after the war under the title Leaves of Hypnos, edited by Albert Camus with whom he remained friends until the latter‘s death in 1960. Hypnos is the name of the Ancient Greek of sleep, which was also Char’s codename in this time.
When war ended, Char refused all decorations and refused to co-operate in witch-hunts for collaborators, saying: “We must triumph over our rage and disgust in order to make both our actions and our morality nobler.” He was haunted by memories from this time for many years — deaths of friends and by the fact that he had had to kill others. There’s a change in his poetry brought about by this time.
His new collection Fureur et Mystère / Furor and Mystery was published in 1948. The poems still have anger and passion. They are also denser, more hermetic, drawing on many sources. The war taught Char the importance of codes and imagery, as both a way of hiding things and as a short hand to a larger reality.. There are more descriptions of things, more imagery, and in this collection has an underling a sense of terror underneath the beauty. This next poem entitled The Swift demonstrates this.
THE SWIFT
Swift spreading wings too wide as he wheels in the air, circling round the house, crying out for joy. Just like the heart.
He dries up thunder. He sows seeds in calm skies. Touching ground tears him apart.
The swallow is his response. The familiar that he detests. What is the use of lacing round towers?
His silence’s reach into the most somber depths. No one can inhabit a smaller space.
Through the lengths of summer’s brightness, he will weave amidst shadows, through midnight’s shutters.
There are no eyes to hold him. His whole being is his voice. A rifle is going to shoot him down. Just like the heart.
The next poem is an invocation of the River Sorgue, which flows through l’Isle-sur-le-Sorgue, Char’s home-town out towards Avignon. It is an incantation to the river and has been set to music by Pierre Boulez. It was later used by Char in the 1950’s for a radio play he wrote about environmental protest which he became increasingly involved in as he grew older.
It’s in rhyming couplets, which is unusual for him, as he rarely uses rhyme. It also has many associative layers for the river. Many of these are self-explanatory. Two require clarification.
You will hear about “the sun leaving its plough to fall in with the liar.” I only found year explanation for this from notes in a French selection of his work. It is a reference to a Provinceal folk-tale. The sun was an honest worker who put his plough in the sky each night. A liar came by and they became friends. The sun stopped working.
The second is in the dedication: “Chanson pour Yvonne /. Song for Yvonne”. Yvonne was Char’s close friend, confidant and muse, Yvonne Zervos. Yvonne was the wife of a patron of the arts, who he knew. Char was also a painter, and Yvonne and her husband helped organize exhibitions of Char’s paintings. The poem suggests that he saw something elemental in her nature, and it flowed through her.
The very last line literally translated is “Keep us violent and friendly with the bees on the horizon”. This has caused some comment by academics, and not least problems for the translator! What are the bees? This I believe is simply what ever lies in the future. But bees can be a mixed blessing: they make honey and they sting! The word “violent” is also a problem. It’s a word that Char found evocative of the elemental violence in nature, which he felt was mirrored in human passion. It’s remarkably similar to Ted Hughes’ elementals in English poetry:
SONG OF THE SORGUE
River rushing by so fast, at full pelt, on your own,
Give my country’s children the full face of your passion.
River where the lightning ends, where my home begins,
Who rolls into oblivion the rubble of my reasonings.
River, in you the earth is shaken, the sun made uneasy.
Let the poor facing night’s darkness feed from your harvest.
River, whom we so often abuse and then abandon.
River, teacher to novices of life’s calloused condition,
There is no wind that ever fails to bow down to your wave-crests.
River of the empty soul, of rags and suspicion,
Of ancient griefs let loose, of elms and compassion.
River of the foolhardy, of the feverish, of the knacker,
Of the sun leaving its plough to fall in with the liar.
River of our betters, river of the clear morning haze,
Of the lamp that dispels fears left in its shade.
River who respects the dream, river who rusts iron,
Where shadows the stars keep from the sea are hidden.
River of transmitted powers, of ferryman’s cries,
Of strong winds that nip the grapes announce new wines.
River whose heart is never broken in this mad world of prisons,
Keep our spirits violent and friends with bees on our horizons.
Char also wrote many love poems. After the war his marriage to Georgette broke down and they divorced. He wasn’t to marry again until just before his death in 1988. In the meantime he had many women friends.
This poem is a prose-poem, and in it Char also speaks of poetry as if it were a mistress that he is making love to. The Penitentiary in the title is a play on the words “penitentiary” for prison as well as implying penitence.
THE LIGHT OF THE PENITENTIARY
I wanted only the briefest night with you, so your silent stepmother would grow old in the background unable to marshal her powers.
My dream was to be beside you, a harmonious fugitive that few ever noticed, as we chanced along this sad but angelic route. Nothing would dare slow us down.
The daylight suddenly closes in. Losing all the dead I loved so much, I am casting off that dog rose, the last living thing left, a distracted summer.
I’m emptied out, yet full. Finnish me, you melancholy beauty, your eyelids fluttering in drunken rapture. Every wound from you awakens the phoenixes whose eyes appear in my window. Something sings and sighs its satisfaction at being complete out there inside the wall’s gold.
This wind that is driving my yoke along.
Gradually in the poet-war years Char’s psychological injuries healed. He looked forward to better times. His next collection Les Matinaux / The Dawn Breakers reflects this. The next poem, is really a group of aphorisms, describing his vision of an ideal country. The title is “MAKE IT SO!” which he prefigures with the note that This land is a wish of the spirit, a counter-sepulchre. This reflects something Char says in another poem, that humanity flees from suffocation.
MAKE IT SO!
This land is a wish of the spirit, a counter-sepulchre.
In my land, the tender evidence of spring and meagrely clothed birds are preferred to far off goal.
Truth awaits the dawn by the candle.
The windowpane is ignored. To the watcher what does it matter.
In my land we don’t question someone who has been touched deeply.
There is no malign shadow over capsized boats.
A half-hearted greeting is unheard of in my land.
We only borrow what we can return with interest.
There are leaves, many leaves on the trees in my land.
The branches free not to bear fruit.
Nobody trusts the good faith of a conqueror.
In my land, we say thank you.
During the years from the 1950’s onwards until his death in 1988, Char lived between Paris and Provençe. They were not as exciting as the war years in terms of external life. He dedicated it to his vocations of writing and painting
All his life Char loved art. The next two poems are taken from a sequence he wrote about the cave-paintings at Lascaux which he visited after the Second World War. The first is titled after the stags of the frieze there. In it Char looks across the whole of human history in wonder at the beauty of the paintings at Lascaux. Maybe also we are being shown Char’s belief in the power of beauty to save us, and how long it has done so.
BLACK STAGS
The waters spoke into the ear of the sky.
You stags have leapt across millennia
From darkness in the rocks to the air’s caresses.
The hunter driving you, the spirit watching you,
How I love their passion, viewed from my wide shore!
And what if, in a moment of hope, I had their eyes ?
The second poem “Young Horse With Hazy Maine” relates these paintings to other works of art. The “White Lady of Africa” is a cave-painting found in Africa. The Madaleine by the Mirror is a painting by Georges de la Tour, a reproduction of which Char carried round with him in his Resistance days, and which gave him much consolation.
YOUNG HORSE WITH HAZY MANE
Spring, horse, how beautiful you are,
Riddling your mane across the sky
Splashing the reeds with foam!
All love is there in your breast:
From the “White Lady of Africa”
To the “Madeleine by the Mirror”,
Warrior idol, grace deep in thought.
In this later period Char wrote many of his greatest poems. Many become much simpler less dense. He is a visionary poet who also still kept his sense of involvement, for example being as mentioned previously he protested against both nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
To finish of I’ll leave with a poem from this period. Like the Song of the Sorgue earlier, this poem has also been set to music by Pierre Boulez. In it a lizard lies on a stone in the Province taking in the sun. There danger, and a sense of nature going about its business. Perhaps we get a sense of Char himself, in his own element, taking in the mystery and violence of creation. It seems right to leave him here.
LAMENT OF THE AMOROUS LIZARD
Don’t pick the sunflower seeds
Lest it annoy the cypresses.
Goldfinch take flight, speed
Back to your woolly nest.
The wind will let go of you
You are not a stone in the sky
Country bird, the rainbow
Comes together in the daisy.
The hunter has his gun, so hide.
The sunflower is his accomplice.
Only grasses are on your side,
Field-grasses that bow and crease.
The snake does not know you,
And the grasshopper is sullen;
The mole sees nothing true;
The butterfly has hate for none.
It’s midday, goldfinch.
The groundsel becomes shiny.
Stay here, out of danger’s reach:
The hunter is back with his family.
The echo from this land rings true.
I watch, prophesy well.
From my ledge I see all, view
Even the twittering owl.
Who better than an amorous lizard
Can tell the secrets of this land?
O gentle, kindly king of the skies
Why not nest on my rock’s side!
Graham Mummery
Although I have spent nearly a quarter or so of my life in France and, during most of this time, maintained a keen interest in French literature, I had never heard of Jean Cassou until Timothy Adès, his gifted English translator, brought him to my attention. Cassou seems to have been forgotten even by his own countrymen and women although he died not so long ago (1986) and seemingly had impeccable credentials politically as an active Resistant left for dead by the Germans at the liberation of Toulouse and not bad poetic credentials either since one might just place him in the slipstream of the French surrealist movement. However, he broke decisively with the French Communist Party in 1949 for which they never forgave him; also, his occasional archaisms and the fact that his poems generally make some sort of sense presumably stopped him from being accepted as a true modernist, or post-modernist.
His 33 Sonnets composés au secret were written in a Vichy prison “nearly all in the dark, half a sonnet per night and committed to memory”. Jean Cassou was not exactly in solitary confinement since most of the time he shared a cell with another prisoner (because the prisons were full) but he was allowed no exercise, no visits, no books and no writing materials. Although Aragon sees the sonnet form as “embodying freedom under constraint”, which is fair enough in a sense, Cassou’s choice of form also had a more prosaic raison d’être : poems in strict rhyme and stanza form are a good deal easier to memorise. Also, the sonnet at fourteen lines is about the right length to at once stretch but not overburden the brain.
It would seem that the choice of form was a happy one. For me, it is wonderful to come across ‘modern’ poems that one can actually quickly learn off by heart and recite to oneself : people today seem to have forgotten that poetry is essentially something to be heard. And Cassou’s varied pace and rich sound patterning make these poems, at their best, very eloquent indeed.
What of the content ? Surprisingly, and yet not so, they are not really ‘prison poetry’. There are occasional outbursts of anger, patriotism and aspirations after a better life for all, as one would expect from a French Resistant and (at the time) communist party member but these are not the sonnets that appeal to me most. In a strange way, these poems bear witness to a kind of mental liberation rather than constriction : other people who have spent some time, voluntarily or not, in solitary and nearly immobile conditions have testified to this ‘expansion of inner space’. (I must make it clear, however, that we are not talking about Abu Graib prison in Iraq or Guantanamo Bay : Cassou was not tortured or brutalised by his jailors though he could, had he eventually been convicted, easily have ended up in a concentration camp as so many of his comrades did.)
Emily Dickinson spent the last years of her life in a single room without exactly being a chronic invalid, seemingly by choice. More to the point with regard to Cassou is the remarkable book, also alas completely forgotten, Solitary Confinement by the Englishman Christopher Burney recounting his (total) solitary confinement at Fresnes during eighteen months at more or less the same time as Cassou was incarcerated (for a year) at Toulouse. (Like Cassou, Burney was suspected of being an agent of the Resistance, but absolute proof was lacking.) He writes of his first day inside :
“Being shut in this little cell was the prelude to what was to become life in a new element, a change as drastic as a transformation of the lungs to use some other gas than oxygen, a rarefaction, seeming often like death, and yet fuller of elemental life than the red-blooded life outside.”
This is exactly what Cassou gives us in sonnet form : the surgings and outpourings of ‘elemental life’ frozen into the words and rhythms of thirty-three fairly regular sonnets.
We should all be grateful to Timothy Adès for bringing this remarkable human document and notable piece of literature to the non-French reading public. (I would probably have had to be put in incommunicado myself to even think of taking on such a daunting task as translating these poems while keeping to rhyme and stanza form.)
I give Sonnets II and VI, my favourites, first in French and then in Timothy Adès’ translation.
II
Mort à toute fortune, à l’espoir, à l’espace,
mais non point mort au temps qui poursuit sa moisson,
il me faut me retraire et lui céder la place,
mais dans ce dénuement grandit ma passion.
Je l’emporte avec moi dans un pays sans nom
où nuit sur nuit me pressent et m’effacent.
L’ombre y dévore l’ombre, et j’y dresse le front
à mesure qu’un mur de songe boit ma trace.
Ce n’est vie ni non plus néant. De ma veillée
les enfants nouveau-morts errent dans l’entre-deux.
Transparentes clartés, apparues, disparues,
Elans sans avenir, souvenirs sans passé,
décroître fait leur joie, expirer fait leur jeu,
et Psyché brûle en eux, les ailes étendues.
Jean Cassou
II
Dead to all fortune and to hope and space,
but not to time whose fullness is to be,
I must draw back, leave time to set the pace;
my passion deepens in this penury.
I take it with me to a nameless place
where night and night on night bear down on me.
Shadow eats shadow there. I show my face;
my tracks are drowned in mental masonry.
Not life, not nothingness, I cannot sleep:
in no-man’s-land my new-dead children stray.
Now here, now vanished, lucid shimmerings,
memories of no past, a forward leap
to nowhere; dearth’s their joy and death’s their play,
and Psyche burns in them with outspread wings.
Timothy Adès
VI
Bruits lointains de la vie, divinités secrètes,
trompe d’auto, cris des enfants à la sortie,
carillon du salut à la veille des fêtes,
voiture aveugle se perdant à l’infini,
rumeurs cachées aux plis des épaisseurs muettes,
quels génies autres que l’infortune et la nuit
auraient su me conduire à l’abîme où vous êtes ?
Et je touche à tâtons vos visages amis.
Pour mériter l’accueil d’aussi profonds mystères
je me suis dépouillé de toute ma lumière :
la lumière aussitôt se cueille dans vos voix.
Qu’on me laisse à présent repasser la poterne
et remonter, portant ces reflets noirs en moi,
fleurs d’un ciel inversé, astres de ma caverne.
Jean Cassou
VI
Life’s distant sounds, celestial, tucked away:
horns hooting, children going home to tea,
the church bells pealing for a festal day,
cars blindly heading for infinity,
rumours — wrapped, muffled, swathed; what people say:
demons of darkness and adversity
have brought me to your chasm; who but they?
I touch your friendly faces haltingly.
Such depths of mystery! To earn the right
of welcome, I dispensed with all my light.
Your voice is heard; light quickly gathers there.
Let me bring back these star-signs from my cavern,
back through the postern-gate, and upward bear
black images, flowers from an inverse heaven.
Timothy Adès
Note : The book Jean Cassou 33 Sonnets of the Resistance, which includes a number of other poems by Cassou, some in free verse and some in other rhymed forms, is published by Arc and can be ordered from their website.
Sebastian Hayes
There’s plenty of books and articles, usually geared to university courses, which tell you how you ought to translate a poem from a foreign language, but rather few where experienced translators tell you how they actually go about it. To fill this gap and hopefully generate some discussion and diverse views, I wrote the following piece.
Some months ago, I decided, I’m not quite sure why, to translate a little poem by the forgotten writer, Paul-Jean Toulet, a Parisian fin de siècle essayist, journalist and 
dilettante. Léon Daudet described him thus :
Mince et moqueur, penché sur son verre de whisky and soda avec un étincelant œil de biais, observant l’existence, tripotant sa barbiche et crispant ses mains fines comme s’il allait s’étirer.(…) Il s’exprime par phrases courtes, sèches, péremptoires, luisantes et qui coupent.
His poetry, like Verlaine’s, is all mood and stance and musicality with no message to speak of. He interests me mainly because of the unusual combination of tight form and lyrical fluency : he is a man dressed in a dark suit somewhat too small for him and a shirt with old-fashioned starched collars who turns out to be an excellent tango dancer. [The contrast is more apparent than real since ‘free verse’ encourages looseness and superfluity rather than fluency and, for that matter, tango is a very stylized dance].
(The poem is untitled.)
Puisque tes jours ne t’ont laissé
Qu’un peu de cendre dans la bouche,
Avant qu’on ne tende la couche
Où ton cœur dorme, enfin glacé,
Retourne, comme au temps passé,
Cueillir, près de la dune instable,
Le lys qu’y courbe un souffle amer,
—Et grave ces mots sur le sable :
Le rêve de l’homme est semblable
Aux illusions de la mer.
My own way of proceeding is somewhat as follows :
0. I print out the poem in bold type and large point size and paste or Sellotape the page to an A4 size sheet of board.
In this way I have the poem available to work on without having to lug around the book itself, can prop the poem up against the wall in the kitchen &c. &c. (I purchase large sheets of board in a Stationer’s, or Art Supplier’s, and have them guillotined as it’s much less expensive that way. There are various thicknesses available.)
1. I have a close look at the form of the piece I’m about to translate.
The rhyme scheme here is the unusual abba acdc cd and, as is customary with Toulet, he uses a short line — I make the syllable count 8-8-7-8 7-9-8-8 8-7.
Rees, in his Introduction to French Poetry 1820 - 1950 (where I came across the poem) makes the important point that French poetry depends more on syllable count than on stress and typically proceeds by flows and bursts. (There is in fact no equivalent in French poetry of the typical English blank verse pentameter, as the seasoned translator Timothy Adès rightly pointed out in his recent reading at the Poetry Café.)
Toulet may have had some reason for the variation around the 8 syllable count, but, more likely, he simply had enough sense to use an approximate line length, not a fixed one — despite being in other respects a very finicky writer. The rhymes themselves are an odd mixture : there is the so-called weak rhyme (rime faible) ‘laissé - glacé’ followed immediately by the true rhyme ‘glacé - passé’. ‘Instable - sable - semblable’ do not quite make a true rhyme trio since the ‘-able’ in the first two words is a shade longer and more emphatic than in ‘semblable’. And, finally, it is not clear whether one should consider ’soufflle amer - la mer’ as straight repetition of ‘lamer’, or as a sort of rime riche manqué. [A rime riche is where the rhyming syllable is repeated exactly with an extra syllable in front e.g. verte - ouverte.] This sort of ambivalence with respect to rhyme is typical of Toulet and most likely done on purpose.
2. I decide, at any rate provisionally, how closely I am going to imitate the form of the original.
It is by no means obvious that a poem that is rhymed in the original comes off better as a rhymed poem in English, or even as verse at all : I have seen French prose translations of Cavafy by Marguerite Yourcenar that do more justice to the modern Greek poet than certain English verse translations. However, in this case, I felt there was only one answer : the poem seemed scarcely worth translating at all if the translator didn’t make some attempt to retain rhyme and probably stanza form as well, since the ‘message’ is commonplace. This is where the standard maxim of “never sacrifice sense to sound” is more of a hindrance than a help, since in such a poem, the sound makes up a large percentage of the sense — “the form is the message” if you like.
3. I get something down on paper at once without bothering too much about accuracy or rhyme.
If you are lucky, you may find one or two rhymes pop up naturally.
In this case, I found myself falling ‘naturally’ into something approaching a pentameter, and started off merrily
“Now that the days have left you nothing more
Than taste of ………… and ashes on your lips”
But, on reflection, I felt the pentameter had too much Anglo-Saxon forward drive, was more Shakespeare than Toulet. I thus forced myself to make the unwelcome decision to rein back into the uncustomary (in English) octosyllabic line, which meant I had to exclude from consideration a whole lot of English words that would simply be too long. For an 8 line you find yourself in practice restricted to one three-syllable word per line at most, and in the original there is only one such word — ‘illusions’ which Toulet saves for the final line.
4. Once I’ve got a line or two down on paper, I go straight to the end of the poem and work backwards.
In strict verse forms, the last line, or last couplet or triplet, usually has a resounding finality and if you miss this, you won’t make a successful translation.
Keeping close to the final line of the French meant that the English had to end with ‘sea’ and I originally wrote
“…than the scintillations of the sea”
but found I had to jettison this when I decided on a basic octosyllabic line throughout.
‘…semblable’ suggested ‘…resemble’ which I quite fancied. However, consulting Stillman’s The Poet’s Manual and Rhyming Dictionary (an indispensable aid for the poetry translator) I found that the only rhymes for ‘resemble’ were ‘assemble’ and ‘dissemble’. Since the poem ended cdccd in the original, I needed a rhyming triplet, so this was out.
5. I allow myself to be guided by rhymes for key words
In a poem with a dense rhyme scheme — the traditional ballade is ababbccdcD repeated three times, and an envoi ccdcD (!!!) — you’ve had it if you don’t choose rhymes for which you can find plenty of words. In practice, I find even getting three or four words to a rhyme is tough.
Here, it seemed almost inevitable to have the third line from the end concluding with ‘…..sand’, say, ‘Engrave these words upon the sand’ and, luckily, there are quite a few English words ending in ‘–and’. Nothing had much to do with ‘resemblance’ though, which was required for the end of the penultimate line and, indeed, in my final version I tacitly dropped the idea.
6. I decide which images in the poem are the most important.
If you’ve opted for strict rhyme and metre, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to include all the images, so one or two will have to go.
An image I above all did not want to lose was that of the lily buffeted by the wind in a terrain vague behind the dunes. Laying someone on a bed to be frozen (lines 3 and 4) was less important and ended up by being more or less sacrificed.
7. I fill in the middle of the poem, make a readable version and polish it up.
8. I go back and check for accuracy.
If you’re too concerned with fidelity to the original, you might end up like the ludicrous character in Camus’ La Peste (a much overrated book in my opinion incidentally) who never gets beyond the first paragraph of the great novel he aims to write because he’s so concerned with getting off to a perfect start. However, before delivering to the public or publisher, it’s advisable to check for wild inaccuracies (and even getting someone else to look at the version you’ve made).
The last change I made to my version was, very reluctantly, to go back to Toulet’s ‘illusions de la mer’ and conclude “…than the illusions of the sea” — in previous versions I had written ‘scintillations’, and then ‘reflections’. To me, speaking of ‘illusions’ is actually a defect in the original : the word is too obvious and, if you think about it, inaccurate as well. The sea does not give back mirror images as a pool of still water does, and the surface aspect of sea-water does not seduce us by its resemblance to real-life scenes but by its jewel-like sparkle. Still, if Toulet wrote ‘illusions’, I felt I had to fall into line — though I might yet go back on this decision.
It is arguable to what extent it is legitimate to improve on the original, or try to : one could claim that, since you are bound to lose something anyway, you might as well try to give something back. Pound does this all the time and on the whole gets away with it — but perhaps only because the poets he translated were long dead and writing in little known languages such as Provençal, Anglo-Saxon and Mandarin Chinese. If he were alive today and translating contemporary authors, I suspect he’d be in danger of prosecution or worse at the hands of the irate authors.
My final, or nearly final version was :
Now that the days have taken all
But taste of ashes on your lips,
Before your tired body slips
Into a frozen sleep, recall
The times that were, gather once more
The lily from the windswept land
Where shifting dunes stretch to the sea,
—Then trace these letters on the sand :
Man’s dreams can no more time withstand
Than the illusions of the sea.
P.S. Maybe someone else would like to try their hand at translating this poem?
Sebastian Hayes
Much as I abhor the Internet and indeed wish that the ‘Information Technology’ revolution had never got started, I must admit that it does turn up the occasional rare and captivating shell amongst the thousands of plastic bottles washed up by the waves onto my minuscule section of the world wide beach. annadenoailles.com (which I started) somehow attracted the attention of Roger Hunt Carroll (left) with whom I have subsequently exchanged letters and who has kindly sent me some of his own publications, one of which is entitled Variations on images in the verse of ….
His approach to the rendering of poems in a foreign language is quite the reverse of my own but, for that very reason, worth noting. In the Preface he writes
“A pure translation is never my intent. These are songs I sing out of their original languages and into my particular American English prosody with the aim that their essential poetry be kept intact.
(…) My terms arranging and transcribing bear some resemblance to what is done in the instrumental or vocal music sense. I don’t make translations: I place a poem in an alternate language, as if in another musical key…. I recast its images, as though for some other instrument. I hear languages as distinct musical instruments, listening to their harmonies, dissonances, assonances, all things in structured music.
This is an interesting and original approach and he goes on to quote the words of John French about musical transcription :
“Transcription is an art form in its own right and not just self-indulgent scribbling. A good study, arrangement, or transcription does not copy note for note and chord for chord, but it tries to adapt the original music to characteristics of the new instrument. “
The author goes on to refer to the ideas of Walter Benjamin (unknown to me) on what ‘translation really is’
“He [Walter Benjamin] said, in effect, that the translator has to allow her/his work ‘to discover the pure language’ existing somewhere between the translator’s language and that of the poem being translated. I take this to mean that a poet conveying lines from one language to another must somehow get in touch with the ‘language beyond specific language’ and let it be the vehicle ultimately carrying the work.”
All this is very thought-provoking and I would welcome readers’ reactions to these ideas which are so much the reverse of current practice.
For the moment, I limit myself to the following observation. As a contemporary writer, I would be greatly offended (indeed livid) if someone ‘translated’ me in a way that transformed my message into the very opposite of what I intended. It has, however, to be admitted that in the eras when literature was thriving, such as the Elizabethan era, authors took a very cavalier attitude indeed towards literary property, shamelessly lifting not only plots and characters but whole scenes one from another. And the ancient Greeks seemed to think it perfectly acceptable for not only different dramatists but even different cities and regions to have their own wildly different versions of semi-sacred myths. Indeed, not only culture but philosophy and religion would never have evolved, had not previous societies been largely lacking in our contemporary squeamishness about recasting and ‘translating’ as we deem fit ancient traditions. It is true that a poem is not quite the same thing as a myth or a philosophical doctrine, but nonetheless….
Rather amusingly, one of Roger Hunt Carroll’s own poems (not translations) prompted me to make a variation, in effect write the poem I would have written myself had I conceived the original idea. (I would, however, not take the liberty of publishing the result as my own work and the author took the’ joke’ in good spirit, I hasten to add.)
Enough about theory : what are the results? I give two ‘renderings’ — I dare not use the term ‘translation’ — of two very different poems taken from the beautifully printed little booklet Variations
LA LUNE BLANCHE
The white of the full moon shrouds the arbor,
and from all branches of its trees
there is a voice calling: ‘Beloved.’
Like a deep mirror, the embowered lake shines
with the shadow of a willow at its edge —
in its bowed limbs, the wind sighs.
It’s the hour of dreaming; a vast, tender lull
descends on us from star-radiated skies.
Now: ecstasy
Paul Verlaine
VOM ERTRUNKENEN MÄDCHEN
The pitiful girl drowned and sluiced downstream
until she was washed into grander rivers,
and all the while the opaline gleam in the sky
burned extraordinarily, as though commanded
to give salute to her passing.
The marsh reeds and grasses wrapped around her —
and in slow motion she grew heavy enough to sink.
Freezing cold fishes caressed her limbs there,
proving that flora and fauna were her burdens,
even in her final descent.
And the sky at evening darkened in a dire smoky screen —
and it stole what was left of starlight, kept it suspended, hidden.
But the new day returned all patterns:
so there was for her dead self a morning,
and as well the sacred hours of night.
And when she drifted to and fro long enough,
her fading flesh diffused itself in the water slowly,
so slowly; and the thing that created her being
didn’t remember her, not even her having-been.
There slipped from her creator’s memory
first her face, and then her shriveled hands, and then —
at the very last of its recollection — her hair.
That was the morning when she assumed definition
as human river-debris, floating away without her flesh,
headed towards currents already full of scattered human reverie.
Bertolt Brecht
Should one translate a rhymed poem by a rhymed poem?
It is difficult to generalize but it is important to realize that rhyme is not just put in for echo effect, or because it makes the poem much easier to learn off by heart (though these are important considerations) : rhyme and stanza form serve to bind the poem together, stop the poet’s mind wandering off into the byways and bushes. And a strict poetic form, sonnet, ballade, villanelle &c. gives a poem finality — because no further lines are allowed by the form.
The sonnet in particular generally leads up to a resounding last line or couplet which wraps up the whole argument :
“For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings”
William Shakespeare, Sonnets
* * * * *
I do not speak modern Greek and only learned recently that Cavafy wrote quite a number of his poems in rhymed stanzas. When this was pointed out to me, I went back to my edition (which has unrhymed translations but gives the rhyme scheme at the back) to see whether I could guess from the prose translations which poems originally rhymed. With one exception I was uniformly right in my guesses. This is a compliment to Cavafy and also his translators (Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard) : it means that Cavafy used rhyme significantly.
* * * * *
The following is the most useful single remark concerning French poetry I have ever come across in a book:
“It is important for the inexperienced reader to grasp the essential fact that French scansion is a matter of syllable-counting, and that stress is very intermittent and very much attenuated in French verse. (…) It [French verse] is in a sense more monotonous than English poetry, lacking a thumping regular dynamic, but it achieves tonal variety through subtle action of sound-patterns (mainly assonance) and subtle interplay through pitch, tempo and syntactic position of the subordinate stresses that certainly do exist and do bring into relief other syllables in the line.”
(William Rees Editor, French Poetry 1820-1950)
* * * * *
There are French poets that one should perhaps not even try to translate into strict rhyme and metre, perhaps not translate at all. I have never seen a verse translation of Racine that is other than as flat as a pancake — though Pope could doubtless have carried it off. French Alexandrines in couplets usually come over as tame and dull. Even translating Alexandrines into English rhymed pentameters, a fortiori hexameters, means you lose the variety and fluidity of the French sound patterning while gaining little in the exchange.
A line in Racine, apparently quite commonplace
“La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaë”
is singled out for praise by Proust in La Prisonnière, my favourite volume of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
Strange to relate, it is quite a good line in the French and is a perfectly acceptable Alexandrine. But the metrical equivalent in English
“The son of Minos and Pasiphaë”
has nothing special about it, indeed sounds a bit odd. There is a slight acceleration of the rhythm in the French “…et de Pasiphaë” whereas “…and Pasiphaë” flattens out at the end so perhaps this is the reason.
* * * * *
There are eras for translation. Although as far as I know English poets of the Restoration period, or the early 18th century, did not much translate French authors such as Molière or Corneille, this is perhaps the only time in English history when this could have been done successfully. During the Restoration and early Eighteenth century, in reaction against the Puritans, poets cultivated poise, neatness and emotional restraint — qualities that we associate with French neo-classicism. Since the Romantics the world has never been the same again, and the destructive impact of Romanticism has been far greater in this country than in France because our Romantics were so brilliant — I doubt if there has ever been an era in European history when such a poetic galaxy as Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Blake co-existed in the same country at the same time.
* * * * *
Neatness is the distinctive mark of traditional French verse, and, to a lesser extent, prose. Even the style of Voltaire, one of the very few philosophers who can really claim to have ‘made a difference’ to ordinary people’s lives, is neat — one feels he prefers elegance to profundity, certainly to obscurity. Strong emotion, especially if it is religious in origin, seems always to have been distrusted in French literature, perhaps because of the wars of religion that nearly ruined the country. Bossuet and even Saint François de Sales are elegant raconteurs, not prophets inspired by God.
The style of French verse suits satire well since too much emotion spoils not only the fun but the effectiveness. Even Pope, probably England’s best satirist, shows too much personal antipathy and thus makes the reader more inclined to ‘see the other person’s point of view’ which is precisely what is not desired in satire.
* * * * *
The cliché about “not sacrificing sense to sound” is by no means self-evident — what if sound is the major part of sense? That there can be sounds that are eminently meaningful without conveying any information at all is proved by the case of orchestral music. In Verlaine and some others, there is about as little content as is possible without the poem ceasing to be written in language. I do not think a literal prose version of Verlaine’s poetry would interest anyone in the slightest. “The medium is the message” perhaps (Marshall McLuhan’s phrase).
In Verlaine the tone and the stance is (deliberately) all there is : lose this and you’ve lost the lot.
* * * * *
Although, as far as I know, no linguist has said this in so many words, French is what I would call a ‘semi-tonal’ language. Chinese really is a tonal language since the ‘tone’ distinguishes one meaning of a word from a completely different one. (I would be curious to know whether the tones in Mandarin also have an emotional significance, similar to what Plato claimed for the ‘modes’ in ancient Greek music.)
Examples of tone affecting the meaning often given in elementary books on Mandarin Chinese are the differences between :
1. “What’s his name?” “Jack.” (Flat, prosaic)
2. “Ja-ack! Come and have your dinner.” (Exclamatory, summoning)
3. “He’s been charged with grievous bodily harm.” “What — Jack?” (Showing disbelief)
I claim that someone who did not know French at all but heard it spoken, especially by a working-class Parisian, could make a reasonable guess at what was being said. It would be much more difficult to do the same for English. A ‘normal’ person in France, particularly in the big urban centres, puts far more variety of expression, pace and timbre into ordinary conversation than we do. I, as someone who used to live in France and at one time spoke like a native, tend to spontaneously overdo variety of pace and pitch at the beginning of each fresh visit to France, though I quieten down after a day or two.
Whether French, and Italian even more so, is in itself more musical than English I’m not sure — though I rather fancy it is — but it is remarkable how interestingly and musically quite a lot of ‘ordinary’ people speak in France — provided you completely discount what they are saying. A friend at whose flat I stay in Paris has a woman friend who is an obsessive talker — Jeanne gets so fed up with this she often puts the mobile phone on the window sill (where you can’t hear what’s being said) and carries on washing the dishes. Strange to relate the voice pouring forth from the mobile sounds wonderful : it is like listening to Italian opera!
Which reminds me of a passage in James Joyce’s Ulysses. A friend of Daedalus goes into ecstasies over the conversation of some Italians in a Dublin street. “They’re haggling about money”, Daedalus says crushingly.
Sebastian Hayes
Anna de Noailles was, during the Belle Epoque, a well known poet, novelist and public figure. She has subsequently dropped almost completely out of view and when I first came across a poem of hers in an Anthology of French Poetry not a single full-length book was in print in French. For me, however, it was love at first sight : I found in her, apart from considerable technical ability, all the fire and controlled intensity which I admire in poetry and a stance towards life which, if not quite my own, is certainly one that I respect. The poem in question was L’Empreinte which I have translated as follows
The Trace I Wish to Leave
I aim to thrust myself against this life so hard,
And clasp it to me fiercely, leaving such a trace,
That when the sweetness of these days I must discard
The world will keep awhile the warmth of my embrace.
The sea, spread out across the globe so lavishly,
On stormy days my fitful memory will sustain,
And in its myriad, random motions ceaselessly
Preserve the acrid, salty, savour of my pain.
What will be left of me in heath and windswept coomb?
My blazing eyes will set the yellow gorse on fire,
And the cicada perched upon a sprig of broom
Will sound the depth and poignancy of my desire.
My joy and restless passion will not die with me,
Nature will breathe me in, making of me a part
Of all that lives, while sorrowing humanity
Will hold the individual profile of my heart.
(The orginal French, along with translations of other poems and articles and commentaries on Anna de Noailles, can be found on the website www.annadenoailles.com )
Anna de Noailles admired Nietzsche, at the time still relatively unknown outside Germany, and espoused his philosophy, in some respects taking it further than Nietzsche did himself (though she lacked the philosophic finesse and scope of the German philosopher). I have, in my own website (www.sebastianhayes.co.uk) written of the fundamental dichotomy between life-affirming and life-denying philosophies, the first epitomized by Nietzsche and the second by Schopenhauer and studied this conflict in three ‘Novels of Love and War’ (Gone with the Wind, War and Peace and A Leaf in the Storm).
Nietzsche was prepared to go very far in accepting, indeed applauding, what one might call the biological basis of life which includes struggle, self-assertion, passion, pain and suffering as well as joy. For Schopenhauer, on the contrary, life, especially human life, was a horrifying spectacle of self-delusion and futile striving after the unattainable from which the only permanent release was the quiescence of the Buddhist Nirvana, and the only temporary release an attitude of resignation assisted by the soothing powers of music (which Schopenhauer considered the highest of the arts).
Anna de Noailles, like Nietzsche, considered that to live life to the full it was necessary to decisively reject any hope (or fear) of personal survival and expressed this in about as extreme and concise a way as has ever been done before or since in her poem L’Ame et le Corps. Surprisingly, this poem was written when she was in her maturer years, not during during the first flush of defiant youth as one might expect.
The Soul and the Body
The soul was first conceived in order to demean
The body, the domain of dreams and reasoning,
Sole source of our desire, of all that’s heard and seen,
For when it stops, it marks the close of everything.
They foist the soul upon us, so we cannot see
What’s underneath our feet, and in our cowardice
Deny our squalid end, the grim reality
That when the wine is drunk, there’s nothing but the lees.
O shattered bodies, eyes whose fire is at an end,
I shall not now commit the shameful treachery
Against your greatness and your beauty to pretend
That you are as you were for all eternity.
No. I refuse all hope, distrust sublimity,
I am an outcast from your world and I invite
The chill of your ignoble tombs, so mean, so small,
For I declare, on contemplating that vast night,
That once our blood is cold, it is the end of all.
Though Anna de Noailles wrote a good number of poems on fairly innocuous themes like the beauty of Nature — like Wordsworth she published too much — some of her more trenchant poems are almost too much for me, let alone her contemporaries. For example, she opens her poem Exaltation with these lines
I have the taste for what is ardent and intense,
Delirious crowds and bodies, a heroic role
In life, such bitter, acrid smells are like incense
To my tumultuous heart and my excessive soul.
It is difficult, not to say impossible, for anyone today in the post-Hitler era to admit so frankly to an enthusiasm for “delirious crowds and bodies”, but there is no point in denying that the excitement of such scenes is intense and contagious as anyone who has been on a mass demonstration knows. To be fair to Anna de Noailles, her social and political views were extremely advanced for her time and class — she refused to give way to the anti-semitic hysteria which swept through France at the time of the Dreyfus affair and even had the courage to publicly oppose France’s entry into World War I, though she somewhat modified her stance later out of a concern for the troops. In any case, people of that era cannot be expected to have anticipated the rise of Nazism — though I certainly feel that today the out and out admirers of Nietzsche, and for that matter Darwin, are being dishonest and cowardly in refusing to admit that both these thinkers prepared the ground for Nazism, whether they would have approved the eventual outcome or not.
Given the trenchant views of Anna de Noailles on certain subjects which scandalized, though at the same time, fascinated the French intelligentsia who were still by and large Catholic at the time, I must admit to being a little disappointed when I came to find out more about her actual life. In flagrant contrast to the poete maudit image, she seems to have been rather too successful for my liking : born a Greek/Roumanian princess, she married a French Count, was an admired beauty sculpted by Rodin and hosted a select salon attended by Proust, Gide, Valery, Rostand, Cocteau — you name them. At least one young man reputedly committed suicide because of her and she attracted the intermittent life-long attention of one of the most prestigious public figures of the day, Maurice Barres, novelist and extreme Right-wing politician, seemingly becoming his mistress though the affair was carefully hushed up.
All this is not quite what I expected and indeed is one of the reasons for her passing out of fashion. The Dadaists actually staged a mock trial of Maurice Barres, condemned him to death and hanged his effigy after the end of World War I. Anna de Noailles did at least have the integrity of not allowing this somewhat unappealing individual to influence her social and political views : she had several Jewish friends, for example.
Anna de Noailles shows, in her writings, a preoccupation with death which is medieval rather than modern, since it is the process of physical disintegration which at once horrifies and fascinates her — I go into this in more detail in my article on the Anna de Noailles website (www.annadenoailles.com) entitled Liebestod. Thankfully, Anna de Noailles just managed to escape the twentieth-century snake-pit of psychoanalysis and she never declines into the obsessive self-absorption and self-pity of such female writers as Anne Seton and Sylvia Plath with whom she has superficial affinities.
Technically, Anna de Noailles resisted ‘modern’ literary techniques such as ‘free verse’ and ‘stream of consciousness’. Dionysian in philosophy and stance, she is Apollonian in style — a powerful combination.
For those who wish to find out more about Anna de Noailles there exists a scholarly full-length study by Catherine Perry, Persephone Unbound : Dionysian Aesthetics in the Works of Anna de Noailles. The principal French biography, alas currently out of print, is by Claude Mignot-Ogliastri who has also edited two volumes of Anna de Noailles’ very interesting Correspondence.
It would seem that a long overdue revival of interest in Anna de Noailles has commenced, since there now exists a Cercle d’Anna de Noailles, (http://cercleannadenoailles.fr) founded by M. Alexandre d’Oriano with President, Mme Eugenie de Brancovan, the only surviving member of the de Noailles’ family, I believe. Also, Buchet/Chastel have recently brought out one of Anne de Noailles’ novels, Les Innocentes ou la Sagesse des Femmes. I can well imagine that one day soon there will be a Hollywood film based on the life and times of this fascinating and talented Belle Epoque femme fatale.
Sebastian Hayes
Recent Comments