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Sunday, June 24, 2007
Translating Verlaine
In the continuing spirit of poetry at the Valve, here’s Paul Verlaine’s 8th Romance sans Parole (1874):
Dans l’interminable
Ennui de la plaine,
La neige incertaine
Luit comme du sable.Le ciel est de cuivre
Sans lueur aucune,
On croirait voir vivre
Et mourir la lune.Comme des nuées
Flottent gris les chênes
Des forêts prochaines
Parmi les buées.Le ciel est de cuivre
Sans lueur aucune.
On croirait voir vivre
Et mourir la lune.Corneille poussive
Et vous les loups maigres,
Par ces bises aigres
Quoi donc vous arrive?Dans l’interminable
Ennui de la plaine,
La neige incertaine
Luit comme du sable.
Here’s my translation of it.
In the interminable
Boredom of the land
The uncertain snow
Shines like sand.The sky is copper
Without light of her own.
It’s like watching the living
And dying of the moon.As the clouds
Floating in grey, the oak-
Forests nearby
Amongst the smoke.The sky is copper
Without light of her own.
It’s like watching the living
And dying of the moonCrow, you wheezer,
And you lean wolves too;
When the bitter wind comes
What will you do?In the interminable
Boredom of the land
The uncertain snow
Shines like sand.
And here, because frankly I am in awe of his chrome-dome and whiskers combo, is a picture of the poet himself.
Several fascinating things, not to mention two excellent new translations, emerged from the previous Mallarmé exercise: Rich’s rhymed version, Joe K.’s plainer, but perhaps more directly effective rendering, and Rich’s inspired adaptation of the same. Tony Christini also riffed creatively and effectively off the original, to the point of making, I’d say, a new poem of considerable eloquence. All four of these poems were better, I think, than Roger Fry’s published 1951 version (although Fry has the edge on mine in that, whilst it’s no less clumsily expressed, at least his grasp of French was better than my rusty O-level franglais—something which Birgit diplomatically, but quite rightly pointed out.) But by the end of the thread we had attracted the attention of at least one talented non-Valvista translator, Andrei Molotiu, which is clearly a good thing.
This Verlaine poem is clearly easier, both formally and in terms of French comprehension than the Mallarmé piece. That’s not to say that it’s easier to translate. My version replaces an abab alternating abba abab rhyme-scheme with an abcb one, and manifests a (I-would-say-this-wouldn’t-I) deliberately roughness of tone. My justification for this, should anybody task me, would be that this is a poem constructed, in the first instance, around one splendidly jarring and effective oxymoronic image: shining sand, which we will of course tend to associate with hot summer beaches (or perhaps with hot deserts) is here used to describe cold snowscapes. That nicely dislocating starting point, together with the bestial dramatis personae (wolves and crows), the freezing wind, the numbed repetitions of stanzas, the living-and-dying poète maudit circularity of the whole, justifies, I’d say, a corresponding degree of formal roughness. On the other hand the original certainly reads more smoothly controlled, formally and tonally, than my rendering. Ah well.
Comments
I was satisfied with the results of the last such thread, but not satisfied with the process. Can people be a bit more considerate this time? In other words, please don’t suggest that the whole thing is wrong unless you want to demonstrate your ideas by making the revisions yourself, and please remember that this is supposed to be a collaboration in translating the poem.
Technically, I read the original as having five or six syllable lines with two stresses per line. My sense is that this would become fewer in English, perhaps four to five or even three. The rhyme scheme I read as abba cdcd. That, together with the stanza repeats (ABCBDA) and the cyclic nature of the content (waxing/waning of the moon) indicates to me that it might be effective to try to duplicate the original rhyme scheme. Do people think so? I could work on it if so; I don’t want to repeat what happened last time, when the suggestion of full rhyme turned out to be a drive-by that no one seemed to really want.
Adam, I think that your start is pretty good. The one stanza that I think really needs changing, no matter what strategy we settle on, is the third, because the English version doesn’t parse well. How about (assuiming that we still want abcb for now):
Appearing as clouds
Oaks in their gray
Float in near forests
In the mist-way
I can’t help it; it was a little wrong last time. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you earlier in the translating process. But
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have known quite late
Than never to have known at all.
The outcome was OK, sure; the aim of the exercise wasn’t a “perfect” translation. But I thought you might be interested, anyway, to know what the original French poem really means.
“Making the revisions” is a thing I can’t reasonably do myself, being a Bavarian speaker of English, or a barbarian speaker of English, or whatever you might call it. I thought I’d better leave that to you gentle properly-English-speaking men. I can only help you as far as I can. Isn’t the point of “collaboration” that everybody contributes what they can do?
It is true that I’ve written some poems in English, even sonnets; I was told my English wasn’t quite “wrong” in most cases, but sounded odd in other places, but was OK for poetry “because in poetry I was entitled to sound odd”. Which reassures me a lot. I could have done the translation alone, having a certain command of French, and a certain command of English. But that wasn’t the point.
You don’t need me for the meaning of the original here. For you to make the revisions.
Oh, I wasn’t writing about your efforts, Birgit—they were fine. I was writing, instead, about the attempts to question the translation strategy in toto by people who weren’t actually translating. In particular, and as only one case, I spent some time helping to make a fully rhymed version that, it turned out, was only wanted in a sort of passive-aggressive sense.
For the rest, I don’t know what a perfect translation would be, or rather, I don’t think there can be one. But we can do whatever we want to do, after all.
So, given your knowledge of French and English, does the third stanza refer to mist or smoke or could it be either?
Birgit: no need for apologies, you were quite right. I should probably have looked at a published translation of the Mallarme lines before attempting mine, except that then my translation would have been inevitably influenced by the other person’s version.
I don’t think my clumsiness with such non-English languages as I know is a trivial business, incidentally. It’s a function of a broader question of cultural imperialism: we English-speakers expect everyone else to learn our language perfectly, and yet rarely bother learning any other languages ourselves, and if we do we tend, as in my case, to do so in a patchy and careless manner. The inertia of this is all tangled up with the imbalances of power and the distortions of the globalised 21st-century world, and is not a good thing. My experience when I visit France is that natives are surprised to find an Englishman who speaks any French at all, and are extremely forgiving of my mangling ungrammatical inarticulacies. I don’t believe that’s true the other way about.
Rich: you’re right about the rhyme scheme of course.
You’re also right, I think, about the third stanza.
Appearing as clouds
Oaks in their gray
Float in near forests
In the mist-way
...is better than mine; although ‘mist-way’ baffles me a little. My Collins Robert tells me that ‘buées’ means clouds of steam or condensation, and therefore mist, so smoke is probable wrong. Except that it rhymes nicely with ‘oak’ (chêne). How about:
As the clouds
Amongst the oaks
Float near the grey
Forest that smokes.
Or
As the clouds
Amongst the oaks
Float near the grey
Forest of smoke.
But those aren’t either of them very good. What if we go for a cliche?
As the grey oak trees
Are cloud-kissed
The nearby forest
Amongst the mist.
Rich: You ask questions ... fog, mist, buées: all different kinds of “Nebel”, I should say. I suppose I’m a little hazy about this.
But you didn’t ask that at all: clearly not smoke.
My French-German dictionary says “Dunst, Dampf(wolken)”, which would be (clouds of) vapour or mist. It seems Verlaine takes up the clouds from above, “nuées” and “buées” being here, really, pretty much the same thing.
“Like clouds, the oaks from the forests nearby float in grey amongst the vapour (clouds).”
Sentence structure: adverbial, verb, subject. “Flottent” is the finite verb; the present participle would be “flottant”.
Like clouds of oaks
Float in grey
Forests nearby
In a misty way.
In cloudy forest
Floats the oak
Nearby and grey
Amongst the smoke.
Both happy, Adam and Rich?
The problem with smoking forests is that it tends to imply that they are burning—either wholesale in a forest fire, or with smoke from charcoal-burners, perhaps. The first is a lot too dramatic for this poem, which is about the ennui of the land; the second implies an active human presence within a landscape that otherwise lacks one. I don’t like “kissed” for the same reason.
“Mist-way” may be too Scandinavian, though.
Perhaps something with oak / cloak, although I dislike bringing such a clothing metaphor into a poem of exposure.
My wife’s suggestion:
Like clouds the oaks
Float in grey
Forests nearby
In mist, oy vey.
I’m not sure that gets us very far. Maybe:
Like clouds the oaks
Float in grey
Forests nearby
In mist arrayed.
But apart from the awkward archaism/inversion, that falls foul of Rich’s good point about clothing metaphors.
How about importing something into the poem?
Like clouds the oaks
Float in grey
Forests nearby
A milky way.
I like “oy vey”.
Allright, time for the tedious rhyme-arranging:
Comme des nuées
Flottent gris les chênes
Des forêts prochaines
Parmi les buées.
Translates literally, as far as I can tell, into:
Like clouds
Float gray the oaks
In forests nearby
Among the mists
That gives cloud, float, gray, oak, forest, nearby/near, mist as potential rhyme first-halves, unless we’re going to look for more latinate synonyms for words. (Vapor has the wrong feel, I think.) The key is to find a second-half that doesn’t introduce a new meaning into the poem, or at least a meaning that’s consistent.
cloud has shroud and crowd
float has remote
gray has stray, stay, way, array, away, display, portray, survey
oak has smoke (of course), cloak, evoke
forest has nothing
nearby has many rhymes none of which look useful
near has appear, austere, severe
mist has kissed, consist, exist, persist, subsist
Perhaps something with clouds and “mist enshrouds”, which is a) a cliche, b) still clothing, but at least dead clothing.
Any better ideas?
OK, Rich; since, it seems, you’re not quite happy, still, I’ve thought out the following, full rhyme and everything, expressly for you:
Oaks floating by
Cloud-shaped and grey;
As trailing mists in the sky
Forests fade away.
For the rest, Adam’s translation is OK.
You should be happy now.
Thanks, that’s pretty good. But the original stanza is an abba rhyme, so if you’re going for full, I wouldn’t do abab. Also, if we’re going to just replace this one stanza, it shouldn’t be full rhyme or it will stand out too much.
So I’d modify it to:
Oaks float nearby
Clouded and gray
Hidden in mist
Forests fade away
Which also turns movement (oaks floating by, trailing mists) into subtraction (with the emphasis on the forests removing themselves from the landscape). I think that may be close enough.
One last note (I say last because there doesn’t appear to be as much interest in this poem); I’d translate ennui as ennui, rather than as boredom. It has a somewhat different meaning than boredom, and a better stress pattern for the line, and it’s a recognized loan word from French into English that shows up in English dictionaries. If I were e.g. translating Spanish into Spanglish, I’d just keep any original word that fit.
Ennui, spleen, mal du siècle, melancholy, Weltschmerz ... I prefer boredom of the land ... until the bitter wind comes, with rising diphthongs and mists in “my” (linking) passage (passage of transition); and transitory trees ...
In the interminable
Boredom (dark, long monophthong) of the land (m.)
The uncertain snow
Shines (rising d.) like (rising d.) sand (m.).
The translation isn’t too bad, really.
Gets over, essentially, what there is to be trans-lated; the living and dying of the moon.
And all the rest ...
Happy birthday, Adam!
You, gasping crow,
And you lean wolves too;
When the bitter winds blow
What will you do?
That can easily be done.
I prefer Adam’s verse, no matter what Verlaine does; for the roughness. And there’s the correspondence wheezer / wind (alliteration; onomatopoeia), which is far better than smooth rhyme here. Kind of “Stabreim”: wheezer, wolves, when, wind, what will, which perfectly imitates the whistling of the wind. Note that in the original there’s not only a correspondence between (sharp, somewhat “rough”, high-pitched) vowels (as English does not have; /yiii/, /iii/, and so on), but also a corr. betw. consonants; if you want to convey the overall mood of the poem in English, I suppose you’re well advised to try with consonant tonalities, and not-so-smooth rhyme. It’s not really the rhyme “scheme” (“schematic” rendering doesn’t seem to make much sense here; we’re dealing with poetry), but rather the quality of the rhymes (and sounds in general, part. in Verlaine) that makes the poem what it is. Adam’s fifth stanza is just as thoroughly worked out as regards consonants as my (third) stanza is in vocalism. These two stanzas stand out, being the only ones dealing with (transitory) forms of life, trees and animals respectively.
As I’ve said, the translation is pretty good; “revisions” might be for the worse.
I wonder how “smooth” the song of the crow, or the howling of the wolf may be.
You, puffing owl,
...
When the bitter winds howl
...
Maybe:
You, wheezing crow,
And you lean wolves too;
When the bitter winds blow
What will you do?
That doesn’t take away too much of the consonant quality; with /ouuuuu:/, and /uuuuuu:/, imitating the howling of the wolf, and of the wind.
Happy, Rich?
And Adam too?
A little bit of alliteration in “my” stanza too: floating, forests fade ... /fff/; like vapour that escapes from the valve ... (not really; no human presence here, I know, but ...) ... as the “souffling” ... (as the soughing, sighing ...) ... as the whiffing wind ...
I pretty much like the poem; it’s a very good example of what the (fugitive, frail) “light” of the moon (our imagination; the moon is not really there, “on croirait voir ... la lune”) can do when the (clear) (day)light of the sun (reason) is excluded from the scene ...
Note the vertical movement of the trees, moving upwards, like vapour (hence rising diphthongs) towards the sky ...
Here’s “Art poétique” by the master himself; so that you know what I’m talking about.
PAUL VERLAINE
Art poétique
De la musique avant toute chose,
Et pour cela préfère l’Impair
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air,
Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou pose.
Il faut aussi que tu n’ailles point
Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise :
Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise
Où l’Indécis au Précis se joint.
C’est des beaux yeux derrière des voiles,
C’est le grand jour tremblant de midi,
C’est par un ciel d’automne attiédi
Le bleu fouillis des claires étoiles !
Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,
Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance !
Oh ! la nuance seule fiance
Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor !
Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine,
L’Esprit cruel et le Rire impur,
Qui font pleurer les yeux de l’Azur,
Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine !
Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui son cou !
Tu feras bien, en train d’énergie,
De rendre un peu la Rime assagie.
Si l’on n’y veille, elle ira jusqu’où ?
O qui dira les torts de la Rime !
Quel enfant sourd ou quel nègre fou
Nous a forgé ce bijou d’un sou
Qui sonne creux et faux sous la lime ?
De la musique encore et toujours !
Que ton vers soit la chose envolée
Qu’on sent qui fuit d’une âme en allée
Vers d’autres cieux à d’autres amours.
Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure
Eparse au vent crispé du matin
Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym…
Et tout le reste est littérature.
In the interminable
Boredom of the land
The uncertain snow
Shines like sand.
The sky is copper
Without light of her own.
It’s like watching the living
And dying of the moon.
Oaks floating by
Cloud-shaped and grey;
As trailing mists in the sky
Forests fade away.
The sky is copper
Without light of her own.
It’s like watching the living
And dying of the moon.
You, wheezing crow,
And you lean wolves too;
When the bitter winds blow
What will you do?
In the interminable
Boredom of the land
The uncertain snow
Shines like sand.
"As I’ve said, the translation is pretty good; “revisions” might be for the worse.”
Well, revisions have been comparatively minimal for this one. I do think that either your third stanza or my modification of yours is better than Adam’s original of that stanza, though. (Although I still prefer my version below):
Oaks float nearby
Clouded and gray
Hidden in mist
Forests fade away
For the fifth stanza, I think that it’s important to preserve whatever rhyme scheme (standard poetry talk in English) we settle on. Adam went for abcb; as long as we’re keeping the rest of his stanzas, I don’t think that the fifth stanza should be abab, even though it works well in isolation. So I’d keep his fifth stanza as is—although if you didn’t like his first line, you could keep your first line and deliberately break the second rhyme like so:
You, wheezing crow,
And you lean wolves too;
When the bitter wind comes
What will you do?
"Although I still prefer my version below”. Well, well.
I suppose you prefer your poetry to mine, and me mine to yours. What else to be expected.
“I think that it’s important to preserve whatever rhyme scheme ... we settle on.”
Stanza 5: I’d keep Adam’s first line, because I like it; and “when the bitter winds blow”, because it rhymes with snow.
Is it possible to say “Oaks float on by”? From the point of view of grammar, I mean. I’m not happy with the sentence structure; I’m quite happy with my rhymes, though.
My poetry does rhyme; and I like Adam’s half rhymes. You won’t force me into standard patterns.
(De la musique avant toute chose,)
Et pour cela préfère l’Impair ...
I can’t force you to do anything, Birgit, and don’t want to; this is a discussion. But this isn’t really an issue of half rhymes vs full rhymes, as it was with the last poem. Adam’s original poem has an abcb rhyme scheme with only one half-rhyme, own / moon. Going to abab for one stanza is, in my opinion, distracting—too many rhymes are as bad as too few.
Sometimes you get more, sometimes you get less.
C’est la vie.
Half-rhyme, half rhymes, full rhyme ...
I meant half-rhymes, and half-rhyming stanzas, all included; his rhymes rhyming halfway, and his rhymes rhyming to the amount of half of them.
I like the way he rhymes.
I imagine Adam sitting there laughing up his sleeve; he knows you, and he knows me, and your poetry, and my poetry. Doesn’t say anything; what else to be expected of him. I wonder where any such “discussion” between you and me is supposed to lead. I’m happy to believe you don’t want to force me to do anything; but you won’t persuade me either.
Hope that doesn’t leave you “unsatisfied” again.
I appreciate your efforts.
And, maybe, with a certain amount of good will, we can agree on Oaks float ...
Floating oaks: a nice picture anyway.
I don’t know where these poetry revision threads are supposed to lead, exactly, other than (as Adam said in the first one) to better translations than they started with, through a sort of communal effort. But judging by the first thread, we certainly don’t need to agree on one final version; there can be as many different versions as there are people. At any rate there’s no large difference that makes me really invested in my version of stanza 3 rather than yours, since I based mine on yours anyway.
So yes, I appreciate your work on this too.
Floating oaks,
Cloud-shaped and grey,
Trail like mists in the sky
And fade away.
That’s it; I’m happy now.
Or rather ... ... ... ...?
Oaks float on high,
Cloud-shaped and grey;
As trailing mists in the sky
Forests fade away.
The poem well chosen anyway.
Could become fond of that ...
I always seem to find these threads too late! I should check the Valve more often. (In my defense, my wife and I had a baby girl a couple of weeks ago). I thought I’d try my hand at this--please excuse the pretty perverse version I came up with. I’m sure I could come up with some kind of rationalization for it, Japonisme in 1870’s France and all that. Here it is:
Strewn over endless
monotonous fields, scattered
snow glistens like sand.
The sky is made of
glintless copper and the moon
now lives and now dies.
Ashen float the oaks
In the neighboring forest
like clouds in the mist.
The sky is made of
glintless copper and the moon
now lives and now dies.
What will come of you,
wheezing crow and famished wolves,
in these bitter winds?
Strewn over endless
monotonous fields, scattered
snow glistens like sand.
If I’m not mistaken, there’s also a bit of Sappho plagiarism in my second (and fourth) stanza.