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Translating Alexandrines: Sonnets of Ronsard and Baudelaire Thomas Carper
In his 1962 collection Imitations, Robert Lowell wrote this in his preface: "Most poetic translations come to grief and are less enjoyable than modest photographic prose translations . . . . Strict metrical translators still exist. They seem to live in a pure world untouched by contemporary poetry. Their difficulties are bold and honest, but they are taxidermists, not poets, and their poems are likely to be stuffed birds. A better stragegy would seem to be the now fashionable translations into free or irregular verse." Lowell admits that this method "commonly turns out a sprawl of language, neither faithful nor distinguished," and so he calls instead for "expert and inspired" translation, or "imitation." Many are likely to agree that much free-verse translation is undistinguished, but some is useful and moving. And surely, as the "captives" section of "Sparrow" magazine and translations in journals like "The Formalist" have demonstrated for years, there are numerous top-notch translators who reproduce admirably in meter and rhyme the meanings and the poetry of their originals. These poets are not taxidermists. But there are always areas where more might be done. My particular concern is with translations from French Renaissance and Romantic poets, specifically those writing in alexandrines--the twelve-syllable line that is as integral to a vast number of wonderful French poems as the iambic pentameter is integral to a vast quantity of poetry in English. First, it must be said that there is a wealth of French verse written in eight- and ten-syllable lines. When these poems are translated into English, tetrameters and pentameters usually convey the rhythms of the originals effectively. But those who translate poems written in the longer French alexandrines almost invariably use the English norm, pentameter (a notable exception is Edna St. Vincent Millay). In the past, I myself thought that pentameters were the only way to go. But for translating many French poems, English alexandrines can be made to work well. Alexandrines in English are relatively rare, and the reason seems to be that a six-foot iambic line, a hexameter, tends to break in two--as though you have two trimeters jammed together. Nevertheless, as Derek Attridge notes in The Rhythms of English Poetry, the alexandrine has been used for long poems by Drayton, Swinburne, and Morris, and with considerable frequency as a "special device to achieve a feeling of closure" (128). When it is so used, the effect of the six-beat line can be magical, as in the Spenserian stanza and, here, Spencer's "Epithalamion": Then I thy soverign praises loud will sing,Or it can be impressive, as at the end of Longfellow's sonnet "Mezzo Cammin": And hear above me on the autumnal blastAnd of course during the nineteenth century Longfellow's popular "Evangeline" was written in dactylic hexameters. So alexandrines and hexameters have occasionally been used with distinction and success--though their effect can seem forced and laborious, as Pope notes amusingly in his famous lines from the "Essay on Criticism," A needless Alexandrine ends the song,Yet in French, alexandrines are usually elegant and musical, and I hope that by giving ear to examples of alexandrines in English we may conclude that it is possible to bring those qualities of elegance and musicality, and their pleasures, into this language as well. But there are pitfalls, and one of them is demonstrated by my own experience with a poem by the sixteenth-century poet Pierre de Ronsard, author of hundreds of marvelous love poems dedicated to Cassandra, to Marie, to Hélène--and others! A friend of French kings and known both as "the prince of poets" and "the poet of princes," he claimed that he was responsible for bringing alexandrines "into vogue and honor." Two summers ago I undertook a project to make a sequence of several translations of Ronsard sonnets interspersed with new sonnets about the places where he was born, where he met one of his loves, Marie Dupin, where his middle years were spent, and where he died--all places my wife and I had visited. The idea was to bring together poems of the present and the past. In translating six Ronsard sonnets I tried to replicate his alexandrines and to follow, as closely as practicable, his Petrarchan-style rhyme schemes. (For my own sonnets I used a conventional Shakespearian style.) But several years earlier I had translated one of the poet's love poems, a sonnet to Hélène, which I wanted to use in the sequence. It had appeared in "Sparrow," and I hunted it up. For that first translation I had managed a longer-than-pentameter line which at that time satisfied me ("When, one day, you are very old, spinning or skeining wool . . ." ); yet looking at the translation afresh, I realized that it was rather sing-songy, and that it strayed far from the twelve-syllable norm; I had fallen into an easygoing meter which I would have to correct. I'll demonstrate what had happened. Here in French are the first four lines of "Quand vous serez bien vieille": Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir à la chandelle,These are the opening lines of my first translation--which I later determined weren't right: When, one day, you are very old, spinning or skeining woolCertainly the rhythm wasn't that of the pentameter line I was trying to lengthen, but it wasn't alexandrines either. What I had done was to fall into an insistantly rhythmical seven-foot iambic line--fourteeners, or heptameter. I had gone from familiar pentameter to the next-longer "easy" rhythmical meter, entirely skipping over what I was aiming at. So, displeased with my own first version's looseness, I revised my way back to a twelve-syllable iambic line. Here is the version I found more satisfactory, being more representative of the French: When you are very old, spinning or skeining woolThis revision permitted my English to represent better the solemn, somewhat melancholy tone of Ronsard's French. Here is a comparison, line by line: Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir à la chandelle,The ordering of ideas and images in the translation is, of course, not identical to Ronsard's ordering, and meanings sometimes shift a bit. But I do feel that a better sense of what Ronsard wrote--even of his speaking tones--comes through in this effort with rhymed alexandrines than with less-formal styles. (Of course Ronsard rhymes his octave in the strict Petrarchan way--a b b a, a b b a, while I, despairing of enough rhymes, had to fall back on the easier a b b a, c d d c.) A more cheerful Ronsard poem, written for an earlier love, is "Marie, levez-vous," which I translated for my project and called "Awakening Marie." As with the "Sonnet for Hélène," I'll compare lines from the first quatrain in the two languages and, then, give the complete translation, hopeful that it will strike you as being a fair representation of the original's rhythm, tone, and meaning--and, at the same time, a poem. Marie, levez-vous, ma jeune paresseuse:Here's the complete sonnet: Marie, arise! Arise, my young, my lazy love;Moving from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, one encounters new subjects, images, and attitudes, but of course the sonnet form remains the same, and the same problems of adequate translation exist. As with Ronsard, over the years there have been more-or-less strict metrical translations of sonnets and other poems from Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal. In the book of translations by Edna St. Vincent Millay and George Dillon, after remarking in a preface that "to translate formal stanzas into free verse . . . is to fail the foreign poet in a very important way," Millay goes on to say that "to many poets, the physical character of their poem, its rhythm, its rhyme, its music, the way it looks on the page, is quite as important as the thing they wish to say; to some it is vastly more important" (vii). She laments that, generally, a translator "takes the poem, no matter what its form may be, and forces it into the meter and form to which he is most accustomed, the one in which he writes most easily." Many may, like Robert Lowell, say "bravo," but it seems to me that Millay holds to a higher standard. And therefore she commits herself to what subsequent translators have generally backed away from: Baudelaire's alexandrines translated into English alexandrines. Even though in achieving the desired result a poem may, perhaps, be "pretty roughly handled," as Millay says, "its anatomy at least is still intact." (One might add that many translators who avoid meter, or rhyme, or both, handle poems pretty roughly, too.) Let's consider the beginning of three versions of Baudelaire's "L'Ennemi," or "The Enemy," which illustrate varying rhyming patterns, degrees of rhyming, and strictness of meter. The first is Millay's (from Flowers of Evil), then Robert Lowell's (from Imitations), and then Richard Howard's (from Les Fleurs du mal). Millay: I think of my gone youth as of a stormy skyLowell: My childhood was only a menacing shower,Howard: My youth was nothing but a lowering stormOnly the first, Millay's, uses alexandrines. As with the Ronsard poems, one can hear how rhymed alexandrines can give the reader, or listener, both meaning and the original poem's anatomy: Ma jeunesse ne fut qu'un ténébreux orage,Some of the language here, particularly in the second line, is less direct and plain than Baudelaire's; but for me Millay's preservation and transmission of rhyme and meter make it the most effective of the three opening quatrains--and the most effective translation as a whole. A second Baudelaire poem, "Le gouffre," has attracted many translators. Its central comparison is one between the poet and the seventeenth-century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, who suffered vertigo from imagining a gulf always beside him. Because I like the poem, and because all of the versions I've seen are based on the pentameter, I tried a translaton using the rhymed alexandrines of the original. Here are the opening four lines of Lowell's and Howard's translations of "Le gouffre," or "The Abyss," and then my complete one. But first, what Baudelaire wrote: Pascal avait son gouffre, avec lui se mouvant.Now, from Robert Lowell's imitation: Pascal's abyss went with him at his side,It's pentameters here (though the sixth line of the imitation, "the silence! And the Lord's right arm," is a tetrameter). And though these opening lines may be said to rhyme "abab," rhymes--full and half--in the rest of Lowell's version seem randomly distributed. Whatever the merits of this imitation, Baudelaire's form is only distantly approximated. Here is Richard Howard's translation: Pascal had his abyss, it followed him.Again, fine pentameters throughout, but without what the translator calls, in the preface to his book of 157 translations, the "minor stratagem" of rhyme. To rhyme the entire Fleurs du mal is indeed a daunting proposition, but without rhyme the pentameters lose, for me, much of their music and energy. And lastly, my effort to use both rhyme and alexandrines in the translation: Pascal had his abyss, sensed ever at his side.To compare the rhythms of first lines for a final time: Pascal avait son gouffre, avec lui se mouvant. Some will undoubtedly ask themselves, is the effort to
replicate in English the technical features of verse written in other languages
worthwhile? And of course many answers have been given. We know what Edna
St. Vincent Millay had to say, and Robert Lowell was quoted as saying, pretty
much, do what you like, but be "expert and inspired." Other ways of sensing
the effects and getting to the meanings of poems in languages other than
English have been suggested. Stanley Burnshaw, in his book The Poem Itself,
recommends our trying to pronounce original texts so that we may experience
their rhythms and sounds, and then seek meanings with the help of line-by-line
prose renderings and commentary by specialists (xi). Some, too, are satisfied
with Sergeant Joe Friday's "Dragnet" approach ("Just the facts, ma'am"),
where a literal meaning--insofar as that's posssible to ascertain--is rendered
in straight prose or a poetical language of one sort or another, free verse
or rhythmical. But though the perfect translation is a chimera, we as readers
continue to hope for the best, so that worlds whose languages are not ours
may be visited with some sense of familiarity. And what about "just the facts"?
The final line of Baudelaire's "Le gouffre" is "Ah! ne jamais sortir des
Nombres et des Etres!" What, in fact, does "êtres" mean? My Larousse
dictionary gives "existence," "living things," and "persons, individuals" as
definitions for this common word. Our translators render "des Nombres et
des Etres" as follows: "numbers and form," "Numbers and Beings," and "Numbers
and Men." (I've also seen "Numbers and Entities.") Which rendering might
Baudelaire say best expresses his meaning? We'll never know. But we do know
one thing for sure: When composing "Le gouffre," Baudelaire was writing a
poem--one with a definite structure, or anatomy, inherited from his predecessors
like Ronsard. Perhaps if he were here now, he would shake his head sadly
at all of our attempts to put his poems into English, but certainly the one
thing he would notice and, I'm pretty sure, approve, is every attempt to
honor the forms that he honored. The meters would count. The rhymes would
count. Should we not, then, encourage our translators to renew their efforts
to achieve the best-possible versions of whatever other-langauge poems have
moved them--both by content and by form--so that the poetic experience they
have valued may be brought more vividly to life for others? Works Cited Attridge, Derek. The Rhythms of English Poetry.
London: Longman, 1982.
Thomas Carper Received: 6 March 1998; Published: 29 May 1998 [This paper was first presented in a slightly different version at the 1997 "Exploring Form and Narrative" conference on New Trends in American Poetry at West Chester University, June 1997.] COPYRIGHT (c) 2002 THOMAS CARPER. READERS MAY USE PORTIONS OF THIS WORK IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE FAIR USE PROVISIONS OF U.S. COPYRIGHT LAW. IN ADDITION, SUBSCRIBERS AND MEMBERS OF SUBSCRIBED INSTITUTIONS MAY USE THE ENTIRE WORK FOR ANY INTERNAL NONCOMMERCIAL PURPOSE BUT, OTHER THAN ONE COPY SENT BY EMAIL, PRINT OR FAX TO ONE PERSON AT ANOTHER LOCATION FOR THAT INDIVIDUAL'S PERSONAL USE, DISTRIBUTION OF THIS ARTICLE WITHOUT EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM EITHER THE AUTHOR OR THE EDITORS IS EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN. |