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Unread 09-13-2017, 04:58 PM
Andrew Szilvasy Andrew Szilvasy is offline
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It is a conversation, but even if it were true that half of Yeats' "When You Are Old" is Ronsard's, this isn't quite the same thing as, say, a poet taking a teenaged girl's poem and merely cutting it, or the example given above. Chaucer and Shakespeare stole plots, stole lines, but reshaped them. To me that isn't plagiarism. That is the heart of intertexuality.

And, just for comparison's sake:

Ronsard
Quand vous serez bien vieille

Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle,
Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant,
Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant :
Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle.

Lors, vous n’aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle,
Déjà sous le labeur à demi sommeillant,
Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s’aille réveillant,
Bénissant votre nom de louange immortelle.

Je serai sous la terre et fantôme sans os :
Par les ombres myrteux je prendrai mon repos :
Vous serez au foyer une vieille accroupie,

Regrettant mon amour et votre fier dédain.
Vivez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain :
Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie.

Yeats

"When You Are Old"

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Notice here that Yeats' title draws the explicit connection to an educated reader, but that rather than parrot him he takes the superficial similarities and goes in different direction within a pretty established poetic motif.

I'm sympathetic to the arguments of intertexuality, and to the invention of "originality." Frankly, I don't think any translation of another's poem, for instance, should neglect the translator. The poem is a synthesis rather than a literal carrying over. Any poems I translate carry their own title, and have "after [x]" after them for that very reason: the French poem is Verlaine's, but what's in front of you is something else. But I'm unsympathetic to more than an unattributed line or phrase swipe, especially in one's own language, and especially when the thief is the powerful figure taking something from the less powerful. Random similarities in phrasing is one thing, but most of the examples given in Matt's article are more than that.
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