[Julie Steiner]

"Chant du Grillon" by Théophile Gautier (France, 1811-1872)


VERSE TRANSLATION:

Tale ("Song") of the Cricket

Blow you Norther! Drop a flood, shower!
Palace of mine, my sooty bower,
I laugh at the rain and the wind,
Awaiting winter's last fled hour
By chimney-side as dreams descend.

'Tis I whose spirit is the fire!
The gas, with a tonguing blue spire,
Leisurely licks about the wood;
The smoke, alabaster thread higher,
Spirals at my voice, understood.

The kettle's achatter and giggling;
The silver-footed flame is jiggling
In its backing up of my song;
The log into its down is wriggling;
The embers boil sap before long.

The asthmatic wheeze of the bellows
Compels with music my ear follows;
The spit of steel-created cogs
Mixes some domestic concertos,
As, tick-tocking, its balance jogs.

The twinkling sparks who shone delighted
In stellar blooms where both united,
Crissing, crossing, above the sphere,
Made salamander eyes unsighted
At snickering laughs, thin but clear.

From deep in my cell dark and dusky,
When Bertha spins tales old and musty,
Like Riding Hood or that Bird of Blue,
'Tis I who's her memory's trustee,
'Tis I to hush fires when due.

I smother the noises found plodding
in spinning-wheel creaks monoglotting;
I choose when the tomcat goes mute;
Though cuckoo's intoning and nodding,
None hears the hours quickly scoot.

I sing from night to day's duration
Below the chimney at my station;
Oft in my cricket language I've,
From her big sister's barbed evasions,
Made sweet Cinderella revive.


FRENCH ORIGINAL:

Chant du Grillon

Souffle, bise ! tombe à flots, pluie !
Dans mon palais, tout noir de suie,
Je ris de la pluie et du vent ;
En attendant que l'hiver fuie,
Je reste au coin du feu, rêvant.

C'est moi qui suis l'esprit de l'âtre !
Le gaz, de sa langue bleuâtre,
Lèche plus doucement le bois ;
La fumée, en filet d'albâtre,
Monte et se contourne à ma voix.

La bouilloire rit et babille ;
La flamme aux pieds d'argent sautille
En accompagnant ma chanson ;
La bûche de duvet s'habille ;
La sève bout dans le tison.

Le soufflet au râle asthmatique,
Me fait entendre sa musique ;
Le tourne-broche aux dents d'acier
Mêle au concerto domestique
Le tic-tac de son balancier.

Les étincelles réjouies,
En étoiles épanouies,
vont et viennent, croisant dans l'air,
Les salamandres éblouies,
Au ricanement grêle et clair.

Du fond de ma cellule noire,
Quand Berthe vous conte une histoire,
Le Chaperon ou l'Oiseau bleu,
C'est moi qui soutiens sa mémoire,
C'est moi qui fais taire le feu.

J'étouffe le bruit monotone
du rouet qui grince et bourdonne ;
J'impose silence au matou ;
Les heures s'en vont, et personne
N'entend le timbre du coucou.

Pendant la nuit et la journée,
Je chante sous la cheminée ;
Dans mon langage de grillon,
J'ai, des rebuts de son aînée,
Souvent consolé Cendrillon.


ENGLISH PROSE CRIB:

Tale ("Song") of the Cricket

Blow, North Wind! fall in waves, rain!
In my palace, all black with soot,
I laugh at the rain and the wind;
While waiting for winter to flee,
I remain at the corner of the fire, dreaming.

It is I that am the spirit of the hearth!
The gas, with its bluish tongue,
Licks more softly the wood;
The smoke, in alabaster thread,
Rises and spirals to my voice.

The kettle laughs and chatters;
The siver-footed flame jumps about
In accompaniment to my song;
The log dons itself in down (i.e., white fluffy ash);
The sap boils in the embers.

The asthmatically wheezing bellows,
Makes me listen to his music;
The steel-toothed roasting-spit
Mixes with a domestic concerto
The tick-tock of its balance.

The sparks overjoyed,
In (fully) blossomed stars,
go and come, crossing through the air,
The salamanders were bedazzled (= temporarily blinded),
At the snickering thin and clear.

From the back of my dark cell,
When Bertha tells one a story,
The Hooded One (= Riding Hood) or the Bluebird (= French literary fairy
tale),
It is I who keeps up her memory,
It is I who hushes the fire.

I smother the monotone noise
of the spinning-wheel that creaks and whirs;
I impose silence on the tomcat;
The hours depart, and no one
Hears the timber of the cuckoo.

During night and day,
I sing below the chimney;
In my cricket language,
I have, from the snubs of her elder sister,
Often consoled Cinderella.

[Julie Steiner]

NOTES ON THE POEM CHOICE:

This poem whisks us into the fiefdom of its self-important little speaker. The transition from his version of reality into the land of fairytales is barely a transition at all. But the hearth is traditionally one of the thresholds of fairyland, anyway. Remember that Cinderella received that insulting sobriquet for her habit of sleeping on the hearth, near the cinders, after slaving away for her stepmother and stepsisters. Ah, but how could we forget, when the cricket himself reminds us in the last stanza above?

By the way, here's a Youtube video of an antique rotisserie (tourne-broche) like that described in Stanza 4, with the balance wheel ticking away underneath the wind-up mechanism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-twzxkxcCc
Apparently, one can still purchase such a contraption for one's home fireplace:
http://www.tompress.com/CT-1870-tournebroches.aspx

If it seems as though the poem simply stops, rather than concludes...that's because there are actually five more stanzas to it:
http://www.unjourunpoeme.fr/poeme/chant-du-grillon
Note that there's a second part in a different meter, in which the cricket sighs that his black palace is a prison, causing him to miss out on the spring that the rest of nature enjoys. But I greatly enjoyed this, and hope that the translator will treat us to the rest of the first section sometime, and perhaps the second, too.


NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION:

Gotta settle on just one title.

I enjoy occasional metrical variations to add interest--for example, the verse translation's wonderfully irregular S3L1 is aces! However, since the narrator presents himself as master of everything, he should be master of the language, too; occasionally in the verse translation, I feel as if there are awkward spots where he's still fighting for control of it. For optimal charm, the piece should flow easily both metrically and syntactically.

In the first and last stanzas, I'd prefer to see "cheminée" translated as "fireplace" or "hearth," rather than as the deceptive cognate "chimney".

The following suggestions to smooth out the meter and syntax are offered as I would any Eratosphere critique--i.e., with the caveat that they are only suggestions, and not infallible.

S1L1: Drop a flood, shower! --> Surge, you shower!
S1L2: Palace of mine, my sooty bower, --> Palaced in my soot-black bower,
(The grammatical relationship between this line and the next is otherwise unclear.)

S2L2: The gas, with a tonguing blue spire --> The gas-flame's tonguing, bluish spire
S2L3: Leisurely licks about the wood; --> Licks more gently at the wood
S2L4: The smoke, alabaster thread higher, --> And alabaster smoke-veils gyre
(I suggest "veils" because I associate "filet" with netting or gauze, rather than with a single thread ("fil") of smoke, as from a candle. "Gyre" popped into my head from the Francisco Leal poem's initial "Gira y gira".)
S2L5: Spirals at my voice, understood. --> And float when I proclaim it good.

S3L1: achatter --> a-chatter
S3L2: jiggling --> jiggling,
S3L3: In its backing up of my song; --> Keeping rhythm with my song;
S3L4: The log into its down is wriggling; --> Into down, the log is wriggling;
S3L5: The embers boil sap before long. --> Sap-filled cinders boil along.

In S4L2, I'm uncomfortable with such submissive language. It seems out of character, since the cricket is otherwise such a dominant, assertive, vibrant personality. I also think it's important to somehow evoke the mechanism of the whole rotisserie rather than just the spit. Finally, "Mêle au" would be better rendered as "Adds to" than as anything related to mixing, even though that's the literal meaning. In short, I think S4 needs a more extensive rewrite than just a few tweaks here and there.

Since the salamanders in S5 are the poem's first genuinely magical creatures, rather than ordinary household items that are enchanted by the cricket's song, I'd prefer more straightforward syntax there, so that the salamanders are easier to visualize clearly.

In S6, I'm not too keen on the circumlocution "Like Riding Hood or that Bird of Blue"; perhaps that could be "Like Riding Hood's or Bluebird's tale" instead, with "tale" reworded in the preceding line. And shouldn't "'Tis I who's" be "'Tis I who am"?

I love "monoglotting," but the penultimate and final stanzas seem metrically clumsier than the rest. The enjambment on "I've" seems awkward; "barbed evasions" doesn't quite connote insults; "revive" doesn't quite connote comfort; and "Oft" is...um..."Oft"; so I'd advise playing around with the wording there a bit more.

I eagerly await the rest of the poem, sometime soon on the Translation Board, perhaps.

[Ann Drysdale]

Ah, here's a poet I love to distraction and who has driven me ditto when I have tried to make him speak in English. He is fiendishly hard to translate because of the open simplicity of his language, its easygoing "Frenchness". Rendering that in English goes beyond "say" or "mean" and in my case, tempts me onto the primrose path that ends in a "version".

So, when I come across a translation as good as this I can only gasp in amazement. Well done! It's all there, and the original rhyme-scheme is preserved.

But I miss the cosiness of the fireside chez Gautier. I think it's the adherence to the original's pattern that has scuppered it. The choice of a freer (more English?) framework would have meant a greater choice of language and that might have made the poem less stiff.

Where it grabs for resonance, with words like "achatter" and the magnificent "monoglotting" (yes, spellcheck - redwiggle all you like, I know what I'm getting at) I feel with the translator that agonising conviction - "it's out there, dammit - but I can't reach it!".

From one Theo-phile to another, a handclasp and a smile.

[Adam Elgar]

I'm less enthusiastic than Ann. Yes, there is much to applaud here as a rendering of a taut, vivid, homely French lyric. The tone is right, and the accuracy is fairly good. But one of the delights of Gautier is his "tic-tac" precision, and metrically there are a lot of false steps in the English version.

As an example, how are we to scan

"'Tis I who's her memory's trustee,
'Tis I to hush fires when due"?

The first of these lines would be fixed by following Julie's advice and making 'is' into 'am' as it should be.

I think the lines about the cuckoo clock need another look too.

[Maryann Corbett]

There are stanzas and lines I like quite a lot, and I'll point especially to the descriptions in s2, 3, and 4.

But l agree with Adam about the metrical problems. I'm sure it's deliberate that the meter slides back and forth from four stresses per line to three, but that sliding can make me unsure about what the poet intends in a given line. [Editing back: I realize belatedly that I'm inferring the translator's metrical intentions from the tight meter of the original, and I could be just plain wrong.]

I have trouble with the inversions and grammatical oddities, too. This insertion/interruption in particular bothers me:

Oft in my cricket language I've,
From her big sister's barbed evasions,
Made sweet Cinderella revive.

It would bother me not at all after a fully spelled out "I have" or between "I" and "have" but placed where it is, it doesn't sound like idiomatic English.

The diction is a mix, and I'm not sure about it. The grammatical inversions might work in a poem that stuck to nineteenth century diction, but the mix of contemporary and archaic phrasing makes the inversions OTT for my ear.

Points to the translator for choosing a long poem, though.

[Sharon Fish Mooney]

I appreciated the translation but the meter is off quite a bit , yet could be rectified without much sacrifice of the current content …..if you scan, for example, the first lines of all the stanzas and rework some of them—then the second throughout, the third and on down the line it could be very powerful metrically though some of the end rhymes may need to go—I don’t think “oft in my cricket language I've” is salvageable (the whole last stanza seems the weakest) ….I’ve been reading more about Gautier – an “Art for Art’s sake” kind of guy ---and looking at his meter in many of his poems—“his mastery of technique” (Williams Rees) seems to call out for a similar mastery of technique with any translation – a few ideas below with change ideas highlighted


Blow you Norther! Drop a flood, shower!
Blow you North Wind! Rain down! Shower!
Palace of mine, my sooty bower,
In my palace, my sooty bower
I laugh at the rain and the wind,
Awaiting winter's last fled hour
While waiting for winter’s last hour
By chimney-side as dreams descend.
By the fire as dreams descend


The kettle's achatter and giggling;
The kettle’s a-chatter and giggling;
The silver-footed flame is jiggling
The flame, silver-footed is jiggling
In its backing up of my song;
In accompaniment to my song.
The log into its down is wriggling
The log, into down, is wriggling;
The embers boil sap before long.

The asthmatic wheeze of the bellows
Compels with music my ear follows;
Draws me in to the music that follows

[Catherine Chandler]

I read this in the original ages and ages ago in my undergraduate days. The translation is quite competent and the effect is enjoyable, but I agree with most if not all of Julie's nits, beginning with puzzlement at why in God's name the translator couldn't decide on a definitive title.

[Skip Dewahl]

Some problematic lines are

Compels with music my ear follows; (Sounds halting)

The spit of steel-created cogs (Well, obviously if the cogs are of steel, they are of steel; no need to fill in with "created". Better to have worked in something like "remating" or some such.)

'Tis I who's her memory's trustee, (Wrong verb; the line should read: " 'Tis I am her memory's trustee", which would flow even more naturally.)

Although you seem to have followed the meter to exactitude with "None hears the hours quickly scoot.", you would have been better off in bringing it to metrical agreement with "I choose when the tomcat goes mute;" It's fine to be slavish to a poem, but not when the original has a line off kilter. No need to mimic bad lines.

Most have taken issue with the final stanza, but I think, despite some need for a little embellishment, it flows nicely, largely preserves the meaning and meter, and the inversions don't bother me. Oh, and "barbed evasions", is exactly what the author had in mind, as he pictures the elder sister passing by Cinderella, making a nasty remark, and then walking away as though her stepsister were unworthy to be heard. So, not bad, if a bit too faithful to the metrics.

[Mary McLean]

Kudos for trying to replicate the rhyme and meter, but it isn't really working for me. The syntax is just too awkward, as others have pointed out.

[Janice D. Soderling]

It doesn't read smoothly. This is often the case that when one concentrates on meaning. (For me, anyway.)

I like Sharon's suggestions. Maybe if the translator just puts it away for awhile, it will smooth itself out.