[Geoff Brock]

Charles Baudelaire


The Cracked Bell

It is both sweet and bitter to remain
On winter evenings by the burning log,
And hear forgotten memories rise again
Upon the chimes that ring out through the fog.

How fortunate that strong and cheery bell,
Despite its age, so wakeful and content,
Who hourly resounds its faithful knell,
Like some old soldier watching by his tent.

Me, my soul is cracked, and when it longs
To fill the dark and bitter sky with songs,
Its voice is like the faint and rasping sound

Made by a man upon the battleground,
Who struggles, by a lake of blood, to rise,
But pinned beneath a pile of corpses dies.


[original]

La cloche felée

II est amer et doux, pendant les nuits d'hiver,
D'écouter, près du feu qui palpite et qui fume,
Les souvenirs lointains lentement s'élever
Au bruit des carillons qui chantent dans la brume.

Bienheureuse la cloche au gosier vigoureux
Qui, malgré sa vieillesse, alerte et bien portante,
Jette fidèlement son cri religieux,
Ainsi qu'un vieux soldat qui veille sous la tente!

Moi, mon âme est fêlée, et lorsqu'en ses ennuis
Elle veut de ses chants peupler l'air froid des nuits,
II arrive souvent que sa voix affaiblie

Semble le râle épais d'un blessé qu'on oublie
Au bord d'un lac de sang, sous un grand tas de morts
Et qui meurt, sans bouger, dans d'immenses efforts.


[trot]

It is bitter and sweet, during winter nights,
to listen, next to the crackling and smoking fire,
the distant memories slowly arising
on the sound of the chimes, that sing through the fog.

Happy the bell with the vigorous throat,
who, in spite of its age, alert and cheerful,
faithfully throws its religious cry,
like an old soldier watching by his tent!

Me, my soul is cracked, and when in its unhappiness,
it wants to fill the cold night air with songs,
it often happens that its weak voice

resembles the thick rattle of a wounded man, who is forgotten,
beside a lake of blood, beneath a great pile of corpses,
and who dies, without moving, in the midst of great efforts.

[Geoff Brock]

Like many of the entries I received, “La cloche felée” by Baudelaire is one of those classics that gets retranslated about once a day. When translating a piece that has never been translated before, the translator may feel a heavy responsibility to help it make a good first impression. When retranslating a classic, however, we can proceed knowing that its place is secure, which is liberating: we can’t hurt it. Of course we probably can’t help it much, either, but that doesn’t matter if we’re translating the piece, as we usually are, primarily for our own pleasure—because we feel that none of the other translations have gotten it quite right, because we want to contribute our version to the ever-growing chorus of versions, or simply because we love the original and want to establish that intimate bond that translation allows.

I should say first that this version, with some minor revisions, would deserve a place among the better versions of this poem that I know: it reads very well in most places. Millay’s hexameter version remains my favorite, and I wondered if that log/fog rhyme in the first stanza was nicked from her. (If so, well nicked.) I do miss some version of the word palpite, which might suggest a burning heart to go with the cracked soul.

The second stanza is by far the roughest. There are too many adjectives—five—in the first two lines, and three of them (fortunate, cheery, content) cover similar ground. The rich rhyme (content/tent) doesn’t sound nearly as good in English as it does in French; I might suggest “vigilant” as a substitute for “content.” (Rich rhyme works best in English when it becomes a motif, as it does in several Donald Justice poems, e.g. “Sadness.”) And if I missed “palpite” in the first stanza, I miss “religieux” in the second; “faithful” doesn’t quite get us there on its own. Finally, the “qui” in line 6 does not have the value of “who” but rather of “that” or “which.” (It’s true that the bell is being personified in French, but not grammatically; using “who” in English makes the personification seem heavy-handed.)

The third stanza is stronger; my main quibble here is with the opening “me, my” construction, which results in a headless line, and which stands (or so I’ve always thought) on a lower rung of the rhetorical ladder in English than in French. (Can anyone confirm or deny this?) I also wonder, in the next line, whether “fill” is as rich a verb as “peupler” and whether the “froid” comes through. (I’m not sure that “bitter,” which in any case already appeared in line 1, necessarily suggests “cold” in this context.) What about: “To populate the cold night air with songs”?

I love the rest—this version of the final tercet is as good as any I know. My only suggestion here is to add two commas in the last line, after the first word and before the last. A crucial quality of the original is the syntactic choppiness of the final couplet, which slows the poem, in jerking motions, to a halt, echoing the soldier’s dying struggle.

[Susan McLean]

This is an excellent version, I think, but could be tightened in a few spots. "Upon" appears twice, and it both sounds old-fashioned and takes two syllables to say what "on" says in one. In L2 "burning" is rather colorless. Something like "flickering" might pick up the "palpite." In L11 "rasping" doesn't evoke quite the right sound. Perhaps "rattling" would be better to evoke the death rattle. I hate to see "oublie" forgotten. I might suggest for L12 "of one left wounded on the battleground." In L9 "me" doesn't really work grammatically in English, even if it does show up in conversation. "But I" or "but my own" could be substituted for it. In L7 "pious" might work instead of "faithful."

Susan

[Skip Dewahl]

As Geoff says, "palpite", not being translated, omits the suggestion of a beating heart, but I have no trouble with "Me" of S3L1, because I take it to mean "As for me".

True, this is a toned down translation of Baudelaire's flowery constructions, but the thing is very accessible and never drags, rarely looks contrived, and this is not an easy thing to accomplish. Sure, one might have wished for more fidelity, but that sometimes brings with it contortions and semantic obfuscations, so I say, salut!

[Stephen Collington]

It's a matter of taste, of course, but I find the metre excessively regular. With the exception, noted above by Geoff, of one dropped syllable at the "headless" head of L9, it's 70 iambs (okay, 69) in a row, all marching in order in neat, end-stopped lines. (Arguably, yes, there's also an "inversion" at the beginning of L12.) The result is that it feels a bit too neat, too pat, for its subject. A kind of self-conscious, formal respectability interposes itself between reader and poem; the illusion of voice is broken.

That said, the sharp caesura after "cracked" in L9 stands out all the more for the "ambient regularity," so perhaps some good comes from it after all. It's the pivotal moment of the poem, its "turn," and the sharpness of that *crack* resounds with suddenness and unexpectedness. Just as it should. And I think that the headless iamb at the start of the line contributes to the effect, too; the disruption in the metre is iconic of the disruptive breakdown in the poet's inner world. So I'd definitely vote to keep it. (As for grammaticality, "Me, my . . . " seems a pretty straightforward example of topic-fronting, using the emphatic pronoun. It might be frowned on in an essay, but there's certainly nothing "ungrammatical" about it. Expressions like that you hear all the time.)

Otherwise, I have to say I miss the "dans d'immenses efforts" of the last line in the original. Of course "struggles" has it covered meaning-wise, but the effect is not the same. In part, it may just be a matter of rhymes--"rise" calls forth "dies" too predictably, and so (again) there's a feeling of too much formal perfection, too much closure. By contrast the "morts" of the original is open-ended, as it were--we're not expecting "efforts" in the same way, and so when it does hit us . . . dans d'immenses efforts . . . there is a sense of terrible grandeur to the rhyme. Or to put it another way, with rise/dies, we literally do get closure, the soldier dies . . . has died, and all is done. But Baudelaire's original leaves us in the middle of the process, the soldier is still dying, "dans d'immenses efforts," at the end of the poem. It's over . . . but it's not; the dying continues on after we finish reading. And that lingering sense of horror is essential to the terrible power of the poem.

So it's a good effort; a very competent piece of verse translation. But I don't think it quite captures the essence of its original.

[Adam Elgar]

I very much like the pause, or break in speech, created by the headless line 9 - I think it achieves just the right effect for the context, and all the more so for coming at the volta. However, if it does need smoothing out, that might be achieved by something like "But I'm cracked in my soul" or "But cracks run through my soul" (since the number of cracks isn't specified).

Like Geoff, I'm inclined to believe that the close is as well done here as it's ever been.

[Petra Norr]

I think this poem is enhanced by the quiet, lovely, measured meter. It helps create the pensive mood at the start of the poem, and as the poem goes on it helps to deepen the mood. As others have said, L9 is great -- the comma after "cracked" and the break at "longs", which could be called the second real enjambment. It introduces an urgency at the right time in the poem.

It's very usual to see padding in translations, but in this case it's the opposite. This translation has simplified the poem. I think it works really well (I read the poem aloud, too, and it sounds great). There were only two places where I thought it was kind of a shame to simplify. Susan mentioned one of them: the "burning log". In the crib the fire is crackling and smoking; that's more active than the passive "burning log".
Also, "the vigorous throat" of the bell is missing. Maybe "vigorous" isn't a good word, but I like the ref to the bell's throat.
In connection with this, I want to echo Susan's comment about "upon". I didn't care for "upon the chimes".

Generally caps don't bother me unless they create a lot of ambiguity, but this is one time when I really have to question them. Why use caps in a translation?

[Catherine Chandler]

I had just written a lengthy critique, but I lost my login status and everything disappeared. How frustrating.

Anyway, it was simply to say that this is a very lovely translation, though I think the second instance of the word "bitter" in line 10 should be replaced (the translator was probably thinking in terms of "bitter cold").

Also, the word "palpite" was ignored and one word "burning" was inserted to do the work of two words "palpite" and "fume" (which is not really burning, but rather smoldering or smoking).

"Faithful" doesn't do the job for the word "religieux" - what about something like holy, pious, or solemn . . .

My biggest nit was the "Me, my" literal English translation in L9. Beaudelaire is using the French tonic accent, via the stressed pronoun, "moi", at the beginning of the sentence, to show what we, in English, would accomplish by simply stressing or saying a little louder, or italicizing (in written form) the word "My". The words "Me, my" is very jarring, at least to my ear, and I would rather see something like, "My own poor soul is cracked", though other liberties must be taken.

[Gregory Dowling]

Yes, "me" as an opening word in an English sentence sounds most definitely downbeat and colloquial - which I think is quite different from the force of the French "moi". As Geoff puts it, on a "lower rung of the "rhetorical ladder". I think Catherine is right that "my own" would work much better.

Apart from that, fine work - particularly in the closing lines.

[Roger Slater]

I pretty much agree with most of the comments so far, though as I started to look more carefully I found quite a few small issues, and at least one large issue, which I explain in my comments on S2, which is the stanza that I feel needs the most work (as Geoff remarks, although I have some objections to it that Geoff didn't cover).

S1:

The first line seems a bit padded. I'm not just referring to the somewhat optional "both," and the sense that "bittersweet" has been recast as four words, but also the use of the word "remain" to end the line, which isn't in the original at all. What is sweet and bitter is the listening, not the remaining somewhere while listening. I suppose it could be argued that adding "remain" doesn't change the meaning all that much, and this is the kind of thing that must be done to produce rhyming translations, but my complaint isn't as much about fidelity to the original as it is about the sense of padding I get in the translation, since "remain" doesn't really do any work but rhyming.

The phrase "forgotten memories" is borderline oxymoron and does not seem to be in the original, which says "distant." Perhaps something like "secluded memories"?

I'm not sure why the memories are rising "again", which implies they rose at least once before.

I'd say "sing" instead of "ring," since it is more accurate and the idea of song returns in L10.

Does "bruit" mean "sound" or "noise"?

Is "chimes" the right word? To me this suggests very small bells, such as you'd find on a clock on the mantel. I guess you didn't want to say "bells" because the next line ends on "bell." Maybe you could work in "carillons" somehow?

S2:

What happened to the vigorous throat? I don't think "strong and cheery" begins to cover it or to sound nearly as interesting. Particularly since the poem ends with a motionless death rattle in a less than vigorous human throat, I would think it's important to keep the throat of the bells in L5 (which is also the throat of the old soldier).

But my biggest problem with this stanza by far (and with the translation as a whole) is the word "knell," since it destroys the sense of the old soldier simile. Old soldiers do not let out a "knell." The original apparently says that the bell lets out a "cry," which makes sense since an old soldier can certainly let out a cry. In S2, the bell is being completely anthropomorphised and given a throat that lets out a cry like an old soldier by his tent. By eliminating the throat and the cry, and continuing to use bell words like "knell," I think the whole point of the stanza is lost.

I'm not sure where "hourly" comes from.

Can "resound" be used as a transitive verb?


S3:

What happened to the unhappiness? I'm not convinced it is fully implied in the fact that the bell is cracked, and Baudelaire did choose to have the speaker announce his unhappiness is so many words at this point. It seems to me that this is the emotional climax of the poem, the cris de coeur, so it's a shame to omit it.

S4:

The word "battleground" sounds a bit cumbersome to me and takes up space you could use to restore some of the words in the original you didn't have room for. For example, you don't mention that the man was wounded, but could do so like this (with a couple of other possible tweaks incorporated):

Made by a wounded man upon the ground,
Who strives, beside a lake of blood, to rise,
But, trapped beneath a pile of corpses, dies.

Or even:

Made by a wounded soldier on the ground

which would avoid the stilted "upon."