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  #1  
Unread 11-04-2002, 05:12 AM
Tim Murphy Tim Murphy is offline
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Welcome, Pierre et Terese. Our purpose this week is to assist--if we can--Terese in her stunning attempts to smuggle Pierre's great lyrical genius into contemporary speech. Background: When we were discussing Yeats' Ronsard "imitation" (in the Lowell sense) over at Mastery, Terese posted a fresh translation that met with great acclaim. It was so fine that I wrote Bill Baer at the Formalist, and he promptly accepted it. And I urged Terese to carry on the work. So this week we are conducting a Mastery Workshop to try to polish some of these up for publication. Our immediate goal is to get twelve of them ready for an e-book.

Here is Chanson:

Song
Spring has not the flowers
Nor autumn such a squall
Nor summer heat the power
Nor winter cold the pall—
Nor Beauce the cornucopia,
Nor all the seas the fish,
Bretagne no utopia,
Auvergne no fount like this—
Nor has the night the torches,
Nor have the woodlands trees,
As I, the scars and scorches
You’ve burned there by degrees.

Chanson
Le printemps n’a point de fleurs,
L’autonne tant de raisin meurs,
L’este tant de chaleurs halees,
L’hyver tant de froides gelees,
Ny la mer a tant de poisons,
Ny la Beauce tant de moissons,
Ny la Bretaigne tant d’arenes,
Ny l’Auvergne tant de fonteines,
Ny la nuict tant de clairs flambeaux,
Ny les forests tant de rameaux,
Que je porte au coeur, ma maistresse,
Pour vous de peine et de tristesse.

I shall have seen and commented on all these prior to posting, but I am no metrical moderator nor have I much command of French. Let me observe of this that I think Terese has wisely decided to compress Pierre's tetrameter into hypermetric trimeter, a decision not unlike Wilbur's decision to smuggle Moliere's alexandrine's into our pentameters. My only remaining suggestion on this translation is to keep Ronsard's title, Chanson, which is widely understood in English and has a ring to it that Song has not.
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  #2  
Unread 11-04-2002, 09:00 AM
Clive Watkins Clive Watkins is offline
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Dear Terese

This is a characteristically attractive version. Alternatively, you could perhaps consider something simpler and more direct, along these lines:

The spring has not such flowers,
Nor autumn such ripe fruit,
Nor summer scorching heat,
Nor winter icy showers,
Nor seas so many fish,
Nor Beauce such good wheat-lands,
Nor Brittany broad sands,
Nor Auvergne springs so fresh,
Nor night such brilliant stars,
Nor endless boughs the forest,
As for your sake, my dearest,
This poor heart bears the scars.


The Beauce region was noted for its wheat. As to "flambeaux", I take this as a conventional image for stars. I don't know if the sands of Brittany are broad, but other adjectives would fit here just as well. I admit that "fresh" for the thermal springs of the Auvergne, to which I take it Ronsard is referring, is a bit of a stretch: call it poetic licence, anyway!

This suffers from (at least) one defect, in that to some degree it transposes Ronsard’s quantitative argument into one based rather more on kind. (Arguably, your version shares this defect.) In this, Ronsard’s French perhaps has the advantage of our English: his repeated "tant de" makes fewer metrical demands on his line than do equivalent English expressions on ours. Whether this inaccuracy is excusable is a matter of taste, I suppose.

What an interesting project!

Clive Watkins
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  #3  
Unread 11-04-2002, 10:54 AM
Deborah Warren Deborah Warren is offline
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Hi, Terese.

What a great project indeed, and no easy task.

Clive's 'sands' is more faithful, and I do prefer it to the '-opia' words. Also, the 'stars' opportunity (I agree with him on 'flambeaux') as a rhyme for 'scars' is inspired.

I'm glad you've not kept repeating 'such'--'the' is much more pleasing.
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  #4  
Unread 11-04-2002, 01:13 PM
Clive Watkins Clive Watkins is offline
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Dear Terese

Picking up Deborah’s wise hint about "such", here is a revised version of my lunch-time effort. Part of the difficulty is that Ronsard’s little poem is built on a rhetoric of repetition, "tant de" occurring in nine out twelve lines.


Spring has not such flowers,
Nor autumn store of fruit,
Nor summer scorching heat,
Nor winter icy showers,
Nor seas large shoals of fish,
Nor Beauce such fine wheat-lands,
Nor Brittany broad sands,
Nor Auvergne springs so fresh,
Nor night so many stars,
Nor endless boughs the forest,
As for your sake, my dearest,
This poor heart bears the scars.

Best wishes!

Clive
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  #5  
Unread 11-04-2002, 06:14 PM
Terese Coe Terese Coe is offline
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Dear Clive

Your posts are characteristically generous.

There's something extremely difficult going on here which doesn't, as much, occur on the boards for original poems: it's clear that we're comparing versions and I, for one, feel embarrassed about having to choose between another's version and my own. The only other alternative would be to sit here and postpone any decisions at all. It feels so absurdly self-indulgent to have to say, "Well, I like this aspect of yours and that aspect of mine," but that's what we're up against. I know that you are one of the real proponents of modesty here, so that makes it doubly grating. You know, the British social deference is very attractive to me.

Last edited by Terese Coe; 03-19-2011 at 03:19 PM.
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  #6  
Unread 11-05-2002, 02:17 AM
Clive Watkins Clive Watkins is offline
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Dear Terese

Your delicacy does you credit!

Of course you are at liberty to "choose" - but the point of my posting was to illustrate what is, after all, obvious, that there are more ways than one of working this into English. No version will ever, for every reader, be perfect. Nor are translations "replicants": they are, inevitably, reworkings in another tongue, and this is part of their fascination.

One of the difficulties with the Ronsard is gauging how strong the feeling is which might be supposed to lie behind what are in many respects very conventional locutions. (This, in various guises, is a problem common to the translation of lyric poems.) You cite, for instance, Ronsard’s last line, which can be read as a powerful cri de cœur, as merely the fulfilment of a familiar rhetorical game - or, of course, as something in between. The slant one tries for will depend to some extent on how one re-imagines the supposed relationship from which the poem appears to spring. This in turn might require some understanding of courtship customs and related literary practice in the social and cultural milieu in which Ronsard lived. In the end, we achieve only approximation in such things; nor will our own creative bias pass unseen in the decisions we make.

Between us, then, perhaps we demonstrate how workable metrical poems can be made both by cleaving fairly close to the source text and by allowing oneself rather more imaginative licence - without, that is, running off in the direction of "imitation" (a perfectly valid form in my view, by the way).

I hope, then, that my rather hasty Englishing of Ronsard’s verses serves a useful purpose on this thread - and as part of the larger exercise it initiates.

Best wishes - as always!

Clive
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  #7  
Unread 11-05-2002, 05:22 AM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is online now
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Very fine, Terese. I've only a minute, so for now I'll restrict myself to just one comment. In your version, I don't know what "there" refers to in the in the final line. In Clive's and the French, I can see the burning is done on the "heart" --but yours leaves out the heart. Maybe a good choice, since the word may be softer and more cliched now than back then, but it still leaves the problem of what "there" refers to.

Bob

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  #8  
Unread 11-05-2002, 02:32 PM
Terese Coe Terese Coe is offline
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Dear Clive

Yes, you're right: we've presented a clear picture of how translations are inevitably tempered by the composite personality of poet and translator.


Roger. Touche! No quick fixes, and "here" doesn't seem to work either, so I'll have to spend some time on that. Thanks for pointing it out.


Terese

Last edited by Terese Coe; 03-19-2011 at 03:22 PM.
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  #9  
Unread 11-05-2002, 03:10 PM
Susan McLean Susan McLean is offline
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Terese,
Perhaps "As my own heart the scorches / You've burned there by degrees"? That would make the referent clearer.
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  #10  
Unread 11-05-2002, 04:44 PM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is online now
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Just a few more hit and run comments now that I've looked up a few of the words in the French.

Maybe insert the word "sand" before "utopia"? I think the meter would be maintained, and at least you'd reintroduce the idea of sand (which my negligible French tells me the line should include) along with your addition of "utopia", which doesn't actually seem to be in the original.

I don't have strong feelings about the degree of fealty to the original that is "required," as it were, but I'm wondering at "squall" as a subsitute for the dead raisins (again, I may have mangled the French, so forgive me), a word that seems to be an addition and not merely an extrapolation.

An overall comment is the way the final lines are prepared for. It seems that the poem is saying that none of these quantities from nature exceeds the pain that the poet is feeling, but maybe the quantitative aspect has been a bit blurred so the pay-off lines don't seem to follow with the same rigid logic they do in the original.

I've never commented on a translation in progress before. It's fun! And I can see how daunting the challenge you face, and how fine a start you've made.

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