A Formal Approach to the Translation of French Poetry, with a Representative Selection of Translated
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GLEANINGS IN FRENCH FIELDS: A FORMAL APPROACH TO THE TRANSLATION OF FRENCH POETRY, WITH A REPRESENTATIVE SELECTION OF TRANSLATED POEMS FROM THE SIXTEENTH TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURIES _________________________________ A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College Ohio University _________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in French _________________________________ by Robert A. Armstrong April, 2020 Invocation: From “Words” by Edward Thomas Out of us all That make rhymes, Will you choose Sometimes— As the winds use A crack in a wall Or a drain, Their joy or their pain To whistle through— Choose me, You English words? I know you: You are light as dreams, Tough as oak, Precious as gold, As poppies and corn, Or an old cloak: . Worn new Again and again: Young as our streams After rain: And as dear As the earth which you prove That we love. Let me sometimes dance With you, Or climb Or stand, perchance In ecstasy, Fixed and free In a rhyme, As poets do. Table of Contents Part I: On Translation Introduction: New Worlds . 1 Versification in French and English: Conventions and Comparison . 4 Historical Perspectives on Translation . 19 A Personal Approach to Translation . 30 Borrowers and Borrowings in Poetry. 40 Part II: Poets and Poems Note on the Texts . 73 Louise Labé . 74 Joachim Du Bellay . 82 Pierre de Ronsard . 91 Jean de La Fontaine . 97 L’Abbé de Lattaignant . 103 André Chénier . 109 Victor Hugo . 118 Gérard de Nerval . 150 Théophile Gautier . 157 Leconte de Lisle . 166 Charles Baudelaire . 179 Stéphane Mallarmé . 190 Paul Verlaine . 195 Arthur Rimbaud . 200 Appendices Timeline of French History, 1500-1900 . 217 Acknowledgements . 225 Works Cited . 228 Armstrong 1 Part I: On Translation Introduction: New Worlds Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken . —John Keats1 In the summer of 2015, I made my entry into the world of French literature as many Americans have done for the past 70-plus years: with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince. The copy was old—a Houghton Mifflin educational edition from my grandmother’s school days, published only three years after the book’s first American appearance, and the very same year it made its debut in liberated France (Cerisier n. pag.). That this now-venerable text was being used to introduce schoolchildren to French literature even in the 1940’s struck me; it bespeaks an instant canonicity for the book. Le Petit Prince certainly has a seminal place in the French canon today—for myself, for all the French students in my high school, and for countless thousands of other Anglophones, it is a rite of passage. It is a portal from the world of verb-charts to the world of literature—that is to say, from the world of artificial classroom language to the world of living real-world language: le monde francophone. It is, veritably, a world unto itself; any speaker of a second language can attest to this fact. There is the world of one’s native language, and there is the 1 Appelbaum, English Romantic Poetry 189. Armstrong 2 world of each foreign language one encounters. Every such world comes with its own population, its own uses and wonts, its own rules—and its own literary canon. As much as it is revelatory, thrilling, seductive—and fun—to enter this new world, the initiation immediately poses a problem. For the student of literature, the canon is the cultural basis of the world. To be worldly, to even begin to know this world, one must know the canon. Even if the student of English has not read the complete works of Shakespeare, Austen, and Steinbeck, there is much to be said for knowing of these authors: when they wrote, what they wrote, what they represented. Within this schema, within this structure, the student fills the canon in with deeper knowledge of those authors and works that particularly interest him or her. And then the student learns a new language, enters a new world, and confronts a new literature in its shining, daunting totality. Daunting is what it is to explore the English canon, the endeavor of a life for those who love the exploration; now the world is doubled overnight. Thus, with that first sentence—Lorsque j’avais six ans . (Saint-Exupéry 1)—I made, as I have said, my entry into the new world of a second literary canon. I liked what I found, and set about exploring. The last assignment in my last year of high school French class was meant to offer us, the graduating students of French 5, some guidance in our incipient explorations. We were to peruse a selection of some of the best-known poems in the language (the likes of “Demain, dès l’aube . .”), pick one we liked, and, reading it carefully and closely, produce a translation. I selected a poem called “Heureux qui, comme Ulysse . .” by a fellow called Joachim Du Bellay. It was Keats finding Chapman’s Homer. I felt the poem; I loved the poem; I wanted my translation to feel the same, and so I set myself the challenge of reproducing the poem’s form: rhymed alexandrine verse. The translation was loose, and marked by a beginner’s clumsiness, Armstrong 3 but the process exhilarated me, and so it is in that spring of 2016 that this project can be said to have its deepest roots. I got to college, and translation stayed in the back of my mind. My first semester at Ohio University I was an engineering major; it was by a fortunate series of events and with the help of some wonderful people that by my sophomore year I was studying French in the Honors Tutorial College. From nearly the start I had a project of poetry translation in mind for my eventual senior thesis. I took a series of classes and tutorials in poetry, translation, and related areas, and gradually built both a body of works and my own focused approach to translation. I will explain these both in detail, but before I do, some preliminary explanations are in order. Armstrong 4 Versification in French and English: Conventions and Comparison “Il fallait . ne pas se croire autorisé à violenter la langue par l’exemple d’un usage ancien dont on n’avait pas pénétré les raisons.” —Maurice Grammont2 As the matter at hand is translation of French verse into English, let us begin by examining the conventions of French poetry, and then pass on to those of English, before we finally arrive at the synthesis of the two that must be reached when translating the one into the other. The main resources I shall draw on in this section are Maurice Grammont’s Petit traité de versification française and Timothy Steele’s All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification. Grammont’s treatise was published in 1908 when the traditional rules of French verse were just beginning to be challenged by experimentative Modernist poets; as I have included no translations of poems composed after the 1870’s, it is a perfectly suitable resource. Steele is still alive and writing poetry, but is something of an apologist for old-fashioned formalism—his work is marked by “its allegiance to traditional forms, meters, and rhyme schemes,” and is thus a similarly appropriate resource (“Timothy Steele”). English verse for the past several centuries has been primarily accentual-syllabic (more on this later, but think of the iambic pentameter “heartbeat” rhythm typical of lines like Shakespeare’s “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”). The defining feature of French poetry during the same time period, however, has been syllables more so than accents. While the 2 Petit traité de versification française 25. Armstrong 5 line above from Shakespeare is considered regular because it has ten syllables, of which five are stressed or accented (hence accentual-syllabic), a ten-syllable line in French like Du Bellay’s “Sacrez costaux, et vous sainctes ruines” (Antiquitez de Rome VII) is regular only for its ten syllables, regardless of where stress falls. French verse shares this syllabic nature with other Romance languages like Italian and Spanish (Steele 137). It is noteworthy that stress is generally much less prominent in these languages than in English. For anybody acquainted with French, but not French verse, this notion of syllables can get confusing. Take the second quatrain from Victor Hugo’s “Nuits de juin”: Les astres sont plus purs, l’ombre paraît meilleure ; Un vague demi-jour teint le dôme éternel ; Et l’aube douce et pâle, en attendant son heure, Semble toute la nuit errer au bas du ciel. To the uninitiated, counting syllables here, it might seem like the quatrain is composed of lines of ten, eleven, eleven, and ten syllables. A strange pattern, but perhaps some conventional form? Not so. While in modern conversational French these lines would likely have those syllable counts as prose, by standard conventions of verse pronunciation they are in fact all regular twelve-syllable lines, called alexandrines. In Old French (the language of the 11th to the 13th centuries, according Chauveau et al. [xii]), Grammont explains that the count of syllables in poetry conformed rigorously to everyday pronunciation. As pronunciation changed moving into Middle and Modern French, however, the rules for pronunciation of poetry remained largely static, resulting in the discrepancy highlighted Armstrong 6 above (7). First and foremost is the problem of the letter “e.” The rules for when and how to pronounce the French “e” are byzantine, but the matter is actually simpler in poetry than in prose.