A Syntax of Cadaverous Dignity.

In E.M. Cioran’s “Lettre à un ami lointain” (Letter to a Faraway Friend), the first chapter in his book Histoire et utopie (History and Utopia), there is a remarkable passage about his switch from writing in Romanian to French:

It would be the narrative of a nightmare, were I to give you a detailed account of the history of my relations with this borrowed idiom, with all these words so often weighed, worked over, refined, subtle to the point of nonexistence, bowed beneath the exactions of nuance, inexpressive from having expressed everything, alarming in their precision, burdened with fatigue and modesty, discreet even in vulgarity. How should a Scyth come to terms with such terms, grasp their true meaning and wield them with scruple, with probity? There is not one among them whose exhausted elegance fails to dizzy me: no longer a trace of earth, of blood, of soul in such words. A syntax of severe, of cadaverous dignity encompasses them and assigns them a place from which God Himself could not dislodge them. What consumption of coffee, of cigarettes and of dictionaries merely to write one half-way decent sentence in this inapproachable language, too noble and too distinguished for my taste! I realized as much, unfortunately, only after the fact, when it was too late to change my course; otherwise, I should never have abandoned our own, whose odor of growth and corruption I occasionally regret, that mixture of sun and dung with all its nostalgic ugliness, its splendid squalor. Return to it, I cannot; the tongue I was obliged to adopt pinions and subjugates me by the very pains it has cost me.

It’s reminiscent of Nabokov’s famous lament about having to give up Russian for English; I wish I could quote the original French, but the French keep their literary treasures locked up tight.

Comments

  1. The French is here.

  2. So it is! I take back my grumpy remarks about the French, and I thank you (and am impressed by your search-fu). “Une syntaxe d’une raideur, d’une dignité cadavérique les enserre et leur assigne une place d’où Dieu même ne pourrait les déloger”!

  3. Good find, Y. Our excerpt is on pages 7 and 8 of that PDF:

    Ce serait entreprendre le récit d’un cauchemar que de vous raconter par le menu l’histoire de mes relations avec cet idiome d’emprunt, avec tous ces mots pensés et repensés, affinés, subtils jusqu’à l’inexistence, courbés sous les exactions de la nuance, inexpressifs pour avoir tout exprimé, effrayants de précision, chargés de fatigue et de pudeur, discrets jusque dans la vulgarité. Comment voulez-vous que s’en accommode un Scythe, qu’il en saisisse la signification nette et les manie avec scrupule et probité ? Il n’en existe pas un seul dont l’élégance exténuée ne me donne le vertige: plus aucune trace de terre, de sang, d’âme en eux. Une syntaxe d’une raideur, d’une dignité cadavérique les enserre et leur assigne une place d’où Dieu même ne pourrait les déloger. Quelle consommation de café, de cigarettes et de dictionnaires pour écrire une phrase tant soit peu correcte dans cette langue inabordable, trop noble, et trop distinguée à mon gré ! Je ne m’en aperçus malheureusement qu’après coup, et lorsqu’il était trop tard pour m’en détourner; sans quoi jamais je n’eusse abandonné la nôtre, dont il m’arrive de regretter l’odeur de fraîcheur et de pourriture, le mélange de soleil et de bouse, la laideur nostalgique, le superbe débraillement. Y revenir, je ne puis; celle qu’il me fallut adopter me retient et me subjugue par les peines mêmes qu’elle m’aura coûtées.

    The translator’s pinions for retient is striking and apt. One thinks of a decked albatross, chez Baudelaire.

  4. Yes indeed.

  5. It turns out that the translator is Richard Howard (d. 31 March 2022, aged 92), masterly transmitter of Les Fleurs du mal. Howard’s rendering of “L’Albatros”:

    Often, to pass the time on board, the crew
    will catch an albatross, one of those big birds
    which nonchalantly chaperone a ship
    across the bitter fathoms of the sea.

    Tied to the deck, this sovereign of space,
    as if embarrassed by its clumsiness,
    pitiably lets its great white wings
    drag at its sides like a pair of unshipped oars.

    How weak and awkward, even comical
    this traveler but lately so adroit –
    one deckhand sticks a pipestem in its beak,
    another mocks the cripple that once flew!

    The Poet is like this monarch of the clouds
    riding the storm above the marksman’s range;
    exiled on the ground, hooted and jeered,
    he cannot walk because of his great wings.

  6. J.W. Brewer says

    Dignité Cadavérique sounds like the name of a Walloon metal band. (Although it would admittedly be odd for such a band to have an L1 name, rather than an English-language name that is clearly trying to sound bad-ass and intimidating but is somehow slightly off in an ESL-ish kind of way.)

  7. I have such mixed feelings about the Albatross translation. It very much feels like what it is—a rhymed poem stripped of its rhymes. The admirable smoothness of the words and the metre only emphasizes the contrast. (Insert analogy to a captive albatross.)

  8. I have my own rhymed translation Y, somewhere in a shoebox. I agree that rhyme is of the essence when it’s there in the original. But that’s a minority opinion around here. Howard has many elegant touches and deserves deep respect.

    Since we are discussing it, Baudelaire’s original:

    L’Albatros
    Souvent, pour s’amuser, les hommes d’équipage
    Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
    Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
    Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

    À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
    Que ces rois de l’azur, maladroits et honteux,
    Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
    Comme des avirons traîner à côté d’eux.

    Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
    Lui, naguère si beau, qu’il est comique et laid!
    L’un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
    L’autre mime, en boitant, l’infirme qui volait!

    Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
    Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer;
    Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
    Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.

    I must consult my wife about the felt relations between Romanian and French. Her mother spoke Romanian, Hungarian, English, and enough German; and she herself speaks Hungarian, rapid earthy French, English of course, some Romanian, etc. etc. These are people who glide broad-winged and effortlessly among the billowing codes. O to be East European! (Think also of Celan, of course.)

  9. J.W. Brewer: “A Walloon metal band” I never thought I would see that phrase. Thank you. I can imagine Bill Bailey saying that. And then actually playing the metal band’s best piece.

  10. Noetica: my great-grandfather was fluent in Ottoman Turkish, Bulgarian, Romanian, Katarevousa Greek and the local Aromanian, as well as French and English and Ladino. That was normal at the time in the Balkans. Singuallingualism is an unfortunate historical abberation.

  11. Hard for the rest of us to catch up.

  12. Neoetica; Bill Bailey is a stand-up comedian and also a musician. He incorporates music in his shows. He was in the TV show Black Books with Dylan Moran and Tamsin Greig.

  13. Neoetica: You’re translating poetry from Romanian to French? A friend of mine will be interested. She does that too, beside Romanian also from Albanian, but to German.

  14. V:

    Bill Bailey is blessed with perfect pitch (less accurately but more commonly called “perfect pitch”), and has appeared many times on the BBC’s comic TV panel show QI. According to Wikipedia, “Bailey has a carnivorous pitcher plant named after him, Nepenthes x Bill Bailey, created by Borneo Exotics in Sri Lanka. His sporting interests include standup paddleboarding (SUP). He is an active supporter of British Canoeing.”

    We who flit among the ruins can only dream – in odd lucid glimpses at the threshold of wakefulness – of how such versatility must feel from the inside.

    The call of truthfulness, however, would have me explain that I know quite enough about Bill Bailey and his like and all too little about Ladino and Bulgarian. I do my best. Sporadically.

    You’re translating poetry from Romanian to French?

    I am not. But I would, for a dare. I came perilously close, through a conversation at dinner with a beguilingly beautiful young Romanian philosopher many years ago (too much information). Her name is lost to me.

    I have translated Serbian (in print), Croatian (in print), Polish, Hungarian, Chinese (published in a 3D VR presentation, in Beijing), Ancient Greek, Modern Greek (in print), Italian, Old Italian (Petrarch; in print), Old Neapolitan, Spanish, French (in print), Middle French (in print), Latin (in print), German (stolen for use on BBC radio, who then offered to pay me $20) … and so on and on. This doesn’t mean I know those languages of course.

  15. I meant “blessed with absolute pitch”, of course. And that I would, for a dare, translate Romanian verse into English verse. Into French would be doable, but a far greater challenge for me – and I would risk stern authoritative scrutiny from Hatters whose native language it is.

  16. I wish I could find a copyable text of Kingsley Amis’ perfectly rhymed version of Baudelaire done into Cockney, “The Helbatrawss”. Maybe someone else can: or if I can find time I’ll type it out, if Hatters can’t find it for themselves.

  17. PlasticPaddy says

    Qvite orfen, fer a larf, coves on a ship
    Ketches a uge seaburd, a helbatrawss.
    A hidle type as mucks in on the trip
    By follerin the wessel on its course.

    Theyve ardly got im on the deck afore
    Cackanded, proper chokker—never mind
    Es a ighflier—cor, e makes em roar
    Voddlin abaht, is vings trailin beind.

    Alof, yus, e was smashin. but es grim
    Like this—e aint arf hugly nah es dahned!
    Vun perisher blows voodbine smoke at im,
    Anuvver tikes im orf by oppin rahnd!

    A longaired blokes the sime: ead in the clahds
    E larfs at harrers, soups is cupper tea—
    But dahn to earf in those ere jeerin crahds,
    Them uge great vings gums up is plates, yer see.

    http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/27th-august-1954/10/the-helbatrawss-aht-er-charley-bordilairs-parleyvo

  18. Excellent! And let’s not forget the Monty Python angle, while we’re at it:

    (Cut to corner of cinema. A man in an ice-cream girl’s uniform is standing in a spotlight with an ice-cream tray with an albatross on it.)
    Man: Albatross! Albatross! Albatross!
    (A customer approaches him.)
    Customer: Two choc-ices please.
    Man: I haven’t got choc-ices. I only got the albatross. Albatross!
    Customer: What flavor is it?
    Man: It’s a bird, innit. It’s a bloody sea bird . .. it’s not any bloody flavor. Albatross!
    Customer: Do you get wafers with it?
    Man: Course you don’t get bloody wafers with it. Albatross!
    Customer: How much is it?
    Man: Ninepence.
    Customer: I’ll have two please.
    Man: Gannet on a stick.

  19. Stu Clayton says

    I discovered that an exiguous book of Baudelaire’s notes to self was published posthumously as Mon coeur mis à nu. In it there is:

    Le monde ne marche que par le malentendu.
    C’est par le malentendu universel que tout le monde s’accorde.
    Car si, par malheur, on se comprenait, on ne pourrait jamais s’accorder.

    He immediately riffs on this with a few lines of divine snark:

    L’homme d’esprit, celui qui ne s’accordera jamais avec personne, doit s’appliquer à aimer la conversation des imbéciles et la lecture des mauvais livres. Il en tirera des jouissances amères qui compenseront largement sa fatigue.

    Of course it’s a bit disturbing to find that a guy now 150 years dead wrote an executive summary of my CV.

  20. ‘Bill Bailey is blessed with perfect pitch (less accurately but more commonly called “perfect pitch”)’. I thought for a moment I was missing a very subtle joke here. It calls to mind Borges’s hero who rewrote Don Quixote in the same words, in the same order, but with a different meaning.

  21. I thought for a moment I was missing a very subtle joke here.

    Same here!

  22. I thought for a moment I was missing a very subtle joke here.

    A perfect bitch (as we used to say). Among my few options now is the Dedalus ploy:

    John Eglinton looked in the tangled glowworm of his lamp.
    – The world believes that Shakespeare made a mistake, he said, and got out of it as quickly and as best he could.
    – Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

    Or I could take the quixotic sidestep and claim to have been exploring not distinction without difference but difference without distinction (Noetica triple-checks to see that he got that right), à l’éroe de Borges.

    But in fact (aquí desnudo mi corazón) my computer froze once I had composed the comment, and I re-composed it without care after rebooting. I thirst for forgiveness.

  23. To quote The ‘Oo:

    |A chord diagramG+G A chord diagramAsus4Asus4 A chord diagramA augmentedA |A chord diagramD MajorD A chord diagramD MajorD DCDC|A chord diagramG+G A chord diagramG+G A chord diagramA augmentedA A chord diagramA augmentedA |
    [pause] You are for-
    (You are forgiv——e……..n)

    ||:D |A chord diagramG+G A chord diagramG+G A chord diagramA augmentedA A chord diagramA augmentedA :||
    -given You are for-
    (You are forgiv—e…n)

    |A chord diagramD MajorD ||:G5 A chord diagramA5A5 |A chord diagramD MajorD A chord diagramD MajorD :||
    -given forgiven Forgiven Forgiven Forgiven Forgiven For-
    (you are forgiv——en) (you are forgiv-

    [end] [spoken]
    |A chord diagramG+G A chord diagramG+G A chord diagramA augmentedA A chord diagramA augmentedA |A chord diagramD MajorD |A chord diagramA augmentedA A chord diagramD MajorD
    Know you’re forgiven

  24. Thank you!

    And know, mindful milliners, that éroe was a typo for héroe so that I could now mention – as in another thread, in connection with Dogberry – The Tale of Goji.

  25. I actually read Noetica’s comment the first time without consciously noticing anything was amiss. The intended meaning was obvious from my long association with classical musicians, although I did have a niggling sense that something had been not quite as I had expected, prompting me to reread it. The comprehensibility may have been aided by the fact that there is not (or at least, twenty-five years sgo, was not) universal agreement as to which of the two pitch-matching abilities at issue should be called “perfect pitch,” and which should be called something else.

  26. Celle in the last sentence of Cioran’s musing refers far back to cette langue inabordable (contrasting with la nôtre); too far for my taste, and apparently for Howard’s as well, who explicitly used tongue. Does it work better with French writing traditions?

    And “Scyth” is supposed to evoke some earthy Romanian roots, right?

  27. And “Scyth” is supposed to evoke some earthy Romanian roots, right?

    I was wondering about that; I’m so familiar with its Russian use (“We are Scythians!”) that it took me aback.

  28. For “superbe débraillement” Howard gives us “splendid squalor”; but that misses the immodesty and careless unveiling suggested by débraillement. Petit Robert does not have this noun (nor débraillage); but for débrailler:

    Fam. Se découvrir la poitrine d’une manière indécente, en ouvrant ses vêtements. Se débrailler en public. — Fig. La conversation se débraille, perd toute retenue, toute décence.

    TLFi does list débraillement, as equivalent to débraillage. For débrailler TLFi includes this (note Baudelaire’s cameo appearance):

    A.− Emploi trans. direct, vx. Mettre en désordre, ouvrir ou retrousser (un vêtement). Un critique républicain (…) félicitait sincèrement le grand Rubens d’avoir (…) débraillé l’une des bottes et le bas de Henri IV (BAUDEL., Curios. esth.,1867, p. 18).

    B.− Emploi pronom., usuel. Déranger ses vêtements, les ouvrir ou les retrousser au point d’avoir l’air négligé ou indécent. Se débrailler devant tout le monde (Ac.). Grossier voyou [Marat] qui se débraille, Orang infect et repoussant (POMMIER, Paris,1866, p. 75).
    Au fig. Perdre toute réserve, toute retenue; se laisser aller. J’ai trop maltraité les catins de plume pour avoir le droit de me débrailler un seul instant (BLOY, Journal,1893, p. 95):

    With that and other concerns in mind, let us attempt to improve upon excellence. For this:

    Je ne m’en aperçus malheureusement qu’après coup, et lorsqu’il était trop tard pour m’en détourner; sans quoi jamais je n’eusse abandonné la nôtre, dont il m’arrive de regretter l’odeur de fraîcheur et de pourriture, le mélange de soleil et de bouse, la laideur nostalgique, le superbe débraillement.

    Howard has this:

    I realized as much, unfortunately, only after the fact, when it was too late to change my course; otherwise, I should never have abandoned our own, whose odor of growth and corruption I occasionally regret, that mixture of sun and dung with all its nostalgic ugliness, its splendid squalor.

    And I propose this, from among a thousand possibilities:

    Unfortunately I saw this only after the fact when it was too late to turn back; otherwise I would never have abandoned our own language, whose redolence of rude vitality and decay I have come to miss: its mix of sunshine and dung, its nostalgic ugliness, its defiant state of undress.

  29. Nice translation, Noetica. For superbe débraillement, how about “brazen display”?

  30. Yeah, I don’t get the sense that “undress” plays much of a role in the modern use of débraillement.

  31. Breffni:

    Given the multivalence of superbe, brazen works well enough. But display is not good because it can give an impression exactly opposite to what was intended: an impression that fits beautifully for French but not for the author’s native Romanian (the whole point). A display, especially one qualified by superbe, could be of polished finery in one’s dress – or of the nakedness that one’s dress ought to be concealing but that one arrogantly doesn’t care about. Superbe sometimes means splendid, but very often “arrogant”, “proud”, or – as I have it – “defiant”. Heh: I like “brazen display of undress” (without ambiguity).

    Hat:

    If our translation is to be evidence-based before refinement or final arbitration by the “sense” we get of the matter, then “undress” is quite apt and current. From 2018, online, (my bold):

    Il n’y a pas si longtemps, pour se faire respecter, il faillait paraître «sérieux». Ainsi, être dans une tenue débraillée était tout simplement inimaginable; seul le sport permettait de porter une tenue décontractée. Si le travail nécessitait un habit spécial, celui-ci devait toujours être impeccable, même avec un métier salissant. Cela donnait, bien sûr, du travail aux mères et aux épouses!
    Aujourd’hui, au nom de la mode, les jeunes et même certaines personnes d’âge mûr portent des jeans déchirés, des habits informes et sales, des T-shirts avec des slogans provocateurs. Ce qui les fait assimiler à des groupes violents, des criminels, des mal éduqués…

    (And sport allows not just for a more casual attire as suggested here, but a near-nakedness that was elsewhere deemed inappropriate.)

    Wiktionnaire draws heavily on TLFi for its treatment of débraillement, but it is curated by our up-to-the-minute contemporaries. Two senses are given:

    1. Action de découvrir, de dénuder une partie de soi-même parfois jusqu’à l’indécence, particulièrement en parlant de vêtement.
    2. (Par métonymie) Laisser-aller vestimentaire

    A state of “undress” need not be entire, of course. A revealing scruffiness that fits ill with the circumstances.

  32. I stand abashed!

  33. Sounds like flashing to me.

  34. Stu Clayton says

    Flashing almost exclusively describes a male activity, it seems to me. It’s quickly over. Whereas ladies arrange matters so that glimpses are accidentally-on-purpose vouchsafed, coming and going over longer periods of time. Débraillement appears to be more like the latter, but epicene – immodest dishevelment (orig. French bad hair day).

    In a commentary on Coeur mis à nu I read that Baudelaire was strictly anti- débraillement, but had to make shift since he never had much money.

  35. Flashing almost exclusively describes a male activity, it seems to me.

    Except for Sharon Stone.

  36. Perhaps the objects exposed might be more stereotypcially secondary sex characteristics in non-males, but flashing does not seem to me to be an activity gendered either by default or by almost-default.

  37. Stu Clayton says

    Default ? I was not talking about standardization, but hearsay frequency. I don’t remember ever hearing in the news about a woman using a raincoat immodestly. Perhaps I don’t get such news channels.

  38. Where is Sophie when you need a nuanced view on Romanian?

  39. Google Translate does a reasonable translation:

    It would be embarking on the story of a nightmare to tell you in detail the story of my relations with this borrowed idiom, with all these words thought out and rethought, refined, subtle to the point of non-existence, bent under the exaggerations of nuance, inexpressive for having expressed everything, frightening in precision, laden with fatigue and modesty, discreet even in vulgarity. How do you expect a Scythian to deal with them, to grasp their clear meaning and handle them with scruple and probity? There is not a single one whose exhausted elegance does not make me dizzy: no trace of earth, blood, soul left in them. A syntax of a stiffness, of a cadaverous dignity encloses them and assigns them a place from which even God could not dislodge them. What consumption of coffee, cigarettes and dictionaries to write a slightly correct sentence in this inaccessible language, too noble, and too distinguished for my taste! Unfortunately, I only noticed it after the fact, and when it was too late to turn away from it; without which I would never have abandoned ours, of which I sometimes regret the smell of freshness and rot, the mixture of sun and dung, the nostalgic ugliness, the superb disorder. To return to it, I cannot; the one I had to adopt holds me back and subjugates me with the very pains it will have cost me.

  40. Google Translate is scary, but I reserve my sense of genuine terror for the day it will be able to handle French “regretter” reliably. Regrettably and missably, both Howard and Google got this wrong. Our author misses those features of Romanian that are starkly absent from French. He certainly does not regret them, in the overwhelmingly dominant current English sense. I found the old “French” sense in frequent use when I listened to an English translation of Anna Karenina on Audible recently. It must perplex the attentive younger listener or reader.

  41. I suppose on the grounds of hearsay frequency only I would at least have to agree that in my experience the agent noun “a flasher” is overwhelmingly likely to be a male referent, on whatever quaint thing a “news channel” might be, females engaged in flashing on the news being reserved perhaps for Marianne-style street protest and described more circumspectly.

  42. I agree with Noetica on “regret”. Reading the History and Utopia translation, I took the sense as being critical of the odour of growth and corruption, its ugliness and squalor, despite the adjectives “nostalgic” and “splendid”. It was frankly confusing to read. Only after reading Noetica’s comment did I realise it was meant to be understood more straightforwardly as “regret no longer having, missing”.

  43. Well then:

    It would be like recounting a nightmare, to give you the full history of my engagements with this borrowed idiom. All those words considered and reconsidered, refined, subtle to the point of vanishing, bent under the weight of nuance, emptied of expression through having expressed everything, fearsomely precise, weighed down with fatigue and reticence, discreet even when vulgar. How could anyone expect a Scythian to take in such terms – to gain access to their hair-splitting significations and deploy them with accuracy and propriety? Not one of them fails to send me dizzy, with its enervated elegance. In them survives no vestige of earth, of blood, or of soul. A syntax of rigidity and cadaverous dignity fixes them so firmly in place that God himself could not shift them. What endless recourse to coffee, cigarettes, and dictionaries to write even one barely correct sentence in this forbidding language, far too noble and rarefied for my liking! Unfortunately I saw this only afterwards, when it was too late to turn back. Otherwise I would never have abandoned our own language, whose redolence of rude vitality and decay I often miss: its mix of sunshine and cowpats, its nostalgic ugliness, its proud state of undress. Return to it I cannot. The language I had to adopt trammels and constrains me, through the travails it must eventually cost me.

  44. Better (avoiding repetition of weigh*):

    … All those words considered and reconsidered, refined, subtle to the point of vanishing, bent under the weight of nuance, emptied of expression through having expressed everything, fearsomely precise, freighted with fatigue and reticence, discreet even when vulgar.

  45. Graham: “It calls to mind Borges’s hero who rewrote Don Quixote in the same words, in the same order, but with a different meaning.”

    I remember that one. It was called “‘X’, the writer of Don Quixote”. It was in the same collection of stories as The Library of Babel, at least in the edition I borrowed.

    “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” was also in it.

  46. Pierre Menard (featured at LH a number of times, e.g. here: “If Pierre Menard didn’t exist, he would have had to be invented”).

  47. John Cowan says

    I agree that rhyme is of the essence when it’s there in the original.

    That can’t be true in the general case. Consider Chinese cí poetry, where each line has a fixed pattern of tones (or rather of tone classes, where tone 1 is one class and tones 2-4 are the other). In translating into English or French (or Romanian), what would essentially correspond to this feature?

  48. What on earth is “the general sense”? The point was about rhyme specifically, not any feature of any poetry whatever.

  49. John Cowan says

    Okay then. Suppose we are to translate a rhyming Modern English poem into Old English, where rhyme is not a feature of verse. Are we to say that it is essential that the translation also rhyme? (The contrary does not work, because alliteration is a feature, though a less prominent one, of Modern English verse.)

  50. A fair question, JC. My own position is that where rhyme (or any similar structuring feature) is commonly used in both the source cultural milieu and the destination cultural milieu it is valuable to retain it, whenever one finds it in the traducendum. A minority view, especially at the Millinery.

    Retain? Well, my own practice is to keep the same rhyme scheme or something quite close to it, if that can be done without undue distortion. With short lines and tight schemes it’s not often feasible. AAAAA… in iambic trimeters would rarely be transferable. But some lesser grade of retention may be achievable, and desirable.

    Richard Howard explicitly decided against rhyme for his award-winning Baudelaire work, and who could blame him? Years ago I laboured to preserve exact rhyme schemes in translating a subset of Fleurs (the poems inspired by Jeanne Duval, and some others). Damn hard work – but the sort of challenge I enjoy. I didn’t publish, though I was given the opportunity.

    I also like to rhyme translations from Latin verse, because that’s a well-established tradition in European languages over the last few centuries till recent decades. Because I’m old-fashioned, and enjoy a little of that very taxing game also. So did Pope, Dryden, and innumerable others in that galaxy.

  51. I am currently following in two slowly-moving parallel conversations about the fundamental problems associated with translating poetry (this one here, and another one with a work colleague). My view is generally that when words are chosen for both their meaning and sound, completely effective translation becomes virtually impossible. It occurred to me that the opening of The Canterbury Tales* shows how even with very closely related languages this can be a problem. It is possible to translated the first stanza of the poem into Modern English using just the cognates of the words in the original text. It seems like this should go a long way toward maintaining both the sound and meaning of the original. However, such a translation actually exhibits major problems, because of what happens to the rhyme scheme.** The first three couplets no longer rhyme in Modern English. Some might feel that that’s not actually a serious problem—that it’s fine to throw out the rhyme scheme—but that doesn’t work either, because the next two couplets do still rhyme in Modern English. I tried reading it aloud with modern words substituted in whenever appropriate, and the mixture of perfect rhymes, non-rhymes, and slant rhymes was a distracting mess.

    * The first time I typed this, it came out “Canterbury Takes,” which sounds like it could actually be an Internet-age updating of the work.

    ** Obviously, the way to completely save the rhyme scheme is to give up on a translation that is completely cognate translation in vocabulary (if not necessarily in grammatical structure). However, this leads to such undesirable and muddled results as (in the second couplet), since it not possible to rhyme the modern forms of licour*** and flour, instead referring to the liquor’s “power.”

    *** The Poetry Foundation link I posted above, to the prologue of the Tales, has an accent on “licóur,” which I don’t think is authentic.

  52. No, I’m sure it’s there to keep the reader from saying “likker.”

  53. i would jump at the chance to read a maria dahvana headley Canterbury Takes!

  54. J.W. Brewer says

    I would say that the verb “flash” is non-awkwardly predicated of females in modern AmEng, e.g. (cutting and pasting an instance found by googling) “the infamous moment in 1995 where, for David Letterman’s birthday, she [viz. Drew Barrymore] stood up on his desk while she was a guest on his late night show and flashed him.”* But it would seem odder to describe Ms. Barrymore or any other female with the noun “flasher.”

    *Specifically (for those of you who were not watching late-night American tv in 1995 …) she exposed her breasts to Mr. Letterman (I think with her back to the camera so he saw something the camera didn’t?), but not anything below the waist.

  55. Brett:

    … an accent on “licóur,” which I don’t think is authentic.

    Licour was of somewhat recent French provenance, so it retained what was heard as a final stress. Similarly for corages, vertue, and nature in the first lines of the Prologue.

    The truly controversial word here is Aprille (or Aprill, or Aprilis, or what you will). Where does the stress fall? Skeat wants it on the second syllable, and I strongly prefer that myself. It’s in accord with how it would be heard in French, and fits with the original Latin Aprīlis. This choice fits best with the prevailing expectation of iambic pentameter. You’d expect that, in an opening line; but many people read it this way:

    |Whan that |Aprill with his |shoures |soote

    Examples of that:

    A British Literature course, University School of Nashville

    Some dude

    Hat:

    Brett’s source also gives áventure (and aventúres and áventúre, with inconsistency), statúre, manére, and the like. The intention is surely to show the positions of stesses in the line where these might be hard to pick.

  56. Right, which is what my comment implied (the accent mark showing final stress rather than the penult of the modern word).

  57. Yes.

  58. David Marjanović says

    The truly controversial word here is Aprille (or Aprill, or Aprilis, or what you will). Where does the stress fall?

    The trick here is that it’s not simply a French loan. In French, it’s avril; and weren’t the Latin month names all imported much earlier?

  59. Yes indeed, it’s an OE word: “Of Apriles dagum þu miht findan Maius regulares.” Presumably with initial stress.

  60. I prefer aPRILle, if only because AHpril makes the whole line trochaic, which seems to me a hell of a way to start an iambic poem. The other way, only the first foot is inverted.

  61. Stu Clayton says

    Never start a poem on the wrong foot.

  62. The other way, only the first foot is inverted.

    But it requires an unnatural stress on “that,” which I find much worse.

  63. David M:

    The trick here is that it’s not simply a French loan. In French, it’s avril; and weren’t the Latin month names all imported much earlier?

    Hat:

    Yes indeed, it’s an OE word: “Of Apriles dagum þu miht findan Maius regulares.” Presumably with initial stress.

    Not simply a French loan. I wrote this: “It’s in accord with how it would be heard in French, and fits with the original Latin Aprīlis.” OED says this:

    Origin: Of multiple origins. Partly a borrowing from Latin. Partly a borrowing from French. Etymons: Latin Aprīlis; French aprill, avril.

    Apparently the standard Anglo-Saxon expression was ēastre-monaþ (or eoster-monat, etc.). Hat, your OED quote for “Apriles dagum” is only part of the story. A fuller excerpt (note the French “v” or “u” forms):

    OE On Concurrents (Calig. A.xv) in P. S. Baker & M. Lapidge Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion (1995) 429 Of Apriles dagum þu miht findan Maius regulares.
    lOE Prognostics (Vesp.) in R. D.-N. Warner Early Eng. Homilies (1917) 91 On April [gyf hit þunreð], hit bodeð blisful gear, & yfelre manna deað.
    c1275 (▸?a1200) LAȝAMON Brut (Calig.) (1978) l. 24196 Þa æstre wes aȝonge and Aueril [c1300 Otho Auerel] eode of tune.
    c1325 (▸c1300) Chron. Robert of Gloucester (Calig.) l. 10410 In þe monþe of aueril is messagers come.
    c1400 (▸c1378) W. LANGLAND Piers Plowman (Laud 581) (1869) B. XIII. l. 269 In a drye apprile [c1450 Rawl. auerel].
    c1405 (▸c1387–95) G. CHAUCER Canterbury Tales Prol. (Ellesmere) (1868) l. 1 Aprille [c1405 Hengwrt Auerylle, c1415 Corpus Oxf. Apprille] with hise schoures soote.

    Avril occurs also in much later English (1805); and at the start of Steeleye Span’s rendering of “Copshawholme Fair” it occurs in rhyme position (an eye rhyme with smile, the way they sing it) stressed on the last syllable.

    Hat:

    But it requires an unnatural stress on “that,” which I find much worse.

    Worse for some, and of course “with” gets stressed also. Anyway, quod scripsit scripsit: we’d like to know how he would have scanned his own first line. Expectations might have differed, in metrical practice circa 1400. I’m pretty convinced of aˈpril because it is indeed the first line, and the following lines are iambic pentameters. (And I’d follow Maddy Prior anywhere.)

  64. Ah, my link for a “much later English (1805)” use of “Avril” relies on a bad OCR of “April”. I withdraw it. But Steeleye Span stands.

  65. But it requires an unnatural stress on “that,” which I find much worse.

    Not if it’s a trochaic foot. “When that” meaning “when” is still alive in rural Appalachia, and the “that” is unstressed. “With” here has (a slight) acquired stress in the collocation “with his.”

  66. David Marjanović says

    On April [gyf hit þunreð], hit bodeð blisful gear, & yfelre manna deað.

    Wow. German “farmers’ rules” are so tame in comparison…

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