I not only studied French at school but I did it as a subsidiary subject for my degree… I didn’t think I was very good, although I had two excellent teachers, Mme Parry at school and M. Morris when I was at the Polytechnic. I was always better at the passive skills, reading and writing than speaking and listening. However, a few months ago I started to go to a French conversation class and I was amazed at how much came flooding back, and how I was able to chat and converse and be understood! Maybe I was to self-conscious when I was younger!
The conversation class has refired my interest and enthusiasm for French poetry and literature, and here is a slightly spooky poem by Charles Baudelaire; I don’t know who made the translation but I am going to set myself a little homework and I’m going to try and translate it myself… I may share my translation with you later!:
Les Hiboux
Sous les ifs noirs qui les abritent
Les hiboux se tiennent rangés
Ainsi que des dieux étrangers
Dardant leur oeil rouge. Ils méditent.Sans remuer ils se tiendront
Jusqu’à l’heure mélancolique
Où, poussant le soleil oblique,
Les ténèbres s’établiront.Leur attitude au sage enseigne
Qu’il faut en ce monde qu’il craigne
Le tumulte et le mouvement;L’homme ivre d’une ombre qui passe
Porte toujours le châtiment
D’avoir voulu changer de place.— Charles Baudelaire
THE OWLSUnder the overhanging yews,
The dark owls sit in solemn state,
Like stranger gods; by twos and twos
Their red eyes gleam. They meditate.Motionless thus they sit and dream
Until that melancholy hour
When, with the sun’s last fading gleam,
The nightly shades assume their power.From their still attitude the wise
Will learn with terror to despise
All tumult, movement, and unrest;For he who follows every shade,
Carries the memory in his breast,
Of each unhappy journey made.
Lois Elsden 
Please do your own translation, Lois. I’m sure you’ll make a much better fist of it than that rather liberal version.
Vladimir Nabokov was of the opinion that poetry could not be translated. He said that you can translate the literal meaning of the words accurately, which of course he did for Pushkin’s wonderful ‘Eugene Onegin’, but he claimed that no other language can retain both the meaning and the poetry of the original, especially within a complex rhyming schema. That’s an extreme position, but he has a point. I have four translations of Onegin, Nabokov (accurate but making no attempt to retain the Pushkin stanzas), Charles Johnston (faithful to rhyming stanza form, but pedestrian), Douglas Hofstadter (faithful to form, and fun, but imaginative and not very accurate), and James Falen (faithful to form, and remarkably close to Nabokov’s version in meaning).
Falen proved that it’s possible to get pretty bloody close in a sensitive translation, even to something as huge in scope and as tight in form as Onegin, so you go for it!
LikeLike
I will have a go, Peter!
As you know, my book club has been discussing Nabokov recently and we spent some time talking about the fact that he was tri-lingual and what effect this would have on the language he used when writing (in any of the three languages) and also about his translations of his own work. I had an embarrassing experience with my other book club when I recommended we read “The Master and Margarita” by my favourite, Mikhail Bulgakov, and several people bought a dreadful translation, rather than the brilliant one I had by Michael Glenny… this amazing, wonderful and very funny book was changed into an unintelligible, boring, muddly mess by whoever it was and the readers hated it!
I’ve been reading books by the Icelandic author, Viktor Arnar Ingólfsun, and a pair of translators on a couple of his books have been excellent! They have made his language beautiful, elegant, witty, and exciting and funny too!
I also have a copy of the Dhammapada translated by Thomas Byrom into a wonderful text… and seen others which are awkward and ‘corny’ and curiously cold…
Having said all that… hmmm, me and Baudelaire…. hmmmm
LikeLike