Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Applied Google translate to this page. I suppose this is something close to a 'literal' translation, although full of errors/garblings ("him" instead of "her", "fills me the immense mug" etc.) and words that don't work like "nipples" instead of (more visible to the narrator) "teats"—or in lager-lad English: "tits".

Interestingly, "Baiser" translates to "Kiss" but also "fuck, shag, bang, caress, hump, screw around". Which I suppose is a double-entendre that would work in French and can't be done in English.

What this translation entirely misses is (naturally) the rhythm and the (i think?) ABAB/CDCD/EEF/GGF rhyme structure of the original.

Eight days ago, I had torn my boots
at the pebbles of the paths. I entered Charleroi.
– At the Cabaret-Vert: I asked for slices
of butter and half-cold ham.

Blessed, I stretched out my legs under the
Green table: I contemplated the very naive subjects
Of the tapestry. – And it was adorable,
When the girl with huge nipples, bright eyes,

- That one, it's not a kiss that frightens him! –
Laughing, brought me slices of butter,
Warm ham, in a colored dish,

Pink and white ham perfumed with a clove
Of garlic, - and fills me the immense mug, with its foam
Which gilded a belated ray of sun.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
The metre probably forces him into hideous, phrases like "to Charleroi old", "damask-lined", "with garlic dressed", but still...

For all I know Rimbaud was using his own form of shopworn romantic lingo but it doesn't feel appropriately "modern" to me. On the other hand he DID rhyme phrases, so maybe it wasn't quite as modernist as Pound's translation would have us believe.

Sorrell's translation seems to me neither accurate (I'm not going to pretend I can step to some professor of French when it comes to accurate translation but he changes too much, the aforementioned "you don't have to be mad...") nor good poetry. So you can certainly do better.

I wonder if he translated my Baudelaire?
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
The metre probably forces him into hideous, phrases like "to Charleroi old", "damask-lined", "with garlic dressed", but still...

For all I know Rimbaud was using his own form of shopworn romantic lingo but it doesn't feel appropriately "modern" to me. On the other hand he DID rhyme phrases, so maybe it wasn't quite as modernist as Pound's translation would have us believe.

Sorrell's translation seems to me neither accurate (I'm not going to pretend I can step to some professor of French when it comes to accurate translation but he changes too much, the aforementioned "you don't have to be mad...") nor good poetry. So you can certainly do better.

I wonder if he translated my Baudelaire?
Pound did at least one more Rimbaud, I'll post it up tomorrow.

All these translations are awful apart from Pound's, cos he had the good sense, talent and technical skill to translate the meaning and the feeling rather than the words themselves. The others are just hacks really.
 

jenks

thread death
Yes, but I do agree with @Corpsey about the form which even Pound doesn’t tackle. Rimbaud clearly using a traditional form, playing with the troubadour ideas of old but with lots of modern bits, including a bit of smut - nipples etc.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Yes, but I do agree with @Corpsey about the form which even Pound doesn’t tackle. Rimbaud clearly using a traditional form, playing with the troubadour ideas of old but with lots of modern bits, including a bit of smut - nipples etc.
I suppose, on a case-by-case basis, as a translator you'd consider the original form and decide whether it's worth trying to emulate it, or if it's better to create a new form that more accurately carries over the poem's essence. Otherwise you might find yourself trying to force a square peg into a round hole.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
There'll almost always be loss in any translation. You can make up for it in other ways, but that's where the artistry comes in, which can't really be fully accounted for. I think you have to be a great writer yourself to be really good at it, and to have read and deeply understood the original essence before channeling it into your own version.

In other words, I'd take a good poem in English only 'inspired' by the original, losing some things while gaining others, over a word-by-word, form-by-form direct translation that almost always comes out sounding stilted and unnatural.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I wrote this last night so I might as well post it fwiw

I suppose an academic's translation (at least notionally) carries the weight of their fluency in the language and knowledge of the poet, the poet's contemporaries etc.

But an academic doesn't have to be a great writer (in fact in some academic disciplines it may positively count against you). And great writers are rare, and generally too busy with their own writing to devote themselves to translation, and inclined to steamroll another writer's style (even if they revere them) and rebuild it in their own image.

Pope translating the Iliad springs to mind (not that I've read it lolz)--and the recently discussed (and derided) Hughes translation of Ovid.

I wonder why Eliot never translated Dante, for example. Probably for all the reasons given above, plus maybe the belief that it's already been done, incomparably, by Dante in Italian, so why bother.

Now I'll say

The problem with poetry especially is that form IS essence. You could say the same of prose, and justifiably so, and especially of someone like Flaubert who agonised over every word, but I'll hazard that a novel can be translated more satisfactorily because the narrative is so important, the themes, the dialogue, the "content". Whereas a poem's content can often be quite (yes) prosaic, shorn of poetic expression.

So as you say, ultimately, it'll never be satisfactory. You're right that a talented poet is incomparably better equipped to preserve a sense of artistry and poetry than the most learned academic, but even they'll never be able to preserve the sense of e.g. Rimbaud's artistry.

This is what lay behind Nabokov's famously literalist and divisive Pushkin translation, in which he didn't even attempt to translate into poetic English, only caring not to mistranslate a single word. (Or at least, so I understand it.)
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Music (lyrics notwithstanding) has this advantage over literature, it's a sort of universal language. (Also leaving aside big issues like how our culture conditions our hearing and music being a technical language that only trained musicians understand on that level...)

You don't have to speak German to enjoy listening to Beethoven, untranslated.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Same with visual art and film (dialogue aside).

Kinda sucks, really, why didn't my parents force me to speak/read ten languages?
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
But an academic doesn't have to be a great writer (in fact in some academic disciplines it may positively count against you). And great writers are rare, and generally too busy with their own writing to devote themselves to translation, and inclined to steamroll another writer's style (even if they revere them) and rebuild it in their own image.
This is how influence between great writers of different languages works, isn't it?

Eliot didn't translate Dante cos he felt he wasn't up to the job probably. It would be a lifetime's work after all, but that didn't stop him from quoting him (in Italian, so creating more work for the reader) and incorporating the ideas into his own work.

I reckon part of why Pound was so good was because he dedicated quite a lot of time to translation and that improved his own practice. It's a bit like apprentice painters who dedicate years to copying/studying the masters, you have to put the work in to get to that level and do your own stuff.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Some thoughts:

Great translators are probably as rare as great poets, in fact they're probably one and the same, but it's clearly not impossible.

Knowing anything of the original language is probably a great disadvantage in enjoying an English translation (woops with his french, me with Spanish - never found any translations of Lorca that I've liked) and having a bilingual edition is always good.

But I've enjoyed loads of stuff translated from languages I don't understand a word of. I suspect it often creates interesting effects where you get phrases that sound weird/unnatural in English that an English writer would never write, which can be good in itself,aside from the issue of fidelity.

The history of poetry relies on translation - where would it be without Homer, Ovid, loads of other classical literature being translated? Or the Bible even???

I reckon the idea of poetry being untranslatable falls down because of a misunderstanding of what translation is and can be - like I was saying before, there are inevitable losses but also opportunities to springboard off and make new works of art. I mean, what about something like Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam? Hardly a faithful translation, cobbled together from unpublished 12th century persian and made into a new form in English, but massively popular and influential on English literature.
 

droid

Well-known member
Thats an argument that translation can lead to interesting or popular new work. Translation as remix. It doesnt really negate the point.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Yeah, I'm not trying to negate any point, if you want to say you can't translate any particular poem exactly without it suffering any loss, fair enough. What I mean is there's a poor understanding of what poetic translation is or has been or can be at its best, what it's contributed to literature through the ages. I think it's massively important, and it's reductive to just say it's impossible to translate poetry. The example discussed here on the last couple of pages of pages is a very minor poem, but it's interesting to see the difference between a major poet's version (Pound) and a run of the mill translator's version.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I mean, all translation is necessarily a 'remix' if you want to put it like that, there's no such thing as a pure,100% accurate translation, but that's just quibbling. The thing I was talking about is the attempt to maintain the essence of something, not just the words themselves. Or, failing that, a new and interesting related work of art - that's what poetic translation is, or should be. You obviously can't translate something without changing it in some way.
 
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