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                       Transposition versus transformation
– some thoughts on the translation of poetry with particular reference to Baudelaire’s L’ennemi

There is certainly no doubt that, as with the translation of any literary work, the translation of poetry brings into play numerous key issues, both general and specific, partly because form and content are inextricably linked in verse. The translation of poetry always involves a series of trade-offs and there are various factors to be considered which are sometimes specific to this genre and sometimes more general.

   One major challenge is form. Although poets tackling a fixed form have the freedom to change direction and set off in search of the unexpected if the form doesn’t allow them to explore the original impetus behind the poem or if the need for a specific rhyme sends them veering off somewhere else, translators can’t do this – they have to stay faithful to the poet’s intentions. If the form is crucial to the overall effect of a poem – say, a sonnet – then to sacrifice it for a different form, or even for no form at all, would surely be detrimental to the poem. Although in the introduction to Imitations, his anthology of translated European poetry, Robert Lowell scathingly refers to metrical translators as “taxidermists, not poets”, saying that their poems are “likely to be stuffed birds”¹, it seems obvious that even a first-class, free-verse translation of a strictly formal poem represents a loss in terms of music, reception and intent on the part of the original poet. The question is whether this loss is necessary or whether some attempt should be made to translate not only the content of the poem but also its chosen form.

   In the case of Baudelaire, who favoured the stately twelve-syllable alexandrine, the first decision a translator has to take is whether to use alexandrines or another metrical form such as iambic pentameter, which is used in English with the same frequency and to similar effect. Baudelaire’s sonnet L’ennemi was written in alexandrines with a regular rhyme scheme (ABAB CDCD EEF GFG) which, although not commensurate with the traditional rhyme scheme of the French sonnet (ABBA ABBA CCD EDE), was perfectly acceptable by the mid-nineteenth century. The stately metrical pattern and fixed form adds to the melancholy effect of the poem and sets the mood beautifully. The alternating rhymes underpin the contrasting themes in the poem – light and dark, hope and despair, happiness and misery, life and death – while the alexandrine offers great scope for a variety of stresses. The caesura traditionally falls at the end of the 6th syllable, dividing the line into two equal hemistiches. Although poetical convention required that the break at the caesura should be one of meaning as well as sound, many poets, particularly from the early nineteenth century onwards, tended to ignore this along with the traditional rhyme scheme, making the alexandrine much more fluid.

   The poet Edna St Vincent Millay was convinced of the need to maintain the poem’s “anatomy”, so as to avoid committing, what she called, one of the many “impertinences” involved in re-writing another person’s poem:

     It is true that the translator, who is hard put to it enough in any
     case to transpose a poem from one language into another without
     strangling it in the process, here takes upon himself an added  
     burden; but he is more than rewarded when he finds that his
     translation, when read aloud directly after the original, echoes the
     original, that it is still, in some miraculous way, the same poem,
     although its words are now in a different language.²

   The pleasing rocking rhythms of her translation echo those of Baudelaire’s French, not only because of her use of alexandrines, but also because she places her caesuras more or less around the middle of the twelve-syllable lines: in the first quatrain, for example, on syllable 6 of the first two lines and on syllables 8 and 9 in the third and fourth lines:

      I think of my gone youth / as of a stormy sky
      In frequently transpierced / by a benignant sun,
      Tempest and hail have done their work; / and what have I? –
      How many fruits in my torn garden? / – scarcely one.³

   In Richard Howard’s blank verse rendering, the caesuras fall respectively after syllables 5, 6, 6, 5, in the first four lines, forming a satisfying pattern that does much to underpin the balanced feel of the iambic pentameter. This pattern is replicated throughout the poem with the caesuras falling roughly around syllable 6 in lines which are roughly iambic varied by dactyls and trochees, so that the overall rhythm is very measured and pensive, making this a good reflection of the mood of the French poem.

       My youth was nothing / but a lowering storm
       occasionally lanced / by sudden suns;
       torrential rains have done / their work so well
       that no fruit ripens / in my garden now. 4

   One of the weakest translations in terms of rhythm is the ‘imitation’ by Robert Lowell. Ironically, although against strict metrical translation, he also seems chary of falling into the trap of producing what he called “a sprawl of language, neither faithful nor distinguished”5. As a result, his version attempts a rough syllabic pattern in place of the alexandrines. Although in the main he uses 10-syllable lines, these vary between 9 and 12, with the caesura falling anywhere between syllables 4 and 7.

       My childhood was only / a menacing shower,
       cut now and then / by hours of brilliant heat.
       All the top soil was killed / by rain and sleet,
       my garden hardly bore / a standing flower. 6

   This is unfortunate, since although the poem starts out well, the overall impression is not one of measured melancholy and ineluctability. It has a more modern feel, perhaps in keeping with the poet’s stated aim of creating a new original written in the language of “now”. However, given that Lowell has opted for a loose syllabic form coupled with a rhyme scheme and has based his poem closely on the French, one has to wonder why he chose not to close the distance between original and version. The translation is not far enough away from Baudelaire’s original to be “partly self-sufficient and separate from its sources”7.

   The use of a fixed form also covers such elements as rhyme, the use of specific phonemes, devices such as alliteration and assonance, punctuation, etc., all of which contribute to the poem’s sound-world and may form an integral part of its meaning.

   Although Millay doesn’t use Baudelaire’s rhyme scheme, she opts for a cross between Italian and English sonnets, keeping Baudelaire’s structure of two quatrains and two tercets as in the Italian sonnet and using the usual rhyme scheme of the English sonnet with only a slight variation in the first tercet: ABAB CDCD EEF FGG (see above). Being more regular in its application of sonnet protocol and thereby keying into the traditional connotations of the
form, Millay already gives her version of Baudelaire’s poem greater resonance. There is a feeling of inevitability which draws the reader through the poem to the satisfying final rhyming couplet.

   Robert Lowell, on the other hand, opts for a rhyme scheme which, although reproducing the pattern of the French in the first stanza (see above), soon lapses into something else again: ABBA CCDD EFG EGF. As was the case with his use of syllabics, there appears to be no organic reason for this rather awkward attempt to recreate a rhyme scheme and the rhymes seem to work more as a jumble of isolated rhymes rather than a definite form forging its way through to what should be a satisfying close. The first four lines, which are the
most compelling of the translation, offer a nice alternation of male and female full rhymes – “shower/flower”, “heat/sleet” – which lend the poem a rhetorical power that soon dissipates. It as if the poet, although starting out with the best intentions, soon abandoned all pretence at a structured rhyme scheme due to the necessary compromises, so that the poem ends with the consonantal rhyme of “food/blood”, which is more eye rhyme than ear rhyme. One cannot help feeling that Lowel might have produced a better "imitation" had he not used rhyme.

   Richard Howard’s blank verse rendering of the poem (see above) has no end rhymes, although he makes effective use of internal chimes and echoes as in the stuttering quality of the ‘u’s and ‘d’s of “suns/done/sudden”, the finality of the ‘n’s in  “sudden/done/garden/ripen” and the assonantal echoes such as

“ lowering” and “now”, “youth” and “fruit” or “lanced” and “garden”, which set the mood of the poem and accentuate the elaborate system of comparisons and contrasts in the first quatrain.

   There are other formal considerations when translating a foreign language poem. Baudelaire, for example, made much use of phonetic structures to create the music of his poems, such as the repetition of certain phonemes at the beginning and end of a line or around a caesura. Take, for example, the first line of the sonnet:

    Ma jeunesse ne fut // qu'un ténébreux orage

   As we can see, there is a phonetic equivalence between the first and last sound units in the line (“ma j/age”), which creates a balanced musical effect. This also occurs in the fourth line:

   Qu'il reste en mon jardin // bien peu de fruits vermeils.

   where not only do “en mon” and “peu de” present a pair of internal rhymes, but there is a phonetic echo on either side of the caesura with the ‘in’ of “jardin” and the ‘ien’ of “bien”. These intricate patterns of repetitive sounds combine to create a compelling music which any serious translator must in some way emulate to create the same type of effect.

   Although the “anatomy” of a poem, its shape on the page—in the case of Baudelaire’s sonnet, two quatrains and two tercets—is crucial, there are other visual elements which a translator ignores at his or her peril. The different types of punctuation used, for example, are significant. Following the convention of the time, the first word of every line of Baudelaire’s sonnet is capitalised. Given that poets tended to stop capitalising the first word in a line around the mid-twentieth century, this factor should always be considered. Other types of punctuation may signal a change of tone or emphasis and are as much part of the form as rhyme or metre. Take the dash, for example, at the beginning of the last tercet: “– Ô douleur! Ô douleur”. This not only indicates that there is a shift in mood – from hope to despair – but also highlights the fact that this tercet answers the question raised by the previous one.

   It is obviously not enough to wield a form successfully or to imitate the visual layout of a poem on the page—even if a translator manages to meet many of the formal challenges, he or she still has to contend with the mood and content of the poem, which may well be skewed by the necessity of maintaining a rhyme scheme or shaving off corners to fit the poem into a fixed form.

   If it is not intended to be an imitation, no metrical or formal translation of a poem can be deemed successful if it is not faithful to the meaning. Firstly, however, the translator has to decide whether the "meaning" resides in the literal sense of the individual words on the page or their sum. Thus, when translating a text, the translator first has to look at the author’s intention, the overall impression they wanted to create, and why they chose one specific word over another, one specific image over another. The translator may also need to take into account the political, social and cultural context of the work to determine the weight and register of certain words or phrases. This extremely detailed approach to a reading of the original is an essential part of the translation process. Every word in a poem plays its part and none is a matter of chance.

   This initial reading can be problematic, as it depends so much on the translator’s empathy with the poet and what they are trying to convey. Modifiers such as adjectives and adverbs in particular can be very subjective, particularly those relating to colour and mood. By way of an example, let’s take the word Ténébreux in the first line of the sonnet. In French, it means variously dark, gloomy, mysterious and obscure and relates to ‘tenebrous’ in English. The English word, however, is much less commonly used in English than ténébreux is in French, so to employ the former might create a rather abstruse effect, not in keeping with the tone of the poem. The French word also has connotations linking it to the devil and the realm of the dead, as in l’Ange ténébreux (dark Angel) or the ténébreux séjour (the shades). The solutions adopted are just as varied. Millay opts simply for “stormy sky”, (see above) changing the French noun “orage” (storm) into an adjective to modify the noun “sky” which does not appear in the French. Does comparing youth to a “stormy sky” differ greatly from comparing it to a dark storm? I would argue that it does, considerably. A stormy sky is overcast, certainly, but does not necessarily result in rain or hail. The image also has a distancing effect: being the storm itself or being something that heralds a storm are very different propositions, the former being far more compelling a comparison. Millay continues this shift in tone with her description of the sunshine. In her version, the sun is “benignant”, a rather archaic word meaning “benevolent” or “gracious”. Gone are the dazzling periods of sunlight that illuminate Baudelaire’s dark days and bathe the garden of his youth in life-giving heat. Millay’s kindly sun penetrating the storm clouds of her sky lacks the intensity and vividness of Baudelaire’s original. Lowell fares better with his “brilliant heat” (see above), which has all the force and light of the original, but opts for a “menacing shower” to translate Baudelaire’s dark storm. Whether this choice was dictated by rhyme or not, I would maintain that it distorts the tone and meaning of the poem. Firstly, his choice of “shower” is, to my mind, unsatisfactory. A shower is something light and of short duration, a nourishing source of moisture that refreshes the soil, and even though Lowell modifies it with an adjective like “menacing”, this does not convey the turbulence and darkness of Baudelaire’s storm. In fact, it sounds unhelpfully paradoxical. Can a shower really be menacing? And, although youth is seen here as a turbulent period that has caused havoc in the poet’s life to date, I think the verb “menacing” goes too far in that it has connotations of intent, ill will. In Baudelaire’s poem, youth is almost seen as a force of nature,
something that brings about disaster unwittingly – it is merely going about its business, bringing rain and wind in its wake. In Lowell’s version, youth becomes a wilfully self-destructive force that ‘menaces’ the garden of life, that sets out to harm it, and this, I believe, is just one of many distortions of meaning in his version.

   Richard Howard’s version is the best in this respect (see above). He uses the verb “lowering” for “ténébreux”, which is an alternative spelling for ‘louring’ and as such conveys both the darkness of an overcast sky and has connotations of anger and sullenness. His sibilant “sudden suns” also convey a sense of bright shafts of sunlight and, while there is no direct reference to the radiance of the sunshine, the sound of the phrase allied with its meaning somehow conjures up the image of bright sun after rain with gentle breezes caressing the foliage. This impression is also strengthened by the use of the verb “lanced”, which, although introducing a somewhat medical image (which points up the beneficial, almost purgative, effect of the sun), also suggests a spear-like shaft or ray of sunlight.

   A successful translation of a poem, however, relies on much more than a meticulous and informed choice of individual words and, although a translator should be faithful to the meaning of a poem, he or she should not treat the text as inviolable, preserving images or content when this clearly works against its meaning. It is permissible, argues Eco, in this “game of faithfulness”8 to translate the “micropropositions” of a text but not the “macro-propositions.” In other words, in certain circumstances, a translator may have to change an image, idiom or pun because it is simply untranslatable, taking the view that the choice of image, the act of making a pun or the use of a colloquial saying are more important than the actual phrase in question. This is particularly relevant to the use of humour or satire in poetry, which is often inextricably linked to the culture that spawned it. While not impossible to get around a joke or pun in a long text, such as a novel, by paraphrasing, adding similar puns elsewhere in the text to create the same overall effect, or even by adding a footnote, this is not feasible in a poem as it would ruin its anatomy and music. It is necessary therefore to determine the reason for the joke or wordplay and attempt to recreate the effect in the target language, something equivalent perhaps to the target culture rather than the source culture, so that the overall impact of the poem is sustained.

   To conclude, then, a good translation of a poem is one in which, to hijack Robert Frost’s dictum, the poetry is not lost in translation. It is the point where one writer’s skill and craft are placed in the service of another poet’s voice and vision and where ego is tempered by tact. “Without modesty translation will traduce; where modesty is constant, it can transfigure.”6 If a translator is too obsequious, too invisible, the result can be little better than metaphrase or literal translation; if he or she is too bound up with their own concerns and their own reputation, the result can be a poor imitation, neither a good translation nor a work of startling originality. However, when the translator has the skill to wield his or her own language effectively and the humility to listen closely to what the source language poet is really saying, then the resulting paraphrase in the target language can work almost as well as the original poem.

   If, then, as Robert Frost says in a letter of 1916, “A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words”, then a good translation of a poem can be expected to do no less. When it works, as Don Paterson says, it is “something like piano transcriptions of guitar music”7: the medium and sound-world may be different, but the theme and emotion remain unchanged.

L'ennemi by Charles Baudelaire

Ma jeunesse ne fut qu'un ténébreux orage,
Traversé çà et là par de brillants soleils;
Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage
Qu'il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils.

Voilà que j'ai touché l'automne des idées,
Et qu'il faut employer la pelle et les râteaux
Pour rassembler à neuf les terres inondées,
Où l'eau creuse des trous grands comme des tombeaux.

Et qui sait si les fleurs nouvelles que je rêve
Trouveront dans ce sol lavé comme une grève
Le mystique aliment qui ferait leur vigueur?

– Ô douleur! ô douleur! Le Temps mange la vie,
Et l'obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le coeur
Du sang que nous perdons croît et se fortifie! 11