Poets and their translators have often agonized over the exhausting task of translating the ineffable poetics of their work, of which every word, punctuation mark, break, pause, and sound is a contributing factor; it goes without saying that the journey from one language to another somewhat impedes upon this delicate balance. In this following essay, Asymptote‘s Alexander Dickow expertly dissects an overarching complication: the act of translating metric verse. In dialogue with a newly published translation of Gérard de Nerval’s famed Chimeras and their predecessors, larger questions of poetics and translations emerge: just how impossible is translating music, and what can be accomplished in an impossible task?
The contemporary preference for unrhymed, free-verse translations of poetry generally has little to do with readability, and much to do with lack of ambition; with the belief, perhaps sanctioned by laziness, that capturing the rhythm of an original with any admirable degree of purity is a fool’s errand, a quixotic fantasy: impossible, and therefore undesirable. The French theorist of translation and poet Henri Meschonnic spent years defending metrical and rhythmic translation, arguing that rhythm is the mark of subjectivity in language and therefore essential to the enterprise of translation. He made this impassioned defense largely in vain, but the proof is in the pudding: whatever one thinks of Meschonnic’s theories of translation and rhythm generally—and he has no lack of critics—the translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets he offers in Poétique du traduire seem, at least to the author of the present essay, indisputably more accurate and powerful than any of the other examples (Meschonnic quotes some five to six examples of other translations for each sonnet he translates into French). Admirable and accurate verse translation is not impossible; even if it were, should the translator’s ambition yield before that impossibility? Is not reaching for the impossible the definition of worthy literary ambition? (See Georges Bataille.) Excessive humility may be a more typical translator’s flaw; perhaps it is time to consider a bit of pride in the “little art,” as Kate Briggs recently called translation, with a hint of tender irony. In fact, translation is an irreducibly arrogant and presumptuous endeavor in the first place—utopian, as Ortega y Gasset has argued. One might as well own that presumption, and aim for the heights: what do we have to lose? The worst that can happen is a bit more failure, which there is no lack of in translation, metrical or otherwise. One may certainly sacrifice too much for a rhyme, but one may sacrifice too much for any formal effect in a poem, and this is not sufficient cause, in my view, to jettison meter and rhyme entirely. Nor is “updating” a text for our own era and its prose and free-verse dominance. For is it not the foreignness of another age that we in part admire in a text of the past? And in resigning ourselves to “updating” a metrical text, are we not capitulating once more to our imprisonment in history (that “impossibility” again, this time of transcending the zeitgeist) and to the anxiety of audience expectations?
All of this, of course, assumes that something like accuracy, if not fidelity, is still the translator’s avowed goal; if the goal is instead to make a new poem entirely distinct from the original, these remarks are irrelevant. But as any survey of the field of translation will likely discover, translators do not often explicitly abandon the principal of accuracy. As I will explain below, many translations do, however, present themselves as supplements to the originals rather than as stand-alone poems, particularly in bilingual editions. But even in such editions, translations should, in my opinion, still aspire to be true poems, and to reflect something of the original text.
I attempted several times this introduction before deciding that I had to stand by these declarations, excessively strident though they may seem. I can only hope the translator whose work has occasioned these remarks will forgive me for my soapbox, and that the latter will be in the service of his work, and not to its detriment. For I do believe that Henry Weinfield, in his new translation of Gérard de Nerval’s Chimeras from Dos Madres Press, has at least done a certain service to this great French Romantic, by offering the only near-metrical, (slant-)rhymed translation of these twelve sonnets (arranged into seven poems) currently in print, to the best of my knowledge.
To critique a translation, one must attempt to provide some sense of the whole. In focusing on this or that flaw, this or that tiny victory, one can hardly judge the overall effect of the translation: at the detailed level of the individual line, one may find as many flaws and qualities as in any other translation, even when the impression of the translation as a whole seems successful. This holds all the more when faced with a text as often translated as Nerval’s Chimeras. I have examined the four most common and available translations of the 1854 text, originally published as the final section of Nerval’s Filles du feu. Among these, Weinfield’s translation comes closest to reflecting the mysterious allure of the originals. This is due in large part to Weinfield’s maintaining something of the original’s rhythm, meter, and rhyme.
I must first complain of a flaw common to all four translations, none of which respect Nerval’s idiosyncratic use of italics, capitalization, and punctuation. I am unable to fathom any justification for not maintaining (as some of these translations do not) the italics of the word star in the third line of “El Desdichado,” the collection’s first and most famous sonnet: “Ma seule étoile est morte, — et mon luth constellé […].” This represents only one example of Nerval’s typographical idiosyncrasy. The potential allegorical or esoteric significance of these italics would seem to demand exact transposition into the translation. These material signs also contribute to the sense of the whole, and abandoning them seems to me an error, and a strange one.
The four translations I have surveyed include those of Henry Weinfield, Will Stone from Shearsman Press (1999, second edition), Richard Sieburth in his critical Penguin edition of the Selected Writings of Nerval (1999), and Geoffrey Wagner (University of Michigan Press, 1957). Among these four, Richard Sieburth deserves no reproach for his prose translations, since these, situated at the bottom of the pages where the original French is presented, seem explicitly designed to aid the reader of the French text, and not as stand-alone translations defensible as poems in their own right. In fact, only Weinfield’s edition does not include the French originals, perhaps to declare their adequacy as fully poetic texts, rather than as supplemental texts. Likewise, Weinfield eschews dense critical notes (which can be found in Sieburth’s edition): Nerval himself, after all, declared that the sonnets might “lose their charm in being explained.”
And to an admirable extent, Weinfield’s versions can indeed speak mostly for themselves. Where others falter, Weinfield captures the original’s incantatory qualities:
Le Treizième revient… C’est encor la première ;
Et c’est toujours la seule, — ou c’est le seul moment ;
Car es-tu reine, ô toi ! la première ou la dernière ?
Es-tu roi, toio le seul ou le dernier amant ?The Thirteenth returns… She’s the first once again;
It’s still the sole moment and still she’s alone:
For are you the first or the last? Are you queen?
Are you king? And the sole or the last lover known? (“Artemis”)
The end-consonance in n (again, alone, queen, known) appropriately adds a particular insistence, absent in the other translations, to this singularly mantra-like stanza, with its tick-tock repetitions of cardinal numbers (treizième, première, dernière, premier, dernier). And the end-consonance, along with the repetition of the word still (an extrapolation of the translator, but here formally justified) also compensates for the loss of the repetition of the ier/ière endings in almost all French cardinal numbers.
In the original, it appears clear that the addressee changes between lines three and four of this stanza; this relatively clear shift does become somewhat obscured in Weinfield’s version, though one might perhaps contest this interpretation of the stanza’s system of address (perhaps by invoking the esoteric figure of the androgyne, to whom one might equally ask, “Are you queen? Are you king?”).
The astute reader will have noticed the peculiar metrical variation; syllabically, these lines run 11, 11, 11, 12, mostly conforming neither to the French twelve-syllable alexandrine, nor to the Anglo-American pentameter line. This may reflect a kind of compromise between the alexandrine, often viewed as cumbersome in English, and the Anglo-American ten-syllable form. Likewise, Weinfield’s judicious use of assonance and slant-rhyme throughout The Chimeras makes for a reasonable compromise between those who would argue in favor of free-verse translations, and purists such as myself who prefer metrical translation. There might be something in this translation for everyone. In fact, Weinfield seems to avoid, at times, overly strict iambic rhythms. In “Myrtho,” he translates the last line as “The pale hydrangea and myrtle green unite,” an eleven-beat line, while he might easily have added a second definite article to establish perfect parallelism and iambic rhythm:
¯ ´ ¯ ´ ¯ ` ¯ ´ ¯ ´ ¯ ´
The pale hydrangea and THE myrtle green unite.
Perhaps Weinfield preferred to avoid perfect symmetry that might feel too contrived or archaic in our free-verse-dominant context. In his place, I would doubtless have chosen the symmetry of the iambic rhythm, but I am a greater rigorist in metrical meters, it would seem: once again, Weinfield seems to opt for a workable compromise between translation strategies, metrical and free.
Perhaps Weinfield also seeks a kind of formal hybridity, as evoked by the collection’s title. In French, the word chimère designates a foolish dream, a sort of castle in the clouds, but also the mythological creature made up of the parts of various animals. As Richard Sieburth remarks in his edition of the Selected Writings, the title may humbly refer to Alexandre Dumas’ mockery of these poems as the vain fruits of a “delightful madman”—Nerval indeed produced primitive versions of these sonnets amidst one of his famous mental health crises—but it also refers to the resolutely composite nature of these poems. Sieburth aptly notes their modular construction, since the seven final poems of The Chimeras resulted in part from reshuffling groups of lines from the original series produced under considerable duress (most editions do not include the original poems of the Gramont manuscript; among those surveyed here, only Sieburth includes these). But the hybridity of these texts is evident without recourse to their compositional history, since Nerval draws on a wealth of proper names of different mythological traditions (including apparent inventions of his own, such as the name “Myrtho,” though this may be a reference to the maenad Myrto)—Biblical, Greek, and Egyptian especially (but not exclusively). To call this esoteric syncretism would suggest a blending of traditions, but Nerval’s patchwork makes little attempt to disguise the disjunctions (although the sonnet “Horus” does broach a transition from Egyptian mythology to the Greek mythology, borrowed in part from Egypt). The emblem of the mythical Chimera, likened by Horace to a “sick man’s dreams” at the opening to his Ars poetica, fits these perfect fever dreams quite well indeed.
Regardless of translation strategies, these twelve sonnets would seem to make for quite a temptation to the translator: the wealth of proper names (easily transposed into English or another language) and the apparently tiny scope of the mini-collection would seem to make The Chimeras low-hanging fruit, and their hermetic esoterism would seem to dispense the translator from much interpretive heavy lifting. In reality, the challenges of Nerval’s sonnets begin with the very first line of the justly famous initial sonnet, “El Desdichado”:
Je suis le ténébreux,— le veuf,— l’inconsolé […]
Any English translation of these lines is doomed to struggle with the triple epithet of the original, since adjectives do not always suffer being nouned in English. Most merely insert a noun after “ténébreux” (my emphasis):
I am the man of gloom — the widower — the unconsoled (Sieburth)
I am the dark man, the disconsolate widower (Wagner)
I am the brooding shadow — the bereaved — the unconsoled (Stone)
I am the dark, the bereaved, disconsolate knight (Weinfield)
Weinfield here has the superior translation: by pushing the noun to the end of the line, he reproduces the triple symmetry of the three epithets with little disturbance of their equilibrium (with the exception of the variation in including or not the definite article), and he also creates a syntactic ambiguity with the first expression, “I am the dark,” which at first seems self-contained. He also maintains the alexandrine form, although with a somewhat irregular prosodic pattern. The other translations make little attempt to maintain anything of the original’s rhythms; Stone even decides to unpack the connotations of “le ténébreux” into what seem like two translation units, “brooding” and “shadow.”
I mentioned before that such details do not necessarily convey the success or failure of the whole translation. And Weinfield is not without its off-key moments:
You ask why in my heart anger is such a goad (“Anteros,” a clumsy slant-rhyme with “god”)
— And nothing disturbs the portico severe (“Delphica,” an adjective in artificial post-position)
But these awkward moments, happily, represent by far the most egregious exceptions to Weinfield’s delicately balanced verse. And if I chose to discuss the poem’s opening line, it is in part because Weinfield’s success there feels representative of his subtler improvements on the other surveyed translations.
Which translation one indulges in depends ultimately on what the reader seeks. Sieburth and Wagner’s translation will serve the reader well who wishes to attempt an approach of the French originals, and Stone’s tendency to expand to account for connotations might help such a reader hone her understanding of the finer resonances at work in the French. Sieburth, and Wagner to a lesser extent, provide extensive critical notes. But for those who seek to taste something of Nerval’s bitter lemons and fragrant myrtle in English, Weinfield remains the best of these translations, and this is thanks to his sensitivity to rhythm, meter, and rhyme.
I would be remiss in failing to mention the intensity of Douglas Kinsey’s illustrations of Weinfield’s translations, a welcome enhancement, and one that once again distinguishes this edition from the others. I regret that a discussion of these images falls outside the scope of this essay, but I mention them in hopes they will further recommend the volume to the reader. Weinfield has produced a fine version of Nerval; Kinsey and Dos Madres Press have given the translation a handsome presentation.
Alexander Dickow is the author of Caramboles (Paris: Argol Editions, 2008), a collection of poems in French and English, and Le Poète innombrable: Blaise Cendrars, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob (Paris: Hermann, 2015), a scholarly work. He lived in France as a Fulbright scholar in 2003-2004, and subsequently completed his cotutelle dissertation on French modernism in 2011 (Rutgers/Paris 8). He has published scholarship, poetry and translations in many journals abroad and in the US, and teaches the language, literature and culture of France and Francophone countries at Virginia Tech. Buy your copy of Alexander Dickow’s poetry collection Appetites here. For more information about past, present, and future work, you can browse his website.
*****
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