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.In Chan sonRoyale 912, for example, an officer of the court is told to makean arrest, and an exchange ensues with the miscreant: Voluntiers; venez en prinsonPuis que la chose est commande. Je n ay meffait a ame ne;Que je parle au prevost a part. Adieu! II est huimais trop tard. The original is almost conversational, and we have tried toretain this level of dic tion in the translation: Gladto do it.Custody for you, my lad.Orders are to put you in the hole. But I haven t harmed a living soul.Let me talk in private to the judge. By God, it s now too late to budge. We felt free to take a poetic catalogue and move the sequenceof items around in order to get an English rhyme and rhythm,since Deschamps had obvi ously done the same to get theoriginal French rhyme.For example, the sequence of placenames in Balade 169 is:Et visit en chascune partie,Jherusalem, Egipte et Galile,Alixandre, Damas et la Surie, POETS INTRODUCTION 67Babiloine, le Caire et Tartariewhich in translation became:and visited all places, every one,seen Egypt and Jerusalem and Galilee,Damascus, Alexandria and Babylon,Cairo and Syria and Tartary.We have occasionally added phrases not in the original, butusually have restricted them to exclamations in the voice ofthe protagonist of the poem, not new content.We have alsooccasionally transposed lines or moved conceptions around ina sentence, in order to translate all thoughts, and get a rhyme.When the wife in Balade 853 complains,Je n ose aler en bois, ville ne plaine,Danser, chanter, manger, boire de vin,Que le villain, a guise d un mastin,Ne m abbaie, crians: Que fais tu la? these lines are translated, shifting the concept of daring fromthe beginning to the middle of the sentence,If I go to the woods, the town, the fields, or dareto dance, or sing or eat or drink some wine,the villain, like a dog, barks his one lineand shouts at me, What are you doing there? The two scholars have added footnotes pointing out whatthey thought were our most serious departures from theFrench.By and large, however, the two poets believe they gotas close as the languages permit to the form and mean ing ofDeschamps s poems, and that all departures are in the spiritof the author.As to versification, we decided that Deschamps, who wrotein a highly formal manner, and was brilliant at it, had to betranslated into formal verse in English. 68 EUSTACHE DESCHAMPSMost of the poems translated are balades, where the mainformal interest is not in the rhymes or rhythms but inDeschamps s extraordinary formulation and use of refrains.Consequently, we started with as accurate, idiomatic, andpowerful a translation of the refrain as we could get.Wepresume, as anyone who has ever written a poem would, thatDeschamps often started with the refrain and worked up apoem to bring out its meaning.In any case, a strict concernwith rhyme and rhyme schemes would have necessitateddeparting too far from exact meanings, which we took to bethe primary interest of the balades we selected.All baladeswere translated into an iambic meter, usually a pentameter,and for quite a few this was as much formality as we felt wasneeded, and we rested content with blank verse.In a fewcases, usually those where the mood was somber, we addedthe requirement of an unstressed end ing to each line.But for most balades we required of ourselves a translationinto iambic meter and full rhyme.We chose rhymes ofopportunity, and did not attempt con sistent rhyme schemesin balades.Full rhymes of opportunity seemed preferable tohalf rhymes in a consistent pattern.Deschamps was a courtpoet, and the satisfaction, the click, of full rhyme was part ofhis display of virtuosity and wit.A courtly audience wouldnot have considered half rhymes witty.At our most lax, whichwas rare, we allowed full rhymes separated by threeintervening lines.We also sometimes allowed ourselves afive- or even six-stress line where the equivalent length wouldhave been shorter.The extra syllables gave us room to get anatural syntax and rhyme word.For other technical matters we did what we could,attempting, for example, to match enjambment when itseemed of poetic importance in the original and possible inthe translation.And sometimes this was indeed possible, as inChan son Royale 912, where the thief is giving a bribe: Prevost, pour Dieu, aiez regartA cent frans que vez ci; tenez;Je suis prodoms. POETS INTRODUCTION 69which we translated as: Judge! have a look, for heaven s sake,at the hundred francs I ve brought for you to take:I am an honest man. For poems in the form of rondeaux or virelais, we tried tofollow the line lengths and rhyme schemes of the original,since these features are a dominant part of the effect of suchhighly stylized poems.And for one of the best of Deschamps spoems, which defies categorization in any of the fixed forms,Sui je belle (Virelai 554), the fifteen-year-old protagonist looksin the mirror and says inter alia (in lines so short they leavelittle wiggle room for a translator, and with a charming andconsistent diction):J ay dur sain et hault assi,Long bras gresles, doys aussi,Et par le faulz sui greslette:Dictes moy se je sui belle.J ay bonnes rains, ce m est vis,Bon dos, bon cul de Paris,Cuisses et gambes bien faites:Suis je, suis je, sui je belle?After many drafts, we had her saying:My breasts are firm, and they are high;Slim arms and fingers, by the by,and my small waist is very fine:tell me if I m lovely.My hips are good, it seems to me,good back, good Paris butt on me,and my legs and thighs are just divine:am I, am I, am I lovely?David CurzonNew York CityJeffrey Fiskin 70 EUSTACHE DESCHAMPSHollywood, CaliforniaSeptember 2002 The PoemsPlus ne prestray livre quoy qui aviengne1fol 6d J ay mes livres en tant de lieux prestezEt a pluseurs qui les devoient rendreDont li termes est failliz et passezQu a faire prest ne doy james entendreLaiz ne chancons ne faiz d amours comprandre 5Hystorier n oneur ramentevoirQuant je me voy sanz cause decevoirEt retenir mon labeur et ma paine [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.In Chan sonRoyale 912, for example, an officer of the court is told to makean arrest, and an exchange ensues with the miscreant: Voluntiers; venez en prinsonPuis que la chose est commande. Je n ay meffait a ame ne;Que je parle au prevost a part. Adieu! II est huimais trop tard. The original is almost conversational, and we have tried toretain this level of dic tion in the translation: Gladto do it.Custody for you, my lad.Orders are to put you in the hole. But I haven t harmed a living soul.Let me talk in private to the judge. By God, it s now too late to budge. We felt free to take a poetic catalogue and move the sequenceof items around in order to get an English rhyme and rhythm,since Deschamps had obvi ously done the same to get theoriginal French rhyme.For example, the sequence of placenames in Balade 169 is:Et visit en chascune partie,Jherusalem, Egipte et Galile,Alixandre, Damas et la Surie, POETS INTRODUCTION 67Babiloine, le Caire et Tartariewhich in translation became:and visited all places, every one,seen Egypt and Jerusalem and Galilee,Damascus, Alexandria and Babylon,Cairo and Syria and Tartary.We have occasionally added phrases not in the original, butusually have restricted them to exclamations in the voice ofthe protagonist of the poem, not new content.We have alsooccasionally transposed lines or moved conceptions around ina sentence, in order to translate all thoughts, and get a rhyme.When the wife in Balade 853 complains,Je n ose aler en bois, ville ne plaine,Danser, chanter, manger, boire de vin,Que le villain, a guise d un mastin,Ne m abbaie, crians: Que fais tu la? these lines are translated, shifting the concept of daring fromthe beginning to the middle of the sentence,If I go to the woods, the town, the fields, or dareto dance, or sing or eat or drink some wine,the villain, like a dog, barks his one lineand shouts at me, What are you doing there? The two scholars have added footnotes pointing out whatthey thought were our most serious departures from theFrench.By and large, however, the two poets believe they gotas close as the languages permit to the form and mean ing ofDeschamps s poems, and that all departures are in the spiritof the author.As to versification, we decided that Deschamps, who wrotein a highly formal manner, and was brilliant at it, had to betranslated into formal verse in English. 68 EUSTACHE DESCHAMPSMost of the poems translated are balades, where the mainformal interest is not in the rhymes or rhythms but inDeschamps s extraordinary formulation and use of refrains.Consequently, we started with as accurate, idiomatic, andpowerful a translation of the refrain as we could get.Wepresume, as anyone who has ever written a poem would, thatDeschamps often started with the refrain and worked up apoem to bring out its meaning.In any case, a strict concernwith rhyme and rhyme schemes would have necessitateddeparting too far from exact meanings, which we took to bethe primary interest of the balades we selected.All baladeswere translated into an iambic meter, usually a pentameter,and for quite a few this was as much formality as we felt wasneeded, and we rested content with blank verse.In a fewcases, usually those where the mood was somber, we addedthe requirement of an unstressed end ing to each line.But for most balades we required of ourselves a translationinto iambic meter and full rhyme.We chose rhymes ofopportunity, and did not attempt con sistent rhyme schemesin balades.Full rhymes of opportunity seemed preferable tohalf rhymes in a consistent pattern.Deschamps was a courtpoet, and the satisfaction, the click, of full rhyme was part ofhis display of virtuosity and wit.A courtly audience wouldnot have considered half rhymes witty.At our most lax, whichwas rare, we allowed full rhymes separated by threeintervening lines.We also sometimes allowed ourselves afive- or even six-stress line where the equivalent length wouldhave been shorter.The extra syllables gave us room to get anatural syntax and rhyme word.For other technical matters we did what we could,attempting, for example, to match enjambment when itseemed of poetic importance in the original and possible inthe translation.And sometimes this was indeed possible, as inChan son Royale 912, where the thief is giving a bribe: Prevost, pour Dieu, aiez regartA cent frans que vez ci; tenez;Je suis prodoms. POETS INTRODUCTION 69which we translated as: Judge! have a look, for heaven s sake,at the hundred francs I ve brought for you to take:I am an honest man. For poems in the form of rondeaux or virelais, we tried tofollow the line lengths and rhyme schemes of the original,since these features are a dominant part of the effect of suchhighly stylized poems.And for one of the best of Deschamps spoems, which defies categorization in any of the fixed forms,Sui je belle (Virelai 554), the fifteen-year-old protagonist looksin the mirror and says inter alia (in lines so short they leavelittle wiggle room for a translator, and with a charming andconsistent diction):J ay dur sain et hault assi,Long bras gresles, doys aussi,Et par le faulz sui greslette:Dictes moy se je sui belle.J ay bonnes rains, ce m est vis,Bon dos, bon cul de Paris,Cuisses et gambes bien faites:Suis je, suis je, sui je belle?After many drafts, we had her saying:My breasts are firm, and they are high;Slim arms and fingers, by the by,and my small waist is very fine:tell me if I m lovely.My hips are good, it seems to me,good back, good Paris butt on me,and my legs and thighs are just divine:am I, am I, am I lovely?David CurzonNew York CityJeffrey Fiskin 70 EUSTACHE DESCHAMPSHollywood, CaliforniaSeptember 2002 The PoemsPlus ne prestray livre quoy qui aviengne1fol 6d J ay mes livres en tant de lieux prestezEt a pluseurs qui les devoient rendreDont li termes est failliz et passezQu a faire prest ne doy james entendreLaiz ne chancons ne faiz d amours comprandre 5Hystorier n oneur ramentevoirQuant je me voy sanz cause decevoirEt retenir mon labeur et ma paine [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]