English and French poetic languages compared

Martin Sorrell

Martin Sorrell is Senior Lecturer in the Department of French of the University of Exeter.

Yves Bonnefoy's 1959 essay on translating Shakespeare [1] is simultaneously illuminating and contentious. As a translator from English (Shakespeare and Yeats principally) as well as a major poet in the French language, he is admirably placed to evaluate what he sees as the inherent and regrettably irreconcilable differences between English and French. Bonnefoy's meditations on this issue - he has written about it in other contexts too - constitute a fascinating if troubled contribution to any debate about the nature and reality of 'the nation'. In this essay, I propose to give a brief account of Bonnefoy's argument, and to test it against a number of examples of French-English and English-French literary translation.

Put succinctly, Bonnefoy sees Platonism as the heart of the French language, and Aristotelianism as that of English. The received wisdom that French tends to abstraction is something Bonnefoy appears to believe. He sees such abstraction as the result of a French desire to seek and map out the 'Idea'. The consistent movement is away from the particular, the discrete, and towards the general, the universal. So French is a language which reduces, which excludes. Its constant tendency is to transform the rich diversity of the world into manageable, intellectual categories. For Bonnefoy, a function of this need is that the focus of attention will be on the word rather than on the thing which it signifies. The symbol, not the thing symbolised, carries the weight. The word is the signifier of an eternal form.

The concreteness of English, however, is for Bonnefoy a mark of what he terms its 'passionate Aristotelianism'. Clearly, he is nostalgic for that commitment to the phenomenal world which is at the heart of the English language, but which has been lost to French (he appears to imply) since the Cartesian Classicism began its one-party rule. Bonnefoy writes of the "intense and narrow aim that restored to poetry that almost obsessional detachment from the phenomenal world [and] which seems to be the fate of our [France's] main body of work"[2]. Nowhere is this difference made clearer than in Shakespeare. Quoting from Henry IV, Part 1, Bonnefoy seeks to demonstrate how there is a particularity about Falstaff, a unique individual living in a specific world (taverns, bawdy houses) and not any other, yet who contrives out of this specificity to suggest universal issues and truths.
The passage Bonnefoy quotes is from Act III, Scene 3:

Falstaff [to Bardolph]:
"Why, there it is; come, sing me a bawdy song; make me merry. I was as virtuously given as a gentleman need to be; virtuous enough; swore little; diced not above seven times a week; went to a bawdy-house not above one in a quarter - of an hour; paid money that I borrowed three or four times; lived well and in good compass; and now I live out of all order, out of all compass. "

Bonnefoy discerns in these lines, as elsewhere in the play, a unique, complex and enigmatic figure who is as unfathomable as any other real human being. His Aristotelian dicreteness is manifest in all the turbulence of a real life led in a real world, yet nevertheless something archetypal arises from the flux and chaos. To this, Bonnefoy compares the translation of Francois Victor-Hugo:

"Oui, voila la chose. Allons, chante-moi une chanson egrillarde. Egayemoi. J'etais aussi vertueusement doue qu'un gentilhomme a hesoin de l'etre; vertueux suff samment; jurant peu; jouant aux des, pas plus de septfois... par semaine; allant dans les mauvais lieux pas plus d'unefois par quart d'heure; ayant trois ou quatre fois rendu de l'aragent emprunte; vivant bien et dans la juste mesure; et maintenant, je mene une vie desordonnee et hors de toute mesure. "

The effect of the French, claims Bonnefoy, is to distance the reality in all its physical 'thereness', to remove us from the actual room in which Falstaff is sitting, and to have us instead observe him through a windowpane. He is now dimmed, distant, insubstantial. He is a character in literature, says Bonnefoy, striving by his exuberant language to resemble life too closely and hence all the less convincing. He has lost his roundness.

Elsewhere in his essay, Bonnefoy quotes with wondering approval a line from the last scene of Anthony and Cleopatra, together with a couple of translations into French which show as pertinently as any other example some unbridgeable gaps between French and English.

Cleopatra says: "I have immortal longings in me", words whose condensed poetic power thrills Bonnefoy. The two translations perhaps show that a similar condensing is not available in French. Neither "Je sens en moi l'impatient desir de l'immortalite" (Letourneur) nor "Je me sens pressee d'un violent desir de quitter la vie" (Francisque Michel) gets the reality of Shakespeare's adjective-plus-noun.

It is as if the power of the high-voltage English has had to be dissipated in the French opened-out syntax. Might it be that an essential difference between English and French, when used for poetic expression (this is crucial), is as much to do with syntactical condensing, short-circuiting in English, and what one could call an 'unpicking' process in French, as it is with inherent qualities of individual items of vocabulary? It might be argued that the problems identified by Bonnefoy are rather more localised than he accepts, that is, that they are caused principally by the constraints of the French Classical tradition, constraints which some writers have been able to refuse.

To test these possibilities, I have gathered a selection of literary texts, some of them poems, some pieces of prose, in both languages, with translations (all published). The choice is personal but not, I hope, arbitrary. The selection is set out below, accompanied by short commentaries which aim to highlight problems of the sort discussed by Bonnefoy.

Baudelaire: L'Ennemi

Ma jeunesse ne fut qu'un tenebreux orage,
Traverse ,ca et la 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.

Voila que j'ai touche l'automne des idees,
Et qu'il faut employer la pelle et les rateaux
Pour rassembler a neuf les terres inondees,
Ou l'eau creuse des trous grands comme des tombeaux.

Et qui salt si les fleurs nouvelles que je reve
Trouveront dans ce sol lave comme une greve
Le mystique aliment qui ferait leur vigueur?

-O douleur! o douleur! Le Temps mange la vie,
Et l'obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le coeur
Du sang que nous perdons cro~t et se fortifie!

The Ruined Garden

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.

From now on, my mind's autumn! I must take
The field and dress my beds with spade and rake
and restore order to my flooded grounds.
There the rain raised mountains like burial mounds.

I throw fresh seeds out. Who knows what survives?
What elements will give us life and food?
This soil is irrigated by the tides.

Time and nature sluice away our lives.
A virus eats the heart out of our sides,
digs in and multiplies on our lost blood.

(trans. Robert Lowell)

Lowell's version suffers from its attempt to imitate fairly strictly the forms of Baudelaire's sonnet. He tries for a syllabic line, not always even, and he consistently uses rhyme. The result surely is most awkward. But beyond this somewhat generalised sense of misplaced 'Frenchness', individual lexical and syntactical elements jar. In Baudelaire's first line, the preterite fut loses its dramatic finality in was. Now and then for ca et la unnecessarily shifts the mode from spatial to temporal, and therefore forces Lowell into the weak hours of brilliant heat. Line 5 demonstrates the sort of difference between the two languages which Bonnefoy pinpoints. The French does indeed seem to have a universalising tendency. Certainly, the first person singular pronoun fixes the poetic persona, but l'automne des idees then frees the meaning from the grasp of a single individual. Lowell, however, in a clumsy line, opts for an entirely individual perspective. Similarly, in the final tercet, Baudelaire's splendid cry on behalf of all humanity (and more, perhaps) is toned down out of recognition by Lowell's Time and nature and a virus. Here, the Platonism (if that is what it is) of the French is forceful and emotive while in the English it has become insipidly prosaic.

Car, pour la grande joie du coeur,
Le gris aux duveteuses mamelles que la terre serrait contre elle
S'eloigne, les cieux bleu-de-geui apparaissant
D'un mai pie et decortique!
Hauteur battant-le-bleu, chatoyante-chenue, et toi, plus haute nun'
Aufeu tintant, d la douce-comme-phalene Voie lactee,
D'apres votre mesure, qu'est le ciel du desir,

Tresor inconquis de tout oeil et, malgre les out-dire, indevine?

(trans. Pierre Leyris)

Leyris's versions of Hopkins have been very well received. George Steiner praised them almost ecstatically on BBC Radio 3 a decade ago. And indeed, they are heroic and often impressive accounts of a poet who must surely provide the greatest challenge imaginable to the translator. The above extract, however, reveals that the task is ultimately impossible. The layout, abandoning Hopkins' centered format, looks less interesting on the page. The very first word is made to sound as though it were introducing an essay in logic through Leyris' use of car plus comma. But the second line shows the translator's problem at its most acute. The condensed but weighty compound adjectives preceding the nominally-used grey generate a power which simply is dissipated in Leyris' re-arranged syntax. Adjective phrases and relative clauses virtually evaporate the line. Hovers off has both a concreteness and a pleasing assonance which are jettisoned in s'eloigne. Hopkins' somewhat spondaic fourth line works well in the French, until decortique. And the admirable mothsoft Milky Way resists Leyris' syntactically very English rendering of it. But perhaps it is the last line which points up most clearly the English-French divide. Not only has Leyris apparently not attempted the treasure/never/ever rhyme and assonance, but he has structured, with his concessive phrase bounded by commas, a line of logical, abstract argument.

James Joyce: Ulysses

By lorries along sir John Rogerson's Quay Mr Bloom walked soberly, past Windmill Lane, Leask's the linseed crusher's, the postal telegraph office. Could have given that address too. And past the sailors' home. He turned from the morning noises of the quayside and walked through Lime Street. By Brady's cottages a boy for the skins lolled, his bucket of offal linked, smoking a chewed fag butt. A smaller girl with scars of eczema on her forehead eyed him, listlessly holding her battered caskhoop. Tell him if he smokes he won't grow. O let him! His life isn't such a bed of roses! Waiting outside pubs to bring da home. Come home to ma, da. Slack hour: won't be many there. He crossed Townsend Street, passed the frowning face of Bethel. El, yes: house of: Aleph, teeth. And past Nichols' the undertaker's. At eleven it is. Time enough. Daresay Corny Kelleher bagged that job for O'Neill's. Singing with his eyes shut. Corney. Met her once in the park. In the dark. What a lark. Police tout. Her name and address she then told with my tooraloom tooraloom tay. O, surely he bagged it. Bury him cheap in a whatyoumaycall. With my tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom.

D'un pas mesure M. Bloom longea les camions du quad de sir John Rogerson, Windmill Lane, Leask le broyeur de fin, le bureau des Postes et Telegraphes. Aurais pu donner aussi cette adresse. Et l'Abri du Marin. Il s'eloigna du vacarme matinal des quads pour prendre Lime Street. Pres des cottages Brady un apprenti de tannerie trainassait, son seau d'aboats au bras, fumant un megot tout machonne. Une gamine plus petite avec des marques d'eczema sur le front l'examinait en tenant distraitement un cercle de barrique deforme. Lui dire que s'ilfume il negrandira pas. O laissons-lefaire! Sa vie n'est pas un tel lit de roses! Il attend a la porte des bistrots pour ramener papa a la maison. Reviens chez M'man, P'pa. Heure morte; il n'y aura pas grand monde. Il traversa Townsend Street, passa devant la facade rebarhative de Bethel. El, oui; maison de; Aleph Beth. Et devant Nichol, pompes funehres. C'est pour onze heures. Tout le temps. Suppose que c'est Kelleher qui a degote ca pour O'Neill.
Chante les yeux fermes, Corny, Rencontree au jardin. Au serein. Quel chopin. Un mouchard. Son nom et son adresse alors elle me donna avec mon mirliton mirliton tonton. Surement lui qui l'a degote. Enterrez-le avec le moins de frais possible dans un trurmachinchose. Avec mon mirliton, mirliton, tontaine, tonton.

(trans.Valery Larbaud)

Joyce starts Homerically, Biblically almost. Larbaud instead promotes soberly, unconvincingly translated as d'un pas mesure, to the head of the sentence (which needs to carry weight, as it is the opening of a defined section of chapter 2). Tell him if he smokes is more personalised that the abstracted infinitive of Lui dire.Against this, though, Larbaud has some felicitous moments which narrow the gap between the two languages. Reviens chez M'man, P'pa has the right sound, and is almost as condensed as the English. Then, Rencontree au jardin. Au serein. Quel chopin is admirable. But three lines later, Larbaud disappointingly slackens his grip and becomes prolix. Is it necessary to render cheap as avec le moins defrais possible? The English admittedly is difficult, but crisper solutions surely might have been worked out. Nonetheless, Larbaud seems, to me at least, to have come close to doing a fine translation, and his French style perhaps calls to mind that of Celine, who might be seen as the writer who has come as close as any in France to breaking the mould which so troubles Bonnefoy.

Philippe Jaccottet: Que la fin nous illumine

Sombre ennemi qui nous combats et nous resserres,
laisse-moi, dans le peu de jours que je detiens,
vouer ma faiblesse et ma force a la lumiere:
et que je sods change en eclair a la fin.

Moins il y a d'avidite et de faconde
en nos propos, mieux on les neglige pour voir
jusque dans leur hesitation briller le monde
entre le matin ivre et la legerete du soir.

Moins nos larmes apparaitront brouillant nos yeux
et nos personnel par la crainte garrottees,
plus les regards iront s'eclaircissant et mieux
les egares verront les portes enterrees.

L'effacement soit ma facon de resplendir,
la pauvrete surcharge de fruits notre table,
la mort, prochaine ou vague selon son desir,
soit l'aliment de la lumiere inepuisable.

Dark enemy, you who brace us in the fight,
let me, in the few days still left to spend,
devote my strength and weakness to the light
and so be changed to lightning in the end.

The gabbling mouths and animated eyes
grow easier to ignore even as they work:
the world gleams in their very hesitancies
between high morning and light-headed dark.

If we could stop whining and overcome
the fear that strangles us, behind, before,
our vision might improve, the lost become
more confident in their search for the buried door.

Let self-effacement be my way of blazing
and poverty weigh our table down with fruit;
death, far or near according to its choosing,
sustain, as ever, the inexhaustible light.

(trans. Derek Mahon)

I cite this example of a fine poem finely translated to show two things: that French poetic language is capable of a concrete robustness, and that English perhaps (to support Bonnefoy) is even more so. Verbs such as combats and resserres in the first line, garrottes in the tenth, contribute to what I consider the poem's physicality. However, Mahon's translation demonstrates that the French nevertheless still inclines to the abstract. Mahon's brace us in the fight; his avoidance of the somewhat academic moins/mieux construction in the second stanza, and moins/plus, moins/mieux in the third; lightheaded dark for la legerete du soir; blazing for resplendir; weigh...down for surcharge; and particularly his re-writing of the first two lines of the second stanza, using concrete terms for Jaccottet's Latinate abstractions; all of these freedoms, it might be argued, move the original into a world of physical contact and thus betray Jaccottet. At first sight, Mahon's piece looks quite removed from the French, but I would suggest that, on reflection, the English is well-judged, even necessary. Mahon has both conveyed whet Jaccottet is about, and written a substantial poem in English.

Rimbaud: Illuminations

1.

Je suds le saint, en priere sur la terrasse, - comme les betes pacifiques paissent jusqu'a la mer de Palestine.
('Enfance', IV)

I am a saint on a terrace praying -
Like gentle beasts who graze their way to the sea of Palestine.
(trans. Paul Schmidt)

2.

Alors je levai un a un les voiles. Dans l'allee en agitant les bras.
Par la plaine, ou je l'ai denoncee au coq. A la grand'ville, elle fuyait parmi les clochers et les domes, et, courant comme un mendiant
sur les quads de marbre, je la chassais.
('Aube')

Then, one by one, I lifted her veils.
In the long walk, waving my arms.
Across the meadow, where I betrayed her to the cock.
In the heart of town she fled among steeples and domes,
And I hunted her, scrambling like a beggar on marble wharves.

(trans. Paul Schmidt)

3.

- meme des cercueils sous leur dais de nun' dressant les panaches
d'ebene, filant au trot des grandes juments bleues et noires. ('Ornieres')

Even the coffins under their canopies
Flourish their ebony plumes,
And out trot great fat blue black mares.
(trans. Paul Schmidt)

These short extracts from Rimbaud's prose poems of the Illuminations are intended to show that French can come closer to principles of English poetic language than Bonnefoy perhaps allows. In the first place, the bold initiative of the prose-poem frees Rimbaud's French from the over-tidy organisation of the syllabic line. One intriguing feature of Paul Schmidt's version of many of the Illuminations is that they have opted to re-work Rimbaud's free forms into verse lines. My own feeling is that this works well, probably because there is so much freedom and diversity inherent in English verse and metre. English free verse seems to convey with fidelity what Rimbaud is trying to achieve with strongly poetic prose. Thus, 'Aube' loses nothing in the English of Schmidt. Similarly, though purists may not like it (and some do not!), Schmidt has contrived a magnificent ending to 'Ornieres', where the eight syllables in a spondaic row convey exactly Rimbaud's image. It is hard to imagine anything better. But where Schmidt perhaps has been defeated is in the first example. Rimbaud's comme les betes pacf ques paissent jusqu'a la mer de Palestine is a beautiful piece of enclosed, packed language of the sort which Bonnefoy finds in English. The adjective pacfiques is rich in a way that pacfic cannot be. Schmidt's gentle is sensible, but is it strong? The major difficulty, however, is the verb paissent, especially tied in with the preposition jusqu'a. For once, there seems to be an instance where French is poetically compact and English wordily 'opened out'. At least, graze their way has the virtue of trying to echo Rimbaud's alliteration (hetes pacfiques paissent) with assonance.

Samuel Beckett: Krapp's Last Tape

- gooseberries, she said. I said again, I thought it was hopeless and no good going on, and she agreed without opening her eyes. I asked her to look at me and after a few moments - after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow, and they opened. Let me in. We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! I lay down across her, with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently up and down and from side to side. Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.

-groseilles a maquereau, m'a-t-elle repondu. J'ai dit encore que ca me semblait sans espoir et pas la peine de continuer et elle a fait oui sans ouvrir les yeux. Je lui ai demande de me regarder et apres quelques instants - apres quelques instants elle l'a fait, mais les yeux comme des fentes a cause du soleil. Je me suis penche sur elle pour qu'ils soient dans l'ombre et ils se sont ouverts. M'ont laisse entrer. Nous derivions parmi les roseaux et la barque s'est coincee. Comme ils se pliaient, avec un soupir, devant la proue! Je me suis coule sur elle, mon visage dans ses seins et ma main sur elle. Nous restions 1a, couches, sans remuer. Mais, sous nous, tout remuait, et nous remuait, doucement, de haut en bas, et d'un cote' a l'autre. Passe minuit.Jamais entendu pareil silence. La terre pourrait etre inhabitee.

(Beckett's trans., La Derniere bande)

One of the most fruitful ways to consider the issues raised in this essay is to look at self-translation. It is well-known how Beckett chose to write in French in order to free himself from the tyranny of an acquired English style. Krapp's Last Tape was first written in English (with the actor Patrick Magee in mind). And wonderful poetic prose it is too, as demonstrated in this extract. But is Beckett's French at the same level? The adjective phrase a maquereau with groseilles obviously is accurate, but there is such a flavour of the dictionary about it. Then, the lovely, loosely chiasmic she said. I said again has gone in the French. I bent over her to get them in the shadow produces a (necessary?) ponderous French subjunctive. The utterly beautiful We drifted in among the flags and stuck loses most of its poetic magic in the French. Beckett has to settle for one tense in the first verb (the imperfect), and for another in the second (the passe compose); whereas drifted and stuck have greater range through their imprecision. Then, the force of the single syllable of stuck is quite dissipated in la barque s'est coincee. Similarly, se pliaient and avec un soupir seem too explanatory by comparison with the English.

I want to draw no conclusions either from Bonnefoy's argument nor from the examples quoted. It seems far too risky. Nonetheless, it does seem fair to agree with Bonnefoy at least with regard to the writers he chooses to cite. Shakespeare in England, Racine and Baudelaire in France, disclose some fundamental differences both in language and in patterns of thought. But perhaps the subtle tendentiousness of Bonnefoy's thesis must be resisted. It simply may not be that French tries but fails to do things which Shakespeare's English manages. The aims of Racine or Baudelaire may be quite distinct, and their language may have been chosen unproblematically with those aims in mind. When a poet such as Rimbaud wishes to conceive of reality in an 'English' way, there seems to be evidence that the French language is able to cope with the different demand. And then Jaccottet is certainly a wonderfully physical, as it were a tangible poet, though one has to look further than the one example quoted in this essay.

Perhaps the only safe conclusion to reach, and which the above examples indeed support, is that translation poses the severest problems in the literary domain, and which arguably can never be totally resolved. In other areas of language (e.g. legal, commercial, technical), the differences are not so apparent, and generally they can be sorted out with satisfactory degrees of accuracy. Not so in poetry - but then we have all known that for a long time.

Would these gulfs and gullies of literary language be admissable evidence in any case for or against the idea of national identity?

Notes:

1 Shakespeare et le poetefrancais, Preuves, 100,June 1959, pp.42-48. A version appeared together with another essay, 'Transposer ou traduire Hamlet', as an appendix to Bonnefoy's translation of Hamlet (Mercure de France, 1962). An English translation of the essay was published, without naming the translator, in Encounter, 18, no. 6,June 1962, pp. 38-47. (return)

2 Naughton, p. 16. (return)