Voice and Versification in Translating Poems

James Underhill

Description

Great poets like Shelley and Goethe have made the claim that translating poems is impossible. And yet, poems are translated; not only that, but the metrical systems of English, French, Italian, German, Russian and Czech have been shaped by the translation of poems. Our poetic traditions are inspired by translations of Homer, Dante, Goethe and Baudelaire. How can we explain this paradox? 

James W. Underhill responds by offering an informed account of meter, rhythm, rhyme, and versification. But more than that, the author stresses that what is important in the poem—and what must be preserved in the translated poem—is the voice that emerges in the versification. 

Underhill’s book draws on the author’s translation experience from French, Czech and German. His comparative analysis of the versifications of French and English have enabled him to revise the key terms involved in translating the poetic voice and transposing the poem’s versification. The theories of versification from the Prague School of Linguistics, the French and Swiss schools of versification, and recent scholarship in metrics and rhythm in the UK and in the USA have been integrated into this synthetic but rigorously coherent approach to translating poems. The extensive glossary at the end of the book will prove useful for both students and teachers alike. And the detailed case studies on translating poems by Baudelaire and Emily Dickinson allow the author to categorize and appraise the various poetic and aesthetic strategies and theories that are brought to bear in translating Baudelaire into English, and Dickinson into French. 

Sujets

• Interpreting
• Translating
• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: University of Ottawa Press
• Date de parution: 09 décembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 6
• EAN13: 9780776622781
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The University of Ottawa Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing list by Canadian Heritage through the Canada Book Fund, by the Canada Council for the Arts, by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program and by the University of Ottawa. We also thank the ERIAC Interdisciplinary Research Group, based at Rouen University, France, for additional funding.
Copy editing: Barbara Ibronyi
Proofreading: Gillian Watts
Typesetting: Counterpunch Inc.
Cover design: Édiscript enr. and Elizabeth Schwaiger
Cover image: Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht by Paul Klee (detail), 1918.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Underhill, James W. (James William), author
Voice and versification in translating poems / by James W. Underhill.
(Perspectives on translation)
Includes bibliographical references.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-7766-2277-4 (paperback).–ISBN 978-0-7766-2278-1 (EPUB).–ISBN 978-0-7766-2279-8 (PDF).–ISBN 978-0-7766-2280-4 (MOBI)
1. Poetry–Translating. 2. Versification. 3. Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886–Translations–History and criticism. 4. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867–Translations into English–History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: Perspectives on translation
PN1059.T7U53 2016
418'.041
C2016-906268-6
C2016-906269-4
For Derek Attridge, who has done more to explain how English poems move, and how they move us, than half of the recent century’s specialists in rhythm and meter put together
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Difficult Task
Hope for Poems
Part 1: Versification
Chapter 1: Form
Formal Definitions of Poetry
Recent Scholarship in Translation Theory
Defining Form
A Few Key Concepts
Chapter 2: Comparative Versification
Different Cultures, Different Stages of Development
A Brief History
Opposing English and French
Resisting a Reductive Model
Terminology
Chapter 3: Meter and Language
Rhythm and Emotion
Stress Systems
Syllable
Stress
Accent and Meter
Metrical Manipulation of Accents
Metrical Manipulation of Syllables
Rhyme
Chapter 4: Beyond Metrics
Acoustic Patterning
Phrasing
Repetition Proper
The Orchestration of Rhythmic Elements
Part 2: Form and Meaning in Poetry Translation
Chapter 5: Theorizing the Translation of Poetry
Chapter 6: Translating the Sign or the Poem?
Translating Form Blindly
Translating a Poem with a Poem
Translating Form Meaningfully
Chapter 7: Form and Translation
Translating Stragegies: Forms of Reformulating
Voices in Foreign Versification
Part 3: Case Studies
Chapter 8: Baudelaires
Baudelaire Today
Scott’s Baudelaire
Chronology
Strategies
The Whole Poem
Chapter 9: French and German Emily Dickinsons
Introducing une Emily Dickinson française
Gender and Personification
Malroux: A Voice That Hears and Responds
Voices after Malroux
Delphy’s Return to the Academy
Malroux’s Missed Rhythms
What Liepe Hears
The Untranslatable and the Untranslated
Chapter 10: A Final Word
Glossary
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank lecturers and students at Stendhal University, Grenoble, and the Université de Rouen for their feedback when I was putting this book together. Thanks are also due to friends and family. My teacher Mr. Watson at Hawick High School did much to open up poems to me, while Henri Meschonnic, the great Parisian translator-poet, helped convince me of the importance of poetics for understanding the act of translating.
I managed to convince a number of people to help me with the ideas contained in these pages. Back in the 1990s, when I was well underway with my rhythm project, friends, colleagues, and lecturers gave me considerable help in refining my ideas and offered liberal amounts of challenging criticism. Donald Wesling, Richard D. Cureton, and above all Derek Attridge were great sources of inspiration for me during my PhD research: my all-too-brief conversations and e-mail exchanges with them redoubled my enthusiasm and gave me greater insight. I’d very much like to thank Ian Tullock, Harbans Nagpal, Marko Pajević, Jean-Louis Cluse, Jacqueline Fontaine, Laure Gaudemard, Céline Reuilly, Kateřina Pavlitová, and Claire Simon-Boisson.
Henri Meschonnic, who directed my master’s and PhD theses, from which this work on comparative versification is derived (Underhill 1999), is quoted sufficiently to make clear the debt I owe him. I have dedicated other books to him, and no doubt his voice will echo in the background of most of the books I write. The encouragement and support that came from Anne-Marie Ducreux in my first years in Paris were precious. Later on I was lucky enough to be given sustaining support by my wife, Laetitia.
Since then, colleagues and friends have continued to help me clarify problems of versification and translation. Many of them pulled apart some of my ideas, allowing me to put them back together to make my meaning clearer and my case stronger. Christine Raguet and Luise von Flotow, great translators and specialists in poetics, and the late linguist Michel Viel gave me excellent advice and solid criticism. I benefited from their goodwill at a time when it was not always obvious to others (or even to myself) that I needed praise and encouragement as well as criticism.
For stylistic help, my thanks go to Faye Troughton and, most of all, to Anne-Marie Pugh. The staff of the University of Ottawa Press certainly deserve great praise for their advice on improvements regarding the content, form, and scope of the project. Editors know more about readers and markets than authors, and readers therefore have editors to thank that academics do not unload more bloated, incoherent, and unreadable manuscripts upon them. Elizabeth Schwaiger’s improvements and all-round efficiency in the editing stage helped ensure that we brought out a more polished finished product. I thank her most of all for elegantly solving the seemingly unsolvable problem of rendering Derek Attridge’s binary scansion in print.
For allowing me to publish poems, extracts of poems, and extracts from other authors, I would like to thank the following publishing houses and Internet editors. Cambridge University Press gave permission for the publication of extracts from Derek Attridge’s The Rhythms of English Poetry (1982). Penguin Books agreed to extensive quotations from Baudelaire in English , edited by Carol Clark and Robert Sykes (1997), and from Baudelaire , edited and translated by Francis Scarfe (1972). The editors of the wonderful website Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal / Flowers of Evil ( www.fleursdumal.org ), which continues to compile both established and innovative translations of Baudelaire’s poems, deserve thanks also. Gallimard must be thanked for enabling me to quote the original poems from Baudelaire’s Oeuvres complètes , volume 1 (1975). Reclam Verlag deserves thanks for kindly allowing me to quote long passages from Gertrud Liepe’s wonderful German translations of the poems in Emily Dickinson: Gedichte (1970).
Thanks go to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for kindly enabling me to publish an entire poem by Ted Hughes from Collected Poems (2003). And thanks go to Tony Kline for allowing me to publish his translation of Paul Éluard’s “Amoureuse,” an online version that I use as a model for rhythm and voice in free-verse translation. Thanks are also due to the editors for enabling me to reproduce Éluard’s original from the Poetica website ( www.poetica.fr ). I would also like to thank the journals Pathhead and Fras for enabling me to quote translations of Baudelaire’s poems by myself and by others that they have published. Finally, two online sites that offered crucial resources quoted in this work were the World Atlas of Language Structures Online ( www.wals@info ), which provides a vast and synthetic cross-lingual account of accentuation, and Project Gutenberg ( www.gutenberg.org ), for its inimitable range of multilingual texts. These resources will make it far simpler for readers to consult originals and compare their impressions with my own findings and arguments.
Introduction
S ince Sophia Coppola’s film Lost in Translation came out in 2003, the familiar phrase that gave the film its title has been used in common speech and in media headlines with a wide variety of meanings, referring to cultural misunderstandings and incomprehension between generations and between genders. In poetics the concept of loss in translation has a much more refined meaning, even if we do not always specify what is actually lost. For what is lost when a poem is translated? Is it the beauty of Hindi or Spanish that fails to penetrate the lexis of English? Is it the shape of French syntax that fails to reform when the poem is “re-form-ulated”? Is it the metrical tradition of one language that turns out to be incompatible with the linguistic norms of another language? Or is it those dominant styles that are currently asserting themselves in literary circles, and which are being endorsed and maintained by the established practices of publishers, that prevent us translating something that is essential in the original poem? Is the voice of the poet simply not to be heard in the translated text?
A human being speaks to other human beings by making use of the shared medium known to a linguistic community. In the same way, poets take their place in language at a given time, addressing others, even if they fail to perceive clearly whom their poems will eventually be addressing. Extracted from the poet’s time, from his or her language and linguistic community, can the translated poem be expected to resound and resonate with the same urgency and vibrancy that the initial voice does? The voices of Shakespeare’s characters, the voice of Goethe’s Faust, the voices that emerge in the poems of Emily Dickinson, of Baudelaire, and of Neruda do rea