from Vol. #8, Issue 3: Fall 2017

Three French Lyrics: Translator's Note
by Avery Broome

Despite the abundance of works already devoted to their poetry, I decided to focus my efforts as a translator on these three authors as well. I'm both academically interested in the transition from traditional to modern poetic techniques that their work represents and concerned that some of their poems remain neglected or only narrowly translated. "Marine" ("Sea") by Verlaine is one such poem. While it has been translated, most interpretations neglect the undertones of joy present in the original. Particularly in the last line of the original poem that simply reads “Formidablement,” the reader can perceive Verlaine's euphoria despite the ferocious and frenetic atmosphere of the poem as a whole. The use of that word alone as the last line implies more than anything else that Verlaine relishes the whole scene; he admires the unchecked power that nature can have and its ever constant motion. Thus, the translation of “Formidablement” is key to unlocking the sentiment of the poem but has been overlooked, which is why I felt compelled to offer my own translation.

My choice to translate "Brise Marine" ("Sea Breeze") by Mallarmé was motivated by both personal and scholarly interests. The colloquial tone of Brise Marine represented a challenge for myself as a translator, as I had to both reproduce that tone but retain the magical, dream-like element present in all of Mallarmé's poems. My scholarly interest comes from the fact that Mallarmé explicitly references his wife and daughter in the poem, in the line I've translated as “Nor the young woman with the baby at her breast” (the original is “Et ni la jeune femme allaitant son enfant”). This provides a fascinating window into Mallarmé's psychology and home life, which is essential to understanding all of his work. Because of the importance of this poem as a means of analysis, I felt it would be beneficial to draw new attention to it and to make it accessible to as many readers as possible.

Although "Dormeur du Val" ("Sleeper of the Valley") is another poem that has inspired many translations, I chose to contribute my own version simply because this particular poem lends itself to many different stylistic interpretations, all of which provide equally valid and interesting insights into the poem. The main reason for this is the numerous enjambements (line breaks in the middle of a grammatical phrase) that Rimbaud employs. Due the grammatical differences between French and English, the balance between maintaining the linguistic correctness and sense of the verses and remaining true to the original text can be achieved in many ways. Rather than creating a new structuring of the lines of the poems, as many translators chose to do, I instead opted to stay close to the original arrangement of the lines and the breaks created by the enjambements. Since such line breaks were unusual and unorthodox at the time of the poem, it was clear that they had been a very specific stylistic choice and that Rimbaud had chosen to break the lines where he did for a reason. As such, I felt that preserving the exact structure of his enjambements was a relatively untried technique that could give the English speaking reader the same sense of atmosphere and rhythm present in the original.

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