Chameleon

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• Sample translation: Soneto XV
• Cette page en français

Sample translation

Analysis and further information

For one birthday, my father gave me a beautiful book entitled Le Ton beau de Marot.  It was a hefty tome written in English by the American Douglas Hofstadter on the subject of a little twenty-eight–line poem with which he fell in love as a student.  It is a curious book that rambles through many points and areas of life Hofstadter is fascinated by, including the mysteries and dilemmas of the art of translation, and reflections on his wife’s death following a rare illness.  Indeed, the poem was written in Autumn 1537 as a get-well note to be sent to a poorly little girl.  The child’s name was Jeanne d’Albret de Navarre and she was around seven or eight years old when her friend — the poet Clément Marot — wrote her this little missive. 

Hofstadter identifies seven characteristics of the poem that he considers key:

1. It is made up of twenty-eight lines.
2. Each line has three syllables.
3. The stress falls on the last of these syllables.
4. It is a series of rhyming couplets (AABBCCDD…)
5. In the first fourteen lines, he addresses her using the formal vous form, and then goes on to call her tu, which is more friendly or colloquial.
6. The last line echoes the first.
7. The poet slips his own name into the poem.

   I would add:

8. The fact that it is also a series of semantic couplets starting from the second line (ABBCCDDEE…A, out of sync with the rhyme).
9. The general meaning of the poem (the food theme, etc.)
10. The rhyme is shown in the spelling. For example, Marot rhymes confitures with si tu dures and not with something like Oui, c’est dur, which would rhyme as well, but without the same visual impact and regular feel.
11. The historical and geographical context

The book contains many stabs at translating the poem (around fifty, I believe) and you will find some more if you Google for them.  Here, I have decided to put just my own, which is technically almost perfect.  Its artistic merit is for you to decide. 

I have stuck to Hofstader’s seven rules except for nº 5.  At first glance, the English equivalent of the tu-vous distinction seems obvious: tu is ‘thou’ and vous is ‘you’.  We spoke like this until the Renaissance.  However, the modern reader (dialect speakers aside) will not associate ‘thou’ with informality but rather the opposite, given that we no longer see this form anywhere but in The Bible.  It is ‘you’ that sounds like an ordinary, familiar, everyday word, even though its origin is the French formal vous. In order to avoid this confusion, and make the rhyme easier, I decided to ignore this rule. 

As for the rules I myself found:

8. I have kept the semantic couplets.
9. I have been very faithful to the meaning of the poem as a whole and each line of it.
   If you think I have not been that faithful, try to translate a poem in any language while obeying eleven structural rules!
10. I have tried to maintain the matching of spellings to rhymes but found it impossible in English.
11. I have used slightly archaic language such as ‘gaol’ instead of ‘jail’ or ‘prison’ so as to respect the historical context, and, in my choice of foodstuffs for her to eat, I have included things considered typically French, in order to allude to the geographical context.

The translation of ma mignonne is difficult.  Other translators have put ‘pretty one’, ‘sweetie pie’, etc.  I finally opted to use the fact the little girl’s name was Jeanne to give her a diminutive nickname she may well have had: ‘Jeannou’, which makes for an easy rhyme with ‘you’.

Sticking to rule nº 7 is hard too.  Other translators decided to represent Clément with words like ‘I’ and ‘my’ or insert their own names.  I wanted to keep ‘Clément’.  However, this poses the problem of having to rhyme a French name with an English word.  My first solution was to adapt the pronunciation of the name to make it rhyme with lines like ‘Soldier on’, but I didn’t like the way it was necessary to pronounce Clément with an English accent for this to work.  My final solution was to find a French word habitually used in English; I found the word ‘restaurant’.  This way, the reader is free to correctly pronounce both French words or mispronounce them with -on or -ont sounds as he sees fit.  The important thing is that they are both said in the same way, for the sake of the rhyme.

My title for the translation is either ‘To a Poorly Princess’ or ‘To an Ailing Maiden’.

You will find all Clément Marot’s poetry on http://poesie.webnet.fr/auteurs/marot.html.

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we would appreciate comments on this sample translation.

This site, including this sample, is ©MMIV–MMVIII David Short

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• Sample translation: Soneto XV
• Cette page en français