Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

When you are very old, at night, by candlelight,Sitting up close to the fire, unwinding or winding thethread,Marvelling you will murmur, telling over the songsof the dead,“Ronsard praised this body, before it became thisfright.”Not one of your companions, dozing over herspinning,But hearing you say these things, in her old woman’sdream,Will be startled half-awake, to bless your famousnameFor the praise it had deserved of my immortalsinging.I will be under the earth, my body nothing at all,Taking its rest at last, under the dark myrtle;There you’ll be by the fire, a hunched-up old womanThat held off my love for a long look in the mirror.Listen to what I say, don’t wait for tomorrow:These flowers in their blossom go quickly out ofseason.I remember with such pleasure the quietly elaborate syntaxof Ronsard’s clauses, broken in on quite suddenly atthe end of the first quatrain, when she is imagined sayingto herself: Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étaisbelle, “Ronsard praised this body, before it became thisfright”; and I remember being proud of that line of thetranslation because of the way it ended with that rhymingword “fright,” with its two meanings, one the recognizablesocial idiom (“I look a fright”), the other looking forwardto the terrifying grave; and I now think, though Istill like it, that my solution to the line violated, to adegree, the tone of du temps que j’étais belle, or, youmight say, melodramatized what she is saying. “Before itbecame this fright” sounds more like the English metaphysicalor Cavalier poets I was then reading in a concentratedway, as a graduate student in the 1950s, andthere’s a smart-ass quality to the solution that’s at oddswith the noble regretfulness of du temps que j’étais belle.This is even more the case with another line that I wasalso proud of: “There you’ll be by the fire, a hunched-upold woman / That held off my love for a long look in themirror.” In fact, I was knocked out, callow self-praiserthat I was, because of the phrase “for a long look in themirror” that I found to express the meaning of votre fierdédain, and now when I reread the translation I see thatonce again, still more noticeably, I was readingRonsard’s poem as if he was an English poet of a somewhatlater period and that I had been reading that Englishpoet in graduate school. The line now seems to me toviolate the ordonnance, the decorum, of Ronsard’s poemand of the great line, stated with elegant abstractness,Regrettant mon amour et votre fier dédain, “Lookingback with regret at the time of my love and your prouddisdain.” There are so many more possibilities in theanalysis of her character, her situation, her culture, themanners of the social and erotic world of her youth inthat Regrettant mon amour et votre fier dédain than thesimple vindictively witty accusation attempted by “for along look in the mirror.” The accusation of vanity is inthe Ronsard line, but there’s a nobility in that proud disdainthat isn’t there in that long look in the mirror, thatdiagnosis of her problem as vanity. Still, I had my ownagenda, in this case also a formal one. I already had thesubsequent line, “Listen to what I say, don’t wait fortomorrow,” and I couldn’t find a rhyme that worked, notin “sorrow” or “borrow” or “furrow” or anything else,and the open-ended, vowel-ended “mirror” seemed towork with “tomorrow.” I was looking for and had to finda technical solution for a detail of the English poem, andI use this motive to say from the gallows that “for a longlook in the mirror” wasn’t all my fault.I could go on with the criminal evidence: “I will beunder the earth, my body nothing at all, / Taking its restat last, under the dark myrtle ….” There’s a power in thesudden declarative beginning the sestet of the poem, Jeserais sous la terre, that may be there, to a degree, in “Iwill be under the earth,” so directly rendered, but “mybody nothing at all” doesn’t get what there is in thespooky fantome sans os that so denies je prendrai monrepos. That boneless unanchored wraith-ghost must bereposeless, and indeed is, in a sense, proleptically thereposeless speaker of the poem. In my translation “I willbe under the earth, my body nothing at all, / Taking itsrest at last, under the dark myrtle,” “my body nothing atall, Taking its rest at last” misses this entirely. I shouldsay, though, that I had other fish to fry. I needed a rhymeor off-rhyme for “myrtle,” and “at all” supplied one, and“Taking its rest at last” pleased me because of the internalrhyme or off-rhyme of “rest” and “last.” The translatoris always writing his own poem, with its owndemands and exigencies.There are the wonderful sounds in the Direz chantantmes vers en vous émerveillant that I tried for in thesounds of “Marveling you will murmur, telling over theTranslation Review 9