Each morning I take our youngest, who’s two, to his crèche three minutes away and we stop at the bakery on the way to buy him two chouquettes. A chouquette is a little puff of the lightest kind of pastry — almost completely empty inside — studded with sugar on the top (though if you don’t eat them immediately, or it’s late in the day, the bits of sugar are mostly to be found at the bottom of the bag). There’s no word for them in English so even though I always speak to the children in English, we call them chouquettes, just as they call Heinz baked beans and jelly, when we can get them, beans and jelly even in French. Chouquette doesn’t translate because the thing doesn’t exist in England (at least, I’ve never seen them), but there’s a whole convention, too, around buying them: fancier and less friendly bakeries will only sell you 100g at once (10-15 of the things). Our nearest bakery, open only on weekdays, is happy to sell me two for 40c (about 35p), which is just the right amount for Daniel to eat in his buggy in the remaining two minutes of our walk, but the next nearest one won’t hear of it.
So buying chouquettes each morning makes me think about the words that don’t translate, but also all the cultural and situational knowledge (or lack of it) that goes into any linguistic interaction. Most of my translations of poetry are motivated by trying to understand — not usually, I mean, because I don’t understand the word-by-word meaning, though of course translation of a certain type helps with that too, but because I want to understand better how a poem works or what it is in some sense “about”. Recently I’ve been reading and also translating quite a lot of Robert Desnos, a major French lyric and surrealist poet of the earlier 20th century, who died in Theresienstadt in 1944. At the start of the week I was working in particular on a translation of his poem ‘La Route’ (‘The Road’ or ‘The Way’), a piece I find particularly seductive but also mysterious. It goes like this:
Une route est près d’ici,
J’entends le bruit des voitures,
Le vent, les pas indécis
D’une lourde créature
Qui va, qui vient, qui soupire,
Trébuche sur les cailloux,
Implore, mendie, expire.
Est-ce un dieu? Est-ce un voyou?Lourdement sa main se dresse
Sur la prairie des cheveux.
Elle esquisse une caresse
Et crispe ses doigts nerveux.
Enfin le restant du corps
Surgit droit jusqu’aux nuages
Et le soleil couvre d’or
Le géant des marécages.Est-ce Hercule? Ou est-ce Atlas?
Il marche à travers la plaine.
De son long sans un hélas
Il tombe et perd son haleine.
Il recouvre de sa masse
Le paysage en entier
Et puis plus rien, plus de trace,
Ni colline, ni sentier.Moins réel que les mirages
Ainsi disparaît celui
Qui voulait dicter aux âges,
Aux vents, aux jours et aux nuits.
I avoid reading other translations before translating myself, but subsequent discussion on Twitter revealed that there are two main English translations of selections from Desnos — books by William Kulik and Timothy Adès.1 Here is the version by Kulik which I give first because, if you don’t read French, it’s a fair representation of the literal meaning of the poem.
The Road
There’s a road nearby.
I hear the sound of trucks,
The wind, the wavering steps
Of a ponderous thing
Who goes back and forth sighing.
Stumbling over pebbles,
Who begs and pleads, then breaks off.
Is he a god? A thug?His hand rises sluggishly
Above the prairie of his hair.
It draws a kiss
Clenching its nervous fingers.
Finally the rest of him
Lunges straight for the clouds
And the sun covers
This giant of the marshes with gold.Is it Hercules? Atlas?
He strides across the plain.
Without a cry he falls breathless
At full length.
His huge mass covers the landscape.
And nothing is left, no trace,
Not a hill, not a path.And so, less real than a mirage,
He who wished to dictate to the ages,
To the winds, to the days and the nights,Vanished.
This translation is very useful for anyone with a bit of French looking for help, but I don’t think it succeeds entirely as a stand-alone translation because it does not reproduce or even really suggest the tight music of the original, which rhymes ABAB and so on throughout, or the associations of its conventional metre. Like a ballad, or even a nursery rhyme, forms like this bear a kind of historical authority of their own. If you strip out the form completely, and with it that nursery-rhyme tradition of concise and mysterious narrative, you can be left with a surrealism that seems merely fey.2
For these reasons, I find Timothy Adès’ version of the poem, which retains the rhyme scheme, more successful, although at the cost of some strain:
Hereabouts there is a road
Where I hear the cars go by,
The wind, and the uncertain plod
Of a heavy entity,
Coming, going, with a sigh,
Stumbling on the stones, and I
Hear it beg and plead and die.
Is it guttersnipe or god?Heavily one hand he raises
To the meadow of his hair,
He delineates caresses,
Clamps the nervous fingers there.
Then his other parts all rush
Helter-skelter to the moon
And the sun gilds with its brush
The big beast of the lagoon.Is it Hercules? Or Atlas?
Striding on across the plain
Falls full-length, no cry of pain,
Winded in the solar plexus.
Blotting out the countryside
He obliterates the place,
Not a single mountainside,
Not a pathway, not a trace.Less real than mirror-images
The man who would be disappears,
Dictator of the centuries,
The winds, the nights, the days, the years.
This gives us much more sense I think of the particular interaction between tone and form, though some phrases are a stretch — ‘delineates caresses’ is awkward; ‘guttersnipe’ is dated and obscure (voyou is a more ordinary word); ‘Winded in the solar plexus’ is oddly specific for perd son haleine (‘loses his breath’), ‘helter-skelter to the moon’ is some way from Surgit droit jusqu’aux nuages (‘rises straight up to the clouds’). Adès has (rightly, I think) prioritised the form but as a result the poem is sometimes uneven in a way that the French isn’t — despite the mystery of the content, the vocabulary of the French poem is of a very even tenor, what we might call in that sense “classical”. It doesn’t, I don’t think, contain any words which are very colloquial, idiomatic or semi-technical (like solar plexus or helter-skelter). (I’ve written before about the peculiar challenges for the translator of the purest kind of diction.)
But either way, this remains an enigmatic poem. Who or what is the giant? Is it a kind of personification of the road itself? (As the title might suggest.) Is it in fact a kind of eco-poem avant la lettre? Will it come into focus as I read more of Desnos? Why and how is the whole thing so mysteriously suggestive?
Trying to translate French poetry is one of my greatest pleasures at the moment, but most of the translation I’m doing is much more pragmatic. At the end of this month, I am resigning permanently from my position as Professor of Early Modern Latin and English at UCL, as we have decided to stay in France. (This year I took a leave of absence while we made a final decision.) As such, I’ve been transitioning away from conventional academia and into freelance work on a range of editing, translating and research projects. Sometimes I am just paid to translate — most often from early modern Latin, though just now I’m also working on a project which needs some seventeenth-century French verse rendered into plausible English couplets, stylish enough to convince as verse but clear enough for undergraduate readers. This is an enjoyable challenge and raises certain technical questions immediately — if a series of long French poems by the same author are all in alexandrines (the default French metre of this as of many periods), but quite different in tone and content, should the translations be in the same metre or in different ones?
But at other times the relationship to translation is less direct. This week I’ve been doing some hours of work copyediting journal articles, including checking translations and transcriptions to catch the errors that inevitably creep in. This can be quite specialist work — in a transcription from an early modern manuscript sources, for instance, I spotted the word papavirum. This is not an attested Latin word but in context it looked sort of plausible, because the transcription was of a strongly anti-Catholic piece of seventeenth-century English invective against the papacy: Papa is the Latin for the Pope, and vir is a man; Protestants on the attack often liked to demote the papacy to the lower-case; and the coinage of insulting new compound words (papa-virum) is a common feature of early modern Latin invective in general. But in this particular case the word was actually just an error, a mistranscription of the ordinary Latin word papaverum, the genitive plural of the noun papaver, “of poppies”.
Desnos’ poem is mysterious — as a reader I feel I am missing some key context to make sense of it (and perhaps I am). When working with historical material, especially manuscript sources, we are often dropped into the middle of interactions thick with implicit but unexplicated context — whether personal, political, institutional or religious. The sensation of being “at sea”, of lacking the right contextual information, can be quite similar.
Satiric and invective material often switches, mixes and invents language particularly freely — which is why initially I was prepared to accept that papavirum might be correct. A popular early seventeenth century poem on the unfortunate physical effects of smoking tobacco is macaronic — that is, in a mixture of two languages, here English and Latin, though in this case with some Greek grammatical features as well. This kind of material is practically impossible to translate in any meaningful way, but even if you have no Latin at all you should still be able to get the idea just by reading it through. I’ve put an attempt at a translation in the footnote — or, for a rough idea of the comedic effect, think of something like the Private Eye column, “Let’s Parlez Franglais”, as seen in this Twitter post.
IN TOBACCO
Gorgon per stomachon vomitos facit et cacothumpon
Fartera brich-bottom out belchizerando cogit.
Slaueron et rheumeton cum perfumeganto tobacco
Lick-spiggaton homines gullitizando nimis
O tu morbi curans. tu magnificensque tobacco
Rumbellicans illicon perpenetransque colon
Qui te degulpant et bumpi gullite gorgant,
Red-nosans illos flammi feruente fumo
Absis tu fumitor et swaggarizando retorque
Abhominon stinckon et vomitando shyton.3
Here, as is typical of fully macaronic verse of the period, English vocabulary has mostly been subjected to Latin morphology — that is, English words are combined with Latin endings (‘fart-era’ (2), ‘bump-i’ (7), ‘Red-nos-ans’ (8), etc) to create novel forms. In some cases, however, English words have been left in their original forms (e.g. ‘brich-bottom’, 2) and in other cases the endings look more Greek than Latin. We find several formulations, such as ‘Cacothumpon’, ‘Slaueron’, ‘stinckon’ and ‘shyton’, in which the ‘-on’ ending can be understood both as an English phrasal verb (‘slaver on’; ‘shit on’) and Greek present participle in the nominative masculine case (‘slavering’, ‘stinking’, ‘shitting’). The prefix ‘caco-’ in ‘cacothumpon’ also suggests Greek κακο- (‘bad’) as well as the verb κακάω / caco (‘defecate’). There’s also quite a lot of leonine (internal) rhyme (ilicon–colon (6); stinckon–shyton (10)), though without forming a consistent pattern.
Overall, the poem is characterised both by its focus upon the unruly body, uncontrollably subject to belching, vomiting, defecation and so on, and by a peculiarly unruly approach to ‘morphological’ macaronic itself, marked by a chaotic combination of Greek and Latin suffixes, the application of verbal endings to nominal stems, and the creation of suggestive but ambiguous new words such as ‘gullitizando’ (4). This word seems to hint at two contemporary meanings of the verb ‘gull’ — ‘gobble’ and ‘deceive’ — and it has been formed by putting a Latin gerund ending (-ando) after a Greek-looking -izo verbal suffix. In other words, it is made up of recognisably verbal elements from three different languages, starting with an English verb that carries two possible meanings. The prosody of the poem is similarly unruly, with several parts unscannable by classical rules.
Such humourous code-switching surely reflects in part the realities of functional bilingualism, at a time when spoken Latin was an everyday reality of schools, universities and other institutional settings. I suspect this particular instance, with its density of sub-Greek forms, may further reflect the particular idiolect of a specific circle or community. But like Desnos’s poem, if for completely different reasons, it leaves us as readers — and even more so as would-be translators — rather out of our depth.
But then, I often feel a bit out of my depth these days, not only when mistakenly attempting to negotiate the purchase of only two chouqettes at the wrong bakery. I had some spoken French when we moved to France, but it wasn’t very good. My French is fluent now, but when I speak French — as I do every day of course — I still oscillate constantly between “translating” and just speaking. Some of the time I am still formulating mentally in English and then “putting it” into French in my head, especially when I’ve been speaking English immediately beforehand or not speaking to anyone at all. (My internal monologue is certainly still almost entirely Anglophone.) Increasingly, though, when I am speaking French, I am just talking, even if jolted in and out of linguistic self-consciousness quite regularly by deficits of idiom or vocabulary.
I am quite an eloquent person in English, and was from early on. In French, I am constantly aware of the limits of my eloquence, of having to make do with what I have, unable to express an idea perfectly or get the register quite right. It’s a little bit like that strange collapse of identity and authority when you have a first baby and transition overnight from inhabiting a well-established professional role to being just another semi-invisible mother with a pushchair, reduced to — but also suddenly part of — the large, tired commonweal of motherhood. But there is freedom as well as loss in such transitions, just as our sense of a language and its literature expands minutely every time we encounter a poem we want to, but don’t quite understand.
Thanks to @EvanPJones on Twitter for filling me in about the available English translations after I asked about interpretations of the poem.
Desnos also wrote quite a lot of poetry for children, which, judging from my own children at least, remains widely read and indeed memorised in French primary schools.
This poem is particularly difficult to translate into coherent English, but could be rendered as something like: “That Gorgon [i.e. tobacco] induces vomiting from the stomach, and thundering as if defecating / forces farts out the bottom of breeches, along with belching. / Slavering and rheumatic from smoking, Tobacco / lick-spigots [is parasitic upon?] men by guzzling [or ‘gulling’, tricking] too much. / O you curer of disease. You magnificent Tobacco / rumbling, enticing (illico = illicio?) and penetrating deeply into the colon / those who gulp you down and greedily gorge on you, stomachs swollen, / you make their noses red with the seething smoke of the flame. / Away with you smoker! and swaggering turn back / abominable stinking and shitting with vomiting.” A ‘lick-spigot’ (n., obsolete) is ‘one who licks the spigot’, a contemptuous name for a tapster or drawer; also implying a parasite, with examples in the OED from sources dating from between 1599 and 1700. It is hard to render the verbal implication of ‘lick-spiggaton’. Transcription from BL MS Harley 791 (fol. 59v), an early seventeenth-century manuscript containing various pieces dating from between the 1560s and 1630s, mostly in English. The epigram is also found (with several textual differences suggestive of a lively oral circulation, but essentially the same meaning) in other contemporary manuscripts. Epigrams in praise or dispraise of tobacco in the early seventeenth century were extremely common in both Latin and English. Parts of this discussion are borrowed from an article on Anglo-Latin macaronic I published, with Giulia Calzi, a couple of years ago. You can read the full article here.
Hello Victoria. On the mystery of Desnos’ poem: I think the creature is the German army. The position of the poet near to a road suggests that he’s keeping his distance to monitor the situation from a place of safety. Hearing not seeing. The clumsy uncertainty of the great creature gives the poet Hope. Leading to the idea that this great intruder will collapse. It’s so huge that collapse is inevitable - failure is inherent to such oppressive invasion. Its collapse will of course leave a squashed and altered landscape, but the great project of imposing external power on France will have failed. That’s my reading for what it’s worth. Tragic that the Nazis got him and he died a couple of years after. I must get back to late Desnos, poems like these. I agree this is a tremendous, intriguing piece. Thanks for foregrounding it. I’m not sure I’ve taken note of it, or indeed read it, before.
On a slight tangent, one aspect of the limits of translation that I think a lot about but is (for obvious Two Cultures reasons) almost never discussed in literary writing is that of translation from mathematics/physics into `regular' languages. Mathematics is its own language, ideally adapted for communicating certain concepts, and fluency in it tends to be acquired either early in life or never. But, rightly, those of us who live in this world also try and translate these ideas for those who aren't native speakers of mathematese.
How does one convert something written in mathematese into English? What does one try and keep and what must one give up? How much should I preserve from what is important, even crucial, in the original? At the risk of sounding pretentious, I don't think this question is structurally that different from one about e.g. turning quantitatively-scanned hexameters from the ancient Mediterranean world into a stress-based English pentameter at home in glass and concrete megacities.