Translations

[Anonymous No.19661274]

Alright, I have a challenge for all of you who think poorly of reading in translation. Here is a poem by Charles Baudelaire, selected from Les Fleurs du mal, with a translation. Tell me right fucking now what is lost in translation. Give me your brilliant analysis of exactly why and how this translation is worthless.

Original: "Correspondances"
La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
— Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.

Translation: Correspondences
Nature is a temple of living pillars
Where often words emerge, confused and dim,
And man goes through this forest, and with familiar
Eyes of symbols always watching him.

Like prolonged echoes mingling far away
In a unity tenebrous and profound,
Vast as the night and as the limpid day,
Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.

There are perfumes as cool as children's flesh,
Sweet as oboes, as meadows green and fresh;
--Others, triumphant and corrupt and rich,

With power to fill the infinite expanses,
Like amber, incense, musk, and benzoin, which
Sing the transports of the soul and the senses.

[Anonymous No.19661324]

>>19661274
The music is not even comparable.
Only the images and the immediate meaning can be translated, and not always.
The music and the non-immediate meaning cannot be translated.

[Anonymous No.19661325]

Nature is a temple where living pillars
Sometimes let out confused words;
Man passes through forests of symbols
Which observe him with familiar eyes.

Like long echoes that merge from afar
In a dark and deep unity,
Vast like the night and like the light,
The scents, colours and sounds respond to each other.

There are perfumes as fresh as children's flesh,
Soft like oboes, green like meadows,
- And others, corrupt, rich and triumphant,

Having the expansion of infinite things,
Like amber, musk, benzoin and frankincense,
Who sing the transports of the mind and the senses.
Better translation

[Anonymous No.19661332]

Yoour final verse left out "l'encense" so thats 1 thing. You fucking retard.

[Anonymous No.19661334]

>>19661325
Same problem. All of Baudelaire's music is lost.

[Anonymous No.19661338]

>>19661324
Can you give any examples of non-immediate meanings in the french text that is lost in the english text?

[Anonymous No.19661342]

>>19661338
You listen to rap music dont you?

[Anonymous No.19661345]

>>19661342
No, why?

[Anonymous No.19661346]

>>19661332
>staggeringly low reading comprehension levels detected

[Anonymous No.19661352]

>>19661346
Yes.

[Anonymous No.19661378]

>>19661338
For instance, the use of "echos" right in the middle of the Alexandrine, and it being surrounded by many words with the sound -o, which enhances the efficacy of that word while creating an echoing music. In the English translation those lines become almost ridiculous:
"In a dark and deep unity,
Vast like the night and like the light,"
It sounds like a bad Byron imitation.
Anyway, there aren't many such details, because Baudelaire is not particularly dense (but French isn't my first language, other posters may notice more of that).
With poets like Mallarmé and Valery you'd be lost.

Those English texts you posted just aren't very good as poetry.

[Anonymous No.19661383]

>>19661338
Correspond is a poor word choice as it causes the misinterpretation of correspond as in categorize/matching when the translator intended correspond as in communication.
That's just one of the many issues.

[Anonymous No.19661386]

>>19661378
His only good poem is the one about vampire prostitutes. En Francais and not in dog shit anglaisisch.

[Anonymous No.19661407]

>>19661378
The one I posted was just a google translate of the french text
And ok, I mean I can understand poetic techniques being lost but that's not really what I was interested in
>>19661383
Well I doubt that the french original gets around that problem since according to a french dictionary Correspondances has multiple meanings so it's up to the reader to infer which meaning the author meant based on the text

[Anonymous No.19661414]

>>19661407
It does. Because no one would ever take se répondent to mean correspond in either sense.

[Anonymous No.19661429]

>>19661414
Oh I thought you meant the title of the poem
Yeah you're right about the op translation making it sound like matching rather than communication

[Anonymous No.19661474]

>>19661429
>>19661332
OP here, to be clear, these are not my own translations. I took them from an anthology.

[Anonymous No.19661478]

>>19661407
Well, so here's another one. The poem talks of prairies, which can symbolize horizontal distance. But in the the same line, what musical instrument does he choose? The "hautbois", "haut" means high. Refers to musical sound, but also has resonances of stature, vertical size. Both are finite sizes. Immediately after that he starts talking of the infinite expanses.
I'm pretty sure a fluent French speaker could find other details, perhaps hidden references to French literature and more. I haven't studied that poem and French is not my first language, so I don't know.

But really, try to do that with actually dense poets and you'll fail even worse. Baudelaire is not particularly dense, at least not most of the time.

[Anonymous No.19661500]

>>19661274
Here is my translation with no metre of the poem

Nature is a temple where the living pillars,
Let sometimes leave confused speech;
Man passed by it through forests of symbols,
Which watch him with familiar eyes

Like long echoes which from far away meld
In a shadowed and deep unity
Vast like the night and like clarity
The odors, the colors, and the sounds to each other respond

There are those odors, fresh like the flesh of children
Soft like the oboes, green like the prairies
And others, corrupted, rich and triumphant

Having the expansion of infinite things
Like amber, music, resin and incense
Who are singing the flights of spirit and feeling

[Anonymous No.19662588]

>>19661274
French here, I am not specialized in poetic prosody but I think I can make some remarks that may seem interesting.
From the first line, "Nature is a temple of living pillars" says that nature is essentially pillars when Baudelaire's line says that the pillars are in nature, the reduction of nature to objects and analogies between objects done by the translator loses nature as a place and exchange with nature as an object. In nature as a place, there is a more general structure of nature with "hollow", mystery.
In the second line, the word "dim" gives a criterion of intensity in the characterization of the words, which is not in Baudelaire's text, and Baudelaire is a reader of Hugo so certainly he is aware of the virile force that a correspondence can have and would not have reduced the evocative possibility of an analogy.
In the third alexandrine, the "forests of symbols" are changed to "a forest" which again operates a qualitative reduction of the Baudelairean idea of the world of analogies, there is more structure in "forests" which implies groupings and distances between symbols, the brass is close to strength, the April flower is far from it, than in a single forest which gives an impression of homogeneity of symbolic structures.
As anon has already said, "corresponds" is not at all suitable to translate "respond to each other", the living pillars respond to each other, the field of correspondences is a noisy and organic world in that despite its rigid character, it possesses a "deep unity" in that it constitutes, taken as a whole, a great synesthetic system.
In "With power to fill the infinite expanses", the capacity of expansion to infinity is in power whereas in the verse in French, it is realized in act, once again the world is correspondences is rigid and the symbols are fixed, the work of the poet is to apprehend the fixed symbols and, in an arithmetic of poetry, to compose them together to expose deep truths on the universe, there is no work of passage of the power to the act but rather a work of harmonious arrangement of given correspondences.

In sum, from the sole point of view of meaning, the structure that Baudelaire gives to his world of analogies is quite modified by the translation. Obviously, all the musicality of the poem is lost in the translation insofar as it is specific to French. There are also a thousand subtleties that add texture to the original poem, such as the play on "echo" that another anon pointed out, that are lost in English.

[Anonymous No.19662609]

>>19661274
Deepl gave you it's answer:

Nature is a temple where living pillars
Sometimes let out confused words;
Man passes through forests of symbols
Which observe him with familiar glances.

Like long echoes that from afar merge
In a dark and deep unity,
Vast as the night and as the light,
The perfumes, the colors and the sounds answer each other.

There are perfumes fresh as children's flesh,
Sweet as oboes, green as meadows,
- And others, corrupted, rich and triumphant,

Having the expansion of infinite things,
Like amber, musk, benzoin and incense,
Which sing of the transports of the spirit and the senses.

[Anonymous No.19662794]

God I wish I kept on learning french