Lost in translation
Jan. 13th, 2026 11:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baroque_mongooseI learnt Italian specifically in order to translate poetry. Which is, perhaps, not the usual motivation; but hear me out.
When I was at university, someone pointed me to a book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. I'd never heard of it before, but they were quite right - I thoroughly enjoyed it. Summarising such a long book (it is a pretty hefty tome) is difficult, but I think the best description of it I can give is that it looks at cognitive science from a lot of different angles, together with a great deal of whimsy and humour. A lot of it is centred around Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, but the other two titular luminaries also get plenty of space. There is really nothing else quite like it.
So when I discovered, years later, that Hofstadter had also written a book called Le Ton Beau de Marot, I bought it sight unseen, thinking I was going to get more of the same. Well, I did, and I didn't. Yes, it's still about cognitive science; but this book approaches it first and foremost from the perspective of linguistics, which meant I actually enjoyed it even more than the previous book. It is a treasure trove of language-related delights, from ambiguous newspaper headlines such as "British Left Waffles On Falklands" (they've probably gone off by now!), to lipograms (texts written without the use of a particular letter or letters), to the longest palindrome I've ever seen ("Doc, note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod."), to cute little computer models for building complex sentences.
But the motif that runs through the entire book is a late mediaeval poem by Jean Marot, the English title of which is "To a Sick Damsel". It's a charming little verse with very short (three-syllable) lines, in which the author wishes the damsel a speedy recovery. And the book contains something like 40 translations of that one poem: all of them are different, and the vast majority of them are brilliant.
Now, that blew my mind. I had always been of the opinion that poetry - well, rhyming and metrical poetry, anyway - couldn't be translated properly; in my defence, the only other translations I'd encountered so far had been terrible. But now I knew it could be done, I was eager to do it... and I felt there was no point in trying to create my own translation of the Marot poem, since that had been so comprehensively done in the book. So I immediately thought of Dante and Petrarch, and set myself to learning Italian.
However, while I was doing this, I found myself starting to think about the Marot poem again, and a translation began to take shape in my mind. I was astonished, but I ran with it, and after a little work I managed to produce a translation which was quite different from any of those in the book, but nonetheless a good translation. My mind was, once again, blown. Then Porthos got some kind of unpleasant lurgy, and, with renewed confidence, I revisited the Marot and did yet another translation, this time for a sick Porthos. That was it. I was convinced. The wells of translation never run dry.
Since then, I have indeed produced translations of poetry by Dante and Petrarch; I have not yet tackled any of the Divine Comedy, the rhyme scheme there being formidably tight, but it is definitely on my bucket list. (Sonnets are more forgiving. The rhyme scheme of the typical Petrarchan sonnet is ABBA ABBA CDE CDE; however, any given English word typically, on average, has fewer rhymes than its Italian counterpart, so I will often bend it slightly to take account of that, and produce a translation with a rhyme scheme ABBA CDDC EFG EFG - to use Hofstadter's own pun, one ABBA stanza is enough (abbastanza being "enough" in Italian)). It is nothing like as hard as most people think. You do, of course, have to be a competent poet in your own right; but beyond that, it's pretty much the linguistic equivalent of killer sudoku. You're just slotting things into places where they fit. And, of course, there is nothing forcing you to try to rhyme the same words in both languages. As long as the line conveys the same meaning, it's perfectly all right to rhyme on a different word, and indeed sometimes you couldn't rhyme on the same words even if you wanted to because of the language structure.
My spoken Italian, alas, is nothing very special. I have ended up tongue-tied in a shop in Rome because I could not just recall the word for the item I wanted; the trouble is I don't get nearly enough practice at speaking it. Being able to translate a sonnet by Petrarch is a wonderful thing, but sadly it doesn't help you when you're just trying to buy an extra layer because it's suddenly gone unseasonably chilly in Rome.
But it's fun!
When I was at university, someone pointed me to a book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. I'd never heard of it before, but they were quite right - I thoroughly enjoyed it. Summarising such a long book (it is a pretty hefty tome) is difficult, but I think the best description of it I can give is that it looks at cognitive science from a lot of different angles, together with a great deal of whimsy and humour. A lot of it is centred around Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, but the other two titular luminaries also get plenty of space. There is really nothing else quite like it.
So when I discovered, years later, that Hofstadter had also written a book called Le Ton Beau de Marot, I bought it sight unseen, thinking I was going to get more of the same. Well, I did, and I didn't. Yes, it's still about cognitive science; but this book approaches it first and foremost from the perspective of linguistics, which meant I actually enjoyed it even more than the previous book. It is a treasure trove of language-related delights, from ambiguous newspaper headlines such as "British Left Waffles On Falklands" (they've probably gone off by now!), to lipograms (texts written without the use of a particular letter or letters), to the longest palindrome I've ever seen ("Doc, note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod."), to cute little computer models for building complex sentences.
But the motif that runs through the entire book is a late mediaeval poem by Jean Marot, the English title of which is "To a Sick Damsel". It's a charming little verse with very short (three-syllable) lines, in which the author wishes the damsel a speedy recovery. And the book contains something like 40 translations of that one poem: all of them are different, and the vast majority of them are brilliant.
Now, that blew my mind. I had always been of the opinion that poetry - well, rhyming and metrical poetry, anyway - couldn't be translated properly; in my defence, the only other translations I'd encountered so far had been terrible. But now I knew it could be done, I was eager to do it... and I felt there was no point in trying to create my own translation of the Marot poem, since that had been so comprehensively done in the book. So I immediately thought of Dante and Petrarch, and set myself to learning Italian.
However, while I was doing this, I found myself starting to think about the Marot poem again, and a translation began to take shape in my mind. I was astonished, but I ran with it, and after a little work I managed to produce a translation which was quite different from any of those in the book, but nonetheless a good translation. My mind was, once again, blown. Then Porthos got some kind of unpleasant lurgy, and, with renewed confidence, I revisited the Marot and did yet another translation, this time for a sick Porthos. That was it. I was convinced. The wells of translation never run dry.
Since then, I have indeed produced translations of poetry by Dante and Petrarch; I have not yet tackled any of the Divine Comedy, the rhyme scheme there being formidably tight, but it is definitely on my bucket list. (Sonnets are more forgiving. The rhyme scheme of the typical Petrarchan sonnet is ABBA ABBA CDE CDE; however, any given English word typically, on average, has fewer rhymes than its Italian counterpart, so I will often bend it slightly to take account of that, and produce a translation with a rhyme scheme ABBA CDDC EFG EFG - to use Hofstadter's own pun, one ABBA stanza is enough (abbastanza being "enough" in Italian)). It is nothing like as hard as most people think. You do, of course, have to be a competent poet in your own right; but beyond that, it's pretty much the linguistic equivalent of killer sudoku. You're just slotting things into places where they fit. And, of course, there is nothing forcing you to try to rhyme the same words in both languages. As long as the line conveys the same meaning, it's perfectly all right to rhyme on a different word, and indeed sometimes you couldn't rhyme on the same words even if you wanted to because of the language structure.
My spoken Italian, alas, is nothing very special. I have ended up tongue-tied in a shop in Rome because I could not just recall the word for the item I wanted; the trouble is I don't get nearly enough practice at speaking it. Being able to translate a sonnet by Petrarch is a wonderful thing, but sadly it doesn't help you when you're just trying to buy an extra layer because it's suddenly gone unseasonably chilly in Rome.
But it's fun!
