My first attempt to render a poem into English verse, this is still in draft form, missing a couple of lines; and if one rhyme, tense, etc. changes, it tends to send ripples through all the rest of the system so it may be far from finished.
I'm working from a transliteration by Tomislav Butkovic, supplemented by a google translation and a couple dictionaries. This poem's main challenge to my part of the process is in its extremely short lines--four syllables per line!--which leaves very little elbow-room for the inevitable jostlings that affect sentence structure, rhythm, and their relationships with the metric scheme, not to speak of accommodating rhyme or at least slant and near-rhyme.
The poem itself, IF I have managed to reconstruct it aright, is a properly sadistic turning-of-the-knife song addressed to a woman abandoned at the alter. The title, Gothic Song, would seem to contextualize this scenerio in relation to the Gothic subculture (which consisted of both an intellectual element engaged with the re-approaching of medieval culture, and a popular subculture which bore the embryos of later horror, heavy metal, etc subcultures) which was a defining element of the Bouzingo as a group (as it had been for the British 'Satanic' Romantics typified by Byron as well). And indeed the bride left at the alter is a recurrent figure in Gothic fiction (with about equal chances that her beloved either has fallen into the hands of a band of Brigands sent by his as-yet-unidentifiable archenemy, or is about to reveal himself as the agent or avatar of the Devil, or some thing cast out by God).
There are a number of points in the translation that I recognise as potential trouble-spots, and undoubtedly some I do not even suspect. I need to fill an empty syllable in the first line (first word) in order to set the rhythmic journey of the poem off with an intuitively recognizable (and therefore precise) iambic rhythm, though I don't know how best to inflect the line with whatever word I put there; the end of the second stanza seems to involve linguistic subtleties that I do not apprehend, her tears 'suiting' or 'becoming' the flowers; I'm uncertain whether to use 'strew' or the more direct (I think) 'sow' in the second stanza; and 'pleasure' is a hell of a thing to rhyme in such short lines, not to mention forcing me to add a bastard syllable to the iambic meter that seems to be the best suited to the original--while at the same time it seems of paramount relevance that the the poem terminate on this word, impaled upon it as if upon a spike, and that moreover it must be 'pleasure' properly, with the ambiguity that the anglophone face of the word also carries with it, not withstanding google's translation to the more innocuous 'joy'--and then there is so little room in which to arrange the content of the second line around such a rhyme in an elegant manner. I am still rather unsatisfied with my use of 'treasure' because it introduces a metaphor (albeit an idiomatic one) which is not in the original text; but so far have been unable, withing the grammatical conditions imposed by the form, to switch to the verb form of this word whose sensory associations are less direct. Etc etc.
I am extraordinarily open to advice and criticism; in fact this is largely a test to begin figuring out what role/s I can or cannot play on the translation side of the project. So--
I'm working from a transliteration by Tomislav Butkovic, supplemented by a google translation and a couple dictionaries. This poem's main challenge to my part of the process is in its extremely short lines--four syllables per line!--which leaves very little elbow-room for the inevitable jostlings that affect sentence structure, rhythm, and their relationships with the metric scheme, not to speak of accommodating rhyme or at least slant and near-rhyme.
The poem itself, IF I have managed to reconstruct it aright, is a properly sadistic turning-of-the-knife song addressed to a woman abandoned at the alter. The title, Gothic Song, would seem to contextualize this scenerio in relation to the Gothic subculture (which consisted of both an intellectual element engaged with the re-approaching of medieval culture, and a popular subculture which bore the embryos of later horror, heavy metal, etc subcultures) which was a defining element of the Bouzingo as a group (as it had been for the British 'Satanic' Romantics typified by Byron as well). And indeed the bride left at the alter is a recurrent figure in Gothic fiction (with about equal chances that her beloved either has fallen into the hands of a band of Brigands sent by his as-yet-unidentifiable archenemy, or is about to reveal himself as the agent or avatar of the Devil, or some thing cast out by God).
There are a number of points in the translation that I recognise as potential trouble-spots, and undoubtedly some I do not even suspect. I need to fill an empty syllable in the first line (first word) in order to set the rhythmic journey of the poem off with an intuitively recognizable (and therefore precise) iambic rhythm, though I don't know how best to inflect the line with whatever word I put there; the end of the second stanza seems to involve linguistic subtleties that I do not apprehend, her tears 'suiting' or 'becoming' the flowers; I'm uncertain whether to use 'strew' or the more direct (I think) 'sow' in the second stanza; and 'pleasure' is a hell of a thing to rhyme in such short lines, not to mention forcing me to add a bastard syllable to the iambic meter that seems to be the best suited to the original--while at the same time it seems of paramount relevance that the the poem terminate on this word, impaled upon it as if upon a spike, and that moreover it must be 'pleasure' properly, with the ambiguity that the anglophone face of the word also carries with it, not withstanding google's translation to the more innocuous 'joy'--and then there is so little room in which to arrange the content of the second line around such a rhyme in an elegant manner. I am still rather unsatisfied with my use of 'treasure' because it introduces a metaphor (albeit an idiomatic one) which is not in the original text; but so far have been unable, withing the grammatical conditions imposed by the form, to switch to the verb form of this word whose sensory associations are less direct. Etc etc.
I am extraordinarily open to advice and criticism; in fact this is largely a test to begin figuring out what role/s I can or cannot play on the translation side of the project. So--
the French:
Chanson gothique
Belle épousée,
J’aime tes pleurs !
C’est la rosée
Qui sied aux fleurs.
Les belles choses
N’ont qu’un printemps,
Semons de roses
Les pas du Temps !
Soit brune ou blonde,
Faut-il choisir ?
Le Dieu du monde,
C’est le Plaisir.
...and the English:
Gothic Song
A XXX lovely bride,
B Your tears XXXXXX !
A Like dew they slide
B Into the flowers.
A That lovely pair,
B Whilst Spring is prime,
A Strews roses there
B In the wake of Time!
A Brunette, or blonde:
B Why split his treasure?
A For this world's God
B Is surely Pleasure.
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