The Process of Translation Explored through 19th Century French Poetry

Abstract

Translation is a process with inherent trade-offs. It is often necessary to sacrifice one element of a work for another, whether that be accuracy for flow, syntax for tone, or authorial intent for reader’s interpretation. These tensions already provide significant challenges for translating prose, but they are augmented for translating poetry, where confounding factors like rhyme and meter exist and where every word carries more than just the weight of its definition. Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, both 19th century French poets with experience in English translation, encountered this issue in both their original and translated works. Their roles as France’s first “modern poets” and their contribution to the French poetic movement of Symbolisme, where poets aimed to depict inner, abstract emotions through symbols, shapes, and colors, are also a testament to their understanding of poetic language as more than direct transcription of simple thoughts and ideas. As it happens, both men published French translations of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” during their lifetimes, but despite their apparent similarities, their poetic and translation style differed drastically. Exploring these poets’ perspectives on translation, both by comparing their translated works and by analyzing their own statements about the translation process, can give one a better understanding of the different theories of translation. Using these ideas even in the modern era can help one find one’s own translation style, especially of poetry, by posing questions about a translation’s ultimate purpose and what trade-offs need to be made to achieve it.