"Ma Mignonne"
26 Jun '08 04:123 editsThanks for the suggestion, Noodles. The following is cribbed, with minor changes, from my blog over on Facebook, and its invitation applies to RHP forumites also.
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I'm reading Douglas Hofstadter's book, "Le Ton Beau de Marot", which is largely about translation, and whose central presentational conceit involves English versions, done by many different people, of a poem by Clement Marot, directed at a bedridden eight-year-old girl. The idea is that poetry is difficult to translate and also illustrates the issues involved in translation in general very well, because of the balance to be struck between preserving the formal aspects of the poem (metre, rhyme, etc. in verse and, more generally, properties of what he later terms "linguistic media", i.e. sets of formal constraints imposed on a language without reducing the expressive potentialities) and the poem's semantic content. Some of Hofstadter's friends got very clever in their translations, observing innumerable little features of the poem (overall syllable count, the fact that the poem has rhymed couplets and semantic couplets out of phase with each other, etc.), deciding on a particular feature as being most important, and preserving it in the English version. Others sort of double-translated (for example, there is a "Shakespearean" version of this old French poem, written by an American)*.
A lot of you speak French (and those that do all do better than I), and I thought it would be cool to have some of you give this a go. Below, I've put the original text, my attempt at an English version, a couple of comments about what I thought was important and sought to preserve, and Hofstadter's "literal translation" of the poem.
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A une Damoyselle malade (ou "Ma Mignonne" )
Clement Marot (the lack of accents is due to my keyboard and laziness, so perhaps I can take credit for authorship of this version 😉)
Ma mignonne
Je vous donne
Le bon jour;
Le sejour
C'est prison.
Guerison
Recouvrez,
Puis ouvrez
Votre porte
Et qu'on sorte
Vitement,
Car Clement
Le vous mande.
Va, friande
De ta bouche,
Qui se couche
En danger
Pour manger
Confitures;
Si tu dures
Trop malade,
Couleur fade
Tu prendras,
Et perdras
L'embonpoint.
Dieu te doint
Sante bonne,
Ma mignonne.
(That's the original. Some of the French seems kind of weird to me, but Marot predates Shakespeare, who sounds kind of weird to me in English, so I suspect that's all there is to that.)
------------------------------------------------------------
Before I give Hofstadter's "literal translation", I'll also list the features he claims anything which aspires to be "Ma Mignonne" in another language would have, namely:
"1. The poem is 28 lines long.
2. Each line consists of three syllables.
3. Each line's main stress falls on its final syllable.
4. The poem is a string of rhyming couplets: AA, BB, CC,...
5. Midway, the tone changes from formal ("vous" ) to informal ("tu" ).
6. The poem's opening line is echoed precisely at the very bottom.
7. The poet puts his own name directly into his poem."
-------------------------------------------------------------
Here's a modified version of Hofstadter's "literal translation", whose status as verse is arguable (his actual translations are beautiful, though) and whose purpose is to summarise the semantic properties of the poem -- his version had many synonyms for each line, but I've truncated things a little. To choose which formal properties of the poem one wishes to use in translation, it's primarily the French poem itself, or some list like the one above, to which one must refer.
My [Diminutive feminine cute person]
adapted from Douglas Hofstadter
My cute one
I give you
The good day
The stay [confinement? convalescence?]
It’s prison
Healing [recovery, etc.]
Recover
Then open
Your door
And let’s exit
Quickly:
For Clément
Commands you to
Come on, [thou, or some other INFORMAL way of saying "you" who art so] fond
Of thy mouth
Who crouches
In danger
To eat
Jam [sweets, confections]
If you remain
For too long ill
A wan colour
Thou wilt take on
And thou wilt lose
Thy plumpness.
May God give to thee
Good health
My cute one.
--------------------------------------------------------
Here's my attempt. To the list of seven attributes above, I added another formal feature of the poem which I feel takes precedence over literal meaning, namely:
8. The middle 26 lines of the poem consist of 13 semantic couplets, e.g. "To eat/ jam", "A wan colour/ thou wilt take on", which are phase-shifted by one line from the rhyming-couplet structure. Hofstadter alludes, when first mentioning the poem, to a beautiful eighth property whose discovery is an exercise for the reader, and then mentions the above property later. I hadn't noticed it until it was mentioned, but I couldn't think of anything else about the poem as clever as this, so I suspect this is what he was talking about.
I made myself one other constraint:
9. I only translate "one step", to make some of Hofstadter's discussion more obvious to myself and to make the little decisions I made in translation as transparent as possible to readers on Facebook who know me personally. By "one step", I mean that I translated from Clement Marot French into ChronicLeaky English, i.e. not only not writing Shakespearean haiku rap, but also sticking to words and even concepts which are very much part of my own mental landscape. I didn't grasp at formal straws to accommodate interesting new ways of preserving the poem's meaning conceptually; my translation is as conceptually close to Marot's as possible in my own narrow head, modulo the eight formal constraints above. In fact, it is even self-consciously me-esque, to clarify that there is a single instance of translation. I don't consider this an important constraint for other tranlat(or/ion)s, though.
My biggest violation is in the inclusion of my own name. My first name (Mark) doesn't have enough syllables, my middle name is accented in the wrong place and this poem is far too informal for using my surname, so I've enlisted the aid of a funky bunch -- interestingly, the current text originally had my full name where "ChronicLeaky" now appears, so this violation can be retroactively claimed to be in the name of internet anonymity! Also, my translation is probably thematically informed by all the ones I've read in the book, although I've followed the formal rules pretty closely, so syntactic similarities to other translations are hopefully derived from syntactical similarity to the original. However, the vous/tu switch has an awkward equivalent in English; it requires a change from "you" to "thou", and I rarely say "thou", which would seem to necessitate a violation of rule 10. However, I do say "thou" if I'm quoting a phrase with "thou" in it, and so I've avoided addressing "Little Miss" directly in the second half of the poem unless I'm using a stock phrase, in this case "thou shalt not". It's the totality of the formal constraints that make my translation deviate as much as it does from the "literal" one, and it's this sort of forced problem-solving that makes verse fun to write, too.
Little Miss
ChronicLeaky's First Attempt
Little miss,
please hear this:
Love and peace.
Swift release
from your cell.
Do get well:
ditch disease!
Then, with ease,
quit your berth.
Walk the Earth!
Stroll the park!
Marky Mark
will suggest:
No more rest;
have a feast!
(Or at least
do not starve.)
Go and carve
up the host.
Nibble toast,
have a scone--
jam alone,
if it's fresh!
Keep thy flesh;
thou shalt not
lie (and rot):
health and bliss,
Little Miss.
(This is self-consciously "mine" in the sense that, for example, "Peace" is a greeting I often use, "walk the Earth" is a reference to "Pulp Fiction" and has become something of an inside joke of mine, "jam alone" is a pun -- to jam is to play music with others, and is difficult to do alone. "Up the host" was originally "up a roast", but I'm a vegetarian and unlikely to suggest that, while the replacement either advocates cannibalism or turns the Holy Communion into some sort of park-strolling, jam-spattered feast, both of which are images I find funny.)
-----------------------------------------------------------
There you go. Note that, given the information above, you don't really need to speak any French to give it a try (although that's debatable in, I think, an interesting way). In particular, I'd like to see gangsta rap and l33tsp34k versions of this poem, and perhaps your ideas about in what sense they are translations. I'd also be interested to see this poem in any other language besides English and French that anyone can manage, although I won't be able to understand it on much higher a level than is provided by the information above (but it would still sound nice. C'est dazlious!**).
*I've read quite a bit more now than when I originally wrote this, and have encountered some translations which deviate strongly from the formal properties of the French poem but which are themselves quite beautiful.
**Noodles already pointed out that this should be "dazlieux".
EDIT I might try to put this in Hrothgarian, for those of you who remember it. The interesting thing about Hrothgarian is that, at least in one sense, orthography is tied to connotation -- words beginning with "p" are understood to be said in extreme anger, and words containing "p" in at least mild anger. Given the intended tone of the poem (certainly not angry), such a translation would have to be a (not easy in Hrothgarian) lipogram.
-------------------------------------------------------
I'm reading Douglas Hofstadter's book, "Le Ton Beau de Marot", which is largely about translation, and whose central presentational conceit involves English versions, done by many different people, of a poem by Clement Marot, directed at a bedridden eight-year-old girl. The idea is that poetry is difficult to translate and also illustrates the issues involved in translation in general very well, because of the balance to be struck between preserving the formal aspects of the poem (metre, rhyme, etc. in verse and, more generally, properties of what he later terms "linguistic media", i.e. sets of formal constraints imposed on a language without reducing the expressive potentialities) and the poem's semantic content. Some of Hofstadter's friends got very clever in their translations, observing innumerable little features of the poem (overall syllable count, the fact that the poem has rhymed couplets and semantic couplets out of phase with each other, etc.), deciding on a particular feature as being most important, and preserving it in the English version. Others sort of double-translated (for example, there is a "Shakespearean" version of this old French poem, written by an American)*.
A lot of you speak French (and those that do all do better than I), and I thought it would be cool to have some of you give this a go. Below, I've put the original text, my attempt at an English version, a couple of comments about what I thought was important and sought to preserve, and Hofstadter's "literal translation" of the poem.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
A une Damoyselle malade (ou "Ma Mignonne" )
Clement Marot (the lack of accents is due to my keyboard and laziness, so perhaps I can take credit for authorship of this version 😉)
Ma mignonne
Je vous donne
Le bon jour;
Le sejour
C'est prison.
Guerison
Recouvrez,
Puis ouvrez
Votre porte
Et qu'on sorte
Vitement,
Car Clement
Le vous mande.
Va, friande
De ta bouche,
Qui se couche
En danger
Pour manger
Confitures;
Si tu dures
Trop malade,
Couleur fade
Tu prendras,
Et perdras
L'embonpoint.
Dieu te doint
Sante bonne,
Ma mignonne.
(That's the original. Some of the French seems kind of weird to me, but Marot predates Shakespeare, who sounds kind of weird to me in English, so I suspect that's all there is to that.)
------------------------------------------------------------
Before I give Hofstadter's "literal translation", I'll also list the features he claims anything which aspires to be "Ma Mignonne" in another language would have, namely:
"1. The poem is 28 lines long.
2. Each line consists of three syllables.
3. Each line's main stress falls on its final syllable.
4. The poem is a string of rhyming couplets: AA, BB, CC,...
5. Midway, the tone changes from formal ("vous" ) to informal ("tu" ).
6. The poem's opening line is echoed precisely at the very bottom.
7. The poet puts his own name directly into his poem."
-------------------------------------------------------------
Here's a modified version of Hofstadter's "literal translation", whose status as verse is arguable (his actual translations are beautiful, though) and whose purpose is to summarise the semantic properties of the poem -- his version had many synonyms for each line, but I've truncated things a little. To choose which formal properties of the poem one wishes to use in translation, it's primarily the French poem itself, or some list like the one above, to which one must refer.
My [Diminutive feminine cute person]
adapted from Douglas Hofstadter
My cute one
I give you
The good day
The stay [confinement? convalescence?]
It’s prison
Healing [recovery, etc.]
Recover
Then open
Your door
And let’s exit
Quickly:
For Clément
Commands you to
Come on, [thou, or some other INFORMAL way of saying "you" who art so] fond
Of thy mouth
Who crouches
In danger
To eat
Jam [sweets, confections]
If you remain
For too long ill
A wan colour
Thou wilt take on
And thou wilt lose
Thy plumpness.
May God give to thee
Good health
My cute one.
--------------------------------------------------------
Here's my attempt. To the list of seven attributes above, I added another formal feature of the poem which I feel takes precedence over literal meaning, namely:
8. The middle 26 lines of the poem consist of 13 semantic couplets, e.g. "To eat/ jam", "A wan colour/ thou wilt take on", which are phase-shifted by one line from the rhyming-couplet structure. Hofstadter alludes, when first mentioning the poem, to a beautiful eighth property whose discovery is an exercise for the reader, and then mentions the above property later. I hadn't noticed it until it was mentioned, but I couldn't think of anything else about the poem as clever as this, so I suspect this is what he was talking about.
I made myself one other constraint:
9. I only translate "one step", to make some of Hofstadter's discussion more obvious to myself and to make the little decisions I made in translation as transparent as possible to readers on Facebook who know me personally. By "one step", I mean that I translated from Clement Marot French into ChronicLeaky English, i.e. not only not writing Shakespearean haiku rap, but also sticking to words and even concepts which are very much part of my own mental landscape. I didn't grasp at formal straws to accommodate interesting new ways of preserving the poem's meaning conceptually; my translation is as conceptually close to Marot's as possible in my own narrow head, modulo the eight formal constraints above. In fact, it is even self-consciously me-esque, to clarify that there is a single instance of translation. I don't consider this an important constraint for other tranlat(or/ion)s, though.
My biggest violation is in the inclusion of my own name. My first name (Mark) doesn't have enough syllables, my middle name is accented in the wrong place and this poem is far too informal for using my surname, so I've enlisted the aid of a funky bunch -- interestingly, the current text originally had my full name where "ChronicLeaky" now appears, so this violation can be retroactively claimed to be in the name of internet anonymity! Also, my translation is probably thematically informed by all the ones I've read in the book, although I've followed the formal rules pretty closely, so syntactic similarities to other translations are hopefully derived from syntactical similarity to the original. However, the vous/tu switch has an awkward equivalent in English; it requires a change from "you" to "thou", and I rarely say "thou", which would seem to necessitate a violation of rule 10. However, I do say "thou" if I'm quoting a phrase with "thou" in it, and so I've avoided addressing "Little Miss" directly in the second half of the poem unless I'm using a stock phrase, in this case "thou shalt not". It's the totality of the formal constraints that make my translation deviate as much as it does from the "literal" one, and it's this sort of forced problem-solving that makes verse fun to write, too.
Little Miss
ChronicLeaky's First Attempt
Little miss,
please hear this:
Love and peace.
Swift release
from your cell.
Do get well:
ditch disease!
Then, with ease,
quit your berth.
Walk the Earth!
Stroll the park!
Marky Mark
will suggest:
No more rest;
have a feast!
(Or at least
do not starve.)
Go and carve
up the host.
Nibble toast,
have a scone--
jam alone,
if it's fresh!
Keep thy flesh;
thou shalt not
lie (and rot):
health and bliss,
Little Miss.
(This is self-consciously "mine" in the sense that, for example, "Peace" is a greeting I often use, "walk the Earth" is a reference to "Pulp Fiction" and has become something of an inside joke of mine, "jam alone" is a pun -- to jam is to play music with others, and is difficult to do alone. "Up the host" was originally "up a roast", but I'm a vegetarian and unlikely to suggest that, while the replacement either advocates cannibalism or turns the Holy Communion into some sort of park-strolling, jam-spattered feast, both of which are images I find funny.)
-----------------------------------------------------------
There you go. Note that, given the information above, you don't really need to speak any French to give it a try (although that's debatable in, I think, an interesting way). In particular, I'd like to see gangsta rap and l33tsp34k versions of this poem, and perhaps your ideas about in what sense they are translations. I'd also be interested to see this poem in any other language besides English and French that anyone can manage, although I won't be able to understand it on much higher a level than is provided by the information above (but it would still sound nice. C'est dazlious!**).
*I've read quite a bit more now than when I originally wrote this, and have encountered some translations which deviate strongly from the formal properties of the French poem but which are themselves quite beautiful.
**Noodles already pointed out that this should be "dazlieux".
EDIT I might try to put this in Hrothgarian, for those of you who remember it. The interesting thing about Hrothgarian is that, at least in one sense, orthography is tied to connotation -- words beginning with "p" are understood to be said in extreme anger, and words containing "p" in at least mild anger. Given the intended tone of the poem (certainly not angry), such a translation would have to be a (not easy in Hrothgarian) lipogram.
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