A little after autumn time
When those who cultivate the vine
Pick their grapes and fill the tun
And with work that’s lightly done
Each man offers to his fellow
Pears and grapes and peaches mellow
When in the soil the corn-seeds grow
And the leaf falls from the bough
By Nature’s or the wind’s design
In thirteen hundred forty-nine
On the ninth day of November
I was closed up in my chamber.
Had the sky been bright and clear
I should have gone to take the air
But the mountains and the meadows
Were hid in fog and deepest shadows
So I was taken by the gloom
Thinking in my lonely room
How all men everywhere are governed
By cronies meeting in the tavern
How truth and justice in the land
Are dead, slain by the hand
Of greed, who over them holds reign
As if she were a sovereign queen
How the rulers rob the ruled
Sack, plunder and assault the world
Crushing them in their distress
Merciless and pitiless
Great mischief seems it to my mind
When vice and power are combined
______________________________________________
(Translation by blog author, 03 November 2012. Copyright.)
Original text:
Un po apres le temps d’autonne
Que chascuns vandange et
entonne
Qui a vingnes a vandangier
Et qu’on a a petit dangier
Pesches moust poires et roisins
dont on presente a ses voisins
Que li blez en la terre germe
Et que la fueille chiet dou
cherme
Par nature ou dou vent qui
vente
L’an mil trois cens nuef et
quarante
Le novisme jour de novembre
M’en aloie par mi ma chambre
Et se li airs fust clers et
purs
Je fusse ailleurs mais si
obscurs
Estoit que montaignes et plains
Estoient de bruines pleins.
Si que la merencolioie
Tous seuls en ma chambre et
pensoie
Comment par conseil de taverne
Li mondes par tout se gouverne
Comment justice et verite
Sont mortes par l’iniquite
D’avarice qui en maint regne
Com dame souvereinne regne
Com li signeur leur subgiez
pillent
Roubent raembent et essillent
et mettent a destruction
Sans pitie ne compation
Si que grans meschies ce me
samble
Est de vice
et pooir ensamble.
From Le Jugement du roy de Navarre by Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377)
5 comments:
good man !
Nicely done. My school French from 1973 recognized 'et'
Well done, Sackers.
Why? ;-)
Translation is just that. Carrying something into somewhere else but losing nothing. So you're moving through time, cultures, modes, even as you find the utmost accuracy in matches of words. Most of all in poetry. What might be called a moving experience for the translator.
Musicians too have to do all this; emoting, say, loss, in the 17th century is a different undertaking from emoting the feeling of loss in the 19th. Affekt they call it, always by the German word - surprisingly there is no English expression.
Truth, justice, vice, greed....very hard to choose just those English words without wearing your 14th century brain.
Enviable, to be able to do such a translation.
Thank you so much, HG, I came across it, felt it spoke to me today, thought I could do it. As you say, translation isn't replacing one word with another but recreating an experience.
James - see first sentence.
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