This is the second of a two-part contribution on literary translation by Ronald Puppo. The first article A translator’s preliminary questions. Part one: The why of it appeared in Tradiling last March.
As in my previous Verdaguerian adventures in translation (Selected Poems of Jacint Verdaguer, 2007; Mount Canigó: A tale of Catalonia, 2015), I have set out to render the prominent Catalan poet’s acclaimed 2591-line epopee, L’Atlàntida, into rhythmic, readable, modern English verse. The poem’s ten cantos feature, for the most part, Verdaguer’s superb quatrains of rhyming, alternating feminine–masculine alexandrines, typically, but not always, feminine at the caesura. The alexandrines are dodecasyllabic, with feminine hemistichs featuring an unstressed, uncounted final syllable. For example (from Canto One):
Al temps que el gran Alcides ǀ anava per la terra,
tot escombrant-la amb clava ǀ feixuga, arreu arreu,
de bords gegants i monstres ǀ que a Déu movien guerra,
en flames esclatava ǀ nevat lo Pirineu.
Rendered into English decasyllables, the lines in this quatrain scan more likely as tetrameter than as pentameter; with, in the first line, an opening spondee “Time was” followed by anapest (“great Al-ci-”), iamb (“-des wan-“), anapest (“-dered the earth”).
Time was great Alcides wandered the earth,
clearing it, with mighty club, of rude monsters
and giants at war with God, when there burst
into flames the snowy Pyrenees Mountains.
The second line might scan as follows: dactyl (“clear-ing it”), amphibrach (“with might-y”), trochee (“club of”), spondee (“rude mon-[sters]”) with a final unstressed, uncounted syllable; the third line: iamb (“and gi-”), anapest (“-ants at war”), iamb (“with God”), anapest (“when there burst”); and the fourth line: anapest (“into flames”), amphibrach (“the snow-y”), troche (“Pyr-e-”), iamb (“-nees Moun-[tains]”) with, again, a final unstressed, uncounted syllable.
Given the wide variation resulting from scansion, the English translation prioritizes rhythm over strictly construed meter, producing a typically tetrameter, pentameter or even hexameter verse, allowing for a syllabic count of up to fifteen. Prioritizing rhythm means reading stanzas freely, avoiding unnatural metrical pausing. Importantly, the concept of rhythm also takes into account lexical and syntactic choices that, together with meter, blend into a coherent poetic whole (see Packard 1989).
Where rhyming is concerned, the English translation mirrors the abab end rhyme of the Catalan alexandrines; the translation also follows the aabccb pattern of the introductory and concluding sextains, as well as the abab quatrains of “Isabella’s Dream.” The freely but richly rhyming non-stanzaic decasyllables and hexasyllables of the “Chorus of Greek Islands” are rendered, for the most part, with similarly freely rhyming pentameter, or tetrameter, and trimeter.
We would be hard put to match Verdaguer’s perfect end rhyme throughout the entire poem. That said, this verse translation features a broad spectrum of various types of rhyme that readers will discern throughout the English text. For example (from Canto Nine):
And of those who brought turmoil into the world,
not a footprint remains; the Almighty has erased them;
the thunder of their battles, the flashing bolts they hurled,
gone: to oblivion the billows have taken them.
The memory of their grave lost to the centuries,
but not for fire-spewing Teide, who still tells the main
of how that night they wrought the debacle together,
while the sea wails as if eager to do it again.
Have you not heard the clouds roll out their rugged chant,
as thunder echoes on cliffs and crags all scored,
when, his chest ablaze, the Genie of the Atlantic
recounts the fate of that world to worlds just born?
As in my previous translations of Jacint Verdaguer (cited above) and Joan Maragall (2020), rendering Catalan poetry into rhythmic, readable, modern English verse has meant recreating an appropriate form–content synthesis by resorting to rhythmic elements such as assonance, consonance, alliteration, weak rhyme, internal rhyme, slant rhyme, sight rhyme, syllabic rhyme and more, then putting it to the test of reading aloud; a process in which, more often than not, the ear signals the many bumps in the road, calling for more, and then more, revision.
Finally, and separately from the translation itself, English readers of Atlantis (forthcoming at Fum d’Estampa Press) will certainly benefit from paratextual matter such as an introduction that presents the work’s literary and social contexts, as well as reception and significance both at home and abroad. Reading translations may also serve as an antidote to ethnocentrism, particularly where speakers of lesser known languages are concerned, counteracting the sort of cultural daltonism that screens any number of cultures and literatures from global view. Translation is, in the end, more than intercultural communication; it opens the way to encountering a cultural other, that is, a reciprocal self. Translation, then, serves as both window and mirror.
