Two Versions Of Translation From Baudelair's Les Fleurs Du Al

Introduction

Translators are always confronted with two questions before translating a text. The first question w they ask themselves is if the text in the target language should be reader or text oriented. The choice of making a translation text or reader oriented depends on the translator, the time of translation and the type of document.

A text whose goal is to entertain the reader will most likely be reader oriented while an educational or a scientific text would be better if they are text oriented preserving meaning of the text as much as possible because the goal here is to pass a specific message which must be accurate in such a text a cohesive shift in the level of explicitness is favored. A translator has the liberty to refuse or accept a given task of translation and when he/she accepts to translate a given text he / she has the liberty to use his or discretion to either make it as accurate as possible or natural as possible, here is the second question.

In rendering unmarked source-language collocations into his or her target language a translator normally aims to produce a collocation which is typical in the target language while preserving the meaning associated with the source collection. This cannot always be achieved. Translation often involves a tension- a difficult choice between what is typical and what is accurate.

There is an opportunity presented here to analyses the difference in choices made by two different translators of two of Baudelaire’s classic poems. The first translation is more natural while the second translation is accurate in conveying the message of the original text. The differences will be highlighted in stanzas.

In the first stanza of the first translated poem the first translation had exactly the same number of words with the original poem (31 words). There was no shift in the level of explicitness. This stanza also had a better rhyme. The first translator believes in the maintaining a good rhyme, he did not do much in explaining at the same time there was no subtraction in the number of words used. In the second translation of the first stanza the there was a shift in the level of explicitness the second translator was not as creative as the first translator with the use of words. The second translator was more concerned about the reader she gave equivalent of words and expression so that the English reader of the poem will understand the poem more but lacked the rhyme that made the original poem and the first translation interesting.

The first translation had phonetic cohesion; all the lines had rhymes with the last word of a line rhyming with that of the second line this is done in such a way to maintain beauty in sounds by creating rhymes. Baudelaire’s poems are known for their rhymes Roy Campbell did a great job of even ensuring better rhymes. The last two words in the first line of the first stanza des puissances suprêmes is translated by him as powers supreme so that supreme will rhyme with the last word in the second line space. In English the adjectives always come before nouns for example the good boy, the beautiful garden etc. Roy Campbell decided to break this rule to maintain the literary beauty in the rhymes of the original poem in French.

In the second stanza the first translator continued with the creativity that made the first translation unique by making the last word of the first line rhyme with that of the third line while the last word of the second line rhymed with that of the fourth line. None of the lines in the second translation rhymed.

In both translations in the third line there was a fronting of predicator in the third line

FT: Cursed be the night of pleasures vainly sported

ST: Accursed be the night of ephemeral joy

The fronting of these predicates in this way will be considered a marked structure in modern English, but, for a poem of the 19th century, in its era it could not have been considered so.

In the 3rd stanza there was shift in at level of explicitness, the total number of words in the original text is 35 while in the first and second translations there are 32 words in the first translation and 31 words in the second translation. The first translator also used a borrowed word from French (billet-doux) so as to maintain rhyme; this made it evident that the first translator was more interested having a poem that is pleasant to read with good rhymes rather than explaining the meaning of words. It is also in this stanza that both

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