Douglas Hofstadter, you have a lot to answer for. Really, you do. If you had never written Le Ton Beau de Marot, I would have had no idea that it was possible to translate formal verse to a high standard, and it would never have occurred to me to have a go at it myself. It's even your fault that I learned Italian.
I was brought up on a varied musical diet containing plenty of opera and operetta, and I used to like to follow the libretto as much as anyone, but in no case was that libretto ever actually singable. It was just there to explain what the words meant. That's a perfectly cromulent thing for a libretto to do, and I'm not in any way complaining about it; but it was why I never really expected anything more. When I finally did go to see an operetta sung in English (it was The Merry Widow, and I would have been in my late teens at the time, so it was not the most recent translation, which is in fact excellent), I was not impressed. This was probably the first time the idea of verse translation had crossed my mind, and that performance convinced me for a long time that it should not be done at all.
Ah, but then along came Professor Hofstadter. I was originally introduced to his work in the early 1980s, when Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid was doing the rounds in the maths department. I read my copy so often it fell apart, and I ended up replacing it with the anniversary edition (had I really had it for so long?). When I discovered that he had also written a book called Le Ton Beau de Marot, I immediately assumed it was going to be more of the same, and promptly bought a copy.
Well, it was and it wasn't. Professor Hofstadter always writes about cognitive science, but he never seems to do it quite the same way twice. This book put much more emphasis on language rather than mathematics, and a recurring theme of the book was the challenge of translating a very sweet, simple poem from Old French. My immediate instinct was to assume that such a feat, if possible at all, could not be done in more than one way, give or take minor variations. The book joyously proved me wrong. There are, if I recall correctly, over thirty translations of the poem in there, done by the Professor and his friends, and almost all superb.
And so, of course, I just had to do it. So, for your enjoyment (I hope), here is a translation of one of the poems from Dante's Vita Nova; here is a translation of a sonnet by Petrarch; and here of a song in Old French called Bele Doette. I have also done more than one translation of the original Marot poem, but for various reasons I no longer have those to hand, or I would show you out of interest.
The reason I don't often translate more modern poetry is not that I'm linguistically stuck in the Middle Ages; it's that it's not easy to find formal verse written recently, and, to be honest, translating free verse just doesn't do it for me. Half the fun is in getting it to fit into the rhyme and metre in a natural-sounding way. However, I have translated a lovely Italian song from the middle of the twentieth century, La signora di trent'anni fa, which you can hear at the link. My translation is here, and if you should so wish, you can sing it to the original tune.
I was brought up on a varied musical diet containing plenty of opera and operetta, and I used to like to follow the libretto as much as anyone, but in no case was that libretto ever actually singable. It was just there to explain what the words meant. That's a perfectly cromulent thing for a libretto to do, and I'm not in any way complaining about it; but it was why I never really expected anything more. When I finally did go to see an operetta sung in English (it was The Merry Widow, and I would have been in my late teens at the time, so it was not the most recent translation, which is in fact excellent), I was not impressed. This was probably the first time the idea of verse translation had crossed my mind, and that performance convinced me for a long time that it should not be done at all.
Ah, but then along came Professor Hofstadter. I was originally introduced to his work in the early 1980s, when Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid was doing the rounds in the maths department. I read my copy so often it fell apart, and I ended up replacing it with the anniversary edition (had I really had it for so long?). When I discovered that he had also written a book called Le Ton Beau de Marot, I immediately assumed it was going to be more of the same, and promptly bought a copy.
Well, it was and it wasn't. Professor Hofstadter always writes about cognitive science, but he never seems to do it quite the same way twice. This book put much more emphasis on language rather than mathematics, and a recurring theme of the book was the challenge of translating a very sweet, simple poem from Old French. My immediate instinct was to assume that such a feat, if possible at all, could not be done in more than one way, give or take minor variations. The book joyously proved me wrong. There are, if I recall correctly, over thirty translations of the poem in there, done by the Professor and his friends, and almost all superb.
And so, of course, I just had to do it. So, for your enjoyment (I hope), here is a translation of one of the poems from Dante's Vita Nova; here is a translation of a sonnet by Petrarch; and here of a song in Old French called Bele Doette. I have also done more than one translation of the original Marot poem, but for various reasons I no longer have those to hand, or I would show you out of interest.
The reason I don't often translate more modern poetry is not that I'm linguistically stuck in the Middle Ages; it's that it's not easy to find formal verse written recently, and, to be honest, translating free verse just doesn't do it for me. Half the fun is in getting it to fit into the rhyme and metre in a natural-sounding way. However, I have translated a lovely Italian song from the middle of the twentieth century, La signora di trent'anni fa, which you can hear at the link. My translation is here, and if you should so wish, you can sing it to the original tune.