A first attempt at translating my own work.

As an exercise for myself in French, I attempted a straight translation of my last posted poem, And sometime drink whiskey with me. I made no attempt to carry over anything but the most basic of senses - the words themselves and the meanings of the clauses. It helped that it was a fairly simply poem to begin with. Here is the French version:


Et un jour bois whisky avec moi
pour que je vais te dire de
ma cache de mots ramassé
secrètement soigneusement
plumé
d'un bouche-piège de grand-père de quelqu'un. Ce Vieux Babillard Mâchoire-Fente-là.

Ou je vais te dire autres baliverne, mensonges, comme la soir fuit de façon précipitée.



I found to my surprise that the rhythm I uncovered with the English version, though modified, still seems to work. The syllables in lines four and five match perfectly. The hardest part was figuring out how to say "That Old Jawing Slit". I settled on, with help from two dictionaries, something that translates more literally as "That Old Talkative Jaw-Slit." I wish I knew French well enough to invent words - I just don't have a good enough grasp of the morphological nuances to do so.

The impossible part was what to do with line seven in the original poem, the line with the three words drawn out of the cache. I considered finding straight translations, but the actual meaning of those three words is secondary to their impact (though they were chosen for specific reasons) as dusty old relics. And I definitely do not know enough French to tackle those sort of nuanced pragmatics.

In retrospect, I would have tackled a different poem for my first go - one that didn't rely so much on lexical precision. My next goal, besides my own work, is to try a translation of e.e. cummings i will wade out, which I have also written about here.