Harry Potter chez les francophones

Today in class we were asked to translate a passage from J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. This passage appears towards the end of the novel, where Harry is working his way through the third challenge of the Triwizard Tournament. Amidst a hedge maze, Harry comes across a sphinx who bars his passage to the maze’s centre, where the Triwizard Cup – and wizarding glory – awaits. The sphinx tells Harry that she will let him go past her if he manages to solve her riddle; but should Harry fail to solve it, she will attack him. Alternatively, Harry may choose to turn around and take a more long-winded way to the maze’s centre, so as not to hear the riddle and get it wrong. But Harry being Harry, he opts to take up the challenge. So the sphinx asks him the following riddle:

First think of the person who lives in disguise,
Who deals in secrets and tells naught but lies.
Next, tell me what’s always the last thing to mend,
The middle of middle and the end of the end?
And finally give me the sound often heard
During the search for a hard-to-find word.
Now string them together, and answer me this,
Which creature would you be unwilling to kiss?

---

So here’s my attempt at translating it into French:

Penses d’abord à un symbole dont les usages sont vastes,
qui est l’Alpha d’un système et au milieu d’une phrase.
Puis, dis-moi la chose pour laquelle on ne paie,
qui réchauffe la peau et qui vient du soleil.
Puis, donnes-moi le verbe qui peut décrire bien celle
qui, s’ouvrant les poumons, trouve le souffle vital.
Ces fragments combines, et puis réponds à ça:
Quel créature embrasser tu ne préférais pas?

***

Back translation:

Think first of a symbol whose usage is vast,
the Alpha of a system and in the midst of a phrase.
Then, tell me the thing for which one doesn’t pay,
which warms up the skin and comes from the ‘soleil’.
Then, give me the verb which perhaps depicts she
who, opening her lungs, finds the breath of ‘la vie’.
So combining these fragments, do respond now to this:
Which creature would, preferably, you not like to kiss?
 

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The answer of the riddle is, of course, spider. But in translating the riddle, it would make little sense to keep the word ‘spider’ as it appears in English. For one thing, unless the francophone reader has an acquaintance with English, the word ‘spider’ is unlikely to elicit the mental image of an eight-legged creature. Moreover, even if one were to recognise the word, it is not exactly easy to translate the request appearing in the first two lines, the answer of which is ‘spy’. The French equivalent is ‘espion‘ (from whence comes ‘espionage’), which could not, in any case, spell out the word ‘spider’.

So it makes more sense to use the French word for spider, araignée. But with this word, it thus becomes necessary to change the three requests in the riddle. So I’ve tried my best to create a riddle that hints at ‘araignée’, using imagery that departs from the ones in J.K. Rowling’s riddle, but which serves the same function of pointing towards a spider. 

 

Quelques corrections

Pour imiter Dante

Quand je suis parti du milieu du chemin de notre vie,
Un désir de connaître, de cette forêt, le monde j’ai trahi,
Je crevais d’être perdu et la mort m’a envahi.

Si grands sont les remords nés de cette vie!
Et la peur qui demeure sous la peau, sans merci, 
Me rappelle du choix si aveugle que j’ai pris.

Après des années à rêver des lumières jolies,
De ce conteneur de douleur, pour mes espoirs je prie:
Que le Paradis je touche ait les étoiles qui brillent.

 —

Besides a few grammatical errors, a friend has told me that ‘mourir de trouille’ is too informal for Dante. I guess he must be right – ‘mourir de trouille’ basically means ‘to be scared shitless’. So I’ve replaced it with the phrase ‘la mort m’a envahi’ (literally ‘death invaded me’), which I wish I’d thought up sooner. Still, the case could be made that although Dante’s writing style is undeniably refined, it’s not as if his narrative is free of vulgarity; on the contrary, the flatterers residing in the second ‘bolgia’ of hell’s eighth circle, reserved as it is for fraudsters, are literally wading in human excrement. If I were in their position, I’d most probably be ‘mort de trouille’, ceteris paribus.  

The Infinite

L’infinito – Giacomo Leopardi

Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle,
e questa siepe, che da tanta parte
dell’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati
spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani
silenzi, e profondissima quiete
io nel pensier mi fingo; ove per poco
il cor non si spaura. E come il vento
odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
infinito silenzio a questa voce
vo comparando: e mi sovvien l’eterno,
e le morte stagioni, e la presente
e viva, e il suon di lei. Così tra questa
immensità s’annega il pensier mio:
e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare.

---

 

And here is my attempt at a translation:

Always precious to me was this solitary hill
as was also this hedge, which many parts
of the horizon’s end does from view exclude.
But sitting and gazing here, limitless
spaces beyond, and superhuman
silences, and the deepest quiet
in my mind do I feign; where unto the verge
of fear my heart all but reaches. And as the wind
I hear rustling through these bushes, I, that
infinite silence to this voice
start comparing: and I sense the eternal,
and the dead seasons, and the present,
and the living one, and how she sounds. So within this
immensity themselves my thoughts drown:
and the foundering to me seems sweet in this sea.

---

Notes:

My translation is rather conservative. What I wanted to do was maintain the syntax of the original poem. But of course, doing so was a real challenge. After all, Italian words are stressed differently from English ones – e.g. when one pronounces ‘siepe’  (see-air-pay), one hangs onto the second syllable for slightly longer than for the other two, which are pronounced for an equally long duration of time; whereas in English, the equivalent word ‘hedge’ is monosyllabic and flat. As a result, in order to keep the rhythm of the original, I tried to surround the word ‘hedge’ with words that can make up for the two syllables which ‘hedge’ lacks. I used this approach throughout my translation whenever the syllable discrepancy came up.  

Equally difficult to translate were Leopardi’s adjectives: words like ‘interminati’ (which I think he made up), sovrumani, and profondissima, have equivalents in English – but these equivalents sound inadequate given the context. The problem with translating ‘interminati’ is, first of all, the fact that there are no equivalent words in English which I know of that contain five syllables. And although words like ‘unconcluding’, ‘boundless’, ‘unending’, and ‘limitless’, bear a similar meaning (‘interminati’ = unterminated), they do not begin with the prefix ‘in-‘ which the word ‘interminati’ shares with ‘infinito’. Although one could argue that finding a word that has such a prefix is not necessary, I believe it is important to the meaning of the poem, which discusses limits and being within and without them. When the prefix ‘in-‘ is added before an adjective, the the word takes on the meaning of its opposite – e.g. ‘indeterminate’ means the opposite of ‘determinate’ (although ‘infamous’ is not the opposite of ‘famous’). But as is also the case with English, ‘in’ is a preposition that means ‘in’. So when one reads words like ‘interminati’ and ‘infinito’, one may subconsciously think of the word ‘in’  in its prepositional sense, and thus consider what is meant by finite and infinite space.

To be perfectly honest, I should also mention that my translation borrows generously from the one I found on Wikipedia. It is not that I had any intentions of copying it, but I wanted to keep Leopardi’s structure intact, and that translation had done a remarkably good job at that. When I did branch away from it, it was because I was not satisfied with its rhythm. 

 

 

In Imitation of Dante

Later on, I tried my hand at translating the poem into English, albeit by breaking the rules of terza rima:  

In Imitation of Dante (English version)

When from the midpoint on life’s way I had strayed,
A desire to know this vast world, I’d betrayed, 
I found myself lost, in dark woods, and afraid. 

So great was my rue that came after the sin,
And now, the fear that thrives under my skin
Recalls that dim choice I had blindly let in. 

Through the years I have dreamed of the lights from afar,
In a container of pain, where my noble hopes are
To touch Paradise, from whence comes the original star.

—

The English translation was by far the easiest one to complete, not only because English is my native tongue, but also because in the language, monosyllabic words are plentiful. In comparison, French has a fair number of monosyllabic words, but is much less flexible when it comes to verb conjugations – in fact, verbs take up so many syllables that one has to take some liberties with the literal meaning of the original poem simply to fit in enough ideas:

 

Pour imiter Dante

Quand je suis parti du milieu du chemin de notre vie,
Un désir de connaître, de ce forêt, le monde j’ai trahit,
Je crevais d’être perdu et de mourir de trouille.

Si grands sont les remords nés de cette vie!
Et la peur qui demeure sous la peau, sans merci, 
Me rappelle du choix si aveugle que j’ai pris.

Après des années de rêver des lumières jolies,
De ce conteneur de douleur, pour mes espoirs je prie:
Que le Paradis je touche ait les étoiles qui brillent.

 

—

If the French version was difficult, it was the Italian translation that was a real struggle for me. Perhaps my Italian vocabulary is rather limited; but in any case, the way in which Italian words are stressed makes finishing lines with monosyllabic words nearly impossible. I also had to alter Dante’s words to render more faithful this Italian translation of my first poem. 

 

Per imitare Dante:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi han visto
desiderare conoscere il mondo, anche se tristo, 
per una selva oscura mi ritrovai, insisto! 

Grand’è il rimorso che da ‘sta vita è venuto;
E ora, la paura che sotto la pelle – aiuto! –
Mi ricorda della scelta che ho fatto senza lutto. 

Dopo anni di sognare di luci sì belle,
Di dove ogni pena fa muovere le vele,
Toccherò il Paradiso in cui brillano le stelle.