The challenge and reward of formal poetry do not lie in mastery of the formal aspects alone. They certainly are a matter of craftsmanship, but unless they serve a subject, they never amount to artistry. And mastery requires not only achieving the numbers, but achieving them with the appearance of inevitability: without tortured syntax, unnatural diction, and so on. It’s not enough for a suit to be elegantly made; it ought both to be worn and to fit its wearer well. The challenge and reward thus lie in tailoring the form to complement the subject. And since in poetry a subject begins as a thought needing further development, it too can be altered in minor ways to fit the constraints of form. Thus, if the translator of poetry has the hard task of expressing the same subject in different but equally effective language, then the translator of formalist poetry has the added challenge of expressing the subject after it has already been fitted to a form other than the one available to the translator.

Even in the hands of a master, something must be sacrificed. One might abandon the form in order to save every unit of meaning as free verse or even prose. One might abandon the subject to save the form — Tim Rice did this when he translated the French musical Starmania as Tycoon, writing the same songs more or less from scratch. Or one might compromise, creating a parallel of the form while preserving the majority of the subject. This is the approach I took to translating the musical Hjälp sökes, and it’s the one Ian Allaby took to translating Nelligan.

This compromise is not a straightforward matter. The crux of the matter is that when form and subject have been fitted to each other with great skill, it’s impossible to cleanly separate the two. Take these rhyming lines of Nelligan’s “Le tombeau de la négresse”:

Aux derniers ciels pâlis de mars, nous la menâmes
Dans le hallier funèbre aux odeurs de cinnames

Literally:

By the last skies turned pale of March we brought her
Into the funereal cinnamon-scented grove

Allaby:

We carried her, in March, under an ashen sky
Into a gloomy cinnamon-scented grove nearby

(“The Black Girl’s Tomb”)

Allaby has replicated the form and has preserved most of the sense. We have lost “last”, gained “nearby”, and traded “funereal” for “gloomy”, but these don’t much mar the meaning, and we can even praise the choice of “ashen” as matching the register of “pâlis”, which provides the essence of the image in the first line.

But we have not thought to ask why the poet chose “cinnames”, an archaic word for “cinnamon” (modern French uses “cannelle”). Different hypotheses yield different translation strategies. The naïve hypothesis is that it was the perfect word for Nelligan’s intended image and happened to rhyme with “menâmes” already in place. In this case, we’re led to preserve “cinnamon”. The cynical hypothesis is that the type of tree didn’t matter as long as it rhymed with “-âmes” (as almost any word in that place would have ended in French). In this case, we may choose another plant to characterize the grove if it helps us tailor a better form. A middle theory is that Nelligan profits from the archaic word’s Biblical suggestion of both time and place — one far removed from his wintry fin-de-siècle Québec — and, though he lighted on “cinnames”, might have been happy with any decor, cinnamon tree or otherwise, that evoked such an image.

It is tempting to say that since there is no way to establish the original intent, we should adopt the naïve hypothesis. But this is not practicable, because that exact fitting of meaning and form, supposedly the poet’s ideal without compromise, can never exist in another language; one or both must change. In practice the translator is constantly deciding, in the case of each word (at least of each rhyme), the harm that might be done by changing the sense. We who write poetry suspect that this is what the poet has done in any case; what’s on the page is the outcome of a deliberation of tradeoffs that might have yielded other solutions.

An excessive reverence for the actual over the potential leads to such renditions as Allaby’s “Funeral Marches”:

Within me I hear voices funereal
Clamoring transcendentally,
As a German motif musically
Propels these marches proverbial.

Amidst mad shudders vertebral
If I sob uncontrollably,
It’s because I hear voices funereal
Clamoring transcendentally.

Like a herd of zebras spectral
My dream roams bizarrely;
I’m haunted so entirely
That in my darkness personal

I hear moans of voices funereal.

Or again, in “Monks in File”, quoting only the “A” rhymes:

They move in file along the corridors antique
… With blood-red rays that play upon the stones monastic
… Already vespers hour has poured a flame ecstatic
… Of all the suppressed urges of their flesh cenobitic

These excerpts’ awkwardness reflects an effort to preserve the exact rhymes in French whose result is essentially a non-translation: the lines have almost been left in French. Thankfully, these poems are exceptional in the collection; usually Allaby recognizes that there is little value in slavishly following the original. He knows that the translator of poetry must be an inventive poet.

All of these remarks are to the effect that the task of the translator of formal poetry is extremely challenging, and much more difficult than if he had been content to reproduce the meaning. If the results are sometimes disappointing, they are at least commendable for their effort in proportion to the difficulty. But if this is the case, why translate Nelligan formally at all?

The poet Émile Nelligan in 1920 (Wikimedia/BAnQ Vieux-Montréal MSS82, S1, D6, P6)

Here is the quandary. Nelligan was a formalist to the core, committed not only to form in general but especially to two or three specific forms. He is often tiresome in French: his subjects are so monotonous, his symbols so cliché and overexplained, that apart from a few gems the appeal is usually in the craftsmanship of tailoring. To translate Nelligan only for the meaning is to miss it. In his summary of “How Sad Is October”, Allaby begins and ends with the line “October is sad.” The summary is accurate, and the comedy unintentional. If one is impressed enough by Nelligan to translate him, one quickly discovers that the translation will have to be lyrical.

“Soir d’hiver” is an example of a poem whose strength is its music:

Ah ! comme la neige a neigé !
Ma vitre est un jardin de givre.
Ah ! comme la neige a neigé !
Qu’est-ce que le spasme de vivre
À la douleur que j’ai, que j’ai !

It goes on similarly and is one of the more enjoyable poems in French. Allaby notes that it has even been set to music and has had staying power as a hymn of Québec. But this same quality dooms the translator if he should aim at a compromise between preservation of sense and form. Allaby has found this out; hence it’s a rare poem where he doesn’t try for both. Unfortunately, he has preferred to keep the meaning at the expense of the music, omitting the alternating rhymes:

Ah! How the snow did snow!
My window is a garden of frost.
Ah! How the snow did snow!
What a thing is the spasm of living
 With all the pain that I know, that I know!

(“Evening in Winter”)

So this is the difficulty of translating Nelligan. Of course, it would be unfair to say that music is all there is to him. If there were no substance to his melancholy, the stature of his life and art in Québec would be ridiculous. But there are some poems whose enormous grief is artfully enough wrought to be tragic, among them “Le vaisseau d’or”, which has been well-placed at the end of the collection. Allaby has selected a good mix of these, as well as some youthful bagatelles, and his selection successfully shows both artistic range and biographical development.

How have the translations turned out on the whole? Unfortunately, they are of mixed quality. Allaby almost always understands the meaning, but in his attempt to render it lyrically has often compromised too far. He corners himself into inversions like “Of the gruff merry mob I’ll be part,” which for a run-of-the-mill rhyme with “art” is hardly worthwhile. Elsewhere a rhyme is achieved by making the poet remark that he has not “pruned” his hair, having crows “chew” the carcass of a zebra, or turning an innocent bedroom turn into a “family lair”. He mixes registers to make ends meet, or even to no end: “The doggy frolics in the vale.”

But the most problematic aspect is the meter. Many lines are well-formed, as these alexandrines:

While naked Aphrodite, tresses wildly blown,
Reclined along the prow before the blazing sun.                  

(“The Ship of Gold”)

But others have miscounted syllables, as this tetrameter (where the rhyme is also rather forced):

I’ll put my feet up to the fire
… We’ll share a dream, safe from winter’s ire 

(“Rondel to My Pipe”)

Others stumble over the words’ stresses:

There was a mad lover, that’s where
The fool was drowned by some female.
In the dark pit that you see there
Lies the source of this sad tale.

(“The Haunted Pit”)

These metrical slips have two effects. One is unfortunately to undermine the poet’s credibility, as if a photographer’s shots were well-composed but always out of focus. The second is to have expressed the meaning awkwardly and yet not gotten in exchange the fluent lyricism that is needed to show Nelligan in a good light. Seek first the kingdom of music and some meaning will seem to be added as well; that’s how the bulk of these poems work in French.

It would be unkind not to cite some translations that successfully conjure up the mythical and Romantic images that are among Nelligan’s best, among them “A Poet”, “Placet”, “Castles in Spain”, and of course “The Ship of Gold”. But most of the English renderings in this collection fall short of showing how artfully Nelligan fit his meaning into form.

Allaby has provided a biographical introduction and copious notes and commentary. On “Castles in Spain”, he does a good job of explaining the interwoven classical allusions (e.g. the wax of Icarus’ wings melting as he approaches Troy). Remarks on Nelligan’s technique are often apt, as when he identifies the poet’s beloved rondel form as providing both propulsion and a “closed loop” of repetition in which to eddy out. Sometimes the explications are gratuitous, as on the “black nails of Calvary”: “Black, because they convey a cosmic intensity of pain.” A strength is that Allaby often identifies aspects lost in translation, noting the range of meaning of a French word or pointing out that “darker place” translates the more allusive “Érèbe”. The notes are not scholarly, but on the whole they give the impression of a guide competent to initiate the novice in an understanding of Nelligan’s life and artistic project.

At the end of the book a few pages of illustrative photos complement the biography aptly. A bilingual reader might regret the relegation of the French originals to an appendix rather than facing pages; I had to read holding my page near the end with a thumb.

Despite its shortcomings, the project is not without merit. To my knowledge Nelligan has not yet been translated well into English. Fred Cogswell’s collection Complete Poems, the most readily found, uses the same approach and yields somewhat better meter but not a less forced expression or a more compelling result. Anne Carson published two translations in 2006 in The London Review of Books, mostly shrugging off meter and rhyme in her renderings and leaving a rather uninspiring reproduction of the meaning. Translations of other individual poems exist on amateurs’ blogs online. Thus the case might be made that many here are among the best so far available of their originals.

As I’ve written, this is due to the great difficulty of the task, which follows from the close marriage of form and meaning in the French. Nelligan’s ship of solid gold is so “diaphanous”, as he puts it himself, that it turns out to be rather fragile and risks coming to pieces when handled.

Luke Sawczak is a teacher and poet living in Toronto.

***