Project MUSE - Niveurmôrre: Versions françaises du "Corbeau" au XIXe siècle</i (original) (raw)

The intriguing title of the book under review represents Stéphane Mallarmé's personally phoneticized transcription into French of the iconic refrain of Poe's raven, "Nevermore." Julian Zanetta's subtitle then reveals the subject terrain of his illuminating study: Nineteenth-Century French Translations of "The Raven" (all translated material from the study will be my own)—though the temporal framework for the sixteen translations and a similar number of contemporaneous illustrations featured is actually restricted to the forty-four years between 1853 and 1897. Zanetta, originally from the francophone Swiss area of Geneva, though with English as a second maternal language, teaches the history of French literature at the Université Saint-Louis in Brussels, having earlier held teaching and visiting-scholar positions at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Michigan, and New York University. Though Niveurmôrre is written in French, Zanetta's underlying mastery of English shores up confidence in the validity of his comparative project, unlike the suspicions sometimes raised in the case of the two most famous of the fourteen French translators of "The Raven" presented in the study, Charles Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Mallarmé is the sole translator in the analysis with multiple versions included. He attempted two versified translations in 1860, trying to mimic Poe's stanzaic sestet pattern—though without a fixed metrical scheme and with rhyme depending on repetitions of the final syllables of lines 4 and 5—only to shift definitively, in 1875, to Baudelaire's earlier preference for a prose-poem format. Baudelaire, who in a preface to his 1859 translation of Poe's "Philosophy of Composition" (appended to the end of Niveurmôrre), praised "Poe's talents as a craftsman of verse" and went on to admit, apropos of translating "The Raven," that "in the molding of poetry into prose, a frightful imperfection can come into play, but the imperfection would be all the greater by adhering to rhymed tomfoolery." In addition to Baudelaire's attempt and Mallarmé's third version in 1875, there were two anonymous prose translations—the first appearing during the same year as Baudelaire's initial "Corbeau" of 1853, the second in 1888, toward the end of the period examined in Zanetta's book—as well as Léo Quesnel's contribution of 1879, and two other hybrid attempts, somewhere between prose and poetry. The remaining nine translations seem to qualify more readily as versified attempts, even if an increasing manifestation of free-verse elements reflects the nineteenth-century French gravitational pull toward la prose poétique of modernism. [End Page 404]

Zanetta gives voice to poet and critic Jean Rousselot, who earlier hazarded his top translators of "The Raven" among those of the same general time-frame being considered: "Baudelaire and Mallarmé are unsurpassable, the first however being a little less precise than the second, Maurice Rollinat [1884] has talent, and Gabriel Mourey [1889] can be classed among the more successful precisely because of his general lack of genius." But the translational solutions among the above four and the other ten of Zanetta's survey run the gamut: "Baudelaire or Mallarmé abandon verse but keep the stanza, others discard verse and stanza in privileging the narration, still others adopt a versified format but refuse to be limited by poetic syllabic constraints." Then too, the iconic refrain mentioned earlier—the cornerstone of the very construction of "The Raven," says Poe in his sometimes puzzling "Philosophy of Composition"—is handled differently from one translator to the next. From Poe's eighth stanza until his final eighteenth, the echoing "Nevermore" returns, though ingeniously punctuating different contextual situations each time. Much has indeed been made of the haunting sonority of the refrain, as well as of its semantic elasticity— and, inarguably, of its lexical centrality to the poem. As Zanetta points out, his fourteen translators had four choices before them: to translate "Nevermore" as "jamais plus" or "plus jamais," as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and four others chose to do; to...