A setting of this poem by
Jacques Leguerney is being done at the
Grandin Festival next Summer and Mary Dibbern asked me for my imput in translating this in English.
Aloysius Bertrand (1807-1841) was very much of an inspiration for the Symbolist movement which lead the way to Mallarmé and Baudelaire. This poem is from the last section of
"Gaspard de la Nuit", and although it seems like a drug-induced hallucination, Bertrand had tuberculosis, the disease which later killed him, and the text may be partially inspired by some sort of fever condition.
Of course, translations of this already exist, but the whole problem in translating something is that you have to choose one word (of course you can give alternative meanings in the footnotes, but that's not the same). Here, in a performance setting, the medium requires much more nuance especially given Leguerney's ambivalent music which does not settle into any one tonality or any one meter (the justaposition between groups of five and groups of four being the central rhythmic conflict in the work). The text is as follows :
Oh ! qu'il est doux, quand l'heure tremble au clocher,
la nuit, de regarder la lune qui a le nez fait comme
un carolus d'or !
Oh, how sweet, when bells announce the hour, at night,
to look at the moon with its nose resembling a gold coin!Deux ladres se lamentaient sous ma fenêtre ,un chien
hurlait dans le carrefour, et le grillon de mon foyer
vaticinait* tout bas.
Two lepers wailed beneath my window, a dog howled in the crossroads,
and my wife quietly muttered. (vaticinait : making crazy statements out loud , the phrase has a double meaning, as "grillon de foyer" also means "wife" or "spouse" but which may also mean "cricket in the fireplace", which would seem to illustrated by the cello harmonics, the "vaticinait tout bas" is an oxymoron...generally "vaticinait" would generally mean "to speak loudly")
Mais bientôt mon oreille n'interrogea plus qu'un silence
profond. Les lépreux étaient rentrés dans leurs chenils,
aux coups de Jacquemart qui battait sa femme.
But soon my ear only questioned the deep silence. The lepers had gone
back to their hovels, along with the blows of Jacquemart* beating his wife. (Jacquemart being an automated figure on astronomical clocks who strikes the hours with a hammer")
Le chien avait enfilé une venelle, devant les pertuisanes*
du guet enrouillé par la pluie et morfondu par la bise.
The dog went off on a small alley, before the weapons of the watchmen rusted by the rain,
and chilled by the north wind. (pertuisanes = a soldier armed with a halberd)
Et le grillon s'était endormi, dès que la dernière bluette
avait éteint sa dernière lueur dans la cendre de la cheminée.
And the cricket (or the wife?) had fallen asleep, as soon as the last spark
had put out its last glow in the cinders of the fireplace.Et moi, il me semblait, - tant la fièvre est incohérente ! -
que la lune, grimant sa face, me tirait la langue comme
un pendu !
And to me, or so it seemed, - since my fever is so incoherent! -
that the moon, heavily making up its face, stuck out its tongue like a hanged man!The nice thing about a sung performance is that one can suggest the many facets of the poem's meaning through nuance, and various vocal colors. This will not be an easy work to perform and I wish the performers at Grandin good luck in this, the work's American première.
Libellés : Aloysius Bertrand, Jacques Leguerney, Vocal Music
