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- Title
Prosody as Field of Play: A Neglected Issue in the Translation of Nonsense Verse.
- Authors
Tigges, Wim
- Abstract
This essay investigates the prosodic aspects of Henri Parisot's French translations of nonsense verse by Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Nonsense verse generally demonstrates a rigid balance between sense and its absence, but also between form and content. If words are the playthings of nonsense, and wordplay, lexical incongruity and ambiguities some of its favourite tactics, the arbitrary encounter of rhyme and rhythm within a rigid metrical format constitutes its poetic field of play. Mainly due to the unresolved difference between English accentual and French syllabic verse, Parisot largely fails to retain this prosodic ‘rigidity'. Working very consciously on his translations of the wordplay in Carroll's Alice books, he has overlooked the importance of rhythmic regularity in their most characteristic verses, as well as in Lear's limericks. This, and the resulting addition of extra ‘meaningful' verbiage to fill his lines of syllabic verse, in particular the favourite French alexandrine or dodecasyllable, has led to a deterioration of the semantic balance between meaning and non-meaning, making the result less ‘nonsensical'. Especially in the case of the limericks it is argued that it would not have been impossible for a French translator to correlate the anapaestic or amphibrachic rhythm of the originals with the requirements of syllabic verse, and thus to create a more level ‘playing field'.
- Subjects
FRENCH versification; FRENCH nonsense verses; PARISOT, Henri
- Publication
Faux Titre, 2018, Vol 418, p220
- ISSN
0167-9392
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1163/9789004355453_017