For my part, I can remember the moment not when I started doing literary translation (f you study languages at school and university, you’re having to do it all the time) but when I found the translation that set me – I was about to write “going” but really I mean “set me free’”as a literary translator (three decades of it now, principally of French, poetry and drama in the main, and this has to be the perspective – limited – of these thoughts ). The translation was Samuel Beckett’s of Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre”. To be precise, it was just two words in one line of the fourth stanza. There, Beckett showed that the translator must be alive to what is going on behind the words the poet has chosen. Here’s the whole stanza:
La tempête a béni mes éveils maritimes.
Plus léger qu’un bouchon j’ai dansé sur les flots
Qu’on appell e rouleurs éternels de victimes,
Dix nuits, sans regretter l’oeil niais des falots!
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