The Drowned Man Translation of Etiemble S Poem Noye By T Wignesan

The drowned (man), Translation of Etiemble’s poem: Noyé by T Wignesan ( Etiemble who devotes some pages in this only verse volume to translations was a stickler to the practice of reproducing the original in its form, metre and prosodical structure, a methodology I find quite useful, on the one hand, and pedantically futile, on the other. “No man is perfect”, an axiom which could easily apply to both poems and their translations. In my view, it is not the translator’s duty to improve on the original creation nor is it to re-create another poem based on the original. Where the ambiguity of sense arises in vocabulary and syntagms, the translator has to make a choice, albeit even a personal one. End rhyme scheme of the original: aaaa, bbcc, dede, fgfg. Syllabic count irregular, roughly around eight, give or take one or two. ) The sea, its games, its lights of jade, its crazy sheep, cheerless foam obsolete languages, their countless watering places standing open-mouthed, all their harbours nets of steel where sometimes an insignificant strip of my fingers signed my passage through these harbours underwater strewn with cadavers, all these actions in which I lose myself and find myself always strong(er) all these abysses where you hope to find in vain the last port and which vomit you via an hiccough towards shoals and their setbacks, towards their beaches, their precipices: non! it’s not for the sea to imbibe. © T. Wignesan – Paris, 2014