Translated from the French with commentary by Jennifer Carr

Carr, Jennifer

English

ScholarWorks at WMU

Transference Volume 1 Issue 1 | Summer 2013 Article 17 2013 Bzzz..., Banned, and Indecent Sonnet by Boris Vian Jennifer Carr jennifer.alice.carr@gmail.com Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/transference  Part of the French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons, and the Poetry Commons Recommended Citation Carr, Jennifer (2013) "Bzzz..., Banned, and Indecent Sonnet by Boris Vian," Transference: Vol. 1: Iss. 1, Article 17. Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/transference/vol1/iss1/17  34     TRANSFERENCE Jennifer Carr             Boris Vian BZZZ…                   BZZZ...   God knew enough of hate to create flies, Hideous, velvety, their frightening bodies Swollen with yellow pus, and in their roving flight Trailing who knows what of foulness and blight   Spoonerizing Satan who rots all he touches You, flies, you touch what is rotten, tasting, Crowded together, the pinkish, seeping eyes Of beasts that your avid mouths have left blind  And your strident wing with its veins of metal  Conjures in my nightmare a nebulous hell Of hairy bodies come from the shade where they pound   The nails of the long casket where I will lie down  And which they will burn in the immortal fire To save me from you, when I expire…    SUMMER 2013     35 Jennifer Carr            Boris Vian Banned                   Au ban   A runt, scrawny and deformed  Had stolen some veal without a scruple To eat, at the butcher’s, and then a barrel Of wine, to drink, from the grocer at his store.   The prosecutor, what a pathetic struggle, Seeing in his person the latest Lucifer, Was after the hide of this unequaled monster. — He was starved! said the pragmatic counsel.   — It was Ahriman’s spirit that pushed him, gentlemen! — No! From his stomach, those imperious strains! For three days they kept up the discussion.  And I left, repeating this refrain: Evil, did you cause the deed? Cause of evil, were you need?   And, uh, I still don’t know.  36     TRANSFERENCE Jennifer Carr            Boris Vian Indecent1 Sonnet             Indécent sonnet   Dreamer, she muses Through the blinds The rising sun  Near her reclines  As in a vision  I often see her Unnerving mirage Chimera, fiction   The wholesome clarity Of rose-hued tea Colors her cheek  On her uncovered Body the sun’s cheek Plays an unknown lover.     1 Hardly…   SUMMER 2013     37 Commentary   Cent sonnets—which is actually a collection of one hundred and  six sonnets and six ballads—features some of the author’s earliest work. Vian wrote several of these poems while he was still a lycéen, and although an  inescapable buoyancy pervades, they avoid juvenility and posturing, demon-strating instead a precocious dexterity and a talent for wordplay, coy allusions, and subtle (or not so subtle) changes in register.  As Noël Arnaud states in his introduction to the work: “on a le sentiment que Boris Vian était bien conscient de mettre à mal la poésie” (“you get the feeling that Boris Vian was well aware of putting poetry to the test”; my translation).  Not only that, but he chose the son-net as the primary form in and through which to do so.  This would have been a distinctly anachronistic gesture in the 1930s and ’40s, when Vian was writing Cent sonnets.  After the sea changes of Dada and Surrealism, rhymed, metered verse could have easily become yet another ossified strata of literary tradition. Yet Vian’s poetry was to be both contrary and prescient.  To turn once more to Arnaud’s introduction: “Il s’en faudra de quelques années pour que l’Oulipo  réussisse à réhabiliter la poétique ancienne … et parvienne à convaincre de l’intérêt, sinon de la nécessité, des structures et des contraintes dans la produc-tion littéraire” (“It would be several years before the Oulipo succeeded in reha-bilitating traditional poetics … and managed to convince people of the rele-vance, if not the necessity, of structures and constraints in literary production”; my  translation).  (Cent Sonnets, Livre de poche, 2009: 8–9).  The translator of Vian’s poems is certainly constrained, or at the very least conflicted.  Respecting, as far as possible, the dictates of the sonnet and ballad forms would appear necessary, yet adherence to form inevitably entails sacrifices elsewhere.  There are no empirical measures available to the transla-tor; nothing to indicate how much of a divergence is too much.  In a sense, translation is nothing more—and nothing less—than an exercise in individual taste.  However, if, for the sake of establishing some parameters, we were to  define the two poles of poetry translation as, say, Robert Lowell’s Imitations and Vladimir Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin, then I have done a somewhat messy job of furrowing out the middle ground.  As a general rule, though, I did try to preserve some semblance of a rhyme scheme, even when this meant tweaking the meter and syntax.  Vian is also adept at various kinds of wordplay.  Consider for instance   38     TRANSFERENCE the neologism contrepettant in “Bzz…,” which takes the French word for “spoonerism,” contrepet, and turns it into a present participle by affixing a final –ant.  I translated this term—which anticipates the deft inversion of the phrases pourrit ce qu’il touche … touchez ce qui pourrit (“rots all he touches ... touch what is rotten”; my translation)—using the equivalent English suffix, “–ing.”  Both contrepettant and “spoonerizing” have four syllables, which works nicely for the meter, but the internal “an” rhyme of contrepettant Satan is lost.  One final consideration worth mentioning stems from Vian’s penchant for footnoting or otherwise attaching “addenda” to his poems.  These present a singular challenge: how would the translator distinguish her own (should she feel the need to include any) from those integral to the original?  I could easily picture the nightmarish succession of footnotes and footnotes to footnotes that would result, and so decided to avoid adding any of my own, even when I sus-pected that something wanted elucidating.  Yet Cent sonnets’s footnotes and addenda can also be understood as subversions of French poetic tradition and its centuries of baggage.  So I chose to reason—however self-servingly—that this irreverence, typical of Vian, allows the translator that much more creative lee-way. 

\u3cem\u3eBzzz...\u3c/em\u3e, \u3cem\u3eBanned\u3c/em\u3e, and \u3cem\u3eIndecent Sonnet\u3c/em\u3e by Boris Vian

https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1021&amp;context=transference

\u3cem\u3eBzzz...\u3c/em\u3e, \u3cem\u3eBanned\u3c/em\u3e, and \u3cem\u3eIndecent Sonnet\u3c/em\u3e by Boris Vian

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

ScholarWorks at WMU