In the gangster drama The Outfit (2022), the sublime Mark Rylance plays Leonard Burling, an English cutter (not tailor, please, “Anyone with a needle and thread and fifteen minutes can be a tailor”) who practices his craft in Chicago in the 1950s. To the local Irish mobsters, who use his shop as a stash house for the illegal returns on their “investments,” the unshakably polite craftsman and tradesman Burling is known as English, a nickname that is belittling or gruffly affectionate depending on the crook addressing him. Throughout the picture, we hear Burling, who trained on the Row, explain his craft in voice-over, from start to what he calls finishings. This narration, by the way, like Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff and his confession in Double Indemnity, is diegetically worked into the storyline, but on several levels by comparison with Neff’s straightforward telling of his femme-fatalled crime. For Burling’s voice-over, like the jacket we see him working on over the course of the film, is both an account of how a bespoke suit gets made and commentary on and explanation of the events we see playing out on screen.

At one critical point we hear English tell an amusing story about his past: “Some years ago a customer comes into my shop, with a suit, not mine. The customer says, ‘The jacket, it’s too big…’ ‘The problem,’ I say, ‘is the shoulders.’ But the customer says, no, he likes the shoulders. The problem is the sleeves. We go back and forth. Finally, the customer says, ‘It’s my money, and I’m telling you, cut the sleeves.’ So what do I do? I say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and then I cut the shoulders. The customer, he comes back, tries on the suit. ‘It’s perfect,’ he says. ‘That’s exactly what I asked for.’”

Translation is an art, a craft, and in many cases a business as well. In that business, the translator does indeed have to cut the shoulders at times and let the customer conclude that the sleeves have been rightly shortened. Things are certainly complicated – and tact is required – when translator and customer share the same tongue. Thus, a French-speaking friend and colleague has to deal with French-speaking clients who are convinced that they, too, handle written French with as much, if not more, mastery as my friend, who has been working in the language for years. Once, he told me, he had a client suggest all sorts of changes. He was flabbergasted, floored, and not a little blue at all the red. He got over the blue part and, as he explained to me with a wink in an email, commiserated with the client, i.e., so many good suggestions but the deadline, alas, that pitiless taskmaster, did not leave him the time to incorporate the many fine emendations.

For the English-language translator, things are decidedly worse. Because English is the de facto lingua franca (gotta love that, Italian to explain the hegemony – Greek! – of English today), and given our human gift of deluding ourselves as to the true level of our abilities, English translators have to face many a mediocrity who knows better while knowing a lot less of the target language than they do. This is especially prevalent in the field in which I have done the bulk of my business, in art history and art criticism, particularly contemporary art criticism. Long ago, when I was new to New York City and the fax and the phone were the only game in town – the ease of internet communications and research was still a few years in the future – I translated an essay of around ten pages and found myself going over my English version on the phone with the French-speaking author, our conversation conducted in French. I remember having used in the text, and mentioned in our conversation, that go-to verb in art history, “boast,” as in “the museum boasts three Picassos and a half-dozen first-rate paintings by Cézanne.” What is that, that “boast” (qu’est-ce que c’est ça ?), my client asked with the tone of doubt and annoyance tinged with disgust used after your dress shoe has hit something squishy and malodorous on the sidewalk. I patiently explained the verb’s use and how it is a synonym for “have” or “possess,” a standard way of avoiding repetition. “No, I don’t want that” (non, je ne veux pas ça) came his informed judgment.

As for Picassos with an ess at the end, I had a French-speaking colleague in Paris, three years before the above, ask me if I wasn’t mistaken writing about several Picassos (in French, plurals of proper names are invariable and do not take the ess that marks the plural normally, so referring to works of art by the maker’s name would be invariable, no ess; le musée possède trois Picasso would be the correct form). She was not the first person, and certainly not the last, to whom I had to reveal patiently a startling truth, that French is one language and English another, indeed a whole nother ballgame. The same woman around this time was also a bit shocked that I would use contractions (“I don’t know,” “I’d have written”) in my translation of an interview with the Nobel Prize-winning writer Claude Simon. It would seem that Nobel-Prize winning authors in conversation never speak like the rest of us. Again, patiently, I assured her that an English-speaking Nobel-Prize winning author would probably say “I don’t know” in an interview, never “I do not know.” Finally, one of my favorite bits of Gallic overreach occurred around this time and when I was working for the same magazine. The French sculptor César (born César Baldaccini) was known for his compressions (compacted metal, often automobiles), expansions (polyurethane foam pieces), and so on, pieces that, to a skeptical eye, seem pretty much facile variations on a fairly straightforward formula. I was informed by César’s studio that his pieces are all unique and hence there cannot be several Césars, as I had mistakenly translated at a number of points in the article-interview. Patiently I protested. Cheerily I explained that English doesn’t work like that; “several César” sounds, to the native ear, like a mistake… No, each piece is unique; “César” cannot take an ess. César could take a fecking hike, as far as the English tongue cared, but I quickly devised a workaround and emended the text. Five pieces or works by César, the uniquest French artist of them all! That was easy. Caesar non supra grammaticos, or Caesar is not above grammarians… That is, even the highest authority, the most powerful individual, has no power over how language works in the end. How I would have liked to have used that at the time, but sleeves had to be shortened, shoulders cut. Now I get to bring it out more than thirty years after the events.

The most egregious example of being out of one’s depth in my experience involved one half of a very wealthy Swiss couple that collected art, especially non-Western works from around the world, pre-Columbian, African, Southeast Asia, Oceania. They were very discerning collectors – but absolutely not gifted linguists. A native speaker of French, Monique Barbier-Mueller decided that she could translate into English a chapter in a book written by her husband, if memory serves. I was called in at the very last minute, when the English version was laid out and about to go to the printer’s, to sauver les meubles (literally “save the furniture”) and salvage the project before it saw print and the disastrous chapter joined Pedro Carolino’s English As She Is Spoke on the humor shelf. I deeply regret not keeping a copy of the priceless thing, before and after my rewrite. And this was before Google translate; Mme Barbier-Mueller had come up with her truly unique idiom entirely on her own, it would appear. The book was on pre-Columbian art and I was genuinely glad to learn, for instance, that lamas (sic) were pack animals as well as a source of meat for the Inca. As Mrs. Lovett might have sung, “If you’ve eighty-sixed priest,/What’s the harm of tossing in lama?/Go on and splurgee, they’re clergy at least.” New Yorkers, by the way, are rightly proud of their deli lama meats. The entire translation was one long howler glittering with an inexhaustible series of particular blunders. As I recall, one statue was described as “blandishing a sceptre,” while elsewhere the “primordial couple arouse from Lake Titicaca.”

Usually, when a client questioned a particular word choice or turn of phrase from the margins of the English version, or, horribile lectu, suggested improvements, unable not to delve into the matter I would return polite, even enthusiastic, and somewhat detailed explanations of my original translation or why the question was interesting or the proposed change unnecessary, awkward, and incorrect often enough. This was poor but ever-hopeful pedagogy (I am doubtful any client ever retained much, if anything, from my attempted instruction) and bad business (marginalia eat away at “margins” in a different shrinking sense). As I neared the age of sixty, I began to have an inkling that casting my bread upon the waters was maybe not a wise commercial strategy, no pain for my pains, no additional bread for my labor.

A ditty, I thought. Head them off at the impasse. Intimate to the French author through English style that only one of us in this temporary relationship really knows l’anglais:

In toil and tomes alone grown rich,
I sort of know what I’m doing,
And up and/or around with which,
I’d prefer you were not screwing.

To be entirely clear (and to use preemptive silverback chest-thumping), I also wrote the following to preface the poemetto:

“Our English translator is a professional with many years of experience behind him. He is quite happy, even eager, to correct a real error when it is pointed out to him. However, if you wish to question his formulations, his turns of phrase; if you want to suggest alternative translations; if you are concerned by a stylistic matter or a choice of words; in short, if any damn thing crosses your mind (almost certainly in French by the way; please be aware of that irony) having to do with his translation and you want to bring it up with him, be advised that he will only consider remarks couched in correct English and formulated in complete sentences. No ‘Stronger word?’ No ‘Correct?’ Niente ‘Why this word?’ Nada ‘In French ceci veut dire…’ He will only entertain (that means ‘consider’ here, by the way – the translator, for one, is certainly not amused) complete sentences in correct English. If you can’t read this paragraph without the help of a bilingual dictionary, you shouldn’t be making comments or suggestions about an English translation. If you can’t be bothered to read until this point, you aren’t a serious writer or scholar and shouldn’t be making comments or suggestions about an English translation. If you think you know English and you only half-understand the above, admit to yourself (it’s not shameful: understanding and writing in any language, especially one you weren’t born into, is hard work!) that you shouldn’t be making comments or suggests. You would only be wasting your time, his time, and any intermediary’s time. All the best!”

I can say that I never heard back from any of the three or four authors I tried my wordploy on, but I doubt it was because any of them was convinced by the text. Indeed, I’m confident nobody bothered to read beyond the first three lines, if that. Maybe the ditty in ital caught their eye and gave them a laugh – provided they had a good enough grasp of English, which in all probability they did not. And twice, I think, I even included a challenge, namely, if the author could point out to me the apocryphal quotation lurking behind the poem, I would be overjoyed and gladly welcome them to our ranks (and take seriously their suggestions). It is of course the remark attributed to Churchill on the supposed rule of not ending a sentence with a preposition (“Nonsense up with which I shall not put.”)

Also around my sixty-year-old milestone, a high point of amusing annoyance was reached by a hapless French artist mining the gender vein. For the translation of a one-page text, I recall, he posed all sorts of questions and pushed lots of stylistic refinements as he saw it. A text one page long. I am proud of having considered every text, no matter the length, to deserve equal professional care but… one page simply summarizing what the artist had done for the show, which was to be expounded on a few weeks later in a proper introduction to the exhibition? I lost my reserve and dipped into my store of saeva indignatio, my savage indignation, when the feckless dauber asked in the marginalia and in French about the difference between “show” and “exhibition,” because “show” is applied to things on television, for example, whereas “exhibition”… I pointed out to him that when you encounter an unfamiliar word or wonder about the precise meaning of a term (perhaps chosen for a very good reason) “you look it the fuck up.” I went on to explain, for the enth time in my career by the way, that the sentence in which “art show” appears contains a number of polysyllabic words; it’s one of the stylistic details a translator must attend to when turning French into English, balancing the weighty Latinate or learned vocabulary a sentence can bear. “Art show” is lighter, as it were, than “art exhibition,” although it is no less serious in its meaning. Works by Old Masters are no less interesting if they are hanging in an art show rather than an art exhibition. By the same token, I thought but did not write, the third rate is not imbued with any of the imagination or interest it lacks merely by being shown in an art exhibition.

The summit of laughable advice on style in a language the advice giver does not possess but confidently knows better than the English translator was achieved for me by the Swiss-German artist Michael Günzburger in a two-page text for his show (or exhibition, I don’t remember which it was in this case) at the Galerie Haas Zürich. Here is a selection of his choicest marginal remarks verbatim; his very first observation concerns the second sentence of the piece (“In Günzburger, the production of form springs from an interest in visualizing the material world through matter itself” – Ms. Laurence Schmidlin wrote it in French, I just translated it; I wouldn’t want to justify it though… I mean, is there any other way for an artist, the producer of form, to visualize the material world than through matter, the stuff of the material world? Alright… Art & Language, yes, but ideas aside, Mr. Kosuth and co.’s output isn’t terribly interesting to look at; it’s a long and tiresome question, settled once and for all repeatedly: the eyes have it):

That sentence does not feel right. [No, that sentence doesn’t think straight; its feel is not its chief problem.]
In german it says. He started to be interested in interested in eggs, not “found a new passion.” Interested is better. [I was translating from the French original, where “passion” figures in the damn text, “…Michael Günzburger s’est récemment passionné pour l’œuf qui symbolise un potentiel…”]
drawn with Indian Ink
also:
just Ink ? [I had correctly translated into American English, “They depict eggs that are delicately drawn in India ink…” The author, not I, used encre de chine; that’s “India ink” in the US and often “Indian ink” in the UK, as well as “India ink” and “China ink.”]
in german I would add a “-” instead of a comma-.
is that sentence grmmatically correct ? [That sentence was indeed grmmatically correct.]

It was enough to make a cat laugh, as they used to say in Great Britain. By the way, une manche, feminine noun, means “a sleeve” in English, while un manche, masculine noun and homonym, is “a handle,” and curiously enough familiar French for someone who is thick, dumb, a moron. Con comme un manche would be “dumb as shit, dumb as a rock, thick as two short planks.” Spoken off the cuff merely, not off the record.

English the craftsman cutter would have been laughing up his sleeve (and all the way to the shoulder, if not the bank). English knows better, this translator is sure of that.

******

By way of a title for the present I was toying with “Alterations Done on the Premises” and “Seamlessly Taken In” with their classic wordplay on “premises” and “taken in,” but then I came across Seamus Heaney’s “Clearances,” specifically the three introductory tercets to the sonnet cycle he dedicated to his late mother:

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984

She taught me what her uncle once taught her:
How easily the biggest coal block split
If you got the grain and hammer angled right.

The sound of that relaxed alluring blow,
Its co-opted and obliterated echo,
Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen,

Taught me between the hammer and the block
To face the music. Teach me now to listen,
To strike it rich behind the linear black.

Heaney surely has another meaning in mind, a different wealth altogether, a purely aesthetic pay dirt, in his striking it rich “behind the linear black,” the lines of black print or pixel on the page. Coming after “to face the music,” it is the unavoidable sense. As a rule, when a poet uses the word “music,” especially in an idiom that is the very opposite of the charged poetic line, readers should assume something else, some connotational add-on, is meant. (For me the greatest comic use along these lines is when Nabokov has Charles Kinbote mention the “very loud amusement park right in front of [his] present lodgings,” where he is preparing his “annotated” edition of John Shade’s poem in four cantos, “Pale Fire.” This sets up his exacerbated cry and aside further on in his introduction, just as he explains that the supposedly missing final line of the poem, verse 1000, should be the very first line: “…and damn that music.” Indeed! Kinbote unwittingly, even madly damns the music in the poem, and throws shade at “his poet,” while transforming “Pale Fire” into an amusement park house of mirrors.)

In my experience, only a few translators ever grow rich financially from whatever lode they can work, especially a literary one and above all poetry. Robert Fagles’ English versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey (Viking Press) “have sold an estimated 1.5 million copies combined” (ait A.I.). That’s pretty darn good – the exception that proves the French expression poetry ne nourrit pas son homme, literally doesn’t feed its man, can’t put enough food on the translator’s table.

Writing in the New York Times (“Making Books: Why the Classics Are Retranslated,” NYT, Feb. 01, 2001), Martin Arnold points out some of the winners in the epic-translation dodge, who include Heaney himself and his stunning Modern English translation of Beowulf (“The Irish Nobel laureate’s verse translation…was on the New York Times fiction best-seller list for 10 weeks last year and has sold more than 200,000 copies in hardback. These sales seem truly aberrational. Classics generally sell in the small thousands.”) Arnold also mentions the then recently published translation and scholarly bilingual edition of The Inferno by the American couple Robert and Jean Hollander, the former a renowned Dante scholar who taught at Princeton and the latter a poet and translator. The couple eventually published a three-volume sumptuously annotated bilingual edition of the Commedia. Jean Hollander’s nonrhyming English version is very good.

Literary translation, especially poetry, is indeed for the love of the craft, one’s mother tongue, and the language of the original author. Like its beloved source, such translation makes one per molti anni macro, literally “over the many years lean,” as Dante writes in a well-known verse about his own experience composing the Commedia in exile (Paradiso XXV, 3).

In late November of the Year of Our Lord 1462 the thirty-one-year-old François Villon, France’s original poète maudit, or accursed poet, is arrested and locked up in Paris’s Grand Châtelet. He has already tasted the dures crostes (hard crusts) and other far darker realities of prison life in the summer of 1461 in the Loire, and is coming off a second briefer stint for larceny at the start of the same month of November. Soon after his final arrest he is subjected to the question de l’eau (a medieval form of water torture). The Provost of Paris has doubtless grown tired of Villon; in his dry eyes Villon is not so much an accomplished versemonger as a recidivist pot poet and swan of the swill, past master in piss-artistry, roisterer, murderer (at age twenty-four in a tavern brawl, though he is found to have acted in self-defense) and repeat thief. He is condemned to be “hanged and strangled from the Paris gibbet.” Cold comfort for a poet, the sentence, “étrangler et pendu au gibet de Paris,” forms a perfect alexandrine, the leading twelve-syllable line of verse in French and equivalent to the English iambic pentameter.

Villon appeals his condemnation before the Parlement of Paris. Not surprisingly for a repeat offender, he considers himself to have been judged by “tricherie” (cozenage, deceit) in what most editions print as his last poem, “The Ballad of the Appeal,” with its eloquent refrain “Was it then time to hold my tongue?” (Étoit-il lors temps de moi taire?) The Parlement generally confirmed the sentences handed down by the Provosty.

Villon apparently composed three poems during this time, one of which is a simple quatrain, a bit of very real gallows humor – although it conceals something more than a mere joke – that has since become famous in French literature. In the first edition of the poems (Levet, 1489), the quatrain looks like this:

Je suis francois, dont ce me poise
Ne de paris empres pontoise
Qui dune corde dune toise
Saura mon col que mon cul poise

while modern editions, updating the punctuation and spelling, print it thus:

Je suis François, dont il me poise,
Né de Paris emprès Pontoise,
Et de la corde d'une toise
Saura mon col que mon cul poise.

Notice that the original edition, apart from the start of each verse, does not capitalize. It is a detail that allows for, and makes clear, an ambiguous reading of the poet’s name, generating one of the additional meanings and charms of the quatrain (also called a “rondeau” in that original edition, although formally it is not).

A straightforward prose translation in English today would read like this, “I am François, on me that burden weighs, born in Paris near Pontoise, and thanks to a six-foot length of rope, my neck will know what my arse weighs.”

Peter Dale devised two verse translations of these four lines; this is the better of the two:

Francis I am, which weighs me down,
Born in Paris near Pontoise town,
And with a stretch of rope my pate
Will learn for once my arse's weight.

This version is very good indeed. While in place of the original French monorhyme, that is, verse that has but one terminal rhyme (an aaaa rhyme pattern), Dale offers two rhyming couplets (aabb), it is understandable since English is a rhyme-poor language and the single rhyme is hard to bring off (it’s also hard to bring off in French). More perplexing is Dale’s decision to overlook the length of rope indicated in the poem (and at the rhyme no less – a toise was an old French measure of six French feet, just over six English feet, that is not entirely foreign to English: Byron rhymes “toises” with “noises” in Don Juan, for example, and there are several other rare quotations in the Oxford English Dictionary). All the more perplexing in that there is a solution that would work metrically and lexically, either “And with six feet of rope my pate” or, for a more informal, man-of-the-street echo, “And with six foot o’ rope my pate.” Given the context of Villon’s poetry, which has one poulained foot in popular verse and song, the latter is the better translation – but either would do, especially since “stretch” doesn’t resonate with any other words in the verse. (You can hear “wretch” in there but you have to cock an ear to catch it.) On the other hand, Dale is right: “stretch” is more menacing than, say, “length of rope” (“to stretch” has long been slang for “to kill” while “to stretch a person” means to hang him, also in slang).

It is a remarkable feat that Villon’s dark joke has survived nearly 560 years and shines through, as fresh as the day it was made, even in my plodding prose translation above and a range of verse ones. The punchline is that good. (By the way, punchline in French is chute, literally fall or drop, which is quite grimly appropriate for the last verse here.)

Villon’s original French actually holds several jokes and an eloquent ambiguity or two, which even modern French readers might miss, along with English translators, and if the latter do catch them, the clever play is very difficult to bring over into English. The French Wikipage devoted to Villon draws on several reliable sources, including the excellent commentary that Claude Thiry provided in his edition of Villon’s complete poems (Poésies complètes, ed. Claude Thiry, Le Livre de poche, 1991).

In the first verse, for example, we have the poet introducing himself, but, as the very first edition points up with its absence of initial capitals, Villon could be saying both “I am François” and “I am françois,” which was the current spelling of modern French “français,” i.e., I am French. As the French Wikipage puts it, drawing on commentary by Claude Thiry and Marcel Schwob, “This double meaning is presented by Villon as a double blow of fate.” What is weighing on him (“me poise”) is the fact that he is who he is, a down-and-out wretch who has led a life of petty and not-so-petty crime. But the other burden is his nationality. Villon’s comrade in harms Robin Daugis, though much more involved in the affaire Ferrebouc (another street brawl and the final criminal straw that led to their arrest), was Savoyard, not French; the wheels of Justice proved more deliberate and one of her scales weighted much more in his favor. Daugis was pardoned when the Duke of Savoy visited Paris.

The dual reading of “François” and “French” is possibly available to an educated and very careful French reader; it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to convey in an English translation. If English readers think of the ambiguity the name Frank would introduce here, echoing the adjective “frank” and suggesting both “straightforward” and “evident, obvious,” they will begin to have an idea of what is going on beneath the surface in French. Finally, in a ditty about being hanged, Villon prepares the punchline – and we wouldn’t know this in a first reading – by stressing weight and gravity with me poise, from the verb poiser, modern French peser, to weigh physically, emotionally, or both.

It is in his second verse that Villon couches his first joke, one that works, as in Shakespeare’s best puns, on an immediate level but also much deeper, even perhaps for the joker alone to savor. Here’s how the joke works. The poet mentions Paris, a place that presumably all his readers would know, but goes on to situate the city in relation to a much smaller out-of-the-way town, Pontoise. It’s a bit like being presented to the Queen and exclaiming, “Oh, I know you! Every time I post a letter, I see your head!”

However, if we are to believe Thiry and his research, as the Wikipage puts it, Pontoise “isn’t chosen at random or for the rhyme,” or for its alliteration with Paris and emprès (near). “The provost of Paris who condemned Villon was Jacques de Villiers, Lord of L’Isle-Adam, near Pontoise.” Villon might even have been ruefully joking to himself that Pontoise was a bit too near Paris for the comfort of his windpipe. “I’m not at the end of my rope yet but soon enough, lads…” There is a slight chance, too, that Pontoise offers a distant ironic echo with a present form (pantoise) of the Old French verb pantoisier, which Frédéric Godefroy defines in his specialized dictionary of Old French as “to pant, be short of breath, have a hard time breathing” (“…haleter, avoir l’haleine courte, respirer avec peine”); derived from the same verb, the French adjective pantois(e) enters the language after Villon’s day – the first occurrence in print is in 1546 thanks to Rabelais (“couillon pantois,” which, leaping o’er several centuries and one ocean, one might translate as “winded schmuck”). There is finally a historical irony here; one of the poets that Verlaine includes in his 1884 Accursed Poets is Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, of the same family that four centuries before produced the man who condemned the poète maudit to hang by the neck!

In the final two verses, a number of purely musical and visual effects are going on that add to the charm of the punchline. The initial consonant and vowel of corde in line three is echoed in line four with col (neck). I should also point out that col is an old spelling of modern French cou, which is preserved in a few specialized terms and as a conscious throwback today to ye olde times (as we do – very lamely – in English to suggest quaint and quiet venerability, e.g., Ye Olde Tech Shoppe; one of those pseudo-archaisms that ought to be dubbed sarchaisms for their sarcastic vein). There is the visual and auditory echo, too, of mon col que mon cul… which is nearly impossible to reproduce in English (neck and nates sounds good, but the latter word is too rare to work here). I should note that the final el of cul was and is not pronounced, while in Villon’s day col was already on its way to its modern pronunciation, going from “coa” to “coo.” When we add in que (in modern French ce que), we have a vowel sound shifting from back to front while the initial consonant remains the same. A clever reader might even hear in that thrice-repeated consonantal sound k… k… k…, a grim gasping for breath (in those days, there was no drop and instantaneous death when the neck was broken; the hanged indeed “danced” beneath the gibbet).

As I mentioned above, Villon’s “rondeau” is a monorhyme over four verses. This is fairly rare in English and modern French poetry, and tends to be perceived as boring and not terribly sophisticated in terms of technique, or as the 18^th-century Encyclopédie puts it, “…if one has a delicate ear, one wearies of this perpetual return of the same sounds” (some “serious” poetry in medieval Latin and Old French was written in monorimes or using recurring assonance (same or similar vowel sound) but it was never a dominant verse form, and by Villon’s time, this was already long-established). It continues to burst forth though, particularly in popular poetry (here in hip-hop):

Brain cells are lit, ideas start to hit,
Next the formation of words that fit,
At the table I sit, making it legit,
And when my pen hits the paper, ahh shit!
– Big Daddy Kane, "Ain't No Half-Steppin'"

Finally, the rhymes in the first and fourth lines are on the exact same word (the obsolete form of the verb peser in poiser), although the sense is slightly different, dont il me poise and [ce] que mon cul poise. This is normally very verboten in succeeding terminal rhymes in French and English prosody, although French does allow homophones (English poetry looks down – terminally – on rhyming, say, knight and night; or cope, the verb, and cope, the noun, which could cover the knight while darkly covering for the night). Benoît de Cornulier points out in his study of Villon’s “Quatrain”( “‘Je suis F/françois’ de Villon comme espèce de rondeau,” http://www.normalesup.org/~bdecornulier/QuatrainVillon) that this might be why the original Levet edition speaks of a “rondeau.” The fixed form that is the rondeau repeats all or the first part (hemistich) of the first verse at two or more verses later in the poem. More significantly, Cornulier draws a parallel between Villon’s “rondeau” here and children’s counting out rhymes, quoting this famous one in English:

Eeny meeny miney mo
Catch a tiger by the toe
If he hollers, let him go
Eeny meeny miney mo

“…the four ‘verses’ of which display the same aaaa rhyme sequence,” Cornulier stresses, providing an example from French as well. Villon is making a joke at his own expense and the form of his quatrain may well be consciously playing up the light-heartedness as a rather brave way of making even darker fun of his impending doom. As Cornulier reminds us, the rope, the “hemp,” brings to mind something else that is suspended, the scales of Divine Justice; Christendom uniformly and firmly believed that all souls were weighed after death (“…ordinarily the archangel Saint Michael… acted as the so-called ‘ponderator’”). Villon knew his soul would be weighed soon and knew all too well that it was especially heavy.

How do the translators who respect the monorhyme do? John Payne (1842-1916) respects the single rhyme, but his version leaves a lot to be desired:

I’m Francis, ill avails it me,
Born near Pontoise, in Paris see:
Whose neck, at the end of a rope of three,
Must feel how heavy my buttocks be.

He misses the allusion to weight in the first verse. He doesn’t catch the Paris-to-Pontoise joke and therefore flubs it in his translation. Our corde d’une toise (the toise was an old French measure of six French feet, just over six English feet) seems to be halved for the sake of the rhyme, although Payne may have been using a poetic shortcut to allude to a length of strong rope; I can find no instances of “rope of three” or “cord of three,” but Ecclesiastes 4:12 in the King James translation asserts that a “three-fold cord is not quickly broken.” It’s a stretch. (Oddly enough, Christians of a conservative stripe, it would seem, in the United States have taken this Bible verse, not as a divinely sanctioned invitation to threesomes, say, but as a divinely inspired symbol for a strong traditional marriage.) And why buttocks? Was our poet too prudish to consider arse/ass, which is what cul is lexically and in terms of appropriate register? Did he prefer the alliteration and rhythm of “my buttocks be,” which forces him to count “heavy” as a single syllable at the caesura? Whatever his reasons, he weakens Villon’s punchline by choosing a term from a higher register than arse/ass. That’s unforgivable.

Peter Dale’s other version of the quatrain reproduces the aaaa rhyme scheme and like his version above fundamentally gets Villon’s humor:

I’m Frank, which weighs me down of late,
Born in Paris – by Pontoise situate.
And from a rope, six foot to eight,
My neck will know my arse's weight. 

Dale properly sets up the punchline in the first verse and suggests a deeper reading of the poet’s name with “Frank.” He could arguably justify “by Pontoise situate” with the inversion and rare adjective “situate” as reproducing the effect on a French reader today of the now obsolete term emprès (it would be just près de in modern French). But what about drawing out the toise to up to eight feet? It’s a detail that fellow translators wink at. Dale definitely knows the ropes.

H.B. McCaskie also chose to keep the monorhyme:

I’m Frances, I regret to say,
Paris born (that's Pontoise way)
So in six-foot of rope one day
Neck must learn what buttocks weigh.

The poet here leaves out the important though not absolutely necessary allusion to weight in line one, at least makes possible the joke of line two, and fits in the more or less correct length of the rope. On the other hand, “one day” tends to retard Villon’s date with the hangman, and while Villon never specifies how long he has, the last two verses in French read with the finality, and imminence, of a death sentence. The absence of possessive adjectives in the final English verse does lend it a kind of stern inevitability (that eternal practical joker, the Grim Reaper, sends out Save the date! cards with no return address – so even if you wanted to send your regrets…), but the expression remains odd. And Villon’s “my neck… my arse” adds a wryly personal note that is missing in McCaskie’s version. But why didn’t the translator here use the alliterative, and lexically accurate, “Neck will know what buttocks weigh”? Lost opportunity. McCaskie does, however, introduce a different metrical pattern, perhaps to counter the possible monotony of the rhyme sequence, alternating eight-syllable lines with seven (octosyllables with heptasyllables). Every even line begins then on a strong beat.

David Georgi, also respecting the single rhyme scheme, comes up with this for his English version of Villon’s complete poems (Northwestern University Press, 2013):

I am François, alack, alas!
Born in Paris (south of Arras)
And from the six-foot rope at last
My neck will learn the weight of my ass.

Alack? Alas? What gives, Georgi? And why the new georgraphy? It rhymes. It lilts. You get a pass. But faithful to Villon? My ass.

Abandoning strict adherence to one rhyme ought to make it easier in turn to recreate more of the original sense. Here is what Lewis Wharton made of the poem (his translation of the complete poems appeared in the 1930s):

I am François, luckless jay,
Born at Paris, Pontoise way,
My neck, looped up beneath the tree,
Will learn how heavy buttocks be.

It seems Wharton didn’t grasp or didn’t care that the French poet was stressing weight in the very first line, going so far as to use the very same word at the rhyme in the crucial fourth verse. Hard to ignore the poet’s insistence but Wharton did. And he shows – what is it? Squeamishness before the word arse? He could have preserved the meter and the correct register by writing, “Will learn how heavy my arse be.” Finally, “tree” is not a mistranslation for the sake of the rhyme; alone or in such expressions as “dry tree” and “Tyburn tree, “ not to mention “fatal tree,” the word could mean a gallows.

The American poet Galway Kinnell (1927-2014) in his translation of the poems (University Press of New England, 1965) rejects rhyme but it’s hard to tell if he did so in the name of greater fidelity:

I am François which is my cross
Born in Paris near Pontoise
From a fathom of rope my neck
Will learn the weight of my ass.

Where has the connotation of weight, a moral burden, gone in the first verse? The poet-translator’s use of the expression “one’s cross to bear” is a bit of a misrendering of Villon. True, the biblical reference does imply a heavy physical burden, but the underlying sense, at least for Christian readers, would be a physical or moral burden that is exterior to the person named, along with the clear allusion, in terms of Christian belief, to an inevitable and necessary, albeit utterly unjust, execution. That is not what one would understand with a first reading of Villon’s first line of verse. Another problem, of word choice in this case, probably leaps out to most readers, i.e., “fathom,” right length, wrong element – at least nowadays. The Oxford English Dictionary does cite five authors writing well before, around the same time as, and shortly after Villon in which the six feet of “fathom” are applied to dry-land measure, so to speak, but after 1500, save in one occurrence, fathom is used to gauge the depth of a body of water. Galway might have argued that his is an old usage that is contemporaneous with Villon’s verse, but that is not immediately apparent to today’s readers. They are stuck with an image of “full fathom five” and sailing ships. Interestingly, Galway the poet consciously or “naturally” also falls into using a varied metrical pattern, 8-7-8-7.

Finally, I stumbled on this attempt by Bob Zisk, which also uses a brace of rhyming couplets:

I am François: on me that burden weighs.
I was born at Paris, not far from Pontoise.
Soon from the loop of a hangman's knot
My neck will know how big an ass I've got.

As Zisk points out, the rhyme weighs/Pontoise does indeed return the pronunciation of ois(e) to an earlier day. In the Middle Ages toise would have been a homophone, it’s generally thought, with our English “toys”; sometime later, it broadly shifted to rhyming with “weighs,” then finally to what is currently accepted as standard pronunciation, a diphthong that gives the American piehole such a hard time – for a reader of a certain age, Patty Duke’s Helen Keller trying to pronounce the stuff that fish swim in offers a good idea of the contortions the Anglophone mouth not schooled in French seems to put itself in. By the way, while “crescent,” making its way from Middle French into English in the 14^th and 15^th centuries, poses no problem – it came from creissant – “croissant,” same word really but enjoying much more wide-spread popularity only recently, becomes crew-sant in American mouths.

Croissant moon up in that dark sky,
Dark as my cup o' joe,
I feel so down, I wanna die,
Dark as my cup o' joe,
Sunny side up three hour away,
Dark as my cup o' joe,
My sugar gone went just yesterday,
Dark as my cup o' joe.
– Ed Hopper Blues 

The main drawback with Zisk’s version, though, is that metrically it’s all over the damn place. The first verse sets up a standard iambic pentameter line, but unless you pronounce “Paris” as a single syllable, line two has eleven syllables – and they are limping to Parnassus. You could fix the problem simply enough by an inversion and a better choice of words, “At Paris was I born, close to Pontoise,” but the third verse has only nine syllables. Also, although it follows that a big ass would weigh more than a smaller one, weight, heaviness, gravity are what the quatrain wants to whisper in readers’ ears, for physical and moral reasons. The first verse in this bad English version correctly introduces the theme, even insists on it with both “burden” and “weighs.” The translator, however, squanders that in the punchline verse. I could also quibble with “loop.” The Oxford English Dictionary gives just one quotation – from 1944, moreover – for the word in the sense of a noose and hanging. The word Zisk wants is “halter”; it has a long history of meaning “noose” and the Oxford lists a half-dozen quotations beginning with Craxton in 1481.

Here’s my go at it:

I’m François – Frank – and grave’s my fate,
Paris born (you know, near Pontoise),
And thanks t'a hemp of one good toise,
My neck will know my arse's weight.

My version doesn’t quite bounce lightly along enough on its way to the punchline, as light verse should, and I opt for an easier abba stanza, but it does have a few features worth crowing about. The traditional apostrophe to indicate the elision of a vowel in English poetry (“t’ a hemp” for “to a hemp”) and the use of the rare word toise (Byron uses “toises” in Don Juan, rhyming it with “noises”), along with several other word choices (hemp and, for American readers especially, arse), are enough to tip off readers that they are in a different world and earlier age. Second, the interjection of the French poet’s name in good old English, like Moby-Dick’s “Call me Ishmael,” sets a particular conversational tone while hinting that there is another less obvious reading hovering around the speaker’s own name in French, along with the soupçon of a certain character trait or even self-justifying reason for the fix the speaker finds himself in. Moreover, I work in the “weighs me down/weighs on me” of Villon’s first verse indirectly with “grave,” from the Latin gravis, meaning heavy (plus the great Shakespearean pun on “grave”: “Look for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man” – Mercutio and the Villon profiled in his own poetry would have gotten along like two rascals with a corporate credit card until they ended up fatally stabbing each other). Finally, “hemp” for “rope” is your only choice since that is the term poets and prose writers used in centuries past when talking about the suspended sentence. The Oxford English Dictionary provides six quotations while recording the existence of such gems as “stretchhemp” (“a person worthy of the gallows”) and “to wag hemp” (“to be hanged”). It is a sign of human progress that practically all these hangman terms have disappeared from the language. It is equally a sign of just how brutally backwards part of the electorate in the United States has become when we are forced to talk about a gibbet and American Presidential politics.

Today’s editions of Villon’s poetry place “Quatrain” as one of the last three poems in the collection. This is not for reasons the above discussion and the content of the four verses would lead us to believe: “Until the squeezer nips your scrag,” that is, until the halter nips your neck, according to the brilliant 19^th-century “canting” adaptation by William Ernest Henley of a Villon ballade, his famous “Ballade de bonne doctrine à ceux de mauvaise vie” with its well-known refrain “Tout aux tavernes et aux filles,” which Henley translates as “Villon’s Straight Tip to All Cross Coves” and “Booze and the blowens cop the lot” respectively – the English here surpasses the French in the familiarly exotic (see https://words.fromoldbooks.org/Farmer-MusaPedestris//villons-straight-tip-to-all-cross-coves.html – the entire site is absolutely irresistible: https://words.fromoldbooks.org/Farmer-MusaPedestris//)!

No, Villon did not “wag hemp,” did not die on the gallows, at least not according to official records. On the eve of the Epiphany, January 5, 1463, the Parlement of Paris met and quashed the earlier ruling, banishing Villon from the capital for ten years. Soon after, François Villon leaves Paris, disappears from the record, and enters legend and literary history. If he composed any verses after this date, they have been lost forever.

How do we know where a word exists in a language vis-à-vis all the other words of the language? By that I mean, is the word high or low, formal, informal, or somewhere in between, dressed in a suit and tie or T-shirt and grungy tennis shoes? Is it used mostly on formal occasions (belles-lettres and solemn ceremony) or in everyday speech? In other words, how do we know what is often referred to as register (first used in this sense by the linguist Thomas Bertram Reid back in 1956 according to Wikipedia)? Where does the word sit on the spectrum of use?

When dealing with our native tongue, we develop that sense over the years simply by dint of using the language, associating the word, or a certain pronunciation, or even a grammatical usage (For shame, Johnny! Remember, a double negative is a no no! A hoary chestnut that is still probably steering learners of English in the direction of a passing grade on TOEFL tests around the globe) with a certain setting, social situation, age group, reading material, and so on. If you can read this and find it at all interesting, and someone said to you, “He don’t speak English so good,” you would immediately know that either the person is a native speaker of English with probably only a minimum of formal education; or he or she is pulling your language leg. You know that third-person “don’t” and “good” used as an adverb are tokens of “low” or very informal spoken English and not to be employed if you want to pass for educated. On the other hand, advanced education be damned, you wouldn’t get terribly far as a pop lyricist if you scrupled to use third-person “don’t.” It doesn’t mean a thing if it doesn’t have that swing… The structure is now fixed in the English popular song tradition, not the least because “don’t” is a single syllable, a rather full vowel, and can take a strong accent. It fits (“You know it don’t come easy…,” “It don’t matter to me…,” “It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe./It don’t matter anyhow…,” this last song lyric by a winner of the Nobel Prize in literature no less!).

To illustrate the idea of register, I can co-opt a classic example of three major strata that exist in English and cleave nicely along usage lines, i.e., “give up” (bedrock Anglo-Saxon) with respect to “surrender” (borrowed from the French) and vis-a-vis “capitulate” (straight outta Latin). In terms of register, “give up” is everyday English, “surrender” less so, and “capitulate” only gets trotted out on special occasions (or, as I remember reading it, a simple soldier gives up, his brigade surrenders, and the whole bleddy country capitulates – although obviously a soldier could also be realistically heard saying “I surrender, I surrender…”). By the way, “outta” above is of course a spelling convention (merely aping the widespread pronunciation of “out of” and echoing Straight Outta Compton) that situates my parenthetical remark in a low or street register, a common tic of comic writers, pairing low with high, “straight outta” and talk of Latin. Linguistically, this is all premised on register.

On a personal note and a particularly exclusive register, the irretrievably corny and unhip exclamation “pshaw” is one of my earliest memories of reading in, I suppose, the first grade of my American school. I don’t think there is any comparably odd consonant cluster in Dr. Seuss’s books, which is really where I had already learned to read, and it so puzzled me that I have remembered it and the feeling of “this can’t be!” at its discovery to this day. In terms of register for English, it was, already back in 1964, an oddball out-of-place backwards-kin kind of term (N-grams puts its peak presence at 1902, while the online Collins sets its highest recorded use in 1797) and I can now only conclude that either our first-grade readers were exceedingly out-of-date, or, like one of those everyday monsters comically philippicked by the great French stand-up Pierre Desproges, the author was a cruel and sadistic horror who enjoyed laying the occasional linguistic booby trap in children’s books , chuckling to the grave over how he had gummed up neuronal bandwidth in heads throughout the land. He was truly mental. “Pshaw” thus occupies a particularly rare place in my idiolect, a register like those legendary forms in Japanese that solely exist for the unimaginably rare chance that you might have to reply to the emperor’s inquiry about your health over tea. It also evokes an odd formal register in current English generally; anyone, say a learner of English, looking up the word will find it indicated as “rare” (the online Oxford much more accurately prefaces the definition with “humorous, dated”). Finally, the term makes me long to read the adjective pshavian, based on the name of the well-known comic playwright George Bernard Pshaw. In contemporary English terms, “pshaw” just got pwned.

The question of register in terms of translation came up for me recently with the death of Stephen Hawking. A German-speaking friend and colleague wrote to me and a mutual French-speaking friend about how we would translate into French the following quotation, specifically the sentence beginning “It has been a glorious time…”:

At a conference in Cambridge held in celebration of his seventy-fifth birthday in 2017, Professor Hawking said “It has been a glorious time to be alive and doing research into theoretical physics. Our picture of the Universe has changed a great deal in the last fifty years, and I’m happy if I’ve made a small contribution.”

The ensuing discussion among us raised for me the question of how we know, learn, suss out the register of a word, turn of phrase, grammatical construction, etc. in an acquired language. I lived for over seventeen years in French-speaking countries, principally in French-speaking Switzerland, and so quite naturally through reading but also, importantly, by aural osmosis I absorbed what I might call the “brainfeel” for lots of areas of French. It means that when I overheard here in Brooklyn a pleasant woman greet a local merchant she knew and apparently regularly saw with a cheery Bonne journée! I realized straightaway, regardless of the accent, that neither was a native-speaker of French. The locution immediately sounded wrong because, at least where I had used French daily, you would mostly say bonjour on arriving and bonne journée only when departing – not strictly a question of register, of course, but emblematic of how we know where what we say fits into a language as a whole. (How did I know the merchant wasn’t a native speaker, if he knew any French at all? A French merchant probably would have pointed out to her the error by then.)

For the translation of Hawking’s declaration, I suggested something but admitted outright that it was probably no good and that our native speaker would come up with a good solution, and in fact he did, offering three possible translations off the cuff. I then pointed out why I thought one turn of phrase (une époque bénie des dieux – literally a time/period blessed by the gods) might not work because, knowing a little about Hawking, an avowed atheist, I doubted he would have gone for anything having God or gods in it in English at that late date (even though he does mention God at the end of his A Brief History of Time and in a few other famous remarks). Then I posed a question, which brings us to register. Why, I asked our friend, had he avoided “glorious” in French since the adjective glorieux/se exists? It seemed a natural choice.

There are two possibilities that worry, or should, a translator when facing a supposedly natural choice. The first is one that translators and anyone learning a language are warned about or discover early on when the two languages, native and foreign to the learner, have significant overlap, which is very much the case of French and English. These are the faux amis, the false friends, of French and English, the ancien (often translated as “former”), which is not “ancient”; or the déception (disappointment) that is not a deception (even though the latter can certainly provoke the former). Molestar in Spanish could lead to a smile or international incident, depending on the circumstances, were it translated as “to molest”; it is the stuff of a classic joke (and no molestar/please do not molest obviously should have been hanging on all the doors of all those hotel rooms where Harvey W. plied his – in his eyes – formidable powers of seduction).

The second possibility, which springs from the first I think, of a translation seeming like the natural choice is that the damn word in one language has a cognate in the other, e.g., glorious and glorieux/glorieuse, which occupy more or less the same semantic field in their respective languages and, crucially to our discussion, the same register nowadays. And yet the translator avoids what argues to be the natural choice.

As it happens, my French-speaking friend never answered my question, but the German-speaker, who lives not far from Geneva and is surrounded by French, did counter that glorieux was less commonplace in French, and of a higher register, and so it would be a mistranslation to put une époque glorieuse. I now tried to disabuse my friend of what I think are his misconceptions about the English “glorious.” I told him the term is really not something you would use every day, at least not in American English and, I’m pretty sure, in the English used in the UK; I linked him to the N-gram for “glorious” in American and English use, showing its decline from the mid-19^th century, and I argued that the decline in written sources probably mirrored a decline in its use in speech. Finally, I reminded him that because of his handicap, Steven Hawking’s “speech” in 2017 was much closer to writing anyway.

The German-speaker then did some research on his own and offered four or five quotations (from 2017-2018) in which “glorious” was indeed used, it seemed to him, in regular speech. And here is where my reasoning shows how one can form some idea of a word’s register in a foreign tongue. I pointed out that all his citations were instances of writing and not an attempt to reflect English as it is spoken today. The first was from a sports article and the author mentions an American football player by name along with his “glorious mustache.” Someone learning English, for example, could ponder the adjective choice here coupled with an apparently conspicuous bit of facial hair; a normally trivial thing, a feature of the athlete’s face, is being singled out, in itself probably a humorous effect. How to point up or emphasize the humor if not by modifying the noun with an adjective normally not associated with trivial things? In other words, try to reverse engineer the joke. “Glorious” is probably reserved for much more important things.

Along these lines, a lot of the priceless 16^th-century comic writer François Rabelais’s material is lost on French readers today, but a great deal more was lost on me when I was immersing myself in his works back when I was first really studying French literature at the University of Geneva. Most editions provide extensive notes to help today’s readers, but when Rabelais, for instance, takes Latin nouns and verbs and comically Gallicizes them, hauls them over into French lock, stock and barrel, any educated native speaker of French is probably in on the joke right away. For me, they were just more nouns and verbs I had to look up (in the Huguet, the wonderful seven-volume dictionary of 16^th-century French). The equivalent in English might be to coin, say, aleajactaesting and sictransitgloriamundize (a quidnunc already exists). And indeed, in the great comic writer P.G. Wodehouse’s priceless Aunts Aren’t Gentleman, the twit and toff Bertie Wooster, who has managed to retain Jeeves’ Latin tag rem acu tetigisti (“you have touched the thing/the matter with the needle,” in other words, you have hit the nail on the head), declares at one point, “I agreed with him that he had tetigisti-ed the rem acu.” In my case, I was being a good and sedulous student, looking the words up, but also a bit obtuse. Rabelais’s humor was practically giving me a raspberry point blank in the face.

The second citation came from the Smithsonian, more of a suit- and even suit-and-tie-kind of publication than a jeans-and-sneakers one. The third was from Seventeen, not a bastion of formal writing in the high style, yes, but the quotation sprang from a movie review of sorts, which is already pitched at a higher level probably than an interview. Importantly, the turn of phrase was “glorious summer,” while the remaining two quotations had to do with beautiful views of nature and the natural world. I explained to our man that he was probably unaware of an expression that was almost certainly hovering over or behind these three usages, “made glorious summer,” from two very famous verses by Shakespeare. I went on to maintain, without any hard data though, that any English-speaker of a certain age (hinting at “over thirty” – hedging my bets) with some university education, and any writer worth their salt really, would indeed have encountered the two verses

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York.

After my above email exchange, by the way, I tested my theory about “glorious summer,” with a fairly limited test group, i.e., just one, a friend who is also edging toward sixty and who holds a BA from an American university but not in literature – and who is not in the writing dodge. I asked him in an email if he could, off the top of his head, cite the opening verses of Richard III. He admitted he could not and that he did not in fact know the play. Then I asked him if he recognized the two verses quoted above. He knew them straight off and had read and heard them on several occasions. And he concurred that if somebody today said “We had a glorious time,” instead of “We had a great time,” the adjective would definitely stand out. The parallel to draw in this case would be with “awesome,” which was of a very high register once (it implied the kind of terror one would feel before the divine when there was no question the divine existed), but today is part of everyday English and synonymous with “nice,” “great,” “cool,” etc. A nonnative speaker of English would have no end of clues to situate the term properly.

Tom Stoppard’s brilliant play The Invention of Love is about, among other things, the great English poet and classics scholar A.E. Housman and Latin love poetry. Early in the first act, the young Housman, already a keen reader of the Latin poets, analyses a verse from Horace’s Odes (III, 24) and in doing so, gives us a tutorial on how one can sometimes work out, even in a dead language, the possible standing of a word by paying close attention to what the text itself may be telling us:

Housman: The Odes. Sorry. Odes Three, 24, “ludere doctior seu Graeco iubeas trocho” – it’s where he’s saying everything’s gone to the dogs.
Pollard: That’s it! …they’re better at playing with the Greek hoop!
Housman: Actually, “trochos” is Greek, it’s the Greek word for hoop, so when Horace uses “Graecus trochus” it’s rather like saying “French chapeau.” I mean he’s laying it on thick, isn’t he?

How do you poke fun at pretentious Latinate vocabulary in Latin? You go Greek.