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My class on Irish lit read Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's essay "Why I Choose To Write In Irish" last week, which I've actually already read under the same teacher in another class. It's an interesting look at a bilingual person's choices regarding the language of their writing and unsurprisingly made me think of Charles and his deliberate choices over what language to use. Ní Dhomhnaill only writes poetry in Irish, though other people have translated it (we also read two translations of "An Rás") so she's obviously taken a different route than Charles, who wrote bilingually (trilingual if you count Latin). I think they've both made ultimately the same choice in writing in a language that is not the "main" language if you will-- Irish instead of English, English instead of French. Charles really had no practical reason to write English since French was still a common language among the Eand there are plenty of people who'd question Ní Dhomhnaill how far she's going to get writing in a language with a little under 75,000 speakers. It comes down to the nuances possible in the language and what conveys the author's thoughts best.
Which leads me to the old joke about how you can say anything in French and it'll sound nice, for example "Je pry Dieu qu'il les maudie" sounds a lot nicer than "I pray God curses them."
The refrain of the French Ballade XXV is "Je pry Dieu qu'il les maudie," "I pray God curses them" as compared to the English of Ballade 25, "I biseche God, acursid mote they dy" -- I beseech God, accursed must they die!" Charles's English is unsurprisingly a little more rough around the edges grammatically and vocabulary-wise, but it's also more raw and unpolished in the emotional sense. While the lover still is in the same allegory-populated dream world, he's less abstract in general and more urgent. Things suck-- he's lonely, tired of being depressed and anxious, and needs to get some-- and he says so in English.
But, I hear you saying, aren't these ballades versions of each other? Why do the French and English sound so different? Because, note that they're versions of each other, not strictly translations. They follow similar patterns and themes, same or similar rhyming, taking into account the different meters (octosyllabic for French and pentameter for English) but they convey the ideas differently. That's, I think, the reason he wrote in both English and French. Both languages have their poetic strengths-- French is easy to rhyme; English, while difficult to rhyme, works well for poetry that relies on meter-- and he saw different strengths in them for his own purpose. His English was raw and urgent, so was the poetic result. This may be in part why early commentators (I'm looking at you Robert Louis Stevenson) said his English poetry wasn't very good. Charles knew what he was doing though, allowing the two languages to express different feelings while still on the same theme.
Which leads me to the old joke about how you can say anything in French and it'll sound nice, for example "Je pry Dieu qu'il les maudie" sounds a lot nicer than "I pray God curses them."
The refrain of the French Ballade XXV is "Je pry Dieu qu'il les maudie," "I pray God curses them" as compared to the English of Ballade 25, "I biseche God, acursid mote they dy" -- I beseech God, accursed must they die!" Charles's English is unsurprisingly a little more rough around the edges grammatically and vocabulary-wise, but it's also more raw and unpolished in the emotional sense. While the lover still is in the same allegory-populated dream world, he's less abstract in general and more urgent. Things suck-- he's lonely, tired of being depressed and anxious, and needs to get some-- and he says so in English.
But, I hear you saying, aren't these ballades versions of each other? Why do the French and English sound so different? Because, note that they're versions of each other, not strictly translations. They follow similar patterns and themes, same or similar rhyming, taking into account the different meters (octosyllabic for French and pentameter for English) but they convey the ideas differently. That's, I think, the reason he wrote in both English and French. Both languages have their poetic strengths-- French is easy to rhyme; English, while difficult to rhyme, works well for poetry that relies on meter-- and he saw different strengths in them for his own purpose. His English was raw and urgent, so was the poetic result. This may be in part why early commentators (I'm looking at you Robert Louis Stevenson) said his English poetry wasn't very good. Charles knew what he was doing though, allowing the two languages to express different feelings while still on the same theme.
