“Shagi / Steps” the Journal of the SASH

SHAGI/STEPS 6(3)

Keywords: Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarmé, Efim Etkind, translation, poetical content, syllabic and syllabotonic versification, rhyme, alliteration, repetition, metaphor

Abstract: This paper discusses two translations into French of the poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. They were produced by great French poets, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, whose style is close enough to Poe’s; in addition, both French poets were near contemporaries of the American poet. This is also a way to compare two approaches to poetical translation, confronting them with the author’s project. Everyone agrees that works of poetry must be translated by poets, but in these two cases Baudelaire as well as Mallarmé declared it impossible to create a poetical translation of “The Raven”. The goal they both aimed for was to convey this poem in prose because this way they sought to stay closer to the source text. However, if we interpret the American poem in the way Poe himself had interpreted it in his essay, we can see that both prose translations totally destroyed the author’s project and did not present to French readers even the slightest idea about the poem. In addition, the two translators did not render exactly the strict literal sense of Raven in spite of their intention to do so. While the French poet Yves Bonnefoy finds both translations quite satisfactory, our view is shared by the French critic Alain Labau, whose analysis is based on the book Un Art en crise: essai de poétique de la traduction poetique by Efim Etkind.

To cite this article: Baevskaya, E. V. (2020). Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”: Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Shagi/Steps, 6(3), 18–27. (In Russian). DOI: 10.22394/2412-9410-2020-6-3-18-27.