Comments on: être etonné c’est un bonheur: baudelaire’s modernization of poe

By: Giovanni

Giovanni — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:33:50 +0000

Yeah, sorry – I must have minstranslated it in my head.

By: pollian

pollian — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:22:21 +0000

I’ll grant you that we are monocultural bastards, but “silly”–that goes too far.

By: adswithoutproducts

adswithoutproducts — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:09:27 +0000

I think you’ve come up with the right one: s’emerveiller is just right. Etre etonne moves the activity to the outside – the emphasis is on the thing doing the astonishing….

It’s sort of the difference, to my mind, between saying “was hit” and “is injured.” Does that make sense? I think the important thing is that Baudelaire’s moving the event in the line, whatever it is, outside of the individual….

By: Frank

Frank — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:23:08 +0000

“être étonné” is an infinitive…

The problem for Baudelaire is he is forced to chose between two meanings of the verb “to wonder” – only one of which seems to be mentioned in the comments. To wonder means both “to marvel at” and “to think to oneself”.

GIven the context, two independent but related clauses punctuated by a semicolon – “It is a happiness to wonder; it is a happiness to dream” – it seem entirely likely that Poe intended “It is a happiness to marvel (at the world)” rather than “It is a happiness to think (to onself), but both, of course, are possible interpretations of the English. In French, there is no possible verb which encompasses both meanings, so Baudelaire’s translation seems to me entirely apposite.

Since French offers no direct cognate for ‘to wonder’, and that the verbs “s’etonner” and “s’emerveiller” are transitive, and having no object, he is therefore forced to use “être étonné” or “être emerveillé”

By: Giovanni

Giovanni — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 07:14:10 +0000

Because you are silly monocultural bastards who won’t and can’t translate texts to save your bloody lives.

Was that too harsh?

By: hamishb

hamishb — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:59:23 +0000

Can of worms! I’ve long suspected that a lot of what is known here, on the left side of the Atlantic, as “French theory” harbours any number of similar semi-inexact translations. In English, we tend to simply use the foreign word, such as cathexis or jouissance, and leave it to the dear reader to do the follow-up; the French, not so much.

By: Giovanni

Giovanni — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:56:54 +0000

I’d be surprised if scholars didn’t know which dictionary(ies) exactly B. used. Might be worth trying a Baudelaire forum – I say it’s the Internet all the way.

By: RobDP

RobDP — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:56:13 +0000

I’m sorry I meant p. 703 below. Not sure what happened there.

By: RobDP

RobDP — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:54:10 +0000

No we’re not See my comment above!

By: RobDP

RobDP — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:53:44 +0000

This is largely a geeky point, but I think Worcester was as big as Webster in the late 19th cy. Also Baudelaire might not necessarily have used an American English dictionary to get his own translation (depends how rigorous he was, I guess), so that's a separate question too. More thrillingly in terms of solving this question, Nugent's French-English/English-French was widely published on both sides of the channel throughout the period, and the 1901 version online suggests s'étonner / etre surpris for wonder. Go to p. 274!