Posts filed under 'songs in literature'

Translation Tuesday: “She Sits Beneath Her Father’s Olive Tree” by Audefroi Le Bastart

Whoever has love’s grief and pain / Should also have love’s joy.

This Translation Tuesday, a melodic love story for the ages floats in the air, transporting us to a time of dueling knights and castle towers. Hear from Timothy Perry, translator of “She Sits Beneath Her Father’s Olive Tree” by Audefroi Le Bastart, on appropriation in the layered histories of France’s medieval weaving songs: an oral tradition of working women recorded in writing by men:

“The weaving songs of medieval France do not survive. Which is to say, the traditional songs of women engaged in textile work—a largely oral tradition—do not survive. In their place, we have approximations to this genre written by men in a purely literary context. These literary weaving songs, with their themes of courtly love, (artfully) simple language, and repetitive rhythms, attempt to preserve the ‘feel’ of the oral tradition, but their appropriation of it results in a problematic shift in perspective—narratives involving the objectification and abuse of women take on an entirely different tenor when taken from a context of women’s work and transformed into a male literary exercise. The resulting poems have been considered among the finest lyrical creations of medieval French literature, but their casual misogyny raises timely (and timeless) questions about how we should read aesthetically accomplished but morally tarnished works, and how we should translate them.

The ‘weaving song’ translated here tells the story of Idoine and the obstacles to her love. The poem upends the conventions of courtly love by presenting everything—even martial pursuits—though Idoine’s eyes, resulting in a complex layering of gender: a male poet writing in a female genre presents male activities through the eyes of a female character. Despite this complexity, the misogyny outlined above remains very much present and I have tried both to draw attention to and undercut it. For example, the French text mentions the aesthetic qualities of Idoine’s hair even as she is being dragged by it, but in an unemphatic way: ‘[the queen] takes her by the hair, which she has blonde like wool’. I have heightened this aestheticization of Idoine’s suffering by overtranslating the prosaic ‘takes’ as ‘grasps’ and by expanding the description of the hair from half a line to a whole line and setting it off between dashes. Elsewhere, however, I employ vocabulary not found in the French to undercut the poem’s ‘happy’ ending. Twice my translation describes Idoine as the ‘captive’ of her love Garsiles. On the first occasion, the French simply says that her love for him ‘preoccupies’ her; on the second, which occurs at a point in the poem when her father is literally holding her captive in a tower, the French simply says that she is still ‘taken with’ Garsiles. And when Garsiles fights to rescue Idoine, after which they will marry, I describe him as ‘an iron tower of strength’, though the French says merely that he has ‘prowess and strength’. By presenting Garsiles as a tower and Idoine as his captive, I try to suggest that Idoine’s plight as a wife may not be so different from what it was as a daughter. READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

Put on your seatbelts: This month’s edition takes us to Egypt, Sudan, and Japan!

2023’s first installment of A Thousand Lives takes us back in time (as far back as 1966) to unearth gems from around the world that some of us may have overlooked. Tackling topics ranging from colonialism to women’s place in society, they are as relevant today as when they first saw light of publication. Join our editors-at-large as they open three fabulous time capsules!

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Originally published in 1975 and first translated from the Arabic into English by Sherif Hetata in 1983, Woman at Point Zero, one of Nawal El Saadawi’s most well-known novels, sadly remains relevant as ever. In the preface, she writes that the book is based on a real woman, a true story seemingly down to the name Firdaus. The frame narrative is that of a journalist, a stand-in for Saadawi, who has been unsuccessfully trying to talk to Firdaus and is finally able to meet her the night before her slated execution. The framed narrative is Firdaus’s story: her traumatic childhood, how she became a prostitute, and why she is now on death row. While it’s certainly tied to a specific time and place for Arab women in Egyptian society, the novel is an indictment of patriarchy at large everywhere. The issues that Saadawi explores—the subjugation of women, women as goods, the hypocrisy of men, men as consumers, state and power, money—have not been resolved almost half a century after it first came out. There is a surprising immediacy, made all the more apparent by the pulsating prose. Here’s the portrait of a woman who has fatally unveiled society’s ugly truths. Buy a copy here.

–Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large for India

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Tayeb Salih was a Sudanese author, cultural journalist, and key figure in the Sudanese literary scene. Published in 1966, his most famous novel—Season of Migration to the North—was translated from Arabic by Denys Johnson-Davies. In a distinctive style, oscillating between a trenchant and a dreamy timbre, Salih tells the story of a young Sudanese man returning to his home village to find the people he’d grown up with succumbing to the charms of a mysterious stranger. The secretive newcomer develops a kinship with the protagonist, having shared a similar past—both had left their native land to study in England—and reveals his troubling biography, adumbrated by a series of dangerous games of seduction and violence. The stranger’s presence in the village is all but benign: soon, events of unprecedented brutality begin to take place, leaving the protagonist to observe powerlessly as his homeland falls apart. Now translated into more than 30 languages, Season of Migration to the North explores themes of exoticism and authenticity, growth and revenge, as well as delving deep into the complicated interplay between colonizer and colonized, on the individual and collective scale. Buy a copy here.

—Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large for Macedonia READ MORE…