Notes on a Translated Poem
Question:
What do you get when you combine
Answer: Moles.
That's what I came up with, at least.
This set of Web pages documents in detail how I came up with a, shall we say, unique translation of Clément Marot's poem "A une Damoyselle malade". It might seem overkill to write a dozen pages concerning a translation of a poem that is only eighty-four syllables long, but bear with me. I didn't transcribe every idea and draft for their own sake. What I was interested in was how ideas related to the translation evolved over the course of time. Why did I keep some ideas and discard others, particularly ones I liked? What made an idea good? How did the current state of the translation affect my judgment of how well a given idea fit?
That was my goal: to document how I thought, and how and why ideas came and went between different drafts. It is very much akin to Melanie Mitchell's Copycat project, except my domain is much wider than hers.
It took rather longer than I thought it would, but the effort was a success. You can investigate the result in these pages:
"Talpidae" is the family of moles. Darkness hide you, little mole.
Last updated 8 June 2000
http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Writings/Poetry/IndexTalpidae.html
All contents ©1999-2002
Mark L. Irons