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Marulić’s Poem Od slavića (On the Nightingale): a Translational Analysis
Teo Radić
; Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
Sažetak
Marulić’s poem Od slavića / On the Nightingale is composed after a Latin original (Philomena praevia temporis amoeni) once ascribed to St Bonaventure, but today considered the work of his pupil, John Peckham. Over the years, the Marulić poem has been assessed in various ways, mainly unfavourably, the main reason being to be found probably in the fact that the text of this poem was until the beginning of the century available in editions of very dubious quality. Since we have today a reliable critical edition (B. Lučin, CM XIII [2004]), it is now possible to compare the original and the corrected Croatian version, re-evaluating the text as both translation and poetic work. The Latin original is written in goliardic verses, i. e. 13-syllable lines the rhythm of which is based on accents, and not on quantity. In the Latin poem we find a total of 360 of them, distributed among 90 four line stanzas with a rhyme scheme of aaaa, bbbb and so on. Marulić’s version has 560 verses, of eight and seven syllables, divided into 70 octaves. The syllables are distributed as follows: 8+8+8+7+8+8+8+7 and the rhyme scheme is aaabcccb. In addition there are 12 octosyllabic couplets of a concluding autobiographical note, which means that the total length of the poem is increased to 572 lines or 71 stanzas. The octosyllabics and heptosyllabics for which the translator opted imitate the trochaic rhythm of the original very well, and in their form they draw on the (Christian) tradition of writing Latin poetry in non-classical metres. Marulić coped with the cramped structure and trochaic imperative of the short lines in various ways, using on the whole short, mostly two-syllabic, words, and metrical aids such as elision, aphaeresis and synizesis. Because the metrical form was so very different, Marulić was unable to construct the translation in such a way that verse corresponded to verse and stanza to stanza in the Latin model. And yet, Nightingale is in total length more or less identical to Philomena. The same principle, however, does not hold true at the level of individual parts of the translation. The ratio of 90 quatrains to 70 octaves should result in one quatrain corresponding to a little more than three quarters of an octave. Marulić achieves such an average by a combination of two procedures – by contracting or expanding the original, in such a way that a single quatrain will be translated either the by whole of an octave, somewhat expanding it, or half an octave, thus greatly abridging the content of the original. Cases of the latter are a little more frequent, and we are inclined to conclude that Marulić acted in this way in the wish to liberate a certain number of verses so that he might insert a few major amplifications in his translation, by far the largest of them occurring in the very middle of his version (lines 261 to 308). In addition, by a comparative analysis of original and translation, using a sample of a few sections, we wished to determine which translational procedures Marulić used most often in the endeavour to preserve in his version the literary and aesthetic values of the original. As cases of more or less literal translation (according to the standards of verse translation) – which in this version are relatively rare phenomena – we can quote the following: Sed ad nonam veniens moritur iam plene – »Kad deveto vrime pride / Sasvim umre i otide«; Post hanc vitam suscipit Iesus et Maria – »Toga t’ Isus i Marija / Na pokonji prime dan«. Conversely, translator’s liberty is shown perhaps most in the additions that have no great basis in the original writing, but which are not there merely to fill up space, rather on the whole being used to place the emphasis on a given image that Marulić thinks important, particularly considering the believers that were his target audience. Thus in the place where the original gives the Magdalene as an example of public sinning and also remorse, the translator adds the image of the robber who shared the final earthly moments of Christ. Also discernible in Marulić’s translation is a procedure of transposition, in both the precise sense (when within a line or a smaller part of the text he changes the order of the words), and in an expanded sense, when, for example, deviating from the mentioned rule of distribution of quatrains into octaves (4 : 8, 4 : 4), he shifts some lines into stanzas to which they did not originally belong; the translator however in so doing still retains in the main the most important images and messages of the original. An excellent example of adaptation can be seen in the way in which the poet/ translator solves the problem of the nightingale’s sad cry oci, oci. This cry is conventionally associated with the nightingale, and is considered to have come from the French ocir, to kill. In Pecham’s poem the bird, with this cry, expresses the wish to be killed as a result of the enormous grief as a result of the fatal struggle of Christ (originally, in love poems, the nightingale wants death for unfaithful lovers as revenge for the betrayal of love). As a literal translation of this nightingale’s cry would not have had much meaning for the readers of Marulić, the poet wittilyrepresents it with the words »Zvižje, zvižje, umrit jur mne«. As an example of paraphrasis we can quote the case when Marulić replaces the noun Adam (est creatus) with the expression »človik (stvoren) blag (bi), da to / parvo blago zgubi, po ko / poče Boga ne znati«. Here the translator reminds the reader of the nature and fate of the first man: born fortunate, but losing this happiness when he forgot the Creator. In this and suchlike specimens the didactic element of Marulić’s translation can be seen. There are also opposite cases, when in the translation a single word is used to replace what was put more completelyin the original. In one place thus Marulić felt the need to »improve« the original by, literally, exactly noting that the »šesto vrime« had come, just as earlier he had had »vrime parvo, treto vrime and after that »deveto vrime«, while in the original,exceptionally, we are told this by periphrasis (cum in meridie sol est in fervore;otherwise in Latin there are primam horam, tertiam, nonam). Certain stylistic figures also sometimes fit into Marulić’s translating procedure. Thus for example we can notice hendiadys – when two Latin predicates (declarasti and cogitasti) are elegantly united into one in Croatian (“skazat jest hotil«), and it is interesting that Marulić several times resorted to apostrophe (Gospe, daj mi sinka tvoga...; [to the baby Jesus] Ja t’ bih vodu donašao…) in places where the original has the ordinary flow of narration. With such modulation, the translator achieves a considerable emotional effect. (In the first case we notice a kind of localisation, when the poet, without any prompting from the original,uses the word »gospa« [Our Lady], in addition in the morphological form that was most often used in his local speech). Finally, as example of compensation we can mention a place from the final verses of the translation, where Marulić compensates for the omitted image of the soul as the betrothed of Christ (nupta feliccisimo Regi) with the image of the soul taking pleasure in heaven (»veseleć se meu sveti«). The Latin original, judging all in all, had as its addressee someone from the Friars Minor. Marulić, however, does not address the poem to any particular individual, sending, instead, the message to each one of his readers, which is discernible from several signals, particularly in those parts of the text that quite often belong to expansions of the original and that reveal the enhanced didactic nature of his interpretation of this religious poem. However, in a discussion of the macaronics of the Nightingale (there are several cases of interweaving mainly Latin or some Italian forms in the body of the Croatian text), the analysis carried out leads to a certain conclusion: Marulić’s macaronic interventions in the Croatian text are not unconscious and conditioned;on the contrary, they are free and deliberated, motivated on the whole by the desire to express a kind of hommage to the original (for example for Marulić’s most important macaronic venture: »Buduć ti kralj angelorum / Tvorac zemlje i cęlorum / I vladavac sęculorum« the prompting in the original, in various different places, is once angelorum, and once cęlorum, and once sęculorum). Such and suchlike interventions by no means reveal Marulić as a novice poet, but, on the contrary, are an undisputable indicator of his poetic skill. Thanks to the critical edition of Marulić’s version, a translational analysis of the Nightingale could be carried out finally on realistic premises, and the results of the analysis give us the right to reject previous assessments that this is a poetically weak text. It is, in truth, fairly free, but at a time when literary translations, particularly poetic translations, are increasingly considered independent artworks, not needing to be slavish and literal, the assessment of the value of such a translation should be found only in an answer to the following question: to what extent did the translation manage to convey to the reader the sense, spirit, aesthetic and message of the original? It should be clearly said that Marulić’s Slavić met this purpose in its entirety.
Ključne riječi
Od slavića; Marko Marulić; Philomena; St Bonaventure; John Peckham; free translation; contrastive analysis; translational procedures; macaronics
Hrčak ID:
80206
URI
Datum izdavanja:
5.4.2012.
Posjeta: 1.858 *