This might feel a lot like cheating, again, but I was writing a piece recently about Cyrano and about adaptations thereof; in this analysis I couldn’t help but think back to my own attempts to translate the classic. So I had to share one of my translation poems with you. I have done a good number of some of the most fun chunks of the play, including the Duel Ballade.
Here’s the thing about Cyrano: it’s a play all in verse. Not just verse—rhyming verse. And French being what it is, with its upward, regular rhythm and its small vocabulary, when a translator tries to replicate the rhymes into English, it just ends up sounding like a commercial jingle. So what I ended up doing was: I used blank verse, in iambic pentameter, for most of the dialogue. Then, at some important or climactic points, I’d add a rhyming couplet. I think it worked pretty well—let me know if you’d like to see more of my work on this.
However! Having said all that, this is actually all in very regular verse, as it’s the ballade that Cyrano composes along with dueling Valvert. Just before the fight begins, he shushes the crowd, saying he has to choose his rhymes. He chooses them, and then begins:
⚔️
I toss away with grace my hat.
I abandon slowly and with great art
My large coat, and lay it flat.
I draw my sword, that I will use to thwart.
She’s as precise as a dart,
As agile as my wit.
I’m warning you now, as we start
That at the end of the ballad I hit.
*
If you’d stayed neutral you’d have stayed intact.
What place on your body shall I cut apart?
In the flank, or beneath your sleeve, you rat?
Under your blue ribbons, right in the heart?
Listen! The shells jingle—there, on the cart!
A fly! my swordspoint will flit
I’ve decided! It will be in your belly (your middle-part)
When at the end of the ballad I hit.
*
I can’t think of a rhyme with ‘at’…
You’re retreating, but so pale, you think you’re so smart;
It’s only to supply to me the word, ‘scat!’
Tac! I parry your point with an arc!
You thought that you would hit the mark!
I open the line, I butcher it.
Hold on to your brooches, you tart!
For at the end of the ballad, I hit!
*
Envoy:
Prince, beg pardon of God that
I four-step, I skirmish, I flip,
I cut, I feint… Hey, la! Splat!
At the end of the ballad, I hit.
