More accurate is not necessarily better, nor more truthful

[larryhammer]

Here's a modern, fairly literal translation of Jerusalem Delivered IV.31, describing Armida and her effect on the knights of the First Crusade:

Her shapely breasts showed the uncovered snow
that stirs and nourishes the fire of love.
They looked, in part, like fruit not fully ripe,
part sheltered by her gown that lay above,
envious--yet if it shuts the pass for sight,
imagination, you have room to rove,
for not content with outward beauty, deep
among the hidden secrets would you keep. (Esolan, 2000)

Four centuries earlier, this looser version was published:

Her breasts, two hills o'erspread with purest snow,
   Sweet, smooth and supple, soft and gently swelling,
Between them lies a milken dale below,
   Where love, youth, gladness, whiteness make their dwelling;
Her breasts half hid, and half were laid to show;
   Her envious vesture greedy sight repelling:
So was the wanton clad, as if this much
Should please the eye, the rest, unseen, the touch. (Fairfax, 1600)

Fairfax notoriously padded out his stanzas with redundancies, and added classical mythologizing that Tasso had rejected as alien to a Christian epic. But there's reasons some of the great Elizabethan translations live on. They had poetry.

---L.

Comments

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

...imagination, you have room to rove,
for not content with outward beauty, deep
among the hidden secrets would you keep. (Esolan, 2000)

There's hackneyed, and then there's cliché-chained and lamed to gimpiness. Esolan is trying to have it both ways: modern language with strategic archaicism when he bores himself into a corner.

[larryhammer]

He strains for his final couplets a lot. He also spends a lot of time in his introduction justifying using the form XAXAXABB with slants rhymes on the A's, which makes me suspect he's just not very good at rhyming.

Also, not very good with line breaks -- they're working against him, in this, rather than he's working against the breaks.

---L.