Saagar Asnani
on translating Pierre de Ronsard
In French, there are two separate words for describing the rewriting of literature from one language to another. There is traduction, which is simply translating the meaning of a string of words from one language to another. One has the freedom to change the syntax, grammar, word choice, and even rhyme scheme in a traduction. The other word to describe such a process is translation, which means rewriting the work in another language while maintaining the original artistry, such as the rhyme scheme, the word choice, the rhythm, and flow. In essence, in a translation, one is writing poetry of one’s own, using the original as a baseline. In this case, I have chosen to do a translation of three sonnets from Pierre de Ronsard’s collection Les Amours. Written in Moyen Français, or Middle French, in the mid-sixteenth century, Les Amours is a collection of sonnets describing Ronsard’s love for a young woman named Cassandre. What Beatrice is to Dante, what Laure is to Petrarch, Cassandre is to Ronsard. He poured all his creative gifts into describing her virtues and beauty in these sonnets, a style of poem heavily influenced by Petrarch and Shakespeare before him. I chose these three sonnets to give a glimpse into Ronsard’s mastery of the genre. His succinct yet vague declarations of love tug at the heartstrings and depict love through a variety of lenses: physical, spiritual, and philosophical.
I attempted to keep with Ronsard’s original poetry by keeping the decasyllabic form throughout the three sonnets. Every line is ten syllables long and follows the same rhyme scheme as the original. The first two quatrains are ABBAABBA, the next couplet is always CC, and the final quatrain alternates between DEED and DEDE. Finally, I attempted to keep with the time period and used the informal, ancient form “thou” for any parallel usage in the original French. What strikes me the most about Ronsard’s creativity, is that it holds true for tales and clichés of amour even today, nearly five hundred years later.
about the author
Pierre de Ronsard was born in 1524 in a small village known as Couture-Sur-Loir, on the banks of the Loir River. Ronsard finished his education in Paris and quickly made a name for himself as a great poet. Growing up in Renaissance France, he started his career under Madeleine de France as a translator of classical works into vernacular languages. After her death, he found himself in Paris and slowly made acquaintances with several other up-and-coming poets and authors of the time, including Antoine de Baïf, Pontus de Tyard, Joachim du Bellay, and Étienne Jodelle, among others. This group came to be called La Pléiade, modeled after the Alexandrian Pleiad of ancient times. Ronsard was the founding member of the group, and has since been known as one of the greatest lyricists of French history. Today, La Pléiade forms an essential part of the French literary canon and is studied by French literature students of all levels.
about the translator
Saagar Asnani is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences at Penn studying biology, French, and music. He has always considered himself an avid Francophile at heart, and more recently a medievalist, concentrating much of his French studies on the Middle Ages and Renaissance, mostly in the realm of literature. Having spent a semester in Lyon studying the works of poets like Ronsard and Chrétien de Troyes, he wishes to make these masterpieces accessible to a wider audience and to translate more works from Middle and Old French into English. He plays viola in various groups across campus, including the Penn Symphony, and intends to go to medical school after finishing his undergraduate education.
