Elias Ziyadeh
on translating Paul Eluard
“Liberté” is a poem that takes on a very rhythmic structure: non-rhyming four-line stanzas that each evoke a certain emotion or message. It was thus very important to me to maintain this structure in the English translation, even when it may have not made sense to do so when writing originally in English. The word “sur” in French translates to “on,” and most lines in the original French begin with that word, so that has been maintained in the translation. French has a different adjective-noun order than English, and almost all the lines refer to a noun having some adjective or quality, so grammatical structure was weighed against the intention of the metronome of the original words to produce a coherent translation.
about the author
Paul Éluard (1895 - 1952), born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel, was a French surrealist poet and leftist activist. He was active in the French Resistance movement during World War II and wrote his most famous poem “Liberté,” as a message of motivation for Nazi-occupied France at the time. The poem is included in his clandestine collection of poems, Poésie et Vérité.
about the translator
Elias Ziyadeh is a candidate for a BA in Chemistry and Mathematical Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, and he serves as a staff editor at DoubleSpeak. Originally from Beirut, Lebanon, he grew up speaking the three languages of Beirut: English, Arabic, and French. He enjoys watching this linguistic intersection and evolution as they shape the new Lebanese generation which, through political, economic, and security crises, is increasingly forced to grow roots outside of its ancestral homeland, in search of a better life.
