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24 The Linguist Vol/57 No/5 2018 ciol.org.uk/tl FEATURES constraints are far less amenable to a rigid analysis of the type that works well with primary constraints. This leaves them fundamentally more open to, and in need of, interpretation. For example, one can easily say whether a poem has a rhyming pattern, but it is far more difficult to decide on the semantic difference between a verbal reflexive clause such as 'to amuse themselves' and the nominal clause 'as an amusement'. Once again, this builds in an interpretative element even before the translation is undertaken. Baudelaire's splitting of the complement clauses between lines two and three – vastes oiseaux des mers and indolent compagnons de voyage – with the interpolation of qui suivent ('who follow'), is slightly unnatural in French. It is possible to match this secondary constraint in an English translation, such as 'great birds of the breeze/ Who follow, lazy companions of the trip', but Condor does not even include complementary clauses in his translation, choosing to refer to what the albatross does rather than what it is: "who on the breeze/ Doth idly sail". The archaic word 'doth' may represent an attempt to match the poetic licence in the original, yet the use of an archaic word is clearly of a different linguistic order to the use of non-standard syntax. How can one compare them in terms of degrees of poetic licence? The answer is a matter of interpretation. Andreas Gryphius's Threnen des Vatterlandes (1636) presents the translator with a different set of difficulties. The poignant poem was written at the height of the Thirty Years' War. Its formal properties include a complex rhyming pattern and an equally intricate pattern of stresses per line. The original language diverges quite markedly from modern German in terms of vocabulary and orthography, and while translator George C Schoolfield manages to honour many of the primary constraints, he makes a decision about how to manage the 17th-century language. He could have decided that, as a modern German could only read this poem in full consciousness of the quaintness of its turn of phrase, any accurate translation ought to have the same effect on a modern English reader. The interpretative decision that he made, however, was to replicate the reception experience as it was at the time of its conception, and therefore to write the translation in modern English. Such linguistic considerations can be complicated by the use of dialect. A deliberate use of dialect needs to be assessed. How far is the dialect removed from the standard or current dominant dialect of the source language? Was this degree of difference necessarily the case at the time of writing? What might constitute an equivalent use of dialect in the target language? The use of dialect touches directly on linguistic, social and political considerations. For example, the poet may POETIC LICENCE Portrait of Charles Baudelaire, painted by Gustave Courbet in 1848, nine years before his poem 'L'Albatros' was published in the volume Les Fleurs du mal