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Vol/53 No/5 2014 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER The Linguist 13 LANGUAGES AT WAR balloon' sounds like a toy and 'spy balloon' like journalese. Here is a possible translation: … Why are you there, among the trees? Why there, behind their lines? Have they made you prisoner and got you on a tether, like a great balloon dangling a man? The menacing quality of dracken is lost. Consequently, 'tether' is preferred to 'lead' because it reinforces the prisoner image and connotes the 'captive' in 'captive balloon'. 'Great' is preferred to 'fat', to suggest something excessive, slightly freakish. 'Dangling a man', the moon is a more formidable female than in the source text (ST), but this restores something of the sinister threat and accords with the rest of the poem, where she mocks the lovelorn soldier-Pierrots' devotion and anxiety. 'Dangling a spy' would be clearer but spies are, by definition, behind our lines not the enemy's. The element of threat is also partly restored by rendering derrière le bois as 'among the trees', and dans les lignes as 'behind their lines' – a furtive presence, watching from behind enemy lines. So the alien menace of dracken is lost as such, but the unsettling paradox of a threatening prisoner is preserved by other means. There is a similar functional exoticism in Jean Cocteau's 'Roland Garros', a fragmentary, telegraphic poem, full of exotic images, mostly from the Americas. Suddenly, there is a short intrusion of prose, taken from a letter from Garros to Cocteau: Mon cher Jean, J'ai tué un Taube. Quel cauchemar! Je n'oublierai jamais leur chute. Ils ont pris feu à mille mètres. J'ai vu leurs corps saignants, terribles. In 1918, French readers knew that a Taube ('dove') was a German warplane. The grim irony in the name is obvious. It is tempting to leave the German word in the target text (TT), as part of the exoticism. But few today will know what it means, even when they have worked out that it refers to a plane. 'I've killed a dove' is initially puzzling in a way that the ST is not. My provisional rendering is: 'I've shot down a Dove'. This loses the brutal immediacy of slaying the bird of peace, but the relatively technical 'shot down' and the upper-case 'D' make it immediately clear that what has been downed is an enemy plane. A further reason for substituting 'Dove' for Taube is that one of the Latin American allusions is to the song Ma Paloma. Contemporary social and political allusions are as potentially tricky as in any poetry. Take Marc de Larreguy's blistering 'L'épître au perroquet'. Here is the first half of the poem: As-tu lu le journal, Jacko, mon vieux Jacko? Il me semble aujourd'hui t'entendre qui jacasse – De la façon la plus cocasse – Tous les « en-tête » rococos De la gazette de l'Echo: « Crr… Crr… on les aurra… Crr… Rrr… Victoire prroche…» Et tu rêves que tu bamboches Avec quelques tripes de Boches! Te voici donc l'«alter ego» De ton grand maître, l'Hidalgo, (Toujours «sans peur et sans reproche ») Qui – « loin de l'œil des Wisigoths » – Ecrit, pour tous les bons gogos, Au nom de Maurice… Baudoche! Rhyme, alliteration and assonance are grotesquely conspicuous. This phonic intensity mocks the parrot – the warmonger journalist – and emphasises the scornful anger of the monkey – the poilu in the trenches, outraged at the moral ugliness of the war. The translator can be relatively uninhibited in engineering similarly grotesque phonic effects in the TT. And this is the most effective way of compensating for the loss of the many telling allusions – to stock slogans of the time (On les aura, Nous les tenons); to the legendary 16th-century knight Bayard (the chevalier 'sans peur et sans reproche'); and to the writer and journalist Maurice Barrès, armchair general of L'Echo de Paris, and the revanchist Colette Baudoche, venerator of the sacred dead in the soil of France and admirer of the violence in Spanish culture. These allusions will certainly be lost on British readers but they will have been crucial to the effect of the poem, which speaks for countless poilus with its sarcastic onslaught on the bloodthirsty civilians, safe in Paris. The translation compensates by reinforcing the obtrusive phonic effects and introducing a few violations of normal usage to convey an equally aggressive scorn: Have you read the paper, little Jacko? I seem to hear you jabbering away – In the comicallest way – With all the military rococo Of the headlines of the Echo: 'Crrr… Over by Chrrristmas… The Hun must pay…' And planning orgies of brioches With flour milled from bones of Boches! So there you are, in parrotry Mirror to your Matamore (E'er the Captain of necrolatry) Who, far from eye of Goth and Thor, For simpleton lays down the law, And signs the column Monsieur Braggartry! This phonic intensity emphasises the scorn of the poilu in the trenches outraged at the moral ugliness of war ILLUSTRATING WAR (Clockwise from main image): French troops defend a cathedral near the Marne in 1918; a US observation balloon; and a German prisoner helps wounded British soldiers during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, taken by military photographer Ernest Brooks