William Shakespeare. Born 1564 in…
You know what?
I am tired of filming against an amateur-hour lockdown green-screen
in a tiny, boxy, echoey room.
So for the first time,
let's take the Language Files on the road.
"Go on location, Tom, it'll look spectacular."
Yeah, maybe it will, but it's also about two degrees above freezing,
and I'm being pestered occasionally by some surprisingly aggressive swans.
Anyway! Shakespeare.
Born in 1564 here in Stratford-Upon-Avon.
Shakespeare’s plays and poetry have a certain rhythm and feeling to them.
A French-speaking poet could not have written something that sounds like Shakespeare.
Because the language you speak
affects the poetry and verse that it’s possible for you to write.
Let’s start with English.
English has what’s called “lexical stress”.
There’s a difference in how we say the noun “a CON-test”
versus the verb, “to con-TEST”.
Stressed syllables are part of speech and poetic writing in English,
and if you put the stress on the wrong syl-LAB-le, it sounds ridi-CU-lous.
...this is not going to be one continuous take.
There’s a lot of really difficult things for me to perform in the script.
So there's going to be jump cuts.
Anyway. English also has “prosodic stress”, which is the difference between:
_I_ want that
I _want_ that
and I want _that_,
which are all different interpretations of the same three words.
I’m not talking about that kind of stress here:
I’m talking about lexical stress,
the stress that’s built into the words that we use.
Stress isn’t normally something you have to consider too much while writing,
but in English poetry where meter and timing matter,
you have to be very careful with it.
But I figured Shakespeare would be quite a dull demonstration to start with,
so instead, how about a less highbrow bit of poetry, like a limerick.
Not that Shakespeare was originally just highbrow, but that’s a whole separate issue.
Limericks.
"There once was a man from…"
Well, from where? In increasing order of rudeness,
he might be from Leeds,
or Madras,
or Nantucket.
But the number of syllables in those names doesn’t matter:
you just make sure that the one stressed syllable
is in the right place and they all sound fine.
But you can’t have: “there once was a man from Washington”.
It doesn’t quite sound right.
The lexical stress is a little bit early.
And you can’t move that stress later, because it sounds worse to say
“There once was a man from Wa-SHING-ton”.
No, the lexical stress is wrong.
For a limerick, the LEXical STRESS has to LAND on the BEAT.
Now, there is a solution:
“There once was a man… from Washington”,
but it’s a little bit clunky.
There’s a pause in there.
Compare that to French, which doesn’t have lexical stress.
Just to be clear, French speakers do still stress words to emphasise them,
they use prosodic stress, but that’s it.
In French, by default, stress lands on the last syllable of an utterance.
So, and this is going to be really difficult to perform,
I’m not going to attempt a ridiculous comedy French accent here,
but, if you experi-MENT,
you’ll find you sound much more FRENCH
when you empha-SISE only the last sylla-BLE.
I think I got that.
Anyway, that means you cannot have a limerick in French.
The FEEling and SOUND of a LIMerick reLIES on the LEXical STRESS,
and that doesn’t exist in French.
So why does Shakespeare sound like Shakespeare?
Well, because: “iAMbic” AND “pentameter”.
Two words that make a fancy way to say:
Stress every other syllable, in pairs,
with five such pairs in every line you write.
And that was Shakespeare’s style. Well, usually.
He didn’t stick to that for every line.
And if you want to sound like him, that’s how.
“If MU-sic BE the FOOD of LOVE, play ON.”
The reason Shakespeare sounds like Shakespeare is:
he wrote in rhythm, mostly.
Which is nice.
But if you’re translating that to French, well,
French can’t do that.
Yes, there are all sorts of exceptions for poetic reasons,
the same as English can break its own rules sometimes, but in gener-AL:
French stress SITS at the end of the utter-ANCE.
You can translate Romeo and Juliet’s words and sentences and meanings into French, sure...
but it won’t sound like Shakespeare.
It can’t sound like Shakespeare.
So instead, some translators use an equivalent French form: the alexandrine.
Twelve syllables per line, broken into two parts.
And it should also rhyme. Stress the end of each half.
This is why poetry in translation often doesn’t sound right, or even poetic:
because you need to translate not just the words,
but the style and the stress patterns as well.
Yes, you can adapt the style, play with it a bit,
English does have an alexandrine form,
but it doesn’t work in quite the same way as the original French.
And French does not work in iambic pentameter.
Are there French poets with the same skills of wordplay and drama that Shakespeare had?
Of course. But they could NE-ver sound like Will.
There’s more about translating texts, including Old English becoming very modern English,
in my co-author Gretchen McCulloch’s podcast Lingthusiasm.
There’s a link on screen or in the description.