It happens when I forget to be on guard. It happens all the time. This is the poem I asked the French teenagers to translate well, only the first stanza β we only had an hour. The usual catcalling and groping sort of business. How do you translate that into French? The problem is the hiatus a hiatus is what happens when you have to force a break between two similar-sounding vowels : Ca-arrive.
Full disclosure, this is the one I picked for my own translation, too. The effect was funny: the stanza becomes a bit of a riddle, to be solved in the very last line. More suspense, but less emphasis on the relentlessness of the harassment. It is perhaps the closest to the source text in both meaning and effect.
I had considered it and am still considering it for my translation. Complete change of focus all of a sudden: the perpetrators are at the very beginning of the line, of each line. Before you ask, the table who came up with this solution was composed exclusively of boys.
All three solutions are acceptable, and all commit the translator differently. Those little decisional acts we perform on a text we translate are what makes a translation a literary practice, and a practice through which words have an effect on the world.
Each of those three poems would have a different effect on the world, because they each focalise our attention differently. Five years later, in theory, the former would gain the nationality of the latter, and thus get back their European citizenship. The only condition, however, is to Not Fall In Love. In practice, this is difficult. Aside from Justine, the main characters include an innocent and romantic French girl, her grumpy Marxist-Leninist singing teacher, a young lord β and son of the leader of UKIP β and a beautiful British-American lawyer.
