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  • Letter to the Reviews Editor
  • Davy Pernet

Dear Sir,

In his recent review of my French translations of Manfred, The Prisoner of Chillon and The Lament of Tasso in the last issue of The Byron Journal, Gilles Soubigou makes a number of critical claims that I should like briefly to address. To begin, Dr Soubigou questions my adherence to the principle of 'formal equivalence'. Might I have the opportunity of explaining to readers of your journal my reasons for translating Byron's poetry in this manner? The most important of these was the thought that it would be useful to provide French readers with a translation repeating, in another language, what Byron really wrote. This is probably why it sometimes looks like 'word-for-word', though it is not: each word is carefully rendered, but the sentences are good and solid French. The quality that I claim for my translations is precisely the reason I did not use Benjamin Laroche's version, which is copyright free. Though it is not the worst, Laroche's translation lacks precision, tending to a Voltarian phraseology which is not Byronic at all. Furthermore, it tends in my view to deaden the verse, systematically destroying images and unique qualities of expression. I thought Byron deserved better.

Apart from questions of translation, I think it would have been fair of Dr Soubigou to recognise what is innovative in the books he reviewed. Firstly, my editions include a lot of material that has never been translated before: forgotten lines in the Prisoner and Manfred; the first draft of Act III of Manfred; letters of Byron, Shelley and others, together with extracts from studies by many Byronists past and present. Secondly, I present a substantial amount of new contextual information, including historical and technical information concerning Bonivard and the castle of Chillon, possible intertextual links with works by Schiller and Senancour, and a discussion of allusions to sacred texts from Christian and non-Christian traditions.

Dr Soubigou writes that in my notes to the poems I privilege 'esoteric parallels' over more conventional references. This again is unfair. In the case of the Bible, for example, I mention eleven allusions to the Scriptures, most of them with the full quotations.

There are also some factual errors in Dr Soubigou's review that I should like to correct if possible. Contrary to what is asserted by the reviewer, the word 'hurricane' can be found in French dictionaries such as the Trésor de la langue française or the Larousse. I had no reason to use another. The choice of rendering 'mind' as mental is philosophically justified in a foreword and ought not to be cited as an example of mistranslation.

Byron is a real passion to me. With the books reviewed by Dr Soubigou in the last Byron Journal, as well as more to come, I seek to change the way the poet is considered in France. I am working freely, but carefully and conscientiously. I hope that, as it develops, this project will win the support of those others in France to whom Byron is important.

Yours faithfully,

Davy Pernet [End Page 170]

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