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  • Wallace Stevens’s Modernist Melodies
  • Bart Eeckhout

Words are the only melodeon.

—Wallace Stevens, “Adagia”1

In an essay on the joys and frustrations of translating Wallace Stevens, the award-winning Italian translator Massimo Bacigalupo points to a study by Tim Parks entitled Translating Style. Following Parks, Bacigalupo claims that “a translation is an excellent signpost towards whatever in a text deviates from standard language, because the translator will probably be forced to normalize the original so as not to be accused of falling into ‘translatorese.’ And it is precisely the points within a text that deviate from linguistic standards and norms that reveal a writer’s peculiarity.”2 Parks offers the striking anecdote that “students, when shown parallel texts in two languages and asked to identify the original and the translation, almost invariably decide that the translation is the original, of which the original (they conclude) is a poor translation.”3

To put this principle to the test, let us consider for a moment the opening stanza of a famous late poem by Wallace Stevens, first in Italian:

Cadute le foglie, torniamo Al senso ordinario delle cose. É come se Avessimo esaurito l’immaginazione, Inanimi in un sapere inerte.4

And here are the same lines again, now in French:

Quand les feuilles sont tombées, on revient À un sens ordinaire des choses. C’est comme si On avait atteint la limite de l’imagination, Inanimé dans un savoir inerte.5 [End Page 53]

Finally, this is the English version:

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.6

Certainly, the English variant looks like a very poor translation: not only does it mistranslate “the plain sense of things” in line 2 (the perfectly normal formulation we have in Italian) as “a plain sense of things,” or “the end of the imagination” in line 3 (the straightforwardly idiomatic phrase in French) as “an end of the imagination,” it also and more importantly fabricates a final line that is totally off. Apparently, the English translator could not quite remember the word for “knowledge” and opted out by inserting the French nominalized verb “savoir.” Or maybe this inept translator deluded himself into thinking that “French and English constitute a single language”7? What was he thinking when producing such an awkward line: “Inanimate in an inert savoir”? Can one sound less musical than that?

As a sometime Stevens translator myself, I have become wary of the ways in which his poetry in Italian and French occasionally sounds too good to be true. It does not require a strong knowledge of phonetics to realize that Italian and French are intrinsically more euphonious than English: the singing quality we primarily associate with the notion of melody is built into the phonemic systems of these two languages more than is the case with English, which, despite more than a half-century of globalized pop music, is a language quite unfit for singing. As a result, it is particularly hard for a translator into Italian or French to open the reader’s ears to the peculiar melody Stevens composed in the first quatrain of “The Plain Sense of Things.” What are we to make of this kind of melody?

To ask the question of melody about Stevens’s poem is not as artificial as it may seem at first sight. Stevens’s favorite Shakespeare sonnet opens with the famous quatrain:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.8

In these lines, Shakespeare gives us a traditional poetic topos—the ineluctability of physical transience—voiced in a melancholy melody that must convey something of the compensatory consolations of poetic creation at a time when the summer birds’ singing appears to have ended. Stevens, at the outset of “The Plain Sense of Things,” takes off from this [End Page 54] melancholy Renaissance melody to stage the condition of an aging modern poet at a time when earlier...

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