Volume 14, No. 2 
April 2010

 
  Robert Paquin

 
 

Front Page

 
 
Select one of the previous 51 issues.

 
Index 1997-2010

 
TJ Interactive: Translation Journal Blog

 
  Translator Profiles
A Professional (and Geographic) Journey
by Frieda Ruppaner-Lind

 
  The Profession
The Bottom Line
by Fire Ant & Worker Bee
 
The Translator and his Client: Factoring external determinations into the translational activity
by Dr. Iheanacho A. Akakuru
 
Crowdsourcing
by Danilo Nogueira and Kelli Semolini

 
  In Memoriam
In Memoriam: Josephine Thornton, 1937 - 2010
by Karen Brovey

 
  Translators Around the World
The Efforts of Translators in the Wake of the Haitian Earthquake
by Michael Walker

 
  Nuts and Bolts of Translation
English and Spanish 'Love' Collocations: A Historical Evolution
by Nuria Calvo Cortés and Elena Domínguez Romero

 
  Medical Translation
It doesn't go up, Doc? A stent may be the answer!
by Rafael A. Rivera, M.D., FACP
 
Handling Abbreviations and Acronyms in Medical Translation
by Małgorzata Kasprowicz
 
English-Spanish and Spanish-English Glossary of Ophthalmological Terms
by Concepción Mira Rueda

 
  Book Reviews
The Untold Sixties—When hope was born: an Insider's Sixties on an International Scale
by Alex Gross, reviewed by Gabe Bokor
 
Iain Halliday: Huck Finn in Italian, Pinocchio in English: Theory and Praxis of Literary Translation
Reviewed by Anne Milano Appel, Ph.D.
 
La Fontaine's Bawdy—of Libertines, Louts, and Lechers, translations from Contes et nouvelles en vers by Norman R. Shapiro
Reviewed by Robert Paquin, Ph.D.

 
  Arts & Entertainment
The Role of Trans-modal Translation in Global Cinema
by D. Bannon

 
  Translators' Education
The Importance of Collocation in Vocabulary Teaching and Learning
by Zahra Sadeghi

 
Translators and Computers
Consider the Luddites
by Jost Zetzsche

 
Translators' Tools
Translators’ Emporium

 
  Caught in the Web
Web Surfing for Fun and Profit
by Cathy Flick, Ph.D.
 
Translators’ On-Line Resources
by Gabe Bokor
 
Translators’ Best Websites
by Gabe Bokor

 
Call for Papers and Editorial Policies
  Translation Journal


Book Review
 
 

La Fontaine's Bawdy—of Libertines, Louts, and Lechers,

translations from Contes et nouvelles en vers by Norman R. Shapiro

Reviewed by Robert Paquin, Ph.D.


La Fontaine's Bawdy of Libertines, Louts, and Lechers— translations from Contes et nouvelles en vers by Norman R. Shapiro
Publisher: Boston: Black Widow Press
ISBN-13: 978-0-9818088-1-9
ISBN-10: 0-9818088-16
Number of pages: 305
Type of binding: Paperback
Price: $21.95


m a dirty old man. I've been a dirty old man since I was 12 or 13 years old. You don't need to be old to be a dirty old man. You don't even need to be a man. I know a few respectable ladies who could qualify. It's a question of mind and attitude. Being a dirty old man doesn't necessarily mean being a pervert. At least not in my understanding and use of the expression. It means being able to see the funny side of certain sex situations, a play on words, a double-entendre. A dirty old man is not necessarily vulgar in speech or manners. Witness La Fontaine.

Not a single four-letter word, other than "love" in this translation of stories that deal with sex and smut.
The key words in La Fontaine's title are "en vers." The stories may be bawdy, but they are so elegantly narrated in verse, that one puts aside conventional morality to enjoy the tale and the wit of the characters as well as the narrator's. "Ah! qu'en termes galants ces choses-là sont mises!" exclaims one of Molière's characters in Le Misanthrope. When a story is well told, in rhymes, with humour, the reader is led to drop the usual defences that an educated intellectual person might raise against coarseness and vulgarity. And once again, Norman Shapiro's translation of La Fontaine does not disappoint. Not a single four-letter word, other than "love" in this translation of stories that deal with sex and smut, adultery, fornication, members of the clergy indulging in sexual acts, and other taboos of the Jansenist era, those French Puritans of the 17th century. I was brought up in a Jansenist-inspired culture. I know.

What liberation when I discovered Rabelais and his gutsy stories of giants with erections so tall you could attach a sheet to them and use them as sails to power a boat. And what pleasure to discover that poets I'd read and learned to admire, like Verlaine, Apollinaire, or even the sacred Jean de La Fontaine, author of the celebrated fables, had also written verse that the good fathers in the private school I was attending would not let us read.

Most if not all of the stories in La Fontaine's Contes et nouvelles en vers are borrowed from somewhere else: Boccacio's Decameron or Petronius's Satyricon or some such tale going back to the Middle Ages. As far as I know, La Fontaine did not make use of Chaucer's bawdy stories, but he could have. Norman Shapiro's poetic translations in a sense re-translates in English what La Fontaine had translated into verse. Both their minds work in the same fashion. La Fontaine makes the stories even more amusing to read by giving them a poetic form that is usually associated with elevated feelings, thus creating a rich ironic contrast. And Shapiro takes this one step further by putting this verse in another language and allowing English readers the iconoclastic pleasure of smashing literary idols. No respect for the classics. We dirty old men can't be trusted.