#our national obsession with alexandrine metre

[hedgehog-moss]

It’s always funny when anglo writers looking to express a specific idea casually pluck a cool ready-made monosyllabic phrase from their language’s unlimited supply and Romance language translators just curl up in the fœtal position and cry. I'm reading a text in which the American author talks about ‘Haves’ vs ‘Have-Nots’ vs ‘Have-Mosts’ —the poor French translator translated this as ‘ceux-qui-ont’ (the French language: don’t worry I’m just getting warmed up), ‘ceux-qui-n’ont-pas’ (nice we’ve doubled the syllable count but we mustn’t falter), and the beautiful ‘ceux-qui-ont-plus-que-tous-les-autres’ (300% expansion ratio let’s gooo! we did it great work everybody.) From 2 to 8 syllables—the minute I saw that bulky thing I knew it had to be Have-Mosts in the original and I was giggling. The anglo author happily proceeds to use the phrase ‘Have-Mosts’ 5 times per paragraph because why not! it’s so quick and wieldy :) we don’t actually need the word wieldy 'cause it’s just the normal state of our language <3 meanwhile you can feel the French translator’s desperation grow as she is reduced to juggling with “those” and “the latter” to avoid summoning her creature. Eventually she reaches the acceptance stage and uses ceux-qui-ont-plus-que-tous-les-autres again like, it’s my monster. I shouldn’t reject it

#language tag #and when anglo authors use a somewhat long and clunky phrase french translators are like no that's our thing? #they're trying to steal our thing. we have no choice but to make the phrase even longer and clunkier. perfidious albion mustn't win this #like how He Who Must Not Be Named went from 6 to 12 syllables in the french HP translation (RIP voice actors who had to dub it) #even though there were shorter options? but i suspect the translator picked the 12 syllable one due to #our national obsession with alexandrine metre

[hedgehog-moss]

You are my hero for using the phrase 'perfidious Albion' in your tags. What is the French obsession with Alexandrine meter?

:) Well it's just that for a very long time France considered the 12-syllable verse known as the alexandrine to be the pinnacle of versification. For your poetry or play to be considered high literature it had to be in alexandrines (I was recently reading an English jstor article about translations of Shakespeare in the early 19th century and it went “[French translator] prefers to translate in verse, which means, of course, in alexandrines.” Of course!) We've moved on now and they’re out of style, but we’re still secretly fond of them I think. We were held hostage by alexandrines for so long a lot of French people still have a Stockholm-syndrome preference for their specific flow over other kinds of poetic metre.

They left a strong legacy in our language too—a lot of French sayings / proverbs are alexandrine verses because they’re excerpts from classical theatre and poetry (e.g. “A vaincre sans péril on triomphe sans gloire” from Corneille; “La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure” from La Fontaine; “Qui veut voyager loin ménage sa monture” from Racine; “Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop” from Destouches, “Vingt fois sur le métier remettez votre ouvrage” from Boileau...)

The alexandrine had a long golden age, from the Classicists to the Parnassians (mid-17th to late 19th century)—the Romantics in between were advocating for a kind of “free verse” but it still meant alexandrines and pretty rigid ones at that! (Victor Hugo’s “J’ai disloqué ce grand niais d’alexandrin” was subversive—but it’s still an alexandrine.) Their verse was only considered rebellious because it ignored some of the many rules that went into a perfect classical alexandrine (e.g. no overflow, 4 rests per line, rhyme purity must be respected when it comes to mute consonants, no liaison between the last word of an alexandrine and the first word of the next, the hemistiches of two successive alexandrines mustn’t rhyme, no prepositions or other tool words at the end of a hemistich, etc. etc.)

Then in the 19th century we liberated ourselves from the tyranny of the alexandrine after Verlaine shot them dead (insert Rimbaud joke) by doing things like placing the caesura on the 3rd syllable of a 5-syllable word (“WTF”—Racine) or ending an alexandrine in the middle of a word and treating the first half of the truncated word like a legit rhyme, which made all the Classicists roll over in their grave.

I really like alexandrines personally! I admit they can sound plodding after a while especially with classical rhymes, but they have such a soothing flow. I also love that they are often French at its Frenchest. By which I mean, there are some gorgeous alexandrines that are genuinely the French language at its best and most graceful, and then you have those that can’t help but highlight how absurd our syntax can get.

My favourite types of alexandrines are the ones with a diaeresis in each hemistich because saying them normally feels like walking down the street, while saying them as an alexandrine feels like doing a figure skating routine (e.g. in Racine, “La nation chérie a violé sa foi”); the ones with an AB-BA structure (“Et le fuyant sans cesse incessamment le suit”), the ones with a ternary structure (“Je suis le ténébreux, le veuf, l’inconsolé”, “Je renonce à la Grèce, à Sparte, à ton empire”) and the ones where 1 word sprawls over an entire hemistich (“Voluptueusement dans cette paix profonde...”).

The worst alexandrines imo are the ones that force you to acknowledge how many tiny grammatical bricks are involved in the building of a French sentence. Orally we tend to squish them together so we can forget about them but the merciless alexandrine will demand that you mortify yourself pronouncing all of them, e.g. “O nuit, qu’est-ce que c’est que ces guerriers livides ?” (thank you Victor Hugo for this ignominy) (<- here’s an alexandrine), or “Si ce que je te dis ne se dit pas ainsi”... “Ce que je te (...) ne se” is a horrible succession of words by poetical standards but wait I’ve got worse!

Tu m’as pris mon trésor et t’étonnes tout bas De ce que je ne te le redemande pas

“De ce que je ne te le”—see? French at its Frenchest.

#ask #language tag #(french speakers tell me your favourite alexandrine if you have one!) #ce dernier couplet provient d'un livre sur la poésie de hugo qui m'a surtout marquée parce qu'à un moment #l'auteur consacre plusieurs pages à citer des vers dont le contenu terre à terre contraste ridiculement avec #la grandiloquence inévitable de l'alexandrin #et c'est vrai que certains sonnaient plus comme une réplique de trissotin qu'un vers de la légende des siècles #mais quand même t'écris un bouquin sur victor hugo et tu décides de passer 20 pages à lui mettre la honte