Ishween Mehta
Sameera Mehta
22 mars 2019
Translation Studies
Take a poem and its translation: explain how the translation
has been done and comment on the quality of said translation.
Source text- Sonnet 43
How do I love thee? Let me count the
ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and
height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of
sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from
praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s
faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the
breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God
choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Browning’s poem is ideally a Petrarchan sonnet with an octet and a sestet, a rhyming scheme
Target Text
Comment t’aimé-je? Enumérons-en les
manières.
Je t'aime au plus profond, plus haut, plus
étendu
Que mon âme puisse atteindre, en étant hors
de vue,
Toute émue par la grâce, quand prend fin
l'univers.
Je t'aime à l'instar d'un besoin qui m'est cher,
Ressenti nuit et jour, au fil du quotidien,
Je t'aime librement, tel le souverain bien,
Je t'aime purement, comme après la prière.
Je t'aime avec la passion mise à endurer
Les peines et la foi d'un âge révolu.
Je t'aime d'un amour qui semblait disparu
Avec mes saints perdus. Sourire et pleurer,
Respirer dans ma vie, tel en est le décor.
Si Dieu veut, je t'aimerai mieux après ma
mort.
French translation by Raouf Hajji.
Copyright © 2005 Raouf Hajji.
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which has been quite brilliantly preserved by Hajji with one exception. While the rhyming
scheme of the octet remains the same, he has taken a certain amount of liberty with the sestet
where the scheme, which in Browning’s version is abacdc, has been replaced by abbcdd.
This translation of the poem is interlingual, from the Source Language English to the Target
Language- French. It is also a literary translation, as we’ll see that the translator has
attempted to reserve the artistic qualities of Browning’s poem.
The Process of Translation
The process of translation ideally involves three fundamental steps:
1) Analysis of the Source Language text to decode it. Here, the translator would act as the
reader.
2) Transfer for the Source Language text to the target language text without losing the
integrity of the translation. Here, the translator’s competency of being bilingual is the one
that’s being tested.
3) Restructuring of the Source Language text to the target language text where the author
attempts to make target language more meaningful. Here, the Translator acts as an
author1.
Discrepancies in the SL text and the TL text:-
1) “Comment t’aimé-je”
Ideally, it should be “comment je t’aime”? Which would then be translated as How do I
love thee? Or if we take the grammatical meaning How do I thee love.
But with the usage of “aimé” which is the past participle of the verb- to love: aimer, it
translates to “How I loved thee”. In fact, the translator here has taken a certain amount of
liberty in not adding the auxiliary verb either so that the rhythm of the poem is
maintained. Grammatically, the sentence could have been comment t’ai je aimé or
comment je t’ai aimé. (both mean: How did I love thee? ). But none of those sentences
have five syllables, which is a characteristic of the author’s temporally chaotic version
“comment t’aimé je”. Therefore, in the transference of this phrase from the SL to TL, the
translator chose to carry over the communicative value and communicate the idea of
the rhetorical question rather than to analyse it grammatically.
I speculated that it was an effort to maintain the iambic pentameter of the poem, which is
quite appreciated.
2) Enumérons-en les manières.
When browning says, ‘Let me count the ways’, she uses first person singular imperative
mood (which is used to request or command something). However, in the TL, the first
person plural form has been used as in the French language- it is impossible to form a
grammatically sound sentence in the imperative, as it is an entirely different tense in the
language and has a specific set of conjugations which are only possible with second

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 person singular, first person plural and second person plural. Therefore in such a case,
only communicative translation was possible as the retention of the source language
meaning and form of the verb ‘let me’ wasn’t entirely possible. Instead of ‘let me’ in this
case, it became ‘Let us count/enumerate the ways’. Besides, the analysis of the text had to
be connotative other than grammatical, as it would have been impossible to maintain
syntax due to the discrepancies in the two languages.
3) “Je t'aime au plus profond, plus haut, plus étendu
Que mon âme puisse atteindre”
The author analysed the connotative meaning of this, as Browning meant to express the
intensity of her love. If we backtranslate it however, it would become ‘I love you to the
deepest, highest, most extended (place) that my soul can reach’ . But the addition of the
word place was what I found a little bizarre about this translation.
I would have translated it as ‘Je t’aime jusqu’à le profounder, le hauteur et le largeur que
mon âme puisse atteindre’
Here, I have nominalised “deepest”, “highest” and “most extended” and attempted a
semantic translation vis-à-vis the communicative one that the author did.
4) “Toute émue par la grâce, quand prend fin l’univers”
Meaning: when all is moved by grace, when the universe ends.
In Browning’s poem, the lines corresponding to this are, “For the ends of being and ideal
grace”, which signifies that her soul can reach beyond natural life and man made
theology. Here, ‘being’ is translated to the ‘end of the universe’ but the end of (god’s
grace) has a rather ambiguous translation. In fact, the phrase ‘toute émue par la grâce’
does contain an aspect of equivalence to it, which is to say due to the the similar socio-
cultural, socio-religious background that English and French come from , the biblical
reference of grace being absolution or being connected to God is retained. In fact, in
French the relation between the soul and all is clearer than the relation in SL text. In TL
“all” has different translation for masculine and feminine objects. Because the soul
(l’âme) is feminine, and the the word ‘toute’ is used instead of the masculine ‘tout’, we
can easily decipher that it points towards the soul.
5) Je t'aime librement, tel le souverain-bien
Meaning: I love you freely, such as the Summum Bonum
This one line was rather profound in its translation and had a socio-cultural meaning
rather than a referential meaning. Browning in the corresponding lines,
“I love thee freely, as men strive for right”
Says that her love is conditional and therefore free as it is a force of good.
In the TL, “Le souverain bien” is the French version of the Latin principle of Summum
Bonum, which is the principle of goodness. In France, a lot of importance is given,
culturally to the branch of philosophy and almost every latin phrase has a French

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 equivalent which does form a part of the collective lexical knowledge.Therefore, the
translation done here is communicative, as the force of good, something that man strive
for has been directly referred to as the principle of good or Summum Bonum.
Conclusion: Due to the retention of artistic touch in the poem and the liberties exercised by
the translator in his attempts to convey the feeling of the poem, rather than the semantic
meaning of it, which leads us to the conclusion that it is a communicative translation where
the TL is prioritised over the preservation of SL meanings.

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1SILVEIRA BRISOLARA, VALÉRIA, The translator as an Author. Nonada: Letras em Revista [en
linea] 2011, 1 (Mayo-Septiembre) : [Fecha de consulta: 9 de abril de 2019] Disponible en:<http://
www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=512451674008> ISSN