Persinette

by Laura Christensen

  • For more information on the sixteenth-century French Wars of Religion, read

  http://www.museeprotestant.org/en/notice/the-eight-wars-of-religion-1562-1598/. To learn more about the Edict of Nantes’ revocation and its consequences a century later, see http://www.museeprotestant.org/en/parcours/la-revocation-de-ledit-de-nantes-et-ses-consequences/.

  • And of course, Wikipedia is always a good starting point for obscure information: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte-Rose_de_Caumont_La_Force; http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Nompar_de_Caumont.

  Translator’s Note

  One of my favorite parts about reading translated novels is when the publisher includes a translator’s note and I get to take a gander at the translator’s process and journey. So I hope this peek behind the curtain will be as interesting for you as it is for me.

  First, let me lay out a few of my tools for you to see.

  I am no stranger to seventeenth century French literature. My final undergraduate years were spent soaking up Molière, Corneille, Racine, and their contemporaries, and I have been unable to extricate myself from that century’s culture since. So if you want to know what tools I used most as I approached my translation of “Persinette,” know that I come from a background of seventeenth century arts, plays, and literature, and I completed four major translation projects previously during my undergrad years.

  If experience with the language and culture of a piece comes first, a good set of dictionaries comes second. Dictionaries, you see, are a translator’s best friend. You would be surprised by how many words I had to look up and mull over. Emily Balistrieri, a Japanese-to-English translator friend of mine recently remarked on Twitter how translation is the art of looking up words you already know. I couldn’t agree more. A single word can have a multitude of meanings depending on the word’s context, whether or not it’s taken literally or figuratively, or if it’s part of an idiom. Not to mention, meanings have a tendency to change over time and this piece dates from the seventeenth century.

  So my particular best friend is the University of Chicago’s ARTFL Dictionnaires d’autrefois, which is a database of dictionaries from 1606 onwards that anyone can use for free at http://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/node/17 . I love this set of dictionaries, not only for their usefulness in looking up terms, but also because they provide a wide range of idioms, usages, and contexts for each word, both in French and in Latin.

  I also used my copy of Le Robert micro, a thorough modern monolingual dictionary, when the ARTFL Dictionnaires d’autrefois weren’t enough to give me all the context and nuance I needed. As for the surprisingly frequent occasions when I had trouble thinking of a satisfying word in English, I turned to Dictionary.com’s thesaurus. And of course, where would we be without Google, the all-purpose modern Internet search engine? My translation predecessors are shaking their fists at me from their graves, but how else was I to quickly learn how many yards were in “30 aunes” (one aune approximately equals the old measurement ell) or that jonc marin’s international botanical name is armeria maritima which translates to “sea thrift”?

  Now, enough about the tools of my trade. Let’s take a peek at process.

  The biggest translation difficulty and decision I faced was what to do about Persinette’s name. Persinette is named after the herb her mother craves, or parsley. In English, the words “Persinette” and “parsley” do not look at all alike. You wouldn’t know where her name comes from unless I told you. But to a French reader it is much more obvious that Persinette comes from persil.

  When Persinette was first translated into German in 1790 by Friederich Schulz, he decided to switch parsley to rampion so her name would make sense to his audience. The German word for rampion is rapunzeln, so naming her Rapunzel works well. Readers can clearly see where her name comes from. Then when the Grimm brothers heard the tale and made it their own in 1812, they used the rapunzeln/Rapunzel combination again. Unfortunately for us, most Rapunzel translations into English leave the herb as “rapunzel” without any explanation as to what it is, and all of them keep her name as Rapunzel. Since this mysterious “rapunzel” plant does not exist in English, it must only exist in the witch’s garden; the homegrown quality of parsley and rampion is lost in translation.

  To compensate for this unintentional exoticism, I experimented with all sorts of solutions. I tried a parsley/Parslinette combination and other names along that vein, but each of these attempts made me cringe. I tried following German footsteps by changing parsley to another common kitchen herb that could easily be used as a girl’s name, like sage, but none of these felt right, either. I still wanted Persinette to be recognizable in her historical context, sandwiched between Petrosinella and Rapunzel. I wanted anyone searching for a translation of Persinette’s story to find her. She is already hidden in obscurity; I didn’t want to further bury her story.

  Finally, I hit on the solution that I like best. I kept both parsley and Persinette, only I added a link between them with a phrase of my own, represented here in italics:

  “… whom the Fairy gave the name Persinette, after the parsley her mother had craved.”

  You may gasp, surprised and outraged, that a translator might add something to the story that wasn’t there in the original, but here I should say that it happens more often than you might think. Later, when I talk more about Petrosinella and Rapunzel, you will see that not only do translators add things in, sometimes we deliberately leave things out. (Victorian-era translators especially wanted to avoid anything remotely scandalous. Others were more prone to trying to shock “delicate sensibilities” and made some…exaggerations of their own.) Most of the time, however, modern translators make slight changes to the text in order to bridge cultural and language gaps between the original audience and the new. We try to avoid leaving unwieldy footnotes everywhere.

  Otherwise, one of my goals with my translation was to capture the wonder, the beauty, and the combination of the familiar and the strange that’s present in the original. For example, I kept “parsley” to keep it close to home, but I also wanted to underline the strange and wondrous magic employed by the Fairy without the audience glossing over it from overexposure to fairy tale language.

  For example, in the French, Mlle de La Force employs the word charmant quite often. The English word that first springs to mind is “charming,” but “charming” has a quaint connotation, an “oh isn’t that nice” sort of attitude. However, the first time Mlle de La Force refers to anything charmant is when “[the Fairy] conjured a silver Tower in the middle of the forest.” In French that phrase is “elle éleva par le moyen de ses charmes;” literally, “she raised by the means of her charms,” where “charms” in this case takes the meaning of “magic arts.” So from here, I understood that charmant in this tale is something both pleasing and magical.

  The word I chose to portray her use of charmant is “enchanting.” Persinette has an enchanting beauty, an enchanting voice. It is lovely, pleasing in an aristocratic way, and has been magically altered by the Fairy. Enchanted and enchanting both.

  Speaking of magical altering, did you notice the Catholic rituals embedded in the Fairy’s blessing of the baby Persinette? “The Fairy received her swaddled in cloth of gold and sprinkled her face with precious water from a crystal vessel that instantly rendered her the most beautiful creature in the world.” The “vase de cristal,” which I translated as “crystal vessel,” highlighted the religious imagery the most for me. I spent some time looking up this phrase’s usages, from sacred vessels of gold and crystal used in religious ceremonies to St. Paul being described as a vase d’élection or “chosen vessel” in scripture. These usages led me to alight on the word “vessel,” as opposed to a vase or a vial.

  Ironically, another phrase I had trouble translating involved the Old French word trouble, which ended up meaning something much closer to the English word “blush” than anything troublesome, but I will spare you the reenactment of how I finally figur
ed that out. I will just say that it involved all the dictionaries I named for you and much scouring through old texts to compare various contexts to check for its old idiomatic usage. You will find the results of my mystery-solving in the phrase, “He told her the most beautiful things in the world, to which she responded only with a flustered shyness that gave the Prince reason to hope.”

  This is not to say that I found the “perfect” solution to every translation puzzle I encountered. I found it difficult to walk the line between the older register, the nineteenth century fairy tale language we’re familiar with, and the more modern colloquial English we read on a daily basis. Consequently, many words and phrases in my translation draw attention to themselves because they sound older. Others read strangely because I left the phrasing too close to the original French to sit comfortably in English. Sometimes a phrase here or there was vague in the original text and I didn’t want to elaborate when Mlle de La Force, herself, didn’t. I would rather capture my reading experience for you, have you stop and wonder at a casual mention of destiny or despair, the way I too had to stop and wonder.

  No matter the reasons for my follies and decisions, literary translation is a delicate balancing act between the original text and its culture and the targeted language and culture. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.

  On that note, I should also say that literary translation, as an extension of the art and craft of writing and revising, is never done. I could keep tweaking my translation forever, as they say, but here is where I cap my pen and close the book. I have learned a lot from translating Mlle de La Force’s “Persinette,” but my journey as a literary translator does not stop here. I have new translation adventures and projects waiting for me to begin.

  And, of course, I hope to see you again. Feel free to drop by www.littletranslator.com to follow my upcoming forays into French fantasy and fairy tales, drop me a note, or ask me a question.

  Part II: Petrosinella and Rapunzel

  “Petrosinella” by Giambattista Basile

  From the Lo cunto de li cunti, (The Story of Stories), also known as The Pentamerone, published 1634-1636 in Naples, Italy. Read the original Italian at Letteratura Italiana.

  I won’t delve too deeply into the history of the author of this tale, Giambattista Basile, except to say that he was both a soldier and a government official who became interested in the Neapolitan language and folk culture and wrote fifty tales in that dialect, which he bound together by a framework story. Although his book Lo cunto de li cunti was not published until two years after his death in 1632, it had a great impact on the fairy tales of France written 60 years later.

  What stood out to me when I first read this tale was how it explicitly states prevailing beliefs from that time period about pregnancy. Holly Tucker, in her book Pregnant Fictions: Childbirth and the Fairy Tale in Early Modern France, wrote about how “in medical and folk culture alike, it was believed that the mother’s desires while pregnant could imprint themselves on the child. Birthmarks, in particular, were considered the results of unfulfilled cravings,” (99). You will notice that this is the reason Pascadozzia, Petrosinella’s mother, cites for her actions.

  Likewise, Petrosinella’s escape is quite different than the escapes in tales that followed it. Petrosinella is the only one of the three captive maidens who gets to square off with magic against her captor.

  As for other notable differences, in Sir Richard Francis Burton’s 1893 translation, the “gallnuts” are translated as “acorns,” though the “ogress” is a “ghula,” a Middle-Eastern flavored form of the word “ghoul,” (this despite the fact that the creature was an orca not a gula in the original Italian). I hesitated between his translation and the John Edward Taylor translation that I ended up deciding to include. Though Taylor’s translation is deliberately, modestly vague in areas where Basile’s tale wasn’t, I prefer its overall effect to Burton’s.

  SOURCES & FURTHER READING

  • Where would we be without the Encyclopædia Brittanica? See their entry on Basile: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/55102/Giambattista-Basile.

  • Christine Goldberg’s review of Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones as translated by Nancy L. Canepa, published in 2007 by Wayne State University Press in the Journal of Folklore Research http://www.jfr.indiana.edu/review.php?id=557.

  • For more information on this period’s culture of pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical practices, see Holly Tucker’s Pregnant Fictions: Childbirth and the Fairy Tale in Early Modern France, published in 2003 by Wayne State University Press.

  • For a comparison, Sir Richard Francis Burton’s translation can be found in scanned pages of Il Pentamerone: or, The tale of tales; being a translation by the late Sir Richard Burton of Il Pentamerone, published in 1893 http://books.google.com/books?id=kCcsAQAAMAAJ.

  • Know Italian and want to read Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti for yourself? Visit http://www.letteraturaitaliana.net/pdf/Volume_6/t133.pdf.

  Petrosinella

  John Edward Taylor translation, originally published 1847, found in Petrosinella: Neapolitan Rapunzel or online.

  There was, once upon a time, a woman named Pascadozzia, and one day, when she was standing at her window, which looked into the garden of an ogress, she saw such a fine bed of parsley that she almost fainted away with desire for some. So when the ogress went out she could not restrain herself any longer, but plucked a handful of it. The ogress came home and was going to cook her pottage when she found that some one had been stealing the parsley, and said, “Ill luck to me, but I’ll catch this long-fingered rogue and make him repent it; I’ll teach him to his cost that every one should eat off his own platter and not meddle with other folks’ cups.”

  The poor woman went again and again down into the garden, until one morning the ogress met her, and in a furious rage exclaimed, “Have I caught you at least, you thief, you rogue; prithee, do you pay the rent of the garden that you come in this impudent way and steal my plants? By my faith, I’ll make you do penance without sending you to Rome.”

  Poor Pascadozzia, in a terrible fright, began to make excuses, saying that neither from gluttony nor the craving of hunger had she been tempted by the devil to commit this fault, but from her fear lest her child should be born with a crop of parsley on its face.

  “Words are but wind,” answered the ogress, “I am not to be caught with such prattle; you have closed the balance-sheet of life, unless you promise to give me the child, girl or boy, whichever it may be.”

  The poor woman, in order to escape the peril in which she found herself, swore, with one hand upon the other, to keep the promise, and so the ogress let her go free. But when the baby came it was a little girl, so beautiful that she was a joy to look upon, who was named Parsley. The little girl grew from day to day until, when she was seven years old, her mother sent her to school, and every time she went along the street and met the ogress the old woman said to her, “Tell your mother to remember her promise.” And she went on repeating this message so often that the poor mother, having no longer patience to listen to the refrain, said one day to Parsley, “If you meet the old woman as usual, and she reminds you of the hateful promise, answer her, ‘Take it.’”

  When Parsley, who dreamt of no ill, met the ogress again, and heard her repeat the same words, she answered innocently as her mother had told her, whereupon the ogress, seizing her by her hair, carried her off to a wood which the horses of the Sun never entered, not having paid the toll to the pastures of those Shades. Then she put the poor girl into a tower which she caused to arise by her art, having neither gate nor ladder, but only a little window through which she ascended and descended by means of Parsley’s hair, which was very long, just as sailors climb up and down the mast of a ship.

  Now it happened one day, when the ogress had left the tower, that Parsley put her head out of the little window and let loose her tresses in the sun, and the son of a Prince pa
ssing by saw those two golden banners which invited all souls to enlist under the standard of Beauty, and, beholding with amazement, in the midst of those gleaming waves, a face that enchanted all hearts, he fells desperately in love with such wonderful beauty; and, sending her a memorial of sighs, she decreed to receive him into favor. She told him her troubles, and implored him to rescue her. But a gossip of the ogress, who was for ever prying into things that did not concern her, and poking her nose into every corner, overheard the secret, and told the wicked woman to be on the lookout, for Parsley had been seen talking with a certain youth, and she had her suspicions.

  The ogress thanked the gossip for the information, and said that she would take good care to stop up the road. As to Parsley, it was, moreover, impossible for her to escape, as she had laid a spell upon her, so that unless she had in her hand the three gall-nuts which were in a rafter in the kitchen it would be labium lost to attempt to get away.

  Whilst they were thus talking together, Parsley, who stood with her ears wide open and had some suspicion of the gossip, overheard all that had passed. And when Night had spread out her black garments to keep them from the moth, and the Prince had come as they had appointed, she let fall her hair; he seized it with both hands, and cried, “Draw up.” When he was drawn up she made him first climb up to the rafters and find the gall-nuts, knowing well what effect they would have, as she had been enchanted by the ogress. Then, having made a rope-ladder, they both descended to the ground, took to their heels, and ran off towards the city. But the gossip, happening to see them come out, set up a loud “Halloo,” and began to shout and make such a noise that the ogress awoke, and seeing that Parsley had run away, she descended by the same ladder, which was still fastened to the window, and set off after the couple, who, when they saw her coming at their heels faster than a horse let loose, gave themselves up for lost.