Translators' Note

Considered a trouvère (as opposed to a troubadour from southern France), Rutebeuf’s poems were not set to music, but they are considered lyric due to their rhythm and rhyme. While translating, we made a conscious choice to honor the end-rhyme patterns in these poems, though we also made liberal use of slant rhyme and playful internal rhymes that contribute to the comic effects of the texts. For the most part, we were able to stick closely to Rutebeuf’s octosyllabic line, characteristic of that time period. 

In order to honor the musicality of the original texts, we applied the strategy of “sound mapping,” analyzing and making note of all the salient rhyme and alliteration patterns in the Old French. We also were on the lookout for any salient wordplay, especially when it seemed to be the heart of the poem. For example, in the excerpt from “Poor Rutebeuf,” we felt driven to replicate the French wordplay on lines five and six, by pairing “paltry” and “Saint Paultry” (a playful way to bring Saint Paul into the poem) and using slant-rhymed couplets throughout. In “The Drifters of Grève,” the salient sound pattern was a riff on the French word point and its multiple meanings, which we brought into the English, as follows:  “on point,” “to the point,” “pourpoints,” “life’s point,” and “made their point.”

As you will notice in this note’s use of “we,” translating these poems by Rutebeuf was a collaborative effort. The two of us were no strangers to the collaborative process, having just completed our first co-translation, a book by Cuban author Wendy Guerra. The exigencies of translating Old French—so distinct from the modern tongue as to be considered a language of its own—required our combined knowledge of Spanish, French, English, Latin, and Catalan to first decipher the difficult language and then come up with creative and humorous wordplay. The process proved to be rather challenging, but now, looking back, we can say we had fun.

Nancy Naomi Carlson
Esperanza Hope Snyder

In the Classroom