Voltaire's Le Mondain and machine translations

I’ve been reflecting on cities (I love living in cities), and abundance liberalism (I happily admit to liking stuff). I then ran into this post re: Voltaire’s poem Le Mondain - a smug, delightful celebration of cosmopolitanism. Wikipedia shares this lovely and quotable bit:

Line 22 of the poem, “Le superflu, chose très-nécessaire” (“The superfluous, a very necessary thing”), became a common catch-phrase.

For those who parlent un peu français:

Delightful! “This time profane was made for such as I” (more on this translation below). I devoured Voltaire as a teenager off of a tiny shelf in the back of a summer-school “Career Studies” make-up class in tenth grade in a small-town school in Ontario, one I never attended before or since. A painful, provincial, a-religious environment if ever there was one.

This poem has a lovely, loose rhyme structure (beginning ABBA CCDD), but unlike the translation, the whole thing is rimes mêlées (freely mixed rhyme), such as lines 13-21, AABABACAC:

Delicious! Cœur très immonde (the speaker’s unclean heart) rhymes with féconde (fertile abundance) rhymes with plaisirs de ce monde (the pleasures of the world).

Now, alas, with regret. Let us turn our benighted eyes to the english version. There appears to be only one authoritative translation, probably descended from the 1760s Smollett–Francklin translations: “Miscellaneous poems. By Mr. de Voltaire. Translated from the French, by T. Smollet M.D. T. Francklin, M.A. and others. - 1764”.

Let’s read it, shall we?

Others may with regret complain
That ’tis not fair Astrea’s reign,
That the famed golden age is o’er
That Saturn, Rhea rule no more:
Or, to speak in another style,
That Eden’s groves no longer smile.
For my part, I thank Nature sage,
That she has placed me in this age:
Religionists may rail in vain;
I own, I like this age profane;

— Voltaire, The Worldly Man, translated by T. Smollett, T. Francklin and others (1764), as modernized in The Works of Voltaire (1901)

……what?

Seriously, what? Nursery rhyme couplets? (AA BB CC DD, jaunty. How English.) Why wouldn’t you keep the Astrea/Rhea pair? Why construct “Or, to speak in another style” out of nowhere (in modern terms, “hallucinate”) to line-break “Eden” from “Saturn and Rhea”, when the joke is to put Christian imagery and pagan myth right next to each other? This poem was so irreverent that Voltaire had to flee his home for months, don’t disarm the bit. 😅

Even that lovely line: “Le superflu, chose très-nécessaire” (“The superfluous, a very necessary thing”) – a quotable celebration of good and joyous things in life, in this version, is just:

Needful superfluous things appear

Yikes. I can’t see that becoming a “common catch-phrase”. Absolutely brutal. They translate “Il court au bain” (he hurries to the baths) as “At Bath”, as in, Bath, Somerset, the english town. Quite a choice for translating a French poem; at best a cute self-insert. “belle aventure” (beautiful adventure) becomes “marriage yoke”. Yikes. Ick, even.

Can we do better? The machine minds (here, claude-opus-5-5) are getting pretty darn good at translation:

aiAI-generated:

Let those who will regret the good old days,
The Age of Gold, the reign of just Astraea,
And happy times of Saturn and of Rhea,
And our first parents’ garden, where they played;
But I, for one, thank Nature, who was sage
And kindly had me born into this age
That all our gloomy grumblers so decry:
This time profane was made for such as I.

…phew. A breath of fresh air. My lovely ABBA CCDD.

I gratefully expunge T. Smollet M.D. T. Francklin, M.A., et al., from my mind. Let us bask in this prettier version.

I hope a poem celebrating the abundance of art and pleasure is honored in its intention with a more beautiful translation. If that hope is unclean, well, “It’s sweet to me, unclean of heart, to see, abundance, here and everywhere around”.

aiAI-generated:

the full translation

Let those who will regret the good old days,
The Age of Gold, the reign of just Astraea,
And happy times of Saturn and of Rhea,
And our first parents’ garden, where they played;
But I, for one, thank Nature, who was sage
And kindly had me born into this age
That all our gloomy grumblers so decry:
This time profane was made for such as I.
I relish luxury — yes, softness too —
All pleasures, all the arts of every kind,
Cleanliness, taste, and ornament refined:
Each gentleman feels just the way I do.
It’s sweet to me, unclean of heart, to see
Abundance, here and everywhere around,
The mother of the arts and happy labour,
Bring us, from fertile springs where goods abound,
New needs, and pleasures of a novel savour.
The gold of earth, the ocean’s treasury,
Their denizens, the peoples of the sky,
All serve this world’s delights and luxury.
The good old days? This Iron Age, say I!
The superfluous, that necessary thing,
Has married hemisphere to hemisphere.
Do you not see those nimble vessels wing
From Texel, London, and Bordeaux, and steer
In search, through happy trade, of goods that grow
Where Ganges rises from its mountain snow,
While, in the Muslims’ own remote confines,
Sultans get drunk, and conquered, on our wines?

When Nature was a child, our forebears dwelled,
Good folk, in ignorance, where none yet held
A thing as “mine” or “thine.” And how could they?
They’d nothing. They went naked. Clear as day,
Who owns no goods has none to give away.
Sober they were. Ah, that I never doubt:
The Golden Age had no Martialo about.
Eve’s dreary gullet never knew the snap
Of good cool wine, its sparkle or its sap;
Their home had neither silk nor gold to show.
Is that the reason you admire them so?
They lacked both industry and affluence:
Was that a virtue? No: pure ignorance.
What idiot, if he’d had a decent bed,
Would have preferred to sleep outdoors instead?
Adam, my dear, my glutton, my good father,
What did you do in Eden all day long?
Did you toil for this foolish human throng?
Or did you fondle Madam Eve, my mother?
Confess, the pair of you: your nails, I’d guess,
Were long, and rather black, a grimy mess;
Your hair not very neatly put together,
Your faces browned, your skin as tanned as leather.
Without cleanliness, love, however sweet,
Is love no longer, just a shameful heat.
Soon tiring of their charming love affair,
Beneath an oak they sup, most gallantly,
On water, millet, acorns from their tree;
Their dinner done, they sleep rough then and there:
Behold the state of nature, pure and bare.

And now, my friends, would you be glad to know
A little (in these days they damn us so),
In Paris, say, or London, or in Rome,
A gentleman’s whole daily round? Then come
Into his house: there, crowding into view,
The arts, Taste’s children, all appear to you.
A thousand hands, with dazzling industry,
Adorned the house-front’s ordered symmetry.
The happy brush, the masterful design
Of gentle Correggio and learned Poussin
Are framed in gold; that figure standing there
Is Bouchardon’s; and all this silverware
Was polished by the royal smith Germain.
In tapestries the Gobelins outshine,
With needle and with dye, the painter’s line.
All these fine objects twenty times repeat
In pier-glasses where light and brilliance meet.
From this salon, through windows opened wide,
I see, in gardens, myrtles trained in bowers,
And leaping waters rising up in showers.
But hark! I hear the master go outside.
A comfortable coach, with grace arrayed,
Drawn by two horses, rapidly conveyed,
Looks like a house on wheels to all who pass,
Half gilded, and the other half all glass;
Within, I see him lolling, idly swayed;
Two springs, with supple and obliging force,
Bear him in softness down the cobbled course.
He hastens to the baths, where perfumes sweet
Make his skin fresher and more polished; he,
Pressed on by pleasure, flies away to meet
Camargo, or Gaussin, or else Julie;
He’s heaped with love and favours; and, that done,
He must repair to that enchanted place
Where lovely verse, the dance, and music’s grace,
The art of fooling eyes with paint, the art,
More happy still, that can seduce the heart,
Combine a hundred pleasures into one.
He goes to hiss the latest opera, though,
Despite himself, he runs to praise Rameau.
Let’s go to supper! Oh, these glittering dishes!
These ragouts, how they answer all my wishes!
A cook’s a mortal creature, yet divine!
Chloris and Aegle pour me out the wine
Of Aÿ, whose foam, pent up and pressing tight,
Leaps from the bottle in so fierce a flight
It sends the cork, like lightning, upward reeling:
It’s off! We laugh! It smacks against the ceiling.
This cool wine’s sparkling froth, its effervescence,
Is the bright image of the Frenchman’s essence.
The next day brings us other appetites,
And other suppers, and yet new delights.

And now, Sir Author of Telemachus,
Extol your little Ithaca to us,
Your Salentum, your walls so full of woe,
Where Cretans, dismal in their virtue, go
Poor in possessions, rich in abstinence,
And lack for all, so as to have abundance:
I much admire your flattering style; no less
Your prose, although it drags a little bit;
But, my good friend, I’ll gladly acquiesce
To being spanked in your Salentum for it
If I go there in search of happiness.
And you, the garden of that first good soul,
Famed for the apple and the devil’s role:
In vain, seduced by pride, have scholars scanned
(Huet, Calmet, with learned nerve) the face
Of the whole earth, to pin down Eden’s place:
The earthly paradise is where I stand.