Hypatia & Palladas

 Not only is there a new book out about #Hypatia but Chapter 2 begins with lines from my #translation of the Complete #Palladas.

Rhetoric to Lettie (A Book of Original Verse)

                                        Lettie 6/12/2001 to 6/2/2013

                                        © Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016

            

Preface for Lettie

A household lacking animals

            Is like a Cyclops who

Half-brained has lost an ear, a hand,

            A leg, a nostril, too.

RACINE’S PHÈDRE

PHÈDRE

By Jean Racine

                                                     Translated By Harold Anthony Lloyd  © 2016

Translator’s Note:  To accommodate the different rhythm of English, I have generally rendered the French alexandrine couplets into iambic pentameter ones.  To accommodate further the linguistic difference, I have freely used enjambment.  I agree with Richard Wilbur that stacking up end-stopped lines in English can sound like piling lumber. 

Either Oar (A Book of Original Verse & Translations)

Poets and Lawyers: Birds of a Feather

Archive of Blog Originally Posted 12/15/2015 in The Huffinton Post

Verse Translation: A Call for Harder Work and Greater Care

Too much verse translation is too free and loose.  We must take the time and effort to preserve both meaning AND form (including meter and rhyme where they exist) without sacrificing one for the other.  Though we can never fully translate verse from one language to another, we can come close if we’re willing to work hard enough.  To illustrate this, I want to give some French to English examples of my own.  I don’t claim they are perfect by any means but I think they make my point.  I ask the reader to pull the original French texts and compare them with what I have done.  I break my examples into seven parts (I-VII).