The Translations of Charles Algernon Swinburne's Poetry in French. Traductology thesis

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UNIVERSITÉ SORBONNE NOUVELLE–PARIS 3 - INSTITUT DU MONDE ANGLOPHONE

           The translations of the poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne

presented by Thibaud Ochem, M1 enseignement, Paris 3

Directeur de recherche : Mrs. Stephens Jessica

Introduction

1) Swinburne today : a national poet ?

 Charles Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909, both in London) may sometimes be considered a minor poet, even from the English point of view, since he was already out-of-fashion before Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot became famous, though the latter wrote an article of poetry criticism devoted to advise the readership to read Swinburne. The decadentism of his life and works, now a topos of the Victorian times, made him a classic, as it did for Baudelaire for whom he wrote an epitaph, thus testifying from the proximity between the two authors. According to Pascal Aquien, professor at Paris IV and editor in chief of the journal Etudes Anglaises, Swinburne's lack of acclaim originates in the rejection of his works by the Victorian critics. Now that the controversies have long faded about the “indecencies” of his poems, readers and critics can turn their looks away from the “racks and rods” that shape the caricatural Swinburne, and contemplate the true pantheist beauty of his writings, largely commented by Pascal Aquien in his introduction to his own Swinburne anthology, Poèmes Choisis. In this view, the theme of the Sea and the liquid element in the writings of Charles Algernon Swinburne are what make of him a British national poet. The importance of the biographical element must be noticed here : Swinburne was the eldest of six children born to Captain, and later Admiral Charles Henry Swinburne; he grew up on the Isle of Wight. Pascal Aquien offered as an explanation to Swinburne's fascination for the act of drowning the fact that as a child, the admiral Swinburne taught him to swim by force, thus drowning him de facto several times. By going a little further, I can link this with the universal feeling of “drowning” to which we could all have been exposed in the amniotic fluid. Therefore, the Sea -or the Seas, the mare nostrum of the British empire- would be the universal mother of all men, explaining the universal celebration of it that is present in Swinburne's works, a sea that he would have traveled only by proxy through the person of his father the admiral. Be it true or not, this obsession or carefulness about water of the lyrical “I” coincides with a major national theme of the British collective unconscious : “the Sea, the Sea”, the very source of the power of the leading country of the world at that time. Is Swinburne's Republicanism a contradiction? Even in his Republican poems, the liquid element comes back in “Les Noyades”, a baroque indictment of the excesses of the French Revolution in the episode of the noyades de Nantes, very ambiguous as we explored the poet's relationship to drowning... The liquid element exults in “The Triumph of Time”, a long pantheist poem where the only subject may be the oceans of the pink Empire on which the sun never sets. ...

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