Fondly Overcome By Female Charms Poem by gershon hepner

Fondly overcome by female charm
to heaven I may be translated.
Such translation does less harm
than causing sense to be castrated,
simplifying language that’s archaic,
making all the words updated,
making poetry prosaic,
like fond females who’re fixated
on their efforts to appear,
despite their age, as when they mated.
Time, a churlish charioteer,
must be respected, We’re all fated
to lose the atmosphere
of paradise, and no belated
attempts can help us to restore
old words that once like harps vibrated
by painting them like an old whore
whose charms were always overrated.

In a blog in the NYT on November 20,2008 Stanley Fish reviews a translation into modern English prose of “Paradise Lost”:
Dennis Danielson, a distinguished Miltonist, has just published a translation of “Paradise Lost.” Into what language? , you ask. Into English, is the answer. Danielson is well aware that it might seem odd to translate a poem into the language in which it is already written. Dryden turned some of “Paradise Lost” into rhymed verse for a libretto while Milton was still alive; but that was an adaptation, not a translation. There are of course the Classic Comics and Cliff Notes precedents; but these are abridgments designed for the students who don’t have time to, or don’t want to, read the book. Danielson’s is a word-for-word translation, probably longer than the original since its prose unpacks a very dense poetry. The value of his edition, he says, is that it “invites more readers than ever before to enjoy the magnificent story — to experience the grandeur, heroism, pathos, beauty and grace of Milton’s inimitable work.”…Roadblocks, in the form of ambiguities, deliberate obscurities, shifting grammatical paths and recondite allusions, are everywhere and one is expected to stop and try to figure things out, make connections or come to terms with an inability to make connections.The experience of reading poetry like this was well described by the great critic F.R. Leavis, who said of Milton (he did not mean this as a compliment) that his verse “calls pervasively for a kind of attention … toward itself.” That is, when reading the poetry one is not encouraged to see it as a window on some other, more real, world; it is its own world, and when it refers it refers to other parts of itself. Milton, Leavis said, displays “a capacity for words rather than a capacity for feeling through words.” The poetry is not mimetic in the usual sense of representing something prior to it; it creates the facts and significances to which you are continually asked to attend.
Here is an example. When Adam decides to join Eve in sin and eat the apple, the poem says that he was “fondly overcome by female charm.” The word that asks you to pause is “fondly, ” which means both foolishly and affectionately. The two meanings have different relationships to the action they characterize. If you do something foolishly, you have no excuse, and it’s a bit of a mystery as to why you did; if you do it prompted by affection and love, the wrongness of it may still be asserted, but something like an explanation or an excuse has at least been suggested. The ambiguity plays into the poem-length concern with the question of just how culpable Adam and Eve are for the fall. (Given their faculties and emotions, were they capable of standing?) “Fondly” doesn’t resolve the question, but keeps it alive and adds to the work the reader must always be doing when negotiating this poem. Here is Danielson’s translation of the line: “an infatuated fool overcome by a woman’s charms.” “Infatuated” isn’t right because it redoubles the accusation in “fool” rather than softening it. The judgment is sharp and clear, but it is a clearer judgment than Milton intended or provided. Something has been lost (although as Danielson points out, something is always lost in a translation) .


12/1/08