Traduire le mètre, traduire le rythme : les poèmes de Sappho par Philippe Brunet
In 1991, Philippe Brunet published a new translation of the seventh century B.C. archaic Greek poet, Sappho. In this translation, he attempted to imitate and instigate the feel of the Greek meter in French. The difficulty of this project stands in the fact that the French language is not one of word accentuation and it doesn't take into account the syllables quantity. The poetic meters in French are indeed based on the syllables number and not on their quantity. During the Renaissance, a similar imitation experiment had already been attempted by Jean-Antoine de Baïf. But dismissing the accentual particularities of the French language, he failed to develop an adequate system. Meanwhile, Phillipe Brunet was able to use the French accentual rules to make his read feel about the quantitative Greek rhythm. Using the tonic accent as well as the initial accent, his system fully respects the French language while creating a new rhythm. When this translation is compared to others, we can see how much his sematic and prosodic research help to the creation of this peculiar system.
Sappho Accent Greek Translation Rhythm Meter Metric Accentuation