La version en vers des Sonnets de Shakespeare par Ernest Lafond (1856) : défense de la poésie à l’âge de la prose

The French Romantics showed little curiosity for Shakespeare as a poet, let alone as a sonneteer. The first translations of his works usually ignore his poems and these start making their entry into the complete works only towards the middle of the XIXth century. When Pierre Letourneur published the first, epoch-making translation of Shakespeare’s Complete Works between 1776 and 1783, he tacitly excluded all the poems. François-Victor Hugo is the first translator to offer a complete French translation of the Sonnets (1857). Thanks to him, the Sonnets finally make their way into Shakespeare’s Complete Works in France. Hugo belongs to the well-established tradition of Romantic translators who translated poetry into prose for the sake of modernity. In fact, for a whole century, from Letourneur to Montégut, Shakespeare’s drama and poetry are consistently rendered in French prose. Chateaubriand is one who theorized about the practice of Romantic prose translation, particularly in the preface to his very influential translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1836). This is the context in which Ernest Lafond published his own translation of 48 sonnets into alexandrines, one year before Hugo’s prose version, in 1656. There will only be one other attempt at turning the Sonnets into French verse in the 19th century, by Alfred Copin, in 1888, but in a context that has by then become much more favourable to translation in verse. Lafond’s version of the Shakespeare’s Sonnets thus appears at a critical moment in the literary history of the century, one year before the publication of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal — a key text in the history of the sonnet — and of Hugo’s prose translation. In this essay, I will try to answer two important questions. First, what part, if any, does the translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets play in this quarrel between poetry and prose in 19th-century translation theory? In this context, Lafond’s version can be read as a manifesto in favour of the practice of verse translation for poetry, but it is also a defense and illustration of the genre of the sonnet. Finally, what are Lafond’s theoretical principles, if any? This essay shows that his translation, which is steeped in contemporary French poetry (Victor Hugo, Lamartine), is characterized both by deliberate poeticization and ideological conservatism. The article will eventually try to assess the status of such an enterprise in literary history and in the history of translation theory