Faculty Mentors
Dr. Hedwig Fraunhofer
Abstract
This paper compares Leonard Cohen’s song Suzanne and its French translation by Graeme Allwright. It takes translation principles into account, by relying on translator Antoine Berman’s “Twelve Deforming Tendencies of Translation.” In his reliance on the instrumental model, which tries to find equivalence and treat the translation as a reproduction of the original, Allwright’s translation misinterprets several important elements in the original, namely the relationship between the speaker and the Suzanne character. In Cohen’s original, the character Suzanne is expected to follow the speaker and is changed by his “superior” intellect, while in Allwright’s version Suzanne is likened to a dangerous siren. By comparing both songs and scrutinizing them under translation principles, the reader will gain a greater understanding of the elements and difficulties of translating music. This paper was written and developed in Dr. Hedwig Fraunhofer’s “Principles of Translation” course and was the basis of a modern foreign language capstone presentation.
Recommended Citation
Sadler, Natalie
(2020)
"A Lyrical Comparison Of Suzanne And Its Translation,"
The Corinthian: Vol. 20, Article 9.
Available at:
https://kb.gcsu.edu/thecorinthian/vol20/iss1/9