French and Francophone Literature Commons^™

A Lyrical Comparison Of Suzanne And Its Translation, Natalie Sadler

The Corinthian

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 …