Talk:Le Marteau sans maître

Comment
Can I nominate this article for GA status somehow? I've never done this, but this article is certainly among the better discussions of a contemporary piece of music on WP. --Myke Cuthbert 18:58, 21 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks very much! There's information on how to nominate at WP:GAN. - Rainwarrior 19:11, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Would it be ok to change "a piece of classical music" into "a piece of contemporary classical music?" I find the term "classical music" very disturbing when applied to 20th-century music. Any thoughts? Matthias Röder 16:41, 21 April 2007 (UTC)


 * it's a good idea, though I tend in my classes to use "contemporary" only for music of the last 20 years; but I'm a little weird that way. But I think better with both terms than just classical alone.  (don't I know you? :)  --Myke Cuthbert 18:31, 21 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Hi Myke! :-) I agree about the use of contemporary. It's a loose concept and as worthless as the "classical" tag. I'll think some more about it... Matthias Röder 21:01, 21 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree with the GA. Nicely written; we need more like this in the contemporary classica  art mus  serious musi whatever we want to call it area.  :-)  Love this piece, by the way.  Antandrus  (talk) 21:04, 21 April 2007 (UTC)


 * hehe ;-) after all the terminology is not such a big problem... Matthias Röder 21:13, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Translation: Jetee-promenade
Though not a French scholar I have a problem with one part of the translation of the text 'Enfant la jetée-promenade sauvage'. With casual research into its usage the term 'jetee-promendade' seems to be a common term for a seaside pier built mainly for pedestrian traffic as opposed to docking ships. I can't see how the word 'sail' has a place in the translation. But I will leave it to a French scholar to correct the translation. Sucher21 (talk) 01:24, 29 July 2010 (UTC)


 * According to Google Translate "promenade savage" translates as "Wild ride". Hyacinth (talk) 02:48, 2 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Literal translations often go hilariously astray. The French word promenade alone has half a dozen possible translations (including "walk", "drive", "stroll", and even—gasp!—"promenade"), while sauvage may be rendered as "wild", "untamed", "brutal", "barbarous", "rude", etc. A jetée-promenade is, as Sucher21 says, a seaside pier, but the problem is to discover the right sense of the larger context. In poetry, especially, translation often requires some license in order to capture the sense of the entire phrase, at the expense sometimes of particular words.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 18:38, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Further translation issues
It is not only that; we also have a "sail" appearing in the English out of nowhere.

The 3rd verse has "marcher" echoing the "marcheur" of the 2nd, but those have been translated differently in the two cases.

The Peru line adds a verb which is not there; at best there is apposition in the French.

Is there not an official translation in a CD booklet?

Has Char's book been translated generally?

Varlaam (talk) 04:59, 16 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't see how any translation published in a CD booklet would be "official", unless such authority came from elsewhere. As far as I am aware, Char's book has not been published in English translation. On the other hand, who made the translation used here? If it was just some other Wikipedia editor, then you should feel free to correct it; if it comes from a published source, then it is certainly copyvio and should be removed immediately. Either way, there is nothing to prevent supplying a better translation.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 05:11, 16 January 2012 (UTC)
 * A CD booklet would involve a professional translator doing it with some degree of scrutiny. That's preferable to our amateur efforts, eh?
 * Classical CDs in my experience are better translated than, say, movie subtitles where they use chimps or something.
 * Sorry, my paragraph omits an intended sentence. Three or four people with quite varying knowledge of French contributed to what we have right now.
 * We have things now like this: "The dead sea waves", which appears in English to be subject-verb, when in French you have 2 nouns.
 * I would retranslate it if I were fully fluent, but I'm not.
 * I would prefer to see it done properly and definitively.
 * Varlaam (talk) 06:26, 17 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Your faith in CD-booklet writers is, if you will forgive me saying so, touching but misplaced. "Professional translators" are often the worst offenders, and the chimps who make bad movie-subtitle translations are also professional translators, I understand. You must speak for yourself when labeling Wikipedia editors as "amateurs". Je suis professionnel, et les traducteurs professionnels savent que ne pas à essayer des choses qui sont hors de leur portée, comme (pour ma part) la poésie. I, too, would like to see it done properly (though translations of poetry can scarcely ever be definitive), and while I may take a stab at patching this up, I hope better-qualified hands will come along and do a proper job.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:10, 17 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I watch all DVDs with subtitles enabled, since not everyone within range wants to watch what I'm watching. Spanish or French if there is no English.
 * And it is very clear that subtitle chimps do not have access to shooting scripts and don't know anything about the subject of the film they are working on.
 * Amateur ici. Je parle pour moué-même, et pas pour toué. Je sais que la poésie est hors de mes expérience et compétence personnelles.
 * You have perfectly sound reasons for not wanting to screw it up, and I also choose not to look like an ass, here anyway. Elsewhere, sure, but not here.
 * A friend of mine used to work for Boulez, and I have seen Pierre conduct this piece.
 * Varlaam (talk) 00:01, 18 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Oh, yes, I forgot to mention: should there prove to be a fully professional, accurate, and even definitive translation published somewhere, it will almost certainly be copyrighted, and we could not use it in this article for that reason.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:41, 17 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Come to think of it, aren't the French texts still under copyright?—Jerome Kohl (talk) 23:47, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

"In the years that have followed, it has become Pierre Boulez's most famous and influential work"
I disagree with the definitive aspect of the above comment at the end of this article. I think the statement could be balanced somewhat by inserting something like "one of" as in In the years that have followed, it has become [one of] Pierre Boulez's most famous and influential work[s].

What do people think --Invulgo (talk) 11:30, 27 December 2018 (UTC)
 * It depends entirely on what Alex Hughes says on p. 123 of the Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture. If he says "one of", then it should be changed; if not, then not. What we Wikipedia editors think is immaterial.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:15, 27 December 2018 (UTC)
 * We don't find much help from Hughes, who says only: "The most famous and important of these Char settings is for a small ensemble, Le Marteau sans Maitre, the work that made him internationally famous as a composer."  In other words, nothing about its being his most famous or influential work.--Jburlinson (talk) 01:03, 28 December 2018 (UTC)
 * I shall mark the source as failing to support the assertion, then.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 03:39, 28 December 2018 (UTC)

I hadn't heard the piece for about forty years until today, in the Boulez/Deroubaix recording - and not very often before that. So I went to Wikipedia. Not a suggestion that we don't all intuitively comprehend at first hearing every word and nuance of Char's text - which does seem rather optimistic. But I'm surprised at the section on the reception and legacy of the piece. Do we really HAVE to hear the serial structure to grasp the piece? And - in my ignorance - I hear a surprising number of coincidences as chords, though I accept they may not have been written primarily with chords in mind. Rhythm and patterns of attack can be heard as successors, say, of "Feux d'artifice". On the disc I have, the next item happened to be "Oiseaux Exotiques" which cast a useful light itself, but I wasn't prepared for the effect of what I played next - the Brahms Rhapsodies and some of the late pieces in the mid 1930s Backhaus recording, which turned out to be far more radical - and radically played - than I had ever heard them before - almost as though Boulez were returning to and evoking the great central European traditions. In which you either can or can't hear what Reti and Schenker found, but you can accept it's there. Perhaps it's easer if you try and approach it through Boulez's Domaine Musicale recording of the Schoenberg Serenade?Delahays (talk) 19:43, 26 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Does the article say we have to hear the serial structure in order to grasp the piece? If so, I shall fix that straight away. It does say that Fred Lerdahl's opinion is that this structure cannot be heard at all, but that this does not mean the music is incomprehensible, since Boulez uses his compositional intuition to shape the sounds his serial matrices generate. As for the "chords", well, goodness gracious me! Roger Scruton says those simultaneities cannot be heard as chords, and he is such an authority that I must of course respect his judgement, just as much as I respect his opinions on fox hunting.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 19:59, 26 November 2019 (UTC)