The Power of Bilingual Poetry

How Translation Alters Meaning

As a multilingual person and avid reader who constantly moves between Italian and English, I have always believed that language changes the way we experience the world. The same landscape feels different when described in another language. The same memory can carry a different emotional weight depending on the words we choose to narrate it. The same musicality and flow can either be heightened or completely disappear based on the syntactic engine that powers a certain language.

What we mean by 'syntactic engine' is the word order and structural framework of a language: while English is a stress-timed language with a rigid word order which relies on brief, hard-hitting accents, French is a syllable-timed language with fluid phrasing and flexible adjective placement. Shifting between them forces a choice between English staccato percussion and French legato flow. In translation, this linguistic reconstruction is reinforced by semantic resonance, which dictates word choice and texture: while English relies heavily on short, punchy Germanic roots and easy compound words, French is founded upon Romance roots that often require multi-syllable phrases and grammatical expansion. This leads to a shift in the acoustic weight and speed of a line.

Poetry amplifies this phenomenon. Unlike prose, poetry does not simply tell readers a story; it relies on rhythm, sound, alliteration, imagery, musicality and cultural references. Therefore, translating a poem is never a straightforward act of replacing one word with another. It is an act of interpretation, reconstruction, and, in many ways, creative rebirth. This makes the bilingual nature of Goblin Market / Marché des Gobelins, our beautifully illustrated bilingual edition of Christina Rossetti’s Victorian masterpiece, feel especially fitting: it creates a dialogue between languages around a poet whose own literary identity crossed linguistic and cultural boundaries.

Christina Rossetti's Bilingual Background

To understand why a bilingual edition of Goblin Market feels so particularly fitting, it is worth looking at Christina Rossetti’s own relationship with language. Although she is best known today for her English poetry, Rossetti grew up in a household where English and Italian existed side by side, shaping both her literary education and her cultural identity.

Her father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a poet and political exile from Vasto, Italy, who fled to England in 1824 following the suppression of the constitutional government in Naples. He later established himself in London as a Dante scholar and became Professor of Italian at King’s College.

This Italian influence was not limited to her father. Christina and her siblings were homeschooled by their mother, Frances Polidori, who was half-Italian and half-English. Their education immersed them deeply in medieval and Renaissance literature, exposing them to the works of Italian writers such as Dante Alighieri and Petrarch. This fascination with the medieval world and its rich literary and visual traditions would also become an important thread in Christina’s poetic identity, particularly through her connection to the pre-Raphaelite movement.

Christina’s poetry was deeply influenced by the pre-Raphaelites’ avant-garde visual language: their fascination with rich sensory detail, nature, medieval imagery and symbolism, as well as their interest in beauty, intimacy and familial bonds. This connection was particularly personal through her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a founding member and leading figure of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It is a visual and literary sensibility that can be felt throughout Goblin Market, perhaps most vividly in Rossetti’s luscious, almost overwhelming descriptions of the goblins’ exotic fruits.

This bilingual environment thus became an important part of Rossetti’s literary identity. She maintained a strong connection to Italian culture throughout her life and wrote poetry in both English and Italian. Seen in this light, Goblin Market / Marché des Gobelins becomes more than a contemporary translation of a Victorian poem: it ties back to the dual-language and cross-cultural framework Christina herself inhabited.

Introducing Goblin Market to a French Audience

Our new French translation of Rossetti’s Goblin Market serves as a fascinating case study in what happens when a poem moves from one linguistic system into another. Cybirdy founder Alix Daniel does not approach Marché des Gobelins as a simple exercise in replacing English words with their French equivalents. Instead, the translation attempts to recreate the poem’s rhythm, repetition, atmosphere and sensory intensity, while allowing the French language to develop its own musical identity.

This distinction is particularly important when translating poetry. A literal translation may preserve the basic meaning of a sentence while losing everything that makes the original verse feel alive: its pace, its sound, its rhythm, its rhymes and even the physical sensation of saying the words aloud. Goblin Market is especially dependent on these qualities. Rossetti combines a nursery-rhyme-like meter with irregular rhyme schemes, driving repetition and the constant recurrence of the goblins’ seductive calls. The result is an enchanting but increasingly unsettling rhythm, almost like an incantation, which mirrors the trance-like pull of temptation itself.

Alix’s translation therefore has to negotiate between faithfulness to Rossetti and faithfulness to French. The aim is not necessarily to reproduce every sound exactly as it appears in English, but to recreate the experience of being drawn into the poem: its musicality, its sensuality and its slightly sinister sense of inevitability. The French version becomes a new musical interpretation of the same poem rather than a simple linguistic mirror.

In her original English poem, Rossetti writes the goblin merchant calls in a mixture of rapid iambic and dactylic dimeter/tetrameter - allowing the short, often monosyllabic words to create a remarkably quick and energetic rhythm:

"Come buy, come buy /

Apples and quinces"

The syntactic engine allows the verbs (come, buy) to act as sudden, rhythmic triggers. The meter forces a fast, bouncy and aggressive sales-pitch rhythm that mimics a chaotic marketplace.

Moving this effect into French presents a completely different linguistic challenge. French naturally produces a smoother and more fluid rhythm, with stress generally falling on the final syllable of a rhythmic group rather than on individual words in the same way as English. French also tends to require longer constructions where English can rely on short, compact words. As a result, the sharp, staccato quality of Rossetti’s English cannot simply be reproduced word for word:

"Venez acheter, venez et acheter /

Pommes et coings"

The French line consequently feels more elongated and flowing. Rather than attempting to force French into the same rhythmic structure as English, the translation works with the natural musicality of the language. This creates a fascinating shift: the goblins’ chant becomes less percussive but arguably more lyrical and hypnotic, allowing the sensual qualities of French to become part of the temptation.

Semantic Resonance: Visceral Sensation vs. Lyrical Sensuality

The same process can be observed in Rossetti’s extraordinarily rich descriptions of the goblins’ fruit. Her language is deliberately excessive, filling the poem with textures, colours, tastes and physical sensations:

“Plump unpecked cherries...
 Bloom-down-checked peaches /
 Swart-headed mulberries”

These descriptions do more than tell us what the fruit looks like. Their hard consonants -particularly p, k, b and ch - give the lines a physical, almost tactile quality. The reader has to work their way through the words, creating a thick and almost gluttonous sound that mirrors the poem’s themes of indulgence and temptation.

This is another point at which translation becomes an act of interpretation. English allows Rossetti to compress several ideas into compounds such as “bloom-down-checked”, creating an image that is simultaneously descriptive, rhythmic and sonically striking. French does not accommodate this kind of noun-adjective compounding as naturally, meaning that the translator has to unfold the same image into a more descriptive phrase, such as pêches aux joues duvetées.

The result is not a loss of meaning, but a change in texture. The hard English consonants give way to the softer, more fluid sounds of French, including nasal vowels such as un, en and on, alongside softer sibilants. The sensuality of the fruit therefore takes on a different acoustic quality: where Rossetti’s English can feel earthy, physical and almost aggressively tactile, the French can become more fluid, lyrical and seductive.

And this is precisely what makes Goblin Market / Marché des Gobelins so fascinating as a bilingual edition. Reading the two versions alongside one another allows us to see that translation does not simply transfer meaning from one language to another - it recreates how that meaning feels. The English preserves Rossetti’s original voice, while the French allows us to hear that voice anew, through the musical possibilities of another language. Perhaps that is the greatest power of bilingual poetry: it reminds us that a poem can belong to more than one language without losing the language it came from. It can be transformed, reimagined and heard anew, while still carrying the same story of temptation, addiction, resilience and, above all, the extraordinary power of love between sisters.