waveofplague:
Probably French, though.
This just seems to re-hash our previous discussion, and fly in the face of the fact that, in the English translations, she is singing
in English...
dAileron:
the English lyrics Castafiore sings are not the lyrics of the Jewel Song by Faust, not by even a liberal definition of "translation".
I think you possibly have an illberal definition of translation, then! ;-)
You seem to be overlooking a number of issues: the translation you give doesn't rhyme, for example, and the original does - how would this affect the way it sounds and was sung? The French original has two lines of six syllables at the start, and this translation has seven then eight, which won't fit in the same way.
Your English version also just plods along absolutely literally - it has no poetry to it, and no sense of the music. For example, "beauty past compare" is poetic in a way that "so beautiful" just isn't.
Add to this that the character of Marguerite has to be expressed too, and how it fits into the particular scene, and the opera as a whole, and you will surely see that translating the libretto isn't just a question of putting the exact words into the exact slot, it is a case of fine tuning it until the words, music and story all come together to make a satisfying whole. This might mean that you end up with something close to the scheme of the original, or it might mean moving things around in the verses, or just going for a sense of the librettist's intention.
True, the version in the books might be better thought of as a free-, rather than a straight-, translation, but it does seem to be expressing the original fairly well to me.