Seeing that my contribution to this fine website had become unwieldy, Brian and I decided to turn the largest ingredient, the French Victorians, into a separate VIRTUAL BOOK. Unlike most books, this one can easily be improved (sorry, Brian) and expanded from time to time!
It is not a balanced selection: it is, simply, poems I happen to have translated. For one who works with
rhyme and metre, the middle and late nineteenth century in France is quite a feast. Corbière
and Laforgue are missing here, because they have been so well translated by Christopher Pilling and Peter Dale. Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud are scarce because there are more than enough versions elsewhere, some very good. I offer five of their sonnets, and Hugo's Booz Endormi, done without letter 'e', in imitation of Georges
Perec's novel La Disparition. (That 'c' with an additional horizontal strut is always busy with diphthongs, and with so many half-caught, half-lost murmurs and susurrations; without it, your words start to bang and clang in a most satisfying way!) Verlaine is also scarce in this virtual book. No collection and no translator has recently reflected the dominating vastness of Hugo, and most of my Hugo versions - How to be a Grandfather (not all of it) and the three epic narratives of Napoleon in Les Châtiments - I hope to show elsewhere; also Nerval's Chimeras (translated in full, much to my surprise); and a few French Christmas Poems. That does not prevent their appearing here, one day. I think the Internet readers and the conventional book-readers are largely distinct groups, that poetry, whether translated or original, should and will appear in any medium, and that both old and new media can benefit from the interplay. I have about four major volumes, and much loyalty and energy, ready for conventional publishers, who are welcome to come forward. I thank all those journals and periodicals which print my work, especially Modern Poetry in Translation, Translation and Literature, Classical Association News, and, in earlier days, Outposts.
My main source for these poems has been the Oxford Book of French Verse, in two editions, one recent, one much older. Lamartine's The Lake was the first proper French poem I ever met, when it was analysed at school. A fellow-poet recently prompted me to attempt it. I tend to perceive the French twelve-syllable line sometimes as six iambics, sometimes as four anapaests, a rhythm I used in the inner poem here. I may turn it into an English pentameter or go to rhyming tetrameters: not that any particular English rhythm is the right or exclusive way of reading or converting an alexandrine. Barbier's Michael Angelo and Hérédia's The Bed are the oldest of the translations, resurrected here after twenty years, the former doggedly archaic with nine thou-forms, which I like in this particular poem (and no modern poet would have written this poem), and both having the abba abba rhyme-scheme which, in translating nearly 100 sonnets, I have rarely used, or wanted to. Gautier is wonderfully skilful, with perhaps too little emotion, Nerval sometimes alarming, with too much. Silvestre's life-span exactly fits Victoria's reign, 1837-1901: I heard his Secret sung to Fauré's music, along with Samain's Evening (three verses), which turned out to be part of a longer poem. Samain's Cleopatra with its Sphynx contrasts with his pious Resting in Egypt, the Virgin between the Sphinx's paws. In Sailor's Wind by Mallarmé I write magick and goodby, and the words above it are adapted from Masefield. Hérédia's Coral Reef has so many words like madrepore which cannot be paraphrased, that I use rhyme very tenuously. I hope the slow triples convey the warm gentle rocking motion of the water. Not that these things are usually foreseen, let alone deliberate.
Verlaine's Poetic Art contrasts with Gautier's Art. The older man is cogent and self-assured in his fittingly lyrical advocacy of lyric verse. But Verlaine seems to attack rhyme, even while using it; he saw Mallarmé and Rimbaud make poems without rhyme, but perhaps did not actually do so himself; here he blusters, and postures, and spins good phrases, but does not achieve a coherent position: we do not know which lines are sarcastic. Gautier cannot tell a hippo from a rhino. Soulary's contribution is charming; Banville's Nous n'irons plus... is somehow nostalgic, familiar, I don't know why. I wish the reader as much enjoyment from reading these poems as I have had from writing them.
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