Customer Reviews

Selected Poems, Bilingual edition

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

[...] At any rate, for those who are not familiar with the movement, I would suggest reading, in this order: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarme, as that is the sequence in which they came to the fore of French Lit (though you could make the case that Veralaine and Rimbaud were contemporaneous, I would suggest that Verlaine's most important work came after his interchange with Rimbaud). Since these are the most influential French poets of the modern era, and had an impact on every modern "movement" that occured in literature thereafter, you can not go wrong with any of them. There are those who contend that poetry especially is lost in translation. I would agree, yet all these poets are represented by "facing" texts these days. The original text is mirrored by the translation on the opposite page. Oxford and Penguin both are good choices. The translators are uniformally well-educated and erudite, the printing is excellent and the overall scholarhip, including introductions, is top-notch. You can't go wrong with these editions.

Length:: 1:13 Mins

This is the poem in the original French:

Une aube affaiblie
Verse par les champs
La mélancolie
Des soleils couchants.
La mélancolie
Berce de doux chants
Mon coeur qui s'oublie
Aux soleils couchants.
Et d'étranges rêves
Comme des soleils
Couchants sur les grèves,
Fantômes vermeils,
Défilent sans trêves,
Défilent, pareils
À des grands soleils
Couchants sur les grèves.

This is Martin Sorrell's English translation for this Oxford World Classics edition:

Setting Suns

A sickly dawn
Spreads over the fields
The sadnesses
Lull with soft songs
My heart lost in
The setting suns.
And then strange dreams
Which seem like suns
That set on shores
Vermilion ghosts
Drift endlessly
Reminding me
Of mighty suns
That set on shores.

This translation, to my mind, goes a fair way to destroying the poem. The four stars are for Verlaine's poems, given in the original French here, and emphatically not for Sorrell's translations. In his introductory "Note On The Text And Translation", Sorrell states that other translations suffer from an "over-reverence for the original" and seem "stuck in the past" whereas he seeks to produce "poems appropriate to the climate of late twentieth-century English-language writing."

When I first heard this poem, it was in Paris in 2005, sung by a Sorbonne student to a guitar. Every subsequent time I heard the poem whilst in France it was in a song, often accompanied by a guitar, piano or, one time, a synthesizer. All of these versions showed a deep "over-reverence?" that the 21st Century French still have for the sad musicality of the poem, which Sorrell has stripped it of in this English translation, along with Verlaine's other poems.

It's been 5 years, since I broke with my Francophone girlfriend, since I've had occasion to converse in French, so apologies for the accent being a bit off. Further, I'm very far from being a professional musician or singer, but I hope I convey here, in my rendering of it, the echoes of what I heard in France.

The listener/reader will follow her/his own sensibility in judging whether my rendition or Sorell's butchering, I mean translation of the poem into a sort of English is the more affecting.

This book is a treasure for for me, in itself and as aid in understanding French. Reading slowly, with dictionary in hand, I sometimes am about overcome with pleasure of actually reading French poetry. And Verlaine's poems are often quite special. I love the book and take it with me.

Verlaine is perhaps my favourite poet--many of his poems are exceptionally beautiful, salacious even. However he wrote prolifically, and as is often the case with prolific artists, his work is of uneven quality. Nevertheless, at his best, Paul Verlaine's poetry is among the most remarkable that I've ever read. I highly recommend this collection.

Having been brought up in a liberal culture which automatically assumed (and taught) that the adolescent rebel Rimbaud was a far more important poet than his old fuddy-duddy "conventional" lover, Paul Verlaine, it is very interesting to read Verlaine's actual poetry and compare it with the so-called poetry of Rimbaud, and to realize that Verlaine was, by miles and miles, the greater poet of the two.

Of course, time and reflection will also cast doubt on the very idea of Verlaine as "conventional," running off to London with a gorgeous young man as he did. And Rimbaud certainly did not stick around his country of birth to fight for his ideas, his poetry, or anything.

Les sanglots longs
des violons
de l'automne
blessent mon coeur
d'une langueur
monotone.

Tout suffocant
et blême, quand
sonne l'heure.
je me souviens
des jours anciens,
et je pleure...

Et je m'en vais
au vent mauvais
qui m'emporte
de çà, de là,
pareil à la
feuille morte...

(That's not Rimbaud!)