Selected Poems (Oxford World's Classics) [Paperback]

Paul Verlaine (Author), Martin Sorrell (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Oxford World's Classics | Publication Date: January 13, 2000

Verlaine ranks alongside Baudelaire, Mallarm�, and Rimbaud as one of the most influential poets of late nineteenth-century France. Remarkable not only for his exquisitely crafted verse, Verlaine is also the poet of strong emotions and appetites, with an unrivalled gift for the sheer music of poetry, and an inventive approach to its technique. This bilingual edition provides the most comprehensive selection of his poetry yet, offering some 170 poems in lively and fresh translations. It also offers a lucid introduction which illuminates Verlaine's poetic form within the context of French Impressionism and the poetry of sensation.

Editorial Reviews

Review

`In his sensitive and discerning introduction, Sorrell finds much of what ws to beomce the quintessentially Verlainaian hallmarks in the book: 'sensuality, a disposition to melancholy and to daydreaming, misty half-tones, and patterns of versification straining to break th stricter rules of French prosody.' Stephen Romer, Times Literary Supplement, Friday 19th May 00.

`there has been no really substantial selection of Verlaine's work in English ... One of the pleasures this volume affords ia s prolonged chance to examin yet again, through the prism of translation, the different geniuses of the two langauges. Another is to rediscover, thanks to Sorrell's selection, a swath of Verlaine's later poetry, so often occluded in the classic anthologies.' Stephen Romer, Times Literary Supplement, Friday 19th May 00.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (January 13, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0192833324
• ISBN-13: 978-0192833327
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,035,440 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Case of Confusion, June 26, 2000

By 

Bruce Kendall "BEK" (Southern Pines, NC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Selected Poems (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

[...] 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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Singing of "Soleils Couchants", October 9, 2011

By 

Daniel Myers (Greenville, SC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Selected Poems (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

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.

5.0 out of 5 stars Selected Poems (Verlaine), Oxford, February 26, 2010

By 

Ray F. Traudt - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Selected Poems (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

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.