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Eliot and Pound (among others) consistently cited Laforgue's work over and above any other French proto-Modernist. But, does anyone else love his work like I do?
RIGOURS LIKE NO OTHER
In an album's files,
A Geranium lying,
Picked in the Isles,
Was pressed and dying.
A fine troubadour,
Ivory, old,
Mocked the flower for
The tales she told ....
'A requiem!'
She asked just this.
'Oh, none of them
Will you have, miss!'
---from _Poems_, trans. Peter Dale, Anvil Press Poetry.
RIGOURS LIKE NO OTHER
In an album's files,
A Geranium lying,
Picked in the Isles,
Was pressed and dying.
A fine troubadour,
Ivory, old,
Mocked the flower for
The tales she told ....
'A requiem!'
She asked just this.
'Oh, none of them
Will you have, miss!'
---from _Poems_, trans. Peter Dale, Anvil Press Poetry.
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Re: Jules Laforgue
Fri, April 22, 2005 - 10:33 AMi want more
smiles
freckly -
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Re: Jules Laforgue
Fri, April 22, 2005 - 12:01 PMTo my ears that sounds like a golden poem is locked in a wooden translation. Do you have the French original?
I've always disliked translations that try to preserve rhyme and meter. At that point, you are composing a new poem based on the original, not translating; and typically the translator is no poet. -
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Re: Jules Laforgue
Fri, April 22, 2005 - 12:16 PMYou should see the new Duration e-book (free, by the way) on the poetics of Translation: available from www.durationpress.com
Particularly Charles Bernstein's piece ... I don't see how you could do anything but compose a new poem, since whatever is "poetic" about it can't be carried over in translation anyhow. Nonetheless, I used to think more along your lines, but I do like Peter Dale's work on Laforgue precisely because it does occur in the kind of ballad-space of proto-Modernist French poetry. Dale's "original" work doesn't thrill me quite as much. Nonetheless, Laforgue's language is clearly superior:
RIGUERS À NULLE AUTRE PAREILLES
Dans un album,
Mourait fossile
Un géranium
Cueilli aux Îles.
Un fin Jongleur
En vieil ivoire
Raillait la fleur
Et ses histoires…
-- «Un requiem!»
Demandait-elle.
-- «Vous n’aurez rien,
Mademoiselle!» … -
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Re: Jules Laforgue
Fri, April 22, 2005 - 1:15 PM> whatever is "poetic" about it can't be carried over in translation anyhow
For me, the 'poetic' is the interwoven field of images that compactly communicates something singular, and through its singularity conveys universality. I am not particularly interested in formal structures, and the more rigid they are, the less I like them. I guess that's why I'm on the "Modernist Poetry" tribe, and not the sonnets tribe.
What I look for in a translation is effective conveyance of images and meaning. Those CAN be translated. Rhyme, by definition, belongs to the native language alone, and I see no benefit in creating a new rhyme for the new poem. The true living heart of the poem is merely forced into an awkward and arbitrary formal analog of its source.
Thank you, by the way, for posting these two poems. Laforgue is new to me, and he seems worthy of attention. -
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Re: Jules Laforgue
Fri, April 22, 2005 - 1:46 PMin my opinion, the rhyme issue is one best solved on a poem by poem, language by language basis.
i say, do what works. the spirit, yes barnaby, is what makes a poem beautiful to me, too. rhyme can be considered word-craft, and craftsmanship, itself, is also a beautiful concept to me.
i'm all about dynamic translation. if we can preserve the spirit of the poem as well as the spirit of its craftsmanship, it's win win when well done....err.. done well. -
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Re: Jules Laforgue
Fri, April 22, 2005 - 2:00 PMI would like a definition of "craft" and "spirit," then.
It seems to me that the first and foremost defining feature of Modernism in any field (from poetics to civil engineering) is a radical uptake in formal innovation which, only in hindsight, resolves itself into a defining "spirit." -
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Re: Jules Laforgue
Fri, April 22, 2005 - 2:02 PMThat is precisely why, to my modern ears, the rigid adherence to conservative formal constraints like ABAB rhyme sound stilted and downright unpoetical.
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Re: Jules Laforgue
Fri, April 22, 2005 - 2:03 PMThank you!
I've always noticed Eliot's references to Laforgue and knew he was an influence. But I never really tracked his work down because it didn't have to do with what I was working on at the time, and proper attention to the French Symbolists would require more French than I had.
It's fun to be reminded how much the suggestive, semi-conscious but startling squishiness of symbolist imagery fascinated the hard, spare, allusive-but-ironic modernists in Pound's and Eliot's crowd.
What I thought of reading that little snip you posted was something that my students noticed this semester that I hadn't before--that juxtaposing plants and corpses is a constantly recurring theme with Eliot: sprouting corpses, flowers growing out of eye sockets, memories of the Luxembourg Gardens and dead Jean Verdenal, madmen shaking dead geraniums.... In the associative context of Laforgue's imagery: album, geranium, ivory troubadour--it makes perfect sense. -
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Re: Jules Laforgue
Fri, April 22, 2005 - 2:17 PMExcellent observation. See or revisit Peter Nicholls' _Modernisms: A Literary Guide_ ... Nicholls deftly reads the interplay of imagery and prosody in Laforgue, and notes the way it is revisited in "the Men of 1914."
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Re: Jules Laforgue
Fri, April 22, 2005 - 2:10 PM"For me, the 'poetic' is the interwoven field of images that compactly communicates something singular, and through its singularity conveys universality. I am not particularly interested in formal structures..."
To reduce poetry en masse to a "field of images" seems like a very tenuous move if we're after "beauty" or "spirit." You'd have to define both tautologically. I can surely understand an emphasis on imagery, and everyone has their own preferences, but how one could sustain an interest in modernist poetry reading in such a way is beyond me.
I also don't understand the implicit imagist / new formalist binary. Wasn't the first of the does and don'ts by an imagist an entreaty to pay close attention to the formal (e.g., rhytmic) matters at play with those images?
And to equate rhyme with sonneteering seems to miss a large chunk of the history of that form from Modernist through contemporary poetics.
So, maybe Laforgue's work calls for some formal play in the translation since this is what connects it to the high Modernists which are, ostensibly, the focus of this tribe? -
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Re: Jules Laforgue
Wed, April 27, 2005 - 12:35 PMso true, Patrick. human beings fighting to understand anything have a tendency, inherent in objectivity, toward polarization. to maintain real dynamism without sacrificing the reality of history, even as a matter of perspective, takes more into consideration. Even historical perspective, though relative, is real perspective.
i love dynamic approaches, but I don't dismiss the reality of influence, even if we must speak of history in terms of perspectives.
Look at the evolution of hermeneutics itself! Can we not find there a reconscilliation between matter and spirit in language, that circles are circles which may overlap? What about thinking of the self as concentric without being isolated, for example?
that is why we are often disconnected from the historical context and its dynamic in contemporary efforts to interpret, experience, and translate the Modern poetic.
yeah, why can't we consider the context without alienating either form or content... historical perspective from contemporary effort...
yep, in my opionon, formal play is called for if it serves the contemporary poet's goals of doing justice to the Modernist poetic from a certain historical perspective.
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